Read That Liverpool Girl Online
Authors: Ruth Hamilton
Hilda sat on her bed and wept. London belonged to everyone. Buildings designed and erected over hundreds of years had been razed to the ground in a matter of hours. Gone was Britain’s strength as a near-impregnable island, because death arrived airborne these days. Roosevelt’s contribution had been to make both sides promise to play nicely, and not aim for people in the streets, but this was Hitler’s way. He walked into countries after the Luftwaffe had pounded them into submission; now he was attempting the same with England. He was gunning for innocent citizens. ‘So yes, Mel, we have to do the same,’ she whispered sadly. Heinrich and Günter, due to start working on Yorkshire farms, were proof positive that Germans were not all bad. But bombs did not discriminate, and Churchill would be hopping mad.
To be fair, the Americans had helped financially, but oh, how Britain needed their forces now. Hitler would resort to any tactic, however cruel and wild, in his insane search for domination. Nellie’s ‘Why?’, asked on the night when Heinrich had descended from the sky, was unanswerable, because the explanations about Poland and saving one’s country failed to address the basic question. There could be no sensible excuse for behaviour such as this. Germany had to be stopped for the sake of its populace, since the Fatherland was in the hands of lunatics.
Mum and Dad are almost ready to depart. It will be interesting to have Mrs Openshaw here, as she is quite a character, and she will be company for Gran. Fortunately, there’s plenty of room in this place.
Sadness still sits in the house, because we all remember how lovely and funny Miss Morrison was. I claimed her little bell, the one she used to ring when she needed us or wanted company. I mean to treasure it for the rest of my life, since she was so precious.
Mam owns the property now, though probate has to be settled, and she was threatening to charge Gran and Mrs Openshaw rent. It was another joke, of course, one of the many we are forced to endure. I believe that Mrs Pilkington, originally from Rachel Street, is getting her mother over to Willows Edge to look after the children while Mrs Pilkington runs the post office for Mrs Openshaw.
I really do miss our landlady. Mum, Dad and I cleared the room out and Dad put the bed etc. upstairs in the old lady’s original bedroom. We got some second-hand pieces and are now the proud owners of a formal dining room, though the chairs don’t match each other. The sideboard was of poor wood and very plain, but it serves its purpose by housing Miss Morrison’s lovely china. We have kept her easy chair by the fireplace with her favourite shawl draped over the back. Sometimes, I sit in it and talk to her in my head.
There was no Christmas. I spent the day with my friend Gloria and her family, and did not find out until I got home that Miss Morrison had died on Christ’s birthday. We console ourselves with the knowledge that she was happy in our company and that she lived a long and useful life. My mother cried a lot. It was the first time she had helped lay someone out.
The funeral was amazing. Two of her ‘girls’ spoke at the service in St Michael’s C of E church, and it was standing room only. They weren’t girls; they were grandmothers, and it took them the best part of half an hour to read out the accomplishments of Miss Frances Morrison. Although the church was packed, you could have heard a pin drop. My mother spoke, too. I was very proud of her – she even made people laugh about the countless cups of milky tea, the coddled eggs and just-right toast, not too pale, not too dark. Knitting was mentioned, as was the old lady’s tendency to be as deaf as she needed to be according to prevailing circumstances.
Right at the front, a very old man sat in a wheelchair. I spoke to him afterwards as he waited in the porch for his great-nephew to take him home. He was the famous vulgar caretaker. I told him that she had loved him, and he fixed me with the palest blue eyes I have ever seen. In a rusty, dusty voice, he said that she had been the only one for him, but he was from the wrong class. For once, I was lost for words. She never exactly told me that she loved him, but I could see it in her eyes every time she spoke about him. Why do people waste love, Miss Pickavance?
So we approach March, and Mam is more than six months pregnant. My stepfather’s war work in Crosby has been with builders, and he has come to love our city while trying to keep it safe. Our house here is finally stable and free of what Miss Morrison termed pit props. I think Dad pulled a few strings.
