Goodnight Sweetheart (33 page)

‘Two kiddies were trapped, but we managed to
get them out,’ Molly answered June’s unspoken question, making a heroic effort to smile and sound relaxed.

‘What about their mam?’ asked June.

Molly’s throat had gone dry. Her eyes felt itchy and sore. From the dust in the tunnel? From the tears she had cried in Johnny’s arms for the two children now without a mother and for the young woman whose whole life should have been ahead of her? Molly didn’t know. What she did know, though, was that she didn’t want to upset her sister.

‘They hadn’t found her when I left,’ she said. It was, after all, technically the truth in the sense that the young mother had still been sealed in the tomb of her destroyed house.

‘It’s nearly Christmas,’ said June in a low voice, ‘but how are we supposed to want to celebrate it with all that’s going on?’

‘We’ve just got to do our best, June,’ Molly answered her. ‘There’s nothing else we can do. Your Frank would want you and Lillibet—’

‘My Frank?’ June cut across her. ‘I dunno that he is mine any more, Molly, nor if I want him to be. Us getting married and all that seems ever such a long time ago now. When he came home for Elizabeth Rose’s christening it were like I didn’t really know him any more.’

‘June, don’t say that,’ Molly protested, her voice muffled by tiredness and despair.

June started to cry so Molly went to put her arms around her, trying to comfort her. ‘It’s just
this war, June. Frank loves you and you love him and—’

‘No.’ June shook her head. ‘I don’t know as I do any more, Molly. In fact, sometimes I think I hate him for leaving me with Elizabeth Rose to worry about and him not being here. It’s all right for him, all he has to do is come home once in a while and everyone thinks he’s wonderful, but it’s me as has to cope with everything, not him. Molly, if anything was to happen to me I want you to promise me that you’ll bring my Elizabeth Rose up as though she were your own.’

‘Nothing’s going to happen to you,’ Molly stressed.

‘You can’t say that – no one can. That woman last night whose kiddies you rescued – that could have bin any of us. And if it were to be me, Molly, I don’t want my little girl being brought up by Frank’s mam, and I do not want her being like you and me neither, having to grow up without her mam. If I wasn’t to be here then you’re the nearest thing she’s going to have to a mam of her own, Molly, and I want you to promise me that if owt does happen to me, then you’ll love her and look after her like she was your own.’

‘June …’

‘Promise me,’ June insisted, her grip on Molly’s arm so tight that her nails were digging into Molly’s flesh.

Tears stung Molly’s eyes. ‘You don’t have to ask me to promise anything, June. You know that I already love her like she was my own.’

‘But promise me all the same.’

June’s face was grey with tiredness and strain in the dull late December light grudgingly seeping into the morning sky. Molly’s heart turned over inside her chest as she looked at her sister. When had the lively and vivacious June grown so gaunt and desperate-looking? So much as though something were eating her up inside and destroying her warmth and spirit.

‘I promise,’ Molly told her. There could be no exchange of confidences now from her to June, telling her about last night and Johnny, Molly realised. The June with whom she might once have had that kind of exchange had gone and been replaced by someone Molly was frighteningly aware she hardly recognised.

‘There she is, crying again,’ said June, looking up towards the ceiling.

‘I’ll make her a bottle and take it up to her, if you like,’ Molly offered.

June shook her head. ‘She’s not due a feed for another hour yet,’ she told Molly sharply.

‘Surely it wouldn’t do her any harm to feed her now. She sounds so hungry, and then you can go back to bed and have another hour yourself, seeing as how the bombers kept you awake,’ Molly coaxed, hardly daring to breathe as June frowned and seemed to consider. But then just as she looked about to accept, her shoulders tightened as though she were preparing herself to carry a heavy burden, her mouth tightening as she shook her head again.

‘I’m not going against what Dr Truby says to do,’ she informed Molly fiercely. ‘So you can stop trying to persuade me.’ Her expression changed, tears filling her eyes and her voice wobbling slightly as she exclaimed woefully, ‘Oh, Molly, I don’t know what’s happening to me sometimes. I feel that mytherated and cross wi’ meself, you and me shouldn’t be falling out – you’re me sister.’

