Free Domestic Soldiers by Jennifer Purcell

experienced its worst raid to date. Woolworths and other shops in the Bull Ring were damaged, the Market Hall was destroyed and, closer to home, just five minutes’ walk away, a bomb dropped in the garden of one of Jacq’s schoolmates, while another lifted a house and dropped it whole in the crater left by the bomb. Overall, twenty-five people were killed or seriously injured in the raid. When the Bridges looked out of their shelter door that night, they could see the glow of fires that erupted across the city, which the German planes flocked to like ‘flys [sic] to the honeypot’.
    The period of ‘nuisance raids’ was over. After three nights of raids on Birmingham and Coventry, the Luftwaffe shifted its attention to Merseyside, which received heavy attacks on the last four nights of August. Over 1,000 people lost their lives in the raids across Britain in August alone. By the end of the month, the effects of regular air raids were noticeable, not only in the damaged landscape of Alice’s Birmingham, but also in the people around her. Stomachs flipped and churned, some bought phospherine tonic to calm their nerves, and everywhere emotions were raw. Bridges’ husband sulked and complained that in all the commotion, Alice had forgotten to pay attention to him. When he came down to the shelter during a raid on 30 August, he was in a huff that he couldn’t find his keys. ‘He was none too sweet … blamed me, how like a man,’ she told M-O. But she kept her calm and helped him search the house, until finally she asked him to try his pockets. ‘I was right, as usual. What a man.’
    With nerves snapping and confidence slipping all around her, Bridges attempted to shore up morale. She taped a large sign to her window for all to see; it wassimilar to one her husband, Les, had noticed on the way to work. It read: ‘ THERE IS NO DEPRESSION IN THIS HOUSE AND WE ARE NOT INTERESTED IN THE POSSIBILITIES OF DEFEAT. THEY DO NOT EXIST .’ The same day she made out her will. In admiration for her neighbours or as a mantra to bolster her own spirits, she told M-O that she was impressed with how others around her endured the Blitz: ‘ INDOMITABLE SPIRIT DOMINATES. THEIR CHEER FULNESS IS WONDERFUL .’
    The focus of the German bombers shifted to London soon afterwards. After a RAF raid on 26 August killed civilians in Berlin, Hitler promised to raze British cities to the ground in revenge. ‘When the British Air Force drops two or three or four thousand kilograms of bombs, then’, he swore as a crowd of Germans erupted in frenzied applause, ‘we will in one night drop 150-, 230-, 300-or 400,000 kilograms’. 6 To those in England who wondered when the invasion would begin, Hitler assured them, ‘Be calm. Be calm. He’s coming! He’s coming!’ 7
    The London Blitz began on 7 September, just three days after Hitler promised to destroy British cities, and would continue uninterrupted for fifty-seven nights. Helen Mitchell endured the first night of the London Blitz playing cards ‘in a state of fright’ with her husband, son and friend in an underground coal cellar in Beckenham among other residents (whom Helen called ‘bodies’) of the flats where the Mitchells were living at the time. The next day, Helen’s husband left for Canada, and her son went off to the army four days later, abandoning her to face the Blitz alone. Unable to carry on she left the city a week later to stay with a friend in Epsom. A landmine later obliterated the flats.
    From the end of August, German ships streamed towards the Dutch coast from ports in Lubeck, Stettin and Kiel. Soon, British reconnaissance reported a build-up of ships in the invasion ports of Holland, Belgium and France. By 8 September, most of the barges, tugs and trawlers slated for Operation Sea Lion were in place. More ominously, British intelligence believed that specially trained Gestapo troops had arrived at embarkation points on the 11 August. Intelligence reports announced