Daughters of Liverpool

by Annie Groves

  She was in the kitchen before she realised what was going on, the shock of seeing the two men going through her cupboards and piling up her food on her kitchen table rendering her speechless for a second, but only for a second.

  ‘Here, what do you think you’re doing?’ she demanded, the sound of her voice bringing them spinning round to confront her.

  They were both wearing dark clothes and balaclavas, and the first one to turn said furiously to the other, ‘See, I told you we should have left when we heard the all clear.’

  ‘Give over,’ the second one told him, for all the world as though Emily herself wasn’t there, she recognised indignantly. ‘Her and the kid aren’t going to cause us any trouble, are they? Get that lot outside and into the car. I’ll deal with this.’

  ‘Oh no you don’t.’ Emily went to block the door. She wasn’t letting them empty her cupboards, not after what she’d paid for what had been in them. Not that she’d realised just how the black marketeers had got their supplies when she’d bought them, she acknowledged uncomfortably. She’d assumed they’d taken stuff from the docks, not from decent folks’ houses during air raids.

  ‘Get out the way, love, otherwise you’re going to get hurt.’

  ‘You’re not taking my—’ Emily began, only to cry out in pain when the heavier man punched her hard in the stomach, before pulling her away from the door and pushing her against the wall. His attack had driven the breath from her lungs and cramped her body with sickness and a pain so agonising that Emily could feel herself losing consciousness.

  And then she heard it, a shrill, frightened but defiant young boy’s voice demanding, ‘Leave her alone!’

  Tommy. It was Tommy, and he had spoken. Hard on the heels of her joy came her fear for him in case the thieves hurt him.

  Then to her relief, from the hallway, she heard the voice of the local ARP warden calling out, ‘You’ve left your front door open, you know,’ as he came into the kitchen, just as the thieves took flight and ran out into the back garden.

  There was no sleep after that, of course. The police had to be called, and the whole thing told again to them, even though she had told it all already to the warden, and Tommy praised for his part.

  The police officer said to him, ‘Tried to protect your mum, did you, lad?’

  ‘Yes,’ Tommy agreed, slipping his hand into Emily’s.

  ‘That was brave of you.’

  Yes, she had told them everything, except that bit about Tommy finding his voice, of course. That special miracle wasn’t something to be shared with anyone else, nor was the way she had felt when he had slipped his hand into hers when the policeman had referred to her as his mum. She’d have parted with the contents of her kitchen cupboards a thousand times over for that, Emily acknowledged happily.

  Charlie woke up abruptly. His head was pounding and he desperately wanted to be sick. The girl lying next to him was deeply asleep. He blinked, not recognising her, but still knowing what she was. The bed smelled of sex and sweat.

  He got up off it. He needed to get back to camp. Where was his jacket?

  He could hear the sound of planes overhead. They weren’t in Paris, then. Dunkirk? No, that’s where they’d been told to get to.

  He fastened his trousers and put on his shoes. No time to waste looking for his jacket. The girl on the bed stirred but didn’t wake. She’d be disappointed when she woke up and found he’d left without paying.

  He staggered downstairs and outside, frowning in confusion, and then lurching down the street. When he came to the place where a huge crater had been blown in the ground, leaving a gap between the buildings, he looked at it for several minutes. Where was the pub? What pub? He was in France, wasn’t he, where they didn’t have pubs? God, but his head ached. He closed his eyes. He wanted to lie down and go to sleep. He could sleep standing up, he was so tired.

  ‘Oi, you there.’

  The sound of the familiar Liverpool accent made Charlie swivel round to watch the man coming towards him. He was wearing a band on his arm. As he approached Charlie suddenly felt violently sick and doubled over.

  ‘Ernie, over here,’ the ARP warden called out. ‘There’s someone in a bad way. Come on, son,’ he told Charlie more gently. ‘Looks like you’ve had a bit of a time of it. You’ll be all right now, though.

