Shelter Read online

  Outside, a bell rang. The mess bell. Fredo trod closer so that he was inches away from Seppe. He was panting, sweat dripping down red cheeks. Seppe backed up against the wall, the wood panels rough and unwelcoming as he pushed up against them. Fredo stepped forward, menacing, forcing Seppe into a corner.

  ‘Oh, you’ve got it coming all right; don’t you think you haven’t. Nobody humiliates me and gets away with it, especially not a traitor like you. You should be ashamed to be your father’s son.’

  Fredo grabbed another chair leg and tore. Wood splintered, the smell flooding out like blood. Seppe tasted metal on his tongue and his ears rang with the urge to get away. But Fredo kept him trapped in the corner. One by one he snapped every chair. Fredo’s aggression was festering in captivity, escalating; it would be Seppe himself next, he knew it. He pressed hard against the wall, needing to feel something.

  ‘Tell anyone I did this and you’ll be next sooner than you think. Don’t think I’m done here, traitor. This is just the beginning.’ Fredo stalked out.

  Seppe pushed himself off the wall, legs shaking.

  His teeth chattering, he forced himself to take stock of the damage. Treat it like a casualty of war, that’s what he needed to do: triage it and work out how to fix it.

  As he surveyed the scene, another part of his brain taunted him. Why could he still not stand up to Fredo? The scars of his youth, the memory of being tracked … they handcuffed him. They bit through the numbness that months of noise, of fighting in the desert, had provided and reduced him to that sixteen-year-old cowering beside the canal whilst Fredo loomed over him, gloating that he’d tell the Major that Seppe was trying to make it back to the docks and then there’d be another beating.

  Shame ran through him, cold and liquid. He had thought the camp was sanctuary. But Fredo would certainly inform the Major that his cowardly, secret-holding only son was refusing to rail against the enemy. Fredo was barely literate but would doubtless consider this piece of vengeance worth the struggle with pen and paper. And the Major, with his connections to the Livorno fascio and beyond, would surely find a way to reach him even here. Seppe was trapped by more than just the wire fences of the camp.

  Nine

  Coventry, January, 1944

  CONNIE STARES IN SILENT shock. She pulls the dress around her but the shivering won’t stop.

  Nothing of her home is left. It’s buried behind a pile of rubble.

  She looks back at the bus conductor. ‘What’s going on? You’ve put me off at the wrong stop!’ The air is freezing, bits of dust hanging motionless in it, and she hacks, bending over.

  The conductor puts a hand on her shoulder, fatherly. Not that her actual pa ever does any such thing, unless he wants to borrow a few bob for the club.

  ‘Got hit last night, love. Thought you must have heard the news and stayed away deliberate.’

  She clings still to the metal pole whilst she searches up and down the street. He’s got it wrong; this isn’t Hillview Road. Where’s the club at the end, by the bingo hall? Come to that, where’s the bingo hall?

  ‘You’ve put me off at the wrong street, mister,’ she insists, frantic now.

  The conductor still looks at her, that expression unchanged. In answer he points at the crumpled metal plate on the ground beside her. It can’t be the street sign. That is nailed to the side of Number One. This is only a pile of rubble.

  ‘We need to get moving, love.’

  Connie stares at the conductor. He gestures at the road. What else is there to do? She steps down onto ground that seems to shake beneath her. The conductor rings his bell and is swallowed into a cloud of ash. Bombs are nothing new in Coventry. In a couple more days this stop will be taken off the route.

  Connie’s tongue sticks to the roof of her mouth and she coughs again into this filled, frigid air. Brick dust is everywhere, and a stink of burning. Beyond a pile of smoking rubble ARP wardens are calling to each other. She can’t see them through the blanketing dust. She gags, her eyes streaming, and lifts her bag up to her mouth in a fruitless attempt to keep out the grime. Her mood has crumbled like the buildings either side of her, toppling sharply down into despair as she picks her way through. Corners of walls stand tall and protected like a grotesque forest of concrete, rubble forming the forest floor. She strains to listen out for Mam, for Linda and Barbara, even for Dad, but the ringing in her ears blocks anything that might be there to hear.