‘We aren’t falling out,’ Molly tried to comfort her, giving her a hug. ‘Like you said, we’re sisters, you and me, June, and nothing can ever come between us,’ she added stoutly, and meant it.

‘Oh, I know what I meant to tell you,’ June sniffed, trying to regain control. ‘You know them tins of fruit Pearl Lawson’s hubby were supposed to have got for Christmas Day?’

Molly nodded, relieved to see June behaving like the June of old, for now at least.

‘Well, it seems that Marjorie Gladdings from number 53 opened a tin t’other day, expecting to find peaches and that inside, and instead it were full of carrots. Went mad, she did, running across to Pearl’s, yellin’ her head off that she’d bin robbed on account of paying George under the counter for them, and saying as how it were all a con, and that George were as bent as a nine-bob note.’

When Molly had finished laughing, more out of relief than mirth, she hugged June again.

‘What’s that for when it’s at home?’ June demanded.

‘Nothing,’ Molly answered her, still smiling, ‘exceptin’ that you’re my sister.’

She couldn’t remember a time she had last felt as sick with nerves as this, Molly admitted as she stood outside the front gate of the neat semidetached house. With every step she had taken down the tree-lined avenue she had wondered if she had the courage to go on. This part of Wavertree, with its smart houses and its tennis club, was a world away from her own home in Chestnut Close. The palms of her hands felt sweaty inside her gloves, and her stomach was churning. But this was something she had to do. She had made up her mind about that. She just hoped that Anne would listen to her and that somehow they could be friends again. Taking a deep breath, she lifted the latch on the gate and walked up the path. It was impossible to know if anyone was watching her through the thick net curtains screening the windows.

The brass door knocker was polished and shiny. Molly’s hand shook as she raised it and then let it drop. No response. She tried again. Still no response.

Her shoulders hunched with defeat, Molly turned round and walked back down the path, blinking away her tears. She felt so bad about what had happened, and about losing Anne’s friendship.

She was less than halfway down the avenue
when she heard the sound of someone running up behind her. Turning round, she saw Anne, hatless and coatless, running after her, calling out breathlessly, ‘Molly, stop.’

Uncertainly, Molly did so.

‘Philip says I’m being mean and that it isn’t fair to blame you. He says that he’d have done the same thing in your shoes, and that you were just trying to protect me.’

‘Men don’t understand. I shouldn’t have kept it from you, Anne. I should have told you.’

They each took a step towards the other.

‘We’ve been such good pals, it would be a pity if we were to fall out now,’ Anne said huskily.

‘I’m really sorry I didn’t tell you.’

‘Oh, Molly, I’m sorry I was so horrid. It was all such a shock.’

‘I’m really sorry.’

‘Can you forgive me?’

‘Can you forgive
me
?’

Suddenly they were hugging each other, both laughing and crying at the same time as they exchanged apologies.

‘We must stay friends for the rest of our lives,’ Anne told Molly emotionally, half an hour later, when Molly was sitting perched slightly uncomfortably on the edge of a chair in Anne’s parents’ immaculate front room. In her hand she balanced the cup of tea Anne had insisted on making her when she had invited Molly in so that they could talk properly. Her parents were out, she explained,
and Philip was upstairs resting. ‘We’ve been through so much together.’

Molly agreed, her heart almost too full of emotion for her to be able to speak.

‘When this war is over, and me and Philip are properly settled, I want you to come and stay with us. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had, Molly. I wish you had told me about Richard but I can understand now why you didn’t.’

‘I wish I had done too.’

They exchanged mutually understanding looks.

The war might keep them apart but Molly knew that they would always remain firm friends because of what they had shared.

‘White Rabbits,’ said Molly, as she and Johnny met up, one evening the following spring, outside the church hall, where they had been attending a civil defence meeting, Molly with her WVS colleagues, and Johnny with his own rescue group.

‘What?’

‘It’s the first of May,’ she reminded him. ‘You have to say “White Rabbits” for luck at the beginning of a new month!’

‘I wouldn’t need no White Rabbits for good luck if you was to agree to be my girl, Molly.’

