Three Women of Liverpool (3 page)

“Oh, Robbie,” she whispered with a sigh. “You have to come back safe.”

“I’ll do me best,” he said, with a forced laugh. “But don’t you forget. Me dad’s earning enough now to keep you for a while.”

She lay quiet for a moment, and then she said in a puzzled voice, “It’s funny that it’s taken a war to give us decent wages, isn’t it?” She rolled over him until she was lying on top of him, her head on his shoulder, and then she sighed. “But I’d rather manage on poor wages and know you was safe.” She felt him stir under her again and scrambled hastily to her feet. “Enough, luv, enough. I got to go to work on the morning. And you got to have the hospital check your feet again. The cold and wet you suffered on that raft must’ve been proper awful.” She dusted down her skirt and buttoned up her blouse, looking down at him impishly. “But, you know, I wish your feet were still just a bit bad, so as we could have more time together before you have to go to sea again.”

He had swung himself to his feet and caught her in his arms and kissed her long and hard. “Aye, luv, I don’t want to go either.”

Another time, while they sat on a bench underneath a chestnut tree in Sefton Park, she had told him about her life with her parents. He had marvelled at her patience and endurance. She had shrugged her shoulders and said, “I only did what a lot of single daughters have to do – who else will look after people like that? Couldn’t let them go into the workhouse. We could just manage if we all three lived together. But there wasn’t nothin’ left over for going to the pictures or suchlike, even if I’d had the time. We was lucky to have a low rent and something to eat each day. We’d have fair frozen to death some winters, if David hadn’t bought some coal.”

“It’ll be easier from now on, luv,” he had promised her. And she had felt indeed that a new life was unfurling for her as surely as the tiny leaves sprouting on the chestnut tree.

“Rialto Cinema,” shouted the clippie, and Emmie came sharply back to the present.

Gwen Thomas always averred that her life was never the same again after that young scoundrel, Patrick Donnelly from next door, had at dinnertime on Wednesday shot an arrow through the back bedroom window of their small row house.

“There was broken glass all over our Mari’s bedspread. Ruined, it was,” she complained angrily to Emmie and to her husband, David.

She was sick to death of her new, Irish next-door neighbours. A pack of sloths, she fumed. She had nearly choked when the 13-year-old boy had calmly knocked at her back door and had asked for his arrow back.

A small bundle of outrage, thin lips drawn back over
blackened broken teeth, she had hissed back, “Arrow? You ain’t gettin’ no arrow from me, young man. You’re goin’ to get a bill for seven bob for puttin’ t’glass back, and I hope your dad gives you a good beatin’.”

Large, calculating blue eyes, fringed with long black eyelashes, looked calmly back at her. “It were an accident, Mrs Thomas – and you could say it were blown out in the last air raid and get it mended easy.” He grinned at her beguilingly, a grin that usually worked wonders with middle-aged lady teachers.

It did not work on Gwen Thomas. She wanted to strike him with the broom she was holding; but he was as tall as she was and heavily built for his age. She felt uneasily that he might hit her back. She shook a bony finger at him.

“And what good would that do me, beyond makin’ a liar of meself?”

“T’ city might do it for free.”

She slammed the door in his face.

Bow in hand, he stood staring at the cracked black paint on the back door. All that fuss about a window, when any night the Jerries raided Liverpool hundreds of windows got broken. Old bitch.

On the way out of the tiny brick-lined yard, he gave the cages holding David Thomas’s racing pigeons an angry shake. The pigeons fluttered madly round and round their prison in alarm. Next time he shot at a cat, he reckoned crossly, he should take a look at what else was in the line of flight. As his father often said, you live and learn.

“Patrick! Patrick! Coom ’ere. I want yer to go a message, afore you go back to school,” he could hear his mother shouting from their kitchen. “Coom ’ere, afore I come after yez. Where are you?”

He dropped his bow into a corner behind the lavatory in the yard and slunk uneasily into the kitchen.

In her living room, Gwen sank on to the sofa, leaned back
and flung a skinny arm across her chest. “He’s started me palpitations, he has. Mari, luv, pour me another cuppa tea and bring the aspirin bottle.”

Mari was just putting on her school blazer, preparatory to returning to school, but she obediently ran upstairs to her mother’s bedroom to get the aspirin bottle and, on her return, poured a cup of tea from the aluminium teapot keeping warm on the hob in front of the fire.

