The Liverpool Trilogy

by Ruth Hamilton

  Eileen began to weep softly. ‘I don’t want to lose me girl, do I?’

  This was the weak link in Mel’s sensible, I-can-cope-with-anything chain. She adored her mother. No matter what she achieved in life, no matter where she worked, this woman would be with her. ‘You’ll never lose me, and I’ll never lose you till the day one of us dies, Mam.’ She had watched her mother going without so that the children might be better fed. She’d seen her in the same clothes day in, day out, frayed but clean, shoes polished and full of holes. Mam’s beauty was finer now, almost ethereal, because her facial skin had become translucent, allowing miraculous bones to boast loudly of their perfection. From this wonderful woman, Mel had gained life, reasonable health, and the power that accompanied good looks.

  ‘We’d be safer,’ Eileen said now. ‘But I’d be worried past meself about you, babe. From the moment you were born, you were perfect. Your dad cried when he saw you, said you were the loveliest girl in the world – except for me, of course. But they’ll bomb Crosby, Mel. They will. I know they’ll be aiming for the docks and the ships, but Crosby’s only two minutes away in a plane. How can I leave you?’

  ‘You’ve the three lads, that’s how and why. On a farm, Bertie can run out his madness, and the other two will learn skills like planting, harvesting, collecting eggs and milking cows. Gran will be better in fresh air. As for bombs – well, they’ll just have to keep out of my way, because I’m going to Cambridge.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘When I get there, I’ll work ten nights a week in a pub.’

  ‘But there aren’t ten in a week.’

  ‘I’ll soon alter that.’

  ‘I bet you could, too.’ If her Mel set her mind to something, it suddenly became achievable. ‘All right, love. But when you decide where you’re staying, I want to see the people and the house.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Eileen went downstairs to re-join the rabble. If she had to meet people from Crosby, she’d need clothes. Perhaps Miss Pickavance would lend her something sensible. But would she dare to ask?

  In one sense, the day on which war was declared had become the best in Hilda’s life so far. Her parents had been kind, gentle but rather quiet folk. Both avid readers, they had introduced her to books at a tender age, and she still devoted much of her leisure time to reading. The wireless was excellent company when she was dusting and sweeping, but at other times she chose books. She had never been a communicator. At work, her employers, who valued her greatly, spoke Cantonese for the most part, so Hilda’s conversation practice had been sorely neglected. Today, she had broken her duck. Very soon, she would become a comparatively wealthy woman.

  But this little house was part of her. She even kept Mother’s last piece of knitting in a bottom cupboard, the needles stopped and crossed in the middle of a row. It had been a cardigan for Father, but it had never been finished, and he would not be needing it now. Yet Hilda couldn’t part with any of it. What was the sense, though? Why should she hang on to a house in a slum, a street that might fall down or be bombed before being selected for demolition? And, if she kept it, would it be burgled and looted in her absence, or might a neighbour look after it? The cleanest people were coming with her, so …

  ‘Calm down,’ she ordered. ‘You are going to look, no more and no less.’ After the war, she might sell – what was it called? Willows. Willows was a large house; then there was Willows Home Farm and a little hamlet labelled Willows End. No, Willows Edge. The place was reputed to be slightly run down, as Uncle had spent most of his time abroad. The solicitor had intimated, as delicately as he could, that Uncle had favoured the company of young men, hence the lack of direct offspring. And Hilda had blushed. She needed to stop blushing and start living.

  Mother and Father were together on the mantelpiece. The photograph had been taken a few years ago during a visit to Southport. Hilda smiled at them. Sometimes, she had felt rather de trop in this house, because the love those two had shared had been enough, and they hadn’t needed a child to underline their status. Yes, they had loved her; yes, they could have managed without her. To this day, she felt no resentment, since she had been raised in a stable home, one to which a drunken parent never returned, where silence was normal, and contentment seemed eternal.

  It had been a sensible union. God knew there were few of those in these parts. But nothing was eternal. Mother had passed away one Christmas Eve; Father had followed her three days later. The whole of Scotland Road had turned out for the double funeral, since most of them remembered kindness and thoughtfulness. So decent had the Pickavances been that no one had ever gone over the top with a slate. Even after the shop had closed, pennies and threepenny bit had landed on the doormat wrapped in scraps of paper with a name, and a message – Last payment, or I still owe you another 8d.

