Her Heart's Desire

by Vivienne Dockerty

  Eliza, one of Lily’s older sisters, who had been in her teens when Lily was born, earned her living as a dressmaker and now that her children had flown the nest and her husband was dead from influenza, she turned her front room into an alteration shop, over the Penny Bridge in nearby Claughton. Trade was good, now that no one had much money to spend on new clothing and she was in need of a girl who was handy with a sewing needle.

  At a family conference, something that the sisters had started after the war, when on a Sunday afternoon they would all turn up to visit Mannion and share light refreshments together, it was decided that as Isabel was only a few months away from her fourteenth birthday, she would fit the bill. She had not been to school since she was ill and was fully conversant with hems, stitching, pattern cutting and sewing buttons, which she was taught at both the convent and the local school. Lily, fully aware that there was no way Charlie could pay for more education for their daughters, though of course she wouldn’t say so to her sisters, jumped at the chance of having one less mouth to feed. Eliza had said it could be a live in position, and so she gave her permission there and then.

  Irene, the baby of the family and coming up to eight, was a quiet little girl, with imaginary friends, Louloubell and Jonny, who lived in the undergrowth in the orchard. She spent a lot of her time reading, as from an early age she had learnt to keep out of the way when Lily started her nagging and everyone got an earful if they happened to be in the way. Her favourite place was in the bough of one of the gnarled old pear trees, where she could keep an eye on the back of the house, in case a parent might be out and about. Not that she had any qualms about her father, she was his pretty pussycat and they got on very well, but she did blame him for her lack of education. Now that there was not much money coming in, she had been taken out of the convent school that she had started at four years old, where she had quickly picked up the rudiments of reading and a little French. For the moment, she didn’t attend a school at all. It seemed it was money, ‘the root of all evil’ according to Charlie, which caused all the rows and the bitter words she heard between her parents.

  By March 1920, Charlie had given up looking for any kind of work. At forty-eight, he couldn’t see how trailing around getting ‘knock backs’ from companies who, if they had any precious work, were looking for a younger man, was doing anyone, including his shoe leather, any good. Occasionally, if the weather wasn’t too wet or the wind too bitter, he would dress warmly in his once-best overcoat, his battered bowler hat and the fingerless gloves that Lily had knitted him and spent an hour hoeing a drill, cutting back the overgrown branches of his fruit trees, or cleaning out the hen house. Lily, bless her heart, still had a little bet on the horses and gave him a shilling from her winnings to spend at the local tavern now and again. It was there one night that Charlie met a man named Tony.

  Tony O’Reilly was one of the few survivors of a German attack, after signing on the R.M.S Lusitania as a steward before the liner had been sunk near Kinsale in Ireland. He retired on medical grounds when he found a sympathetic doctor who agreed he was unfit to enlist in any of the British forces, then found he could make a good living as an entrepreneur. There was always a willing crewman who had dropped anchor in the Port of Liverpool, then had made his way to one of the many pubs that stood on every corner in the dock land area, who could supply Tony with most things from his travels, providing it would fit in his kit bag. At the time he met Charlie, who in his opinion looked an honest man, he was heavily into contraband. Cigarettes, tobacco, spirits or wine from Bordeaux, he wasn’t bothered, providing he made a buck, which was an expression he was fond of using.

  Bert, the man who stood behind the bar at The Coach and Horses, had pointed Charlie out as someone who might be interested in renting out his garden shed, after hearing Charlie bemoaning the fact that the tools in his shed were getting rusty with disuse. Tony, desperate to find storage for the many boxes arriving on an incoming ship from Rotterdam, due in for repairs at the Birkenhead Pool the very next evening, jumped at the chance of a new place to hide the merchandise, as Plod had been sniffing around his gaffe again.

  “I hear yer might be interested in a bit of business?” Tony, a tall, lean man in his early forties, with yellow teeth as he smoked a lot, said affably, coming over from where he’d been standing at the bar with another man. “It’s Charlie, isn’t it? It’s you that has the land on the corner of Poulton Bridge Road.”