She gave him a reproving look, and changed the subject. ‘Elsie was round at our house last night and she says she reckons she saw Mr Churchill when he were here. Swears it were him she saw. Mind you, if everyone who reckons they saw him did, then half of Liverpool must have seen him,’ she laughed.

There had not been any repetition of the night they had shared after the bombing. Molly had
made it plain that she wasn’t a fast girl and that she did not want to have that kind of relationship, and Johnny, to his credit, had not attempted to press her. They both recognised that their union had been the result of an extraordinary night – a night when they had needed to take comfort from the devastation and destruction all around them. She had allowed Johnny to take her out, though: to the Grafton over Christmas, and just recently she had been going to the cinema with him once a week.

‘Courtin’ with him, are you?’ June had asked her one evening when he had dropped her home.

‘He’s just a friend,’ Molly had told her sister firmly, and that was quite truthfully how she thought of him. It was, after all, only just over a year since she had lost Eddie, and she couldn’t imagine any man taking his place in her heart.

She had got up early on the anniversary of Eddie’s death and had gone first to church to say a prayer for him, and then to the cemetery where, to her delight, the bulbs she and her father had planted at the back end had been in flower. She had viewed their dancing golden heads through a haze of tears, which had flowed more heavily when she had lifted her head to see how many new graves had extended the perimeter of the cemetery since Eddie’s death.

She had felt hesitant and even guilty at first, quietly telling him about her year, and promising him that she had not and would not ever forget
him, but then a sense of peace had filled her as though an unseen hand were gently lifting those feelings from her shoulders and freeing her to speak honestly and openly to the young man she had loved, and who now belonged to a place that seemed so very far removed from her.

The news reported in the
Echo
in March, that a baby girl had been found alive under bomb debris in Wallasey after being trapped there for three and a half days, had plunged June back into a mood of dark foreboding and anxiety. Trying to coax her sister into a happier frame of mind had pushed Molly’s own most private feelings and concerns to one side. June had been furious when she had been told by the doctor that baby Lillibet was underweight for her age, and to Molly’s concern, June’s phobias about the safety of air-raid shelters had grown worse rather than better.

‘I wish June would go out and stay with Auntie Violet in Nantwich,’ Molly had confided to her father. ‘She wouldn’t have to worry about the shelters out there, and there might be some extra food to spare for Lillibet.’

‘Aye, I wish she would go, as well, lass, but June’s like me sister and they’re as stubborn as mules. Think on, Molly, you can tek a horse to water as often as yer like, but you canna make it drink.’

‘Pity it isn’t dark,’ Johnny whispered in Molly’s ear now as she stopped at the kerb to head off
across the road and home. ‘Not going to ask me why?’ he teased her.

Molly dismissed him with a shrug, but he refused to be quelled.

‘Then I’ll just have ter tell you, won’t I?’ he whispered. ‘If it were dark I could put me arms around you and then I could kiss you …’

Molly pursed her lips into a firm line. ‘There’s going to be none of that going on between us, Johnny,’ she told him. ‘My Eddie’s only bin dead a year and …’ She stopped speaking when he reached for her hand and held it tightly in his own.

‘I’m being as patient as I know how, Molly, but it isn’t easy. I want you to be my girl and I want to start courtin’ yer proper, like. I made a mistake letting you go once – I’m not doing it again.’

Molly didn’t know what to say. She liked Johnny and she enjoyed his company. Her childish sexual fear of his maleness was long gone and she couldn’t pretend to herself that she hadn’t enjoyed his lovemaking because she had. So why was she holding back? The war had brought the best out in Johnny, changing him as it had done all of them. He relished the danger of the rescue work he did, and was well thought of by the others on the team. So much so that he had now been officially put in charge. Any girl would be proud now to claim Johnny as hers. No one would blame her or look askance at her if they were to start courting, and given what had happened between them she ought
to accept. So why did she feel so reluctant to do so? She was a woman now, not a foolish girl any more, and she had seen enough of how the separation caused by war and the different experiences of it could drive couples apart. She and Johnny were sharing their experience of it and she had seen too how that could bond a couple and how, indeed, it could foster a dangerous intimacy between couples who were already committed elsewhere.

