A Wise Child

by A Wise Child (retail) (epub)

  ‘You both did a good job with Roz and me anyway,’ he said. ‘Gave us confidence in ourselves.’

  Tom took Roz’s hand and leaned over to her grandmother. ‘Roz and I would like to get engaged, Mrs Palmer,’ he said. ‘Do you approve?’

  ‘I do, lad,’ she said heartily, and leaned over the table to kiss him, then Tom put his hand on his mother’s cheek.

  ‘And what about you, Mum?’ he said softly.

  Nellie put her hand over his, her eyes full of tears. Oh Sam, she thought, if only you were here now, but she smiled at Roz and kissed her.

  ‘I’m made up,’ she said. ‘I think you’re just right for each other.’

  There was excited discussion of their wedding plans and both the older women thought they were wise to marry quickly.

  ‘This isn’t the time for long engagements,’ Nellie said and Mrs Palmer said they should make the most of their happiness.

  ‘I know I’ve only just met you, Tom,’ she said, ‘but Rosie’s told me a lot about you and I’m pretty good at weighing people up. I’ll die happy to see her with a good man like you.’

  Nellie was more restrained but she held Roz’s hand and told her that she felt that she knew her because Tom had told her so much about her.

  ‘I knew he was head over heels,’ she said, ‘and I’m so happy now I’ve met you.’

  ‘I’m crazy about Tom, too,’ Roz whispered to her.

  ‘You’d better look after her, lad,’ Mrs Palmer said mock ferociously as they stood up to go. ‘That girl’s my world.’

  ‘Oh, Nin,’ Roz protested and they left laughing.

  Before they parted it was arranged that Tom and his mother would visit Mrs Palmer’s house for tea on Sunday, then they would all go back to Nellie’s house and Jean and Bob and the boys would join them.

  ‘Call me Gwen,’ Mrs Palmer said to Nellie.

  ‘My name’s Nellie.’

  ‘Ellie?’ Gwen said.

  Nellie said hastily, ‘No, Nellie.’

  It was like a stab at her heart but Gwen said cheerfully, ‘I’m going deaf in my old age.’

  Tom and Roz chose the engagement ring, a half hoop of diamonds, on the following day and it was the start of an idyllic week for them. They tried to divide their time equally between Gwen and Nellie during the day and the older women were understanding about their need to spend time alone together at night.

  ‘I’m finding it hard to wait,’ Tom groaned one night when they were locked in each other’s arms near a bombed house.

  ‘Only three months, Tom,’ Roz said. ‘I’d rather do things properly.’

  Tom sighed. ‘I would really,’ he said. ‘But we know we’ll be married soon. It’d only be bringing it forward.’

  ‘But my Nin and your mum, they’d be so upset if anything went wrong,’ Roz said.

  ‘So would I,’ said Tom, releasing her and sitting up to light cigarettes for both of them.

  The tea party in Gwen’s house was a great success. It was a tiny four-roomed house with a lean-to kitchenette containing a sink, a gas cooker and a mangle with large wooden rollers.

  ‘I’ve put some washing through that mangle,’ Gwen told them. ‘I took in washing to keep us, one and sixpence for a big caseful and I think they must’ve sat on the cases to get the lids shut. The washing’d spring out when I opened it.’

  ‘My ma took in washing,’ Nellie said. ‘Mostly from publics and big houses. I used to have to fetch and carry it and do most of the washing too. I was a proper drudge for her.’

  The two women began to reminisce and Tom heard details of his mother’s early life that she had never told him, including the way his father had rescued her when they were children.

  ‘I was terrified of them rough lads,’ Nellie said. ‘But I was more terrified of me ma. If that washing had got muddy!! Sam chased them away and wiped me eyes on me pinny. He often used to help me carry the washing after that and he looked after me the same way when we married.’

  ‘He sounds a good man,’ Gwen said. ‘When did he die?’

  ‘He’s not dead,’ Nellie said. ‘He was ill on a voyage and he had some trouble when he came home. He sailed for New York and he backed off there. I’ve never heard no more from him but I feel sure somehow he’s alive. A fortune teller told me that water would flow between us and the golden cord would stretch but never break.’

