Short Story - Just Another Day

Short Story

August 2025

They say time heals all wounds, but some scars etched deep by the past never truly fade, merely soften at the edges. For James Ezra Jones, now a man whose ninety-odd years sat comfortably on his weathered frame, the local reporter’s gentle query about his early life was like a key turning in a forgotten lock.
"I grew up on the Docklands and streets of Liverpool," he began, his voice raspy with age but resonating with the echo of those desperate times. "Back then there were lots of black kids. We used to play together, no animosity between any of us. There were kids whose parents were white women who married black men, kids whose parents were black women who married white men, there were kids like me, whose parents were both black, white folks and black folks, all living and working together, just trying to survive."
The reporter nodded, “It must have been terrifying, a young boy caught in a world war he couldn’t understand, can you tell me how you felt during the raids, I’d like to give my readers a sense of what you went through” she said flipping her notepad to a new page. James looked at her, and his face paled as the memories returned. His gaze, though distant, held the sharp clarity of a black and white film reel flickering to life as he began to tell his story. He wasn't in the home’s common room anymore; he was fifteen again, a lean, scared boy, his mother's hand clutched tight in his as the guttural roar of Luftwaffe engines filled the Liverpool sky, followed by the high-pitched scream of the bombs as they fell followed by an earth-shaking thud as they obliterated the familiar landscape. “It was easy to see in the light of flares, fires, tracer bullets and searchlights” he began, “as my mother dragged me across the street away from the shelter.” The reporter looked up “Away from the shelter?” she left the question hanging hoping to gain some clarification. James smiled at her naivety “The racial taunts had become insufferable, and we had stormed out of the shelter despite the protestations of the few decent people there. Mostly for my benefit my mother had raged that “I’m not going to be kept from home by any German planes” but we both knew the real reason we were running. I had argued against her at first, but she had insisted and now we had come too far, home was nearer than the alternative of going back” he said. “We were lucky enough to have a shelter, one of those things that the local authorities had given out. Anderson shelters they were called, simple sheets of metal with earth or sandbags piled on top, you had to build them yourself in your back garden, if you had one. My pappy built ours against the wall of the back yard before he died. It wasn’t the best and it certainly hadn’t been no use to him when the car slewed across the road and pinned him against a wall in Chapel Street” he coughed, a sickly red phlegm filling the tissue he held to his mouth, he quickly stuffed the tissue down the side of his cushion as though embarrassed by his condition before continuing “but it was all I could think about as we continued to hurtle down the streets in abstract panic, determined to outrun the Luftwaffe. At several points, the raid passed right overhead but there never seemed to be a place to hide, so we just kept running; terrified did not come close to what I was feeling…A series of bombs hit the next street, suddenly we were sprawled in the gutter covered in dust and rubble, and I was thankful that my mother had been following a blank wall on our side of the street, if there had been a house or shop doorway, we could well have been speared by glass slivers bursting from the windows.”
The air in the common room seemed to thicken, a palpable contrast to the chaos the elderly man was vividly recounting. The reporter, a young woman named Sarah, had initially braced herself for a stoic, perhaps even detached, account. But as the veteran’s voice, surprisingly strong for his age, detailed " the whistle of the bombs, and us just running, legs pumping like mad things bricks exploding all around," Sarah felt a cold dread creep up her spine. Her pen paused mid-air, the comfortable weight of her notebook suddenly feeling alien in a world where children had sprinted through streets lit by fire and debris. She pictured the familiar Liverpool she knew – vibrant, noisy, safe – collapsing under an unseen terror, a ghostly echo of that horror now filling the room. A shiver traced its way down her arm, not from the chill, but from the horrifying realization of the sheer, unadulterated terror he must have felt as a boy, running for his life through the very same streets she walked today, untouched by war.