Mam and he need to get away. I pray nothing else will happen to keep them here; I also pray for a sister. Can you imagine how life would be if we got yet another boy? Dad is diplomatic, says I’ll need a bridesmaid in a few years, so he wants a girl. I know what he really wants – he wants the birth to be easy and his beloved wife safe and well. The sex of the child is not significant, because he loves Mam so much. So there are one-woman men. One is married to my mother, and another sat in a wheelchair in a church porch in freezing cold. Wasted love? How cruel life is sometimes.
Please, I beg you, look after my mother when she comes back to Willows. She has been well through the pregnancy, and I know Dad loves her to bits, but Gran has always been with her for births in the past, and she will be here looking after me. I begin to feel quite a nuisance. This will be our fifth baby, and I want her and my mother to be safe.
Thank you yet again, Miss Pickavance.
Hoping to see you soon.
Mel x
There were snowdrops outside, and they were fading fast. Hilda counted twenty-seven under her window, and she could see clumps of grey-white, drooping flowers spread round the edges of the lawn. Even in wartime, these preludes to spring caused hope to burgeon in the saddest of hearts. Here and there, premature green swords thrust their first inch above soil. These gladiatorial announcements were a proud statement from daffodils, narcissi and cheerfulness. ‘We’re coming,’ they said. Jay had planted them just about everywhere, including under the grass, so the first mowing could not take place until spring flowers had died off completely.
The boys were safe and behaving well. Rob, buried in his Christmas books about farming, muttered from time to time about turnips not being as easy as people thought, about the impossibility of resting land while there was a flipping war on, about spuds being good for the soil. He had gathered enemies and friends in the animal kingdom, and Bertie was his close ally when it came to ploughing. Those horses were brilliant when tractor fuel ran low. Bertie, too, was amazing, because he talked to the beasts and managed to urge them on till a job was done. But beetles, mice and crows were the enemy, and Rob fought them like a trooper.
Ah, here he came. After tapping on the door, he pushed his smiling face into Hilda’s room. ‘Well, I worked it out,’ he announced. ‘It was simple, really. The animals have to be closer to the farmhouse because they need tending. I’d never looked at it that way. Crops have to be further away.’
‘So will you be arable or mixed, young man?’
‘Mixed. I’m getting used to the animals. Bertie helps. He’s turned out to be a good lad, has our Bertie.’
‘You all have. So has he given up the idea of being a vet?’
‘Too much blood. Me and Bertie want to stay together and rent a farm. He can run a livery while I do the rest. Anyway, Gran says are you coming down, because the food’s going cold.’
‘I’m coming.’ So was Phil. He was walking across the lawn with Mr Marchant, his teacher. Mr Marchant had been known to say that Phil should be the teacher, so great was his talent. Snowdrops were not the only good news. Three boys who had led the wild life were gaining sense and knowledge. As for Mel, the world was her lobster, as Nellie often said with that cynical gleam in her eyes. Nellie was a walking dictionary. She knew all the right words, but preferred her own, and the gleam was the challenge.
‘You coming, then?’ Rob asked.
‘Soon, yes.’
He left the room, muttering this time about soil suitable for carrots, the differences between early and main crop, and the difficulties attached to thin planting.
‘I’ll miss you, Nellie,’ Hilda whispered. That lovely, voluntary Mrs Malaprop would return to Liverpool, and thereby leave a large hole in Hilda’s life. Nellie Kennedy was a one-off, a light in the darkness, a true friend. But life, as people often said these days, had to go on . . .
Women would trek miles in search of supplies. A whiff of orange peel, a glimpse of a banana, a rumour regarding tinned salmon, and they were off like the proverbial bats out of hell. A treasure-huntress was easy to spot; the head was always down, the march brisk, the owner-occupier of the body totally out of reach when it came to conversation or even a brief greeting.
Her purposefulness attracted followers who tried to latch on without being noticed. They noticed each other, of course, though it was quite commonplace for the leader of this route march to remain completely unaware that she was exercising a whole regiment. Unfairness set in when the shop hove into view. It was easily identifiable, as there was usually a queue outside. The ranks put a spurt on and overtook their not-really-commanding officer, often leaving her to bring up the absolute rear.
