Put Out the Fires

by Maureen Lee

  She’d even had the strangest feeling that he was already hers, that he had nothing to do with Dilys.

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “The authorities that deal with such matters, adoption societies or -whatever they’re called.”

  Sheila looked puzzled. “What’s it got to do with them? If Dilys said you were to have him, then you should. There’s a woman in Garnet Street who brought up another woman’s baby when she had a girl and not the boy she really wanted, and one of me mates from school lived with her grandma right from when she was born. All you need to do is get him registered, that’s all.”

  Ruth shook her head. “I want it to be official. I couldn’t bear it if someone took him off me in a few months’ time.”

  She would be heartbroken enough if he was taken from her now. With a flash of illumination that left her reeling, she knew that was why Dilys had bravely struggled through the birth, alone and virtually silent in the dark, so Ruth would find the baby in her own bed and want to keep it. In hospital, it might have been whisked away in a stranger’s arms. The poor girl had been told what to expect and knew when she went to bed she was in labour.

  What was it she’d said when Ruth offered to buy a nightdress? “I won’t need one.” Perhaps, you never know, she’d felt contractions in Spellow Lane and deliberately had herself thrown out so she’d have an excuse to come back to Pearl Street, drawn instinctively to Ruth, the only person who cared. No, she couldn’t possibly let someone else have Dilys’ baby.

  “What about Ellis? She’s his grandmother,” she said.

  Sheila snorted rudely. She lifted the baby off her shoulder where he’d gone to sleep and stared at his grumpy, old man’s face. “If there was a chance of Ellis getting her hands on this lovely little bugger, I’d kidnap him meself,” she said flatly. “She won’t want anything to do with him, I know that for sure. Here, take him back, and I’ll make us all a cup of tea.”

  Ruth stretched out her arms eagerly for her baby.

  In February, the entire country decided that as far as the war went, things were definitely looking up. Morale, though never low, began to soar. Lloyds of London, it was reported, were laying odds of five to two that peace and victory would be theirs by June that year, and at last it looked as if the marauding, murderous U-boats were being brought under control. Tobruk was taken by the British and Australians, and Mussolini was being hammered into the African ground. In Ethiopia, which had been conquered by Italy in 1936, the exiled Emperor Haile Selassie was brought back by the British whilst they continued to drive the enemy out. Italy, it seemed, was beginning to fall apart.

  What did it matter then, with victory on the horizon, that there wasn’t enough meat to fill your rations, or the greengrocers had hardly any vegetables, except potatoes, and even less fruit, and the sweetshops stayed closed for days for lack of sweets to sell?

  “We shall pull through,” Winston Churchill assured the people, “we cannot tell when or how, but we shall come through. None of us has any doubts whatever.”

  In Pearl Street, Kate Thomas went to see Ruth Singerman as promised. She was astounded to find Dilys gone, and the baby being held firmly in the arms of a beautiful woman with shining eyes and dark red hair who looked rather like a Madonna as she stared down at the child. It was the first time Ruth and Kate had met.

  After initial exclamations of awe and wonder at his size and strong build, Kate Thomas asked, “Has he been checked by a doctor?”

  “Of course. I took him to be examined straight away,” said Ruth. “The doctor said he’s a perfectly healthy baby and beautifully formed.”

  “And you wish to keep him?”

  “That’s what Dilys wanted,” Ruth said firmly. She was conscious of the baby’s heart beating close to her own.

  “Well, I see no harm in that, but what about your job? I take it you won’t be able to give up work?”

  Ruth found the woman’s manner rather officious and overbearing, but Eileen had already warned her not to take any notice. “She’s upper-class and used to bossing people about and giving orders. Underneath, she’s all heart and anxious to help.”

  She replied, “No, I need the money more than ever now, but Sheila Reilly - that’s Eileen’s sister-has offered to look after him while I’m at work. She’s longing to get her hands on a baby. And my father will take him for walks. Sheila’s promised to lend me a pram.”

  “You seem to have everything quite nicely sorted out.”

