Lights Out Liverpool (12 page)

‘It’s shift work, though the women aren’t expected to do nights,’ she explained. ‘It’s six in the morning until two o’clock in the afternoon, then two till ten at night. Annie’s starting with me, but she’s going to do the other shift to mine and look after Tony when I’m working. I felt bound to do something for the war effort, Francis,’ she added virtuously. ‘There’s nowt much to do here with you away and Tony at school – and me dad thinks it’s a good idea.’

Eileen got support from an unexpected quarter. Pete English said, ‘Good on yer, Mrs Costello. Me sister’s gone down south to work in a refugee hostel, that’s why I’ve got nowhere to go, she gave up our rooms in Preston. She’s earning twice what she did in her old job in a bakery, and having a good old time to boot.’

Francis gave a steely smile. ‘Well, Eileen won’t be having a good old time, will you, luv? She’ll be working hard instead. Now, I think you’d best go and buy that stewing steak. I’m starving, and I’m sure Pete is, too.’

They had an audience whilst they ate their tea; her dad and Sean, Paddy O’Hara and Mr Singerman, Sheila and
half
the kids, and numerous other neighbours. Francis beamed at them, and when the meal was finished, he opened a bottle of whisky and regaled them with funny stories about life in the army. There was the chap in his billet who put his false teeth in a glass before he went to bed and someone had filled the glass with green ink and his teeth were discoloured for weeks.

Everyone screamed with laughter, except Eileen, who didn’t think it particularly funny. In fact, it seemed rather cruel.

‘The Sarge, he’s a regular and a right ould martinet,’ Francis continued. ‘Everybody hates him, but one night, I saw him in the pub all by himself and looking dead lonely, like, so I did no more than go over and offer to buy him a drink and we’re good mates now. Fact, that’s probably why I got me stripe, ’cos Vince put in a good word.’

‘That’s just like you, Francis,’ Jack Doyle said admiringly. ‘Sounds like you and the army get on like a house on fire.’

‘I’ve settled in better than most chaps,’ Francis said modestly. ‘As long as you do as you’re told and keep your nose clean, it’s a good life, though I miss me family something rotten.’ He reached out and chucked Tony under the chin and sent a warm glowing smile in the direction of his wife. ‘Don’t I, luv?’

‘Yes, Francis,’ Eileen replied obediently.

‘Now, who’d like another drop of whisky?’ Francis asked.

Soon afterwards, the women went home, the men disappeared to the King’s Arms and Eileen put Tony to bed.

‘You’ll have to sleep in your own room tonight, son.’ He’d been sleeping with her for weeks on the clear
understanding
he was only there to protect her against enemy attack.

‘I know, Mam.’

She gave him a kiss and an extra hard hug, then went downstairs and began to prepare a little speech for Francis. But to her surprise, he came back from the pub and announced he and Pete were going into town to a club. She presumed it was the same one he went to with Rodney Smith.

‘But how will you get home?’ she asked.

‘There might be a train running,’ he replied airily. ‘If not, we’ll get a taxi back.’

‘A taxi? It’ll take forever in the blackout.’ Headlights had to be covered with cardboard with only a narrow slit of light left to see by. Cars crept along the road at five miles an hour, guided by the kerbs which had been painted white.

‘Well, that’s for me to worry about, not you,’ he said irritably, so different from the way he’d been when people had been there.

As the night wore on, Eileen turned off the light, feeling safer without it, though she wasn’t sure why. Earlier, she’d lit the fire – October had turned out to be wet and chilly – and kept poking the dying embers for a bit of ghostly illumination, enough to see the clock on the mantelpiece. When the fire eventually went out altogether, she drew the curtains back, but the moon only came out in patches, and she sat there, shivering out of a mixture of cold and fear. She turned the wireless on low and, with her ear close to the cloth grille, listened to the music of Henry Hall and his Orchestra. The news bulletin at midnight turned her blood cold. German planes had attacked the Firth of the Forth! They’d missed the bridge, and four planes had been shot down, but even
so
, it was ominous news, the first air-raid attack on the British Isles.

Soon after that, the Kellys next door came home, and the two brothers had one of their flaming rows. But May Kelly kept Fin and Failey firmly under her thumb, and Eileen waited for the inevitable reaction.

