“I’ll have to ask the boss,” Eddie answered.
“Please do it,” she begged tearfully. “The rain is getting in and the children’s beds are soaked. I’ll pay you anything, only please mend the roof.”
“I’ll see what I can do, but like I said, I must square it with the boss first.”
Eddie walked down to see the foreman in his office, feeling very sorry for the young woman and her children. Although the air raids were mostly responsible for the damage to the houses around there, a lot of the dilapidation was caused by years of the landlords’ neglect.
The foreman looked at his list, only bomb-damaged houses qualified for repair, the woman’s house was not on it.
“It’s not on the list, so we can’t do it,” he said, pushing the paper under Eddie’s nose for scrutiny.
“Then I’ll do it in my dinner hour with the apprentice, it will be good experience for him to work on a roof repair. We can’t have the children’s beds soaking now, can we?”
The foreman shook his head and said he’d turn a blind eye.
Eddie spent his dinner hour next day mending the woman’s roof with the help of the apprentice; he used second hand slates that he had picked up from a tip in the next street. She came to Eddie later and offered him payment from a slim and shabby purse, but he felt he couldn’t accept payment and told her so.
A few days later he was working on another house and an old lady appeared by his side.
“Are you the fella that mended our Cilla’s roof ?” she asked.
“If you mean the roof on the end house, yes,” replied Eddie.
“Then come along to the pub with me, I want to buy yer a drink.
“I’m working, I can’t stop now,” he said a trifle indignantly. “It’ll be my dinner hour soon, I’ll see you then.”
At twelve o’ clock, Eddie took his sandwiches and went along to the pub on the corner of the street. There seemed to be one on the corner of every street in Liverpool, this one was called The Clock. It was a spit and sawdust type of place where people didn’t dress up to enter it, so Eddie didn’t mind the fact that he was wearing his working clothes. He found the old woman in a wide circle of friends, they all seemed to be drinking glasses of light ale.
“Come over here,” she shouted making room for him on the wooden bench beside her. “What’ll yer have to drink?”
“I’ll have the same as you,” he said.
When he was seated comfortably, she lowered her voice and told him that if he went to the shop in the next street and mentioned her name, Mrs Cooper, he would be able to buy two pounds of sugar. Sugar was on strict rations then and if Eddie ever wanted his shoes mending, her old man would do them for him. He thanked her and continued to sip his ale, thinking what a pleasant woman the old lady was, but what she said next caused him to sweat with embarrassment.
“See that house opposite?”
Eddie looked through the pub’s grimy window.
“I’ve got it all arranged for yer. Next time you’re feeling horny, go over to Liz’s house, she’s our Cilla’s sister, she’ll see you’re right and then I think we’ll be square, don’t you?”
Eddie was so relieved when he finished the work in that street and moved on to the next, though he kept looking over his shoulder in case Mrs Cooper appeared again!
Old ladies seemed to make a beeline for Eddie. One day a woman came up to him and asked would he fix her fire grate? She told him that she couldn’t light a fire until it was repaired and the weather was getting chilly. So once again Eddie gave up his dinner hour and went to the house to repair the grate; he was rewarded with tea and cakes for his efforts and felt lucky that he wasn’t propositioned again!
As the war rumbled on, a couple of local women started a Services canteen in Irby. They first got in touch with Northern Command and asked permission to do so. Their request was granted and they were given a permit for rations.
Their idea was to give service men and women, who were billeted in the area, somewhere to go in their free time. They were provided with a hot meal, table tennis for exercise and plenty of chairs by a warm fire. It proved very popular and a weekly dance, where an elderly band volunteered their services, was held in the village hall on Saturday nights to raise the funds to pay for it.
