Three Women of Liverpool (9 page)

Despite Gwen’s own nervousness and confusion, the sickly smell of the children’s unwashed bodies penetrated to her. Repulsed by it, she snapped at them, “Now you be quiet. I’ll get a candle and go and have a look at your mam.”

As the candle was lit, the howls tailed off into small sobs. The flame showed the small, barefoot crew in more detail. They all had white rivulets down their dirty faces.

For safety’s sake, Gwen decided that the children could not return to their home with her; the gunfire was too heavy. She lit another candle and handed it to Patrick. “Sit on the cellar steps with Mari – all of you. Get a move on, now. It’s not safe up here. And mind your feet on the floor – there’s glass all over. I’ll be back in a minute.”

Ruby, dragging a protesting Michael, led the way timidly. Patrick wiped the tears from his face, put on a defiant air and stood on the top step, leaning one shoulder against the wall to stop himself shaking.

Mari half smiled at him as she looked up the steps, but he
did not even glance at her. She felt unexpectedly hurt. She turned her attention to Ruby. Gosh, how she smelled.

The clangour of fire-engine bells came clearly through the roar of the blitz, as Gwen, candle in hand, hesitated in her front doorway. What would she find next door?

A string of incendiaries slithered down a short distance away. Vicious pencils of flak suddenly peppered the road in front of her. She bobbed back into the hall. The candle blew out. With it still in her hand, she crept down the two carefully whitened steps of her own front entrance, as if by making no sound she could outwit the German pilots. Then she turned into the immediately adjacent front doorway of the Donnellys and stared into their hall. In dismay, she dropped the dead candle and it rattled away on the pavement.

Just inside, Ellen half lay, half sat, against the weathered door. One hand was flung across her breast. Her eyes, wide with shock, stared at the wall opposite her.

“Oh, my goodness!” Gwen took the two steps in one stride and knelt down by the woman. “Mrs Donnelly? Are you hurt?”

There was no reply. Gwen put out a careful hand and touched her face. She did not move. The body was surrounded by the effluvium of human excrement, and a primeval fear of death clutched at Gwen’s throat. In an agony of indecision, she glanced up at the small piece of sky she could see above the roofs opposite; in the flushed torment there, the battle raged on. Her breath came in short pants and she wanted to run away, out of Liverpool, away from the dirty horde on her cellar steps, away from this scarifying hulk of a woman. But there was nowhere to run to; even the street across the doorstep was a death-trap.

She took a big breath and pulled herself together. How did one make absolutely certain that a person was dead? She might still be alive – in shock – wounded only.

A resonant bang nearby, followed immediately by a shower
of bricks and mortar on the doorstep, galvanised Gwen into action. Still kneeling, she leaned forward and tried to heave Ellen further into the hall. Ellen’s arms flopped and her whole body reeled towards Gwen’s tiny frame. In horror, Gwen let go and scrambled to her feet. Ellen slumped to the floor.

Doing her best not to vomit, and risking the descent of further missiles, she ran a few steps to the nearest street shelter and called hopefully through the doorway, “Anybody there?” But only a faint echo came from its stinking darkness.

She ran back to her own house and scuttled through the length of it. On the cellar steps, the children were sitting as rigidly as images; one little boy was crying heartily. At the sound of her footfall they turned to look up at her, the whites of their eyes gleaming in the candlelight.

“I’m going through the alleyway to Mr Baker’s next door but one,” she told them quickly. “To get some help for your mum. You all stay close, now. Everything’s going to be all right.”

She ran through the brick-walled back yard, out of the tall, plank gate and down the alley, which, with its narrowness and high walls, seemed to offer more protection than the front street. She reckoned the Baker family, also, would be in the basement and they would hear her knock more easily if she tried the back door.

“Mr Baker,” she shrieked, above the rat-tat-tat of machine-guns. Fearfully she glanced upwards and then renewed her bangs with her fists.

“Wasser marrer?” inquired a richly Liverpool voice, as the door was opened a narrow crack.

