Lully, Lullay, thou little tiny child

A John Macdebs Enquiry

“I ain't ever heard of any goblin called Lert.”

Mauve

The First Clue

The Smith of Willerby is an important person – traditionally the same would have been said of any village: the blacksmith held a key role with skill and knowledge passed down across generations and a status that put him (or, occasionally, her) on a par with the innkeeper and the priest if not quite the lord of the manor.

More recently smithing has fallen by the wayside along with other pre-industrial crafts and if a village still has a smith, then it will be as a form of artistry, a village luxury rather than an essential service.

Not so in Willerby.

The Smith of Willerby is an important person – and perhaps the best indication of this is that when the smith dies the smithy is immediately locked up and that night, after dark, a car arrives carrying officers from London who go through the smith’s belongings. Some they take away, some they destroy in the flames of the forge and some they leave to be passed on or sold. They go the way they came, still under the cover of darkness, with the smithy unlocked for the village to put straight whilst the next smith is chosen. Smiths being smiths there are rarely relatives to claim what belongings are left and so the village holds a sale of goods.

At such a sale I picked up a copy of Ralph Leake’s “Discourse on Silversmithing” from 1712, more for the hand-tooled cover than because I had a passion for the subject, but you never know what you’ll find nosing through old books. In this case I found that Ralph Leake may have had magnificent skill in metalworking but his gift for writing was, let’s say, poorly developed: overblown, vague and meandering are the politest adjectives I can find.

I also found a slip of paper – old fashioned parchment, in fact, tucked between the pages. In a bold hand on one side was a message written in ink. It read

Coventry
This Night
None of this Realm to know

In one corner someone else had neatly written the date 1490 and on the reverse were marks as though it had spent many years glued into some kind of scrapbook. My mind leaped precipitously to the possibility that the scrapbook in question was something that was taken away by car and that this had become unstuck before that event and put into Leake for safekeeping but that the smith had died before finding time to glue it back in place. If this were true then this was an original summons for the Willerby smith (from what authority remains unclear – to whom are the smiths answerable?), but to take part in or avert what event? This stumped me – 1490 was an exciting time to be in Hungary, France or Scotland but this period of time (between the court of Henry VI and the birth of Shakespeare) was a historically barren one for the area.

1940, however,…

The Second Clue

On 14^th November 1940 the most devastating attack of the Blitz hit Coventry. Over one night five hundred German bombers dropped waves of high explosives (which knocked out the infrastructure including the telephone lines and water mains that would have allowed an effective response by the fire brigade) and incendiary bombs (which consequently caused maximal damage) on the city. Although a full firestorm was avoided because the bombers dropped their loads over too long a time period the city’s industry, residential quarters and historical centre were to a large extent destroyed.

The next morning, standing in the ruins of the medieval cathedral, his home and life’s work, Provost Richard Howard put two twisted and burned roof timbers above where the altar used to be and ordered the words “Father Forgive” to be inscribed in the wall behind. Amidst the pain and fear and sorrow of a ruined city, hearing of a death toll of hundreds and still creeping upwards, Howard found the strength to look for peace rather than revenge, the courage to hope and rebuild rather than destroy, the humanity to reach out across borders rather than lash out against the enemy. It is largely because of him that the new Coventry Cathedral has been rebuilt alongside the remains of the old as a living symbol of peace and reconciliation.

In 1974, Group Captain F. W. Winterbotham asserted that the British Government, and Winston Churchill in particular, had advance warning of the Coventry raid through decrypted messages but that they were unable to do anything about it for fear of giving away that they had broken the Enigma code. This was denied by other key figures in the Ultra programme that Winterbotham worked with and since 1996 (when they were declassified) it has been possible to read through the messages decrypted by Ultra and it’s clear that whilst they mention a significant raid, none of them specify that Coventry was the target.

Winterbotham died in 1990 still convinced that someone at Bletchley Park had known that Coventry was to be targeted – we know now that he can’t have got this impression from reading an intercepted message and, of course, it might have been an imaginative retro-fitting of what he knew later, but in a tight-knit and tight-lipped community like Bletchley we must consider the possibility that the information was gained through another source, possibly one even more secret than Ultra.

If that was the case, then the dilemma Winterbotham ascribes to Churchill would have faced somebody in the intelligence establishment: to save Coventry and give up the secret source of information or to leave it to burn. What if they knew enough secrets to try to do neither – what if they sent a secret message to a powerful agent located nearby, a message that was later filed away and marked misleadingly just in case of accident?

The Third Clue

Given the levels of destruction, the number of civilian deaths in Coventry was comparatively low. This is largely explained by two factors: the evacuation of the town by thousands of residents before the bombing; and the survival intact of most of the bomb shelters. One thing that isn’t explained is the low fatality rate for the city’s homeless: this is obviously a difficult thing to measure both because the figure is necessarily vague and because after the bombing the number of those needing temporary accommodation rose hugely. The cathedral records of those accessing support both before and after the bombing are, however, well-kept and in a group one would expect to be disproportionately affected there are almost no recorded deaths, or even unexplained disappearances.