  “That’s true,” said Charlie, puffing up a little with pride, when he heard that someone was addressing him with a bit of respect. “Had it as a market garden before the war, but it’s too much for me now. Needs a younger man to work it.”

  “Well, I’m sure I could find someone to take it on fer yer, if yer wanted, Charlie. I’ve lots of contacts and there must be plenty out there that would work for reasonable wages. I’ll keep me ear out. Meanwhile, I’m lookin’ for somewhere I can store a few boxes. A lockup really and there’d only be me that would have the key. I hear you might have a shed or suchlike that I could rent?”

  “For the right price.” Lily would go mad if there were people traipsing through the yard into the gardens, Charlie thought.

  “I was thinkin’ two quid a week and a bottle of whisky.” That would get him; Bert had said that Charlie liked a drop of whisky now and again.

  “You’re on. There’s a separate entrance on the dock road, save you coming through the front gate. The shed is at the back of the orchard. Hang on, though, it’s nothing illegal, is it? The missis’ll go mad if it is.”

  “No, pal, rest assured the boxes are kosher.” It’s the contents that aren’t, he thought to himself.

  Lily, fed up again with make-do and mend, had started buying The Woman’s Weekly magazine. It was more to scan the fashions than anything else; she was feeling dowdy and nothing like the young miss who liked to wear whatever was in vogue all those long years ago, so had decided to treat herself to a pattern and a length of material. It would be just enough to make a calf length summer dress, with cap sleeves and a button bodice. If truth was told, however, it was Irene who was in more need of a summer dress to wear. The hand-me-downs from Isabel or any older cousins were long gone, especially so from her sister, as Isabel had been as thin as a willow and Irene was a little more plump.

  Lily had rid herself of the wide brimmed hat that she had alternately trimmed with feathers or flowers of felt after the war was over. She now sported a cloche, a type of bell-shaped close fitting hat, that flattened her hair and made her face look a little more rounded. But it was fashion and she and Isabel, on one of the rare weekends that her daughter came to visit, had a lot of fun together as they tried to cut one out of a piece of thick blue felt that the girl had brought along. One weekend, much to Irene’s surprise and gratitude, Isabel brought her a calf length, peach, cotton dress, with a drop waist, buttoned bodice, Peter Pan collar and little puffed sleeves. She had sown it herself with the help of her Aunt Eliza in the dark winter evenings.

  It now seemed that Isabel had a beau – not that she had discussed the matter with her mother, but she had decided to take her younger sister into her confidence as she knew that Irene, who would probably listen to Isabel’s tale with some astonishment, wouldn’t tell. In 1920 Isabel was only just fifteen, but it seemed she had attracted the attention of a young man, some three years older than herself, who worked at the butchers along the road. She had turned into an attractive young lady, anxious to follow the latest fashions seen in her aunt’s woman magazines, or when window shopping at the new department store, Saltbury’s, that had just opened in Grange Road. The two girls were sitting on Irene’s bed, out of earshot of their parents, when Isabel, not having a confidante of her own age, decided to tell all to her sister.

  “He’s ever so nice, Irene. He has black curly eyelashes and lovely brown eyes. He really is my heart’s desire.” Isabel had sighed, unwittingly parroting her mother’s thoughts when she had thought that she was in love with her cousin, Lawre
nce, all those years ago. “His name is Duggie, Douglas really, but he prefers Duggie. He works in the butcher shop, just along the row from Aunt Eliza’s and I met him when he came in one day to have his trousers shortened. He’s asked me if I would like to go to the Argyle Theatre with him.”

  “Did he ask you in front of Aunt Eliza?”

  “No silly, he knows I’m too young to start walking out with someone and I had to tell him that I wasn’t allowed out of the house once the shop was closed for the day. So, he’s asked me to meet him outside the park gates next Sunday. I can pretend that I’ve come over here for a visit, Aunt Eliza doesn’t check that I’ve been here.”

