Some Sunny Day (14 page)

Rosie felt as though all the blood was draining from her body. Her father’s ship was due in any day as well.

‘Did you hear which ships it was?’ she asked anxiously.

Fanny shook her head.

‘Quick, Sylvia, go and put the wireless on,’ Enid demanded sharply. ‘It will be on the news.’

Rosie’s mouth had gone dry and her heart was pounding heavily with sick dread. ‘It won’t,’ she said. ‘They don’t give out that kind of news – not at first.’ She bit her lip and tried to fight back her fear.

The Elegant Modes workers had still not heard any fresh news when it was time for them to go home. Rosie had been unable to concentrate all afternoon.

‘Try not to worry, Rosie,’ Enid told her in a kinder voice than she normally used to the junior girls. ‘I’ll have a word with my hubbie for you. With him working down at the docks, they normally get to hear the news before anyone else.’

Rosie gave her a grateful look. She couldn’t bear to think of anything happening to her father. It was too atrocious even to contemplate. She cheered herself slightly at that – if she couldn’t imagine it, then it couldn’t happen, could it?

Normally she and Sylvia left the shop together but today Sylvia had rushed off without a word and although she was so worried about her father, Rosie still felt concerned for her friend.

It was still raining, and Rosie shook the raindrops off her umbrella as she let herself into the empty house.

She had just got the fire lit and made herself a much-needed cup of tea when she heard someone knocking on the front door. In her haste to answer
it she almost knocked over her tea cup. In her mind’s eye she could already see the telegram boy waiting outside to hand her the message every household dreaded receiving. But when she opened the door it was Rob Whittaker standing there, his bicycle propped up against the wall. Rosie had never felt so relieved.

Rob was wearing his fireman’s uniform and he removed his cap when he saw Rosie, squeezing it in his hands.

‘I hope you don’t mind me calling like this, but I heard earlier on today that one of our convoys had been badly torpedoed and—’

‘Yes, I heard that too,’ Rosie sighed. ‘My dad is—’

‘It’s all right, Rosie. Seeing as I’m based down near the docks, I checked up, remembering you’d said he was due back any day. He’s on the
Aurora
, and she’s part of a different convoy. They should be anchoring up out over the Liverpool bar later on tonight and getting into the dock in the early hours, all being well.’

Rosie couldn’t speak at first, she was so delirious with happiness. When she did finally find her voice all she could say was, ‘Oh, thank God.’ And then her expression changed and her face became shadowed. ‘I was dreading hearing bad news. In fact I thought when I heard you knock that it was the telegraph boy, but here’s me over the moon because my dad is safe, whilst that boy will be knocking on the doors of some
poor families tonight with the news that their men won’t be coming home.’ She pressed her hand to her mouth in an attempt to stop her lips from trembling. ‘I’m really grateful to you for taking the trouble to let me know that he’s all right, Rob.’ She hesitated and then opened the door a little bit wider, and offered shyly, ‘I’ve just brewed a pot of tea and you’re welcome to come in if you want.’

‘That’s kind of you, Rosie. I’d like to but I’d better not. Mrs Norris, whom I’m lodging with, will have the tea on. Mr Norris always gets in at seven o’clock. Woe betide if I’m a minute after. I tell you, even Hitler would be defeated by Mrs N.’ s moaning.’

Rosie could hear in his voice that he would have liked to have accepted her invitation and she gave him a small smile, suggesting, ‘Well, perhaps another time – when my dad’s here. I’m sure he’d like to meet you and have a chat with you, what with your brother sailing under the Red Duster as well.’

‘I’d like that.’ He was smiling so much she might have offered him the moon, and despite his dinner waiting, he was still standing on the doorstep as though he couldn’t bear to leave.

‘Your tea will be getting cold,’ she reminded him.

‘Rosie…’

‘Yes?’

‘I was wondering if sometime you might fancy going to the cinema with me?’

Rosie’s stomach did a little dance. ‘I might do,’ she told him, ‘if there was to be a good film on.’ She didn’t want him thinking she was too keen. Rob nodded and finally stepped back off the doorstep.

As she closed the door, Rosie told herself severely that if she had had any sense she would have turned him down, but there was a small bubble of happiness inside her that hadn’t been there before, and as she went to tend to the sulky small fire with its covering of slack, she was humming happily under her breath, thinking maybe the world wasn’t such a bad place after all.