Eddie and Irene managed to find a willing babysitter in Rosaleen, Eddie’s youngest sister. Now eighteen and with no love interest in her life, she was persuaded by Gina’s happy smile and cherub ways to keep an eye on her, so they were able to attend the dance on that first Saturday. Unfortunately there was no M.C., so Eddie took the job on. He loved it: he’d announce each dance, popular then was the rhumba and bossa-nova, then leap off the stage to dance with Irene, or a young lady that he saw hadn’t got a partner. He was such a good dancer that he developed a following, all the girls competed to partner him in the ‘Ladies request dances’.
After the work finished on the houses around the docks, Eddie was directed to work for a contractor who made him a foreman over a gang of six men. It was further out of Liverpool in a place called Litherland. Mostly it was clearance work, as a new estate was needed to house some of the blitz victims who couldn’t return to their homes. The work was very tiring, dirty and dusty; the wallpaper that was hanging on the walls in some houses sheltered all sorts of bugs and the men went home in a terrible state with fleas bouncing off their clothes.
Most of the men liked to slake their thirst in one of the pubs nearby, as the enterprising landlord provided a range of delicious sandwiches and pies. The dinner hour was what it said; an hour and Eddie demanded that they started back at work at one o’ clock on the dot. He was a fairly easy going boss, providing that the men did their work, so he turned a blind eye if one of the workers was five minutes late.
Curly Flanagan was one such worker, but he pushed the five minutes to the limit and arrived a little later each day. At the end of the week he was short by two hours, so Eddie decided to teach him a lesson and dock the man’s pay.
“What’s this?” shouted Curly as he flung open the back door of the house that Eddie was working on. He was a mean-looking man, with eyebrows that met in the middle under a narrow forehead; the type of man who would have been spending time in Walton Jail if it hadn’t been for the War.
“I’m two bloody hours short in me pay packet, don’t think yer goin’ to get away with this.”
Eddie carried on with his work and said over his shoulder, “You didn’t show up for work at one each day like I told you to, so that’s why I’ve docked your pay.”
“We’ll see about that,” retorted the man and, gripping Eddie by his arm, he slung him against the kitchen wall. Next he picked up a lump hammer and brandished it in front of Eddie, effing and blinding, saying what he’d like to do to him. Eddie ducked as the hammer swung at him, then hit Flanagan squarely on the jaw. The man bounced with the force from Eddie’s fist through the back yard door, then cracked his head on the stone flags there. He lay still with blood pouring out of the wound and Eddie thought that he had killed him. He ran with the labourer, who had been working with him and had seen it all, to check his pulse and to see if the man was dead. Thank God he wasn’t, he began to come round and started mouthing obscenities.
Eddie sent his labourer to the telephone box for an ambulance, while the rest of the men in his gang crowded in. A violent row started, with all the workers taking Flanagan’s side.
“Ted shouldn’t have hit him.” “Curly was only messing, he wouldn’t have used the hammer.” “He was only fooling around.”
With the sound of the ambulance came Eddie’s boss, who was told the version by his men before Eddie got a chance. Labourers were hard to find owing to the army conscription, which were decimating the work forces week by week.
“It’s me that keeps yer out of the army,” the boss growled at Eddie. “If I can’t rely on yer to keep things going smoothly here, I’ll have to get somebody else.”
Eddie had no one to back him up bec
ause his labourer, his eyewitness, had disappeared.
“Right,” he said, his anger getting the better of his judgment at the injustice of it all. “If that’s the way it is, get my cards ready for tonight. I’d rather be in the army than try to get work-shy fellows like this one to do an honest day’s work.”
Then the eyewitness to Flanagan’s attack came back, after directing the ambulance men to where the stricken man lay. He told the boss the story, but Eddie didn’t stay for an apology. By then it was too late for Eddie and his pride; if the boss hadn’t believed him in the first place, then he’d rather not be there in any case.
There were two losers on that day, besides the wounded Flanagan. The boss who would soon realise that without Eddie, the men could do what they liked with him; and Eddie, who through sitting on his angry pride, was destined to fight in the depths of Hell.
