When Day is Done

  At last the raids ceased, and people could draw breath and assess the devastation of the city and how it affected them.

  The house where Kate and Marie had rooms was still standing, although the roof had gone and their rooms were uninhabitable. A tarpaulin had been spread over the roof, and Kate and Marie were able to move into empty ground-floor rooms. Several of Kate’s customers were dead or injured, and many more had been moved to temporary accommodation because their houses had been bombed.

  The deaths that affected Kate most were those of the manager of the shop, Mr Dutton, and his wife, and Mrs Greaves and her husband and their daughter, who was an ambulance driver. The Greaves’s house was still standing, but Mrs Greaves and her husband had been killed by a direct hit on the shelter they were in, and the daughter was killed on duty. The two sons, both firemen, had survived.

  The death of Mr Dutton had a more lasting effect on Kate. Another manager was appointed, a slight, sandy-haired man with small eyes and a tight, pursed mouth. Kate disliked Mr Higgins on sight, and every day her feelings grew stronger. He watched her like a hawk, especially when she was serving old people, and she was unable to do anything to help them. He constantly found fault and darted suspicious glances at Kate while he complained that the coupons received were insufficient for the stock that had been used.

  ‘I’ve had enough,’ Kate finally told Marie. ‘I don’t have to stay there. I’m going to give him notice.’

  She sent her notice to head office, and they replied thanking her for past service and asking her to stay for a month to help the girl who would replace her.

  The girl who arrived the following Monday was a big, breezy character with a large bust and unlimited energy. Her name was Ada and she had been in the ATS but had been invalided out after an accident. ‘A woman soldier!’ the customers said to Kate. ‘She’ll be a match for that ferrety little feller. She won’t be put on the way you was.’ And so it proved.

  When Ada asked why Kate was leaving, Kate was quite frank about her reasons, and Ada declared that if the stocks were out the manager must be helping himself.

  ‘Mr Dutton used to let me give a bit extra to old people on their own, and his stocks always balanced,’ Kate said. ‘But this fellow’s so hard with them. I can’t stand it. Old Mr Johnson lost his leg in the last war, and now he can’t even have a cup of tea when he needs one.’

  ‘The bloody little creep,’ Ada said. ‘I’ll soon sort him out.’

  Kate asked if Ada’s accident would make it hard for her to bear the long hours and sometimes heavy work, and warned her that Higgins could be very vindictive.

  ‘Don’t worry about me, Kate,’ Ada laughed. ‘I’ll tell you but nobody else. My accident was that I got pregnant. The first night I was home there was a raid and I sheltered under the railway arch. It was hit and I lost the baby. Frightened the life out of the ARP man who dug me out. When he seen all the blood he thought I’d lost me legs.’ She laughed heartily.

  Before the month was up Kate had become very fond of Ada. She had quickly learnt the ration book system and managed to circumvent Higgins in many ways. He had weighed scant two ounces of tea into the cone-shaped bags usually used for small amounts of sweets, and one day he took one of these bags from the drawer behind him for Mr Johnson, the one-legged war pensioner.

  The manager glanced triumphantly at Kate as the old man looked sadly at the tiny amount of tea, but behind him she caught sight of Ada quietly opening the drawer and sliding one of the bags of tea into her pocket. As Mr Johnson started towards the door, Ada came out from behind the counter, saying loudly, ‘You all right with that crutch, sir?’ and opened the door for the old soldier. As she returned she held open her empty pocket, whispering to Kate, ‘There’s more ways than one of skinning a cat.’

  One day before the end of the month Ada asked Kate to come for a walk with her when the shop closed. Kate agreed although she was puzzled, as it was now October and the evenings were becoming dark earlier.

  After clearing up and restocking the fixtures after closing, they bade Mr Higgins goodnight and set off together. After a few minutes Ada said, ‘I think that feller’s helping himself and I want to catch him at it. I want you for a witness, Kate.’ She climbed over the wall of a bombed building behind the shop and hauled Kate over after her, then guided her to a corner where they could look down on the side door of the shop.