  Miss Thomas chucked the baby under the chin. “What do you intend to call him?”

  “Michael,” Ruth replied. The name had come to her out of the blue and held no connotations or memories of people she had known in the past.

  “As this is Liverpool, everyone will call him Mike or Mick or even Micky.”

  “My father’s already pointed that out, but I shall call him Michael, nothing else.”

  “You don’t need my help, after all,” Kate smiled.

  “Everything’s perfectly fine.”

  “Not really.” Ruth looked at the woman anxiously. “I want to adopt him. I want him to be officially mine.” She stroked the baby’s cheek. “Have you any idea what I should do?”

  Kate looked dubious. “I don’t know much about these things, but I think the powers that be like children to go to married couples. I’ve no idea how they would regard a single woman.”

  “But I can try, can’t I?” Ruth said eagerly.

  “I wouldn’t if I were you.” Kate looked even more dubious. “I’d advise against getting in touch with anyone in authority. You know what some of these people are like, little tinpot Hitlers, if you’ll pardon the comparison.

  Once they know you have the baby, they might start waving the big stick and take him away, even if it means the poor little thing being dumped in an orphanage.

  Frankly, I’d keep quiet about it.” Her earnest little face split into a wide grin. “Either that, or get married. That would be the best thing of all.”

  Something else happened in February, though scarcely of world-shattering importance. It mattered only to one person, but to that person, it felt like a milestone that she’d never thought she’d pass.

  Eileen Costello was accepted into the Women’s Land Army and moved into the hostel, a dilapidated old vicarage, with Peggy Wilson and eighteen other land girls, where the warden, Mrs Bunce, a moody but goodnatured woman, kept them strictly in line. Eileen didn’t care about curfews; she didn’t even mind the appalling food, so different from that supplied by Edna. She knew straight away she would like it; the atmosphere was carefree and full of fun, just like Dunnings, though here the girls came from all walks of life, stretching right across the social sphere. They slept four to a room, and the backgrounds of the three women Eileen shared with couldn’t have been more different. Gillian Mitchell, intense and studious, had just finished university when the war started, and had a BA (Hons) degree in Biology, whereas Val Hanrahan, just eighteen, was the only experienced farmworker in the place, having been born on a farm in County Antrim. Pam Jones, very tall and as thin as a lath, had never worked before. She was a quiet girl, who’d married a midshipman in the Royal Navy just before Christmas, and she spent most of the time writing long letters to her new husband.

  All the girls had adapted to their new environment with remarkable, cheerful stoicism. They made a joke out of their aches and pains, and the appalling conditions under which they worked.

  The thing that happened, the milestone, occurred on Eileen’s second night there, when Gillian removed a Wellington boot and a mouse came scurrying out and disappeared through a hole in the skirting board.

  Gillian screamed blue murder, despite the fact, as she assured them later, she’d examined many a mouse under a microscope during her course at university, but the others, the mouse by now in a place where it could do no harm to three girls who worked every day with creatures immeasurably bigger and more dangerous, fell about with helpless laughter, including Eileen Costello,
much to her astonishment when the laughter had subsided.

  Later that night, she wrote to Nick, an affectionate letter in which she suggested they meet. “Can you get a weekend’s leave? You could stay in the village pub. I’d love to see you.”

  She’d never stop mourning Tony, she knew that, but perhaps she was beginning to learn to live with it.

  Chapter 13

  Brenda Mahon smiled cynically when she noticed the letter on the mat was from Xavier. His letters were becoming more frequent and more frantic ever since she’d stopped sending money. “It’s awful hard managing on seven bob a week,” he complained. “What’s happening down there? Has the dressmaking dried up or something?”

  She still wrote to him regularly every Sunday, friendly little letters that she didn’t mean a word of, which completely ignored his pleas for cash. In fact, she didn’t even mention money, and imagined how frustrated he must feel when he opened the envelope and a postal order for thirty bob or more didn’t drop out as it used to and there was no explanation as to why.

  It wasn’t until a couple of hours later that she bothered to read the letter and when she did, she felt herself grow faint. Xavier had a few days’ leave beginning on 10 March.

