“Are we safe from the fires?” Mrs Robinson asked, after greeting him.
“Aye. There’s a firewatcher on the roof – young Dolly – she’ll tell you if fires out t’ back are spreading this side.”
“What’s burning?” Mrs Starr asked.
“Church House. It’ll be gutted. Too far gone to save. And the Corn Exchange and the White Star building – God knows how many others. Bootle’s calling for fire-engines out there, but they can’t spare none from here.” He heaved a sigh. “Must go check next door. Ta-ra.” He crunched his way back across the strewn canteen floor and they heard him curse as he caught his boot against one of the recumbent samovars and it clanged like a bell.
v
While Emmie and Gwen cleaned up their home and David laid new waterpipes in the Royal Infirmary, Conor walked round his district to assess the damage of the previous night.
“Rain’ll do more damage than t’bombs,” he told the already very depressed families, who a few streets away from his own home had lost their roofs. “I’ll get you some tarps to lay over the rafters.”
He returned to the post and put in a request for tarpaulin. Then he retrieved the front and back doors of the oldest couple affected, and helped the old man hang them again.
From nearby homes still comparatively undamaged, older women, silent, hands clasped over their stomachs, drifted over to watch and then to help their stricken neighbours shovel plaster and soot out of their chaotic little homes. Children, too small for school, found jam butties thrust into their hands by strange, smiling women. Buckets of water and trays of tea were lugged from several streets away, where water was still available. Friendships which were to last a lifetime were made between tearful outbursts from women beginning to quiver from delayed shock. The acute shortage of young, strong men to help was remarked upon and an extra tear was shed for those of them fighting in Greece or on a warship somewhere in the Mediterranean. And slowly, painfully slowly, some order was restored.
While he munched a very dry sandwich, back at the post, Conor wrote out his reports. After that, seething with rage, he went to see the bitch who had refused to produce the street’s stirrup-pump, at a time when the whole road had been littered with incendiaries.
God, how he needed a drink. He seemed to be floating, rather than walking. Lightheaded, that was the word. And what a fool he had been to put at the back of the cellar of the post the half dozen bottles of whiskey he had lifted from a lorry unwise enough to park in the district a couple of days before. Now, the post was as busy as a tram terminus and he could not retrieve them without its being noticed. If he had found a better place for them, he could have had a drink right now and flogged the rest for good money.
He slammed down his fountain pen and went home.
With one side of her face still slightly swollen from the blow he had given her, Ellen was in no mood to be conciliatory. Practically the whole of the family’s bacon radon piled on his plate, however, suggested that the storm might be passing. He was too tired, too overwhelmed by other people’s troubles laid upon his shoulders, to make an effort to break the silence between them, and as soon as he had mopped up the last bit of grease from his plate with a piece of bread, he announced that he was going to bed.
Within minutes, he was sound asleep, and did not hear Ellen shouting exasperatedly at Patrick’s back, as he went out of the front door.
“I’m not going to bed at seven o’clock, no matter how many raids there are,” he had said obstinately. “I’m goin’ to see a pal.” And he had wandered out into the deserted street, with a lazy grin at her over his shoulder.
He slipped through the soft spring evening, to the unfinished, roofless air raid shelter where he had taken Mari and where she had reluctantly promised to meet him again. He hung around outside it for nearly an hour, but Mari did not come.
A thoroughly scared Mari was certain that the previous night’s raid had been arranged by God particularly to punish her.
He walked back home, clenched fists in trouser pockets, shoulders hunched, muttering angrily under his breath. Nothing but a stuck-up Judy, that’s her. Wait till he caught her again. Yet, beneath his rage, he felt no true desire to harm her; only a craven fear that she would not come again; a young Romeo who had not yet managed to persuade his Juliet to fall in love with him. Wait till he was a Spitfire pilot, he reassured himself, with embroidered wings on his tunic; then she’d come crawling, and he might just condescend to take her to a dance.
