Читать книгу Christmas on the Mersey - Annie Groves, Annie Groves - Страница 9

The light drizzle was turning heavier as Kitty turned into Empire Street. It had been a long day at the NAAFI canteen where she worked and she would be glad to get home this evening. She hoped that her brothers, Danny and Tommy, weren’t in before her. Danny, who was twenty, had got a new job on the docks and Kitty hoped that working alongside older men with families and responsibilities would knock some of the rough edges off him. Danny had a habit of sailing a bit close to the wind in the law-abiding department and Kitty worried that he would get his collar felt one of these days. Tommy, meanwhile, was still a little weak after contracting a nasty bout of diphtheria while an evacuee, and his health was a constant nagging anxiety for her. Despite the bombing Kitty was loath to send him away again and in the face of all of the warning voices around her, she wouldn’t ever trust anyone outside of the family with his wellbeing again.

Kitty had looked after her brother and her father, Sonny, since her mother died when she was just a young girl. Her father had hardly done his best by his children and they had often had to go without while he drank away his meagre earnings at the Sailor’s Rest. They’d frequently had to rely solely on their older brother, Jack’s, wages from the foundry, but they had all been floored when Sonny had died just before last Christmas, even Jack, who’d had a difficult relationship with their father. Kitty found comfort in believing that her mother and father were united again, and never questioned the burden of running a family from such a young age.

She sidestepped the puddles in the gutter as she made her way across the street. There was a big hole in her shoe but money was tight and she hadn’t scraped enough together to get a new pair. She’d been trying to put a bit aside each week, but her savings weren’t growing very fast. She hoped she’d have a new pair before the bad weather set in. There were now shortages and rationing for most of the essentials. Kitty had heard a rumour that clothes rationing was going to be introduced and she half thought that she was more likely to get a new pair of shoes with rationing than without.

She was keen to get the dinner on. She’d managed to pick up a few sausages extra to the ration from the butcher and Pop had given her some potatoes from his allotment, so she was looking forward to making some hearty sausage and mash for the three of them. When Pop had brought the potatoes round this morning before she left for work he had also told her that their Frank was coming home. Kitty’s heart was almost in her mouth at this news. The last she’d seen of Frank was before he’d gone off for rehabilitation after losing his leg. Things had been awkward between them and Kitty had been forced to remind herself that there was no reason that Frank should give her any special treatment. He’d been through a lot and any idea she’d had that there was something between them was just a lot of silly girlish nonsense. Frank just saw her as one of the family; the girl across the road. That was that.

Still, Kitty couldn’t help a pang of emotion when she thought about the dance and the kiss that they had shared the night before he’d returned to his ship. She didn’t think she’d ever forget it. She sighed now as she pushed open the door to their little terrace – it was never locked. She still hoped she’d see Frank, though. Perhaps she’d pop round with something later on or tomorrow … perhaps an apple pie? The butter ration didn’t go far but she’d managed to eke it out. Frank would like that. He had a sweet tooth.

Frank watched from the shadows as Kitty closed the street door behind her. Even though he couldn’t see her closely, his heart had ached as he took in her dark hair and fine features. Kitty was beautiful and she didn’t even know it. Frank cursed himself for being a romantic twit. He’d walked past Kitty’s house at least a dozen times earlier on his stiff false leg. However, he couldn’t bring himself to ‘just call in’ like he always had in the past. Too much had happened since this bloody war had started. What could she possibly see in a man like him – one who was damaged beyond repair? Nothing, he imagined. He and Kitty had grown up together, and since her mother had died he’d been like a brother to her, but now what he felt for her was more than brotherly love. Something had changed between them but since he’d lost his leg he knew that he would never be good enough for her.

Dressed in his uniform of a petty officer of the Royal Navy, Frank acknowledged cheery greetings from passers-by he had known all his life. He smiled to hide his shame, but that was all that he could feel now: shame for being half the man he had been. He hated the two sticks that enabled him to manoeuvre on his new tin leg. He’d had it only a couple of months and it still didn’t feel comfortable. It rubbed like hell, and each day he had to massage the tender stump before re-dressing it ready for the false leg. Kitty would be sickened, he was sure.

