The Liverpool Trilogy

by Ruth Hamilton

  He placed her on the grass, awarded her a huge kiss, then beamed at the pure Englishness of the scene. ‘Beautiful,’ he said. Marie steadied herself, led him round and introduced him to those he had not already met. He spotted the Watson/Greenhalgh clan and said, ‘There’s the girl who introduced us, Marie. That Liverpool girl. My sisters will blame her when I stay here with you and try to become the English gentleman. If your country will have me, that is.’

  ‘Of course they’ll have you. There she is, Joe. There’s our Mel.’

  But Amelia Anne Watson was having one of her moments. She walked behind the screen provided by the largest weeping willow. With her vision of the world fractured by trailing branches, she peered out at the people she loved, at an environment she had come to enjoy. Everything was so green and fresh, so untouched by hostility. This was how life should, could and would be. Even Peter was calm here in the bosom of Lancashire’s rolling generosity. He had settled into his own uncertainty, had decided to wait until the light dawned and pointed out his true way home. ‘I’m happy,’ she said to herself. ‘Everyone here is happy.’

  While she watched, the tree whispered to her. Magical trees, beautiful gardens, contentment. Willows was filled with wonderful people, and she was a lucky girl. Well, she would be when the war ended, when clothes came off ration, when Gran stopped moaning about the shortage of tea, when sweets were more plentiful, when … She laughed. A few flies in the ointment? No matter. The willows were healthy, the land was fruitful, and an American Jeep was parked on the drive.

  Mel stretched out in the shade, closed her eyes and dreamt of a better future. And the willow continued its whispering.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I welcome into my life

  Wayne Brookes (editor) and

  Ryan Child (Wayne’s assistant),

  both fabulous people.

  Thanks for all the help, boys.

  Oh, and the laughs.

  I dedicate this work to Daryl Whiting of New Gloucester, Maine, USA.

  Daryl, sweetheart, never has the good fight been fought with better equilibrium, more humour, so much patience.

  Readers, I beg your support for cancer research. This scourge must be eradicated.

  Ruthie

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Home From Home

  One

  Through a gap in the buildings across the road, a short stretch of the Mersey was visible. On the waterfront, things were back to normal, more or less. Cranes appeared skeletal against a sky lit by an enthusiastic full moon, their metallic limbs stilled for now, because tomorrow was the Sabbath. The repairing of docks had begun almost before end-of-war rejoicing had ended, since the coming and going of ships kept Liverpool alive.

  But up the road and further inland, areas of Bootle and the rest of the city waited to be rebuilt by a country impoverished by war. Piles of bricks and bags of sand and cement remained the backdrop of many people’s lives. It would happen, though. Eventually, the reconstruction of the community would be complete.

  The building behind Paddy still retained the old sign, Lights of Liverpool, since it had once housed a factory that had made electric light fittings and lamps, but it had been closed down. Eventually, Paddy had taken it over as a place where hungry dock workers could be fed, and where Irish people could meet at the weekends. It had several nicknames including Scouse Alley and the Blarney, but Paddy still called it Lights when it was used for a function. And today had been a function, all right.

  Paddy leaned against a wall and lit a cigarette. Out of several thousand Bootle houses, only forty had remained safe and steady at the final ceasefire. Roads had been repaired, and houses had been built, but in the year of our Lord 1958, some families remained in prefabs. ‘And the Catholics wait the longest time.’ Was this paranoia? Of course it was; some Catholics were properly housed, others were not, and Paddy’s family happened to fall into the latter group.

  Behind Paddy, the wedding ceilidh was in full swing. Irish folk music crashed out of an open front door and into nearby streets, as did the whoops and cries of five dozen guests whose behaviour was deteriorating with every Guinness, every tot of whiskey. The fighting hadn’t started yet, but two people had disappeared off the face of the earth, and those two were bride and groom. They couldn’t have gone far, since Reen’s shoes had four-inch heels, while the groom was no more sensibly shod in his built-up brothel creepers.