As Eddie travelled on the ferry back to Woodside, his heart was heavy as he realised what he’d done. His temper had cooled and as he stood on the top deck looking down the Mersey, he felt full of misery. He’d be leaving all he held dear to fight a war he had no stomach for. Deep down he was a pacifist, a country boy, it was just that sometimes his temper overtook him. He wondered how long it would be before he got his call up papers. Irene was devastated when he told her.
“Well you can just go back to the site and apologise,” she said. “How are me and Gina going to cope without you being here? I’ll have to go and get a job now, we can’t exist on army pay.”
“You’re not getting a job and I’m not going back to apologise,” Eddie replied stubbornly. “You’ll manage, it’s just a question of economising. You’ve got the chickens and they’re laying plenty, and before I go I’ll take one of the pigs to the abattoir and you can put it in a barrel of brine and leave it in the wash house.”
“I’ll have to have my mother back then, I’m not living here with just Gina for company. This is too bad of you Eddie, that job kept you out of the war and now you’ve chucked it away.”
“Well tough,” said Eddie, his temper rising again as he heard her condemnation. “I’m off to my mother’s, she’ll be happy I’m going, anyway.”
Irene sobbed her heart out when Eddie flung out of the house in a fit of pique. It was the first real quarrel that they’d ever had; she usually kept her mouth shut if she didn’t agree with him. But this time he’d gone too far, put his life in jeopardy, possibly putting her into early widowhood if he didn’t return. Gina, who was now three years old and had listened to her parents rowing, flung herself on her mother’s lap and cried along as well.
There was an uneasy truce between the couple for the next few weeks, Eddie not admitting the fear he felt, nor the annoyance with his mother when she had called him a fool. Everything had to go on as normal, keep a stiff upper lip, pretend that what he’d done wasn’t going to ruin their happiness. It would all be over in a year or so, wasn’t Winston Churchill saying that the war was nearly won? He went to work on a local farm, the farmer was having difficulty getting his harvest in, where peace and quiet helped to settle his mind. The words of the boss still rankled though and he still clung on to his pride.
The dreaded Call Up papers arrived a month later, but it was still a shock to Eddie and Irene because they’d tried to push it out of their minds. He was to report to the Chesterfield barracks at the end of the week and a travel warrant was enclosed. That meant they only had three days left together and they carried on as if he wasn’t going away. But the day before he was leaving, Irene broke down in tears.
They decided to have one last happy day together, something that they would remember for the rest of their lives, a day out in the lovely Autumn sunshine, picking blackberries in the fields of Barnston, a twenty minute walk away.
With Gina toddling beside them, they picked basket upon basket of the glossy sweet-tasting fruit from brambles low with the weight of their bounty. They laboured until sunset, picking with stained hands, popping the occasional large berry into their mouths, then back home where they both shared in the making of their meal. Afterwards, with Gina tucked up in her little bed, they set to work making jam, with the hope that it wouldn’t be too long before Eddie was having the results of their efforts on a piece of bread.
It was not until they lay in bed later, that the enormity of what Eddie had done finally hit them. He was leaving early next morning and might not come back again. This was not a time for sleeping, nor even making love because if Irene was made a widow, she’d have two children then to rear. Instead, Irene lay in her husband’s arms, cherishing each moment together, praying that one day, not so far away, Eddie would hold her in his arms again. If not, their dreams of a happy future would be shattered by the war.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Loneliness was the biggest problem for Irene once Eddie had gone. She was ignored by his family, unless she made the effort to visit his mother to show Gina off, or went to her aunties’ bungalow to help them with work in their house. Nothing could be done in the garden as temperatures had plummeted and the ground was a solid block; rationing had begun to bite and Irene could only purchase what was in the shops. She was glad that the chickens were still laying and there was still a barrel of pork, but money was tight for the first few weeks until she was able to draw on Eddie’s army pay.
Irene decided to invite her mother to come and stay. She’d be company, they could pool their ration books, Lily had a widow’s pension and she would be happy to babysit Gina if Irene got a job. The problem was that Eddie had insisted that she stay home and look after their daughter, but he hadn’t said she couldn’t do voluntary work, so that had become her plan.