At half-past ten, he was sitting despondently on the basement steps, listening to the guns and whistling to himself, while a fearful Ruby crouched close to him, pulling nervously at her thick, black fringe. Their sleepy father had tumbled back into his overalls and gone down to the post.
vi
Dress Materials at Blackler’s had, that Friday afternoon, been busy. Women were buying dress lengths, in anticipation of clothes being rationed; Gwen herself had several such lengths stored away in the mahogany chest of drawers brought from Emmie’s home. Out of her wages, she was also holding a little money in order to buy two pairs of silk stockings, which a girl from Hosiery had told her, during her tea break, had at last arrived.
She was surprised when her supervisor sent her over to the Dress Department to help out.
“They’re rushed off their feet,” she explained. “People wanting mourning clothes.”
When, homeward bound, she descended from the tram at the corner of her street, her feet ached abominably. She had sold so many black dresses that she felt deeply dispirited. At one point, she had been positively thankful to be faced with a giggling 15-year-old who wanted a pale blue bridesmaid’s dress.
“Me sister’s boy friend’s got a forty-eight-hour pass. Comin ’ome Tuesday night. Me mam’s nearly out of her mind tryin’ to get everything ready for a wedding on Wednesday mornin’.” The girl’s flippant elation had made several sad-faced women turn on her with reproving murmurs of “Really! At this time?” Unable to relate to the grief of strangers, she had gone away happy, with a fluff of blue net carefully packed in tissue paper.
“Phew!” Gwen groaned, as she tottered through the twilight. The sky was still an unnaturally bright pink, but she was too tired to care. She thought only of her clean bed, with David, solid and reliable, snoring on his side of it.
“Where’s your dad?” she asked Mari, as she took off her Sunday hat, black velveteen with a bunch of feathers held by a diamanté brooch, and laid it carefully in its box.
The girl lifted a wan face from gloomy contemplation of her arithmetic book and wiped her pen nib with a piece of blotting paper. “I don’t know, Mum. I’m scared. It’s late for him.”
“Ach, he’s probably doin’ overtime. What did you do with his bit of fish pie?”
“I kept it hot for a while. Then it got so dried out in the oven, I put it back in the pantry.”
“Good girl.”
Good girl? Mari chewed the end of her plait nervously, and sighed, and tried to forget the extraordinary sensations within her.
About midnight, David staggered in and thankfully plunked down his heavy tool-box.
“Worked late and then I had to walk home,” he told them as, regardless of the guns roaring outside, they scuttled round to get him his supper. “There’s a proper raid on down town. The sound of the planes diving, as I come along, give me the willies, they did. Hope our Em’s all right.”
Gwen had forgotten entirely about Emmie and now she paused, tea caddy in hand, a twinge of conscience striking her.
“Anyway, we can’t do anything about her,” he went on practically, as he sat down to his fish pie. “We should go to bed. They’re not bombing round here – too busy with the town to bother us.” He turned to Mari and said with a grin, “Your room’s a deal safer with the window being boarded up. Maybe young Patrick did you a good turn.”
Mari stared at him for a second, her smile frozen on her face. Then she said diffidently, “I suppose he did.”
&
nbsp; Gwen climbed nervously into her bed and pulled the clothes over her head, to shut out the sound of chugging aeroplane engines. Two hours of sitting on the basement steps had made her back ache and to lie down was a blessed relief. David put his head on his pillow and began to snore immediately. Mari lay quietly in the stuffy darkness of her room and wondered what had really happened to her. Could you have a baby if a boy touched you?
None of them heard Emmie’s flagging footsteps, when she came in. Groaning sleepily, they got up again at six o’clock in the morning and were astonished to find her sound asleep in David’s chair, a cold cup of tea beside her on the bookshelf.
SATURDAY, 3 MAY 1941
i
Gwen stared unbelievingly at the shattered windows of Blackler’s store. She seethed with indignation. An attack on Blackler’s was, she felt, an attack on her personally. It was her store.