  “She wouldn’t because she trusts you.” Irene still only a child at that time, was astute enough to know that what Isabel was planning to do was a very naughty thing.

  “Well, I’m going to meet him anyway and you’d better keep your mouth shut, or they’ll be no more pretty dresses for you.”

  Irene treasured that dress and couldn’t bear to part with it, until inevitably one day the generous seams of the bodice couldn’t stretch anymore and even Lily couldn’t fix them. Financially, things hadn’t got any easier, with Lily scratching a frantic living from her efforts in the garden. Charlie, hampered now by a winter cough, had taken himself off to bed, where he read his precious newspapers and back copies of the Lloyds Register, which he still kept in his father’s sea chest that had been liberated from Jessica Parsons. Not that his ill health had stopped him from shuffling in his worn out slippers along to the Coach and Horses once a week, where an envelope was left behind the bar with his name on it. He told Lily that it was something from the benefits, when he handed her twenty shillings to pay for food and the ‘bloody rent’, which seemed to be rising every year.

  It was in the garden on a chilly afternoon, after Irene had been instructed to look for eggs in the undergrowth, as two of the hens had seemed to have stopped laying but might have been hiding them away, that she had a sighting of Tony O’Reilly. She was talking to her imaginary friends, Louloubell and Jonny, who were always there when she had something to tell them, and had stood near the open door of the shed after she had heard noises of things being pushed about, bottles rattling and a couple of grunts came to her ears as she waited. It wasn’t polite to enter a place without permission from a grown-up and from the back of this person, who she had seen using a key to remove the padlock, he was a grown-up.

  He nearly dropped the box he was carrying when he saw the sweet little girl, her chestnut hair all done up in ringlets and wearing a patched cotton dress that was far too short, a much-plucked shabby green cardigan and scuffed black boots that looked too big for her.

  “For the love of Mary and all the saints!” he spluttered, nearly dropping the box in his agitation. “Where did you spring from, Alanna?”

  “My name is Irene, not Alanna, sir. I live in the house at the top of the orchard. Papa didn’t say we had someone living in our shed.”

  “Just moved in yesterday, so I did. Back in Ireland, where I come from, little girls are to be seen and not heard, and Alanna in Irish means little child, so it does.”

  “Oh.”

  “Well, run along now and don’t yer come back agin, or I’ll tell yer pa yer’ve bin disturbin’ me.”

  “Yes, sir, I’m sorry sir.”

  With that, poor Irene fled, much chastened by this funny speaking stranger. Though being a child with a secretive nature, it felt nice to have a knowledge she didn’t have to share.

  Chapter Twenty

  By the summer of 1921, Lily found she couldn’t carry on with the way things were for much longer. She was waking up with a headache, her first thoughts being to what they were going to eat that day and to what she was going to put on Irene’s sandwiches, as the child was now attending the local Church of England school in Liscard, a mile away. She was going to have to take her engagement ring to the pawn shop, otherwise how was she going to find the money for a pair of new shoes for Irene? The walk there and back again was wearing out the soles. Next it would be Grand-mama’s ebony display cabinet and the black piano going as well, if the fortunes didn’t change for the Wilson family soon.

  She found it hard to look at herself in her mirror during those days, dismayed as she saw the weather beaten face, lined with worry, staring back at her, with crows feet nestled under her dull eyes and a mouth that had lost the habit of smiling. There was no money to be spared even for a small tub of face cream, a necessity for a woman who had reached forty-five. The last time she’d had her hair trimmed was courtesy of Eliza’s scissors, at one of their sisterly get-togethers.

  It seemed that the benefits, which Charlie collected every Friday morning from the office on Victoria Road, before popping into the Coach and Horses for a weekly bevvy, had been withdrawn; something to do with Charlie being quite capable of continuing his business as a market gardener and if heavy digging was a problem, he could always take on an unemployed local lad to help. Of course, Charlie wasn’t telling lies when he related all this to Lily, as the benefits department had said all this to Charlie many months before. He had jumped at the chance of O’Reilly’s offer, seeing it as a way of making money without slogging his guts out in all kinds of weather, trying to grow vegetables on his weedy land.