  The moon was rising, and in the faint glow they could see the errand boy’s bicycle. ‘I’ve been keeping watch,’ Ada whispered. ‘He won’t be long now.’ They waited, Kate shivering with cold and nervousness, until they heard the sound of the door opening. A dark blur moved to the bike and Ada stood up and shone a torch down on it.

  ‘What’s in the bag, Higgins?’ she shouted. He gave a squeal of fright and clutched the bag to him, but Ada jumped down and pulled it away. ‘Look, Kate!’ she cried, dumping the bag in the bicycle carrier and shining the torch on the various tins and packets it contained. ‘Spam, cheese, butter, sugar and tea. Tea, Kate.’ She grabbed Higgins’s shoulder and shook him. ‘And not a mingy two ounces like you gave the old feller that lost his leg for this country. You bloody worm.’

  She aimed a blow at his head, and as he tried to struggle with her Kate awkwardly scrambled from the bombed building. ‘I ruined my stockings,’ she told Marie later, ‘but it was well worth it.’

  ‘Will she report him?’ asked Marie.

  Kate shook her head. ‘I thought she would,’ she said. ‘But she said she might get someone worse. She wrote out a confession and made him sign it, and I signed it too, but she said she won’t say anything at present. She’s a case. She told me she’s got him under her thumb now so I needn’t worry any more about my old people.’

  Kate had applied to the factory where Marie worked but had to take a medical examination before they would give her a job. The old doctor who examined her asked her many questions about her previous work, then told her her heart was a little overstrained. ‘Never mind, lassie, we’ll find you a nice light job,’ he said. Kate was not too dismayed. She felt well, and she told Marie that if she had been really ill she would not have been taken on.

  She was employed in a converted house owned by the factory, sitting at a workbench assembling small radio parts. Deft and conscientious, she was a good worker and enjoyed the job, and the company of the five other women and two men employed there. They were from different backgrounds but all were friendly, and jokes and laughter made the day pass quickly.

  The girl who worked beside Kate had been an art historian, and another of the girls, Deirdre, had been about to start at a finishing school in Switzerland when war began. There was a middle-aged woman with a stomach ulcer, a Cockney girl who had come to relatives in Liverpool when her parents were killed in the bombing of London, and a girl called Maggie who came from the roughest part of Liverpool.

  Maggie’s Scouse accent was so thick and mixed with thieves’ cant that even Kate found it hard to understand at times. To everyone’s surprise, Maggie and Deirdre were the two who had most in common and they became good friends. They were both worldly-wise in their own way, and used language that shocked the other women. They also understood each other’s jokes which the others failed to see.

  Of the two men, one, called Basil, was a weedy creature, happily married as he often announced, who was convinced that all the women wished to seduce him, and the other was a cheerful, slightly backward boy who did the fetching and carrying. Kate entertained Marie with stories about all of them and Marie declared that Kate had fallen on her feet.

  ‘I was worried about you going in the factory,’ she said. ‘So big and noisy and such crowds of people. You’d have hated it.’

  ‘I didn’t realise,’ Kate said, looking troubled. ‘You’ve never told me this before. You must hate it too, Marie.’

  ‘No, I’m used to it, and it’s not bad in the part where I work. I’ve got good friends there too, as you know.’

  Marie had started to g
o to dances occasionally with friends from work, and Kate was pleased to see that she seemed to be trying to put the past behind her. The couple who had adopted her baby had now moved away from Liverpool, which Kate thought was better for Marie, and the father of the child had also gone. His wife had been discharged from the sanatorium and advised to live further inland, so the family had moved to Derbyshire.

  Kate and Marie still lived in the house in Queens Road. It had been patched up but ominous cracks had begun to appear in the walls. They talked of moving nearer their work in Edge Lane, but neither had the time for house-hunting. As the war dragged on, they began to wonder if it would ever end. There had been a hopeful period in 1942 when the Germans under Rommel had been defeated in Africa by the Eighth Army, but Churchill had told the country gloomily that this did not mean the end of the war. ‘It is not the beginning of the end,’ he intoned, ‘but the end of the beginning.’ Marie said crossly that she was not going to listen to him any more. ‘He only depresses me,’ she said.

