Three Women of Liverpool (5 page)

About ten o’clock, an exhausted Conor arrived home. He was covered in dust from working on the results of a direct hit on a dairy three streets away. “Three dead – and twelve cows spattered all over,” he informed his sleepy wife. He went straight to the window and flicked back the half-drawn blackout curtains. “Where’s me whiskey?”

“Me and Bridget Mahoney drank it,” his wife said dully. “She were hurt.” She was holding Michael to her breast and he was sucking eagerly. She did not look up.

In two strides her husband reached her. He struck her hard across her plump face. Then he stumbled upstairs to their bed and flung himself on to it.

To alleviate the excruciating boredom of raidless nights, the clerks and shop assistants on fire guard duty in the buildings near the sailors’ canteen would take it in turns to nip into the canteen for coffee. Mrs Robinson had once remarked that they complained when nothing happened and then they complained when there was a raid. “Then they’re scared stiff, poor souls,” she added.

Emmie had looked up at some of the steeply sloping roofs along which a firewatcher might have to clamber to get at a fire, and had been thankful that up to now the regular canteen staff had been excused from fire-watching.

Tonight, she entered the canteen through the narrow side passage which led into the light well at the rear. The light well was already shadowing and she fingered the long hat pin she kept under her coat lapel, until she had slipped through the kitchen door. You never knew who might be lurking at night in such a gloomy place as a light well, she told herself. A hat pin was a girl’s best defence.

She greeted Doris, another paid member of the staff, who was shaking up a huge basket of potato chips above a vat of fat. Near her, with a bulging sack between them sat two volunteers patiently peeling and slicing further supplies for her. One lady dropped a handful of irregularly sliced chips into a bucket of water, and moaned, “This must be the most unromantic job in the whole war.”

Emmie had lost some of her awe of these well-dressed ladies, and she teased them. “Now what would the boys out there do without chips? They couldn’t go on without your chips. Proper miserable they’d be.”

The volunteer nodded her head in rueful agreement and picked up another potato between her beautifully manicured nails. Then she chuckled. “You’re quite right – they all seem to keep going on chips.”

Emmie took her new lipstick from her handbag and clumsily outlined her lips in front of the kitchen mirror. She grimaced at the uncertain result. “Painted women are the devil’s children,” Gwen had told her. She smiled at herself in the mirror.

After years of having only Mrs Forster-Harrington to talk to, Emmie was happy in the company of the canteen staff. The customers were usually fun, too, she thought, though she did not always understand the jokes they made; and she was sure that to many she was only a pair of chapped hands bringing plates of food.

As she closed the wooden shutters over the big kitchen window looking out at the light well and then slotted the iron
bar across them, she thought wistfully of Robert in his new ship. Perhaps after the war, when he could go back to being an inshore fisherman again, he could be at home more often, depending only on the time of the tides for his trips in and out.

She went to attend to a small window on the same wall. Carefully she drew a pair of old grey velvet curtains over it. Then she lifted the telephone off the table nearby and tucked it tightly against them, so that cracks of light would not show at the curtain hem. She had never in her life used a telephone and regarded it with some deference; Mrs Forster-Harrington had felt it unnecessary to have such an intrusion upon her privacy.

Despite the wail of the air raid siren, a steady buzz of conversation came through the thick tobacco smoke. Liverpudlians are not easily stopped in mid-argument, she reflected with a little smile. The men’s aplomb lessened her own fear, and she bustled round her tables as if nothing unusual was happening outside.

In the kitchen, Doris stood clutching the edge of the pig bin in which all the kitchen scraps were kept for feeding pigs. She was trembling violently, her lined face as white as the tiles on the walls. She had lost home, husband and children in the Christmas air raids the previous year and the memory was still agonisedly fresh.

Lady Mentmore, a countess, lifted her beringed hands from the washing-up water and went to comfort her. Not by even the flicker of an eyelid did she show her own nervousness.

The gunfire was heavy and the quick thump-thump of bombs hastily discharged was unnervingly close. From a table in the corner near the kitchen door came the piercing sweet sound of a mouth organ. Almost immediately a strong tenor voice joined in with the words,
She’ll be comin’ round the mountain
when she comes
. There was a general roar of voices raised to sing what she would be wearing when she came, and Emmie tut-tutted to herself, as she dried dinner plates at record speed for the countess. What would Lady Mentmore think of such
naughty words, worse than anything she had heard since she left school? Proper wicked little boys’ words they were. Through the open door, she glimpsed the men’s faces, red from exposure or yellow from too much confinement below decks. They glowed with pure mischief as they thought up new verses, each bawdier than the last. Doris gave the countess a watery smile and the countess unexpectedly chuckled.

