That Liverpool Girl

by Ruth Hamilton

  Gill Collins wasn’t coping. Like many who wait endless years for an imagined child, Gill found the reality of motherhood disturbing. Several days each month saw her hurtling to Willows Edge or to the main house in search of advice when the baby vomited, when she seemed too hot, too cold, too fretful. And Jay got on his wife’s nerves.

  Elsie placed the bottles of stout in a small space on the cluttered table. She hadn’t been a good mother, and she didn’t want to watch Gill failing at this very important job. Oh, well. At least the nappies had been washed, because a dozen or so were hanging as stiff as boards in the freezing cold outside. ‘Shall I fetch your washing in, love?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘While you’re feeding her, shall I get the nappies in and put them to dry in here? There’s no breeze. They’ll be frozen solid by teatime.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Elsie waited. ‘Right. I’ll fetch them in and they can thaw out near the fire. Then I’ll make you a bit of tea and toast, eh?’

  Gill shifted the infant to her other breast. ‘If you like.’

  The old Elsie revived and bridled. Jay was a grand lad. He was on the daft side, very good at acting the rubber pig, but he had a big heart and he loved his wife and child. ‘You want to pull yourself together, missus. Yon man of yours is ill—’

  ‘So was yours,’ Gill snapped. ‘But you still mithered him till he keeled over. Don’t be lecturing me, Elsie Openshaw. You’ve only gone nice since Nellie came and helped you out in the shop. So think on before you start telling the rest of us how to fettle.’

  Elsie had learned from Nellie how to hold her tongue. And this girl wasn’t well. She’d settled down during the pregnancy, but once the baby became a reality Gill started losing her grip. The gatehouse deteriorated into a mess, while Jay, who had special dietary requirements, was abandoned to manage for himself. That might have worked had he not been such a clown, but his diabetes was fast becoming unstable, because he let himself run too low on sugar before noticing that he felt odd. With Phil Watson away, Jay had no help, and he could let himself go all the way to coma if this wasn’t sorted.

  While Elsie went to bring in nappies, Gill stared into nothingness. She remembered, just about, imagining herself in love with Keith Greenhalgh. She’d even been upset when he’d married the Liverpool glamour girl, but now she knew the truth. The fact was that she wanted to be married to somebody sensible, and Keith had happened to fit the brief. Jay had been fun at the beginning, but she’d grown up, while he had remained a child. She had two children. One was at her breast, while the other was outside somewhere clowning about up a ladder or on a roof. ‘I can’t worry about both of you, Maisie. There isn’t enough of me to go round, you see. And that was why I thought I wanted Uncle Keith. He’s dependable.’

  Elsie came in and began to place ice-stiffened washing on a couple of clothes horses. The nappies would thaw out faster near the fire. ‘Shall I come back after I’ve closed the shop? I can cook something and tidy up a bit in case Nellie doesn’t get home in time.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Elsie.’

  ‘Nay, lass. Put your name down for a good skrike. Tears and temper are good as long as you let them out.’

  ‘He’s driving me mad. Remember when he got tanked up on Guinness and came home a bloody fighter pilot? I half drowned him, but I managed to keep going. Even then, before Maisie, I was wishing I’d wed somebody with a bit of gumption, a gradely chap who didn’t go round acting like somebody let out for a day from the loony bin.’ She placed the child in a pram and fastened her blouse. ‘I’ve a baby to wean. When she starts crawling, I’ll have to watch her. And I have to watch him, him, him.’ Her voice rose with every repetition. ‘I can’t do it. I can’t listen to his stupid jokes any more, can’t watch him playing the fool all the while. He’s a father, and he should act like one.’

  Elsie pushed a pile of newspapers from a chair and sat at the littered table. ‘Does he know you feel like this?’

  Gill shook her head. ‘He’d stop looking after himself altogether, and he’d die, then that would be my fault. I am so bloody tired, Elsie.’

  ‘I know, love. Look, I can leave the shop shut and stay with you if you like.’

  Gill shook her head. ‘I’m best by myself, thanks all the same. God knows where he’s got to. It’s all the worry. Cleaning up’s beyond me, and I even forget to cook. Sometimes, I can’t remember what happened yesterday, because life’s always the same, like a muddy ball of Plasticine when all the colours have got mixed up together. There’s no order any more. He comes home, the singing, dancing joke of a husband, and I don’t hear him these days, hardly see him till he picks Maisie up.’ She couldn’t let him hold his own daughter. What if he had a hypo? What if he jiggled the child until she vomited? What if he dropped her on her head?