  On the now fairly rare occasions when she was able to visit Rose, Kate was concerned to see how strained and ill Robert looked. He too had suffered a loss in the May Blitz, as it was now being called. His foreman, Stan, had been buried under rubble for two days, and although alive when rescued had suffered a heart attack and died after four months in hospital. The man who replaced him did his best, but for Robert no one could replace Stan as a friend and confidant as well as an employee.

  In contrast Rose appeared to be blooming. She now held a high position in the WVS and told Kate that it helped her to stop worrying about the boys. Kate, though, thought that it meant more than that to Rose, who felt that her intelligence was at last being recognised and admired.

  Richard had been to Canada to gain flying experience, and was now home again as pilot in a bomber crew flying Wellingtons. John was a Commando, doing all the things he had always longed to do. He had been to see Kate when home on leave, and his only grumble seemed to be that tram conductors called him Jock, because of the large bonnet with a bright hackle on the side that the Commandos wore. He described his training to Kate, warning her not to tell his mother.

  ‘It’s great,’ he said. ‘We row up to cliffs with muffled oars because the Jerries will expect the attack to come by land. We’re in camouflage gear with our faces and hands blacked and we climb the cliffs. A bit awkward, that, because they’re usually pretty sheer, but we carry our knives in our teeth so our hands are free. We’ve got great instructors. The stuff they can climb!’

  ‘And where do you do this?’ asked Kate.

  ‘I can’t say. In friendly places while we train,’ he said, then, with belated caution, asked her not to repeat his words to anyone. Kate would have liked to know why he carried the knife, but thought it wiser not to ask.

  Richard also came to see Kate when he was home on leave, and Robert visited too, but Rose had never been to Queens Road. ‘I called in on impulse because I was in the district,’ Robert said once. ‘Rose would have come with me had she known I was dropping in.’

  Kate smiled at him. ‘I see Rose quite often at your house, don’t I?’ she said. ‘I know she’s very busy at present with her WVS work,’ and Robert smiled back at her gratefully.

  He was concerned about the state of the house, but Kate told him that she and Marie would soon find somewhere else to live. She felt that he had enough to worry about, and was distressed to see how ill and strained he looked. She sometimes went to see Essy, and she confided her worry about Robert to her.

  ‘Yes, he’s missing Stan,’ Essy said. ‘He could talk over his worries with him, but he makes light of them to the boys when they come home. The one he should be talking to is his wife, but he won’t worry her with anything, and she can’t see what’s under her nose. Too busy strutting about, but we’d better not have floods of tears if she loses him or I’ll tell her.’ Kate said nothing. She found that was wisest when faced with Essy’s implacable dislike of her sister.

  When Kate saw Rose she found that her sister was worried about something entirely different. For many men marriage was out of the question, either because they were serving abroad or because they were prisoners of war, but Richard was flying bombing missions from England and John, although his movements were mysterious, occasionally appeared on leave. Neither son, however, appeared to have a regular girlfriend, and Rose was afraid that they might meet girls from another part of the country and settle down there after the war. ‘I have to part with them now,’ she said. ‘But they should be with me for my old age. They’re my sons, after all.’

  Kate laughed. ‘I know they both have plenty of dates, but nothing serious,’ she said. ‘It’s too soon to worry, Rose.’

  She wondered whether she should tell her sister that she should be anxious about something far more important, her husband’s health, but Rose changed the subject and the moment passed.

  For the first time since November 1940 Richard and John were due to come home on leave at the same time. When Richard arrived he looked almost as haggard and tired as his father, but he had completed a tour of operations and was now due to be grounded. John, when he came, seemed to be bursting with health and good spirits. News trickled out occasionally of the daredevil exploits of the Commandos, and the family worried about him, but although he could say nothing about his life he was obviously enjoying it.

