Put Out the Fires

by Maureen Lee

  Well, there was no harm in asking.

  “What does your husband do, Eileen?” he enquired casually.

  The husband?” She looked slightly startled, as if she’d forgotten she had one. “Oh, Francis was in the Territorials when the war started, like, so he was called up straight away. The Royal Tank Regiment were sent to Egypt last February.”

  Francis! Of course, Francis Costello, who worked for the Mersey Docks & Harbour Board and had a seat on Bootle Corporation. Donnie remembered the chap distinctly. He was one of those silver-tongued Irishmen with the gift of the gab who was great mates with Jack Doyle. Everyone spoke highly of Francis, though Donnie, more astute than most, hadn’t taken to him much. He seemed a bit of a fake, insincere, as if everything he said was only to impress people.

  “I suppose you miss him, like?” he probed.

  “I suppose,” she replied listlessly, which Donnie took to mean she didn’t miss him at all, though she missed the “friend”, the one with the cottage in Melling who’d joined the RAF. She gave a funny, cracked laugh and seemed to pull herself together. “I’m not exactly cheerful company, am I, luv? Anyroad, I’d best be going. I only came out for a breath of fresh air, like, and I’ve been gone for ages. It’ll take half an hour or more to get back, and me feet are killing me in these shoes.”

  “I’ll walk with you,” he said with alacrity, wishing he was big enough to carry her, which he would have offered to do willingly if she’d let him. “In fact, I might call on your Sean. I haven’t seen him since I got me uniform.”

  “Well I never!” she said in surprise as soon as they were outside. “The sun’s come out.”

  The dark clouds which had appeared when she left the house, as if in sympathy with her mood, had completely disappeared and the sky was a dusky blue. The sun itself was out of sight, but the tops of the ships anchored behind the high dock walls were suffused with an unnaturally vivid light.

  A cart passed them, drawn by two horses, magnificent beasts, their sleek bodies as black as coal and with tumbling silken manes. The wooden wheels bumped on the uneven surface of the road, and the driver held the reins loosely in his hands, as if fully confident the animals needed no directions. His shoulders were hunched and he looked tired, as well he might, for he’d probably begun work before the crack of dawn.

  “I love the Docky,” Eileen said with a catch in her voice. “When we were little, me and our Sheila used to come and meet me dad when it was time for him to hand in his tally. I was a bit scared in those days. The high walls made me feel as if we were walking on the very bottom of the world.” She also loved the smells, even if some weren’t exactly pleasant; the aroma of oils and spices, of carpets and tea and coal, and all the million and one imports and exports that came from and went to places all over the world. The atmosphere was alien, slightly mysterious, and even now, at this late hour, there were scores of black, brown and yellow faces around, and the gabble of a dozen different tongues.

  The dad said Liverpool Docks are die next to biggest in the world,” Donnie said, as proudly as if he were the owner.

  Eileen nodded. “That’s right, only those in Hamburg are bigger.” They began to walk in the direction of Bootle.

  “Have you finished your training, Donnie?” Eileen asked.

  “Oh, yes.” He squared his shoulders importantly. “I take up me first posting tomorrow. I’m on a corvette guarding a convoy of merchant marine all the way to America.”

  “Our Cal, that’s Calum Reilly, our Sheila’s husband, he’s a merchant seaman and due back from America any minute, God willing.” She crossed herself briefly, the way his mam often did. It wasn’t only in the air that the battle for survival was being fought. The carnage at sea, the loss of life and tonnage of ships being destroyed, was getting more and more horrendous by the day as German Uboats prowled the Atlantic in their search for prey. She looked down at him quickly. “You’ll take care of yourself, won’t you, Donnie?”

