“HMS Bravery, it’s one of these new things called a submersible. They’re out in Liverpool Bay on sea trials. They say there’s twenty of ‘em, if you don’t count the crew.”
“Sea trials?” said Lily faintly, only just becoming aware that this might be something to do with her husband’s secret mission. “What has happened? My husband said he was going on a sea trial the other day.”
“Then ‘e’ll be aboard the Bravery. They say it’s stuck… got a man down there in a divin’ bell… ‘e says they’ve a load of mud down there and the propeller got stuck. Do yer want ter go through, join the others? Oh dear, shall I get yer a chair?”
Lily did indeed need a chair, as her legs had buckled and there seemed to be a buzzing noise around her forehead and ears.
“I’ll get yer the company nurse.”
An ambulance cart, drawn by four black stamping horses, came along aside the gates just then and Lily was forgotten, whilst the driver, a doctor and his nurse were granted access into the dockyard. She sat there watching, as the cart drew up alongside the buildings, where a woman dressed in a long blue dress, short white cloak and a frilly ribbon tied hat, came out to join them. They seemed to be waiting. Waiting for what, Lily wondered?
More kerfuffle. A shiny black car, the occupants dressed in business suits sat inside looking grim faced, as the driver hooted his horn for access.
“They’ve had word that the lieutenant commander ‘as got it shifted,” the gate man announced to Lily, when he came back from saluting stiffly at the dignitaries. “Poor buggers, begging my French, madam, but if it weren’t fer ‘im, they’d be goners. ‘E’ll get a medal for this, I’ll be bound.”
“Can I go in?” asked Lily in a voice she heard herself using, but wondering at the calm way she spoke when inside she was quivering like a jelly. “I’ll have to take the baby, but I’m sure she’ll stay asleep.”
“Aye, get yerself in there and let’s thank our lucky stars we’ve got people like the lieutenant commander.”
Or God, thought Lily, who had been sending up silent prayers and making all sorts of deals with her divine maker if He would only send her Charlie back again. There’d be no more talk of buying houses and she wouldn’t resent him being master in his own home. She was just in time to see a tug boat berthing further up the high stone wharf and, behind it, with a crowd of people standing on the deck, was a dull grey, cylindrical vessel, that looked to Lily like a picture of a beached whale she’d once seen.
It was three days before Charlie was allowed to leave the Borough hospital and in that time he had decided that even if Lily was to take Isabel and return to her mother, there was no way he was ever going to set foot on anything that floated ever again. It had nearly finished him when the announcement had come over the speaker that the propeller had got stuck in very deep mud on the sea bed and, that all personnel should be aware that there was only a certain amount of oxygen in the vessel. They must restrict their breath, which contained carbon dioxide and could be fatal to all in the crowded conditions of the small vessel. That announcement had been enough to cause Charlie to have a panic attack and he was led away to his bunk by a member of the crew, who had been ordered to remove any stupid cretin who might jeopardise the other men’s sanity.
It wasn’t only me, he had thought irrationally, whilst the heavy dullness in his chest and the heaving of his lungs led him to think that it was only a matter of time and everyone would be fighting for air just like he was. He had seen the wildness in the eyes of the others, especially young Jimmy Baines, who looked about to make a dash towards the hatch to try and open it. He had heard the thrusters reversing and whirring and the indicator buoy being released. His last thoughts before he had, mercifully for him, fainted, was if they never floated up again, how could Lily be expected to visit his watery grave?
Back home, after the doctor had advised him to blow into a paper bag next time he had a panic attack, Lily made a fuss of him by cooking his favourite meal of steak and kidney pie with a rich gravy, garden peas and boiled potatoes, in an effort to lift his spirits. Charlie sat morose, wishing day on day that he had never left his Scottish paradise. One thing was certain, though: he was finished dicing with death in an underwater coffin and had said that much to Lily, who had nodded her head but didn’t seem to have much to say on the subject.
