by Maureen Lee
‘I told her where I would be at Christmas and she sent a card and said she’d like to come and see me. She suggested next Saturday. Would you mind, Eileen?’ Lily was twenty-one and worked as an admissions officer in a military hospital in Essex. ‘She can sleep with me.’
It was Kate’s second night home, and she and Eileen were sitting lazily in front of the dying fire at almost midnight. Napoleon was purring on Eileen’s knee, keeping her warm. Nicky had been fast asleep in bed for hours.
Eileen said she felt offended to be asked. ‘Of course I wouldn’t mind. This is your home at the moment, isn’t it?’
Kate happily agreed that it was. ‘When she comes, I’ll try and get something special for tea.’
‘Would you like me to go out so you and Lily can have the place to yourselves?’
Now it was Kate’s turn to claim to be offended. ‘Just as if! It might be my home, but it’s your house, isn’t it? Anyway, I’d like you to be here in case there are any embarrassing silences, which you can fill with idle chatter.’
‘I’m good at idle chatter,’ Eileen said with a smile.
‘Maybe so, but you’re not very good at hiding the fact that something pretty awful happened while I was away,’ Kate said drily. ‘Whenever you think I’m not watching, you look dead miserable, as people say in Liverpool. What’s wrong, love?’
Eileen sighed, but was relieved to be able to share the news about Nick with someone. ‘He’s having an affair with an eighteen-year-old girl and she’s pregnant,’ she explained in a rush. ‘They’re about to move in together.’
Kate literally went pale with shock. ‘I can’t even bring myself to imagine what you must have said when he came home at New Year. I mean, how did you manage not to kill him?’
‘I didn’t say anything.’ Eileen was aware how inadequate she must appear in other women’s eyes. There were many who wouldn’t have let Nick in the house – even if it was his house. ‘He doesn’t know I know. I want him back,’ she said fiercely. ‘I’m not prepared to give him up without a fight – and I’m fighting in the only way I know how.’
‘And did it work?’ Kate looked doubtful. ‘The fighting?’
‘I don’t know. I might not know until the war is over and it’s time for him to choose.’
‘It seems she, the girl – what’s her name?’
‘Doria.’
‘Doria has a very big advantage over you – she’s with him all the time. Whereas you …’ Kate paused.
‘I only see him when he feels like it.’ Eileen shrugged. ‘Then I’ll just have to fight harder, won’t I?’ She had written Nick a long, tender letter, but had no idea what to do next. It all felt very limp. ‘I really should go to London and face him.’ Or should she? ‘I never dreamt I’d end up fighting for Nick.’
On Saturday morning, Kate went to the station to meet Lily. Mother and daughter returned to the cottage in tears, having experienced an emotional reunion. Lily was a pretty young woman, very like her mother must have been at twenty-one.
With Nicky’s help, Eileen had set the table for lunch – home-made potato soup, a one-egg omelette each with slices of fried potato, and apple charlotte for afters. It was quite a decent spread for wartime.
‘We grow our own potatoes,’ Eileen explained, ‘so we have loads. And loads of apples too. I would have liked to make an apple pie, but we haven’t any lard. Our neighbours occasionally give us eggs.’
‘It was a lovely meal.’ Lily patted her stomach. ‘Thank you very much.’
Eileen took Nicky upstairs, where she managed to find lots of things to do, leaving Kate and Lily to discuss in privacy the tragic story of their lives so far – a mother and her daughters separated for years due to the evil nature of the husband and father. While she dusted and tidied drawers, she couldn’t help but overhear snippets of their conversation.
‘Dad said you kept having affairs with different men,’ Lily said.
‘Oh, but that’s not true,’ Kate protested.
Then later, ‘He told us you never really wanted children.’
‘I would have liked more children, darling, but he’d already turned against me by the time I had Maisie.’
Maisie was Kate’s youngest daughter. Eileen paused in the middle of rearranging the ornaments on the dressing table to reflect that it wasn’t just wars that made people unhappy and turned their lives upside down: people of ill will were quite capable of doing the same thing. Her own first husband, Francis, had been that sort of man. She shivered just thinking about him.
