The Seven Streets of Liverpool

by Maureen Lee

  ‘That’s not like Nick,’ Eileen murmured.

  ‘No,’ Doria conceded. ‘I must admit it isn’t like him at all. Until recently, he was always very reliable. I think, between us, we’ve got him down.’

  ‘I haven’t done anything to get him down,’ Eileen said angrily. ‘I have always been exceptionally patient with him. It was losing his arm that’s got him down.’

  ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t have been so patient. Perhaps you should have given him a good shake and told him to pull his socks up.’

  ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t have seduced him – that’s what you told me you’d done when I was in London. Without you around, he might have been his old self again by now.’

  ‘Mum!’ Nicky entered the room accompanied by Napoleon, his tail erect and bristling with indignation at the sight of a stranger in his house. Nicky looked shyly at Doria. ‘Hello.’

  Doria’s ill temper vanished in an instant. ‘Hello, little boy. What’s your name?’

  ‘Nicky.’

  ‘My name is Doria.’ She held out her hand for him to shake. ‘It’s nice to meet you, Nicky.’

  Nicky grinned and shook her hand, very grown up. ‘It’s nice to meet you, D …’ He looked at Eileen. ‘I can’t remember her name, Mum.’

  ‘It’s Doria, love.’

  ‘Why have you come to see my mum?’ he asked the visitor – a very unwelcome visitor, Eileen thought sourly, but an attractive one all the same, with her mass of ringlets and her lovely blue eyes. She wore straight black slacks and a dark pink maternity smock with an embroidered yoke. She hoped the woman would go away soon – but why on earth had she come all this way in the first place?

  ‘Why have I come to see your mum?’ Doria put a finger to her chin and pretended to wonder. ‘Because I’m her friend and she’s invited me to stay until my baby is born in June.’

  ‘I have done no …’ Eileen spluttered, ‘no such thing,’ she added more quietly.

  ‘No, you’re right,’ Doria said airily, ‘but it was your idea I go home to my parents. It’s your fault I’m in the position I’m in. The least you can do to make up for it is to let me live here for a while. I honestly have nowhere else to go.’

  Eileen could think of numerous arguments against this, as well as suggestions for places she could go, but she knew Doria wouldn’t be prepared to accept them. Anyroad, if the girl refused to budge, she couldn’t very well physically throw her out or demand that the police come and do it. All she could do was let her stay and put up with it.

  ‘Are you wearing your wedding ring?’ she asked.

  Doria held up her left hand, showing the ring on her third finger.

  ‘You’ll have to invent a husband. Me sister and her friend know the truth, but I don’t want the whole world knowing you’re on your way to becoming an unmarried mother.’ People would ask her all sorts of questions. Just imagine if she told everyone that Nick was the father of Doria’s baby, who would be Nicky’s half-brother or sister!

  ‘My, you’re frightfully narrow-minded, Mrs Stephens,’ Doria said in a dead posh voice.

  ‘I’m not, actually, but some of me family and friends are.’ Her dad would be shocked to the core. ‘Oh, and another thing. You’d best think up a name other than Mallory. Peter has become a family friend. It’ll confuse everyone no end if they find out he’s your brother.’

  Doria’s jaw dropped. ‘I know you said you knew Peter, but how on earth has he become a family friend?’

  ‘You’ll have to ask him that.’ Just at the moment, Eileen couldn’t be bothered to explain.

  ‘What,’ Leslie Taylor enquired of his daughter, ‘were you and a crowd of other people doing last Saturday morning marching through the business area of Liverpool?’

  Phyllis gave him a look of contempt. ‘Were you following us?’

  ‘Yes,’ her father conceded miserably. ‘I saw you leave the house and went upstairs on the tram you caught into town. And please don’t give your poor old dad a horrible look like that, Phyllis. It’s not a very nice thing to do.’

  ‘I wouldn’t give you horrible looks if you weren’t such an idiot and acted like a proper father.’

  ‘Don’t call me an idiot, either.’

  Phyllis gave him a truly awful look. ‘Fathers don’t spy on their daughters.’ She had gone back to work at her various schools on Monday, and her father had been waiting outside the house when she arrived home today. Her mother was on the afternoon shift at the hospital.