  Now this. What would Mother and Father have done? Had Father outlived Uncle, this problem and its accompanying wealth and responsibility would have been his. There was a farmer, there were farmhands. There was a land agent who collected rents and kept order on the whole estate. Hilda would be their boss. It was all rather daunting, but she didn’t want to shame the memory of the people who had raised her. ‘I’ll try,’ she said to the photograph. ‘God help me,’ she continued as she doused gas mantles in preparation for bed. She picked up her candle and walked to the stairs. This place was all she knew. From tomorrow, life might change, and she was not prepared for that.

  Two

  ‘A woman. A bloody woman!’ Neil Dyson threw his cap onto the kitchen table where it narrowly missed the milk jug. ‘I know I won’t be one of the first to be called up, but I might have to go sooner or later unless the job here’s termed reserved. Jean, you’re the best wife any farmer could want, and I’d trust you with my life, but this is one blinking big farm, and you’ll be answerable to a female from the middle of Liverpool. The only things she’ll grow are her fingernails, and I bet she’d run a mile if she saw a cow or a big boar. She’ll be as soft as putty and as daft as a brush.’

  Jean Dyson poured another mug of tea for her rampageous spouse. He was ranting and raving, while she was trying to bake bread and scones. ‘It’s not her fault, Neil. She’s just the last man standing, and she happens to be female. She didn’t turn her uncle into what he was. None of it’s her fault, love. You know I thought the world of Adam Pickavance, but he was never here, was he? If we saw him twice a year, we were doing pretty well. But calm down, for God’s sake. We’ve trouble enough without you aiming for a stroke. And you know how much I hate all the shouting.’

  ‘Adam Pickavance?’ he snorted. ‘Too busy chasing pretty boys all over the place, he was. He never bothered about us lot, did he? The houses down the Edge need new roofs and all sorts, Willows is slowly rotting away, and who’s going to run this place?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘But you’ll lose most of the hands. The older ones might get left here, and a few of the very young, but anybody eighteen to twenty-five with no children will be off within weeks. You’ll have to register every animal in triplicate, there’ll be no meat to market without the Ministry say-so, and you’ll be—’

  ‘Oh, give over. It’s not just us. Every family in the country’s going to be in a bit of a mess.’ She raised a hand when he opened his mouth to continue the rant. ‘Neil, just stop it. I don’t want anybody to go, don’t want anybody to fight. You won’t be called up, because you’re turned forty, so stop it. Anyway, all this has to be taken out on Hitler, not me, not Chamberlain, not England. We’re all frightened and in the dark, and it’ll get worse before it gets better. Like I said, it’s everybody from Land’s End to John o’ Groats, but God help them in the south, because they’re nearest to hell. Now, go and stamp about on the land, because I’ve listened enough, and I’ve baking on. My bread doesn’t thrive when somebody’s in a bad mood, and we want to send some decent stuff up to Willows for when she comes on her visit.’

  Neil picked up his cap and slammed out of the hous
e. Not for the first time, he wished he could get his hands on enough money to buy this place. His dad had farmed it, and Neil had taken over. He knew every animal, every pleat and fold in the land, every ditch and hedge – a bloody woman? Adam Pickavance had been as much use as a damp squib, but answering to the agent of an absent man was one thing; having a woman in charge would change matters. Or would it? Perhaps she might leave everything in the hands of Keith Greenhalgh, who was a fair man, knowledgeable about the estate, and unlikely to be called up, as he was well into his forties while his occupation could sit nicely under the umbrella labelled essential and reserved.

  In the top field, Neil stopped and surveyed a domain he had always considered his own. As far as he could see in any direction, the land belonged to Willows. The hamlet known as Willows Edge nestled in a dip, and all the houses therein were tied to the estate. Keith Greenhalgh had done his best, but the funds left in his care by Adam Pickavance had been insufficient to cover anything beyond bare essentials, and the dwellings were in need of attention. A flaming woman, though …

  ‘Morning, Neil.’