She could have easily cried, but didn’t want to upset Nicky, who was in his favourite place in the world – sitting in the middle of the double bed playing with his teddy bears. She hugged him and told him she loved him very much.
‘I love you too, Mum,’ he assured her. He picked up the tiny teddy that Lena Newton had brought him months ago. ‘But I love little Pip best of all.’
It was a Saturday afternoon at the end of January when Jack Doyle remarked to his daughter Sheila, ‘Y’know, luv, I haven’t heard from our Sean for quite a few weeks.’
‘Well I haven’t heard from him for nearly a whole year,’ Sheila complained. She was attacking a mountain of ironing. The younger children were being unnaturally quiet and the older ones had gone to the matinee at the Palace in Marsh Lane to see Deadwood Dick. ‘In fact, I’ve only had about two letters since he was called up, and then they were written on a titchy scrap of paper.’
‘I know, luv,’ Jack said patiently, ‘but he sent them on your birthday, if I remember right. The lad can’t be expected to write letters to every single member of his family. He writes to Alice and to me, and the ones he writes to me are for you and our Eileen too. Anyroad,’ he continued, annoyed at the interruption, ‘it was well before Christmas that I had the last letter, and there’s been nowt since.’
Sheila looked worried. ‘That long! Maybe he’s been posted somewhere else. You said, didn’t you, Dad, that there wouldn’t be much more need for him to be in Malta; that he’d be sent to Italy soon, or back home?’
‘If that was the case, luv, he’d have written to us like a shot.’ Jack frowned. He was getting really worried about Sean. He got to his feet and groaned along with his creaking bones. ‘I’ll go and see Alice, see if she’s heard.’
Number 5 wasn’t just the best house in Pearl Street; it was probably also the cleanest and the shiniest. Alice Doyle, Jack’s daughter-in-law, was in the kitchen in the middle of drying the dishes when he went in, rubbing a dinner plate with such zeal he thought she could well make a hole in it. Little Edward was seated by the table, playing with a wooden train set. A delicate child of just over a year, he wasn’t nearly as robust as Eileen’s Nicky or Sheila’s lads. Jack patted him affectionately on the head and the child blew him a raspberry. Should anyone dare to call him ‘Eddie’, Alice would correct them, saying in a stern voice, ‘His name is Edward, if you don’t mind.’
‘Hello, luv,’ Jack said guardedly to his son’s wife. At twenty, she was less than half his age, and half his size, yet she scared him witless. A tiny wisp of a girl with the face of an angel, she had more character in her little finger than most people had in their entire bodies.
At the sound of his voice, she turned upon him like one of those whirling dervishes he’d heard about. Her long skirt flared, exposing the specially made boot she wore because her left leg was three inches shorter than the right. ‘Have you come about our Sean?’ she demanded.
‘Yes, I have.’
‘Have you heard from him, then?’
‘No, I haven’t, luv.’
She collapsed on a chair as if all the air had gone out of her. ‘I’d’ve come to ask if you’d had a letter, but if you’d said no then I’d only have been more worried than I was already. I was hoping you’d had a letter and mine had gone astray. D’ye know what I mean, Mr Doyle?’
He hadn’t the faintest idea what she meant. He also wished she’d stop calling him ‘Mr Doyle’ and call him
‘Jack’ instead, but he’d given up suggesting it. ‘I just hope there’s nothing wrong,’ he said.
‘There can’t be anything wrong,’ she cried passionately. ‘I won’t let there be. Sean’s all right, I’m sure of it. The good Lord will have been keeping an eye on him.’
Jack Doyle hadn’t an ounce of faith in the good Lord keeping an eye on anyone. If that was the case, then why hadn’t he been keeping an eye on the millions of people who’d already died in this bloody awful war? He thought it best to keep his trap shut in front of Alice, who had a fearful temper.
‘Our Harry got his call-up papers the other day,’ she said. She already had one brother, Tommy, in the army.
‘Well I doubt he’ll be in for long,’ Jack assured her. ‘The war’s bound to be over by this time next year.’