  Lily had appeared to be coping well in his eyes, tending the grapevine, picking the ripe tomatoes and gathering the tubers for the next glut of flowers. She always had something on the table when she called him from upstairs for his evening meal, so why pay for a labourer? Lily was quite capable of keeping things going for them all. It was a crying shame when O’Reilly – not a man, it seemed, who stayed in one place for very long – decided to move his operations back over the water to Liverpool.

  He was a bit dismayed, to say the least, when Lily announced that she was going to look out for another lodger. The landlord had been around wanting to put up the rent, something he seemed to be doing annually. When queried this time by an irritated Lily, who asked what extra facilities would be provided if they were to pay the extra, putting up as she did with a dilapidated house with no mod cons, still with an outside toilet, he’d backed off for the moment, saying that he’d have to have a think. She didn’t have to stay there if she wasn’t happy with the property and there were a lot of families around about who would love to live where she did. Her tongue, increasingly sharp when she found she couldn’t even afford to put a bet on with Kenny nowadays, made Charlie spend more time at the Coach and Horses whilst Irene, a timid child, dawdled home from school.

  The old house across the road, tenanted before the war by Mr Wilson then by Frank, who had left the area when his wife, a nurse, was transferred to a bigger hospital during hostilities, had been up for sale by the owner and had been on the market for some time. There had been the occasional interest, a chap called Mr Rea who had a coal round and rented the stable that went with the place, but no one seemed to want to buy the big old building, circa 1621, which must have been the oldest house in Wallasey.

  Then one day, after Lily had idly spoken to Bertha about the big house across the road during one of her visits, saying how it was such a shame that the place had lain empty for such a long time, a family arrived. Not a local family, Irene decided, when she heard the children whooping and calling as they charged around the garden that lay behind the perimeter wall. They didn’t have the Mersey twang, more a language of their own that she didn’t understand, which was Welsh, or so she learnt later from Bertha. It appeared that the new family were distantly related to them via the Patterson’s and had travelled all the way from a place called Swansea in Wales. Tom Patterson was taking up a post as a lecturer in the recently completed building at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. Having an avid interest in historical architecture, he had been delighted to hear of the old place on Poulton Bridge Road, after he had written to Lawrence, his cousin, for information on the area, especially with Wallasey being only a short train ride under the River Mersey to Liver
pool.

  There was an older boy, Richard, who had just turned fourteen; Evan, who looked to be around Irene’s age; and a little girl, Myfanwy, who was aged seven. Bronwen Patterson, their mother, was small, dark and a bit nervy, looking as if a puff of wind would knock her over, but extremely pleased to meet Lily, hoping that she might have made a new friend.

  “Students,” Lily had said to Charlie, in a voice that brooked no argument when she had come back from across the road to introduce herself, looking well satisfied after a long time spent chatting over a cup of tea with Bronwen. “That’s who we’ll be having to stay. Tom, who’s got a plum job at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, said there’ll be a lack of accommodation over there for students and as they’ll mostly be from middle class families, who are able to afford to send their children to universities and colleges, they’ll be able to pay a little more.”

  It wasn’t long before their first student moved in, a young lady by the name of Dorothy Kershaw, a blue stocking if ever there was one. She reminded Lily a bit of her sister, though her personality was not hidden under a bushel like Mabel’s, more the opposite; she was a bluff and hearty girl like Henrietta used to be and was dismayed to find that the cottage was devoid of a bathroom or inside toilet. She managed to put up with the woeful facilities for a month. To the family’s fascination – especially Charlie’s, who expected members of his household to wear feminine apparel – Dorothy would don a pair of breeches on her return each evening from the college, studied for hours burning more oil than Lily would have liked and went to play a game of hockey in Crosby on Saturday mornings.