However, he was glad of one thing: he had been allowed to stay in the navy – in the recently established Weapon and Radio branch at HMS Collingwood naval base – which spared him the humiliation of being invalided home.

Gulls and pigeons bullied the sparrows that swooped for scraps from the hessian sacks being carted along the busy dock road. Frank had arrived home only that morning and it was wonderful to see his family, but the constant questions and chatter were wearing him down already.

He toyed with the idea of knocking on Kitty’s door again. Seeing her up close and in the flesh would be a sight for sore eyes. He imagined her face, lit up like a Christmas tree when she was happy – God, imagin­ing it was unbearable. But then he imagined her face as she took in his new leg. He did not want to see the pitying look in her eyes nor the exaggerated look of pleasure when she saw he was actually walking again. No, Kitty had her own life – she didn’t need to be hindered by a cripple. Frank was scared of neither man nor beast but the thought of being rejected by Kitty put the fear of God into him. Better leave things alone, he thought as he ambled along, knowing he could fight most things but he could not battle his feelings for Kitty Callaghan …

Frank’s thoughts were interrupted by a swaying woman who might well have been pretty at one time, but was now hard-looking and weary. She came towards him, scraping her heels against the stone pavement as if the effort to hold herself upright was too much to bear; she greeted him with a practised smile.

‘Hello ’andsome, fancy a jar?’ By the sound of her tired voice she couldn’t care less if he wanted one or not.

‘Not tonight, girl,’ Frank smiled politely, ‘but here, have one on me.’ He gave her half a crown and hoped she would go home to her kids, or whoever it was who was waiting there for her. She kissed him on the cheek.

‘God bless yer, lad, you don’t know what that means ter me.’

Frank could only imagine as she wended her way along the dock road. He gave a gentle laugh and shook his head. He’d called her ‘girl’. He was sure she hadn’t been a girl since Adam was a lad!

‘How did that happen?’ Dolly’s eyes were wide when she saw the gash on the side of her daughter’s forehead the day after Frank’s return.

Rita called in most days but had tried to keep out of the way yesterday. However, she wanted to hear all about Frank.

‘It happened during the raid,’ Rita lied, knowing Pop would be out on horseback looking for Charlie Kennedy if he suspected Rita had been mistreated. ‘The windows on the ward were blown in. Luckily we were over the other side but when I dived under the bed I caught it on the steel frame.’ Rita was amazed at the ease with which the lies tripped off her tongue.

‘I hope you got one of the doctors to look at it,’ Dolly said, her brows pleating. ‘Is it sore?’

‘It’s fine, Mam!’ Rita said a little impatiently, then she relented. It was normal for her mother to be concerned and so she said in a more tender tone, ‘At least I came through it.’

‘Glory be to God!’ Dolly said in her quick Celtic way, but she couldn’t help but feeling uneasy all the same. There had been no suggestion before this that Charlie was violent with her daughter, but Dolly heard the rumours, the same as everyone else, and she knew that of late he had taken increasingly to gambling and to drink. He’d been ruined by his own mother, Dolly knew, and if he ever harmed her daughter …

‘So help me, I’ll swing for him!’ she muttered out of Rita’s hearing.

‘Oh, Mam, I will miss Michael and Megan even more after having them home for the past months.’ Rita sat at the table in the kitchen of her mother’s three-bedroomed, gas-lit terraced house, situated on the other side of the alleyway from Winnie Kennedy’s corner shop.

‘Who did he say they were staying with?’ Dolly, a loving, sensible mother who was everybody’s mainstay, was pouring tea into a cup with a hairline crack, something that would never have happened before the war. The cup rattled a little on the saucer as Rita took the hot tea. It would never occur to Dolly to offer a cup of tea without a saucer. She still had her impeccable standards, even though the shortages had forced her and the rest of the country to lower them a little.