‘I’m thinking of changing me job to the night shift.’

Rosie looked at her mother, who had just arrived home. Rosie had told her immediately that her father was safe – the first words they had shared in days. Christine had been typically blasé about the news.

‘Why would you want to do that?’

‘Well, I’ve bin talking to one of the other women there and she was saying, like I told you, that you can get five pounds a week if you do nights. With that kind of money we could afford to move out of here and rent somewhere a bit safer. That’ll please yer dad. He’s never liked living here.’

It sounded a logical reason for her mother’s decision to work nights, but Rosie could hear a note of evasion in her voice, so she pressed her uneasily, ‘You want to move out? But you’ve always said that you’d never move from here.’ She brought out
the fish pie to dish up, which was in reality mostly mashed potatoes with a small helping of the reconstituted dried fish that everyone was being exhorted to eat. No matter its quality, she wanted something proper for her father to eat when he came in later.

‘That was before Hitler started bombing the docks,’ her mother retorted. ‘I can’t sleep in me bed at night any more for fear that we’re going to be killed, and as for that ruddy air-raid shelter…Besides, I thought you’d be pleased, seein’ as you was on at me to change me ways,’ she told Rosie meaningfully.

‘I didn’t say that you should work nights, Mum. In fact…’ Rosie paused. Now that her mother was speaking to her properly again this surely was an ideal opportunity for Rosie to say what was on her mind. ‘…It seems to me that it would be a good idea if you were to leave Littlewoods, and look for a job somewhere else.’

‘Oh, it does, does it, and why would that be, I wonder?’

Rosie tensed at the hostility in her mother’s voice, but she wasn’t going to back down now.

‘It would be for the best, Mum; you must know that.’

‘Because of Dennis, you mean?’

Rosie had to look away. She couldn’t bear hearing the man’s name on her mother’s lips but she dare not risk antagonising her too much She knew her mother and how she could fly off the handle if she was pushed too hard.

‘He’s married, Mum, and so are you, and with you both working at the factory…’ When her mother didn’t respond Rosie accused her miserably, ‘You’re still seeing him, aren’t you?’

‘What if I am? You think you know everything, Rosie, but you know nothing. Why shouldn’t I have a bit of happiness in me life? I’ve had precious little of it with your dad—’

‘Mum, can’t you see how much better it would be for everyone if you got another job?’ Rosie interrupted her.

‘For everyone but me and Dennis, you mean?’ Christine challenged her bitterly. ‘But of course what we want doesn’t matter, I suppose.’

‘Mum, you’re both married.’

‘Look, me and him won’t be seeing one another no more, all right, and I don’t want you going on about it to me all the time, Rosie, ’cos if you do I’ll start wishing that I hadn’t stopped seeing him. And as for me job – well, if you think I’m going to turn down the chance to earn a fiver a week then you can think again, miss.’

Rosie pushed her plate away, her appetite gone.

Her mother did the same, standing up and announcing, ‘I’m going up to get changed. I’m going down the factory to see about changing over to nights.’

‘Dad’s ship’s due to dock any time,’ Rosie reminded her quietly. ‘The least you can do is be here to welcome him.’

But her mother wasn’t listening. She had already disappeared into the hall.

Rosie sighed. What would happen to them now?

The sound of the air-raid siren brought Rosie out of her sleep. Getting out of bed, she pulled on her candlewick dressing gown, practically bumping into her mother on the landing. In the hallway they pulled on their wellingtons and grabbed their gas masks and the emergency boxes everyone was supposed to keep ready for air raids, with a few basic necessities in them: tea for a hot drink, matches, a torch, toys for children if one had children, along with all their important papers, like their birth certificates, ration books and anything else of value.

As they hurried down the street towards their designated public shelter, overhead they could hear the drone of planes, heading for the docks – and their target. One of them picked out a target by the searchlights from the defence battery, banked and suddenly, up ahead of the people making for the shelter, a shower of incendiary bombs were fizzing from it, to explode in a dazzle of light.

‘Watch out, everyone,’ someone called.