‘That’s what they said this time last year,’ she pointed out.
Jack escaped, but not before promising to come round straight away if he heard from Sean, and Alice promised to come and see him if she got a letter first.
In London, Nick Stephens had received an item of news that had come as a bit of a shock. The bedroom of the apartment he rented in Birdcage Walk was extremely small. It had been perfectly adequate until he’d met Doria. Even then, a young, healthy man and woman having to occupy a single bed had been more of a pleasure than an inconvenience, but it was beginning to feel a bit cramped now that she was pregnant. They would certainly require a bigger space once the baby was born.
It seemed as if they’d been extraordinarily lucky when a ground-floor flat with two bedrooms became vacant in the same building directly after Christmas. Nick applied for it immediately, Doria gave in her notice at her own flat – she had long ago left the family home in Wimbledon – and she and Nick prepared to move in together.
The shock came when they were turned down on moral grounds.
‘That’s what it said in the letter,’ an astounded Nick told Doria later in the day. ‘On moral grounds.’
‘What do they mean?’ Doria enquired, puzzled. For all her expensive education, she wasn’t nearly as clever as Eileen, who’d left school at fourteen.
Nick smiled. ‘We’re not married, are we, idiot? We’d be living in sin. And the landlord of the building disapproves.’ The smile faded. Put like that, it sounded rather shameful. He thought about Eileen and the time they’d spent together in the New Year, and felt like a cad. He was behaving disgracefully, but was unable to see a way out of it.
‘We’ll have to find somewhere pretty quick,’ he said. On top of everything, he’d been given a week’s notice for his present room. He was no longer a desirable tenant; they wanted him off the premises.
The flat Nick eventually found wasn’t in nearly such a pleasant area. He would no longer be able to walk to the office. It was advertised as South Kensington, but was really on the edge of Fulham. Unlike the Birdcage Walk flat, it was much too big, having two huge rooms with high ceilings, a cavernous bathroom and a tiny alcove of a kitchen.
Doria, always easy-going, said she didn’t mind. Each day she brought another suitcase of clothes and other possessions round to Nick’s flat, ready to be moved to the new place on Friday evening when he was due to leave – or be chucked out, Nick thought drily.
They ended up having to make several journeys by bus and underground to get everything from one place to the other, taxis being rarely available even in London. Not that everything would have fitted in a single cab anyway.
The enchantment of their affair hadn’t completely vanished, but something had changed. Instead of being exciting and illicit, it had become immoral. Although Nick considered the landlord of his flat to be unnecessarily narrow-minded – after all, there was a war on and everything had turned topsy-turvy – it nevertheless made him feel uncomfortable being thrown out of his digs. It wasn’t the sort of thing that happened to a chap like him.
To make matters worse, the Jerries had started to bomb London at night again, though the raids weren’t as heavy as they had been in the early years of the war. It just made life a trial when it had been a pleasure. Doria had to leave work when the baby began to show, and there she was, stuck miles away from the West End and the shops that she loved. It was all rather unfortunate, Nick thought sadly.
It wasn’t until February was almost over that Alice received a letter from the War Ministry to say that her husband, Sean Doyle, was seriously ill in St Steven’s Hospital, South Promenade, Blackpool, Lancashire.
She had Edward’s warm coat on him in a jiffy, along with his woolly hat and a pair of mittens, but when she reached Jack Doyle’s house, he’d gone to work. Alice stamped her foot in frustration, annoyed with herself for always expecting her father-in-law to be there to help in an emergency. Years ago, Sean’s dad had fought hard to get compensation when her own dad had been killed in an accident on the docks. He’d obtained £25, which had been a boon at the time, helping the family through until her mam found a job and could provide for her family of six young children. While other people had urged her to put them in an orphanage, Jack Doyle had kept them together. Since then, Alice had worshipped him, not that anyone would ever know, and certainly not Jack himself.
After some thought, she wheeled the pushchair around to Sheila’s.
Sheila was sitting at the table doing absolutely nothing. ‘I’ve just got four of ’em off to school,’ she explained. ‘In a minute I’ll sort out the other three.’ The sound of childish laughter was coming from upstairs.