  “Oh, you can bet your life on that!” he said cockily. He couldn’t wait to serve his country and give old Hitler the promised kick up the arse. On the other hand, although he did his best not to think about the dangers that lay ahead, . sometimes, alone in the middle of the night, he felt quite scared. You had to be devoid of imagination completely, and Donnie had more imagination than most, not to visualise the ship being torpedoed and him tossed into the icy waters of the Atlantic and struggling to stay above the waves. Or, perhaps worse, trapped by fire in the signalroom and roasting, ever so slowly, to death. There were half a dozen of his mates who’d already lost their dads or older brothers at sea, and his mam behaved as if Donnie had already had a death sentence passed on him. He was only eighteen, thought Donnie, panicking suddenly, and didn’t want to die. There were all sorts of things he wanted to do with his life, and dying young wasn’t one of them. One day, he’d like to meet a girl like Eileen Doyle and get married . . .

  To Donnie’s horror, he felt his eyes fill with tears and he prayed Eileen wouldn’t notice. He’d been trying to impress her as a man of the world, and here he was on the brink of crying in the street like a little boy.

  “Just a minute, I’ve got something in me eye.” The tears were by now coursing down his cheeks.

  The lie didn’t work.

  “Oh, luv!” She pushed him into a doorway and took him in her arms and there they were, in the clinch Donnie had been imagining ever since they met, but there was nothing romantic about it as she patted his back like a baby and said, “There, now. There.”

  “I went into town this awy to buy me mam and dad and our Clare their Christmas presents,” he sobbed, “in case I was dead by the time it came. Then I walked home along the Docky, because it’s where I used play when I was a kid and I thought I might never see it again.”

  When he was a kid! He was little more than a kid now, thought Eileen in despair. What a terrible world it had become, when lads of eighteen expected to be dead by Christmas!

  “I’ll say a special prayer for you every night, Donnie,” she vowed. “Perhaps you can drop in and see us whenever you’re home, just so’s I know you’re all right, like.” He was a kind lad, and had been a tremendous help that day.

  “Come on, now, luv, dry your eyes and we’ll go home.”

  “I don’t think I’ll call on Sean,” he sniffed. “I’ll go back to me mam and dad and have a game of Snakes and Ladders with our Clare. It’s me last night . . . ” He stopped and gave his nose a good blow on a rather grubby handkerchief.

  “That’s a good idea,” she said comfortably. Anyroad, knowing Sean, he’d be out with one of his never-ending stream of girlfriends.

  They scarcely spoke again the rest of the way as they turned off the Dock Road and walked passed the Goods Yard and through the warren of narrow streets of two-up, two-down terraced houses where they lived. Eileen seemed lost in thought and Donnie felt too embarrassed to say another word. What on earth would she think of him, breaking down like that?

  “This is our street,” he said awkwardly when they reached the Chaucer Arms, and she came to, blinking, as if she’d forgotten he was there. He almost wished he could run away without another word.

  “Take care,” she said. “Don’t forget, I’ll be praying for you.”

  “Ta.” He shuffled his feet awkwardly. “I hope you come through the raids all right, and . . . ” He wanted to say he hoped her RAF friend would come through, too. Instead, just to be polite, he said, “And I hope your husband comes home safe and sound.”

  To his surprise, she gave a little bitter laugh. “There’s no need to worry about Francis, he’s quite safe, if not entirely sound. He arrived back unexpectedly this afternoon and they’re going to discharge him from the army. He’s home for good.”

  Chapter 2

  Eileen waited on the corner for Donnie to wave goodbye.

  But she waited in vain, for the small hunched figure merely crossed the street and went into the house without a glance in her direction. No do
ubt he felt awkward bursting into tears like that, she thought as she continued towards home. She reckoned, somewhat sadly, that she’d probably never see Donnie Kennedy again unless they met by accident.

  It had been four o’clock exactly, and she’d been about to slam the door on 16 Pearl Street for the final time, already late for Nick, having missed the train through no fault of her own, when an ambulance turned into the street, bringing Francis Costello home to his family. Eileen was put in the worst predicament she’d ever known; how could you walk out and meet your lover when your husband had returned injured from North Africa?

