34
Morning had come, and the planes were gone. But when the curtains were opened, the sight before Alex was shocking. Belfast was alight, fires and smoke everywhere he looked, and a yellowish pall of belching fumes and noxious smoke hanging over his city like an evil miasma.
Now that it was a little safer to be out, more casualties were arriving – women with injuries, women whose babies had become still when they had been injured, women whose homes were gone and they had nowhere else to give birth. Almost biblical, it was.
Alex kept going. He called ‘Next!’ until hoarse, using all the reserves within to assess each woman fully and accurately. Someone brought him tea, and he drank gratefully, his throat parched and his stomach rumbling with the hunger.
‘Dr Lowe!’ It was Mr Russell, looking fairly dishevelled.
‘Yes, sir?’
‘Take a break for a few hours and come back later. You’ll want to check on your family.’
Alex frowned. More than anything he wanted to check on his family, but he couldn’t leave when there was so much to be done. ‘I’d love to, but I can’t really leave here.’
‘Five more doctors have made their way in so far, including a couple of retired obstetricians and Dr Wilson. We’re fine.’ He looked Alex directly in the eye. ‘It’s ten in the morning, which means you’ve done fourteen hours straight. Go.’
So Alex went. He called at delivery suite to check on Maisie, enjoying a quick hug and kiss in the empty corridor, then picked up his packed lunch from the medical staffroom, marvelling at how familiar it all was, how prosaic.
There were the forms he had completed last night, just before the madness.
Ten minutes later he was on his bicycle, eating a sandwich as he pedalled out of the hospital grounds.
Almost immediately his appetite left him.
The extent of the destruction was much, much worse than he had anticipated.
Whole buildings had been flattened, others left standing undamaged, while yet others were on fire.
The roads were full of rubble and craters, along with dead livestock, and occasionally, dead bodies.
He was forced to walk on many occasions, wheeling his bike around obstacles.
Survivors were milling about everywhere – air raid wardens directing ambulance and fire teams along with first aiders and volunteers.
He saw lines of men removing rubble in different locations, trying to free people from under the wreckage.
He also saw dozens of families on the move, their faces blank with fear and bundles of bedding tied to their backs, and realised that many of them intended to walk out of the city and never return.
As he rode, picking his way carefully amid piles of rubble, dead animals, and small fires, he heard snatches of conversations around him.
Entire streets were gone in some places apparently – the area around Victoria Barracks, and a collapsed mill on the York Road both being mentioned. ‘Vere Street is gone,’ someone said.
‘Aye, and Sussex Street too,’ was the reply.
Whole streets, gone. It was impossible to take in.
Only yesterday the city had been peaceful, intact, normal, with people going about their business.
And now . . . this. It was as though some bad magic had transported him to another world – a world of madness, where the streets retained just enough familiarity to make the destruction seem even more appalling.
The public baths on the Falls Road had become a mortuary, and Alex had to avert his eyes from some of the sights around that area, as stretcher men and soldiers queued to bring the dead inside.
Further north, he heard some people talk about a directive not to drink the water; he didn’t dare think about what might have happened to the area around the Waterworks.
Twice he saw fractured water mains – hopefully they were the cause of the low water pressure.
Crossing the Shankill, he heard that a public shelter had collapsed, killing dozens of people sheltering there, and his thoughts went to the Canavans.
Were they safe? John-Joe was already gone.
What other names would be added to the list of the dead?
And there were many, many dead. He knew that already, just from his journey from the Royal to the northern part of the city.
Never could he have imagined the level of destruction from only one night of bombing.
And in a sense it still wasn’t over. Unexploded and time-delayed bombs were still detonating, and there were gas explosions too.
His ears still ringing from a night of auditory assault, his throat parched, and his body aching with tiredness, Alex was too exhausted even to feel fear.
Yes, he was running a gauntlet of mines and hidden dangers, but he was committed to his path now.
Living or dying was not in his gift; he only knew he had to try to reach his family.
He still muttered a fervent prayer under his breath, though.
One theme was apparent in conversations everywhere: anger.
