Three Women of Liverpool (2 page)

David added, “She’ll get work soon enough and then she can pay her shot, couldn’t you, Emmie?”

Emmie gave a long shivering sigh and glanced uncertainly at Gwen. Gwen had, for the moment, put on her chapel expression, as Mari called it, a thoroughly virtuous look. It had suddenly been made clear to her how she could acquire her parents-in-law’s furniture with a minimum of infighting.

“Aye,” she agreed. “She can have the middle room – and
there’s space enough in the house, if I move our furniture round a bit, for the furniture from here.”

Though very suspicious of Gwen’s sudden acquiescence, Emmie said thankfully that, of course, she would pay. “And I could help you in the house,” she added, as she wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands. Until she got on her feet, any company would be good company. And there was little Mari – she liked Mari.

Mari stopped munching seed-cake and unexpectedly interjected, “It would be nice if you could live with us, Auntie Emmie.”

Emmie smiled waterily at her. From time to time, the child had come on her own, or with David, to see her grandparents, and Emmie had always spoiled her with a bit of cake or a sweet biscuit and a loving hug. To Mari, her aunt was easier to gossip with than her mother was. Mothers had a way of jumping on you, Mari had always thought, if you so much as said a word out of place.

With a satisfied smirk, Gwen rose, to indicate that they should leave. Once the furniture had been moved into her house, she would hold on to it; possession was nine points of the law. And if, in order to do this, she had to put up with a paying sister-in-law in the house for a while, it was cheap at the price; very different from having a couple of invalids wished on you, a fear which had haunted her all of her married life.

She sniffed. Despite the local gossips’ accusations of neglect, David
had
visited his acerbic parents occasionally, and had spent good money on winter clothes and coal for them. Only Emmie had said thank you, according to David. And, she recollected bitterly, no one seemed to have ever given
her
any credit for getting by with that much less money.

It proved simple to obtain work. After asking what
experience she had, the employment exchange sent her to a sailors’ canteen, set up in Paradise Street by a church group.

Stout, beaming Mrs Robinson, a volunteer who managed the place, was delighted to have an applicant willing to do washing up, clean lavatories and scrub floors. Furthermore, she liked the well-mannered, grey-eyed woman with a face as innocent as a nun’s, yet old enough to keep young seafarers at bay.

“We have a lot of volunteers on the staff, but occasionally they don’t turn up,” she explained to Emmie. “Then we have to manage somehow, so we have four full-time paid people, two for each shift.”

Emmie smiled and said she could cook, too. Mrs Robinson looked at the marvellous reference from the Honourable Mrs Forster-Harrington – and increased the wage offered by five shillings a week.

At seven the next morning Emmie was given a white overall and the prettiest flowered apron she had ever worn, and was sent across a small back yard to scrub two very dirty lavatories.

The yard was cobbled and was obviously much older than the buildings surrounding it; it had been adapted as a light well and was lined overhead with office windows. Little of the spring sunshine penetrated it; only a small square patch of sky far above hinted at the beauty of the day.

With her long, straight nose wrinkled in disgust, Emmie used up four pails of hot water and a whole bottle of pine disinfectant and, to the relief of the other members of the staff who had to use the ancient thrones, as well as the seamen, she had left them cleaner than they had been for half a century.

When she returned to the canteen itself, she saw that the front door was hospitably open, though round the entrance stood a wall of sandbags to protect it from blast. The two big windows facing the street had been pushed up; their panes had been criss-crossed with black tape, to minimise the danger of flying glass, and on either side big, old-fashioned shutters,
their hinges well oiled, hung ready to be folded across the windows at night.

Two volunteers were wiping down the tables and chairs. They were both dressed in matching sweaters and cardigans, one in pink, the other in green. Over their tweed skirts they had tied flowered aprons similar to Emmie’s. One had a string of pearls round her neck, the other a gold chain with a cross hanging from it. Though they were about the same age as Emmie, Emmie thought she had never seen two more beautiful young ladies. They greeted her cheerfully and asked her name; she did not dare to ask them their names.

Bringing with her a strong smell of sausages grilling, Mrs Robinson rushed in from the kitchen carrying a pile of clean ashtrays. “Put one of these on each table, Emmie,” she ordered briskly.

