The Mersey Angels

by Sheila Riley

  The Mersey Angels

  Sheila Riley

  To the brave men and women who willingly gave their future for our tomorrows

  Contents

  Part I

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Part II

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Acknowledgments

  More from Sheila Riley

  About the Author

  About Boldwood Books

  Part I

  Prologue

  May 1915

  Jerky Woods sauntered along the dock road towards Great Homer Street, heading for Saint Martin’s dance hall near the open-air marketplace. Unlike many Liverpool people who were in the doldrums about the sinking of RMS Lusitania, affectionately known by the people of Liverpool as ‘The Lusy’ because so many of her sons were serving on board, Jerky was in the mood for a good time.

  RMS Lusitania had been sunk by an imperial German Navy U-boat off the south-west coast of Ireland, killing one thousand one hundred and ninety-eight civilians travelling from New York to Liverpool. The headlines in the local newspaper caused outrage. Not only in Liverpool, but elsewhere in Britain, but there was a strong maritime community in this part of Liverpool who were directly affected, when their son or husband had been caught up in the tragedy and killed.

  What’s the use of worrying? He whistled the tune of the popular new song knowing the words had never been more appropriate. He had no intentions of worrying about anything. Why should he? Nobody had ever worried about him.

  Unless he counted Lottie Blythe, who was so clingy since her mother died, and no mistake. She didn’t give him a minute to himself. Always wanting to go for nice long walks. Hands in pockets, he could think of nothing more depressing than wasting valuable alehouse drinking time to walk hand in hand with a soppy, doe-eyed girl who wittered endlessly about mundane things like weddings and how many kids she would like, her only interest was getting him down the aisle. She had even started coming to his lodgings to ‘tidy up’. Telling him he needed a woman about the place. But she was scandalised when he asked her to move in with him. And why she kept insisting on calling him Jerry, he would never know.

  Not without a ring on my finger, Jerry, she said. Well, he was having none of that marriage lark, they had been courting for just over a year, on and off, and she was always wanting to know where he was going and who with? What’s it got to do with her? Jerky Woods knew if he wed her, he would be responsible for her upkeep. And he didn’t like the sound of that. Paying good ale money for her food and board? Not likely!

  Lottie even had the cheek to hint that he might want to take the King’s shilling and join the khaki glory-hunters at the Front. No fear of that happening either, he thought. Look what happened to those poor innocent blighters on The Lusy.

  The war had been raging for nine months, even though it was supposed to be over by last Christmas. Jerky Woods believed men had been conned into fighting a war for a country they had no interest in, and the thought chunnered away in his head. He had no beef with the Germans. Furthermore, if he fancied a bit of fisticuffs, he didn’t need to join the army or navy to have a fight.

  He intended to get what he could out of this war, though, by fair means or foul, and had no intention of becoming a name on the Town Hall List, like those poor buggers on the ship.

  Twenty minutes. That was all it took to sink that fine liner. Twenty minutes.

  You wouldn’t credit such a thing was possible on a balmy night like this, he thought, as scarcely a ripple of a breeze was strong enough to cause the chip paper he had just discarded to stir from its resting place in the gutter. He was restless, on the lookout for a nice bit of skirt who wanted a good time and no ties. Even in these prim-and-proper times, being so close to the docks a man could still find a good-time girl for a quick canoodle in the moonlight. He would tell the unsuspecting female he was serving on board a warship, or awaiting orders to set off for Flanders battlefields, and the girls went weak in his arms. Easy-peasy after that.

  Walking with a rolling gait, so familiar in this North Liverpool area of seamen, Jerky meandered past the market stalls that were closing for the night. He was more than ready to wet his lips with a pint or two. It was a good thing he had his eyes to business when he’d spied Lottie’s rent money behind the clock on her mantlepiece. He could not stomach another night of her yapping and the money was quickly dispatched to his pocket.

  A sudden outcry from the side street caught his attention, and before he managed to get to the dance, he could hear the heart-rending wail of women whose husbands had gone down with The Lusy.

  It were a crying shame what the Hun did to that ship, he contradicted his earlier belief that the enemy had done nothing wrong to him or his community, and his footsteps slowed. She weren’t even a warship, he thought. She was merchant class.

  ‘You come out of there, Kruger, before we drag you out!’ A rowdy crowd gathered outside the pork butcher shop and shouted up to the window above. Vicious threats were being directed against Germany, and anybody with a German name.

  ‘It’s a bleedin’ shame it is,’ Woods said to nobody in particular. ‘I knew a few good lads on The Lusy,’ he lied to a black-clad woman crying into her handkerchief who had just come out of Blackwall Street, where nearly every blind was drawn as a symbol of a death.

  But when she threw her arms round him and sobbed into his freshly laundered jacket that only came out of pawn this morning, Jerky Woods stood like petrified stone, baffled. He did not know how to comfort the stricken woman. All he hoped was that her snotty tears didn’t mark his clean lapel.