  Elsie left the poor young mother with a cup of tea and a couple of biscuits. Feeding a kiddy took a fair lump out of a woman, and Gill needed help. The post office could look after itself for once, because this problem needed a solution. One of the Land Army girls hadn’t taken kindly to field work, but Elsie had a use for her.

  At Willows Home Farm, the large woman stopped and reclaimed her breath while preparing to knock on Jean Dyson’s back door. The Land Army girl in question lived in Jean’s house, so the farmer’s wife had to be consulted. Jean opened the door. ‘I thought I heard somebody out here. Get inside before you freeze to the ground. We’d do better if it snowed. Apart from anything else, snow would confuse the Germans, and we’d be that bit warmer, too.’

  Elsie sat down in the kitchen and accepted a welcome cup of scalding tea. Words tumbled from her tongue in no particular order, but Jean was good at jigsaws, and she managed to piece together the message after just one repeat. ‘Gill can have her for a few hours a day, and welcome. She’s one of the older ones from a family of eight, so she should be all right with the baby and a bit of tidying up. No good at all on the land, Elsie. It’s like sending a fox to mind the chickens.’

  Elsie managed a smile. ‘Nellie says the girl’s nesh.’

  ‘Nesh? What the hell’s that?’

  ‘Mardy. Soft. A moaning Minnie.’

  ‘She’s all of the above. I just hope she does better for Gill than she has for us.’

  So it was sorted. Until Neil Dyson walked in with an unconscious man in his arms.

  ‘You’ve no idea,’ Nellie moaned. ‘When she was fourteen, she fell hook, line and gobstopper for the milkman’s lad. I gave her down the banks for it – I never stopped shouting at her for about four hours. So she moved out. She didn’t go far; she went living with her friend four doors away. For the best part of three weeks, she never spoke to me. Her dad was dead, bless him, so there was just me left to manage Madam. Anyway, she came home because she decided the milkman’s lad was a few sarnies short of a picnic, but she carried on sulking.’

  Tom tried not to laugh. Nellie Kennedy was afraid of her own daughter. He had parked the car a few houses away from Miss Morrison’s, because Nellie’s panic had started about halfway up Manor Road. There was some heavy breathing in the rear of the car, too, since both lads were tired and hungry. Eventually, Phil declared that he’d had enough of this malarkey, so he and his brother were off, thanks, and they were grateful for the lift.

  Nellie watched them as they walked to the house. ‘The big one’s a Leonardo de . . . Italian bloke, I think. Or a Botticell-something-or-other,’ she announced proudly.

  ‘Botticelli.’

  ‘Yes, him and all. I’d best go, eh?’

  ‘You’ll be all right. She loves you.’

  Nellie opened her door. ‘I know that. She loves me enough to kill me.’

  ‘Good luck,’ he called.

  ‘Hmmph.’

  Tom chuckled to himself when Eileen appeared in the street. She grabbed her mother and dragged her through the front gate just as the doctor’s car shot past at speed. He couldn’t have coped with Eileen Watson as a lover; she was too hot to handle. But God, she
was beautiful.

  Inside, one angry woman stood at each end of the kitchen table. Between them, Keith occupied a chair at one of the two longer sides, a newspaper spread before him. While they argued for several minutes, he turned pages and pretended not to be there. The boys, having discovered a tin of jam tarts, had gone off to eat these treats while examining bomb holes in the playing field. Miss Morrison parked herself in the hall, wheelchair wedged between front door and coat stand. She liked a good row. Nellie and her daughter were brilliant at rows, since they were loud enough to be heard quite clearly. This one was heating up nicely.

  ‘You shouldn’t have brought the boys away from Willows. There’s dead bodies and all sorts down there in Liverpool.’

  ‘I didn’t know that, did I? If nobody tells us nothing, we don’t know nothing, do we?’

  Frances Morrison decided not to stand up and argue the case against double negatives. She hadn’t counted them anyway, so Nellie’s nobodies and nothings might have worked out positive . . . Language could be quite mathematical if one thought about it. But she couldn’t care less at the moment, because Keith was stepping into hot water, and Keith was quite effective when it came to the management of his wife. It was rather unfortunate, really, because he often put a full stop before a sentence had ended.