“It’s Mrs Thomas. Mrs Donnelly’s hurt bad and I can’t lift her into the house meself. And Mr Donnelly’s on duty and me husband’s in Bootle.” The words poured out, as she wrung her hands helplessly.

The door swung open immediately to reveal, in the light of a kerosene lamp, an elderly man who looked, thought Gwen, a bit like a tortoise wrapped in a dressing-gown.

The wide mouth in the crumpled face opened. “Step in, step in. Let me get me slippers and tell Mother.” He padded away, towards the cellar door.

Gwen thankfully entered the kitchen and shut the door behind her. By some fluke of the blast, Mr Baker’s kitchen window was still intact. As fear gave way to resentment, she wondered crossly why her windows should always be those to be broken. Why should she get landed with someone wounded? And have to let in five disgusting kids?

Mr Baker came panting up the cellar steps again, his dressing-gown now tightly belted, his misshapen feet encased in carpet slippers.

“Where is she?” he inquired.

“By her front door. It’s open.”

“Coom through then.”

Seething with suppressed vexation at the unfairness of fate, she followed him through his front door, round the tiny bay windows of his home and that of the Donnellys, and up the latter’s front steps. From behind the closed door of the kitchen, Sarge began to bark.

Mr Baker put the lamp down on the floor. Very gently he lifted Ellen’s arm. A piece of shrapnel was deeply embedded in her side. He held her wrist for a moment, but there was no sign of a pulse.

He got laboriously to his feet. “Let’s get her in and shut the door.”

As a postman, he was used to lifting awkward weights and he soon pulled her along the bare wooden floor, by putting his hands under her arms from the back. Then he quietly shut the front door; it cut off a lot of the noise from outside.

He looked carefully at the wound. It had bled little and he toyed with the idea of pulling out the piece of shrapnel. Better to leave her as she was, he decided. With womanly care, he turned her on one side to look at her back. Another sliver protruded for about an inch from under one shoulder-blade.

“I reckon she were hit first in her chest and she half turned into the house, and the second piece hit her in the back,” he said to a shocked Gwen. “She’s dead for sure.” He laid the body flat on its back and gently closed the staring eyes. Then he glanced round him, puzzled. “Where’s all the kids?”

Gwen licked her white lips. “All in my house, with our Mari.”

“That’s proper kind of you, Mrs Thomas.” He took a crumpled handkerchief out of his dressing-gown pocket and, with a grimace of distaste, wiped Ellen’s life-blood from his hands. Gwen stood uncertainly before him, her hands clasped tightly together. Her irritation had faded and she felt numb, unable to make herself think.

“It’s more’n anybody’s life’s worth to go up to the post in this,” Baker went on heavily. “As soon as the All Clear sounds, I’ll get up there and tell him – and get some help to move her.” He rubbed his almost non-existent chin, grey with a day’s beard, and then smelled the dried blood still on his hands. Sickened, he dropped them to his sides. “The kids’ll do fine with you.” He looked down kindly at the small wraith in front of him. “Five of them, isn’t there? Poor little buggers – excuse the language.”

At the remembrance of the repellent collection sitting on her well-scrubbed steps, Gwen felt nauseated again. But she could not, in all conscience, send them back home, while their dead mother lay where she did. “Donnelly’ll have to get a relation to come in and look after them,” she said.

“Aye,” he agreed. “I’ll leave it to you how you tell them.”

Gwen stared up at him, aghast. How could
she
tell them? Surely it was not her responsibility? But Mr Baker’s mind had gone on to other things, and he said, “I’ll let the dog out in the morning, if Donnelly isn’t back.”

In her own house, she faced the children, as they rose expectantly from their uncomfortable seats on the steps. Ruby held a sleeping Michael; she looked as if she might faint.

Mari was in the kitchen, calmly making cups of cocoa for their guests, while the early morning breeze fluttered her long white nightgown and made the gas jet dance.

The sounds from outside indicated that the attack had shifted slightly to another part of the town, though the rhythmic beat of engines overhead continued.