James never paused, the memories coming thick and fast now as he recounted that terror filled night “she yanked me to my feet, and we ran like frightened alley cats. The fear of an incendiary bomb falling on us filtered through my mother’s hand as she pulled me along with a vice-like grip. Incendiary bombs are quite small, but they were deadly if they fell on someone, but I also knew the danger of flying pieces of rubble and glass from bombed buildings when they were hit again, I had lost more friends through those than being caught directly by a falling bomb, so we kept close to the wall, only pausing to check our direction. In a few places power lines, still live and spitting like angry dragons, writhed across the streets but we were lucky and easily went around the few that we came across.” He paused, allowing Sarah to catch up with her notetaking. His brow was beaded with sweat and Sarah noticed “Are you alright, would you like to take a break?” she asked genuinely concerned. “No Ma’am I’m just fine” he said smiling before continuing with his story. “My Ma pulled me up short at the crossroads,” he paused again as if trying to remember something “William Brown Street, I think it was, where the Picton Library is, then we skirted around the wall of St John’s Garden. Ma was yelling at me the whole time ‘Stay low! Keep up!’ she yelled at me. I’m not sure if she was just thinking aloud or if she was just scared. The route we took bypassed most of Lime Street, that was the main walk for prostitutes in the city, where I had no doubt, it would be business as usual, blitz or no blitz; and this added to my fears. It was not the ladies I feared, but their pimps and hangers-on. The city was in turmoil, with service vehicles zipping recklessly through the battered streets. Opportunistic crime was rife and a coloured mother and her fifteen-year-old son running in blind panic would be seen as an easy target.” He laughed, a sad sound to the reporters’ ears, a sound that she sensed masked a bitter experience, but she didn’t press him for fear of interrupting his flow. “But run we did, there was little else to do, incendiaries fell like rain, and the magnificent St George’s Hall was already alight and there seemed to be a very big fire at the beginning of Dale Street, behind the buildings past which we ran up to the far end of Lime Street. The heat was intense so there was obviously another large fire, which I found out afterwards was St John’s market burning… there were hundreds of people sheltering in the cells underneath it, unaware that the building above them was in flames.” His voice trailed off and they both sat in silence, the room seemed to darken momentarily. James wiped his brow with another tissue and the moment passed.
“Through all this there was the constant fear of the blitz itself,” he continued “I was aware of a blizzard of bombs screaming as they fell, followed by red hot shards of shrapnel, remnants of Ack – Ack fire, falling in a downpour back to earth. A barrage of sounds and light, raining down on us, combined with flak and tracer fire speeding upwards to strafe the sky, it seemed surreal, as though I was running through a dream. That was until a fire engine, racing to a call, fell into a bomb crater in front of us, undoubtedly killing the entire crew, and brought the dream to an end, uncensored and horrifically close. I was lucky that I did not fall over something or into something myself. I felt stripped naked, emotionally and physically, the dream was a nightmare but one I couldn’t wake up from, a multicoloured Hell.” He said with venom, Sarah could feel the emotion behind the words, and she noticed a tear trickling down the old man’s cheek. She searched for nothing in her bag giving him time to compose himself. He coughed once again and wiped his face with another tissue, stuffing it down the side of his chair to join the countless others, before continuing “as we left Renshaw Street behind us and climbed the hill towards Catherine Street I could see the Anglican Cathedral to my right, standing defiant, its scaffold-clad tower outlined against the blood red sky. It was less noisy there and the roads were totally deserted. The fear had given me energy but now it had begun to drain, and I was exhausted. There were several hospitals at the top of the hill, where cars and ambulances were coming and going steadily. I hoped Ma would give up and take refuge in one of them, but she seemed to read my thoughts ‘don’t stop now boy, them hospitals can be hit, too’ she said dragging me on. My legs refused to work, my lungs was scorched by the smoke and dust, and my ears were deafened by the sound of bombs whistling down on the city center. I don’t remember much more and can only assume I passed out, overwhelmed by our flight, but we survived the night… the following morning, we carried on as though it was just another day, I went to school but when I got there it was just a pile of rubble. Our school was bombed, and we weren’t allowed to go home; we had to sit in what had been the school yard with our pencils and paper, until we were found another school to go to, and that was it, just another day” he said.
A heavy silence fell in the common room, punctuated only by the distant hum of modern traffic through the window and the veteran's slow, measured breathing. Sarah found herself unable to speak for a moment, the ghost of whistling bombs seeming to echo in the quiet air. Her pen, poised above her notepad, felt impossibly heavy. The image of her own children, and the comfortable existence they had compared to this, she couldn’t even imagine them sitting amidst the rubble of their schoolyard, pencils in hand, waiting for a new normal that was anything but, it was almost too much to bear. Her own sheltered existence, where a flat tyre was a 'crisis,' felt obscenely trivial in comparison. The resilience, the sheer, unyielding fortitude required to treat such unimaginable horror as 'just another day' was a testament to a generation she could only begin to comprehend. Taking a slow, measured breath, Sarah finally looked up from her notes, her eyes brimming with tears, and wide with a mixture of awe and profound sorrow. "Mr. Jones," she began, her voice breaking, "I never knew…that's... that was incredible. Thank you"