“It’s funny-peculiar how small things change your life,” Emmie remarked to Mari later on. “All the happiness I’ve got came because I had to put an ashtray on a certain table. Proper queer, when you think on it.”

As Emmie put down the last ashtray, two men, anxious for a late breakfast, swung themselves into chairs at the table. Both wore navy-blue turtleneck sweaters and shabby jackets over them. They grinned up at Emmie.

“Mornin’, duck. What you got for brekkie?” The speaker must have been in his sixties, judging by his almost bald head fringed by tightly clipped white hair. Black eyes, like a friendly magpie’s, surveyed her.

Emmie blushed slightly. “I don’t know. I can smell sausages.”

The other man was younger, fair-haired, with a full moustache tinged orange by tobacco smoke. He laughed, and Emmie’s blush grew redder, because she felt she had given a stupid answer. Her fingers fidgeted with a corner of her flowered apron. After a second, he said to his companion, “It doesn’t matter what it is, Dickie. I’m that hungry, I could eat
an elephant. Had to wait hours at the bloody hospital, in spite o’being so early.”

“Aye. Bring two plates of whatever’s cooking,” agreed his companion, taking a well-charred pipe out of his pocket and then opening up an oilskin tobacco pouch from another pocket.

Emmie flashed them a shy smile and fled to the kitchen. She reported anxiously to Mrs Robinson.

Mrs Robinson paused, a half-open packet of dried eggs in her hand. Then she chuckled. “Here, take a pencil and notebook from over there, and ask them whether they want tea or coffee, bread or toast, and would they like porridge to start with.”

Flustered, Emmie snatched up the notebook, while Mrs Robinson called after her, “We’ve got scrambled eggs, sausages and baked beans.”

Emmie waited, pencil poised, until the men looked up from their conversation. Behind her, other men rolled in with the typical sailor’s gait, each man’s head bent slightly forward, chin tucked in, from years of living in boats’ confining spaces, where heads could be easily bumped. Coughing, hawking, talking, they scraped chairs back from the tables, while the volunteers advanced purposefully, notebooks in hand.

The man with the moustache watched her curiously, as she took his friend’s order; when she turned to him she found herself facing rich blue eyes, narrowed as though used to staring into sunlight. The face was weatherbeaten, lined and filled with strain. He smiled at her and she lowered her eyes modestly, as she wrote the order down. Her mother had been warning her since the First World War about being forward with men. Not that she need have worried, thought Emmie. When you’re keeping house you live in a daytime world of women, children and very old men. Even the tiny shops she had patronised had been largely run by women, and her parents had never allowed her to go out at night; when she had
once or twice protested at this, her father had, in a tremendous rage, shouted her down, threatened her with his stick and told her that it was bad enough that they were left alone in the mornings while she was with Mrs Forster-Harrington and went for the groceries. Many of her neighbours were equally tied to their homes, she knew, by a horde of children, the sick or the old, and by sheer lack of a penny of their own. She submitted.

This morning, she was being rapidly surrounded by an ever increasing crowd of lively, talkative men. It felt very strange, nervously exciting.

“Tea or coffee?” she inquired of her younger customer, forcing herself to look at him. He grinned, a slow, friendly smile, which made all the sun wrinkles on his face stand out. Her heart gave an uncomfortable bounce. “Tea,” he replied, and then asked, “You new here?”

“Yes,” she said shyly, smiled briefly and hurried back to the safety of the kitchen. A whole lot of questions about men tumbled into her mind. Here, this very morning, she was going to meet more men than she believed she had met in the whole of her desperately narrow existence, and she really knew very little about them.

When she was a young girl and her mother was still able to move around the house a little, she had not dreamed of being tied to her parents for the rest of her life. She had hoped for a handsome sweetheart in soldier’s uniform, with fine legs bound up in puttees; but her parents had kept her rigidly reined in and, very soon afterwards, the horrible battles of the First World War had taken nearly all the young men of the district, and hardly any of them returned. “Round us, there must have been three girls to every man,” she guessed, as through the day she trotted patiently backwards and forwards to the tables; and once she suddenly felt sick, as she realised that the same thing was going to happen to the young girls now hoping for a husband. The young lads were again going out to die. And for what? How many men in this very room would be
alive twelve months hence?