  It was the man himself. ‘Keith. I was just thinking about you.’

  Keith joined him and both men leaned on a fence. ‘How’s it going?’ the agent asked.

  ‘As all right as it can go. Conscription hangs over the field hands like a thundercloud, and a Scouse woman’s taking the reins. Couldn’t be better.’

  Keith chuckled. ‘Look. I shouldn’t know this, and I shouldn’t be telling you, either, but the old man left a fair sum, didn’t fritter it all away. She might pull us out of ruin.’

  It was Neil’s turn to laugh. ‘Oh, aye? And one of my pigs has just floated down tied to a purple parachute. The bloody woman’ll be all lipstick and shoes, because she’s a townie. I guarantee she’ll think more about her perfume than she will about folk. These city women know nowt about owt.’

  ‘If you want to know what’s in her head, she’s been talking about bringing evacuees from Liverpool, because they live near the docks. Seems quite a sensible type to me, and no spring chicken, or so I’m told.’

  Neil shook his head thoughtfully. Down below, in the large hollow that contained Bolton, children were living among factories and smoke, but they weren’t going to be brought up to the tops, were they? Oh no. The place was going to be overrun by Scousers. The invaders would be useless. They would have no idea of husbandry, because the only animals they would have seen were dray horses, and he pictured the hordes in his mind’s eye running through fields and flattening crops. ‘Bloody wild, they are. They pinch what they want, run about barefoot, and—’

  ‘And that doesn’t happen in Bolton? You’ve not had much to do with the bottom end of Deane Road and Derby Street, then? I have relatives down yon, Neil, and they struggle. Their kids aren’t perfect. Hungry children steal, because when push comes to shove we all would if we stood alongside real hunger. Get off your high horse, lad, before you take a fall.’ He tapped his forehead, then his mouth. ‘Keep that open, and that closed. Until she arrives this afternoon, we’ve no idea what she’s made of. But I can tell you this much for nothing – the owld fellow loved the bones of his brother, and the lady is that brother’s daughter. Open mind, buttoned lips. Think on.’ Keith walked away.

  Neil knew that Keith and Jean were right. He was carrying on like a two-year-old in a tantrum, when in reality he was no more than a speck in the cosmos. Everybody mattered. Everybody was the same in the sight of God. Willows Home Farm was no more important than the next, and he had been blessed with a sensible wife. Two daughters, they had. For the first time in his married life, Neil was glad that he had no son.

  But behind all these worries at the front of his mind, there was a dark place he scarcely dared to visit. In spite of propaganda in newspapers and on cinema screens, the mood of the country was not good. Hitler was reputed to have thousands of fighter planes, hundreds of bombers. He could wipe out Britain in a day if he so chose. These fields, this pure, green, velvet beauty, could soon belong to a crowd of goose-stepping foreigners, so why worry about a few bloody Scousers? An invasion by Liverpool was infinitely preferable to the other possibility.

  Fruit-pickers were busy denuding trees in the orchards. Cows grazed in the distance, and even further away, on higher ground, sheep looked like little flecks of cotton wool against the hillsides. In a place as beautiful and peaceful as this, it was difficult to imagine war. But he remembered war. He had fought in it, had survived, though it had taken many men from these parts. The war to end all wars had been the subtitle of the previous mess. Men had come home after doing the impossible, after climbing over dead comrades in mud-lined trenches, after losing limbs, sight, the ability to breathe … Neil nodded. They had come home to grinding poverty, had fought to their last ounce of strength to live in a country that didn’t deserve them. ‘And now we do the same, and we come back to the same. Land of hope and glory my bloody backside. If I go, I’ll be fighting for Jean, Stella and Patty.’

  Yet a small corner of Neil’s heart held a picture of a good, quiet man with a stammer, a soul so fine and true that almost every Englishman admired and loved him. His brother, the one with all the airs and the swank, had buggered off with the ugliest woman imaginable, leaving a sibling in poor health to run the family shop. Bertie, now George VI, his wife and daughters, they deserved saving. But even they couldn’t sort out the nitwits at Westminster. Which was just as well, in a way, because the King favoured Halifax, while the country needed Winnie. Chamberlain would have to go. Yes. The cretins in the Commons should have listened. To Churchill.