  Paddy, acting as security, loitered near the front doorway and fingered a whistle. When things got totally out of hand, a football referee’s equipment was as good as anything if help was needed. Ah. Here came young Seamus. ‘What is it now?’ Paddy asked.

  The unwilling pageboy, resplendent in a food-streaked white satin suit, shoved an item into the doorkeeper’s hand. ‘Our Reen’s took her knickers off,’ the child said gravely, his accent pure Scouse. ‘They were under the table with my stupid hat. They made me wear a stupid hat.’ He would never, ever forgive the world for that stupid hat. His sister Reen was the chief culprit, of course, but surely some other member of the family could have saved him from such dire humiliation?

  ‘Yes,’ Paddy replied with sympathy. ‘But you took it off in church, so you did. And that was the most important part of today. It’s all over now, but. You need never wear the thing again.’

  The little lad almost growled. ‘It’s on a lot of the photos. I kept taking it off, like, but people were always shoving it back on me head. Why won’t people leave people alone, Gran? All me life, I’ll be the lad in the hat. Mam will show loads of photos round the prefabs when I’m older. I look dead soft in that white satin thing.’

  ‘You’ll live it down. And the prefabs will be gone once our houses are rebuilt, so no bother. Away inside and tell your mammy that your sister is now Nicholas.’

  The lad scratched his head. Then the penny dropped. ‘Oh. Knickerless.’

  ‘That’s the chap.’

  He turned to walk away, still muttering under his breath about daft hats and frilly knickers. His own blood relative had forced him to dress up like something out of a pantomime. Liking Reen after this terrible day was going to take a degree of effort. He should have lost the blooming hat, should have put it where it might have been trampled underfoot till it fell apart. In fact, if he’d pinched a box of matches, he could have cremated the bloody thing.

  ‘Seamus?’ He was a beautiful child from a beautiful family, and Paddy was prejudiced, of course. But oh, he was gorgeous, and no mistake. Blue eyes, blond hair, good Irish skin.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’ll be grand, so. I’ll see can I arrange the wedding album with as few photos of your daft hat as I can manage. Just leave it all to me. I’ll sort it as best I can, I promise.’

  ‘Thanks, Gran.’ He studied her for a few seconds. Patricia Maria Conchita Sebando Riley O’Neil owned Scouse Alley. She also appeared to own the supposedly temporary Stanley Square and all who lived there, though some people railed against her air of authority. The green rectangle, bordered by a tarmac path and twelve prefabricated bungalows, had been organized by the borough to house some of Bootle’s many displaced families.

  ‘Did I grow a second head?’ she asked. ‘You’re staring at me like I came down in one of those saucer things.’

  Seamus grinned. He was proud of his grandmother. Paddy O’Neil held her drink as well as any man, and she was an excellent doorman. She could spot a gatecrasher from twenty paces, and had been known to lift two at a time towards the exit. ‘You make everything right, Gran,’ he told her. She was his star, his saint, his everything.

  Paddy placed the whist
le in a pocket. After patting her grandson on his Brylcreemed head, she walked towards the storage shed. Although this structure was made of thick metal, she could hear them, and they were at it like rabbits. ‘Maureen?’ she yelled, heavy emphasis on the second syllable. ‘Get yourself out here this minute if not sooner.’ There were two Maureens, and this one was usually named Reen. Both Maureens were mortallious troublesome, and the younger one would know she was in the doghouse, because she’d been given her full title on this occasion.

  The sudden silence was deafening. ‘I have your knickers, madam. When the creature you married went under the top table, he was after more than the dropped spoon, so he was. You are a disgrace to your family. No need for you to laugh at my Irish-speak, Jimmy Irons. The day I start losing my accent is the same day I’ll start being a bit dead.’ She waited. ‘Right, now. Will I blow this whistle and get you a bigger audience?’

  The door opened. A dishevelled bride did her best to conceal the groom, who was having trouble with his drainpipe trousers. Paddy wondered how he might feel in years to come when children looked at the wedding album. The photographs would be black and white, but the long-line, velvet-collared coat, the DA hair with the heavy quiff at the front, shoes with two-inch crêpe soles, black string tie – these could all become talking points. As for Reen … well …

  ‘Gran?’