Gwen looked resentfully at the little crew and cleared her throat uneasily, while the children waited like marble statues in a cemetery. She said carefully, “Your ma’s hurt rather bad. Mr Baker next door but one is looking after her. He’ll send her to the hospital.” She cleared her throat again, some pity for them seeping into her. “You’re not to worry. Everything’s goin’ to be all right.”

Relief dawned on Ruby’s face. She said to Nora and Brendy, aged 7 and 6 respectively, “See, I told yer so. We’re all goin’ to have a nice cup o’ cocoa, and when the raid’s over, we’ll go home to bed.” She turned to Gwen. “I could go to Mam now – the kids’ll be all right with you and Mari.”

“No. No,” Gwen responded hastily. “Your mam wants you to stay to comfort them.”

When she turned to fuss round the cocoa maker, Patrick followed her and stood squarely in front of her. His face was grim and the fine, blue eyes looked at her fearlessly. “I
know
” he said scornfully.

“Well, don’t you say nothin’ for the minute,” Gwen murmured out of the side of her mouth, like a convict. Then, feeling ashamed, she added, “I’m real sorry, lad.” She felt like adding, I’m sorry for me, too.

Mari glanced up from her stirring, surprise and fear mingled in her expression. Patrick’s face crumbled, tears welled up again.

He’s only about 13, Gwen thought, for all he’s so big. Instinctively she moved towards him and put her hand on his shoulder. She tried to reassure him. “It’ll be all right when your dad comes,” she said.

Mari bit her lips to restrain her own desire to cry. She put four cups on a brightly printed tray, filled them and took them to the children on the steps. She said with forced cheerfulness, “Here you are, ducks.”

When she turned back to pour out cocoa for her mother and Patrick, she saw with a pang of jealousy that her cold, fastidious parent was holding Patrick’s head against her skimpy chest and crooning, “Never mind, luv, never mind.” And Patrick, tough cruel Patrick, was actually crying as if his heart would break. Her own lips quivered, as she took down some more cups from their hooks.

Gwen herself was in torment. The children must stay with her until their mother’s body was removed. That meant they would probably have to sleep the rest of the night in her house; and they probably had nits in their hair – she would have to burn the pillows afterwards, which would make David thoroughly angry because of the cost of new ones. But what else could she do?

She was personally revolted by their dirtiness; even this beautiful boy smelled as if he had never had a bath since he was born. With a sigh, she urged, “Have a cup o’ cocoa, luv. Make you feel better.” She took a cup from Mari and handed it to him. “What was your mam doin’ at the door on a night like this?”

He took a small gulp of the scalding liquid. “There were a terrible bang – and then it were dead quiet, like. So she run up to see if it were the houses opposite what were hit – ’cos they’d need our help, if they were.” He faltered, and then went on, “I heard her cry out and I run up meself – and there she was on the floor – and she never said nothin’ – and I knew.” His cup rattled against his teeth, as he took another sip.

“God rest her.” Gwen put her empty cup down on the drainboard. “We’d better get down the steps. You, too, Mari. We’ll wash up tomorrow.”

Ruby’s arms were stiff from holding the dead weight of young Michael. Every so often in his sleep, he would nuzzle into her non-existent breasts, looking for the comfort of his mother’s milk. Then, frustrated, he would whimper and sleep again.

Patrick sat with eyes closed and fists clenched. He was tortured by the idea of his mother lying alone in the house next door. He wanted to go to her, look at her, try to wake her from her long sleep. But he was afraid of the demons in the sky, afraid of facing alone the fact of her death. After a while, his head fell forward, his mouth opened and he, too, slept.

Just before five o’clock, they all awoke with a jerk to a profound silence, except for Gwen who continued to snore.

Mari shook her mother’s arm. “Ma, it’s stopped. They’ve gone.”

“Who? What?” Gwen jerked her head from against the cellar wall and blinked. She had been having a nightmare, a nightmare in which the whole house crawled away as a result of the infestation brought in by the Donnelly children. Through her fogged brain, she heard the long, thin cry of the All Clear.