  ‘I’m sure he’ll come back,’ Gwen said. ‘When you’ve lived as long as I have and seen what I’ve seen, well, you know that anything can happen in life. Like I heard someone say, truth is always stranger than fiction, and I’ve heard of men come back from the dead more than once.’

  The meal had been laid in the back room, which had a grate shining with blacklead and a row of brass ornaments along the mantelpiece with a copper kettle at either end, but then they moved into the tiny front room.

  This had a tiled grate with a wooden surround and a mahogany sideboard and corner cupboard and a walnut sewing table. They all shone and Nellie looked round.

  ‘You’ve got some beautiful furniture,’ she said.

  ‘It was me mother’s and her mother’s before her,’ Gwen said. ‘Mother came from farming people out Burscough way and she brought them with her when she got married. I’ve put some elbow grease on them, I can tell you.’

  ‘They show for it,’ Nellie said. ‘And so does your brass.’

  ‘Aye, well, elbow grease costs nothing, I always say.’ She smiled at Roz. ‘I don’t know how much she’ll put on them when they come to her. You can have them, girl, as soon as you get a home of your own.’

  ‘Thanks, Nin, but I wouldn’t take them from here while you were here,’ Roz said.

  Later they all often spoke wistfully about this conversation.

  In the evening they went to Nellie’s house and Bob and Jean came with the three boys, then later Cathy and Winnie came. Everyone liked Roz and her grandmother and Bob and Gwen discovered that her husband had worked for his boss’s father many years earlier so they enjoyed a long chat.

  Bob was due to leave for the Air Force the next week and Gwen said, ‘You give them Germans hell, lad. The way they’ve knocked Bootle about.’

  ‘I hadn’t the heart to tell her I was only ground crew,’ Bob said later.

  Tom and Roz made as many arrangements as they could for their wedding in three months’ time although they could only give a provisional date.

  ‘I feel as though it makes it seem that much nearer and more definite,’ Tom said and Roz agreed.

  Before they left there were two air raid warnings on 23 and 24 April but no bombs were dropped.

  ‘Perhaps the raids are over in this area,’ Roz said optimistically. ‘I know other places are getting it but maybe the Germans think they did enough damage to Bootle up to Christmas. It’s been fairly quiet since then.’

  Tom said nothing. He knew that Roz was trying to convince herself as well as him that there was less need to worry but the devastation that they saw on the way to Lime Street Station made both of them fear for their loved ones.

  It was fortunate that they knew nothing then of what was to come. A few days after they returned, both Liverpool and Bootle, and the other bank of the River Mersey, were bombed ferociously for eight consecutive nights.

  The news bulletins said only that a north-west city had been attacked but a man returning from leave in Birkenhead and another from Walton told what was happening.

  ‘Liverpool’s like a bloody inferno,’ the Birkenhead man said. ‘Lewis’s has gone and Blackler’s and the docks. You wouldn’t believe the damage.’

  Later that day Harry came to Tom, white-faced, to tell him that he was going home on compassionate leave.

  ‘My mum and my sister were slightly injured when our house got it but it’s my dad. He was fire-watching in Dale Street and he’s got shrapnel in his spine. Your mum must be all right, Tom, or you’d have heard.’

  Tom did what he could to help Harry to get away quickly, thinking what a g
ood friend he was to think of reassuring him at such a time.

  Shortly afterwards a driver came looking for Tom with a letter from Roz telling him that she was going home as her grandmother’s house had been hit and she was in hospital.

  Letters in grimy envelopes came for Tom from his mother and Jean and Winnie, all telling him not to worry as they were all all right, but he was in a fever of anxiety. It was almost a relief to hear that his mother was in hospital with a broken arm and to be given compassionate leave.

  He was stunned to see the extent of the damage in Liverpool and the number of houses damaged in Bootle. He stopped by an ARP man who was with a gang of men carefully searching through some rubble.

  ‘How many came over, for God’s sake?’ Tom gasped.

  ‘Hundreds, mate,’ the man said. ‘They came in relays, the buggers, bombing into the places they’d already set on fire.’

  Another man shouted, ‘Alf, quick, there’s someone here,’ and the man hurried away.