You’d have to be a history nerd to know this – it’s only apparent if you go through some of the least interesting papers in the cathedral archives with a careful attention to detail. A perhaps better-known mystery of the Coventry Blitz is the myth of the “Sleepers Through”.

Whilst most of the people of the city were awake that night, hiding in shelters, heading for the countryside or valiantly fighting fires, there were a handful of families who survived the bombing having apparently slept through untroubled. They were never formally identified, of course, and some have put it down as an urban legend, unlikely in both detail and broad sweep, but the phrase Sleepers Through entered the town vernacular to describe those so inattentive that even a direct hit by the Blitz wouldn’t attract their consciousness, and letters to the Coventry Echo over the following decade suggest that it was normal, if not universal, to know someone who knew a Sleeper Through.

In searching for the truth of this story I spent time in the care homes of Coventry and the surrounding area, talking to old people of their memories of the Blitz, listening out for anything that might put me on the scent, hoping that some day I’d come across someone who had, as a child, been a Sleeper Through. Eventually, I think I’ve found one.

Elsie Knott was 90 when she died in 2024 and had been a resident of White Oaks for two and a half confused years before that. She didn’t have any family that anyone knew about and spent her days in a chair in front of the television, occasionally shouting out strange and unconnected thoughts that disturbed the other residents.

I was there one day when this happened, playing draughts with an old man I’d come to know. Suddenly, our concentration on the game was broken by a shout from the centre of the room. Elsie (as I came to know her) was standing up, pointing at the ceiling, and shouting “They slept through, but I didn’t, I didn’t.” She was quickly calmed down by the nurses and taken to her room, but my attention was grabbed and so I went to speak to her.

“Elsie, were you a sleeper through?” I asked, and her bony fingers closed round my wrist as she fixed bright, sparkling eyes on mine. “They said so,” she replied. At that moment I would have taken an oath that she was no more confused than I was but instead I took my notebook from my pocket, settled down in a chair by her bed and asked her to tell me more. This is Elsie’s story as best as I can put it down, the unlikely memories of a scared six-year-old recalled a muddling eighty years later.

It seems that her family had heard the sirens and left their house to go to the nearest shelter but hadn’t got far when they saw an accident – a speeding motorbike knocking down an old drunk before disappearing round a corner. Her parents stopped to help, telling her to hold tight to the tails of her mother’s coat so as not to get lost in the deep autumn darkness, and as she stood there she saw a pair of eyes looking at her from a hedge – straight at her from a face the same height above the ground as her own. It wasn’t another child though, an older face, strange, comic even. The other person said “hello,” introduced themselves as Lert and winked. Somehow the wink convinced her of Lert’s trustworthiness and she remained convinced as Lert stepped out of the hedge, heaved the drunk into a fireman’s lift and led her and her parents to an underground cave, or crypt that was being used as an unofficial shelter. She stayed there all night with half a dozen other children whose parents, like hers, seemed to sleep peacefully sitting up. Throughout the night Lert, and others like him, no longer comical but filled with solemn purpose, swashbuckling grace and a piratical glee, brought people down to the cellar where they were given soup from a great cauldron and then laid down to sleep with a blanket and a bed-roll. Elsie and the other children did their best to help but most of the work was done by Lert’s people directed by an old priest in a black robe.

When the sound of the bombs faded and they knew morning was coming another grown up person came down to the shelter – huge, bearded, black with soot, wearing leather overalls and carrying a hammer.

“Remember this night,” he said. “Remember that folk with no reason to help came to Coventry and saved lives. Remember the good that hot soup can do. Remember to hope. Children – to you we give lives filled with purpose: use them to rebuild Coventry over the coming years. Reverend – to you we give a fresh morning, the sky filled with smoke and the bodies of those we could not save on the streets. Make something good of it.”

With that he turned and left, followed, in single file, by a line of goblinfolk. Lert, towards the back, turned just before passing through the door and gave Elsie a last wink.

Epilogue

We don’t know who the other children were that night, who the other sleeper through families were, but we do know that Provost Howard was faithful to his charge, as was Elsie. She trained as a nurse and worked for almost fifty years in the hospital on Stony Stanton St, living in a small terrace in Bishopsgate where she was a stalwart of the local church: on the cleaning and flowers rotas and for a few years church warden. She’d be there every Sunday morning except for one day in mid-November, the closest Sunday to the 14^th when, without fail, she’d be in the Cathedral, remembering the Blitz. She never married, never had children but was Auntie, and then Granny, Elsie to generations.

We also know one thing more – we know that in December 1945, when the war was over, two weeks before Christmas, the Provost held a service of reconciliation in what was left of the old Cathedral in which he announced the plan to build a brand-new modern replacement in the space alongside the ruins. As part of the service a mixed choir of local adults and children sang a specially arranged version of the Coventry Carol and, in the photo taken for the Echo, there on the end of the front row in a beautiful new dress bought for the occasion is little Elsie Knott, winking.

Lully, Lullay, thou little tiny child.