Someone to Trust

by Someone to Trust (retail) (epub)

  Lucy met her gaze. ‘Didn’t you feel it? Didn’t the music touch you, Mam?’

  ‘Of course, it was lovely,’ said Maureen, placing a hand on Lucy’s shoulder. ‘But how’s Mr Jones to concentrate on his playing when you go on like this?’

  ‘It’s all right, Mrs Linden,’ said Barney, taking his smouldering cigarette from an ash tray on the piano. ‘She’s doing me good. Matching up to pictures is exactly what the music is supposed to do. Tell me, Lucy, about some of your pictures?’

  Warmed by his interest, she said, ‘I was flying, up over the Mersey. I was with the seagulls, following a ship out to sea.’ She held out her arms and pirouetted.

  Maureen shook her head. ‘Don’t you be encouraging her, Mr Jones. You’re kind to take notice of her but I’m needing her feet firmly on the ground. Flying indeed! She’ll be wanting lessons next.’

  Barney smiled but asked Lucy was she in an aeroplane?

  The girl’s eyes twinkled. ‘Oh, no! Although I’d love to have a go – just like Perilous Pauline.’

  He laughed.

  She grinned and did a spin, holding out her arms. ‘It was lovely.’

  ‘Enough!’ Maureen frowned and seized one of Lucy’s. ‘You’ll have to excuse us, Mr Jones.’

  Lucy gritted her teeth, putting up a hand to ease the pressure on her scalp as her mother dragged her away from the piano by the hair, up the aisle and out into the foyer. ‘Let go, Mam! What did I do wrong?’

  ‘You were flirting! Not thirteen years old and flirting with a man more than twice your age! That’s a dangerous thing to do.’

  ‘I wasn’t flirting!’ Lucy couldn’t believe the way her mother was going on.

  ‘You were flattering him, making a fuss of him, amusing him! There’s men who like young girls…’

  ‘What’s wrong with that? I’d rather be liked than hated.’ Maureen let out an anguished squeal. ‘You’re getting to that age, Lucy, when it could be dangerous! If a man was to start putting his arm around you, kissing you… or… or putting his hand up your skirts, you promise me to run.’ Lucy felt a tide of hot colour flood her neck and face. ‘But Uncle B-Barney wouldn’t do that!’

  ‘I should think he wouldn’t,’ said Maureen sniffily. ‘He is a gentleman.’

  ‘Then what’s the fuss about?’ Lucy was bewildered.

  ‘You’re practising on him. You’re getting to that dangerous age as I said.’ Lucy opened her mouth, wanting to know more about the dangers attached to her age, but Maureen held up a hand as if to ward her off. ‘Enough! You have far too much to say for yourself. Get home and see how Timmy is.’

  Lucy flounced out of the cinema, really annoyed with her mother for making such a show of her and treating her like a child in front of Uncle Barney. She’d never be able to look him in the face again after all that talk of kissing and hands up skirts!

  She was still feeling a bit like that when her mother took them to the pictures the following week. Timmy sat beside Lucy at the end of a row so he could get to the toilet quickly. Sometimes during matinees children were so reluctant to miss the excitement they wet themselves. Her brother, like the rest of the audience, was soon caught up in the drama on screen, played out for them by Lillian Gish. Lucy admired the actress tremendously. She was small like Lucy herself, with a fragile beauty but spunky with it. Lillian could cope with anything, be it storm, flood, war or family troubles.

  Soon Lucy forgot Barney was playing the accompaniment. Despite a girl behind her reading the words on the screen aloud Lucy was not distracted. It was an emotional scene and the music set the mood beautifully. The cruel father of the heroine had just hit her and flung her to the floor. An angry murmur ran through the audience. They were all with her. But the tables were soon turned on the evil monster and our heroine ended up in the hero’s arms. A cheer went up as THE END flickered on the screen and the gas lamps were turned high.

  ‘Is it finished, Luce? Do we go home now?’ asked Timmy, wriggling in his seat. He asked this every time without fail and every time she said the same thing.

  ‘The projectionist is changing reels for the next film. It’s a Harold Lloyd short. You’ll remember him. He’s funny.’

  She was about to get up and take her brother outside to the lavatory when Barney came clumping up the aisle. Her escape route was blocked. He rested his hand on the back of Timmy’s seat and flashed his wide smile. ‘Hello, Lucy. Mrs Linden!’ He inclined his handsome head. It was hot in the cinema and Lucy noticed beads of sweat on his brow. ‘Did you enjoy it?’

