Liverpool Revisited by Michael White

Author:Michael White [White, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: EDP
Published: 2017-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

The Last Bomb, Aloise's Café and

Death by Cow.

The last bomb that fell on Liverpool in the Second World War fell on the evening of the tenth of January nineteen forty-two in amongst other places, Upper Stanhope Street, Toxteth. I know this for I was there at the time, and remember it well.

You would have thought we had grown used to the seemingly endless series of bombings by then, but I think that we never really had. Of course, we did not know at that time that it was the last bombing raid. As far as we knew it would carry on forever. We were not to know, but that was the last night and that was more than enough. I left the air raid shelter as the all clear was sounded and found myself in hell. Whole streets were now reduced to mounds of burning rubble. I could not reconcile my position in the sense that what I now saw did not match with what I had briefly glimpsed as I had hurriedly entered the shelter hours before when the sirens had begun to sound. The skyline was in flames. Smoke floated in eerie clouds across wide open spaces that hours ago had been houses, businesses. They were now just piles of concrete, metal and glass shattered across the ground. Flames roared across the heavens as an inferno lit the night.

I reached down and helped the Irish lady, who I now knew as Brigid, out from the Anderson shelter, which had presumably been sited in somebody’s garden at some point; for it was only there that you would find an Anderson. Now however, it was simply surrounded by rubble.

“Thank you.” said Brigid in her light Dublin accent as I gave her a hand back up to the surface. We had spent the last three hours alone in the shelter. I did not know her and she did not know me. Yet somehow over that time we had forged some kind of bond as we sat in that buried corrugated iron hut waiting to be blown to smithereens. We had both been lucky to find the shelter when the air raid sirens had sounded, as we were both off course on our journey across Liverpool, if not lost. It was difficult you see, to gauge where you were by landmarks when they continued to disappear every night. The city seemed as if it was in flux and flow, and most of it seemed to be falling down.

“Was this part of Upper Stanhope Street?” she asked, and I looked about me. Though it was night the fires from all around made it quite easy to see, if not to navigate.

“I think it was.” I said. “The lower half, anyway. It’s hard to say. I think there used to be a crossroads there.” She followed the direction I was pointing in.

“That building there.” she said, pointing to what was not a building any longer but a burning pile of rubble. “That was standing

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