‘I—’

I need more time, she had been about to say, but before she could do so, Johnny grabbed hold of her and kissed her. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Pearl coming towards them.

‘Oh, thank you very much,’ Molly reproached Johnny, but he refused to be abashed, simply grinning at her instead, and keeping hold of her hand.

‘Nice to see someone is looking happy,’ Pearl commented, eyeing them both up with interest.

‘Well, if you really want to do that,’ Johnny answered, giving her a teasing wink, ‘then you want ter find someone who has bought some of them tinned peaches from your hubby that have actually got peaches inside ’em.’

Molly had told Johnny the story about the carrots and he loved nothing better than to tease people.

‘It weren’t my hubby’s fault that there was a bit of a mix-up,’ Pearl defended her husband crossly. ‘He sold on them tins in good faith.’

‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ Molly objected, once Pearl was out of earshot.

‘Why not? It wasn’t my fault either that them tins—’

‘No, not that about the peaches. I mean that you shouldn’t have kissed me like that in front of her. She’ll have it all over Liverpool by tea time.’

‘So what if she does?’ Johnny asked her softly. ‘I’d be very happy to have folk think of you and me as a couple, Molly.’

‘I’ve just told you, Johnny, it’s too soon. And besides, folks round here have long memories. There was all that fuss about that lass and me and you.’ Molly could see from his face that she wasn’t convincing him.

‘Look, I’ve got to go. Sally’s invited our June round tonight to make amends and I’ve promised I’ll make our dad’s tea.’

‘So them two have finally made up, have they? Last I heard was that your June weren’t speaking to Sally Walker.’

‘That was just a bit of sommat and nothing, Johnny, and I’ll thank you not to go saying anything about it. Sally reckons that her Ronnie and June’s Frank should be getting some leave soon. I hope they do. It will do our June a power of good to have Frank home. Do you think we’ll see anything tonight?’ she asked uncertainly, glancing up towards the cloud-brushed May sky. April had been an unusually quiet month for bombing raids and some people had started to hope that the end
of the war was in sight. Molly knew better than that and worried it was the calm before the storm.

‘I dunno,’ Johnny answered her. ‘If Jerry knows that Churchill has had the Western Approaches Command HQ moved from Plymouth to Liverpool we’re bound to see some action.’

They exchanged sober looks. The central command for all the shipping approaching England from Canada and North America was now operating from a large secure underground headquarters in Liverpool, and everyone was concerned that it would draw more bombing raids to the city. The occupants of the close had three new residents billeted amongst them, all of them working at the new HQ, and Molly had already exchanged tentative hellos with one of the young women, having seen her on her way to work whilst she was on her own way to the factory.

‘Fancy coming for a walk wi’ us this next Sunday?’ Johnny asked.

‘A walk? Where to?’ Molly asked cautiously.

‘I dunno. Somewhere as I can have you to myself.’

Molly smiled again and shook her head. ‘Get away with you!’ she laughed, and headed for home.

She reached number 78 just as June was about to leave, Lillibet already strapped into her pram. Molly paused to blow her niece some kisses and watch her rosebud mouth widen into a delighted smile. She itched to take her out of the pram and
cuddle her, but she knew how June was likely to react about her interfering with Lillibet’s routine if she did. Her duties with the WVS plus her job at Hardings meant that Molly had very little free time, but she still managed to make enough to sing nursery rhymes to Lillibet from the books she and June had shared as children. Molly adored her niece, and couldn’t have loved her more if she had been her own.

Over Christmas Molly and Sally, giggly after a glass of Elsie’s homemade wine, had whispered together about claiming Dr Truby King’s book for the war effort.

‘We’re allus being told how much we need fuel,’ Sally had said virtuously, slightly spoiling the effect by hiccuping loudly.

‘I reckon he’d go up in flames right well.’

‘You mean our June will when she finds out.’

‘I dare you,’ Sally had giggled.

Molly looked wistfully at the book, where it lay ready to hand on the sideboard. It had caused so much trouble she’d be pleased to see the wretched thing destroyed.