  ‘Me son and me husband, both gone,’ the woman sobbed. ‘Most of the terraced houses round here were occupied by Irish coal-trimmers, firemen, and many of them were sailors who had been on the Lusitania…’

  ‘Shame, that…’ His words were superfluous, but she wouldn’t notice. She was too lost in her grief. Although his blood rose when he noticed a gang congregating on the corner, and already drunk, they were fighting furious. Trouble was so thick in the air he could smell it. ‘Never you mind, Ma, I’ll make sure the Hun pay for what they’ve done to our boys.’ It had been a long time since he had been involved in a good scramble. And as the adrenaline pumped through his veins, he was eager to be part of this one.

  The dance was forgotten as he picked up his pace, impatient to be part of the action in any disturbance when he heard the loud crash coming from the pork butcher’s shop near Great Howard Street, followed by a deafening shatter of glass and a volley of angry voices.

  Hurrying up the road, he saw Kruger’s butcher shop being ransacked. It didn’t seem to matter to the baying crowd that the butcher was not a German immigrant, but Polish, when the front window had been knocked in with bricks and batons, and the pavement was littered with glistening shar
ds of glass.

  Jerky Woods saw a crowd of men and women demolishing the place, and he decided they needed his assistance when he picked up a discarded house brick and a wooden baton from a broken sash window. Joining in with much fervour, Woods was not satisfied until everything of foreign origin was smashed to smithereens, and as a finale he threw a lit rag into the devastated shop before stuffing his pockets with pork chops and sausages that had spilled out onto the street.

  Women were filling their aprons with loins of pork, trotters and pigs’ tails, obviously not too fastidious in nicking Mr Kruger’s profits before heading home prior to the police vans turning up. But the night was yet young. When the police did arrive, Woods made sure he was nowhere to be seen.

  Although, his luck had run out when he encountered a mob outside the jeweller’s shop in Commutation Row, and as he filled his pockets full of sparklers, the bobbies snapped him in their own type of bracelet and bundled him into the back of a police van for an overnight stay in Cheapside before an early appointment with local magistrates the following morning.

  1

  May 1916

  The first thing Ruby Swift noticed was the clean front door, complete with gleaming brass furnishings polished to a high shine, and a spotless doorstep buffed white with a donkey stone. Izzy, on her knees, was scrubbing the doorstep until it was immaculately clean. The ground-floor windowsills had already received the same treatment, Ruby noticed. And through the sparkling front parlour window the pristine, heavy cotton lace, complemented the bright curtains.

  ‘You look surprised, Mrs Swift,’ Izzy Woods, on her knees, said in a more assured tone than the one she adopted five years earlier, when she cowed in the pawnshop doorway. Mother of Jerky Woods and her younger son Nipper, Izzy was married to the laziest drunk it had ever been Ruby’s misfortune to encounter. And Izzy was no stranger to the pawnshop. She was on her uppers on that cold Christmas Eve back in 1910 when Ruby gave her a ten-shilling note to stave off the hunger and shame of having nothing for her family at Christmas. It changed her life. And she had never forgotten Ruby’s kindness.

  ‘Not surprised at all,’ Ruby said, taking in the red, work-worn hands and short stubby nails that never had time to grow, and was not surprised by the untethered strands of prematurely silver-streaked hair that had escaped its turtleshell comb.

  ‘Not everybody lives in a filthy hovel.’ There was more than a hint of repressed anger in Izzy’s tone when she sank her scrubbing brush into the white enamel pail of hot water, splashing the pavement and almost upending the bucket.

  Ruby’s eyes took in the front, lower-storey bricks and the pavement outside her front door which had been scrubbed to remove the sooty coal-fire coating and was drying in the bright spring morning sunshine, knowing that nothing she said would soothe Izzy’s worries, especially when the Hun sent those destructive airships. The terrifying Zeppelin raids over Liverpool at the end of January had brought the war closer to home.

  Ruby knew that these routines of propriety were not associated with class or place. They were almost exclusively the marker of a respectable position, which had not been attributed to Izzy Woods five years earlier, when her good-for-nothing husband stole the remainder of the money Ruby had donated and spent every penny on himself and his cronies in the dockside alehouses.

  ‘Here, Freddy, wipe your nose,’ Izzy said, taking a clean handkerchief from her rolled-up sleeve, offering it to a neighbour’s child who was lolling against the bay-fronted bricks supporting the parlour window. ‘Have you had your breakfast, yet?’

  The child shook his head and, getting up from the step with the agility of a five-year-old, Izzy disappeared through the vestibule door and up the long thin lobby. Moments later, she returned with a hunk of freshly baked bread slathered with fruity home-made jam.

  ‘Poor little sod, if he doesn’t watch himself, Lord Kitchener will persuade him to rush headlong overseas too. Or Lord Derby might introduce him to a voluntary recruitment for infants.’ Izzy sounded angry and who could blame her.