‘A woman called Elsie Lowe, someone Charlie’s mother knows … She runs a boarding house for businessmen, in Southport.’ Rita sipped at the hot tea, used to not having sugar since it became rationed last January.

‘Is she old, then?’ Dolly asked. ‘I mean, won’t the kids be a bit of a handful for a woman who has a boarding house to run?’

‘Apparently not,’ Rita answered, nodding to Nancy, who was just bringing baby George in from his nap in his pram, which was parked on the small terracotta-tiled pathway under the parlour window.

‘Did you use the cat net?’ Dolly asked Nancy, who scowled. ‘Only, you forgot it yesterday and next door’s tabby was sniffing around the pram for milk.’

‘I won’t forget again in a hurry, not after it lay on his face and almost suffocated him!’ Nancy said with venom. ‘I’ll get Pop’s gun and shoot that bloody cat!’ Pop was the local ARP warden and allowed to have a gun in the house. Not that there had been any reason to use it. They even had a white diamond painted at the side of the front door to identify this as the warden’s house.

‘Everybody in the hospital was talking about the raids,’ said Rita, trying to take her mind off her own troubles. She did not mention the fact that they had a German airman in a single secure ward with armed soldiers standing guard outside. ‘The wards have been cleared of patients who were almost ready for dis­charge and allowed an early release.’

The raids had people’s nerves rattling, their tetchiness showing in all sorts of different ways. In Nancy’s case she thought she had the given right to go around with a scowl on her face just because Gloria had come over the other night after Nancy had got all dolled up and told her that the dances were off for the foreseeable due to the raids.

‘I’ll go mad if they close down all the dance halls and theatres the way they did at the beginning of the war,’ Nancy said, passing her son to Rita, who wrinkled her nose before proceeding to remove his blue cotton helmet. Giving George a loving kiss on his plump little cheek brought a gurgle of baby bubbles from his smiling pink lips.

‘I love them at this age,’ Rita said, missing her own two desperately already. ‘Are you going to have him evacuated, Nancy?’

‘He’s only six months old. Children under five years old are being evacuated with their mothers.’ The question needed to be asked, especially after the latest raids, and Rita knew her mother was on pins worrying about little Georgie’s welfare; they all were.

‘It’s at their mothers’ discretion,’ Nancy added tartly.

‘You can’t be serious, Nancy!’ Rita exclaimed. She knew the port of London had ceased to be an operative channel for worldwide trade since Germany took control of the French coast. Mines had been laid by both the Allies and Axis powers, making the English Channel far too dangerous for large-scale cargo, so the Mersey docks were now handling all vital cargoes. They were an ideal target for the enemy.

‘I am not having him evacuated!’ Nancy was adamant. ‘Where I go he goes and I’m going nowhere!’ Not even back to Mrs Kerrigan’s house if she could help it. She had already wangled a few nights’ stay here, but now their Frank was home there wasn’t going to be much room for her and little Georgie so she would have to be canny.

Nancy had lost her naïve charm since the war started, Rita noticed. Since Sid had been reported missing, then found and reported as a POW, Nancy had developed a fatalistic attitude of almost selfish what-will-be-will-be.

‘We’re not going to the countryside. We’re staying here in the bosom of our family,’ Nancy said, opening the sideboard door and taking out a clean towelling napkin.

‘I should imagine they won’t have much in the way of dance halls in the countryside, either,’ Dolly remarked with her unmistakable Irish humour. Rita suspected her light-hearted banter disguised her worry about their Eddy. He had not been home for months.

After their Frank was brought home injured, Mam almost closed her mind off from the serious aspects of life, and concentrated on safer things instead. Like minding the nation’s business instead of just her family. Her WVS work kept her going, and so too did salvage collection and setting up cookery classes for young women who were going through a war for the first time – after all, Mam had already gone through one war. She was a fountain of information, even if she did get her words wrong explaining things.