  ‘Reckon he’s going to need to be taken to hospital, Ernie. Go and tell one of them ambulance lads on Whiteley Street, see if they’ve got room for him as well as them others they’re taking back to Mill Road Hospital,’ the warden instructed the first-aider, who had come running up.

  It would soon be morning. Lena had had to hide the jacket away and clean the kitchen and the bedroom before her family came back. Luckily the all clear had woken her.

  She’d been disappointed and upset at first when she’d realised that he’d gone, but then she’d recognised that it was better that way. After all, she wouldn’t have wanted her aunt and uncle coming back to find him in their bed with her.

  Lena giggled nervously at the thought. There would have been hell to pay then, even though he’d told her that he was going to marry her. Doris wouldn’t like that. Not with her being older.

  Lena wriggled in mute pleasure. She was a bit sore, it was true, from them doing ‘it’, but then it was only to be expected, what with it being her first time and him being so much in love with her that he hadn’t been able to wait. She smiled happily to herself. All she had to do was wait for him to come back for her. She knew he would.

  TWENTY-TWO

  ‘What’s going on?’ Con demanded, looking up the stairs to where Emily was struggling down with a heavy suitcase, whilst the hallway overflowed with boxes that spilled into the front parlour.

  ‘What does it look like?’ Emily responded tersely, then answering her own question. ‘What’s going on is that me and Tommy are off to the country where it’s safer. Mr Bindle from around the corner has a sister who’s got a cottage in Cheshire she’s willing to let out to me. Get out of me way, will you, Con,’ she demanded, puffing under the weight of the case, ‘unless you’re going to make yourself useful for the first time since we’ve bin married, in which case you can go upstairs and bring down the rest of the cases. I’ve got the milk float coming round in half an hour to help me get this lot to the station.

  ‘Yes, you bring that one down for me, Tommy,’ she called up the stairs to the boy, who was manfully dragging one of the smaller cases along the landing.

  ‘Oh, and you needn’t worry about this place,’ Emily informed her husband. ‘I’ve been round to the council offices and sorted out for the house to be taken over by the billeting lot. Proper pleased to have it, they were as well. Mind you, I’ve told them I want it handing back to me just as they found it otherwise I’ll have something to say.’

  ‘You can’t do that. What about me?’

  ‘What about you?’ Emily asked him mercilessly.

  ‘This is my house as well as yours,’ Con blustered.

  ‘No it isn’t. But I’ve told the billeting officer that you’re to have a room here if you want one, although I reckon you may as well sort yourself out a bed at that theatre, seeing as you’ve always been so fond of staying there.’

  Once Con would have jumped for joy at the thought of Emily going away, leaving him free to do whatever he chose, but now somehow he wasn’t keen on the idea at all, and in fact it filled him with a sick feeling of panic.

  ‘Milk float’s here,’ Emily announced. ‘If you want to make yourself useful you can help get some of this stuff onto it.’ She turned away from Con towards Tommy, her voice softening as she told him, ‘It won’t be long now, son. Soon we’ll be in the country and it will be just you and me and no bombs or any other kind of trouble.’

  Bella wouldn’t have noticed them at all if her mother hadn’t pestered her into delivering a message to one of her fellow WVS committee members. The fact that this committee member lived several streets out of Bella’s direct route home from her pa
rents’ house had added to Bella’s sense of ill-usage, since it would add a good half-hour onto her walk home. For Sale and For Rent signs were very much in evidence along one avenue of Edwardian semis, which had obviously taken the brunt of the bombing raid on Wallasey, with several houses in ruins and gaps between the buildings where others had been.

  It had been a smart area, leafy and green, before the newer areas like Bella’s parents’ and her own had eclipsed it. It had remained a good address, though, although not as good as theirs. The houses had good-sized front gardens enclosed by neatly clipped hedges, and the road itself was flanked by wide grass verges planted with plane trees. Now, though, since the bombing it was looking slightly forlorn and neglected. There’d been rumours that the War Office were planning to requisition some of the houses but as yet no one knew whether or not it was true.