  Sheila thought she should have gone and let Francis look after himself. “I would have, if it was me.” His head was heavily bandaged and he’d lost the sight of his left eye, but he could walk and talk and indeed had seemed quite cheerful when he arrived. “You owe him nothing, Eileen,”

  Sheila cried. “Nothing!”

  By not going, she was letting Nick and Tony down, Sheila added, working herself up into a proper lather.

  Tony couldn’t wait to live in Melling in the cottage with black beams on the ceiling and roses around the door and apple trees and strawberries in the garden. He’d been looking forward to sleeping in the room with the new curtains which Mr Singerman had made on the window.

  Most of all, he was looking forward to having Nick for a dad, because his real dad made him feel unhappy most of the time.

  “For Jaysus sake, girl,” Sheila said scathingly, “there’s a war on. You should snatch at happiness if it chances to come your way, ‘cos by this time next week you might be dead. The most important people are the ones you love,’ which all seemed strange to Eileen, because Sheila was the religious one, not her. She couldn’t have just walked away.

  She couldn’t have lived with Nick, or, more importantly, with herself, if she had. She felt split in two, utterly divided between love for one man and responsibility to another - though if she’d caught the train it might have been different. She would never know how she would have felt, once ensconced in Melling with Nick before she’d learnt Francis was home.

  She imagined Nick sitting in the cottage alone. What was he thinking? How was he feeling? She’d slipped along in her dinner hour yesterday and set the table with a new white cloth and freshly polished cutlery ready for today’s tea, so the place would look homely and welcoming when they arrived for the start of their life together - not that Nick would be there for long. He had a fortnight’s leave due to a broken wrist, but once the time was up, he’d be back to the damn Spitfires he loved so much. In the meantime, there was a tin of salmon in the larder, along with a pound of home-grown tomatoes bought from a woman in the village who grew them in her own greenhouse, plus her and Tony’s entire week’s butter ration. Unlike them, Nick hadn’t been brought up on margarine, and claimed it tasted like petrol.

  If only she hadn’t missed the train! The thought of what might have been “if only”, of lying in Nick’s arms that night, his lovely brown eyes smiling into hers, caused an ache so fierce she felt as if a knife had been driven through her.

  She must have been walking in a dream, because she didn’t hear the music, and all of a sudden found herself in Pearl Street, when she’d meant to avoid everyone by going down the entry of the neighbouring street and entering the house by the back way.

  Although Annie and Chris had left for their honeymoon hours ago, the reception was still in full swing and most people remained outside as if trying to squeeze as much enjoyment as they could out of the occasion, for Pearl Street loved nothing more than a party. The women wore their best frocks, as befitted a wedding, though the men who clustered around the King’s Arms on the corner with their pints of ale had long since loosened their stiff collars and removed their ties. Children playing tick darted in and out of the grown-ups, their voices sounding extra high and extra loud, even above the music, on the still evening air. There weren’t so many children about as usual, as quite a few had been re-evacuated to places like Wales and Southport when the air-raids had begun. Eileen noticed Tony wasn’t there. When she left he’d been in the back yard kicking a football against the wall with a monotonous regularity that would have got on her nerves had she not known the reason for it. Tony didn’t want Francis back any more than she did.

  The atmosphere in the street was carefree with an undercurrent of defiant excitement, as if everyone were lying to themselves, “We know there’s a war on, but that’s not going to stop us from having a good time!”

