Little Lake Part 2

...We were finally in our street!
Mother and I gave large relieved sighs when we saw the street name still standing on the side of our road, however once we looked up into the street all we could see was carnage and mayhem as all the fire engines and ambulances that had past us speedily had been coming to the desecration of our once beautiful street.

Mother gasped as she let go of my hand raced over bricks and shrapnel through the street to our house. I stayed behind a little as everything became muffled and fuzzy. I walked slowly through the centre of the street stepping over glass and wood, observing the houses as best I could.

It was like walking through a dream, a nightmare, but so surreal and vivid.
I saw children sitting on the half destroyed walls of their front gardens waiting for relatives to come pick them up, I saw dogs and cats circled through the rubble searching desperately for their owners to come back to them. I saw a mother crying over the body of her dead baby who was as limp as a doll and as black as the sky from the soot.
I looked away from these awful sights and looked ahead, the view didn't improve.

A giant fire engine was sat in the road opposite my house, I watched as the firemen grabbed their hoses and brought out the water calming intense fires amongst all the houses, not just our own.
I walked up to the fire engine unsteadily and confused, I watched as my mother cried out in horror and shock but I did not hear her screams only the sight of her fainting into the arms of a woman who had been a volunteer ambulance driver. This sight did not hold much interest for me however the sight of my house did.

I walked over to the unfamiliar charred gate entrance to our house, pushing through firemen and police to see it. The house I lived in was nothing but a pile of bricks. The milk bottle that we had forgotten to take in that morning was still sitting at the side of the door, not even but everything else was completely gone.
Parts of the Anderson Shelter were at my feet, a frame that once held a picture of my mother and father when they were younger was now smashed and the image now black crisp paper. Half of the floor in my bedroom still stood but barely as bricks and insulation crumbled to the floor indecently.

I waited and watched as the firemen put out the fires that still continued to violently rampage through my parent’s bedroom and in our kitchen. Once they were out and the sight secured I started to search through the remains of everything we had ever owned, all the memories, all the precious things, everything.

I stood on broken parts of the dining room table, cracked and brittle china tea cups, the sofa that was blasted to pieces and my comfortable soft bed which was now full of brick dust and shrapnel holes! My wardrobe lay on the side with the door blasted off but inside I see the remnants of undamaged clothing which I started to sift through. Some pieces of clothing had melted wood and metal on but other’s like my ill fitting beige coat and an old evening dress survived. I found a pair of shoes all in the bottom of the wardrobe which I picked up promptly to their discovery.

As I walked away from the wardrobe I stood on something slippery and crisp, I moved my foot away to see my beloved sketch pad burnt to the softness of a cinder beneath my feet, no pictures survived, no paper survived not after I stood on it. I felt a pang of pain in my chest and that familiar painful lump in the centre of my throat but I inhaled deeply as I looked away and I moved onto the next destroyed room of the house.

The kitchen was gone; I couldn’t even see the bad yellow wallpaper or the fright there was nothing! The bathroom tiles were al under the bricks and I kept standing on them as I moved each brick away like some pauper in the derelict street sifting for food. The living room was also ruined, the wireless was standing in its familiar corner of the wall but the speakers were blown out and the glass from the windows had scratched the perfectly polished surface to pieces. The gramophone was shattered and all of the vinyl’s melted.

The front half of the house was gone and the stairs along with it.

My parent’s bed had fallen through the floor to where the living room was supposed to be. The only thing I could salvage from the possessions of their room was my mum’s childish jewellery box that she had had since as far as I could remember. It was only small and my mother didn’t even use it but I collected it anyway and whenever I found a small piece of a possession I would place it inside. I found a single fake pearl earring of my mother’s and put it inside, a half charred picture of my whole family with my brother and mother destroyed but my father and I still together, half of my brother’s christening bracelet and my mother’s bible which was badly scorched but still readable.

I also found a blackened teddy bear who I hugged tightly as I continued to look around the ruined remains of my house. However I didn’t have long because an army van had come to collect all those that were stranded and to take them to new homes or places. Most of the people were off to the train stations to get as far away from London as possible, for my mother and me there was only one place we could go. Caroline’s.

When we arrived we were welcomed with benevolent arms of sympathy. My mother collapsed in Caroline’s hold and sobbed hysterically. I passed them both as I went and re-took my seat in Caroline’s parlour, the same seat in which I had sat twelve hours previous. I sat silently, calmly yet incredibly shocked. I did shed a tear or two which was only natural but I didn’t cry manically or scream and shout angrily! For a year that house hadn’t felt like a home and from the moment it was gone I barely felt any different from when it was standing.

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For four months my mother and I stayed with Caroline. We were accepted into her home like guests but we left like family. My mother and Caroline grew close over the weeks that we spent there and they would also consol each other in moments of weakness of heart. It was an unlikely friendship but the only thing that supported my mother and me. I continued to attend school like nothing had happened although many of the school students knew of my demise in my social life but no one ever commented on it because it was a frequent thing to see a student walk into school wearing the only clothes that they had left due to a spread fire, a bomb or a general collapse of a house.

My teacher walked into school one day midweek of school wearing the clothes she wore previously and a large fur coat, the only thing that she had recovered from the wreckage of her home. At least she had a job to return to my mother and I had nothing but my school which brought no income obviously. Caroline was left to support us on her secretarial job at the War Office. My mother searched but who would employ someone with no qualifications other than cooking, cleaning and housewifery. She was offered a job as a hospital cleaner but even Caroline said that this job was beneath her and she refused.

My mother and I had to apply for new rations card seeing as our old ones were destroyed in the obliteration of our house. For a time we were living on Caroline’s food rations which barely filled us up long enough to satisfy anything that we called hunger, but eventually our cards came through and we were eating more again.
Along with my rations card came another gas mask, a hideous facial protection that was hardly needed but required for children and young people my age. I had to wear it to school along with the rest of my year. Even though none of us were out of place we were all feeling silly and childish having to wear the box containing the mask around our necks, which was why at the earliest occasion I left my new one in a bin on my walk to Caroline’s and I pretended that someone had stolen it.
Although I doubted that my mother would have believed me saying that someone had stolen my gas mask she did! This may have been because she was so preoccupied trying to fill her vacant bank account with some sort of money.

It had become quite clear once we moved into Caroline's house that my mother and I were desperate and destitute. We hadn't a penny to our names and no source of income. We were only living off the charity of Caroline and even she wasn't rich enoguh to support us for long, even though she implored us not to do anything to rash or un-thought through, seeing as my mother was making secretive plans to leave, plans that she refused to tell me but I knew were a last resort.

My mother looked grave the morning she sent an important letter, one she had trouble posting through a perfectly good red letter box. I did not query to who it was sent to at the time but afterwards when my mother alerted Caroline to our immediate departure I did, and she refused to tell me.

On the door of Caroline’s when we left for the last time my mother kissed Caroline’s cheek, shook her hand gratefully as a tear was shed on her skin before she turned her back on the house and she walked to the taxi that Caroline had paid most graciously for. When I said my farewell I implored to tell me where I and mother were going but she refused although her piteous face and her sympathetic tone told me enough that I knew I was not headed for a happy place.