He spent his waking hours reading, down at the landing stage if it wasn’t raining, or walking along to The Grapes, where for the first few evenings locals treated Charlie as if he was a returning hero. The grog helped dispel those gruesome nightmares, when Charlie’s chest felt as if he was being crushed by a great wall of water as the vessel split in two from the weight of an ocean on its hull. The whisky helped him sleep, even if his snoring did keep his beloved awake and it was then that Lily became a nag. She didn’t act like his beloved anymore and had withdrawn all his marital entitlements, because he was spending all their money on drink.
After two long weeks of seeing her husband drunk as a mop and pushing frantically against the front door each night if he couldn’t see to put his key in the lock, Lily had told him that she was going to get a job. “This can’t go on, Charlie. If you’re not willing to find another job, then I will.” She had stood there ashen faced, bewildered that the man she’d put her trust in was a sot and not only that, was drinking their precious savings away. Yes, she knew all his excuses, knew he had been troubled with nightmares and who wouldn’t be after the trauma he’d been through, but there were others in the household who were dependent on him. “I’ll have to get a job, Charlie. We can’t afford to live whilst you’re swilling all the housekeeping down your throat. Bertha said that she will look after Isabel and Mabel could do with a hand in the floristry shop.”
“No wife of mine is going to work for a living… you’re just a bloody nag, Lily.”
Charlie huffed and puffed and said the same thing to Ernie Morris, when the next night, propping up the bar in a stupor once again, he bemoaned the fact to his drinking mate.
“Aye, not like yer other wife, Mary Casson,” Ernie had said, his eyes all bloodshot and his face all puffy, having been a heavy drinker over the years. “She were a worker, though mostly on her back.”
“Eh?”
“I said, the other one, Mary Casson.”
“I don’t get your meaning.”
“She was a prozzy – yer know, ‘ave any man fer a shillin’? Told me once she was goin’ ter give it up ‘cause she’d found a decent fella, but once yer’d gone missin’ she was back on the game again.”
After the cramped conditions in a limited space when Charlie had worked on the submarine, it seemed wise for him to look for work in the open air. He could have had his old job back in the development office, Mr O’Neill having said he could when Lily went there to pick up his final wages, but somehow the very thought of going near a shipyard again made Charlie shudder.
It came as a bit of surprise to Lily, when he came back from The Grapes one Saturday evening, having cut his visits down to a couple per week and announced that a cousin of one of the chaps he drank with was thinking of giving up his market garden. All he would be asking for his enterprise was twenty-six pounds, which included the price of the stock, goodwill and the table he had at the local market. He didn’t own the house that was on the land though and that was seven and sixpence in weekly rent. The other problem was that the property was out in Wallasey, which meant Lily would have to leave her family behind.
Twenty-six pounds was about all that Charlie had left in his savings account. Without a job there would be endless months of make-do and mend and perhaps even having to borrow, perish the thought, from his now not so wealthy father-in-law. He had decided to give in and allow Lily to help her sister, by making funeral wreaths in the evenings when Isabel was asleep, though it didn’t make him much of a man if he couldn’t earn their keep.
Chapter Sixteen
It was in April 1909 when Lily, Charlie and Isabel sat on the front be
nch of a removal wagon, which would take them and their possessions to a place called Pear Tree Cottage, just off the Poulton Bridge Road in Wallasey. It was the second trip that day for the horse and driver, as they had gone ahead with the first load of possessions, which had consisted of the sofa and two armchairs, kitchen table and chairs, Lily’s display cabinet, a mahogany dining set and a black piano. The previous owner of the place, pleased that he could put his feet up for a week or two because twenty-six pounds was more than he had ever earned, had volunteered to keep an eye on things between visits. Lily, unhappy with the whole situation, but not having much choice in the matter since she had made her bed and must lie on it, thought it was more ideal to have a husband working for a living than hanging around doing nothing most of the day.
