Until We Meet Again by Margaret Thornton

God! I thought the end of the world had come! And that must be only a fraction of what our poor lads are going through over in France.’
    ‘I suspect we’ll be pretty busy for the next weekor so, Father,’ said Patrick. He and Katy had now arrived on the scene. ‘There’s sure to have been some fatalities.’
    ‘Aye, that’s the way it goes, lad,’ replied his father, ‘but it’s work I’d much rather do without. Yes, it’s a bad do, it is that. And so unexpected an’ all. We thought we’d be far enough away from it all, here in Scarborough, didn’t we?’
    ‘So we did,’ agreed Freddie. ‘Well, I’d better get off to work now. I’ll go and see if the bank has survived.’ He kissed his wife and little daughter. ‘I’ll see you around six o’clock… We really are most grateful to you, William, and Faith.’
    They decided to carry on as normal at Moon’s Modes and the undertaking yard, at least as normal as it was possible to be. There were no customers at the store, though, save for two ladies, regular customers, who came towards the end of the afternoon, ostensibly to choose new winter hats – which they did – but also, Faith guessed, to see for themselves the damage that had occurred in their neighbourhood. Faith and Muriel and the younger assistants had spent most of the morning clearing up the chaos left by an exploding shell. Fortunately, only a few items of clothing had been destroyed, and the others which were merely crumpled would be sold in an end of season sale.
    Work proceeded as usual in the yard; therewere two funerals booked for later in the week; life – and death – had to go on. William made arrangements with a firm of joiners to board up the broken windows of the office and store, and those of Maddy’s business, Nicholls and Stringer.
    He went with Maddy in the motor-car later that day to collect more of their belongings to transport to Victoria Avenue, which would be their home for the unforeseeable future. There was other damage to the property, which had not been noticed at first; cracks in the brickwork, a broken chimney stack and slates missing from the roof. All would have to be put to rights to make the little home safe again for the Nicholls family…but who could tell how long that would be?
    There was a good deal of comment in the newspapers – not only the local ones, but in the national press as well – concerning the raid on the north-east coast. There was outrage amongst the public at large, not only at the enemy but at the Royal Navy for failing to prevent the raid.
    It was not only Scarborough that had been shelled. Following their onslaught on that town the three warships – named in the press as the
Deerflinger
, the
Van der Tann
and the
Karlberg
– had sailed northwards to Whitby and Hartlepool. The combined attack resulted in 137 fatalities and 592 casualties. In Scarborough itself, where fivehundred shells had landed, nineteen people were killed and eighty wounded, many of them severely so. These were the first civilian casualties on British soil since the French Revolutionary Wars.
    ‘Why Scarborough?’ was the question on everyone’s lips. At the outbreak of the war the council had taken the usual defence precautions in the form of barricades on all roads leading up from the cliffs, but no one had expected bombardment from the sea. Scarborough was an undefended town with no gun emplacements; the harbour was not suitable for warships, nor was it close to any significant military targets.
    This was not true, however, of the entire Yorkshire coast. To the north the mouth of the River Tees and the town of Hartlepool were defended by gun batteries, as well as the mouth of the Humber, further south. It was reported that the Germans had genuinely believed that Scarborough was defended by a gun battery, which would have made it a legitimate target under the rules of the Hague Conference of 1907. But this cut no ice with the many people who had lost their