The canteen closed at midnight, but most people there stayed on until the All Clear sounded about one o’clock. The volunteers murmured that they hoped all the ferry boats had not been sunk. “You can’t walk on water,” one laughingly remarked. Doris hoped the trams out to Bootle would still be running, and Emmie, who could walk home, hoped fervently that she would not be accosted by thieves, because she had just been paid. She transferred her pay packet from her handbag to her coat pocket and checked that her hat pin was still under her lapel; too many petty thieves, either singly or in small gangs, haunted the ill-lit streets and she was always nervous.

The light of the fires in the city made the shadows of the buildings still standing look even blacker than usual. She glanced at the sky. It was flushed in several directions and the smell of burning tobacco and smouldering rubber was thick in the air. Service vehicles of various kinds, with shaded headlamps, moved like dark ghosts. Except for two drunks helping each other along, there seemed to be no pedestrians. She began to run.

At half-past one on Friday morning, when Emmie let herself into her brother’s house, an overwhelming smell of soot greeted her, but when she had lit a candle in the hallway, she was thankful to see that everything looked much as usual. She went straight upstairs, undressed and crept thankfully into bed.

At six o’clock the sound of Gwen’s alarm jerked her awake, and she heard Mari next door clamber out of her creaky bed. Yawning, she crawled out herself, poured water from her ewer into a hand-basin on the wash-stand and splashed her face with it.

As she dried herself with a worn white towel, she whipped back the blackout curtains and saw a cheerful sun in a pale blue sky. Behind the houses across the back alley, the sky was flushed, but she argued hopefully to herself that it could be because the sun had not long risen. She hurried into an old cotton frock.

In the living room, the curtains were already drawn back, and David Thomas was kneeling on the hearth rug, clearing the ashes and soot from the hearth. “’allo, la,” he greeted her amiably, between small, persistent coughs. “Proper mess, eh? Soon get t’ fire goin’, though.”

Emmie agreed. Every srick of furniture was covered with a fine film of soot. It clung to the bronze Roman soldiers ornamenting each end of the high mantelpiece; it had coated the net curtains at the window and the fancywork runner across the middle of the table; even the four precious oranges in the fruit bowl on the sideboard were black. Gwen was going to be hard to live with today, she thought wryly.

David gave a sudden enormous sneeze and little puffs of soot rose round him.

Emmie clicked her tongue. “I’ll get the floor cloth and wipe down the table and chairs, so as we can have brekkie,” she said briskly. “Has the milk come?”

“I haven’t looked.”

Emmie went to the front door and peeped out. No milk bottle sat on the doorstep. “Well, I’m blowed,” she exclaimed. “He’s never missed before, not even in the Christmas blitz. I’ll have to open a tin. Gwen’s not going to like that.”

Where the dairy once had stood, the milkman and his twelve cows lay neatly shovelled into bags, awaiting transport.

As she worked the tin-opener into a tiny tin of Nestle’s milk, Emmie asked, “Did you have any incendiaries up here?”

“Aye. Had to put ’em out with sand. Woman who stores the stirrup-pump wouldn’t open her door. Keeping the pump for herself, she was, in case her own house caught fire.”

“That’s proper awful.”

“It was. I hope the warden gives her what for, today.”

David, in clean overalls, was dispatched on time to the Royal Infirmary, where he was still repairing the plumbing damaged in the Christmas raids. A dreamy Mari was slapped by Gwen for not getting on with washing herself at the kitchen sink, scolded for not eating her cornflakes and was sent to school comparatively free of soot smudges.

With endless buckets of hot water and small amounts of the irreplaceable, rationed soap, Emmie spent the morning washing down every nook and cranny of the living room and
Gwen’s bedroom, which was the only bedroom with a fireplace. The blackout curtains were taken into the back yard, put over the clothes-line and beaten, the net ones were washed and hung out to dry. The fireplaces were blackleaded and the oranges carefully scrubbed with a nail brush. Gwen herself sprinkled tea leaves over the red, Belgian carpet in the sitting room and solicitously brushed it, remembering sadly the number of weeks it had taken her to pay for it, shilling by shilling. The china ornaments on the mantelpiece were lovingly bathed in the kitchen sink, the various messages printed on them in gilt twinkling
A present from Blackpool
or
Greetings from Llandudno
through the soapsuds. Gwen nearly cried. Lovely holidays those had been. She wondered when they would be able to go to the seaside again.

One of the whiting which Robert had caught made a consolingly large fish pie, some of which Gwen, Emmie and Mari ate at lunchtime. The rest was put away for David’s tea.

