Daughters of the Mersey (26 page)

Tom and Elaine arrived to drive Pa, Mum and Milo to the register office. The twins were with them, looking like bridal attendants. Dulcie wore a pale blue satin dress with a skirt of many frills while Lucas was in navy velvet trousers and a white satin shirt.

‘You both look beautiful,’ June told them and made a mental note not to send Amy any photograph that showed them. She’d weep that they could be here and she could not.

Ralph arrived wearing his best suit. June pinned his buttonhole in place and, hand in hand, they walked out to his car.

The Birkenhead register office had a large hall for weddings but as the wedding party numbered only seven and two children, they were guided towards a small room panelled in light oak. Leonie had a lump in her throat as she heard her daughter make her vows. This wasn’t the wedding she had envisaged for her and she was afraid it had come much too soon, but June’s groom was gazing at her with such love in his eyes that she felt heartened.

He was slipping the ring on her finger when the sound they all feared and
dreaded shredded the peaceful atmosphere. It was the siren sounding an alert. There was an involuntary pause and then the ceremony carried on as though nothing had happened. Dulcie started to cry and Elaine put an arm round her to comfort her.

Leonie shivered, she was glad now that she’d decided Amy should be evacuated and that she hadn’t given in to temptation and brought her home today.

For June, the signing of the register came quickly. She’d sensed the rising tension as their guests listened for the sounds of explosion or gunfire outside, and now there was relief that the ceremony was over and the bombs hadn’t come.

Ralph put down the pen and felt for her hand. The alert had frightened them and been a distraction. ‘Daylight raids never amount to much,’ he whispered to her, and sure enough it was still quiet when they went out.

The registrar advised them to take shelter but they decided to keep to their plans. Tom lined them up on the steps outside to be photographed, and as Ralph was escorting her back to his car, June heard the all-clear sounding its note of safety through the streets.

They were all in heightened good spirits when they reached Elaine’s house, laughing with relief that the marriage had taken place despite Hitler’s attempt to stop it. Tom had persuaded his wine merchant to allow him to buy two bottles of champagne for the occasion. He removed the cork with a resounding plop and filled the glasses. June felt the bubbles going up her nose as she sipped and felt her wedding was now going with a swing.

Elaine was good at entertaining at home but had had to turn to the black market to obtain two chickens, and rely on her home help
to roast them. June felt they couldn’t have had a better wedding breakfast anywhere. Pa praised it and thanked Elaine; he called it lunch though it was clearly more than that.

The afternoon was gone in a flash and at five o’clock Elaine made them a cup of tea and brought out the wedding cake. From the start, Mum had said regretfully she’d only be able to make one tier. It looked very festive, with a touch of pre-war richness.

June could see her mother wasn’t so pleased when she cut into it. ‘It’s turned out to be a lighter fruit cake than I intended. I had the icing sugar put by but I couldn’t get any almonds or almond paste to go under it.’

‘There’s almond paste here, Mum,’ June said.

Her mother smiled. ‘Elaine found me a recipe for a wartime substitute and provided the almond flavouring.’

‘It looks a very good cake, Leonie,’ Pa said, ‘and we all know how hard it is to get anything these days.’

Leonie laughed as she cut slices. ‘Ida let me borrow the wedding cake ornaments that came from a relative’s wedding cake.’

‘It tastes beautiful,’ Ralph assured her. ‘I’ve never tasted better cake,’ and they all agreed.

Leonie put what was left back in its tin and gave it to June when they were leaving. ‘You have it,’ she said, ‘and eat it. This is wartime wedding cake and won’t keep.’

‘I’m taking my bride home,’ Ralph said as the family were kissing her goodbye. ‘We’re going to have a quiet evening because June has to go to work early tomorrow morning.’

Amy was waiting eagerly for the
photographs of June’s wedding, but it was Mum who wrote to her the following week. She ripped open the envelope to read, ‘
I’m going to tell you all about June’s wedding
,’ but almost the only thing Mum did tell her was that there had been an air-raid warning in the middle of it, and how everybody had said they were glad Amy was in a safe place.