  Tom went to Walton Hospital and was told his mother had been sent home. ‘Her house is standing and we need the beds for tonight,’ a harassed nurse told him.

  He dashed home to find the house still standing although most of the windows had been hastily boarded up as the glass had been blown out. The glass of the attic window, criss-crossed with brown paper, hung out waving like a flag.

  The house was filled with WVS ladies and other people setting up a temporary rest centre to replace others that had been bombed and Tom found his mother, her arm in a sling and a dressing on her head, taking teapots from a cupboard.

  ‘Tom!’ she exclaimed, bursting into tears as he took her in his arms but she soon dried her eyes. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve got nothing to cry about compared to some,’ she said, ‘I’m just so glad to see you.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be in bed, Mum?’ Tom said anxiously.

  ‘No, I’m better up. That hospital, Tom. Those poor people. You know Bob’s away but Jean and the lads are all right. They’ve got an Anderson shelter.’

  ‘Have you seen Roz?’ Tom asked.

  ‘Yes, she came to see me. Poor Gwen. Her house has gone, Tom. All that lovely furniture but still, she’s alive, that’s the main thing,’ Nellie said.

  Tom went to look round and found that though the strong old house had stood, the extension was completely demolished. He met Winnie with a tray of cups and she told him that she was staying downstairs with his mother as the attic flat was uninhabitable.

  ‘It was the incendiaries on the roof,’ she said. ‘What isn’t burned is soaked with water.’

  ‘You’ve had a bad time,’ Tom said and Winnie said it was impossible to describe it.

  ‘The worst night was when the Malakand, you know, the ammunition ship, was blown up in Huskisson Dock. That’s the night Gwen’s house got it.’

  ‘I don’t know where to start looking for Roz,’ Tom said.

  ‘She’ll be at the hospital. Belmont Road. That’s where Gwen was taken,’ Winnie said.

  ‘Belmont Road!’ Tom exclaimed and Winnie told him that people were taken to anywhere the ambulances could get through to.

  ‘Where’s Cathy?’ Tom asked.

  ‘At work. She works in the ROF factory in Long Lane now,’ Winnie said.

  ‘You don’t mean to tell me people are still going to work in all this?’ Tom exclaimed.

  ‘Of course. People are going out to places like Maghull and Huyton to sleep but they come back for work,’ Winnie said. She picked up the tray of cups she had put down to greet Tom. ‘I’d better go through with these,’ she said but she turned back to say, ‘Don’t worry about your mum, Tom. She’s better pottering. I’ll make her lie down if she gets too tired.’

  Tom went to Gwen’s house, thinking that Roz might be there, and stood stunned with shock at what he saw. Where Gwen’s house and the house next door had stood there was only a hole in the ground and the houses on either side had walls blown away to show bedrooms open to view.

  And this was what Roz had seen, he thought, desperate to find her and comfort her.

  He found Gwen first at Belmont Road Hospital. Her head was bandaged and her foot was in a splint but she seemed comparatively cheerful.

  ‘This was the price of me, wasn’t it?’ she greeted Tom. ‘Talking about bowing out and leaving Rosie me furniture. The bloody Huns got it instead. Is your mum all right, lad?’

  ‘Yes, I went to the hospital but she was at home, organising teapots,’ he said.

  ‘That’s the stuff,’ Gwen said. ‘I tell you the buggers aren’t going to get me down either, Tom. Our Rosie’s helping on one of the wards. Ask Sister.’

  He found Roz kneeling beside one of the makeshift beds crowded in the corridors, a Catholic priest beside her bending over the dying man on the bed, and he stood back to wait until she was free.

  After a few minutes the priest drew the sheet over the man’s face and moved on to comfort others and Roz came to where Tom stood by an office door. As his mother had done, she came into his arms and wept for a moment, then took a deep breath and dried her eyes.

  ‘Oh Tom, last night was terrible,’ she said. ‘I think Bootle got the brunt of it. The docks were destroyed right along to the South End but it’s the houses, Tom. Streets and streets of little houses. Thank God a lot of people were sleeping at Maghull but when you think of what they’ll come back to.’