  ‘Eileen?’ Keith looked first at his father’s watch, then at his beautiful partner. ‘Right, that’s six minutes, and I’m chucking in the towel. Stop it. My newspaper’s curling at the edges, so give over. We all know what’s going to happen, because it’s like a bloody pantomime. You tear strips off your mother, she bounces back and calls you all the names under the sun. She cries, you cry, and all that energy’s been wasted, cos we all end up supping tea anyway.’

  ‘But she’s fetched two of my lads into a burning city, and—’

  ‘Stop it,’ he repeated. ‘I’m not having behaviour like this in a house belonging to a woman with a weak heart.’

  He had forgotten, just for a moment or two, that he was living in a matriarchy. Lancashire women were strong and bolshie; those who clung to the banks of the Mersey were particularly robust.

  ‘Spoilsport,’ called Miss Morrison, thereby proving to the only male in the house that even she was his superior, and she was supposed to be polite, since she came from the posher end of the conurbation and had a bad heart. They always bloody won in the end, didn’t they? Though he usually got some sense out of Eileen when they were alone. And horizontal. Oh, God, he mustn’t start laughing. His sweet angel would probably beat him about the head with a wet dishcloth if he kicked off laughing. And the cast iron frying pan was still standing on the hob.

  Nellie turned and leaned on the sink, but her shoulders betrayed the fact that she was trying not to chuckle. Eileen stared hard at the man she worshipped. There was amusement in his eyes, and he had not been given permission to be amused. ‘No interest for you this quarter, young man; I don’t care about the size of your deposits.’ His smile melted her heart, and she left the house in order to retrieve her sons before they took a nosedive into a bomb crater.

  While marching across the playing field, she wore a daft smile. She was putty in his hands, and she would deal with him later. Or would she? ‘Come on,’ she called. ‘All the explosives have gone, so there’s nothing to laugh at.’

  Inside the house, a delicate truce clung desperately to life. When Frances Morrison had been wheeled back to her room, and her lunch had been delivered, five people sat round the kitchen table. At its centre sat a package wrapped in red creˆpe paper done up with a festive if rather squashed green ribbon. Phil’s cheeks burned brightly.

  ‘For me?’ Eileen asked.

  Rob nodded. ‘He drawn it,’ he said, a thumb jerking in the direction of his older brother. ‘But Miss Pickavance put it in a frame and wrapped it up, like.’

  ‘Shut up,’ cried Nellie. ‘Don’t spoil the surprise.’

  Eileen opened her gift slowly, her gaze fixed on Phil. He had made whatever this was just for her. The lad had changed. She remembered his scribbles and how he had guarded them, head down, arm shielding the work from prying eyes. Her children were growing up, and the war had stolen precious months, because they could not be together as a family all the time. Phil was twelve, and his head was almost level with Keith’s shoulder. Soon he would be a man, and if she was going to be there to see him grow she would have to leave Mel, who was up to something— ‘Oh,’ she breathed. ‘Oh, Phil. That is wonderful. It’s Jay. Look, Keith; it’s him to a T.’

  Phil continued to blush. ‘It’s called Man at Work.’

  Eileen shook her head in near-disbelief. He’d always been able to draw, but this was the work of a trained artist. ‘Ink?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah. I found it in the roof.’

  Keith looked at the drawing. ‘You’ve even got that sideways twitch on his nose – he always goes sideways when he snores. The barn, the yard – I feel as if I’m there. That dandelion seems to be growing while I look at it.’

  Nellie broke the spell. She could always be depended on when it came to emotional moments. ‘He’s another Van Cough,’ she announced, ‘what cut his ear off and posted it to some poor bugger instead of a birthday card.’ She knew the words were wrong, but this was her way of making up with her daughter.

  Eileen ignored her mother. ‘Has Miss P looked at this?’

  Phil nodded. ‘Yes, she’s looked at them all. I’ve done some watercolours, too. And I’ve tried with oils.’

  ‘And what did she say, Phil?’

  ‘I have to see somebody about it. Manchester College of Art. She wants to put me in some exhibition gallery after the war.’ He pondered for a moment. ‘I’ve got more in my head now; things I saw today. Because I want to tell the truth in pictures. Like a diary, but sketched.’

  ‘Bombed houses.’ Nellie folded her arms. ‘He wants to draw the mess in town. You’re right, they shouldn’t have come here.’