‘Isn’t our June back from Sally’s yet?’

‘No, but it’s still light,’ Molly pointed out to her father, taking from him the vegetables he had brought back from the allotment.

‘Aye but it’s gone ten o’clock. What time did she go out?’

‘About six.’ Molly reached for the kettle and
started to fill it, then broke off as she heard the familiar squeak of the pram’s wheels, to tell her father, ‘That sounds like June now.

‘Dad was just asking where you were,’ she told her sister, as she helped to unstrap Lillibet from her pram harness, picking up her niece and giving her a loving cuddle. She was crawling now and giving everyone she knew big loving smiles that showed off her newly cut teeth. Despite June’s strict routine, she had a sparkle and spirit that gladdened Molly’s heart to see.

‘Don’t go getting her all excited, Molly,’ June protested. ‘It’s gone ten and she should be asleep.’

‘Do you want me to do her a bottle?’ Molly offered.

‘No, thanks. I gave her one at Sally’s and she’s not due another now for four hours. She were a bit grizzly earlier on. I hope she’s not starting up with cutting another tooth. I still haven’t made up me lost sleep from them last two.’

Molly laughed to see the dimples appear in her niece’s cheeks as she smiled up at her. Tenderly she stroked the dark tousled curls off Lillibet’s face. She was such a pretty baby. Everyone said so, and a loving little thing as well, always holding up her arms to be picked up. Molly knew that June would have something to say if she knew how often Molly did just that, when June’s back was turned.

‘One of the lads down the allotments was sayin’ that he’s heard that one of them conchies has moved in on Mabel Street.’ Everyone knew about
the conscientious objectors, who were exempted from fighting because of their beliefs, but Molly had not actually met one. ‘Works up at the hospital, so Ted Hargreaves were saying.’

Dusk had fallen whilst they had been talking, its twilight fading into darkness. June was just reaching out to take Elizabeth Rose from Molly when they heard the warning wail of the air-raid siren. Briefly, all three of them stiffened into silence.

‘Quick, let’s get down to the shelter,’ said Molly, retaining her hold on Elizabeth Rose, and resisting June’s attempts to take the baby from her. ‘You first, June,’ she insisted firmly. ‘Dad’ll bring the bags.’

Doors were opening up and down the close, as people hurried towards the shelter.

Daisy caught up with Molly, shooing her two sons in front of her. ‘Ruddy Jerry. I thought he’d realised over Christmas that he’s wasting ’is time trying to bomb Liverpool, because we won’t give in to him.’ She was having to raise her voice to be heard above the wail of the sirens.

‘You not on duty tonight then, Molly?’ another neighbour called out as she caught up with them.

Molly shook her head, hurrying into the shelter. As always its sour smell caught at the back of her throat and made her wrinkle her nose.

‘Lord, but it stinks in here,’ Daisy complained.

‘P’rhaps we ought to try leaving the doors open during the day now the weather’s warming
up a bit,’ Elsie suggested. ‘Get a bit of fresh air inside.’

‘Wot, and have the place stripped out by thieves? Don’t be daft, Elsie.’

‘Molly, give Elizabeth Rose to me,’ June demanded.

‘You get yourself settled first, June,’ Molly told her calmly, discreetly putting herself between June and the exit. Molly didn’t want to risk anything spooking her into trying to leave before the all clear had gone.

They heard the first wave of bombers coming over within minutes of the final arrivals squashing into the shelter and the door being closed.

Everyone started to settle himself or herself down for the night, unrolling sleeping bags and punching them into shape with weary resignation.

‘I were ’oping as how we’d seen the last of these ruddy air raids,’ one of the men commented grimly.

Molly, who had counted the seconds of the first wave of bombers, wondered if anyone else in the shelter had realised just how many of them there were flying overhead. Far more, surely, than there’d been during the Christmas air raids. The crack and rat-a-tat-tat of the AA batteries exploded like fireworks, followed by the ominous sound of the bombs. Some of the docks were still damaged and unable to be used from the Christmas bombing raids, and by the
sound of it they were being targeted again.