Gwen reminded Emmie that she was due at Blackler’s Store at one o’clock, to help in Dress Materials. She was very proud that she went to work two afternoons a week. Just before lunch, she changed into her best black dress, with its neat white lace collar, and her Sunday black stockings and shoes.

After she had left and Mari had returned to school, Emmie filled the kitchen bowl with hot water dipped from the oven tank beside the living room fire, stripped herself in the back kitchen and washed herself all over, in an effort to remove streaks of soot. Gwen did not encourage such scrubbings in the bedrooms – it made too many splashes on the polished linoleum.

Next door, a sullen, resentful Ellen fried up some boiled potatoes and an egg and shoved them in front of her husband seated at the table. Conor was unusually quiet as he ate the
food. When Ellen sat down by the fire, picked up 3-year-old Michael and gave him her breast, he stared past her, as if he were looking at something behind her.

The youngster suckled contentedly and Ellen enjoyed the physical pleasure of it, but finally her husband’s oppressive silence became too much for her.

“What’s to do with yez?” she asked sulkily.

He poked listlessly at his fried egg and sighed heavily. “It were a bad night, last night. The dairy were a shambles – blood everywhere – from the cows mostly. And them two women in Plum Street – bits of one of ’em hanging from the tree out front.”

“Jesus Mary!” exclaimed Ellen. She shuddered, and Michael lost her nipple and complained fretfully. Her anger at Conor’s striking her was forgotten in fascinated contemplation of this horror. She pushed her nipple back into Michael’s mouth. “Maybe t’ Nazis won’t come again,” she tried to comfort.

“There’s nuthin’ to stop ’em. ’specially at night. Play ducks and drakes they can.” He contemplated a piece of grey potato on the end of his fork. “T’ kid at the corner house ’as got a broken arm and bruises all over – part of the roof fell in on ’im. His dumb cluck of a mother left him in bed ’stead of bringing ’im down to the cellar.”

“Poor little divil.” She hugged her child closer and remembered, with a tremor, how close she had come to losing Ruby. What an evening that had been. The rest of the family had returned from a Christmas visit to the local cinema, to find the rescue men just hauling her out, unscratched, from under the kitchen table, which her grandfather had fashioned from oak fifty years before. She wondered idly if, when he had made it so solidly, he had had an intimation that it would save a life. Bless the sainted man. And God preserve her from another night like that.

When Emmie descended from the tram, at her usual Church Street stop, on her way to work that afternoon, the traffic seemed nearly as busy as usual, though everywhere there was a strong smell of burning, and there was a general haze in the sky.

At the door of the canteen, she bumped into Doris, who promptly complained, “Me pore feet. Had to walk all the way to Bootle last night. Not a tram working. Bloody miles.”

When Mrs Robinson and two volunteers arrived, they also looked tired after being up half the night, though all three were immaculately dressed. One of the volunteers, Mrs Starr, said, “I thought I was going to be late. We lost all our windows and I’ve been hammering old rugs over the downstairs ones ever since daybreak. First time I’ve ever used a hammer!”

Emmie listened to the lament. Did the stupid woman imagine that they had all been able to spend the morning in bed? In her opinion, complaining never did any good. You just took what life threw at you and did the best you could.

When the siren went, Emmie was busy serving a surge of men who had just come in after the closing of the public houses.

“Blow it,” she exclaimed irritably, and some of the men made obscene gestures towards the ceiling. They were none of them drunk – publicans spread their meagre consignments of beer and spirits too thinly for anyone to achieve that happy state – but they were loquacious. Some of the language they used, as they consigned all Germans to Kingdom Come, made Emmie wonder innocently to Doris how Robert managed not to pick up such words.

Doris, trying to be brave, laughed shakily. “There never was a sea-going man what couldn’t swear – your Robbie knows his manners, that’s what it is.”

While she doled out fish and chips – a little fish and a lot of
chips – Emmie meditated on Doris’s remark and realised that there was a side of her beloved which she did not know much about. For a minute or two, the sickening loneliness she had felt when her mother’s coffin had been lowered into her grave was revived; and her new world of Robert Owen and the canteen seemed suddenly distant and alien.

As she cleared a table hastily evacuated by the buildings’ firewatchers when they had fled back to their posts, there was a high-pitched swish-swish overhead.

Emmie froze. For a second all conversation stopped. The tiny silence was succeeded by a tremendous roar. The room shook and the electric lights dipped. Everyone looked towards the ceiling.

A tumbling rumble announced the descent of the debris flung up by the explosion. Another roar, another series of rumbles.