  He was coming home!

  Bloody hell!” she screamed. She tried to remember today’s date, but couldn’t even remember the month.

  Since Carrie turned up, life was nothing but a lazy meaningless blur. In the end, she had to nip along to Sheila Reilly’s to take a look at her calendar where she discovered today was Friday, March 7, which meant Xavier would arrive on Monday. He’d given no indication of the time.

  Brenda ran home and hastily lit a fag to calm her nerves.

  “Bloody hell!” she said again.

  “Whassa’ matter?” asked Sonny, who was playing with a feather duster.

  “Your dad’s intending to put in an appearance,” she told him.

  Brenda was on tenterhooks all day long waiting for Carrie to come home so she could break the news. Not that she got on all that well with Carrie lately. Relations had turned frosty since New Year’s Eve. It seemed as if the dance had reminded Carrie there were other men in the world as well as Xavier, and she was out on a date almost every night. She’d dash in, yellower than ever, plaster another layer of make-up over the one she’d put on that morning, change her frock, then dash out again to meet her latest feller.

  “Why don’t you come with me?” she asked Brenda regularly. It seemed that Tom or Dick or Harry had a mate and they could make a foursome.

  “I don’t want to,” Brenda would answer sourly. It was her own fault the atmosphere had changed. She no longer felt even vaguely happy as she wallowed in the pigsty that had become her home. The truth was, she felt jealous of Carrie. She knew darned well the mate wouldn’t want her.

  His face would be bound to drop when plain old Brenda Mahon turned up. “Anyroad, I’m already married, aren’t I?” she said once. “Not like you.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Carrie demanded.

  Brenda didn’t know what she meant. She didn’t know anything nowadays. She was merely the dressmaker who lived downstairs whose entire life had been turned upside down. Some days she hated Carrie and other days she admired her tough, sparky spirit. Then there were times when she wanted Xavier back more than anything in the world, and times when she could have killed him. Why did he take a second wife? What had Brenda done wrong or not done right to make him go off and marry someone else? You never know, she thought on the blackest days, he might have a third wife by now, a Scots girl called Flora Macdonald or something, who wore a tartan dress for the wedding. Xavier would really fancy himself in a kilt.

  “Seeing as how you’re so bleedin’ virtuous,” Carrie sneered on one occasion, “what are you doing with Vince?”

  “He’s just a friend.”

  “Huh!”

  But Brenda felt too confused and depressed to argue.

  Vince had turned up at the beginning of January. “I bet you’re missing something,” he said when Brenda opened the door to his knock. She stared for a long time at the rather ugly young man, neatly dressed in a belted gabardine mackintosh and tweed cap, before recognising him as the conductor on the bus on New Year’s Eve. It was the thick glasses that did it.

  “Not that I’ve noticed,” she said.

  He produced something bright green out of his pocket.

  “Your evening bag! I put it in Lost Property, but when no-one turned up to claim it, I thought I’d better bring it round. I felt sure it would be you. If I remember right, your dress was the same colour.”

  Brenda gasped. “It’s got me identity card in! I hadn’t noticed it was missing. It’s not like a proper bag, the sort I keep me purse in.” She recalled shoving it in her pocket, but it must have gone down between the back of the seat instead.

  “That’s how I knew where you lived.” “It’s dead kind of you.” She felt quite overcome. “Ta, very much. Did you come much out of your way to get here?”

  “From Smithdown Road, but I go for free on the bus.”

  Brenda had no idea where Smithdown Road was, but knew it wasn’t local. It seemed mean not to offer him a cup of tea, but, as usual, the place was like a midden. She wondered which was worse: not to ask him in, or to let him see the dustbin in which she now lived? “Would you like a cup of tea?” she enquired, deciding on the former and hoping he’d refuse.

  Instead, he said eagerly, “Well, I never say no to a cuppa.”

  “I’m afraid it’s all in a bit of a state. I haven’t had time to tidy up this morning.”