The government had built a barracks on the perimeter of Arrowe Park, it housed men from the Free French Army who had come over to help their allies with the war. They frequented the Services canteen in Irby and Irene had heard that volunteers were needed a few hours every day.
The soldiers were charming, courteous and extremely polite to the canteen ladies and Irene tried out her schoolgirl French to the amazement of the homesick men.
She had her favourites; there was Jean Pierre, Grand Pierre and Petit Pierre who gallantly vied for her attention when her shift came around. She felt flattered, skittish, unused to the compliments that were always coming her way, suddenly she felt alive again and not so lonely after all.
Like many of the call up men, Eddie was very unsettled in those first few weeks away from his family. He couldn’t get used to the army discipline and being left-handed he found it awkward drilling and handling the weapons. He had hoped to be put into a regiment where his experience in driving lorries for his father could be put to good use, feeling that he would be more suited to a transport regiment than being assigned to become an artillery man.
One day, a man named Sergeant Miller unfortunately pushed Eddie to his limit, by sniping and picking at everything he did. He was ridiculed because of his clumsiness with a rifle, ridiculed because he couldn’t seem to march in time and told off for not saluting an officer that had passed by.
That day Eddie saw red. His arm was aching with the pain of the injections he’d been given, but as he’d always had a short fuse anyway, he challenged the sergeant to a fight behind the tents. Miller was man enough to take him up on it and they were to meet that evening at seven o’ clock, but some sneak told the Major and Eddie was thrown into the guardroom to cool his heels.
An hour later no one had come to lay a charge against him, the corporal who was on duty had gone for a cup of tea, so seeing the open door and an open gate beyond it, Eddie decided he’d had enough.
He walked until he reached the town of Chesterfield and passed a small white pub where he heard music being played. He was thirsty and thoroughly fed up with the way he was being treated, so in he went, thinking a few pints would make him feel human again and the army could do what it liked.
The pianist was a young lady, a pretty girl with a cheerful face, who was dressed in a green long-sleeved woollen
dress and when she saw that Eddie was in uniform, waved to him merrily. “Don’t bother to buy drinks, soldier,” she shouted over, “help me by drinking some of these that have been bought for me.”
He looked at the row of glasses lined up on top of the piano and gave her a broad smile. An hour later the glasses were empty and the world had become a better place.
Two soldiers came in and sat at his table, by this time everyone had become Ted’s friend and he poured his troubles out to them in an inebriated state. They were sympathetic, but horrified that Eddie didn’t know what was in store for him. To go was a great big sin, the penalty would be more than just an hour in the guardroom. They helped him up and, taking an arm each, walked the unsteady rookie soldier back to the camp.
The sergeant was waiting; Eddie hadn’t turned up for their fight, so he sent him back to the guardroom and this time laid a charge on him.
Eddie spent an uneasy night feeling trapped and bewildered, his head ached from all the beer he had drunk and his arm throbbed from the injections he’d had. Not for the first time he realised how foolish he had been, he could have been home with Irene, home and free.
The next morning after Eddie had been given his breakfast he was escorted to the parade ground, where he joined six other men on a charge like himself. They were marched in single file down a steep hill to a school house that had been taken over by the army. The other men were taken in first, leaving Eddie to cool his heels with a corporal in charge. The man was sympathetic, hadn’t he been a raw recruit like Eddie, confused and bewildered, not knowing any of the rules?
Sergeant Miller appeared, with a nasty sneer on his face, he grabbed at poor Eddie’s forage cap and threw it on the floor. Then he yelled very loudly at him. “Quick march, quick march!” Eddie pretended to have a limp, which made the sergeant mad again.
In the bare room where three officers sat at a long table by a wall, Eddie was told to stand at ease. Ease was about the last word Eddie was feeling, his case had already been fully discussed; he was there to hear his punishment. He was told that he would be returned to his own country.
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