Blitz Next Door by Cathy Forde

stayed. Weren’t so lucky…” Mrs Milligan paused. Pete heard her voice break as she said, “Like poor Jean.”
    “Beth’s mum died? No!” Pete didn’t want this to be true. He wanted Mrs Milligan to have made a mistake. But he could sense the old lady nodding next to him.
    “They found her body under a collapsed…” Mrs Milligan had to stop and clear her throat. “These big walls we had,” she said when she went on. “They were put up in front of the tenements to protect them from blast. Baffles they were called. A menace. And one fell on poor Jean; buried her. Dear God…”
    Pete had to wait a few moments before Mrs Milligan carried on.
    “Dr Aidan said she’d ignored the air raid to come and find yon box because she knew how much the weethings inside meant to Beth. And they got her,” Mrs Milligan whispered. “Not the only undeserving soul to die in someone else’s war—”
    “Then or now,” Mr Milligan chimed these words with his mother.
    The shelter fell silent after that. It was so quiet Pete could hear the rustling tune of the leaves on the hedge that led to Dunny’s garden. He wondered what Dunny was doing right now. What he’d say if he wandered down to play with his footie figures and found Pete, his dad’s boss and a very old survivor of the Clydebank Blitz sitting in silence in the dark.
    Sitting in silence in the dark for a long time. Until Mrs Milligan spoke, her voice clear and strong. Matter-of-fact.
    “And now you understand why wee Beth keeps coming back.” She gave Pete’s hand a few taps. Pay attention . “Needs to deal with her mother’s unfinished business—”
    “By finding the box,” added Mr Milligan, his voice matter-of-fact too. “I should have done it myself, Pete.”
    “But he was a big tumshy.” Mrs Milligan leaned into Pete to nudge him. “Too feart of a wee lost lassie.”
    “Guilty as charged.” Mr Milligan almost sounded sheepish. “Of course this is when I was round your age, Pete, and I’d be in your room. ‘ Jamie ?’ she’d call me, all hours of the night.”
    “Course he never told me . I’d be asleep and there he’d be standing, white as a ghost over my bed: ‘Mammy, I’ve had a bad dream’,” Mrs Milligan tutted. “I only find out what he’s been running away from all these years when he decides he’s not scared any more,and he’s in that room with his Elvis and his Chuck Holly blaring—”
    “Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly.” Mr Milligan’s sigh was good-natured. “Waiting for Beth to call me, but she never came back.”
    “No wonder: yon racket,” Mrs Milligan tutted.
    “She’s been complaining about my taste in music all her life,” Mr Milligan chuckled. “Anyway, Pete, even when I moved into my own place in Glasgow, I’d come back and stay in my old room for a few nights round the anniversary of the Blitz, just in case Beth…”
    “And she didn’t?” asked Peter.
    “Never.” Peter sensed Mr Milligan swirling his hand about in the air. “Just had this feeling of… nothingness on the other side of the wall. I knew she was gone.”
    “Gone like dead?” Pete’s voice was tiny.
    “Not a bally bit of it!” Mr Milligan rapped his hand hard off the bench. “Gone like living. Stayed up north till after the war—”
    “And then emigrated in the early fifties, with her daddy. New Zealand they went,” interrupted Mrs Milligan. “Still alive—”
    “As far as you think or like to hope,” Mr Milligan interrupted his mother. Then he sighed. “We used to get letters, Christmas cards.”
    “Because I’d write to the wee lassie. Sent her an Arran wool tammy I knitted one year.” Mrs Milligan leant into Pete and nudged him. “Jamie said it’d look like a plate of lumpy porridge on Beth’s head but I mind she wrote me a lovely thank you. And then, over time…” The old lady tutted.
    “Lost touch, didn’t we?” said Mr Milligan.
    “Maybe the memories from home we were stirring up were too painful for the