When the shop door slammed and the
CLOSED
sign appeared, shoulders drooped and a corporate sigh was offered up by the whole congregation. Somewhere towards the back, a little woman would be on the rampage, spitting, swearing and clobbering people with an empty shopping basket. It was all par for the course, and no one took much notice. This did not happen in Crosby, of course. Crosby was too dignified. Underhand behaviour might elicit a quiet sigh of disgust, animal faeces on a gate and, occasionally, the odd unsigned letter that pulled no punches, but there were no wrestling matches in the streets.
It was after one of these fruitless treks that Eileen was stopped in the main shopping area of Crosby village. Her newly arrived companion was Dr Tom Bingley, who was developing a habit of popping up all over the place, and he was bearing gifts in the form of two tins of salmon and two oranges. ‘For you,’ he said.
She took out her purse to pay.
‘No, Eileen. I get these things from grateful patients.’ Even when pregnant, she shone. Clear eyes, glossy hair with escaping tendrils, perfect skin, slender fingers . . . Oh, he shouldn’t look, shouldn’t be so bloody stupid.
‘Do you?’ She remembered telling his wife that he would do nothing to damage his precious reputation, yet just a year or so earlier, he had threatened to embrace Eileen in public and cause a divorce. She didn’t trust him. He was warming up again, was working on a last desperate plan before she left Crosby for Willows. He was actually panicking. ‘Then I don’t want them. The patients mean your family to have them.’
‘But the baby—’
‘Is my problem, mine and Keith’s. Leave me alone.’
‘I can never do that.’ His voice was low and quite chilling. ‘No matter where you go, it—’
‘Will never be over,’ she finished for him. ‘I am six months pregnant with the child of a man I would die for. He loves me so well and so thoroughly that I have no need, time or energy for anyone else. I am off the market, Tom. Not just rationed and in short supply – I am completely out of stock.’ It was true. Any residual desire for this man had dissipated completely. Did he care at all for his family? Was he aware that his son . . . No, she must not think of it. As the sole keeper of her daughter’s big secret, she needed to tread softly.
‘I love you, and you know it.’
He touched her hand, and she felt nothing apart from skin on skin. Well, almost nothing . . . ‘You love Marie, and she knows it.’
‘And you know I’d leave her for you. It makes no sense to me, either, so I just accept it.’
‘And I’m pregnant.’
‘And I noticed. You carry beautifully.’
‘My baby wants no new visitors calling in.’
Tom hid a smile with his free hand. She called a spade a bloody shovel, didn’t she? What was it about her? Why her? If he put his mind to it, he could surely find a quiet little woman with hidden depths and raging hormones. But he already had that in his newly improved wife. Whenever he thought deeply about Eileen, which he did frequently, he realized that what he loved was her playfulness, her outright silliness. He wanted to park her with cups on a draining board, carry her around like a sack of King Edwards, mess about before breakfast, chase her on the beach.
‘Tom, I have to get home.’
‘I’ll drive you.’
‘You’ve already driven me mad. Go away.’
‘I’ll miss you.’ Even a glimpse of her in the street was pleasure. The thought of Crosby without her was unbearable. Taking photographs to Willows for Phil was not going to be enough, because he could not travel every week just to see Madam. He had already posted three packets. And Phil was living at a different address; he would probably stay there, as there was no room at Keith’s place in Willows Edge. ‘Your husband knows how I feel about you.’
‘Yes.’
‘Is he angry?’
She shook her head. ‘He knows there’s no danger of me betraying him.’
‘Yet you’re tempted.’
‘No. I am not. He is enough for me, Tom. We have a very strong bond, and only death could separate us. I was happy with Laz, but this is perfect. So stay out of it, because you are wasting your own time and mine. Oh, and don’t think about killing him, because if anything happens I’ll get the police on to you before you’ve breathed in. Now get out of my way, because I am going home.’