Why had Belfast been left unprotected? Why had there been almost no anti-aircraft barrage?
Why had the Northern Ireland government not built more shelters?
Compared to other cities across Britain, Belfast had been left woefully unprepared.
‘Them bastards up in Stormont,’ was a common refrain and, honestly, Alex couldn’t disagree.
Merging on to the Cliftonville Road, the first thing Alex saw was that his old school, the Royal Academy, seemed relatively undamaged.
Unlike— He whistled. St James’s Church, where he had spoken to George’s parents just last night, had taken some direct hits.
The spire looked unaffected, but the rest was badly damaged.
His stomach sick, he started to move up the road, seeing damaged houses on both sides.
His home came into view, and he exhaled.
It looked undamaged – apart from the broken windows which were everywhere.
Jumping off the bike, he went through the front door, calling out as he went.
Nothing. The house was silent – a dead sort of silence.
His heart now thumping, he made his way through the kitchen and out the back, briefly freezing in horror at the sight before him.
The adjoining house – where the Wallaces lived – had been hit to the rear.
The roof had a gaping hole, and a large part of the rear facade had fallen, most of the rubble landing in George’s garden, the rest in Alex’s garden – directly on top of the Anderson shelter where his family had probably gone for safety.
‘Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!’ Barely noticing that his expostulation had been decidedly Catholic, he rushed outside. ‘Father! Mother! Granda!’
Instantly, he heard an answering male voice from underneath the rubble. Someone is still alive!
Bending, he tried pulling away some of the bricks and tiles from the entrance to the shelter, his heart sinking as he realised it would take hours to clear it all.
Some of it was in large clumps too which would require two men to lift, he reckoned.
Racing to the back, he saw there was much less debris here, further from the houses.
It was blocked too, but he should be able to clear it by himself.
Damn it! We should have built the shelter at the bottom of the garden.
‘Father? Is that you? Can you hear me?’
‘Alexander! I can hear you! The door won’t budge! We’re trapped!’
‘This end is better! Use the wrench in the corner to take apart the steel panels, and I’ll get rid of this rubble!’
He didn’t dare ask about Mother and Granda. He didn’t want to know.
Grunting, he knelt, throwing tiles and bricks and stones behind him, willy-nilly.
At the same time he heard Father working on the bolts that held the panels together.
The construction manual for the Anderson shelter had included a recommendation to leave the rat-tailed spanner known as a podger inside, and now Alex knew why.
Exhaustion was in every pore, but he knew he had to keep going. After a long night of mental strain, it was almost restorative to do some hard physical work.
‘Got it!’ There was relief in Father’s voice, and Alex saw the panels in front of him separate at the top.
‘Oh, well done, Henry!’ That was Mother, and Alex had to pause for a second, closing his eyes against the sting of sudden tears.
‘Don’t pull them apart yet!’ he warned, his voice thick. ‘I need to dig it out.’ Jumping up, he went to the shed for a sturdy spade, and began digging out the earth around the rear of the half-submerged shelter. The design had undoubtedly saved many lives last night.
As he worked, he and his parents talked – catching up on the night’s events. Alex skimmed over the things he’d experienced in work, saying only that it had been busy, but he was able to describe the devastation he’d seen cycling home from the Royal.
In turn they talked of their fear when the sirens had sounded, and how they had cowered for hours under the bombardment, realising when the all-clear had sounded that their exit was blocked, and they would have to wait for rescue. That had clearly been scary in a very different way.
‘I was terrified,’ Mother admitted frankly. ‘It felt like Armageddon had come, and there’d be no one to rescue us.’
Alex paused to ask the question he’d been dreading. ‘What about Granda?’
‘Oh, him!’ Mother said insouciantly. ‘He’s been sleeping like a baby for hours.’
‘I have not indeed!’ Granda’s familiar croaky voice sounded, and Alex sagged against his spade handle. ‘I’ve been lying here listening, and thanking the good Lord for our Alexander!’ There was a pause. ‘It’s good to see that wee bitta daylight now.’