Alice waved the letter that had come that morning. ‘Sean’s in hospital in Blackpool.’
‘Is he now? Let’s see.’ Sheila grabbed the letter and quickly read it. ‘What are we going to do?’ she asked.
‘I’m going to Blackpool to see him. Here and now, like. Would you mind looking after Edward while I’m gone?’
Sheila looked shocked. ‘Oh, Alice, Blackpool’s a long way away. Would you like me to come with you?’
Alice wanted nothing of the kind. She just wanted to be left alone to find her husband, no matter how hard it might be.
‘No, ta, Sheila. I’d sooner go on me own.’ There were times when Alice’s confidence knew no bounds.
Sheila knew it was no use arguing. She nodded. ‘All right, girl. Do you need some money?’
‘I’ve got money at home, thanks.’ Alice abruptly kissed Edward on the top of his head and left.
In her own house, she upturned the old tea caddy that held the cash she’d been saving for an emergency ever since she and Sean had married. There hadn’t been one as yet, but now there was an emergency bigger than any she had ever imagined. She picked up the two crumpled ten-shilling notes and the assortment of copper and silver coins and counted them; she had thirty-two shillings and fourpence halfpenny.
She put the money in her purse and sat down at the table. All of a sudden, the confidence had gone. Instead, she was panting for breath and felt as sick as a dog. She had no idea how to get to Blackpool. None of Sean’s relatives realised that she had scarcely been outside Bootle in her life. When Mam was alive, they’d sometimes gone on the tram to Scotland Road, where there was a market and they’d bought enough second-hand clothes to see the family through the next few months, but that, and Eileen’s house in Melling, was as far as she had ever been.
She knew Blackpool wasn’t far away, because it was in Lancashire, and Bootle was in Lancashire too. She reckoned if she caught a train from Marsh Lane station then she would be going in the right direction and at some point she’d find out which way to go next. All she had to do was grit her teeth and get on with it. It was what she’d done when she used to take in washing. She’d come home laden with a frightening amount of bedding that had to be washed and ironed quickly, and had worked till midnight day after day until it was done and she could return it to its owner in good time and be paid what she was owed.
Alice had never let anyone down, and she certainly had no intention of letting down her darling Sean, who was lying seriously ill in a hos
pital somewhere in Blackpool.
It was a relief to discover that an electric train would take her from Marsh Lane to Exchange station in Liverpool, from where she would catch another train, a steam one this time, to Blackpool.
It would have been an adventure if the reason for her journey had been less worrisome, passing row after row of streets on the way in to Liverpool. Alice knew that there were millions of people in the world and that thousands of them lived in Liverpool, but it was strange to see proof of it for the first time.
The journey to Blackpool was just as interesting, stopping as it did at St Helens and Wigan and at a place called Preston, where hundreds of soldiers were waiting for other trains to take them to places unknown.
Alice alighted from the train in Blackpool feeling as if she’d just landed on the moon. It looked so strange, with its tall houses and closed shops and not all that many people about when she’d thought it would be crowded. But perhaps that was only in the summer, when people came on holiday.
The letter said that Sean’s hospital was on South Promenade. ‘Just catch a tram along the front, luv,’ a porter at the station told her, so Alice did, and it looked even more like the moon as she trundled past some alarming constructions and the weirdest buildings, with signs proclaiming themselves Pleasure Park, Amusements, Fortunes Told and even a Ghost Train, whatever that was.
Out of the window on the other side of the tram, the Irish Sea was a vast expanse of huddled waves the colour of mud, and the sky was full of mottled grey clouds without a patch of blue.
Alice had never felt so alone before. She was relieved when the alarming constructions ended and houses took their place, some of them extremely grand. She got off the tram in case it passed the hospital without her knowing.
Her boot was hurting badly by the time she arrived at a big double-fronted sandstone building with a sign above the glass doors saying that it was St Steven’s Hospital. She limped up the steps and through the doors into a small hallway with a room marked Reception. She had no idea what that meant, but she knocked on the door anyway; it seemed the obvious thing to do.