  She spoke in a low voice, then went past Tom to bend over a makeshift bed in the little office. ‘Are you all right, sweetheart?’ Tom heard her say. ‘Try to go to sleep like Shirley.’ He realised that two little girls were in bed in the tiny office.

  Nothing that Tom had seen on his way to the hospital, the devastation, the fire engines from areas miles away from Liverpool, the soldiers drafted in, brought home to him the horror of the bombing more than Roz’s appearance.

  Usually immaculately neat, now her white apron was crumpled and bloodstained, her face was grimy and her dishevelled hair escaped from a crumpled cap.

  ‘I’ll have to go, Tom,’ she said. ‘I’m needed here. I had to turn to and help, they’re so short-handed. A lot of the girls have been killed or injured.’

  He went back to Gwen and she told him that she was all right. ‘Rosie nips in to see me when she can,’ she said. ‘You go and keep your mam company. That’s what you came home for.’

  On the way back Tom helped to manhandle a piano from a hole in the ground. It was covered in rubble and had protected an elderly woman who lay beneath it but she was amazingly cheerful.

  ‘I’ve never played a note on that thing,’ she said, ‘but it come in useful after all.’

  When he arrived back at the cafe he was told that his mother had gone to see Jean.

  ‘I think she’s lost her baby,’ the woman whispered and he found that she was right when he reached Jean’s house.

  ‘They were looking forward so much to this baby,’ his mother told him, ‘but she’s being very brave.’

  The three boys were pleased to see Tom but very subdued. He spoke to Jean later and found her resigned to the loss of the baby.

  ‘Perhaps it’s not a good time to bring a child into the world, anyway,’ she said. It was now 8 May and everyone braced themselves for another onslaught from the bombers but all was peaceful and the same thing happened on following nights. It was clear that the Luftwaffe had moved their attention elsewhere.

  Tom had only been given three days’ leave but he managed to see Roz several times and under less fraught conditions. He also had a long talk with his mother. She told him that she had decided to close the cafe. It was still being used as a rest centre but neither she nor Jean were able to run the cafe anyway at present. She told him that she was worried about Gwen.

  ‘The homeless people are sleeping in church halls and places like that and rooms and empty houses are being commandeered for them. Winnie and Cathy are in my third bedroom at present but they’ll soon fix up their flat. If Gwen wants to come here until she gets something sui
table she’ll be very welcome.’

  Tom hugged his mother. ‘Roz’ll be made up to hear that,’ he said. ‘She’s dead worried about going back, not knowing what’ll happen to her Nin.’

  It was soon arranged and the two women spent happy hours planning the wedding.

  Harry returned to camp a few days after Tom and told him that his father had been moved to Winwick Hospital.

  ‘I thought that was a lunatic asylum,’ Tom said.

  ‘It was, but patients like Dad are there. They think he might be paralysed,’ Harry said.

  ‘But they’re not sure?’ Tom said.

  ‘No, we’ll just have to hope for the best,’ said Harry.

  He said his mother and sister had been only slightly injured as they had been in a shelter and the house though damaged could be repaired.

  Tom found that the rumours that the battalion was moving were unfounded but immediately after his return a group including Tom went on night exercises. By the time he returned Roz had come back from Liverpool and had been sent to a hospital forty miles away to complete her training.

  Although they were unable to meet they wrote to each other every day and went ahead with their plans for a wedding in early September.

  Tom had heard nothing from the third publisher but he was feeling the itch to write again. Harry now had a WAAF girlfriend so Tom could refuse to go to the Saturday dance and other social occasions with an easy conscience, on the pretext of writing letters.

  Sometimes as he wrote in the quiet hut he became so immersed in memories of the past that it was difficult for him to come back to reality when the other men returned.

  ‘Love’s young dream,’ some of the men joked. ‘He goes into a trance when he writes to his girl,’ but the jokes were good-natured.

  When Tom and Roz were both sure of their leave the wedding was fixed for the first week in September and the honeymoon was to be a week on a farm in Shropshire. Gwen was now staying with Nellie, as Winnie and Cathy were back in their flat, and the arrangement seemed to be working well.

  Tom arrived first at Lime Street Station and waited for Roz and they travelled together to his home. They sat close together on the tramcar, Tom’s arm round her, unaware of the other passengers looking indulgently at them.