  She’d marched down the middle of this street only last week, after yet another row with Mam about not being stuck in minding her damn sisters. She’ll find them now, and she’ll look after them all week – all year – whatever Mam wants. The dust layers thickly over her like fear, stifling all thoughts, the ringing in her ears louder and the wall-trees shrinking as her vision tunnels with panic. She’s small again now, coiled up.

  She’d give anything to scarper, to winkle out Don from his cosy barracks and stay in their world of unknowing a little bit longer. But she can’t.

  Connie walks slowly, as slowly as she dares, making each step tiny. Shivers take her again and she wobbles off course. But eventually there she is. Number 27.

  Connie sways. Her bag drops into the dust in front of her. Someone’s having her on. This can’t be Hillview Road, can’t be home. There’s nothing left of it. She wants to shriek, turns around in horror for someone to scoff, tell her she’s seeing things, it’s the lack of sleep and one too many gins last night. She clamps her hand over her mouth and bites down hard but nothing’s working. She can’t feel her teeth against her finger, can’t trust her eyes.

  Everything’s gone.

  No, that’s not quite it. It’s like someone’s dropped a doll’s house. Their front door is gone. The walls facing the street are gone. The roof, the window frames … She stares, and the more she takes in, the bigger and more unmanageable it gets. It looms in front of her and she can’t grab it, can’t make it make sense. Everything has shut down.

  Where Mam and Pa’s room should be, a wardrobe hangs open, grotesquely out of place, half over the gap at the front where the wall should be. Is that Mam’s dress with the blue spots on? The one she’s always saving for best?

  Connie’s legs go now and she plonks down on the road, pulls her knees tight up to her chest. The ground is cold, goosebumps appear straight away on her skin, and she looks at them as if they’re nothing to do with her.

  Her bag is open beside her, but who is there here to steal anything? The scavengers will be along soon, clambering up after Mam’s dress and whatever else they can get their hands on, but even they haven’t copped on yet. For now the only noises are the sharp scrape of shovels against brick. There are no cries from under the rubble, no sign at all that people have ever lived here.

  Connie’s hair droops into her eyes and she rests her head on her knees. Weariness cloaks her. She closes her eyes but when she opens them it’s all still here. Now she does scream, again and again, sending signals out into the dust. Her family do not hear her.

  ‘Constance Granger? Is that you?’ Old Mrs Cole. Is that one of Mam’s best teacups in her hand? Is she planning a tea party here in the middle of the street? Connie raises her head but doesn’t get up.

  But Mrs Cole is crouching down beside her, trying to get her arms round Connie. She isn’t the hugging type; more likely to throw her prayer book at you than come for a cuddle. That’s when Connie knows.

  Mrs Cole stopped being an old baggage and showed the first kindness Connie ever knew from her. She’d been off visiting her sister when she’d heard the raid, knew from the searchlights where it must be. She’d raced back at the dawn’s light to see what could be salvaged and found the whole street gone, wiped out. She’d stayed to see who they found.

  Nobody.

  Nobody was brought out alive from here. Got the lot, that raid.

  Shards of brick bite into Connie and she welcomes them. Good. Let her feel something, let there be pain. It’s better than this awful realisation. Anything to hold
that off. She rocks backwards and forwards, arms hugging her knees tightly to her.

  ‘Won’t they have made it to the shelters?’ She won’t believe it. They’d have been fine. Mam would have got them out, would have come back from the boozer when she heard the sirens. They’ll have a right cob on them but they’ll be fine.

  Mrs Cole picks at a nail sticking out at an angle from a bit of wood. ‘The shelters flooded when the water main burst.’

  Connie gags. She’s seen those bodies be pulled out before, purple and swollen. Beside her, Mrs Cole waits, saying nothing for perhaps the first time since Connie has known her.

  ‘Right sudden, that one was,’ the warden tells them, joining them in their awkward mid-road huddle.