“Phew!” she exclaimed. Then she gazed blearily down at the appalling weight of responsibility sitting on the inhospitable stone steps below her.

Brendy, aged 5, struggled awake and stood up on wobbling legs. He stared round the alien staircase and then roared tearfully, “Where’s me mam?” He started to struggle past the knees of the other children, to get to the top of the steps, howling like a miserable dog. Nora, a year older, turned to follow him. She began to whimper. As she threatened to teeter backwards down the steps, Ruby grabbed her wrist.

“Leave me go,” the child yelled savagely. She began to beat her big sister in the face with a small clenched fist.

Patrick got up slowly. With frightened, bloodshot eyes, he glanced down at his hostess and then at the other children. A curling spiral of unvented rage ran through him. “Brendy! You shut up or I’ll clobber yez. Mam’s been hurt and can’t come to yez.”

Brendy’s howls came down a full octave, and Nora stopped trying to get a hold on Ruby’s hair to tear it out; when Patrick decided to hit someone, he often distributed the favour throughout the family. Nora’s white-lashed eyes narrowed and she made an obscene gesture at Ruby.

Patrick addressed his snivelling siblings again, his voice suddenly placating. “Mrs Thomas is going to let us stay here, aren’t you, Mrs Thomas?” His eyes were on Gwen now, pleading, defeated.

Gwen was dizzy with lack of sleep and could not bring her mind into focus. She rubbed her face and then ran her fingers through her frizzy hair. She nodded. Even if Ellen Donnelly’s body had been removed, the children would feel the absence of their mother more keenly in their own home and would ask more questions – and she did not want to have to break the news to them that they would never see her again. Better by far to keep them in her own home and let Donnelly do the job in the morning.

She stood up. Her whole body ached. And where was David in all this? He should be at home taking charge of everything. It was unfair that she should carry the whole burden. She began to simmer with resentment. And Emmie hadn’t turned up either, to give her a hand.

“I want to pee,” wailed Brendy, clutching at himself.

“For heaven’s sake, take him down the yard,” she ordered Patrick, as she yawned mightily. “Tut, he hasn’t got any shoes on – lift him over the glass in the kitchen – and no socks neither – ’is poor little feet is purple.”

It was as if Brendy’s sad straits forced her awake. She turned to her drooping, equally sleepy daughter. “Mari, get the dustpan and brush, and get the glass off the kitchen floor, so the little boy – and the little girl – you ain’t got no shoes neither, luv? – don’t cut their feet.”

Nora was not to be wooed by a kindly tone. She stuck her finger in her mouth and looked sulky. Gwen turned to Ruby. “And you, what’s your name?”

“Ruby, missus.” From beneath her shaggy fringe two sad eyes gleamed dully.

“Well, you got shoes on. You bring the baby upstairs with me, and we’ll put him on a potty and then into bed. The little girl can wait in the living room a minute, till Patrick comes back with the little lad.” She lifted a stiff, unyielding Nora up the stairs and deposited her on the living room hearthrug, which seemed to be clear of broken glass. The child ignored her and stared around the strange room.

Thankful that someone seemed to know what to do, Ruby trailed upstairs, a fretful, complaining Michael in her arms. She looked with awe at Emmie’s bedroom into which she was ushered. Though its pretty, rose-covered curtains, which normally masked the blackout curtains, had been torn by glass, to Ruby it looked like a film star’s bedroom. A matching curtain hung from a corner shelf, to make a wardrobe, and Ruby eyed its cascade of printed flowers wonderingly. The
window glass had fallen in a rough heap beneath the sill, and Gwen leaned over it to slip the ripped blackout curtains across the casement.

Ruby shivered in the draught. She felt as if she had expended every scrap of energy she had, and she was sick with apprehension about her mother; she was silently counting the minutes until morning, when she could ask her father how she was and whether she could go to the hospital to see her.