  ‘Can I come in, darling?’

  Phyllis stood aside to let him in. ‘Kindly don’t call me “darling”, Dad. You’ve never did it when we lived in Beverley.’

  He stamped his way along the hall into the living room, where he threw himself into a chair. ‘What am I going to do?’ he pleaded. ‘I can’t go back to Dawn’s. The police are threatening to come and take Mick O’Brien away by force. Can’t you think of a way I can get back in with your mum?’

  ‘No, and anyway – or anyroad, as they say in Liverpool – what makes you think I want you and Mum back together? We are both very happy without you.’ Actually, Phyllis would quite like him back; he was a hopeless father, but fun to live with, always cracking jokes and doing stupid things. She remembered the advice Eileen Stephens had offered. ‘It’s up to you to think of how to get back with Mum,’ she told him, laughing. ‘Perhaps you could pretend to recover your memory. It might work.’

  It was a hint, and she hoped he would take it.

  Leslie Taylor was deep in thought as he made his way towards the public house in Seaforth where he worked. How on earth had he managed to get himself into such a mess? The trouble was, Dawn was so provocatively attractive, and he’d felt lonesome in Bootle on his own, and petrified by the air raids. It had seemed exciting at the time to just disappear from his old life and become someone else. He might even write a novel about it one of these days.

  He stopped dead in the middle of Marsh Lane, remembering what his daughter had said. ‘Why don’t you pretend to recover your memory?’ How about if he had an ‘accident’, his memory returned and he could profess total ignorance of what had happened in the meantime?

  If he were going to do it, then he should do it now, not let himself think about it, risk changing his mind. He wouldn’t go back to Dawn’s house in Chaucer Street to collect his things. It would be more believable if he only had a few bob in his pocket and wasn’t carrying an identity card. He would announce his name to be Leslie Taylor and deny all knowledge of what had happened to him since 1941. Even if they produced Dawn, he would fail to recognise her and profess total ignorance of Mick O’Brien, who he had pretending to be all this time.

  He turned on his heel and walked in the direction of Marsh Lane station, where he knew there was a set of steps up to the platforms.

  A train had just come in when he arrived, but once everyone had gone, he climbed to the top of the stairs and looked back, ready to throw himself down. It looked awfully steep! If he wasn’t careful, he could cause himself a serious injury, or even genuinely lose his memory. He walked halfway down the steps, but it still looked dangerous. In the end, he sort of let himself roll down the final three steps, banging his head deliberately so he would have a bruise.

  He lay prone at the foot of the steps to Marsh Lane station and waited to be found.

  ‘Nurse Taylor, Nurse Taylor!’

  Staff Nurse Winifred Taylor looked up when she heard the cry. She was in her office in the children’s wards bringing the records up to date. The ward was only half full. Children – and a goodly proportion of adults – were much healthier than they’d been when she’d started nursing more than twenty years ago. Of course, she’d had to leave when she got married – for a reason she could never fathom, only single women were allowed to be nurses.

  But the war had changed all that, just as the basic rations had improved the diet of the entire population, making them healthier. The rich might complain about the limited variety of food available, little re
alising it was doing them the world of good.

  ‘Nurse Taylor!’ A young nurse had appeared at the door of her office, her eyes bright with excitement. ‘There’s a chap in Emergency who says his name is Leslie Taylor. When we told him what year it was, he claims he can’t remember anything that has happened since May 1941 – you know, when we had those terrible air raids. We wondered, me and Staff Nurse Bennett, that is, if he’s your husband. Staff Nurse Bennett said he’s been missing for ages.’ She sighed a sigh of pure happiness at the idea of being at the centre of such a drama. ‘Would you like to come and take a look at him, Nurse Taylor?’

  ‘Yes, Nurse.’ Winifred Taylor got to her feet. ‘I’ll come now.’

  The emergency ward was on the ground floor. She followed the young nurse downstairs, along corridors and around corners. ‘We put him in a room on his own,’ she was informed, ‘once Staff realised who he was – or who he might be, like.’