  ‘What?’

  The bride swallowed. ‘Can you sneak us in the back way so we can have a bit of a wash in the toilets?’

  ‘A bit of a wash?’ Paddy looked her up and down. ‘Reen, it’s fumigating you need. Hair like a bird’s nest, cascara all over your face – yes, I know, it’s mascara …’ The dress, which had started the day like stiffened net curtains from a hundred windows, was now limp and soiled. One bra strap had escaped its mooring rings, so young Maureen was now one up, one down, a bit like the house in which Paddy had started life in the old country. ‘The cake’s cut, so away home, the pair of ye.’

  Jimmy stepped forward. ‘We waited till we were wed, Gran.’

  Gran tapped a foot. Who with any sense would get married in a bright blue suit with shocking pink socks and a quiff that tumbled further down his face with every passing hour? Paddy knew for a fact that he used rollers and setting lotion in the front of his hair. Had Reen married a big girl’s blouse? ‘Then why didn’t you start the shenanigans on your way back down the aisle? Or on the church steps? Once you’d signed the heathen English papers, you were married in the eyes of the state.’

  She looked them up and down. ‘And what a state this is. Just look at the cut of bride and groom, like tinkers at the Appleby horse fair. Away with the both of you. I’ll tell your mother you turned an ankle in one of those daft shoes, may God forgive my lying tongue. Go on. At least have the comfort of a bed before you start making babies.’ She sighed and shook her head; they were young, full of hope, and had a great deal to learn while navigating the stepping stones of real life.

  Jimmy glared at his grandmother-in-law. Built like a brick outhouse without being actually fat, she was unsinkable, unreasonable, unforgiving. And yet … and yet there was a kindness in her. ‘We don’t want no babies yet.’ His accent was treacle-thick Scouse, but at least he was Catholic. ‘We want some time to ourselves first.’

  ‘You’ll have what God sends to you, so be thankful and keep its arse clean and its stomach filled. Marriage is more than slapping and tickling, so think on. It’s a pledge for life, better or worse.’

  Think on? Jimmy was thinking on. He and his new wife had to live in a tiny space with Paddy and Kevin O’Neil. The design of Bootle’s prefabs meant that the bedrooms shared a wall, and he would be inhibited. Friday, Saturday and Sunday could be all right, because on those nights Scouse Alley became Lights Irish club, nicknamed the Blarney, and Paddy would be out of the house. But would those evenings be free, or would his mother-in-law from next door pay a visit with Seamus, her last resident child?

  Paddy cleared her throat. ‘Look, I saved this for you as the best present. The O’Garas have a brand new little semidetached off Southport Road, just finished, it is. I got the rent book for you, so you’re to have their prefab in a few days. Your furniture will be a bit of a hotch-potch, but beggars and choosers are miles apart—’ She was silenced when the two of them grabbed and hugged her until she could scarcely breathe. ‘Let me be,’ she gasped. ‘I’ll be glad to be rid of the pair of you, so.’ She glared at Jimmy. ‘Nobody wears those daft suits any more. Only the young gangs dress so stupidly, and here’s you making a show of my granddaughter.’

  He smiled at her. She was all sound and echo, and there wasn’t a bad bone in her body. ‘Thanks, Gran,’ he said. ‘Your blood’s worth bottling.’

  They left hand in hand to continue their marital business in Paddy’s temporarily empty house. ‘God go with you,’ the Irishwoman whispered as the couple disappeared round a corner. They were decent kids. Daft, but decent. And the daftness would be eroded soon enough, because life would move in on them. ‘Hang on to your silliness,’ she mouthed. ‘And hang on to each other, because this is a cold, bold world.’

  She lit a second cigarette and sat on a tea chest in the shed. Well over fifty years, she’d been in Liverpool. But if she closed her eyes, she was back in Ireland in that little one up, one down house, white with a black door, stuck in the middle of nowhere, miles of green in every direction. She saw cows and chickens, geese and pigs. It was a wondrous place, pretty, with an orchard full of apple trees, a secret stable where lived two supposedly matchless Arab stallions, and Ganga’s rickety sheds where stills bubbled and gurgled, and roofs and walls went missing in puffs of smoke from time to time. The isolation had been total. She just remembered when the house had been packed to the rafters with chattering people at the table, but most had disappeared over to England by the time Paddy was taking real notice.