  Right. He had a horse with a limp, a sow with a sore teat, and a wife who was fed up with him. He would walk to the vet’s to ask for a visit on behalf of the first two, and he would find some nice apples for Jean. She made a lovely apple pie, did his Jeanie …

  A car arrived in Rachel Street. A novelty, it attracted small children like flies until the driver sounded the horn, at which point they dispersed and stood in a jagged line on the opposite pavement, only to shift again when Nellie Kennedy and her daughter emerged from their house.

  Hilda Pickavance, who had been waiting for her new friends to put in an appearance, gathered together pieces of shattered nerve and stepped outside. This was all getting a bit too much for her. She was to have a meeting with a Keith Greenhalgh, agent and steward for the estate known as Willows. The only men with whom she’d had contact thus far were her father and her employer at the laundry. She thanked goodness that older children were at school as she placed herself in the front passenger seat, smiling tentatively at the driver, who had left his seat in order to open the door for her. When he had settled her two companions in the rear of the vehicle, the man returned and pulled away.

  Cheering children chased them as far as the Rotunda theatre, where they fell away and turned to go home.

  ‘Miss Pickavance?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m Jay, really John Collins. There was a spate of Johns when I was born, so I got reduced to Jay.’

  Hilda couldn’t lay her tongue against one sensible syllable, so Nellie helped her out. ‘My granddaughter’s reduced from Amelia to Mel, and it never done her no harm. She’s at Merchant Taylors’. That’s the best public school, and she won a full scholarship. Very clever girl, our Mel. And beautiful like my Eileen.’

  Eileen dug her mother in the ribs. ‘Stop showing off,’ she mouthed. It was always the same with Mam when she met someone for the first time. She said her own name, then waded in over her head with Mel’s success. Her granddaughter was top of the class in most subjects; she was going to Cambridge if a source of money could be found, and she did lovely calliography. Time after time, Eileen had corrected the word to calligraphy, but Nellie was happier with the extra syllable, as it sounded posher. She had quite a collection of home-made words, and she used them deliberately and without mercy.

  ‘She can sing and all,’ Nellie said now. ‘Voice of an angel.’

&nbs
p; ‘How would you know?’ Eileen asked. ‘For one thing, you’re tone deaf, and for another, you’re biased. Why don’t you brag about the other three, eh? One of them put Sally Wray’s tea-rose-coloured directoire knickers up a flagpole – I don’t know which of them, but I’ll get to the bottom of it.’

  ‘Or the top,’ said Hilda, her back shaking with laughter. ‘Flagpole? Top?’

  ‘Oh, heck,’ groaned Nellie dramatically. ‘You’ve woken a sleeping giant here, Eileen.’ She poked Hilda’s shoulder. ‘Oi, clever clogs. Might be top for flagpole, but it’s bottom for knickers, so hang on to your ha’penny, missus.’

  But Eileen ploughed onward. ‘Our Bertie and the horse – that’ll go down in history down Cazneau Street and Scotland Road. I mean, I know he’s only six, but per-lease. Hiding a carthorse between a small tin bath and a bloody mangle? He has to have come from a different planet. If he hadn’t been born at home, I’d swear they’d given me the wrong baby.’

  The driver pulled into a kerb, dried his eyes, and swivelled as far as possible in his seat. ‘You two should be on the wireless,’ he moaned.

  ‘We haven’t got one,’ came Nellie’s quick reply. ‘We had one, like, but it never worked since our Philip stood on it to reach a shelf. He’s been on the wireless, but he fell off.’

  Jay drummed his fingertips on the steering wheel. ‘And I suppose when he tried tap dancing, he slipped into the sink? The old ones are always the best, right?’

  Nellie pretended to glare at him. ‘This is all we need, a clever bloody Woollyback. You talk slow, but you get there, don’t you, lad?’

  He sighed. ‘Look. Getting there’s what it’s about today. We’ve miles to go, and we’ll not get there at all if I can’t see for laughing.’ He pointed to the new boss of Willows. ‘And this lady has business to discuss, but she’ll get yonder all red-eyed and daft if you don’t stop this malarkey. All right?’