“I don’t suppose he meant to break the window, Mam,” she pleaded, turning a thin, well-scrubbed face towards her mother who was lying back with her eyes closed.

Gwen ignored her plea. She shook a couple of aspirins out of the bottle, popped them into her mouth and swallowed them down with a gulp of tea. “Mind you come straight home,” she told her daughter, without opening her eye. The girl slowly buttoned her blazer and, with a sour grimace towards her mother, she left for school. Palpitations! How come every time her mother fell into a fit of rage, it was called palpitations, and when she, Mari, was angry, it was called a sinful paddywack.

As she kicked a stone down the road towards school – her mother hated her to do anything so vulgar – she ruminated on the subject of Patrick. Though she was scared of him, she found him a fascinating subject for thought. Her school friends thought he was the handsomest boy in the neighbourhood and he was so excitingly wild – and a wicked Catholic, too. Only last week, at the end of the street, he had fought off three Protestant boys and left them all with bleeding noses. Cock of the walk, he was, thought Mari a trifle wistfully. But her mother’s warnings about men had been drummed into her ever since she could stand, and while the other girls, Protestant and Catholic alike, giggled hopefully whenever they passed him, she held back and passed with eyes cast down, her satchel carried neatly on her back, to cover her long black plait so that boys could not pull it.

Emmie descended from the tram and walked briskly down a side street towards her brother’s house. The wind sent bits of paper skittering before her, and a red-faced baby, which seemed to have got dust in its eyes, was wailing unhappily in a pram set outside one of the front doors. In a gutter, two small boys in brown woollen jerseys were quarrelling loudly over their coloured glass marbles.

“Evenin’, Miss Thomas.”

At the sound of the deep Irish voice, Emmie’s lips clamped together. She half turned towards the lanky man in blue air raid warden’s overalls, who had fallen into step with her. His battered old retriever, Sarge, nosed between them as if anxious not to be ignored, and she bent to stroke his dusty muzzle. “Evening, Mr Donnelly,” she replied a little stiffly, uncertain how to treat him.

Patrick’s father, with his shrieking wife and bevy of unwashed children, had been, according to Gwen, a no-good out-of-work until he had been made a warden. “Keeps fighting cocks, if you please. Says a bad shoulder keeps him out of the army, ha! For ever shouting at you to ‘put that light out’. Never seems to miss the slightest chink in your blackout curtains. Thinks you’re signalling to the Jerries if you so much as carry a candle down the yard when you got to go to the lawie. Work? He lives the life of Riley.”

For his part, Conor Donnelly regarded Gwen and David Thomas as worse than a packet of starch, with their highly polished and scrubbed house front, their ritual of Sunday clothes and chapel-going, their disapproval of little boys who sometimes got caught short and piddled on the pavement, and ate conny-onny butties while sitting on their adjacent front doorstep. Ellen Donnelly had expressed the opinion that,
“Them holier-than-thou types is the worst. That Mari’ll be in trouble with the boys in no time at all, at all.”

Conor Donnelly could not imagine how anybody could endure such a regimented life, without even an occasional bout of drinking or fighting to break the monotony. Of course, since he had become an air raid warden he had had to mind himself a bit. He had to stay sober while on duty and be a bit careful when he was carrying stolen goods for a small group of friends who preyed on lorries serving the docks.

When he and his family had been bombed out in the previous autumn, the city had rehoused him in the empty row house next door to Mr High and Mighty David Thomas, plumber. That bombing had been a basketful, that had. Poor little Ruby, his eldest daughter, and old Sarge had been buried for nearly four hours. A bloody miracle that the rest of them had been at the pictures at the time.

Miss Thomas, now she was different. She was polite to his wife and sometimes she made jokes with the kids. On Easter morning she had filled Ruby’s hands with toffees – must have given her most of her ration – to share with the other kids. She was a very quiet woman, he mused, but with a bit of encouragement from the right fella she might be more lively than she appeared. His face crinkled up in a grin, as she glanced up at him. He ventured a mild joke and was rewarded by a shy laugh.

Emmie forced herself to attend to what he was saying. With his face a polished mahogany from years of inadequate washing and his long, yellow teeth, he was an oddity to her; yet his sheer bouncing gaiety was infectious and she could understand why he had been chosen as an air raid warden – he would be a real tonic if you were in trouble.