  An older nurse was holding a glass of water for the new patient, a remarkably handsome gentleman in his early forties. She smiled when Nurse Taylor walked in; Winifred’s own face was totally devoid of expression. ‘I’ll leave you two alone together,’ she said, and left the room, closing the door behind her.

  The patient raised his head slightly to stare at the newcomer.

  ‘Winnie?’ he said weakly.

  ‘Oh, come off it, Leslie,’ Winifred said in a voice the opposite of weak. ‘I know darned well you haven’t lost your memory. You’ve been passing yourself off as a man called Mick O’Brien for the last few years and living in Chaucer Street with a woman called Dawn. Did you really expect to take me in with this charade?’

  ‘Well, yes.’ The invalid pushed himself into a sitting position on the bed. Apart from an insignificant bruise on his forehead, he appeared to be in the best of health. ‘If you’ve known all this time, why didn’t you come and rescue me?’

  ‘Rescue you! Were you being kept prisoner?’

  ‘Well, no,’ he conceded. ‘But if you knew I hadn’t lost my memory, why did you and Phyllis come all the way from Beverley to look for me?’

  ‘At first we thought you were dead and your body would eventually be found. Then we went to the cinema and saw a film and genuinely thought you had amnesia, like Ronald Colman in Random Harvest – or at least I did; I don’t think Phyllis was ever convinced.’

  ‘She wasn’t, actually.’

  ‘How on earth would you know that?’ Winifred asked in astonishment.

  ‘We’ve met each other a couple of times.’

  ‘And she didn’t tell me?’ Winifred felt hurt.

  ‘She doesn’t want me back, Winnie, that’s why. She thinks I’m bad for you.’

  ‘You are bad for me. Frankly, Leslie, I wish I’d never met you. When we arrived in Liverpool, we spent over a year looking for you. Then last Christmas I decided to hire a private detective. He tracked you down within a week. Ever since, I’ve been waiting for you to approach me. I knew you’d get fed up with Dawn, just as you’ve got fed up with all the other women you’ve had relationships with since we’ve been married.’

  He looked at her soulfully. ‘Yes, but you’re the only one I’ve ever loved, Winnie; really loved.’

  Despite the cloying voice and the soulful eyes, she almost believed him. He reached out and took her hand, and she wanted to collapse on top of him on the bed and kiss him to death.

  ‘Does the bruise hurt?’ she asked instead.

  ‘Only a little,’ he said bravely. ‘When the hospital let me out, can I come home with you?’

  Winifred sat in the chair beside the bed and thought. This Dawn person was bound to start searching for him. And initially Winifred herself had made such a performance out of trying to find him that the local newspaper might well discover he’d turned up and want to do an article about him. If he was discovered to have been lying, he could well get into serious trouble: leaving his job in a government establishment; using another man’s identity card.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said slowly. ‘You’ve got yourself into a rather dubious position, Leslie. I think the best plan would be for you to go back to Beverley and start again. You won’t be able to get our own house back for a while, so you’ll have to rent somewhere else for the time being.’

  ‘Anything you say, Winnie.’ He smiled obediently. ‘Will you be coming with me?’

  ‘I think you should go first, straight away, in fact, and find us somewhere to live. I can’t give up my job just because I feel like it, so that will take some working out. I might be able to arrange a swap with another nurse.’

  ‘Yes, Winnie. I’ll go tomorrow.’ He stared at her. ‘Just now, how did you know I hadn’t lost my memory?’

  ‘I could tell by the expression on your face. You’re an awfully clever chap, Leslie, but somehow you manage to be awfully silly at the same time.’

  Phyllis flatly refused to leave Bootle and return to Beverley. ‘I like it here,’ she said defiantly. ‘Anyway, I shall be eighteen in August and will be called up.’

  ‘Women aren’t called up,’ her mother informed her.

  ‘Then I shall call myself up. I’d like to join the army and go abroad.’

  ‘Phyllis!’ Her mother sat down with a thump. After Leslie turning up, she didn’t think she could stand another shock. Although she was right about women not being called up, they were required to take on some sort of wartime duties when they reached the age of eighteen, like working in a munitions factory, for instance. One of her friends at the hospital had a daughter who was in the Women’s Land Army.