Gwen pulled out a rose-wreathed chamber pot from under the bed. Michael objected violently to being held over it, and kicked and screamed. Gwen persisted until he made water – she was not going to have her beds soaked. A puddle was left on the heavily patterned linoleum. With the enraged child under one arm, she pulled back the bedclothes, to expose the whitest sheets Ruby had ever seen, and then shoved the little boy into bed.

“Now you be quiet,” she ordered sharply. “Your Ruby’s going to come and lie by you and make you warm, aren’t you Ruby?” Ruby assented and started to climb into bed, shoes, dress and all, but Gwen looked at her in such a scandalised fashion, that she hastily reversed herself and pulled off her faded cotton dress and hooked it on to the bed knob. Then she kicked her worn lace-up shoes under the bed.

“That’s better,” Gwen approved.

Emboldened by the approbation, Ruby inquired, “Me mam? Which hospital did they take her to?”

Gwen looked at the whey-faced, skinny child nearly as tall as herself, the bony chest half-covered by a grubby vest. She knew nothing of the silent terror with which Ruby had faced the night; she saw only that the girl was swaying on her feet. She replied carefully, “Mr Baker was going to see about her being taken to hospital. I don’t know which one, though. But you don’t have to worry. Mr Baker is proper kind, and Mrs Baker will have gone in to comfort her, until the ambulance arrived.” The latter statement made her realise what an accomplished
liar she could be, but she cringed at telling the brutal truth. “Now you get into bed, and in no time your Dad’ll be here and tell you all about it. Mr Baker was going to send a message up to the post as soon as the All Clear went.”

Ruby smiled weakly and climbed into the wonderful bed. Two pillows and real white sheets – and blankets. Gwen tucked her and the complaining child into the bed and left them, taking the candle with her. As soon as she had left the room, Ruby got out again and felt around for the chamber pot.

“Our Emmie is going to have to make do on the sitting room sofa, when she comes in,” Gwen told Patrick, who was waiting by the cold fireplace in the living room. He was still holding Brendy. Brendy’s head had sunk on to his brother’s shoulder and he was sound asleep. Patrick had managed to light the gaslight which hung from the middle of the ceiling, and a bright shaft lit up the back yard. Gwen tushed, and ran to the window to close the dusty blackout curtains over the flushed dawn sky. The breeze blew them up into the room, so she hastily picked up her work-basket and balanced it on the sill, to hold them down. A clatter of glass dropped into the kitchen rubbish-bin told her that Mari had done what she had been ordered to do. Gwen sighed, and turned to survey her remaining unwanted guests. “Now, what to do with you?”

“Dunno,” responded Patrick mechanically. Round and round inside his head, went the picture of his mother as he had last seen her; nothing else touched him.

“I know. I’ll put the girl here …” She paused, and then asked, “What’s your name?”

A malevolent, pinched face was turned up towards her. “I’m Nora,” the tight lips spat out.

Gwen recoiled slightly. What a horrid, wizened-faced brat. “I’ll put you and the little lad here – Brendy, isn’t it? – in our Mari’s bed. Mari can sleep with me.” Not for all the wealth in China could she bring herself to put any of the children in her own huge double bed; she would never sleep comfortable in it
again, she told herself. “And you, Patrick, can kip down on the sofa here. I’ll get a blanket out for you. But first bring the kids upstairs.”

She preceded him, the candle flame streaming a thin line of smoke behind her. “The whole place smells of smoke,” she remarked over her shoulder, “but it’s all from outside. Nothin’ to worry about.”

Patrick did not care what the place smelled of, as long as he could lie down, curl up and try to obliterate the fact that his maddening, bossy, beloved mam was dead.

Nora’s stony expression relaxed and she followed Gwen up the carpeted staircase, sidling along like a stray dog in search of something to eat, sniffing, touching everything. She went straight to the dressing table and, standing on tiptoe, reached over to pick up Mari’s most prized possession, a china lady in a crinoline.

“You put that down!” Gwen’s face was dark with immediate anger. “You don’t touch nothin’ in this house, young lady.”