  ‘Jerry was at us before we’d drawn breath, the first bombs down before we’d even got the sirens sounding. Weren’t even supposed to be bombing up here as far as we can tell; word is that one of their lot lost their way and wanted shot of some leftover bombs before they got back across the water. Couldn’t get a soul out alive. They were just too quick for us.’

  Connie has to wait for an hour for a bus and, when it comes, she gets on without knowing where she’s going, makes her way back to the factory with unseeing eyes. None of it’s real. It can’t be. She clocks herself in and rescues her overalls from the peg in the lavs where she’d left them. Once she’s done her shift she’ll try again, will go back to Hillview Road on a different bus and it will all be all right. It has to be. She won’t go to the dance tonight and then, when she gets home, they will all be there. Maybe she’ll even go via the chippy and surprise them – she can afford it with all this overtime she’s been doing.

  Connie reaches her place on the line and there’s someone there. The other girl looks at her.

  ‘What you up to?’

  ‘Working.’

  ‘We’re halfway through a shift and you’re not working today, love.’ The girl looks more closely. ‘You’re covered in dust. Are you right?’

  She’s taken into the foreman’s office and given a cup of tea with four sugars. One for each member of her family, she thinks, and the sugar won’t revive them any more than it will revive her. Eventually someone gets hold of Cass and she hurries in, takes Connie by the elbow as if she’s feeble-minded and ushers her out. ‘You can stop with us for a bit, Mam won’t mind.’

  Connie can’t cry, not during any of those empty, merciless nights dossing in with Cass in her lumpy bed, and she can’t make it stick. Night after night her eyes refuse to close and she stares up at the brown lampshade, that night playing out over and over again like a Pathé newsreel. Come dawn she drops off just before the bed creaks with Cass leaving to get to work. On her days off, she takes the bus back to Hillview Road. She stands outside number 27 in the hope that maybe someone’s got out, got word to her about where they’re kipping now. She keeps as still as she can and tries to hear Linda upstairs singing, Mam bawling at her to keep the bleeding racket down. Outside her home is the only place the tears will come and she returns over and again, tears falling into the dust, waiting for them to return.

  One day she shows up and the looters have been. Mam’s best dress has gone, the kids’ clothes, even the drapes. The tears won’t stop that day.

  The factory sacks Connie in the end for never showing up; but she can’t blame them. A few weeks later, Cass’s mam makes it clear that she needs Connie gone too. Connie accepts it with none of her old fight; what is there to care about now? Cass’s mam doesn’t know her from Adam and can’t find it in herself to worry about yet another homeless factory worker in a city full of them. Perhaps she’d have hung on to Connie for a couple more weeks, though, if the shock of it all hadn’t caught up with Connie in quite such a nasty way. She can’t stop being sick. Though Connie tries to brazen it out, Cass’s mam is repulsed – and fair enough. ‘Ain’t you got no family you could stay with?’ she asks one morning, watching Connie sluice the back steps as she stands in her headscarf, one elbow crooked to banish the fag smoke. But she doesn’t; Mam and Dad kept themselves to themselves. She’s on her own now.

  Ten

  May

  SEPPE CLENCHED THE TOKENS. The edges bit into his hand, proof he was alive.

  ‘Scum like you get nothing from this shop whilst I’m in charge, not with those traitors’ discs.’ Fredo’s eyes narrowed, his arm barricading the doorway, the black armband crowing.

  ‘I’ve earned these! They mean the same as money. You can’t stop me using them.’

  Fredo laughed and strode forward until his lips were an inch from Seppe’s. ‘I can do whatever I like.’ It was and wasn’t true. Fredo was so devious and these camp guards so trusting that many of his transgressions simply went unnoticed.

  The stink of him rotted the air. This close, you could see the lice crusting around the black of the armband and crawling in the brown seams of his uniform. Fredo refused to wash because that would mean defeat, giving in to the evil Allies. To reduce this dyed British uniform to nothing more than a fetid, creeping bug repository was his way of showing who was boss, even, apparently, if it meant itching and stinking and being covered in weals.