  ‘It might be July before I can join your father in Beverley,’ she said. ‘I always thought that one day you would take your Higher School Certificate, then go to university. Isn’t that what you planned to do?’

  Phyllis hadn’t realised her mother would be so upset at her refusal to return home. Her voice was softer when she replied. ‘Yes, Mum. I’d still like to do it one day, but there’s a war on. Hopefully it will be over soon, but I doubt it will end before I turn eighteen. There may never be another war in my lifetime, so I really would like to do my bit while I have the chance.’

  Winifred stroked her daughter’s glossy hair. ‘You are a lovely young woman, Phyllis,’ she said fondly. ‘Me and your father don’t really deserve you.’

  ‘Well he doesn’t,’ Phyllis said derisively. ‘And he doesn’t deserve you, either.’ Privately, she was overjoyed that her parents would soon be back together again.

  After about a week, Eileen and Doria weren’t getting on too badly. Their conversations were becoming slightly friendlier. Now that it was May, her dad came almost every day after work to tend to the garden or just sit on the old bench at the bottom smoking a cigarette and surveying his little kingdom with a pleased smile.

  She had told him that Doria was a friend of one of Kate Thomas’s daughter’s – he already knew that Kate had moved out – and that her husband was with the British forces in India.

  ‘I expect he’s an officer,’ Jack said with a cynical grin. ‘Her talking the way she does, dead posh like. You don’t get made an officer if you don’t talk like you’ve got a plum permanently stuck in your gob.’

  ‘Oh, you’re a sarcastic bugger, Dad.’ Eileen punched him lightly in the chest. ‘But you’re right, he’s a captain.’

  Sheila, Brenda and their children had visited on Sunday and had been told the same thing, though they demanded more information.

  ‘His name’s Hugh,’ Doria had told them. ‘Hugh Kneale. He comes from London, the same part as me: Wimbledon. We met when we were children.’

  ‘Why are you staying with our Eileen?’ Sheila wanted to know.

  ‘Because I desperately needed peace and quiet,’ Doria said with a dramatic wave of the hand. ‘Hugh and I hadn’t found a place to live when we married, only a year ago. It was a rushed wartime wedding: you know the sort of thing.’ She paused. ‘I’ve been living with my parents and they have so many friends! There wasn’t a moment of p
eace.’ She glanced slyly at Eileen and winked. They had worked out the story the other night. There was loads more information about the imaginary Hugh should anybody ask. But nobody did.

  Nick’s bus had taken him as far as Earls Court. It was a part of London he didn’t know, so he got on another bus that was going to Liverpool Street station. He didn’t know that either, but at least it was a major station and he could get a train to somewhere far away that he had heard of.

  Norwich, he discovered when he arrived at the station and enquired about tickets. He bought a ticket; a single. Norwich was where he’d gone to meet Eileen when she’d worked for a while on a farm. It was after her little boy, Tony, had died and she was devastated. Nick had been looking forward to them all living together one day in the cottage in Melling.

  Life had seemed so much more simple and straightforward in those days, yet in reality, looking back, it had been full of complications. His courtship of Eileen had been eventful; would they get married or not? Deep down, he had always known they would, because they had loved each other, ‘till death us do part’, as the vows they had taken at their wedding had promised. What had happened to change all that?

  He laughed aloud, a sardonic laugh that had no humour in it, startling the other passengers in the carriage. For a moment, he’d actually forgotten that he had lost his arm.

  Chapter 16

  Phyllis Taylor turned up at Eileen’s cottage one Saturday at the end of May bringing her cheese ration and a tin of golden syrup that had been given to her mother by one of her patients.

  Eileen professed herself eternally grateful. ‘Nicky loves syrup sarnies, the sort where the syrup soaks right through the bread, and cheese is useful for all sorts of things. I think I might grate it.’

  ‘Can I help with something?’ Phyllis enquired. Eileen, Sheila and Brenda were seated around the kitchen table drinking tea.