  There’d been no school, and not a solitary book in the house. Ganga slept downstairs near the fire, while the boys had a couple of mattresses at the other end of the same room. Upstairs, a curtain separated Muth and Da from the girl children, so no one had ever been in doubt about the creation of babies. How had they managed when the house had been fuller? Paddy had no idea. Perhaps some had slept in barns and unexploded huts? Ah yes, that row of caravans. Many had slept in those.

  Ganga had been a sore trial, mostly because he blew up sheds with monotonous frequency. His life had been devoted to the perfecting of poteen, though he’d never really achieved that. He sold enough of it, sometimes taking off with the horse and cart for weeks at a time, only to return and cause further explosions all over the place. Paddy giggled. She remembered him with no moustache, half a moustache, one eyebrow, smoke rising from his flat cap. It was poteen money that had got everyone out of Ireland. It was poteen that caused all the explosions, but Ganga had blamed the spuds. Spuds, he had declared with every disaster, were not as stable as they used to be. The stud fees had been welcome, too … Paddy shook her head sadly, though a smile visited her lips. She had loved him …

  But Ganga had died there, in that little white house miles from anywhere, a jug of home-brewed cider by his chair, a ticket for Liverpool in his pocket. All his adult children and their families were established in England, and he had intended to join them. But when Micky Malone, the nearest neighbour, travelled twenty miles to pick up Ganga’s cows and horses, he had found a corpse, three rebuilt sheds full of alcohol, a couple of stills, and some distressed cattle. He tended the cows, led away the aged horses, buried Ganga, took the stills and all they had produced, then sent a message with money to the oldest of the male emigrants.

  Paddy drew on her Woodbine. Micky Malone had been an honest man, but when the money had been divided between all the Rileys, the sum for each of them had been paltry. When everything was sorted out, Paddy had received a pearl rosary from her dead ganga. The pearls hadn’t been real, of course. Muth and Daddy, now deceased, had done their best, God love them. They were buried in English soil, but i
n a Catholic cemetery. Paddy missed them every day of her life. Both had been immensely clever, yet neither had ever learned to read.

  But Paddy had mastered the art. In her late teens, Paddy – known then as Patricia – had been handed over to Liverpool nuns. Unable to read or write, she had been placed with five-year-olds and, because of her skill with arithmetic, was nominated as a junior teacher in that area; in return, she was taught to read within months, and was then moved out into society to keep company with her peers. ‘I shone,’ she whispered now. ‘But to what end?’ There had been no chance of further education. The Cross and Passionist sisters had taken her, a young adult, out of the goodness of their hearts, but Paddy had wanted to be a qualified teacher.

  ‘No chance,’ she mumbled. ‘But you won’t moan, Paddy O’Neil. You’ve a good man, a precious daughter and lovely grandchildren.’ Even while alone, she made no mention of her sons. She didn’t want to think about them. They had followed her brothers into the gaping maw of England’s capital of culture, government and crime. More recently, Maureen’s lads had made the same journey. Six of them gone, two from each generation. Were they all in gangs? No, she wasn’t thinking of them, refused to. Invitations to the wedding had been ignored, and— ‘Stop it,’ she snapped aloud. Not thinking about them did as much damage as thinking about them.

  The lovely grandchild returned covered in even more food and without the dreaded hat. He was worried. She could tell he was worried, because he was shifting his weight from foot to foot. ‘Gran?’

  ‘Would you ever consider the possibility of standing on both feet? You’ll have me dizzy.’

  ‘I counted, but I think she’s gone and hid some near the wall.’ The child bit his lip and stilled his lower limbs. He meandered on, throwing into the arena knickers, hat and his cheating mother. There were only seven bottles on the table, but there might be six or more hidden and she’d started singing. ‘I was busy with knickers, so I couldn’t watch her, could I?’