They turned towards their adjoining front doorsteps. Conor pushed open his unlocked door, while she inserted her key into her brother’s carefully burnished Yale lock. Before he entered, Conor turned to point up to the sky, where a few clouds were
building and a slight haze was dulling the sunshine.

“Bit o’ luck and them clouds’ll form a nice cover afore midnight. Should mean no raid.”

“Aye. It’s been over quiet lately, hasn’t it? Makes you wonder what’s brewing.”

Conor nodded agreement. “Well, keep yer fingers crossed.”

“I got to work the late shift at the canteen tonight, so I’ll be up and about anyways,” Emmie confided.

As usual, the slam of the Donnelly’s front door caused a slight shudder to pass through the Thomases’ house and rattled the wooden signboard nailed to their door. The faded board announced
David Thomas, plumber, est. 1914. Prompt attention
.

The noise immediately brought Gwen Thomas out of the back kitchen. She clucked fussily, as clearly through the dividing wall came the sound of Ellen Donnelly’s strident voice above the shriek of a child. Conor’s voice rumbled back.

“Really! Slammin’ t’ door like that! Brings all the dust down. And me just finished cleaning.” Red-ringed, faded blue eyes looked impatiently up at Emmie, as Gwen licked her finger and ran it along a ledge to pick up an offending grain of dust.

Emmie hung up her coat, gas mask and handbag on the hall peg. While she nerved herself to deal with Gwen, she picked up the floppy, brown carrier bag given to her by Robert. She was always anxious not to break up her tenuous housing arrangement by letting her bitter, pent-up resentment burst forth at Gwen’s never having given her the slightest help with her parents. She was grateful for David’s protection and did not want to move until she was married. Though she was now paying very adequately for her lodgings and she also helped Gwen in the house, Gwen never considered it necessary to thank her and was often barely civil.

Nothing annoyed Gwen more than dust and dirt and
untidiness, and her shining, neat house indicated how successfully she dealt with them. Almost invariably wrapped in a black cross-over overall dotted with blue forget-me-nots, she was a bundle of muscles. Because she kept running her fingers through her greying red hair with its tight natural curl, it tended to stand up in a wild bush. Tonight it was in particular dissarray, indicating a trying day’s battle with her household gods.

“T’ glazier hasn’t got no glass for Mari’s bedroom window,” she grumbled, as she followed Emmie into the living room, where a cheerful fire blazed in an old-fashioned cooking range gleaming with blackleading; at its side, the brass tap of the hot water tank winked in the light of the darting flames.

David Thomas was seated in his armchair beside the fire, and he looked up from his perusal of the
Liverpool Echo
. “’Allo, la,” he greeted Emmie, and then he said to his wife. “I’ll nail a bit o’ plywood over t’ window when I’ve had me tea. It’ll be safer for Mari than glass.”

“Where
is
Mari?” inquired Emmie, smiling down at her brother.

“She’s away out to tea with her friend, Dorothy.” Gwen clicked her tongue and reverted to her grievance. “I’ll teach that lad, even if his mam won’t. He’ll not get his arrow back.” She continued to grumble, as she went through to the back kitchen. Emmie followed her with the carrier bag.

She interrupted Gwen’s tirade, by saying, “Robbie set a line while the tide was out yesterday. He caught ten whiting and he’s sent you two. They feel real heavy.”

“That’s proper kind of him, I’m sure,” replied Gwen coldly. She seized a pot of boiled potatoes and deftly drained the water from them into the sink. Through the ensuing steam, she added with a sniff, “Being engaged to a fisherman has its advantages, I suppose. T’ fishmonger didn’t have so much as a cod’s head left today, by the time he got to me. Ever so long, the queue was.”

“Well, there’s the makin’s of a nice dinner here,” Emmie soothed.

“Humph,” grunted Gwen. “Here, take the potatoes and put them on the table for me.” She sighed. Provided Emmie could be prevented from taking her parents’ furniture with her, she would be thankful when the woman got married and left. When the pieces had been moved into the house, nothing had been said as to the ownership; but Gwen burnished them determinedly; they were hers, because David was the eldest and should inherit.

What little Emmie said about the furniture indicated that she took it for granted that, since she had lived with it all her life, the furniture belonged to her. Besides, in the middle of a war, where else would she get furniture from for a home?