She knew about the bombing in Liverpool and on the Wirral because another group of five evacuees arrived from Birkenhead. They were not from her school and she didn’t know them. They came without a teacher, were immediately settled into Mrs Robert’s class and seemed to think she was a local girl.

The next week, June did write to her and sent her three postcard-sized photographs taken at her wedding but she looked nothing like a bride. She was wearing a funny hat stuck on the side of her head and Mum was wearing a hat and coat Amy had seen many times before. She wasn’t sure about the bridegroom either. He looked almost as old as Pa, but June wrote that he was being called up soon and she dreaded to see him go, so she must love him.

She also said that Elaine had given her a little box that had been left over from somebody else’s wedding to send her a piece of her wedding cake. It arrived two days later and was very pretty with silver wedding bells and ribbons printed all over it, so even the postman knew she’d had a wedding in the family.

Amy opened it carefully and was disappointed to find it held just a sliver of cake. It looked pretty much like the fruit cake Auntie Bessie made except this had a tiny bit of icing on top. She cut it into three
pieces so Bessie and Jack could taste it too. They both said it was an excellent wedding cake and Jack said, ‘A mouthful of wedding cake like this is said to bring you luck.’

Amy felt a little sorry for June; it was surely not the wedding her sister had expected and hoped for.

June couldn’t bear to think of Ralph going away to fight. But yesterday, as instructed, he’d reported to a local army call-up centre and after a lot of form-filling he had been given a medical examination. He’d been passed as A1 medically fit, been given a warrant to travel by train and told to report to the army barracks at Catterick for basic training in four days’ time. She was shocked; she’d not expected him to be spirited away so quickly.

‘Catterick isn’t far,’ he told her. ‘I’ll be able to come back and see you when I get leave. It’s probably safer there than it is here. They aren’t getting air raids like we are.’

Ralph had already decided he would have to give up renting his rooms. ‘I doubt I’ll be able to afford them and anyway, what is the point? You’ll have to live in the hospital and on your day off you’d be better going home than staying in those rooms by yourself. I’m glad I’ve got a few days to put my affairs in order.’

‘Five more nights and four more days,’ June mourned, but on only one would she be off duty and be able to spend it with him.

Ralph discovered he was obliged to give a month’s notice on his flat, so it gave him time to pack and give some thought about what he would do with his furniture and belongings. Leonie told him she’d be happy to keep his bedroom furniture
at her shop until he needed it again as she had an empty bedroom and there would be room for anything else to be stored in the unused cellar rooms at Mersey Reach. Pa offered to dispose of anything he didn’t want to keep at auction and Elaine arranged for a van to move his things.

Ralph couldn’t make up his mind what to do with his car. ‘I’d like to take it up to Catterick to use there but petrol is almost impossible to get nowadays.’ In the end decided to use his travel warrant and go up by train.

June had her day off on his last precious day at home, but he needed to drive his car to Mersey Reach where Milo helped him to disconnect the battery and put it up on blocks in one of the sheds. June went with him and they spent a lot of time with Milo but June wanted to savour her last day with Ralph and this wasn’t how she’d have chosen to spend it. She couldn’t go to see him off on the train the next day as she had to work.

As student nurses were forbidden to marry during their training, she had told nobody at the hospital that she had. There she was still Nurse Dransfield. Ralph had already bought her a gold chain on which to thread her engagement ring, so she added her wedding ring to it and wore them together, hidden under her uniform.

She thought of him all the time and the days seemed endless. She was really missing him, she’d spent so much time in his company recently that she’d let everything else in her life drop. It seemed her world was coming to an end.

That evening, when she came off duty at eight o’clock, she went up to his rooms. She had intended to do some more packing, there was still plenty to do, but she was overcome with misery and didn’t achieve much. An hour later, she was surprised
to hear a knock on the door. One of the other residents had come to tell her there was a phone call for her. She raced down the hall to the public pay phone and was delighted to find it was Ralph.

‘I rang the nurses’ home and was told you’d gone out, so I guessed where you’d be,’ he said. ‘I feel really down in the dumps at having to leave you. I’m here with a crowd of other men I don’t know, all of whom would rather be somewhere else.’