  In Number 3, the parlour window had been shoved up as high as it would go and Mr Singerman was playing Tipperary Mary on the piano. People clapped their hands in time to the music as Agnes Donovan and Ellis Evans did an improvised jig, lifting their skirts as they approached each other with a sort of wary caution, elbows jutting, feet lifting daintily on the confetti-covered cobbles. Ellis was almost twice Aggies’s size, yet she seemed the lighter as they joined arms and skipped a circle, changed arms and skipped another. The women’s frocks were as familiar to Eileen as the clothes in her own wardrobe; Ellis’s blue brocade, bought for a wedding a decade or more ago, was becoming decidedly the worse for wear, as if the creases stubbornly refused to be pressed out for the hundredth or more time. Aggie’s brown wool with the turquoise beads like birds’ eggs on the bodice, seemed to get bigger the more she wore it; either that, or her already skinny frame was shrinking further in her old age.

  Mr Singerman increased the tempo and Eileen imagined his gnarled old yellow fingers skipping over the equally yellow keys of the upright piano with the painted flowers on the front. The pace was too much for Ellis whose face was already bright red, and she collapsed, panting, in an open doorway. Aggie, thirty years older, finished the jig by herself to a burst of applause.

  Phoebe Crean’s two mongol lads, Harry and Owen, were dancing with each other, their faces the picture of utter happiness as they did a clumsy sort of waltz, whilst Phoebe watched over them, her own face bursting with a mixture of pride and love.

  By now, the sun which had reappeared earlier was slithering out of sight for good, so that the chimneys of the fifteen houses on one side of the street were silhouetted blackly against its dark gold radiance and the slate roofs of those opposite had the appearance of melting lead. Eileen tried to slink along to Number 16 unnoticed, but she’d already been spotted. The neighbours crowded round solicitously and several grabbed her sleeve. Pearl Street had already lost two of its own to the conflict. Now another had arrived home with his head wreathed in bandages, and they were full of sympathy for his poor wife.

  “Hello, luv. How’s Francis?”

  “It’s a terrible thing for such a handsome chap to be disfigured like that.”

  Mr Singerman must have noticed her arrival through the window, and came hurrying out to ask after Francis in the deep, strangely youthful voice which had never lost its Russian accent, despite the fact he’d lived in England for three-quarters of his long life.

  “He seems fine,” Eileen assured them. “He’s taken it very well.” Very well indeed, she thought wryly. He’d been quite the proud hero when he first arrived, as if he’d gained a medal, not lost an eye. “He was about to have a bit of a lie down when I left.”

  “Is that Eileen? Is that Eileen Costello?” Paddy O’Hara came towards her, his white stick tapping on the cobbles.

  “Here I am, Paddy.” Eileen touched his cheek briefly and he clasped her hand.

  “It’s a shame, a dead shame,” he said dolefully. “After all, he didn’t have to join up, did he? A man of his age wouldn’t be anywhere near to getting his call-up papers yet. He’s a fine, brave man altogether, is Francis Costello.”

  People always said that about Francis. People had actually wondered how she’d manage without him when he first went away. If they lived with him a little while, Eileen thought bitterly, if the women spent just one night in the same bed and put up with his disgusting behaviour, they’d soon change their minds.

  Agnes Donovan squeezed
Eileen’s arm hard with her bony fingers. “Now you mustn’t think of giving up that important job of yours. We’ll keep a lookout for Francis, and for Tony, too, while you’re at work.” She turned to the other women. “Won’t we, girls?”

  There was a chorus of agreement and Eileen said, touched, “I don’t know what I’d do without yis all, though I don’t think it’ll be necessary as far as Francis is concerned.

  He’s already talking about going back to work as soon as he gets his discharge from the army.”

  They were the best neighbours in the world, though she was well aware that Agnes Donovan’s motives weren’t solely altruistic. Aggie liked nothing better than to manoeuvre herself into another woman’s house and poke around. Soon, rumours would circulate that soandso’s bedding wasn’t changed as often as it should be or their sink could be a mite cleaner. Eileen reminded herself that Aggie frequently let Sheila have her meat coupons. Deep down at heart, she was kind.

  “Anyroad,” said Brenda Mahon, who was Sheila’s best friend, “once Francis is back on his feet, you can still move to Melling. It’s a shame you had to put it off.”