  Maureen spoke before Lucy could get a word in. ‘When the day comes I don’t get pleasure from the films and your playing, it’ll be a sad day indeed.’

  Lucy could only agree and ask him to excuse her and Timmy. She was still within earshot, though, when she heard him ask if her mother had had news yet from Mick.

  There had been none. Last they’d heard he was in Russia, fighting the Bolshies. But as things sometimes happen, within days a letter arrived, explaining he had been wounded, was in England and now on his way to a hospital on the outskirts of Manchester. Maureen and Lucy would have liked nothing better than to go and visit him there but he’d said they weren’t to bother. He’d been shot in a place he’d rather not mention and when he was fit for company he’d be coming home.

  The news excited Lucy but she wondered what he would make of the house they were now living in. They’d still been up in Everton when he’d gone off to war. She remembered her uncle being a regular visitor at their house then. He’d played at wild animals with her, growling and pretending to be a lion. She would run away screaming with delicious excitement. When she was seven he’d taught her to play cards: Snap and Rummy. More often than not they’d played for farthings and he’d sub her and let her win as well. She really looked forward to seeing him again. When the next letter arrived saying he was being invalided out of the Army and would be home for Christmas, she couldn’t wait.

  Mick arrived one stormy evening. Maureen fussed over him, ushering him to the best chair in front of the fireplace. A freezing draught whistled under the front door, lifting the rag rug. Lucy shoved an old coat against the door in an effort to keep the cold out. Uncle Mick was looking about him with a frown. ‘You have come down in the world, our kid.’

  ‘I know,’ sighed Maureen. ‘Times have been tough.’

  ‘That’s a miserable-looking fire.’ He rested his head on the back of the chair. ‘Don’t be tight with the coal, Mo.’

  ‘We haven’t got much to be tight with. I’m saving the last half hundredweight so we can have a lovely blaze over the Christmas holiday.’ Maureen placed a stool nearby for him to put up his feet. ‘Lucy, help your Uncle Mick off with his boots while I see to the tea.’

  Lucy knelt, smiling up at him. He was a ginger top and had freckles just like her. No longer was he lean and wiry but had put on weight, probably due to his stay in hospital. He returned her smile, gripping the wooden arms of the chair and thrusting out his foot. ‘I’ve money. We’ll have a good Christmas. More coal definitely. I’m thinking I’ll go down to the pub later.’

  Maureen smoothed his hair back from his brow. ‘You won’t go drinking all your money away?’ she said in a teasing voice. ‘Jobs aren’t that easy to come by and you might have trouble getting work straight away.’

  Lucy remembered her mother telling her Mick had gone to sea a couple of times when he was a kid but had given it up, saying it was a rotten, hard life. She remembered him having worked in one of the warehouses down by the docks, too.

  ‘I’ll get something,’ he said confidently. ‘And don’t be acting like me mam, doing that to me hair. I’m a man now.’

  ‘Tell us what Russia was like, Uncle Mick?’ said Lucy, tugging at his boot. It came off suddenly and she toppled backwards.

  ‘Easy, girl!’ he laughed, looking down at his foot. There were holes in his sock. ‘You’ll darn these for me, Mo?’

  ‘Lucy’ll do it for you. Perhaps you’d like her t
o take the jug and bring you a pint back from the North Star? She could take two jugs and you could buy me one as well?’

  He shook his head. ‘I’d rather go out. I want more than one pint. I’ll go up to the Mere and see if any of my old mates are still alive, find Callum and have a crack. Does he know you’re drinking? I’m surprised at you. That man of yours never did for all he went to sea. I don’t know why you ever married him.’

  Maureen frowned. ‘Don’t start, Mick. Larry was a good man and Daddy didn’t say anything against him. Liked it that he had a bit of money and was sober and upright. As for me drinking… I don’t much, but if you’d been through what I’ve been through the last few years, you might have started drinking, too. Now take that other boot off and come to the table and get this scouse down you.’

  ‘You know nothing about suffering,’ her brother said, scowling. ‘You should have been at the front. I tell you, girl, it’s a miracle I survived.’

  Timmy, who had been silent until then, chimed up now. ‘Will you tell us about Russia?’