He was on a pay phone too, but he had his small change lined up and was able to talk for a long time. She heard his first impressions of army life and he didn’t like it. The army food was stodgy and they didn’t give him time to eat it. He was to sleep in a hard and narrow bed, jammed in a hut with thirty others, and he’d spent most of the afternoon out on the parade ground in heavy drizzle, learning to march wearing boots that weighed a ton. He didn’t know how he was going to cope with it.

June walked back across the park in the pitch dark of the blackout, had a hot bath and went to bed. She was in tears for a long time and was just settling down to sleep when the air-raid warning sounded and she had to go to the shelter.

Milo was getting plenty of sleep and couldn’t remember when he’d last had so much leisure time in which to please himself. He felt well enough to go out and about and went to Ralph’s rooms to help his sister pack up. On June’s day off, he took her and Mum to the pictures. He went to see Duggie Jenkins’ family and they seemed pleased to see him.

He knew Duggie had a sister called Floris but he’d had little to do with her in the past. Now she was working
as a secretary for a company in Birkenhead making life jackets and other air-sea rescue equipment. She made him welcome and produced a cup of tea.

‘Where is Duggie now?’ Milo asked. ‘I feel I owe my life to him. Once I was injured, if he hadn’t dragged me out to the boat and heaved me on, I’d have succumbed on that Dunkirk beach.’

‘Duggie would always do his best for his friends,’ Henry Jenkins told him. ‘They’ve sent him to the Far East. Singapore.’

‘He wasn’t given much time to recover from Dunkirk then?’

‘He had a month at home,’ Floris said, ‘and he likes Singapore. Duggie felt lucky to have come home unscathed.’

‘How is he?’

‘In fine fettle.’

Floris told him of two other friends who used to go to Milo’s shed to pore over yachting magazines and work on his old sailing dinghy. Milo had been quite envious of Derek Brierley and Phil Jones who had wanted careers at sea and had joined the merchant navy.

‘They haven’t had your luck,’ Floris said. ‘Both lost their lives in separate incidents. Their ships were sunk trying to bring essential supplies to English ports.’

Milo went home in a subdued frame of mind. It seemed he could have had less chance of survival if he’d joined the merchant navy. Seeing the Jenkins family had made him yearn to return to his old life. He wanted to shrug off being an invalid and get out on the river. The small dinghy, a pram really, that he’d used to get out to the
Vera May
, his fishing boat, was upturned in the back garden.

Mum came down the garden
and he said, ‘Help me roll it over, I want to see if it’s all right.’

‘You aren’t strong enough to go out on the river yet,’ she said. ‘Leave it until you’re passed as fit.’

‘I’d like to take a look at the
Vera May
.’ He pushed his hair back. ‘Perhaps I’ll ask somebody to come with me the first time I take her out.’

He went inside to the sitting-room window and put the binoculars on
Vera May
. She was bobbing about in permanent deep water where he’d left her and had been all the time he’d been away.

‘Tomorrow I’ll ask Mr Jenkins to come with me to have a closer look,’ he told his mother. So far he’d been unable to make contact with any of his old friends; all his generation had been caught up in the war.

Henry Jenkins was balding and looking older, he said he was exhausted with his day job at Camell Laird’s and his work as a warden at night, and Floris said she knew nothing about boats. But they kept him talking for an hour or so and when he asked Floris if she’d come to the pictures with him, her father said, ‘I think I’d better mention right away that our Floris is spoken for. She writing almost daily to a merchant naval officer and she’s expecting him home within the next few weeks.’

‘Right,’ Milo said. ‘That’s understood, but it’s no reason not to come to the pictures with me, is it?’

‘No, she spends too much time at home on her own.’

‘I’d love to come.’ Floris was all smiles.

Before he left, Henry Jenkins said, ‘I can put you in touch with Oswald Hemmings if you like. You remember him? He taught you
and Duggie to sail in that boat we did up.
Dido
, wasn’t it?’

‘Of course I remember him. He was Gerald’s father and taught a lot of our friends to sail. Where is Gerald these days, d’you know?’

‘He joined the Royal Navy and he’s serving on the aircraft carrier,
Ark Royal
. We built it in Cammell Laird’s and his father says it makes him feel he’s never far from home because of the connection. Oswald might like a trip out in the
Vera May
.’