Mannion had not been pleased when he had heard that his son-in-law, he who had been a local hero for the part he had played in bringing the HMS Bravery back up to the surface (according to one of the local papers), was walking away from the job for life at Cammel Lairds and taking away his little princess to a different town. Not Lily now, but Isabel, who at three years old had replaced her mother in Mannion’s affections. He tended to be scathing in his attitude towards Charlie’s dreams of resurrecting his former enterprise, if it involved taking his grandchild away. Though what could his daughter do? She’d been a fool to marry for the second time, when she could have stayed in her parents’ home, sheltered from the problems that this husband had brought upon her.
Charlie had walked from Rock Ferry to Wallasey a few weeks before, to check out that the man wasn’t selling up for any other reason than becoming tired with his thriving business. He then met with the landlord that owned the house, who demanded the first week of the rent in advance. He had not told Lily that the house they would live in was so archaic that it didn’t even have an inside bathroom. He had set his heart on the place after first setting his eyes upon it as he walked up the brew, situated as it was on a hilly incline overlooking the Penny Bridge. There was a large greenhouse filled with tomato plants on the land, a smaller one complete with a flourishing grapevine, a tool shed filled with all the implements he would ever need, and an orchard, the trees awash with blossom that heralded an excellent harvest. It even had a sheltered area behind a wall nearer the cottage, which was stocked with row upon row of regimented dahlias. For the first time in many months he had felt happy, especially as he had spotted an imposing looking stone church with diagonal buttresses up on the nearby hill, that he and his family might worship in.
Lily’s spirits, however, had plummeted even further when she saw that the docks at Wallasey Pool were only a few minutes walk away. Furthermore, when she saw the cottage, squatting as it did on the corner of a main road, which might possibly get choked with carts, cars and omnibuses for carrying the workers to the dockyard, became even more of the opinion that they should load their furniture back onto the wagon and retreat back home to Rock Ferry.
It wasn’t until Charlie had sat Lily down on a wooden bench in a paved, lavender hedged area in the garden, whilst blonde haired Isabel toddled around looking into buckets and wheelbarrows, to gently explain to her that there was no going back, as their savings were all gone and they had to make a go of it, did it hit her that she had got herself in a same situation as she had before. This time not in a tumbledown manor house in the middle of the country, with a husband that had an upper class hyphenated surname and no money to speak of, but in a tumbledown cottage on the edge of the docks, with a husband who could well be committing them to a life of poverty.
She felt trapped and even more so when she walked into the kitchen. It was dark and sparse, the gas mantles were chipped and grubby and the tiles were cracked, both on the dirty looking flagstone floor and the mildewed walls. A door opened onto a shabby scullery, which held a stained slop-stone sink and a battered copper for doing the washing in. There was a smell of gas coming from a stove in the corner and one of the shelves that had probably held more than its weight could carry had come away from the wall. There was another door that she couldn’t bring herself to open fully, as it housed some steps that would probably lead to an even smellier cellar.
It was all too much for Lily and she fled outside and hid in the orchard, where she could let her tears flow out of view. Charlie, aware that he’d been high handed by making this life changing decision without even consulting her, was unrepentant. She’d have to make some sacrifices, knuckle down, or back to her parents she’d have to go. In the five years that he and Lily had been a couple, there had been small, underlying changes in Lily that Charlie had not been fully aware of. She’d grown up; gone was the petted daughter whose only thoughts were of her appearance to her family and outside world, gone were the romantic dreams of a wonderful marriage to a man of wealth and substance and, recently, gone were her thoughts of betterment, a brand new house in an affluent suburb, rubbing shoulders with the wives of men in commerce and solicitors. Her time at Brookvale had served her well.
After weeks of scrubbing, cleaning and making the four bedroom cottage habitable with a good Axminster carpet laid in the best room, with the help of Bertha and occasionally Ellen, who would travel over on the omnibus that stopped along the dock road, Lily felt able to spend a little time looking around. Charlie – now seemingly in his element tending to his vegetable patches, greenhouses, a new herb garden and the abundant perennials in his flower beds – was planning to put a table out at the front of the cottage, where workers from the dockyards could purchase fresh produce on their way home. He had dismissed the opportunity of selling from the stall at Leasowe Market, as the idea of a table would be so much easier and better for his health than rising at the crack of dawn and pushing a laden cart up a rather steep hill. He had stopped short for the moment at providing egg sandwiches, now that he had also built a hen run and bought a few good layers, as a small shop that sold sandwiches and bakery goods existed nearby and he wouldn’t like to get on the wrong side of the owners. Lily, happy to assist if required one morning, but seeing that Charlie was making a good fist of displaying his produce without her, made her escape, holding Isabel tightly by the hand as the little girl was apt to wander.