She glanced along its usually immaculate frontage. Little piles of swept-up glass stood waiting to be shovelled away. The gaping holes which had once been windows filled with merchandise labelled with large, cheerful notices of special bargains, had been cleared; only one or two, where the glass, by some fluke, remained intact, still bravely displayed for the benefit of the weekend invasion of shoppers from Wales a collection of special offers.
And the Welsh were coming in in force. Dressed in their best, they came by train and bus not only to buy but to make holiday, joining shoppers from the Liverpool suburbs, in touring the damage wreaked on the city and viewing the roaring fires. People from slum and suburb alike walked into cafés and grocery shops whose fronts had been blown out, and stood around feasting on food not yet salvaged. Rowdy groups, dodging the already harassed police, calmly looted anything they fancied, laughing and joking and getting drunk on wines and spirits they found in the grocery stores. Not a few owners defended their little broken shops with cricket bats, battered symbols of integrity.
As, later on, she snipped lengths of material for a customer who spoke, with disgust, of the behaviour of a group of hooligans she had seen, Gwen said bitterly, “You’d think we was a circus, the way they gape – and a free-for-all. Rob their own mothers, they would.”
“Aye,” the customer agreed heavily. “Who’d have believed it?”
ii
David usually finished work at twelve noon on Saturdays, and Gwen had left a dish of stew in the oven for his midday meal. It grew dryer and dryer and finally shrivelled up on the plate, because David had not, that morning, been pursuing the incredible intricacies of the plumbing of the Royal Infirmary. He had, instead, been pounced on by his supervisor, immediately upon his arrival, and had been sent by taxi out to Bootle, together with his mate, Arthur, a grizzled ancient, back in the work force after four years of retirement.
“Bloody chaos out there,” the supervisor had told them. “No water. Gas lines flaring up in the streets. Electric’s out. Report to the town hall. They’ll tell you where to go.”
They were joined by two electricians, who had also been impounded, and as they sat in the taxi, tool-boxes rattling in the luggage compartment by the driver, they looked out in astonishment and no little trepidation at increasing turmoil, the further north they proceeded.
The driver had to pick his way through miles of littered streets made muddy by burst water lines and, in places, lacings of fire-hoses temporarily abandoned for lack of water pressure. Timber yards crackled and smoked on both sides of the road, the draught of the flames making it hard for the driver to keep the taxi stable, for a scarifying few minutes. Occasionally, they would be redirected by police or special constables, to detour a mass of masonry spread across a street.
When they finally found the streets they were to work in, after being redirected by a series of city officials, they stood for a moment bewildered, their tools at their feet, wondering where in earth to start. Civil defence workers of every kind toiled amid the havoc, while the homeless scrambled over the debris in an effort to pick out some belongings which might still be usable. In desperate efforts to help families still entombed, some of them got into the way of rescue workers cautiously digging through piles of bricks, mortar and shattered wood, to get at victims for whom there was little hope. Others stood in forlorn groups, an occasional sob indicating some poor soul for whom it was all too much; still others were unnaturally cheerful, thankful to have survived; the true hardship of their situation would hit them later.
A hundred yards up the street, a cracked gas line gave way. A white sheet of flame roared upwards, its deadly heat threatening further damage. Rescuers and inhabitants scrambled over debris to a safer distance.
“Good God!” exclaimed Arthur, and turned to run.
David caught his arm. His breath came in frightened gasps, but he said, “It could blow the whole street up. Better find the valve. See if we can turn it off.” He grabbed a tool from his box and followed by a protesting Arthur ran towards the explosion. While wardens shouted to them to come back, they searched likely spots for the valve they needed, and, within a minute or two, found it. A quick twist and the flame subsided. David stood very still for a moment, holding on to Arthur, while the pain in his chest subsided, a shivering unsung hero, like many others that day.