  When they went into the living room, she hastily removed an empty gin bottle and two glasses off the table, and picked up some of the litter off the floor. Sonny began to wail when she took away the empty cornflake box he appeared to be eating. She gave him one of Monica’s dolls and he immediately began to screw the head off.

  “Sit down,” she said, emptying a chair of dirty clothes.

  “I suppose I’d better introduce meself. I’m Vincent McLoughlin, Vince for short. I already know your name from your identity card. Brenda, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right.” She fetched a kettle of water and threw a few more cobs of coal on the dying fire. It was a bind having to remember to keep the fire stoked up.

  “That’s a fine looking little chap,” said Vince, nodding at Sonny who was chewing the doll’s ear.

  “He’s not mine,” Brenda said quickly. “He belongs to me friend. I only look after him while she’s at work. I’ve two girls, meself, Monica and Muriel. They’re both at school.

  Me husband’s in the Army,” she added, just in case he got any ideas. She could have sworn he looked slightly disappointed and wasn’t sure whether to feel flattered or not.

  “I’m not married meself. I was courting for five years, but we broke up right before the wedding.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It was a mutual decision. We decided we weren’t right for each other, after all.”

  Well, you certainly took your time about it, Brenda thought. “It was dead nice of you to come all this way with me bag,” she said.

  “Think nothing of it. I reckoned one of these days you’d be looking for your identity card and you’d never remember where you lost it.”

  “You’re probably right.” She would probably have thought Sonny had eaten it.

  “When you got on me bus on New Year’s Eve, I couldn’t make out if you were dead upset or angry.”

  “I think I was a bit of both. I’d been to a dance at the Orrell Park. It was me first dance and I hated it. I’ll never go to another.” It had been thoroughly degrading, standing there like a pill garlic waiting to be asked onto the floor, then bored witless by having to make stupid conversation. Though not as degrading as having your husband marry another woman when he was still married to you. Brenda began to feel confused again as she thought about the uncertain future. She sighed.

  “What�
��s the matter, luv?” Vince asked.

  “I’m sorry. There’s days when everything seems to get on top of me,” she said.

  “It must be dead rotten, with your husband in the Army and two kids to look after, as well your friend’s,” he said sympathetically.

  “It’s not that, it’s . . . oh, nothing!” She’d no intention of revealing her private affairs, but she’d managed fine without Xavier, better than most women would, with a good business of her own. She was used to being without him—he was away most nights of the week long before he joined the Army. “With Carrie,” a little voice reminded her.

  “The kettle’s boiling.” Vince interrupted her chain of thought. “Would you like me to make the tea?”

  “No, ta. I’ll do it.” She’d sooner die before she’d let him into the back kitchen, which was the filthiest room in the house.

  Vince stayed for more than an hour, most of which time was spent explaining how the raids were playing havoc with his timetable, and he was fed up with passengers complaining the bus was late. When he got up to leave, he asked if he could come again. “Just for a cup of tea and a chat, like.”

  Brenda agreed because he was easy to get on with and didn’t seem to notice the place being in such a state. She guessed he liked her, which did her ego a mite of good under the circumstances, and if he ever made a move she decided she’d slap him down pretty quick.

  Since then, he’d begun to turn up regularly, and all they did was talk about this and that, mainly bus routes and timetables. Carrie had been there on a few occasions, but Vince didn’t seem the least bit interested, despite the fact she sat with her skirt halfway up her smooth yellow thighs, which did Brenda’s ego even more good.

  Brenda read Xavier’s letter for the umpteenth time and wondered if she should tidy up, because if so, she should start now. It would take days to return the house to some sort of order. She decided she couldn’t be bothered. Let him see the state he had reduced her to! In fact, it was a pity he wouldn’t be home on Sunday for Monica’s Confirmation, to witness his daughter being confirmed in a cheap white taffeta frock, the first shop-bought frock her girls had ever worn. Although Brenda had meant to make it herself, she just never seemed to get round to it. She recalled miserably that the girls’ First Holy Communion dresses had been subjected to much lavish praise from the nuns at St Joan of Arc’s and much envy from the other girls’ mams.