  Although John had to go back after three days, Richard still had leave and he spent some of it at the works with his father. He told Kate how worried he felt about Robert. ‘If I get through this lot, Aunt Kate, I’ll go in with Dad,’ he said. ‘I’ve got no burning ambition to do anything else and I think I’ll enjoy working there and taking a bit of the weight off him.’

  ‘Have you told him?’ Kate asked, and Richard confessed that he had only decided during this leave. ‘Tell him before you go back,’ Kate advised. ‘It’ll be just what he needs to cheer him up. We’ve all been worried about him because he misses Stan so much, and he’s got so many problems and so much red tape to deal with.’

  Richard did as Kate suggested, and the change in Robert could be seen immediately. Rose was pleased too, as it meant that Richard would make his home in Liverpool.

  The war news was better now too. Throughout the war Kate had become used to seeing the uniforms of the sailors or soldiers from many lands as she walked along Church Street, but suddenly Liverpool seemed to be full of American soldiers. Rose invited some of them for meals, as many people did, and found them cheerful and friendly although dismissive of Richard and John’s years of service and very sure of their own worth.

  Just as suddenly many of them were moved, as people later discovered to the south coast for the D-Day landings. On 6 June 1944, Sally, the art historian who worked with Kate, attended a concert at the Philharmonic Hall, and at work the next day she said, ‘I detest jingoism, but when Malcolm Sargent announced that the Second Front had come at last, that our troops were landing in France, I found myself on my feet singing “Land of Hope and Glory” like everyone else in the hall. It was so emotional.’

  Everyone felt that the war would soon be over, and Deirdre said to Basil, ‘Nearly the end of your cushy little number, darling, surrounded by nubile young women.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t call me darling. What if my wife heard you? She’d think we were carrying on.’

  ‘Not to worry, darling,’ Deirdre said. ‘I’m a lesbian.’ As none of them had heard the word before, her joke fell flat, though Maggie guessed what she meant. Kate thought she was speaking about her birth sign. Since it was not a word ever written in the newspapers or spoken on the wireless, Basil continued to fear, or hope, that he was in imminent danger of being seduced.

  Robert still worried about Kate’s living conditions, and he urged her to come to live with him and Rose. He said he was sure that Marie could easily make other arrangements, but Kate stubbornly resisted, and Rose was not enthusiastic about the idea either, although she said little, knowing that Kate would
refuse anyway.

  So much of Everton had been destroyed in the bombing that although she had lived there most of her life, Kate sometimes felt like a stranger. She was willing to move but she and Marie had not found anywhere else to live, so they were delighted when Robert told them that he had found a flat for them.

  It was the ground floor of a large detached house in Lilley Road, off Edge Lane, not far from the factory where they worked, and was a pleasant flat with two good-sized bedrooms, a well-proportioned drawing room and a kitchen and bathroom. The rent was the same as they paid in Queens Road and Kate and Marie were amazed, but Robert told them the rent was protected by a by-law and could not be raised.

  Neither of them was aware that Robert had bought the house and left it to Kate in his will. He had not told Rose either, as he was unsure of her discretion, but he did confide in Richard. ‘When the time comes, explain to your mother and Kate that it was self-indulgence on my part. It made me feel better,’ he said with a smile.

  Kate and Marie were delighted with the new flat, and both felt that life was good. Marie had put her trouble behind her, and although working very hard still managed to have a good social life, and Kate rejoiced for her.

  Kate worried less about Robert now, but she longed for the end of the war, when she could listen to news bulletins without fearing that Richard’s plane was one of those that ‘failed to return’, or that John had taken one risk too many. She often thought, too, about Henry’s son, wondering if he had become a soldier like his father, and if so, whether he had survived the war.

  She would have been comforted to know that he was farming in Shropshire, and amazed to learn that he sometimes thought of her. When war broke out Charles was twenty-five years old and running his father-in-law’s farm after the older man had suffered a stroke. He had tried to enlist in his father’s old regiment but had been told in no uncertain terms to go back to the farm. ‘That’s the best way you can help your country,’ the recruiting officer told him. ‘We need all the food we can get. You can save the lives of a few seamen if we don’t have to import so much,’ and Charles could see the logic of it.