  As she was about to draw level with one of the houses, one half of three pairs that remained intact, Bella saw two little girls, dressed in matching pink and blue floral frocks, their blonde curls tied up in pink ribbons, standing patiently on the front step of one of the houses, plainly waiting for someone to come out. A woman – fair-haired, like the children, and wearing a stylishly cut white dress splashed with scarlet poppies under a red cardigan, emerged from the house, followed by a man, dressed in cavalry-twill trousers, and an open-necked white cotton shirt with a cravat. Bella stiffened, automatically stepping back into the shadow of one of the plane trees that lined the grass verge. The man lifted first one of the little girls and then the other to kiss each of them in turn, before putting them down again and then turning to the woman to kiss her as well.

  Bella waited until the woman and the children had walked to the end of the road and disappeared out of sight, and then she marched over to the house and knocked on the door.

  If Ralph was discomfited to see her he managed to hide it well, she acknowledged.

  ‘Who was that I just saw you kissing?’ she asked him bluntly, ‘only it didn’t look much like she was your sister – it looked more like she was your wife.’

  He laughed and shrugged. ‘All right, I’ll come clean,’ he told her ruefully. ‘I am married, but that doesn’t matter to us, does it, Bella? You and I, we know the score; we’re two of a kind and we take what we want. This is wartime; we might not be alive tomorrow. Why shouldn’t we have today what we may not be able to have tomorrow, especially when it’s what we both want, and we do want one another, you and I, don’t we?’

  Ralph’s words were an unwelcome reminder of what Jan had said to her. A feeling of anger and panic, almost as though she was trapped in something she didn’t want, invaded her. Alan, Jan and now Ralph, none of them had treated her as she had seen other women being treated, women who were respected and liked and … and loved.

  She had gone weak at the knees, Bella discovered. Inside her head was an image she couldn’t ignore and inside her body was an even more insistent yearning. The image, though, wasn’t of Ralph; it was of the two little girls, his children.

  Yes, she may have gone weak at the knees, Bella told herself grimly, but that was no reason for her to go weak in her head as well.

  ‘What I want is a man who doesn’t tell me lies about not being married,’ she told him crisply.

  A feeling – new to her and somehow uplifting – filled her. Holding her head high Bella walked away without looking back.

  What was there to look back for, after all?

  She had been betrayed by her husband, humiliated by Jan, and now made to look a fool by Ralph. If she let her, Laura would have a field day when Bella was forced to admit that she had been right about Ralph, and Bella had been wrong.

  If she let her. She needed to get away from Wallasey, Bella decided. What, after all, was there for her to stay here for now? Her father wanted her out of the house so that he could give it to Charlie, which meant she’d end up having to live with her parents, and a mother who was beginning to treat her like her personal servant.

  It was time for her to live a different kind of life, but just what kind of life Bella did not know as yet.

  ‘Where did you go at dinnertime today?’

  ‘Nowhere.’

  ‘Yes you did.’

  Lou and Sasha confronted one another angrily in the street. It was ten minutes past six. They had finished work at six and had just started the half-hour walk from Lewis’s in the centre of town, up Edge Lane to their home.

  ‘All right then,’ Sasha told Lou, tossing her head angrily. ‘If you must know I went to Joe Lyons with Kieran.’

  Lou stared at her sister in furious disbelief. ‘Are you mad?’ she demanded.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  They had stopped walking now, oblivious that other people in the busy city centre were having to walk round them.

  ‘It means that anyone could have seen you and told our mum, and then the fat would be in the fire,’ Lou announced, starting off walking again – this time striding out in the sensible low-heeled shoes their mother insisted they wore for work, as though she wanted to leave her twin behind.

  ‘That’s not it at all. You’re just jealous because it was me that Kieran took for dinner and not you,’ Sasha told her, having caught up with her.

  They were both wearing their working ‘uniform’ of plain dark skirts and neat white shirts, the wool serge of their skirts heavy and uncomfortable in the airless warmth of the late afternoon. The air still smelled of smoke, and dust filled the air, getting into everything so that you could feel it in your eyes and taste it like grit in your mouth.

