When it comes to the Blitz most people think of London, Liverpool, Coventry, hardly ever Birmingham. Yet Birmingham was the third most bombed city in the UK and in November 1940, three consecutive nights of bombing came close to destroying the place.
By the end of those three nights, three fifths of Birmingham had no water mains – even the canals were low – and there was governmental concern that another night’s raid could raze this city of tightly packed workshops and wood framed buildings to the ground.
Water tankers from across the country were sent to Birmingham but for whatever reason, no bombs fell again until early-December 1940, by which time Brum was better prepared – albeit marginally.
Amidst all this chaos and confusion crime was rife. Bomb sites were looted, juvenile delinquency rampant, sexual harassment during blackout common and fatalities due to road traffic accidents rose. There is also some suggestion that the murder rate peaked, as bodies found in bomb-damaged buildings were assumed to be war victims and were buried without postmortem. Postmortems did happen but were reserved for the few cases when circumstances were obviously suspicious.
Black marketeering was rife too with, for instance, untaxed Irish tobacco and whiskey smuggled in from the Republic, flooding Birmingham – Brum has had a large Irish population for a long time.
But as well as its Irish, Scottish and Welsh citizens, wartime Birmingham had a vibrant European community of Italians, Poles, Serbs, Germans, Croatians, French, Greek Cypriots and many more. Obvious enemy aliens, such as Germans, had been interned but Italians who’d been in the UK over twenty years were allowed to carry on as normal, or as normal as wartime would permit.
Moving in and amongst all of this, from Birmingham to West Bromwich and back again, was my family and my two very different grandfathers.
My Mom’s dad, a straight-up Methodist, was a furnace worker by day, a volunteer fireman by night. Mom (born in 1937) claimed that she was being pushed home one night after a raid, only for her mom – my nan – to point at a burning warehouse. The fire brigade on-site, there was a man astride the end of the long ladders, dumping water into the inferno.
“That’s your dad,” my nan said to my mom.
Mom always swore this was her earliest memory of her father.
Garg – that’s what I called my maternal grandad – never talked about his war but he did on occasion talk about petty crime and black marketeering and once how one man, who was clearly a “wrong ‘un”, disappeared during night shift, never to be seen again. Rumour was, he’d been thrown into one of the molten metal pools, evaporating instantly.
My other grandfather was a different sort: a hard-drinking house painter and communist. He believed the war was a necessary evil which would wear out the imperialist forces of Britain and Germany. And once both nations were down and out, the Soviet Union could role across Europe, creating in its wake a Marxist utopia.
There was also a suspected murderer in my family.
A young girl was found dead under a door in the garden of a bombed out house and a cousin of my dad arrested. This lad was described as “simple” – whatever that may mean today.
Eventually, he was released without charge after the pathologist was unable to determine whether the girl’s death by suffocation was murder or an unfortunate accident.
I was told this story by my Auntie Vi, when I was about four. She was my dad’s elder brother’s wife and a lively woman, who took a wicked pleasure from scaring little children – especially me.
I adored her.
During lockdown, when I decided to write Fire Damage, this old story came back to me and I asked Dad if he could remember any more details about the incident. Ninety at the time, he said it rang a vague bell but no more. Mom said it definitely happened but she wasn’t sure when or where, as it had taken place before she knew the Proctors – but Vi had married George in 1941, so it could have been around then.
Possibly.
She knew no more than I did.
However, this was good enough for me: a starting point without too many pesky, constraining facts.
So now I had my inciting incident, a location and time and the complex diversity and broad criminality of wartime Birmingham to draw on.
All that was missing was my lead detective but that’s another story.
Fire Damage by Nigel Proctor (Floodgate Press) Out Now
The Birmingham Blitz, November 1940. War kills, crime pays, no more so than when the lights are off and everyone’s looking out for themselves – or looking the other way. After a young girl is found dead, Detective Sergeant Harry Marsh and his new partner, Policewoman Annie Scott, uncover a world of illegal immigrants, arms theft, domestic terrorism and police corruption – all against a backdrop of burnt-out houses and burnt-out lives. In a world at war, only one thing is certain: life is the cheapest commodity of all.
Nigel Proctor can be found on Instagram @nigelproc
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