  Seppe fought his own impulse to scratch. Fredo had terrorised and repulsed Seppe for a decade now, his political fervour only increasing his own belief in his licence to bully. But now they were both living on enemy ground, a place that brought Seppe comfort Fredo could never imagine.

  ‘What are you staring at?’ Fredo took a pace back, hoicked and spat, hitting Seppe square in the face. A warm trickle insinuated its way from nose to chin, bitter to the taste. The urge to scrub it off, or even to lick it away, was overwhelming. Don’t react. You reacted in the desert and it didn’t help.

  Seppe emptied the tokens onto the counter, pushing them off his palms where sweat had stuck them. ‘Give me what I’ve paid for.’

  Fredo was spiteful, but he wasn’t stupid. If he didn’t hand over the cigarettes, he’d be thrown off shop duty and given the job of incinerating the night soil.

  Seppe exhaled as the cigarettes were slammed down. There they were. God knows, they wouldn’t lessen the reek of living cheek-by-jowl with 700 other POWs, but they’d make it bearable. With one hand he reached out for the cigarettes, the other already fumbling in his pocket for matches.

  ‘Not so fast, collaborator.’ Eyes still arrowing hatred, Fredo fisted the contents of the carton, the cigarettes poking out from his fingers like so many beheaded flowers.

  ‘Remind you of anything? Shame you make such flimsy chairs, wood pigeon. You’re a useless carpenter. Worthless, chickenshit soldier, too, and no sense of loyalty. You aren’t loyal to your fellow men, you dishonour Il Duce. You don’t deserve these.’ Slowly, deliberately, Fredo broke each cigarette in half, every muted crunch making Seppe sag with deflated hope. Today was going to be a struggle after all.

  ‘What’s the matter, soft boy?’ Threads of precious tobacco unfurled onto the counter, the smell sparking in the dank forest air. Could he scoop them up before they wilted? No, with Fredo in this mood, the best thing to do was to accept the loss and get away.

  Seppe stuffed the fragments into his coat pockets and shuffled down through the rows of Nissen huts. He turned right at the mess hut and paused at the chapel. Should he retreat in there? But God had forsaken Seppe before, and there was no guarantee of safety in an enclosed space. Better to stay out in the open.

  Seppe slowed when he reached the parade ground, scrubby and muddy, but exposed. Fredo couldn’t do much to him here, out in the open, couldn’t try and attack him with a broken chair, kick his shin viciously or tip the night urine into his boots. He cupped his hands to get the stub of cigarette glowing. He wasn’t going to waste these, whatever Fredo tried to do. The wind extinguished the spark. It was mild here, not like Egypt, where those whistling gusts had bulleted hot sand into every crack and crevice.

  Seppe turned round out of the wind, sucked hard. There it was, the numbing bliss of the nicotine snaking down his throat even
through those brutalised fag ends. It tasted better out here than it ever had in the desert, or back home in Livorno.

  There was nobody else in sight, the air blown clear of the constant noise. The bulk of the men were out in the forest or working on the fields. He looked across at the darkness of the trees. After the forbidding expanse of the desert, no place to hide, the labyrinthine woods promised something that this camp, with Fredo in it, no longer could. Perhaps it would be better to be concealed in their depths than up here lathing endless pieces of furniture ready to be broken all over again. Fredo delighted in destroying each object, called it his ‘resistance effort’, and wore the ensuing restriction of privileges as a badge of pride.

  This forest, the guards had told them, had been there for generations. Its history was vast enough that his concerns would be swallowed, concealed by everything they’d borne witness to. And to be amongst the trees, to listen to the symphony of their leaves, to inhale the rich scent of spruce and pine and yew intermingling … this was something that could nourish him, that Fredo could never take away from him. If only that were Seppe’s world.

  ‘Oi! Coward! You forgot these.’

  Fredo strode across the parade ground towards him, a handful of papers clutched in his fist, in full sight of the perimeter guardhouse. Don’t react. Fredo forced these on anyone entering the shop: rudimentary leaflets proclaiming the greatness of Il Duce that he and his cronies scribbled late at night. They rained down onto Seppe’s head. He concentrated on the sweet path of the nicotine as it grated his lungs.