Emmie stood terrified, the crockery rattling on her tray, as the guns began to answer the challenge of the planes.

“Put your tray down, luv, or you’ll break everything.” Deckie Dick, the friend of Robert’s who had breakfasted with him on the morning he had first met Emmie, took the tray from her and put it back on the table. “Those two was away over …” he began.

His voice was drowned by a crash that numbed her ears. His arms went round her and she was clamped against an old navy sweater that reeked of perspiration, as he sought to protect her face and head. In the kitchen, Doris screamed.

“Phew! That was near.” Deckie Dick slowly let her go and she giggled nervously. As the guns continued their steady tattoo, a man at the next table chipped Dick, “You never misses a chance with the girls, do you?” Dick gave him a playful punch on the head, and Emmie slipped away to continue her clearing of tables.

Another crash, somewhere at the back of the building, brought Mrs Robinson running from the kitchen.
“Gentlemen, there is a shelter downstairs. Take the staircase to the left of the front door. I think it would be a good idea …” She was cut off by a series of appalling crashes, when again all faces automatically looked up at the ceiling. A crack zipped across it, but it held.

“Come on, lads. Everybody downstairs. Come on.” Deckie Dick began to move amongst the tables, touching men on their shoulders and pointing to the staircase. He turned to Mrs Robinson. “Get your ladies down, missus. It’s going to be a bad night.”

Without a word, she hastened back to the kitchen, where Doris was trying not to have hysterics in front of a pile of fish which she had been flouring. The fish was now covered with heavy dust.

Outside, fire engines raced pell-mell through the darkness, amid the shrill blare of burglar alarms set going in the shaken buildings opposite. Boots pounded past the front door, as rescue crews and air raid wardens ran by.

The customers no longer felt the need to look brave; the pandemonium outside was bad enough to justify a retreat, and they followed the volunteers down to the basement as fleetly as they would have abandoned a sinking vessel. Mrs Robinson, white-faced captain of her little ship, refused to descend until everyone was safely down. Then she quietly followed her crew.

At the foot of the stairs, she closed a very ancient, heavy door, bound with iron, hung there, presumably, to keep out eighteenth-century thieves and rioters. As she lowered the iron latch, she heard the upstairs front windows and shutters blow in, and the tinkle of slivers of glass sweeping across the canteen, to bury themselves in walls and tables. The blast reversed itself and blew outwards, causing a resounding crash of crockery from the tables. There was a muffled bang, when the shutters hit the empty window-frames again.

“Pooh!” she exclaimed. “Just in time.” She sank down thankfully on one of the timeworn school benches which had
been provided as seating.

The shelter was a windowless cellar, used for years for the storage of coal to heat the building. Its only entrance, other than the stairs, was a pavement light of heavy glass set in an iron frame. This could be swung upwards to facilitate the delivery of sacks of coal; in the construction of the shelter, it had been left as it was. A simple bolt on the inside held it down and it would form a convenient escape hatch from the basement to the street in the event of fire. Though the walls had been freshly whitewashed and the floor well swept, there was still a smell of coal. As a first line of defence against fire, a stirrup-pump with several buckets of water stood in a corner. In another corner was a small table; on it lay an electric ring and a clutter of much used tea-making apparatus. A single bulb hanging, unshaded, from the centre of the ceiling provided the only light.

Some of the men stood around smoking, while others slouched on the benches. Four of them sat cross-legged on the floor and prepared for a long wait by dealing out a pack of cards. The two volunteers sat primly together, backs straight; two middle-class women determined to be stoical.

A shivering Emmie sat by Doris with her arm round her. The bombed-out woman was sobbing quietly to herself, tears glistening on her rouged cheeks.

“Have a cigarette, me duck. It’ll calm you.”

A tall, thin seaman, a cigarette wobbling at the corner of his mouth, squatted down in front of Doris and generously proffered a precious packet of Player’s. “You like one, luv?” he asked Emmie.

Doris smiled wanly, but made no move to take a cigarette. “Neither of us smoke,” Emmie responded for both of them. “Ta, all the same.”

The man turned back to Doris. “Well, you start. You’re the woman that was bombed out, wasn’t yez?”

Doris’s eyes clenched shut. She nodded agreement.

“You should smoke. It helps. See, I’ll show you how.”

Her mind diverted, Doris opened her eyes. He was not a young man and bore all the marks of years of seagoing, of rotten food and working in cramped spaces. He grinned and lit a cigarette for her, drew the first breath on it and handed it to her. “There y’are, luv,” he said, his sallow, hollow-cheeked face compassionate.