  ‘I heard about Nipper joining up, and wondered if there was anything I could do to help?’ Ruby knew Izzy’s boy Nipper had signed up to fight only after he left her stables, telling Archie, Ruby’s husband, he must do his bit.

  ‘He isn’t even old enough to get served in an alehouse,’ Izzy said, her anxiety obvious in her galvanised delivery, ‘yet they let him go to war.’

  ‘Poor Nipper,’ Ruby said to Izzy, watching the child scurry down the street devouring the morning feast. Ruby knew Izzy’s kind-hearted nature was only allowed to come to the fore after her late, indolent, husband had toddled off his mortal coil after falling drunk into the River Mersey. ‘I heard Jerky will be out soon,’ Ruby said, knowing Izzy’s oldest lad had caused her nothing but heartache.

  ‘Aye, well… That’s Jerky for you. I can’t see prison changing him.’ Izzy sighed, kneeling on an old newspaper to save her poor knees from the hard concrete. Leaning back on her heels, she rang out the floor cloth into the bucket of water. ‘Always up to something, takes after his father, he does.’ Her shame at the antics of her oldest lad was overshadowed by the pride she had in her youngest son. Young Nipper was serving his country while Jerky was incarcerated in Walton Gaol for ransacking the pork butcher’s shop and attacking Mr Solomon’s jewellery shop in Commutation Row. ‘The authorities prolonged the sentence; he should have got out last December but he got another five months on top for fighting and it serves him right.’

  Ruby agreed, although she did not voice her belief that Woods should have got far longer to serve behind bars.

  ‘When your Archie gave me the job in the pawnshop, after Jerky was locked up, I was ever so grateful,, the job gave me peace of mind.’

  ‘Which you deserve,’ said Ruby, knowing Izzy was a hard-working woman who tried to keep her head above water.

  ‘My purse is safe from his sticky fingers, for now.’ Izzy threw her head back and laughed; obviously, she had more to care about than her clean step, crisp lace curtains, and the most spotless laundry in the street. Yet, Ruby surmised keeping busy kept Izzy’s mind from the worry of Nipper doing his bit for King and Country, even though he was not old enough to fight overseas.

  ‘Any news from Nipper?’ Ruby liked the young lad who was as different from his father and older brother as it was possible to be. She and Archie had not been surprised when Izzy’s youngest lad came to Ashland Hall and told Archie he would not be working with him in the stables any more because he had joined the end of the line – took the King’s shilling and was off to fight for his country.

  Izzy looked thoughtful. ‘“You’ve got to have one son to be proud of, Mam”, he said to me the day before I waved him off at Lime Street Station.’ Izzy swallowed hard and it was obvious she still had not come to terms with the thought of possibly losing him forever. ‘Like every other mother, I was proud to say my boy was doing his bit. But he wasn’t the one who should have gone.’

  ‘You must be worried sick, Izzy,’ Ruby said when the mood took a sombre tone, knowing there was a young lad who wanted to do his bit, as the posters pasted on every wall and hoarding pushed home the message that Britain needed brave young men to fight for their country.

  ‘Working in the pawnshop takes my mind off things for a while,’ Izzy said. ‘The security of a regular wage coming in is still a novelty and it helps to share a laugh or a tear with other mothers whose sons are away fighting and going through the same thing.’

  ‘I’m sure you are right.’ Ruby knew what it was like to be a mother who had no control over the well-being of her offspring. ‘I admire your resilience, Izzy.’

  ‘Thanks to you for giving me a chance when I most needed it,’ Izzy said, getting up off her knees and picking up her bucket, beckoning Ruby to follow her inside with a sideways nod of her head. ‘My luck changed for the better that time you gave me a ten-bob note.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Ruby said, knowing exactly what Izzy meant, recall
ing the time five years ago when she saw Izzy, destitute, outside the pawnshop waiting for it to open.

  ‘I managed to pay my rent that Christmas Eve,’ Izzy replied. ‘So, his nibs didn’t get all of it,’ she said, referring to her lazy husband. ‘And you could have knocked me over with a feather when the man from the Corporation told me I had this new house.’ The three-up-three-down terraced house was further back from the confined spaces of disease and vermin ridden courts and had its own parlour, a privy in the yard and modern gas lighting.

  ‘It’s a credit to you,’ Ruby said, looking round, admiring the clean cosy kitchen.

  ‘Well, everybody knows you’ve got to be as close as God’s sister to get an ’ouse round here,’ Izzy said, watching Ruby closely. ‘It was like stepping into a palace after my old place, in the court cellar.’ She was quiet for a moment, searching for any signs of acknowledgment from Ruby. But there were none. ‘You should play poker, Mrs Swift,’ Izzy said, and her face broke into a smile as she placed the black-bottomed kettle onto the hob. ‘I know you had a hand in getting me this house.’

  ‘Be off with you,’ Ruby scoffed, flicking her hand as if swatting a fly.

  ‘When I moved in here with Nipper, the family reputation went before us, and the neighbours, no matter how poor they were, would not give me the time of day.’