Across the road was a big old house with the date 1621 etched into a stone mantle over the front door. Lily, fascinated by the fact that the wide, diamond-paned windows, with stone mullions in between, reminded her of Brookvale, had been waiting for the moment when she could introduce herself to their neighbour, who she hadn’t seen since they’d arrived. There was silence, after she had knocked on the old oak door, then peeped through one of the front windows to see if there was any sign of life within. She could hear a shuffling, someone violently coughing, so she waited with Isabel for the person to answer the door.
The man who stood in the hallway looked familiar, though she couldn’t say why, because she didn’t know anyone who lived in the vicinity. He was small in stature, had a short white beard and an old lined face, his fair hair was sparse, but he had kept it short, not straggly. He was dressed in a blue velvet dressing gown that had seen better days and he wore black leather down at heel slippers on his feet.
“How do you do? My name is Mrs Lily Wilson. My husband and I have recently moved into Pear Tree Cottage, I thought I would come across and introduce myself. This is my daughter, Isabel.”
The man, who from the look of him was possibly almost blind, as his faded blue eyes seemed milky, smiled down at Isabel, then patted her on the head. “Wilson you say? That’s a bit of a coincidence. My name’s Wilson too. James Wilson.”
“We must be related,” Lily joked. “Well, I’ve just come to say hello and if there’s anything you need Mr Wilson, let us know, as we do try to be good neighbours.”
“Aye that I will, but me sister Emily and our Jo pop in a couple of times a week. They do a bit of cleaning and cooking for me, since me dear wife passed away.” He turned and coughed violently into his handkerchief, after Lily and Isabel had said goodbye and walked down the
path.
It wasn’t until Charlie came in for his meal around midday that Lily mentioned the coincidence of having a neighbour with the name Wilson. As Charlie had always kept to the story of his father’s demise and had no interest in seeking out a would-be relative (he had enough with Lily’s lot without adding more), he had shrugged his shoulders and had gone to wash his hands in the scullery.
Now that Charlie was at peace in his small corner of the world, marital relations were resumed, though it was Lily who initiated it. She had forgotten all the trauma of having a colicky little daughter and now that Isabel was nearly old enough to attend a nearby convent school, seeing as Mannion had offered to pay something towards his granddaughter’s education, she thought it would be pleasant if they were to have a son to keep Charlie company; not that the child would be much of a help for at least ten years, but more help than a daughter would.
Charlie, living as he did in the fresh sea air and producing baskets of flavoursome Wallasey tomatoes that disappeared from his stall out front as soon as he put them there, had no problem in doing his duty. In fact, he found that Lily was more amenable in their lovemaking and was quite happy to do the deed now without extinguishing the light as she used to. It would be only a matter of time before she announced that there would soon be another little Wilson on the way.
Lily had settled now, enjoying her large kitchen with its cooking range and chunky, wooden table. Charlie had whitewashed the solid stone walls and had built her a couple of cupboards where she could put her pots and every day crockery. Her saucepans hung from ceiling hooks and the scullery with its gas stove, stone slop sink and an old fashioned copper for washing clothes overlooked the privy, housed in a narrow brick building by her washing line.
There were two best rooms either side of the front door: one where she kept her grand-mama’s piano and could be used as a dining room on Sunday; the other, with the ebony cabinet full of her best English bone china, decorated with rosebuds and gilt and small family mementoes that she had gathered over the years, would be called the parlour. The pear tree that had given the cottage its name and had been trained to grow up the left wall had grown above the cottage roofline, where its branches overhung the high stone perimeter wall and the fruit was a magnet to passing children.
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