Soon, watched anxiously by housewives, black-shawled against the morning coolness, David and Arthur were set to work by a city hall official to reconnect a major break in a water line. The women were desperate for water to clean their damaged homes and wash the dirt off their children and themselves. The Women’s Voluntary Service brought food both to workers and watchers, and they stood around in the street, their children about them, while they thankfully sipped mugs of tea. Their voices were shrill with nervous tension and they wound their shawls tightly round themselves for comfort. To David, it seemed particularly wicked that people so painfully poverty-stricken should have their tiny, crowded homes broken open like eggs. “And the men at sea – or struggling to keep the docks working,” David muttered angrily to Arthur.
There was no question of going home that night; the need of them in Bootle was too grave.
As twilight approached, he and Arthur paused to stretch themselves and eat the sandwiches brought to them by the indefatigable WVS canteen staff. They both became aware of a general movement in the neighbourhood. Women, pushing perambulators or pushchairs loaded with children and bedding, were so numerous as to form a long procession in the now partially tidied up street.
“Where do you think they’re goin’?” he asked Arthur.
“Walkin’ out to Huyton, to sleep in t’ fields, I expect. It’s a deal safer’n staying here overnight.”
David nodded. Except for an occasional shout to a child to mind himself, the procession was strangely quiet. There was a dull acceptance in the passing faces, framed in dusty, tousled hair. Dragging boots made a slow shuffling sound on the gritty street.
“They’ll be back in t’ mornin’, bright and early no doubt,” remarked Arthur, “to check on their homes – and sent t’ kids to school – if the school’s still there.”
iii
Mari and her friend, Dorothy, went to the Saturday, children’s programme at the cinema that afternoon and then went home to Dorothy’s house for tea.
While his mother sat on the front step, nursing Michael and enjoying the sunshine, and Ruby and Nora played skipping on the pavement, Patrick sloped around the alleyways, hoping to find Mari. Unsuccessful, he irritably teased his father’s fighting cocks and for his pains got a long scratch on the back of his right hand.
Conor Donnelly’s area had been mercifully free from incidents on the previous night, so while he had a comparatively quiet day, he wandered down to the Hercy Dock to see if he could find an American sailor off a tanker, with nylons or lipsticks for sale. Both fetched good prices on the black market.
iv
As Gwen bustled into her home about eight o’clock that evening, she felt more energetic than she had done for some days. A few hours of good sleep, despite the noise of t
he raid, had restored her, and she had enjoyed at Blackler’s the close feeling of unity amongst her companions, engendered by their joint dislike of the large influx of sightseers and ill-intentioned riff-raff into the town.
Mari was sitting alone, by the fire, slowly turning the heel of a sock, one of a pair she was knitting as a contribution to a parcel being made up for the men of the King’s Regiment. Two of the girls in the class had fathers serving in it, stationed at Hull. Mari was a good knitter, having been taught by her mother as soon as she could hold a pair of butcher’s skewers and a ball of wool.
“Yer dad not in?” Gwen inquired, as she once more returned her best hat to its box.
“No.” Mari paused, needle in stitch.
Mari was feeling a little less panic-stricken about Patrick. She had stuck close to Dorothy all day, and after tea they had rearranged Dorothy’s doll’s house and put up new curtains in it. Mr Hale, Dorothy’s father, who had to go to a chapel meeting, had kindly walked her home, since it was on his way. They walked slowly because he limped; Dorothy said he had been wounded in the First World War at a terrible place called Passchendaele, and, as had sometimes happened in her grandfather’s house, Mari was reminded that the results of war stayed on and on, long after the battles were finished. Did it mean, she wondered fearfully, that her life would be different after the war? Would she, all her life, drag a foot or, much worse, be jeered at because she had been disfigured? She nearly choked, when she remembered that her grandfather had once told her that he had a friend kept permanently in hospital because he had almost no face.
She had thought about this, as she sat quietly knitting; it was all mixed up with a hodge-podge of ideas about Patrick. To her relief, her figure had not swelled up as she knew a pregnant woman’s did, so she had begun to think that being caressed all over by a boy’s exploring fingers did not produce a baby, and that was a relief; she had heard of girls who had committed suicide because they were pregnant and did not have a proper husband.
Three Women of Liverpool Page 6