  ‘Found your voice, have you, lad? Decided not to be frightened of me?’ His uncle grinned. ‘I’ll tell you what Russia’s like: snow as thick as you’re tall. Icicles as long as me arm. And a waste of bloody time us being there! What do I care about the bloody Russian aristocracy? They’ve kept the workers down for years, just like the English kept us Irish. The Bolshies are winning and up the revolutionaries, I say.’

  ‘Things are changing here, Uncle Mick,’ said Lucy, thinking there had been enough fighting on the streets of Liverpool. ‘Women over thirty have the vote. They’ll help to get a Labour government in.’

  Mick shook his head. ‘You don’t understand what I’m getting at, girl.’ He dug his fork into a potato. ‘But now isn’t the time to go into it. Christmas!’ He gazed across at his sister. ‘Remember the goose Mam used to buy? We’ll have one this year. She always swore the grease was good for our chests. You said young Timmy suffers like I did. You can buy other goodies, as well.’

  Lucy thought, Things are going to change now he’s home. She looked at her brother and they both let out a whoop of joy.

  * * *

  It was late Christmas Eve. Lucy stood in the queue in Limekiln Lane, waiting to put the goose in one of Skillicorn’s bakery ovens. The bird had cost almost as much as a week’s rent but her mother had said it would be worth it because it would feed them for days. Lucy’s mouth watered, imagining a slice of breast moist and succulent on her tongue.

  ‘Well, well, look who it isn’t!’ said a boy, coming alongside her.

  She dropped the goose, recognising him by his shock of black hair as the youth who’d threatened her with a knife, in the grounds of St George’s and whom she had last seen pasting a poster outside the cinema. She went down on her knees and managed to get her arms under the goose and to struggle to her feet. Now Owen was standing in front of her and the queue had moved up. ‘D’you mind?’ she gasped. ‘That’s my place.’

  ‘I’m not taking your place.’ He thrust his face into hers. ‘Do I look like I’ve got a chicken up me sleeve? Anyway, how would you stop me if I did? You’re a midget.’

  ‘I’d bloody stop you, lad,’ said a woman behind Lucy, thrusting an arm the size of a ham between them. ‘I’m wanting to get to mass, so beat it!’

  He stepped back a few paces. ‘Keep your hair on, missus. I was just passing.’ He turned to Lucy. ‘I believe your mam works at the cinema where I do? My mam’s a cleaner, too, and my dad was killed in the war. I never thought you and me would have something in common.’

  ‘So what?’ she said, sticking her nose in the air, wishing he would go away.

  He shrugged. ‘So what about that lad you were with that I had a fight with at St George’s? Any competition?’

  She wondered what he meant by that. ‘His family did a moonlight flit.’

  Owen looked pleased. ‘I’m the projectionist’s assistant now. So next time you’re watching a film, think of me working behind the scenes, helping lift them heavy reels. I have to fetch them, too, wheeling the handcart to the filmshop and pushing them all the way home ’cos I’m not allowed on the tram. They can catch fire easy, you know!’

  ‘Fancy! You’ll have me crying next.’

  ‘I will if you speak to me like that again and you haven’t got your bodyguard with you.’ He cocked his head in the woman behind’s direction before walking away.

  Lucy told Mick and her mother about him when she arrived home. ‘What d’you think of him, Mam, threatening me like that? It makes me wonder why Barney Jones helped him get that job.’

  Mick glanced up from the newspaper. ‘He fancies you, Lucy. Any lad who’d stop and talk to a girl in a queue of women must.’

  ‘Don’t be putting ideas into her head, Mick,’ said Maureen, putting down the flat iron. ‘She’ll be thinking soon enough about boys without starting this early. I’ll speak to Mr Jones about the lad. I don’t know if he’s the right sort to be working at our place.’

  Mick snorted. ‘You make it sound like Lord Derby’s estate! Leave the lad alone. If his mother’s cleaning then maybe there isn’t much money coming into their house and that’s why he got the job.’

  Maureen’s face brightened. ‘You’re right. He does seem a nice lad. Our Lucy’s probably misunderstood him.’

  Lucy felt really indignant about that but decided it was no use saying anymore.

  Christmas passed pleasantly. There were even presents. Lucy received a pair of gloves from her mother and a skipping rope with bells on from Mick. She kissed him and told him how pleased she was that he was home. ‘Aye,’ he said, frowning. ‘But I don’t know if I’ll be staying, Lucy.’