‘I can see now that it was a mistake for me to bring mine home when I did. They were safer on the farm,’ Rita said, causing the women in the room to focus their attention on her now. ‘I know Michael and Megan will be safer away from the air raids, but there’s no substitute for a mother’s love.’

‘It was a bit sudden, the kids going like that,’ Nancy said, and Rita nodded, making no comment, still bristling and feeling anxious about Charlie’s motives for taking the children. As she unbuttoned little George’s romper suit her mind was in turmoil.

It must be difficult for Nancy, having no man to talk things over with. Nevertheless Rita would prefer that to having Charlie Kennedy hanging around tormenting her and ignoring her all at the same time. It was mental cruelty – that’s what it was. However, although she suspected Nancy missed Sid, Rita noticed that her sister was talking a little less of him each day.

‘Georgie Porgie, pudding and pie, kissed the girls and made them cry.’ Rita’s dum-de-dum nursery rhyme made the young baby chuckle as she rubbed her nose in time to the rhythm. ‘When the boys came out to play, Georgie Porgie ran away.’

‘My little man would never run away!’ Kitty Cal­laghan popped her head around the door. She was carrying a plate covered with a clean tea towel and said, ‘I’m just on my way to the NAAFI and I thought I’d bring this apple pie over, Aunty Doll.’

‘Oh, you are a little darlin’, Kit,’ Dolly said. ‘That won’t be wasted, for sure.’ She was not Kitty’s aunty by blood but, having been a great friend of her mother who died when Kitty was just eleven years old, she was the closest woman to a mother Kitty, Danny and young Tommy had known.

Kitty was always working. Making delicious pies and cakes for the NAAFI, which were the talk of the neighbourhood, was her biggest pleasure in life. When there was a glut of apples, like now, Dolly was the lucky recipient of a plate apple pie or two. Sometimes it seemed as though rationing had not reached number two Empire Street, but nobody asked questions, realising it was better not to know. The area was poor and if people got a little extra they did not shout about it. Even if information was available there would be a rush for ears to be covered. What you didn’t know you couldn’t tell lies about – that was Dolly’s philosophy.

‘Have you seen our Tommy, Aunty Doll?’ Kitty asked after greeting the other women present.

‘I saw him this morning, but he’s not been in here since then.’

Kitty had hoped to catch Frank, whom she knew was home for only a short while. However, noting his chair was empty and feeling a little disappointed dip inside, she knew she must pull herself together. On such a short visit home, he would have people to see, places to be.

‘I’ll give Tommy his tea, don’t worry,’ Dolly said, noting the white turban covering Kitty’s ebony curls and the dark blue overall that covered her slim frame were spotless and ironed.

‘Is Frank not in then?’ Kitty asked, disappointed despite her resolve.

‘You just missed him,’ Dolly said. She was delighted to have him home again, even for a short while, and unable to fathom why he wanted to go back on duty. Anybody in their right mind would have got right out of the navy and away from those U-boats if they had a chance, and no one would blame him in the circumstances. Although, Dolly thought proudly, even with half a leg missing her elder son was still a catch; everybody said so.

‘I’m bringing fresh tea in now, Kit,’ Dolly called as she got up and went to the back kitchen, where she put the pie on the cold shelf and covered it with a clean tea towel of her own. Bringing Kitty’s cloth back, along with the fresh pot of tea, she asked lightly, ‘Have you got time for a cuppa before work?’

Kitty nodded. ‘Aunty Dolly, I want to ask your advice. Our Tommy’s turning into a right little tearaway lately.’ Her dark blue eyes darkened further. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do with him.’

‘Oh, he’s not bad, Kitty. He’s just restless,’ Dolly said, knowing that up until recently Tommy was in here more than he was in his own house. Now he was in with some bigger boys who lived near Marsh Lane and had been seen hanging around the emergency water tank in Strand Road. ‘He’ll call in when his belly’s empty, you wait and see. I’ll save him a bit of that apple pie.’

