Three nights that almost destroyed a city By Nigel Proctor

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

Mick Scully on being a bouncer and The Norway Room!

Today’s guest blog post is by Mick Scully who lives in Birmingham his debut novel The Norway Room was published earlier this year.  He had his first story in his Little Moscow series published in the anthology Birmingham Noir.  His story collection Little Moscow was highly praised.  He has been a bouncer, teacher, acupuncturist and now works as a humanist funeral minister.

There is a moment described in the biographies of many actors when they get away with it.  Auditioning for a role for which they don’t totally fit the bill they take a chance, either falling flat on their faces – literally, sometimes – or succeeding with possibly career-changing consequences.

    

Can you ride a horse?  Of course I can.

   

 Deep-sea dive?  I’m a natural.

Swing from a helicopter above the English Channel?  I was fifteen the first time I tried that.

Invariably in the accounts we read the blag convinces, the actor secures the part and, with maybe a hiccup or two, a star is born.

    

In real life it isn’t quite like that.  No, not quite, but maybe sometimes close.  In the seventies, in my twenties and desperately needing to supplement my teaching income, I applied for a bar job in a Birmingham nightclub.  ‘We only employ girls,’ one of the middle-aged Spanish brothers who owned the club told me.  Curiously he spoke only out of the right side of his mouth.  ‘Pretty-ones,’ his brother added, from the left side of his.  As a six-foot twenty-five-year-old bloke there was no way I was going to blag my way through that one.  I had to admit defeat.

But wait.  It seemed I had something that was of interest to them.  The very thing, it turned out, that so definitely disqualified me from the position for which I was applying.  ‘You seem a big, strong lad,’ left-mouth brother said.  ‘You look as if you can handle yourself.’  I suppose that phrase is open to interpretation, but I was pretty sure I knew what they were suggesting.  In the seventies, of course, before security checks and training courses, being able to handle yourself was pretty much the only qualification required for door-work.

This was my swinging from a helicopter, of course I can ride a horse, walk a tightrope moment, and I knew what was required.  I nodded.  ‘Did a bit of boxing at school,’ I lied.  And, referencing the Bruce Lee craze of the time, ‘little bit of Kung Fu. No expert though.’  And it was enough.

I certainly looked the part.  The black suit.  The dickie-bow.  The stance – legs just a little further apart than is comfortable – was easy.  The swagger – almost naturally acquired.  But I knew that sooner or later there would come a moment when I was going to have to get on that horse, put on that diving suit.  And I tried to put it off for as long as possible.  The way I did this was to talk to people: be reasonable; be nice.  Prevention is better than cure as my old mum used to say.  Look, I’m really sorry about this, but it’s obvious that you’ve had a few.  Another time we’ll be glad to welcome you.  But tonight … There’s a taxi rank over there. I’d have a word with a drunk’s mates, persuade them to see him home, get girls to help me to talk their blokes out of a potential punch-up.  I developed quite a technique, as much chat as a vacuum-cleaner salesman as one of my colleagues observed – well it was the seventies!

But of course luck always runs out eventually.  And when the place did take off one night, I fell off the horse, dropped from the helicopter.  Even the diving bell couldn’t save me. 

I thought the job was finished.  But the twins came round to see me when I came out of hospital.  I was sussed, yes: not a fighter.  But I was a talker and that, they decided, was what they wanted.  When undesirables – for whatever reason – were trying to gain entry, it was my job to talk to them – be nice – get them to change their mind, go somewhere else.  Go home.  If that failed, a specially choreographed little manoeuvre took place: sadly admitting that all attempts at reasonable persuasion had failed, I moved back towards the ticket kiosk so that my heavier colleagues could move in to – in the words of the brothers – do the business.

And so for three years I was part of the Birmingham nightclub scene, working the door, patrolling the dance floors, pretending to be hard – but the friendly one.  Memories from those times came back to me when I started writing crime stories ten years ago.  All the dodges that can be part of that world.  And the more sinister aspects.  The shock I felt when someone told me that a gun was kept in the safe – the brothers keep one in their draw too – deeply shocking in the seventies, and probably not true, but all grist to the mill of a writer.

And I certainly drew upon those days when developing the characters of Craig Carrow and Shuko for my novel, The Norway Room.  Both work in Birmingham’s club land.  Carrow, an e-ex cop, is part of the security team of The Norway Room, the city’s premier nightclub.  Shuko, a fixer for the Triad gang the Ninth Dragon, that is active in the city. Both men who really can handle themselves.

It is interesting the things from one’s past that you draw upon when writing fiction.  After my nightclub and then teaching days, I trained in Chinese medicine and had for a number of years an acupuncture practice in Birmingham.  In training one learns a lot about the structures of Chinese society, the importance of hierarchy, the mythologies.  And I was able to use some of the sensibility of these things in creating the Ninth Dragon.

Shuko, the fixer, looks to the histories of the Chinese Emperors for guidance when planning the Dragon’s strategy in a turf war over the Norway Room.  He uses the brutal outcomes of some of the traditional stories as a warning to opponents.

So in writing The Norway Room, almost inadvertently it now seems, elements of my past working lives were excavated as I constructed the narrative.  Night Clubs.  Chinese medicine.  And the years spent teaching?  Well, there is Ashley; the thirteen-year-old lad at the centre of the novel, attempting to survive on his own in the city while his father serves a prison sentence.  

The Shots review of The Norway Room can be read here.

The Norway Room is out now (£11.99, Tindal Street Press)