Nora glanced up at her with pale, expressionless eyes. Slowly she opened her hand and let the china figure drop. It broke into three pieces.

“You naughty little vixen,” Gwen shrieked at her. She caught the child by the shoulder and gave her a sound slap on her bottom. “Our Mari’ll be broken-hearted, she will, you little devil. Get your frock off and get into bed afore I mairder you.”

With a look of complete satisfaction on her face, Nora removed her dress, to show only a pair of tattered knickers.

Gwen pulled a chamber pot from under the bed, this one with a pattern of violets to match the mauve curtains. “You pull them panties down and pay a call,” she ordered a bridling Nora. Nora did not seem to hear, so Gwen took her by the shoulder and shoved her down on to it.

Patrick had stood with Brendy in his arms, waiting for Gwen to finish with Nora. He was used to loud voices and slaps and
to Nora being a trial to his mother; it was nothing out of the ordinary.

Boiling with rage, Gwen whipped back the bedclothes and he thankfully put Brendy, fully-clothed, into the bed. “And you get in, miss, and let’s have no more trouble,” she ordered Nora. Nora, knowing the precise breaking point of most adults, felt it was wise to comply.

Outside the bedroom, Gwen and Patrick came face to face with a bewildered, sulky Mari; she did not like her room being taken over by two dirty kids. “You get into our bed, Mari – on your father’s side. I don’t know what we do when he comes home. And I don’t know what he’s going to say.”

She opened a drawer of a fine oak chest on the landing, one of the pieces of furniture appropriated from Emmie’s home, and took out two thin, but clean, blankets. “You go make yourself comfy on the sofa in the living room,” she told Patrick.

She had to repeat her command before Patrick took any notice. As Mari passed, she had caught his hand and squeezed it. “I’m sorry,” she had whispered, and he realised with a gleam of comfort that she understood how he felt. He wanted to cry on her shoulder. To Gwen he said, “Yes, missus.”

While Gwen lay, rigid and awake, beside Mari, Mari suddenly remarked, “You know, mam, it’s over half an hour since the All Clear went, and Auntie Emmie isn’t in yet.”

“Your aunt’s big enough to take care of herself. She’ll be in just now – probably gossiping somewhere.” Gwen could not take any more; she had been tried beyond endurance, and the very thought of Emmie and her Robert added to her grumpiness. The sly bitch and her greediness about the furniture.

Though Emmie went through the motions of being a good sister-in-law, her bitter resentment against Gwen’s refusal to help with her sick parents was all too apparent. Mari’s reminder that Emmie had not yet returned made Gwen feel
that she did not care if the woman never came back; yet, underneath it all, her Methodist conscience smote her hard – Emmie had carried a terrible load which Gwen could have eased. Angrily, she turned over in her bed. If Emmie were dead, she would be free of the remainder of her own sins of omission. Savagely, she
wished
her dead, as she lay seething with frustration at her current predicaments.

Suddenly, as a new horror occurred to her, she sat up in bed beside the sleeping Mari. She had never looked to see what had happened to her precious sitting room – the aspidistra in its big, green pottery bowl, set on a table in the bay window, the settee and two easy chairs which she had recently recovered herself in bright orange-flowered cretonne, and the piano, still not quite paid for, which Mari was learning to play, taught at a shilling a lesson by Mrs Cooper down the road. Was it all ruined by the blast?

She could not bear it, if it were all spoiled. She started to turn back the bedclothes, to go down and look, and then flung them back over herself. She could not endure to know now, and she turned her face into her pillow and quietly wept herself to sleep.

Patrick, too, cried – into the patchwork cushion on the sagging horsehair sofa. The pain was so great that it was as if the shrapnel in his mother’s body had pierced him.

A light tread descending the staircase made him lift his head abruptly. Was Mari coming down?

“Pat, where are you?”

“Here, Rube.” He let his head fall back on to the cushion.

“I were so scared, Pat.” She crept towards him through the darkened room and knelt down by the sofa. He sat up and her seeking arms went round him.

“It were the worst raid.” Patrick’s voice was more gentle.