Nancy wrinkled her nose as she picked up George’s dirty nappy and, holding it away from her, she handed her sister the tin of talcum powder with her free hand. ‘Go easy with the talc, Rita. I can’t get me hands on any more and you’re shaking it on him like you’re salting a bag of fish and chips,’ she said as her older sister expertly lifted her nephew by his ankles and liberally doused his nooks and crannies with a snowy covering of scented powder.

‘He loves it.’ Rita was holding him like a prized chicken in the butcher’s window, before expertly slipping the clean towelling nappy under him and, joining both sides together, secured it to his vest with a large pin either side.

‘How did you manage to hide these nappy pins from our Sarah?’ Rita asked, knowing their younger sister was an avid salvage collector these days.

‘She’s not getting her hands on those, even if it will help the war effort. I need them to cover my son’s modesty,’ Nancy quipped.

‘Our flying boys need all the nappy pins they can get now,’ Rita admonished. ‘Isn’t that right, Kit?’

Kitty nodded. Her brother Jack was now a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm, having transferred from the RAF as his skills as a shipwright were in great demand after serving an apprenticeship at Harland and Wolff, the ship-builders in Belfast, returning as a skilled man to their foundry in Strand Road.

‘Mrs Ashby’s grandson’s joined the army,’ Dolly said when there was a lull in conversation. ‘She says he’s being shipped to the desert.’

‘I saw your Jack the other day,’ Rita couldn’t resist saying, knowing Kitty’s elder brother could not get away from the Borough quick enough. And even though he came back to Bootle, he never stayed in the house he grew up in across the street. Rita often wondered what it was that drew him back home even now; given the chance, Jack could be anything he wanted to be.

‘He had a day’s leave. He said he’ll try and get home for Christmas.’

Rita took a deep breath, staying silent. She and Jack had been in love – childhood sweethearts, some called them – but they’d been too young, and then he had gone away to Belfast for his apprenticeship. It was after he had left that things all went wrong, and she had got together with Charlie for all of the wrong reasons … But she and Jack would always remember their feelings. They may not be together now, and there was no way that they ever could be, but he was still a good friend to her and that would have to be enough, for both of them.

Fastening Georgie’s romper suit, she tried to push down the painful lump of melancholy that thoughts of Jack always brought. He wanted a life away from Empire Street. He wanted to see the world, conquer mountains. Lifting her nephew into the air she pushed the low point of her life from her thoughts, concentrating instead on baby George and making daft duck noises. This made George laugh, and the sight of his smiling little face raised her own spirits. ‘Just be thankful he’s not old enough to go and fight.’

‘Perish the thought,’ Dolly shuddered, refilling the tea cups.

‘My Sid always used to be up to something, his mother told me.’ All the women in the room knew that Nancy had elevated her Sid almost to the point of sainthood since he became a prisoner of war, which was strange because the two of them did nothing but bicker before his Territorial unit was called up and shipped out to France with the British Expeditionary Force. ‘Boys will be boys.’

No matter how much she tried to behave herself Nancy could not. Playing the dutiful wife did not suit her. She wanted to go out dancing with Gloria. She felt she deserved a little fun after nine months of pregnancy, much of it spent living alone at Sid’s mother’s. There was no use moping about the war, she decided. She absolutely refused to be miserable for long and drag everybody else down.

Rita was happy bouncing baby Georgie on her knee. His little gurgles of delight took her mind off her own children momentarily, especially when the infant chuckled, really chuckled, for the first time. Then he dribbled all over her, making everybody laugh. Who would think that talk of a nappy pin could bring forth such powerful emotions, she thought.

‘Drink your tea while it’s still hot, love,’ Dolly said in that gentle sensitive way that told Rita she knew exactly what she was going through. She gave her a tight, encouraging smile. ‘It doesn’t matter how old your kids are, you still miss them.’

Suddenly tearful, Rita turned her eyes away from her mother now. She did not want to share her fears with her mam about Charlie taking the kids away. Mam had enough on her plate with Frank being home.