  ‘That’s what I said till my dearly beloved shut me up. Phil, this is magic, son. There’s something about my kids. Every one of them’s talented. But this? Well, I don’t know what to say.’

  Keith cleared his throat. ‘That’ll make a nice change.’ He stood up, reached out his right hand and shook Phil’s. ‘You’re a star, lad. If you’ve shut your mother up, you’re a walking miracle, and I thank God you’re here. And . . . well, wherever he is, your dad’ll be proud of you. I’m proud, and I’m only your stepdad.’

  Nellie took the boys and the sketch through to the ground-floor bedroom. From the kitchen, Eileen and Keith heard the old lady as she exclaimed over the quality of Phil’s work. ‘Life’s full of surprises,’ said Eileen, her eye on the kitchen clock. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Mel? With Gloria, I expect. School holidays – they’ll be trying clothes on.’

  But Eileen didn’t agree. There was a glow in the cheeks of her fourteen-year-old daughter, a twinkle in her eyes. ‘I reckon she’s with Peter in Rachel Street, Miss Pickavance’s house. She has a key. They’ll be up to no good.’

  Thirteen

  ‘Jeanie!’ Neil Dyson staggered into Home Farm’s kitchen, the unconscious Jay Collins a dead weight in his arms. ‘He gets heavier with every step, I swear to God. Blankets.’ He placed Jay on the sofa before taking a few deep gulps of oxygen into lungs that had been working overtime for the best part of a mile. ‘Come on, Elsie. There’s nothing new on this earth, nothing you haven’t seen before. Strip him. His clothes are wet through and frozen. We’ve no chance of warming him up till we get these things off him. Towel him dry once he’s bare – there’s some nice rough towels on the pulley. We need to keep his blood on the move.’

  Elsie thrust her cup into Neil’s hands. ‘Get yourself outside that tea. You look nearly as bad as he does.’ She glanced at Jay. He was frighteningly still and, she suspected, near to coma. She grabbed towels from the line above the fireplace, put them on the fireguard to warm, then began to peel off the poor young chap’s clothing. There was hardl
y anything of him. She’d noticed that young ones with diabetes tended to be on the thin side. He needed building up and looking after, but would Gill Collins listen? Would she buggery. It was like trying to talk to a heap of coal in the dark. ‘Come on, lad. Buck up, eh?’ she whispered to the motionless Jay. ‘You’ve got to fettle a bit better than this, son.’

  Exhausted, Neil dropped into a chair. ‘Jean, run up to Willows and ask Miss Pickavance to tell the operator we need an ambulance fast. Hypogly-wotsit and hypothermia. Or diabetic, unconscious and very cold’s easier. Go on, love. I’d go myself, but I’m puffed after lugging him up from Four Oaks. I had him in a barrow, but the wheel shaft broke and I had to carry him. Soft bugger must have keeled over and fallen in the horse trough. Ice on the water wasn’t thick enough, so the mad article could have drowned in six inches of wet. I pumped the stuff out of him, and he’s breathing, but not for much longer if we don’t get help.’

  Jean screamed for her daughters. ‘Stella? Pat? Bring every sheet, blanket and eiderdown you can manage. Fill some hot water bottles.’ She grabbed hat and coat before running to the big house. Of course, it wasn’t the big house any more, was it? The big house had been pulled down years back and— Why was she thinking about this kind of stuff? Jay Collins lay near-dead, and here she was trying to remember the original sandstone building that had all but fallen down years ago.

  And she had bread in the oven, and the kitchen copper was boiling water so that she could do the extra sheets for Land Army girls’ beds. Wasting wood or coal was a sin, especially now. Oh, Gill, why couldn’t you have looked after him just a bit better? You know he’s no idea when it comes to counting points against insulin. ‘Jay,’ she muttered, ‘you’d best pull round, because we don’t want to bury you before we’ve given you a bloody good telling off, you mad bag of bones.’ Fighter pilot? The air force needed Jay like it needed squadrons of blind monkeys. He was lovable, though . . .

  Why couldn’t his wife love him? He needed taking in hand, but who had the time these days? Every farmer was up to his ear holes trying to make a hundred acres do the work of a thousand. ‘You’ll pull round, too, Gill Collins, if I have to break every bone in your miserable body. No time to play the wild card, not with a war on. Nervous bloody breakdowns are a luxury we can’t afford till later. Post-natal depression – huh!’