  That news dismayed her as it did Maureen. ‘It’s your not having a job, Mick. You must try. What about Collins’ on Vauxhall Road. I believe they’re going into the electrical goods market.’

  ‘OK!’ he said, frowning. ‘I’ll give it a go.’

  But Mick didn’t get the job. There were no vacancies. Next Maureen suggested he try the police. ‘Those that went on strike never got their jobs back. I know they’ve taken more on but some don’t last. Remember what Dad said?’

  ‘Yeah, I do,’ said Mick with a sneer. ‘It’s a tough job but someone has to do it. Well, it’s not going to be me, our kid.’ And he stood up and walked out.

  ‘Couldn’t Callum help him get a job?’ asked Lucy, looking up from her darning.

  ‘Aunt Mac said he’s in Ireland. God only knows what he’s doing there,’ muttered her mother. ‘Anyone can see by reading the newspaper there’s going to be trouble, the time everything’s taken to be sorted out over there. I just wish Mick wouldn’t be so bloody awkward. He’s eating us out of house and home and his money’s all gone.’

  ‘Perhaps you could have a word with Uncle Barney, Mam?’ said Lucy. ‘He might have friends with influence who’d take Mick on.’

  Maureen gnawed on her lower lip and made no comment. Lucy could only hope she would ask the pianist.

  A week later Mick received a letter from the British American Tobacco Company. One of the biggest factories in Liverpool, it was situated on Commercial Road down near the docks, backing on to the Leeds-Liverpool canal. He was taken on but had to be vaccinated against smallpox before he started.

  ‘It was horrible,’ he said to the children. ‘The doctor had this pronged thing and scraped my arm until it bled. Then he put the cowpox vaccine into it. It doesn’t half hurt!’

  Mick’s arm continued to hurt – and didn’t Maureen, Lucy and Timmy know about it! He was like a cat that had caught its tail in the mangle. Eventually the wound healed and he started work. He complained occasionally that the room where he worked was dusty and hot, yet he came home smelling sweetly of the spices and perfumes that were put into the tobaccos. He smoked like a chimney and developed a hacking cough, which kept them awake half the night, but the money was good and the rent arrears were paid off.

  Lucy celebrated her thirteenth bi
rthday in March and left school. As jobs were scarce and her mother did not want her going into service and she already had the firewood round, Maureen suggested she make do with that. Although perhaps she should try and build it up.

  Spring arrived and as Lucy made her way down to Vauxhall Road, she sang the latest song from the music hall. At last she came to Farrell’s cooperage. It was a huge place, producing casks and barrels for all kinds of substances: turpentine, whale oil, creosote and pitch, cotton, palm oil, syrup and molasses, not to forget barrels for beer.

  Timber was being unloaded from a cart, on the side of which was painted G. GRIFFITHS, TIMBER MERCHANT. A line of children waited outside the sawmill and Lucy frowned. How had she come to forget the schools had broken up for Easter? By the time she reached the front of the queue there would only be the smallest of offcuts, of no use for chopping into firewood. This hadn’t happened since her gran had died.

  She decided to try somewhere else. Making a choice was not easy. There was another cooperage on Richmond Row up near Paddy’s Market in a district known as Sebastapol but she remembered her gran warning her not to go there. The girl shivered, recalling the warehouses and buildings towering above the mean, narrow streets where women with painted faces stood on corners or hung out of windows, shouting down to seamen. Suddenly she had a brilliant idea. What about the Griffiths who delivered wood here? She would try there.

  Lucy did not delay but hurried past the seedcrushers and oil refineries, tallow, paper and coal merchants on Vauxhall Road, eventually turning left and heading up Roscommon Street where the Rossie Picture Palace was situated, once two large houses but now knocked into one. She hurried past rows of stables. This was where the teamholders and carters of the district were located and she wished she had the time to stop and stroke the grey horse which stood in a cobbled yard, eating hay from a manger on a wall. Next to the stables was a glassmaker’s. Several men sat in a yard, cheeks puffed, blowing glass into shape. Lucy stared, fascinated, as jars and bottles were cooled in heaps of sand. She carried on, heading for St George’s Hill. It was not as steep as Havelock Street but even so she was hot and sticky by the time she arrived at Griffiths’ timber yard, which was situated a few minutes’ walk from St George’s church.