‘Shut your gobs, the pair of yez,’ May bawled, ‘or you’ll wake the neighbours up,’ which usually roused anyone who’d managed to sleep through the fight.

It was half past one when Francis came home and Eileen could tell, from the muffled curses and occasional giggles when he showed Pete English into the parlour where she’d made a bed up on the settee, that he was drunk out of his mind. He came stumbling through the room where she was sitting and, with her eyes now used to the dark, she saw him reach for the light switch. Then he uttered an obscenity. Even in his drunken state he’d noticed the curtains were open which meant he couldn’t turn on the light. Imagine, that great man, Francis Costello, fined for a blackout offence! He staggered through the back kitchen and down the yard to the lavatory. A few minutes later, he came back and went upstairs.

He hadn’t noticed she was there!

Eileen, listening hard, heard the bedsprings creak and breathed a sigh of relief. He was so drunk, he’d probably go asleep without her. She took a deep breath, her heart was thumping wildly, and after a while felt herself begin to doze and gave in to a blessed feeling of relief. She was safe!

She would have screamed, but she couldn’t. There was a hand over her mouth and another on the back of her neck. She felt herself being yanked roughly out of the
chair
and a voice hissed in her ear, ‘What the hell d’you think you’re doing down here? You’re me wife, you bitch!’

Francis!

He turned her round and flung her down into the chair and held her there, her face buried in the cushion. She gagged for breath as he tore away her clothes and she prayed she would die or at least lose consciousness, but her prayers weren’t answered.

When he’d finished and removed his heavy weight from on top of her, she began to cry quietly. He said nothing, but returned to bed and left her there, feeling dirty and utterly despairing. She stopped crying after a while in case the sound disturbed Tony, and dragged herself into the back kitchen where she washed her body from head to toe. Then she made a cup of tea and sat in the chair, smoking, her mind a blur of confusion. What was a woman supposed to do in this situation? Just go on for the rest of her life being treated like an animal? She could leave him, but where would she go? There was Tony to think of. She’d have no furniture, what they had now belonged to Francis, and the rent book was in his name. People looked down on women who left their husbands. No matter what the man did, no matter how badly he treated her, the woman was supposed to stay by his side, in her place, and put up with it. Dai Evans knocked Ellis around when he was in his cups, but Ellis appeared rather proud of the occasional black eye, as if it were some sort of trophy, and she was almost as big as Dai and gave as good as she got. It was Dai who’d been taken to hospital with a broken nose one Christmas Eve, not Ellis. But there was no way Eileen could stand up to Francis like that.

But that was the future; it was the night to come that
Eileen
was most worried about. She wouldn’t put up with it again, she couldn’t, and she knew it was a waste of time talking to him. Anyroad, she never wanted to face Francis again. Of course, Annie would take her in, she’d offered, but she wouldn’t feel safe in Annie’s, only a few doors away. It would be the first place Francis would look if she wasn’t here when he came home, and although Francis would never make a scene in public when he was sober, she wasn’t sure how he’d behave in his drunken state. He might beat on Annie’s door and demand Eileen come back – it had happened before in Pearl Street, some man being locked out and hammering to get in, waking the whole street up – and everyone would think that brave man Francis Costello was in the right. Home on leave, about to go and fight for his country, yet his wife refused to sleep with him!

It was six o’clock and she was freezing. Outside, the dark watery sky was streaked with silver threads and it looked as if it was going to be another chilly day. The cold wet weather had come as something of a shock after such a lovely balmy September.

Eileen stood up. Her legs, her entire body, felt stiff and aching. She’d better light a fire, though Tony wouldn’t be up for a few hours yet and God knows what time Francis would show himself.

‘Oh, Jaysus,’ she whispered aloud. ‘What am I going to do?’

As if in answer to her prayer, she thought of the one person in the world she had a right to call on for protection, though he would be the person most difficult to convince she was entitled to it. She would be safe with him, there was no way Francis would create a scene with Jack Doyle.

Impulsively, Eileen snatched her coat out of the hall and went to see her dad.

