Free Domestic Soldiers by Jennifer Purcell Page A

that, ‘An expedition may be launched at any time now.’ 8
    The Battle of Britain lasted until 15 September, when the RAF chased German fighters and bombers to the coast during a daylight raid on London, forcing the Germans to rely on night raids from then on. On the 17th, the RAF bombed Dunkirk and scattered the invasion fleet. Hitler now had little option but to postpone the invasion of Britain until the spring. Nonetheless, across the Channel, preparations for invasion continued to be reported by Allied intelligence well into October.
    Bridges didn’t write for the entire month of September, but by October, when she resumed her diary, Birmingham was once again a target despite the heavy raids on London. Sleep was becoming a treasured commodity with each passing day and, although Alice had complained in August that her sleep was cut to a mere seven hours, it got considerably worse.
    On the night of 4 October, it wasn’t the German bombers that deprived her of sleep, but her husband. He stumbled into the shelter late that night, drunk from a night out with his mates. She sent him back to the house for his dinner, but when she went in to check on him, Alice found he’d burned his meal and in a fit ofanger had thrown the plate across the kitchen against the wall she’d recently painted.
    I blazed … I told him exactly where he got off and that I was wasting my time running a home for a man who could go out drinking, come home and make himself a damn nuisance, when at that moment there were our lads giving their lives for such as he.
    Defiantly, she said that she would evacuate Jacq to safety in the countryside and find a job instead of keeping house for him. He threatened to lock her inside the house so she couldn’t. She went to bed shaken, ‘I cannot afford rows … I can face bombing better.’
    In the morning, she told him he could keep some of the housekeeping money and eat his dinners out, for she wouldn’t waste her time cooking for him. He balked, but then they patched things up. He admitted that he’d got drunk because he felt guilty that he was doing nothing for the war effort. She softened and defended him to M-O:
    The last war he was seventeen or sixteen when he joined up, he was in it, you see, and doing something. This war he has responsibilities, a home to pay for and upkeep, a wife and child, his job to keep or another to get, to help the war effort and yet he’s in a reserved occupation.
    For most of October, Alice and her family rushed down to the shelter at around 8 p.m., the time when the sirens seemed to wail as if on schedule. Some nights were relatively ‘quiet’, but the roar of German planes could nonetheless be heard overhead as they bypassedBirmingham and turned their wrath on another district. Bridges and her friends held their breath and hoped that Lord Haw-Haw, the British turncoat who broadcast on German radio with seemingly uncanny accuracy (though often this was little more than rumour spread after the fact), was right. Maybe Hitler really would spare Birmingham for his capital since he was determined to raze London to the ground, as Haw-Haw had asserted. But the hope was fleeting. In mid-October, the Germans returned to Birmingham for several nights.
    At the start of these raids, on 15 October, Bridges had a difficult time convincing her husband to take cover. He was slightly deaf and swore she was too cautious: her ‘2 miles away is about 10 miles’, he mocked. Stubbornly, Les vowed not to move until he heard the bombs himself. Between the raids, she ran from the shelter through the garden, with ack-ack fire blazing nearby, to the house to beg him to come down, but it was no use. Finally, she absolved herself of all responsibility for him and ran back to the shelter. ‘He got terribly peevish, he’s a man that likes everything cut and dried and he thinks jerry shouldn’t come until he’s ready for him,’ she huffed to M-O from the safety of her Anderson shelter.
    In his