  ‘That’s not true.’ Lou was now red-faced and even more furious.

  ‘Yes it is,’ Sasha insisted, her face as white with temper as her twin’s was red with angry humiliation.

  ‘You’re jealous because it’s me Kieran likes best.’

  ‘No he doesn’t.’

  ‘Yes he does.’

  ‘Well, let’s go and ask him, shall we?’ Lou challenged Sasha. ‘Because last week, when you’d gone to the first-aid room because of your monthlies, Kieran came in and he told me that it’s me he likes best.’

  ‘You’re lying,’ Sasha protested.

  ‘Come on,’ Lou demanded, grabbing her twin’s arm, and turning round.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘We’re going to find Kieran. Then he can tell you to your face that it’s me he likes the most,’ Lou told her.

  ‘But what about tonight? We’ve got to get home and have our tea and then get out again, and Mum was going on this morning about thinking it might be too dangerous for us to go to the pictures tonight like we told her we were doing, in case there’s another air raid. Louise …’ she protested as her twin marched off in the direction they had just come, without her, ignoring what she was saying.

  She had to run to catch up with her, automatically grabbing hold of her arm when she did, only to have Lou shrug her off.

  ‘You don’t even know where Kieran will be.’

  Lou stopped in mid-stride and turned towards Sasha. ‘Not so ready to boast that Kieran likes you best now, are you? He’ll be at the Royal Court, won’t he, stupid? And as for Mum worrying, well, she won’t because with going on in the middle of the contest we’ll be able to get home before it goes dark and everyone knows that the Luftwaffe don’t drop bombs in daylight.’

  Lou was off again, striding out at a furious pace, her head down.

  Luckily the streets were emptying now of the Saturday shoppers and as yet not filling up with cinema-and theatre-goers.

  ‘We’ll never get home in time to have our tea, get changed and then get out again now,’ Sasha protested.

  ‘And whose fault is that?’ Lou demanded, still walking determinedly.

  When she reached the Royal Court’s backstage door, Lou knocked on it three times – the signal always given by those ‘in the know’, wriggling inside the moment the ancient doorman opened it and leaving Sasha no option other than to follow her.

  ‘We
want to see Kieran,’ she told the doorman. ‘You can tell him that it’s Lou,’ she looked disdainfully at her sister, ‘and Sasha.’

  ‘Wait here then.’

  The musty darkness of the narrow backstage entrance was sour with the smell of stale scent, food and cigarette smoke.

  The twins, normally so full of things to say to one another that they never let one another finish a sentence, stood almost back to back in angry silence.

  * * *

  It took the doorman ten minutes to climb the stairs to Con’s ‘office’, where Kieran had been following in his uncle’s footsteps and entertaining the most junior member of the chorus, whom he pushed ruthlessly off his knee, ignoring her screech of protest, when the door opened.

  ‘Them twins are downstairs asking for you,’ the doorman announced.

  Kieran cursed under his breath. He’d already had Con going on about how much money the competition was costing him and how it had better be a success otherwise Kieran might as well go and join up, flat feet or no flat feet.

  His uncle, who had gone off to the pub for a drink with his cronies, had been in a bad mood all afternoon following the discovery that his wife was upping sticks and moving herself out to the country. In his uncle’s shoes he’d have soon found some way to enjoy himself in her absence, Kieran boasted to himself, but of course his uncle Con’s wife held the purse strings, and no doubt she was taking her money with her.

  Anyway, it wasn’t right that his uncle was taking his temper out on him. After all, he’d done his best to follow his uncle’s instructions and foster distrust between the two girls, ready to pit them against one another when they danced, to increase audience excitement, but they were beginning to get on his nerves. They were just kids, after all, and he liked girls like the now sulking chorus girl.

  Not that she’d keep on sulking for long. He’d learned a thing or two from his uncle, and a pair of silk stockings from that new order that he’d heard from the twins Lewis’s had just got in would soon bring a smile back to her face.