It was just light enough to see as she made her way round to Garnet Street through the damp, deserted streets. A light drizzle fell and the blacked out windows shone like blind, unseeing eyes. The lampposts stood dejectedly, unused and unwanted. Eileen felt as if she was walking through an alien, scarcely recognisable world. She was glad when she reached her dad’s and, instead of drawing the key through the letter box on its string, she knocked on the door in case she startled him at this time of the morning.

He was up, which she’d expected. He had to be at work by half past seven and answered the door almost immediately.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked grumpily.

‘I just wanted to talk to you a bit, that’s all.’

‘You’d better come in, then.’

She followed him into the living room where a cheerful fire burned in the grate. The room hadn’t changed a jot since her mam had died fourteen years ago. There were the same crocheted covers on the seats and arms of the chairs where the upholstery had worn away, and a little rag rug on the hearth. The sideboard was full of framed photographs. In pride of place stood a photo of her parents’ wedding. Her mam’s sweet dimpled face smiled back at her. It could have been Sheila on her dad’s arm, slightly younger, slightly slimmer. The wireless was on, it sounded like Sandy MacPherson at the organ. He was playing
The Blue Danube
.

Eileen regarded the room with affection. It held nothing but pleasant memories. They’d always been poor, but mam had done wonders with the cheapest cuts of
meat
, so they’d never gone hungry, never gone cold, and there’d always been clothes on their backs, even if they were secondhand. Jack Doyle might be a dangerous troublemaker, but even so, he hadn’t suffered as much as other men had from the iniquitous system by which dockers were employed, standing outside the gates on a daily basis waiting to be picked for work. The employers, reckoning it would be best to have Jack where they could keep an eye on him, chose him regularly. Anyway, he was as strong as an ox and could work as hard as two ordinary men.

‘D’you want a cup of tea? I was just about to make one,’ he asked.

‘I always want a cup of tea,’ she answered, sinking into a chair, grateful for the warmth.

She watched his deliberate movements through the doorway of the scrupulously clean back kitchen; the precise way he put the cups on the saucers, poured the milk in the jug, put a clean spoon in the sugar basin. She knew he wouldn’t pour the tea out there, but fetch it in the pot covered with the cosy mam had knitted and which she felt sure he must darn regularly. He’d never asked her or Sheila to do it, that would seem maudlin and sentimental, and she could have wept, imagining big Jack Doyle sat mending the tea cosy made by the wife he adored because he couldn’t bear to throw it away.

He came in, puffing slightly, his muscled arms bulging under the rolled-up sleeves of his flannel working shirt.

‘You’re smoking too much, Dad,’ she said sternly. ‘You’re out of breath carrying the teapot.’

‘Look who’s talking!’ He sat down at the table and poured out two cups of tea.

‘I only started proper a few weeks ago. You’ve been doing it since you was a nipper.’

‘Smoking keeps the working class and the tobacco companies happy,’ he said, grinning slightly. She knew he only said it to irk her and she rose to the bait immediately.

‘Oh, Dad! D’you have to make a political point out of everything?’

‘You’ll never learn, Eileen. Everything
is
political. The capitalists run this country for their own profit. The more we smoke, the more they like it.’ As if to prove his point, he lit two cigarettes and handed her one. ‘Have you heard the news this morning?’

‘No, what’s happened? Did they bomb the Germans back after that raid on Scotland?’

‘Not bloody likely!’ he said savagely. ‘They drop bombs on us, we drop paper on them. If we’re going to fight the Jerries, it’s about time we started on it. It’s about time Neville Chamberlain threw in the towel and gave way to Churchill. He’d know how to run a war, the Tory git. Look at the way he ordered the police in during the Sydney Street Siege! If he can do that to his own people, think of what he could do to the Jerries.’

‘Oh, Dad!’

‘According to Lord Haw Haw, we’re all on our knees begging to surrender.’

Lord Haw Haw was the nickname for William Joyce, a notorious traitor, who tried to undermine the British people by broadcasting terrible lies from Germany. ‘You should be ashamed of yerself, Dad,’ she chided. ‘I won’t have him on in our house. Y’know the Government said we weren’t to listen to him.’

‘I can’t think of a better reason for doing something than the Government telling me not to.’

Eileen supposed she’d asked for that.

‘Anyroad,’ he went on, ‘what do you want? I’ll be
leaving
for work soon. It must be something important at this time of the morning.’