The man with the moustache came again the next morning, this time for a cup of coffee and a bun. He sat at the same table. Dickie was not with him.

Emmie snatched her notebook out of her apron pocket and scuttled across the crowded room to take his order, afraid that one of the volunteers would get there first.

“Mornin’,” she greeted him shyly, wondering what had brought her to him at a run. He was sitting with his elbows on the small round table, chin resting on clasped hands. At her voice, he glanced up quickly and smiled. Despite the smile, he looked drawn and very tired.

“We got a bit o’ bacon,” she whispered conspiratorialy. “Would you like some?”

He had already had breakfast with his parents, out at Hoylake, but he was delighted to be specially favoured. “Ah would,” he said, the smile broadening into a grin.

When he took his cup of coffee from her instead of allowing her to lay it on the table, she noticed that his hand was not too steady. The cup wobbled in the ill-fitting saucer and then tipped over. He was deluged in coffee.

She whipped a tea towel from the belt of her apron and gave it to him to wipe himself down, while they had a rueful laugh together. “Lucky your trousers is navy blue,” she told him. “Stain won’t show.”

When she brought his bill, he asked her rather diffidently if she would like to go to the cinema with him the following night.

Gwen was scandalized. “At your age!” she exclaimed. “Lettin’ yourself be picked up.”

Mari had giggled, and said, “It’s exciting for her, Mam.” Her mother’s look was sufficient to freeze her into silence and, with tight lips, the 13-year-old again bent her head over her knitting.

Shaken by a series of emotions she had never expected to be
able to give range to, Emmie had turned appealingly to David.

“I’m free now,” she said to him, a little break in her voice. “I’m goin’ to enjoy meself as much as I can.”

David folded his newspaper up carefully. “And so you should,” he said, regardless of his wife’s grim disapproval. “Be careful who you’re with, that’s all.”

“He’s a real nice fella,” responded Emmie, looking defiantly at Gwen. Inwardly, she wondered what kind of a man she had drawn out of the pack. He was certainly nothing like her father. She was trembling with nervous anticipation, as, after tea, she washed her face and did her hair. Instead of her usual bun, she rolled her long hair over a shoelace tied round her head and the result was a smooth, neat roll which framed her face; she had got the idea from a women’s magazine which Gwen subscribed to. As she tucked in a few precious hairpins to make sure the roll did not slip, she wondered frantically if he were married.

Now, homeward bound on the clanging tram, she reflected fondly on the memory of that first date. There had not been an air raid and they had laughed together as they stumbled round in the blacked out city. He had insisted on bringing her all the way home to her brother’s house and he had actually kissed her before leaving her. With joy mixed with fear for his safety, she once more felt under her glove the small garnet-and-pearl ring which a couple of weeks back he had given her.

He had produced it shyly and had confessed when he had slipped it on to her finger, “I never thought much about getting married before – always seemed to be too much to do, fishing with me father. Prices was so bad we never made much – not enough for me to keep a wife as well. Being Methodists, me and me brothers didn’t drink and we didn’t dance, so we didn’t meet too many womenfolk – a few neighbouring girls – but never anyone like you, Emmie. You’re beautiful and I want you so bad.”

They had lain in the damp April grass, amid the Meols
sand-dunes, not too far from his home. Great rolls of barbed wire stretched along the beach, to protect it from possible invasion. The Home Guard, keeping their nightly watch, had left them undisturbed. Rumour had it that both the beach and the dunes were mined, but they forgot everything in their need for each other. While the sound of the waves rolling softly up the shore, and a silent sea mist drifting inland, cut them off for a little while from a world in torment, two gentle, deprived people found an ecstasy granted to few.

They lay for a long time in each other’s arms, until Emmie giggled suddenly.

“I was thinkin’. Supposing I have a baby! It
could
happen, even at my age.”

Robert had lifted his head and kissed her again. “Not to worry. It’ll have a proper father. I wouldn’t let you down, luv.” He held her tightly, and then said, “If anything should happen to me before we can be married, and you’re in trouble, go to me mam and dad. They’ll take care of you.”