Instinctively Rosie flung herself to the ground, covering her head protectively with her hands as the incendiaries fell all around them. One rolled so close to her she could feel its heat. Automatically, she kicked it out of the way and then jumped up
to help cover the fires all around the street with sand.

‘Come on, let’s get into the shelter before he comes back with his big brothers,’ one of the men called out semi-jokingly, whilst the ARP warden urged them to hurry. The half-kilo incendiary bombs had become so commonplace that they no longer caused Rosie’s heart to contract with fear. So long as they didn’t have a direct hit and their fires were put out immediately, the damage they caused was limited. Unlike the much bigger parachute bombs the Germans were now dropping, and which were responsible for the ugly gaps that were appearing all over the city where once there had been buildings.

Overhead the bombers droned menacingly, the sound of their engines interspersed by the heart-stopping whistle of the bombs they dropped. Rosie could hear one now, but she refused to give in to her fear and look back over her shoulder. They said anyway that you never heard the one that got you and she could certainly hear this one. She winced as a dull boom echoed from a nearby street, whilst the ARP warden grabbed her arm and half pushed her into the shelter.

‘They’ve had a hit in Bessie Street so them from there have had to come in here,’ one of their neighbours informed Rosie as she looked in dismay at the already crowded interior of the shelter. Unfamiliar faces stared back at her, illuminated by the thin blue light from the special-issue lanterns that was all they
were allowed inside the shelters. A young woman was trying to quieten her crying children, whilst an old man was complaining that he had come out without his teeth.

Christine had followed Rosie into the shelter and somehow they managed to find a space where they could sit down.

‘I hate these ruddy shelters,’ her mother complained. ‘They stink to high heaven, and I swear summat bit me the last time we was down here.’

A small child screamed as more incendiary bombs exploded somewhere close at hand, whilst a neighbour who was known to be the street’s worst gossip, seated opposite Rosie, announced, ‘I saw young Rob Whittaker calling round at your house this tea time, Rosie, just before your ma got home.’

Rosie could feel her face growing hot but she ignored the insinuation and answered pleasantly, ‘Yes. He was calling to let me know that Dad’s ship wasn’t one of those in that convoy that was torpedoed.’

‘A good lad young Rob is,’ Mr Walton, the ARP warden, who had overheard, nodded approvingly. ‘Very thoughtful and conscientious.’

‘Yes, it was kind of him to come and tell me,’ Rosie agreed.

‘So what’s this, then?’ her mother demanded, giving her a nudge in the ribs.

‘It’s nothing,’ Rosie answered her curtly. She didn’t want to discuss Rob with her mother. She
didn’t want her barbed comments sullying their conversation.

‘What are you up to?’ she asked suspiciously.

‘Nothing as bad as you,’ Rosie hissed.

‘Shush! Mind you remember what you promised me, Rosie, and no telling your dad about me and Dennis,’ Christine said under her breath. ‘It’s bad enough with gossips like her around,’ she continued, nodding in the direction of the busybody sitting near them.

‘You promised me you wouldn’t see him again,’ Rosie hissed back angrily.

‘I wasn’t going to, but he was that upset. See, Dennis’s got feelings, not like your dad.’

‘Mum, you mustn’t do this,’ Rosie urged. ‘Please don’t. Please don’t see him any more. It’s wrong and…it’s shameful…and – and someone’s bound to find out.’

The all clear sounded, making it impossible for them to say any more.

‘Bloody Hitler, I’m sick of him getting me out of me bed night after night,’ one woman was complaining as they all started to make their way up the steps into the damp night air.

‘Aye, well, you’d be a hell of a lot sicker if you was bombed in your bed,’ someone else replied grimly.

The smell of smoke, burning wood, soot and old buildings hung heavily on the air. Gerard Street and the streets around it smelled so very different now from how they had done when Rosie was
growing up. Those happy days seemed so far away. Her eyes smarted with tears as she remembered the rich aroma of freshly made coffee and the wonderful smells in the local Italian grocer’s, with its delicious salamis and cheeses, and its freshly made pasta, and fat juicy tomatoes. In those days, or so it seemed to her looking back, every door in the street had always been welcomingly open so that the air of the street itself had been warmed by the smell of Italian cooking. Just thinking about Maria’s special basil-flavoured pasta sauce made Rosie’s mouth water.