Goodnight Sweetheart (4 page)

‘I’ve told Frank as how he’s got to write to me as soon as he can. I was thinking this afternoon that one of them uniforms we’re going to be making could be for Frank. It gave me a rare old turn, an’ all,’ June admitted.

‘Hannah’s very upset that we’re going to be making uniforms,’ Molly commented sympathetically.

‘Aye, well, she’s got to snap out of that, otherwise she’s going to find herself out of a job and she can’t afford that. All she’s got is that bit of a pension.’

‘It must be awful for her, though, June. I was talking to her for a bit this morning and she was saying as how she’d been married only a few weeks when her husband was killed.’

‘Maybe so, but that was nearly twenty years ago,’ June responded bracingly. ‘Things are different now.’

Their bus arrived and they both climbed on board, Molly paying both fares before slumping thankfully into an empty seat.

‘What you got there, girls?’ the conductor ribbed them jovially.

‘Blackout material, that’s what,’ June answered.

‘Want me to come round and give you a hand putting it up?’ he offered, winking at Molly.

‘Give over with yer cheek,’ June told him firmly, but she was still smiling at him, Molly noticed with amusement.

The bus set them down on the corner of the
cul-de-sac and they walked up it together in their normal manner, Molly pausing frequently to admire the flowers growing in the small, neatly tended front gardens whilst June hurried her along, her attention concentrated on reaching home.

As they drew level with Frank’s mother’s house, Molly stopped walking and suggested warmly, ‘Why don’t you give Frank’s mam a knock, our June, and see if she wants a hand with making up her blackout curtains? Those big windows of hers will take a lot of covering and we could easily run the curtains up for her on our Singer.’

‘Why should I put meself out to do her any favours?’ June demanded belligerently.

‘You’d be doing it for Frank,’ Molly said gently.

‘You’re a right softie, you are – just like Frank. But, aye, go on then, we might as well give her a knock,’ June agreed.

Unlike their own, Frank’s mother’s gate did not squeak when it was opened, but Molly did not think that the Edwardian tiled pathway looked any cleaner than their own, nor the front step better donkey-stoned. Their mother had been as house-proud as the next woman, and June and Molly, encouraged by Elsie Fowler, had grown up maintaining those standards.

It was true that their front door did not have the coloured leaded lights adorning number 46’s, nor did they have the advantage of a big bay window overlooking their small front garden, but
their father kept their privet hedge every bit as neatly clipped.

‘Come on, she mustn’t be in, and I’m not wasting any more time standing here knocking again,’ June announced, turning round.

Molly had started to follow her when she heard the door opening and stopped.

Mrs Brookes – a former ward sister at the hospital before her marriage, whose discipline and rigidity still remained – was a tall, well-built woman, firmly corseted, with a sharp-eyed gaze that rested disapprovingly on everything and everyone apart from her beloved son. It was certainly fixed less than welcomingly on them now, Molly recognised.

‘Oh, it’s you, is it?’ she declared grimly.

She hadn’t invited them in and quite plainly wasn’t going to do so. Molly quickly realised that June was leaving it to her to speak.

‘We were just passing on our way home and we wondered if you wanted any help with your blackout curtains, only me and June are going to be sewing ours tonight and …’

Was that a small softening Molly could see in the grimly reserved features?

‘Yes, and whilst we were in Lewis’s I had a good look at their wedding dress patterns,’ June chipped in determinedly.

Immediately Frank’s mother’s hackles rose and her mouth pursed with displeasure.

‘I’m already sorted out with me blackout curtains.
My friend on Carlton Avenue and her daughter have invited me round there so that we can make them together. In fact, Angela is going to come round for me tonight in her car. Such a lovely girl. A schoolteacher, she is, and the whole family so refined.’ She stepped back into the house and started to close the door, pausing to add coldly, ‘Oh, and I wouldn’t be making too many plans for any wedding, if I were you. From what I’ve heard, my Frank isn’t likely to get any leave for quite some time and when he does, the last thing he’s gonna want is to be rushed into a wedding.’

‘Well, that’s not what Frank has said to me,’ June insisted angrily. ‘And since it’s him and me that is going to be gettin’ married, it’s our business what we do, and no one else’s.

‘Gawd, she’s got her nose so stuck up in the air it’s a mercy she doesn’t fall over her own feet,’ June complained to Molly as she slammed Frank’s mother’s gate forcefully behind them. ‘So much for your idea, eh, Miss Clever Clogs?’

‘Well, at least Frank will be pleased that you offered,’ Molly told her, trying desperately to salvage something from the situation. Privately she half suspected that June quite enjoyed her set-tos with Frank’s mother and even deliberately encouraged them, but her loyalty to her sister prevented her from saying as much.

‘It works both ways,’ June replied. ‘So how about you going round and asking Johnny’s mam if she wants a hand with her curtains?’

‘She’s got Johnny’s sisters to help her,’ Molly protested, but she knew her face was burning guiltily.

‘What, them pair of useless articles?’ June sniffed disparagingly. ‘A lot of good them two will be, from what I know of them.’

‘All right then,’ Molly gave in reluctantly. ‘I’ll go round and see her as soon as we’ve had our tea.’

Half an hour later Molly was standing in her apron, slicing what was left of the Sunday roast for their cold meat salad tea, to be served with hot new potatoes from the allotment, while listening to the wireless, when she heard the sound of her father’s heavy work boots on the back step. Leaving what she was doing, she went to fill the kettle.

‘Kettle’s on, Dad.’

His walk back from Edge Hill railway yard had brought a sheen of perspiration to Albert’s sun-reddened forehead. As always, Molly was filled with a rush of love for him when she saw him. Left with two young daughters to rear alone, he could have opted to hand her and June over to their mother’s family and got on with his own life, but instead he had done everything he could to provide them with a loving happy home. It must have been so hard for him. He had had to work long gruelling hours at the gridiron to ensure there was food on the table, but he had never once
missed reading them a bedtime story, nor listening to them recite their times tables, nor checking their spelling homework. Tears pricked Molly’s eyes. She could scarcely remember her mother but she knew from the way he still talked about her that her father had loved her and still missed her.

‘I’ll get washed up, love,’ he called, disappearing into the small back scullery. Repairing railway lines and working on rolling stock was dirty and often heavy work, but Albert took pride in his appearance and was fastidious in scrubbing up the minute he got home. ‘Costs nowt to be clean’ was one of his favourite phrases. Medium height and slightly stooped, he faithfully clung to the small domestic details of family life originally put in place by the girls’ mother. A bath once a week, their hair washed on Sunday night ready for school on Monday, a kitchen that was kept spick and span with the pans, like the family’s shoes, polished so brightly that you could see your face in them. Albert had instilled in his daughters his own respect for cleanliness and neatness. There was another side to him, though, a side that had him cultivating flowers in the tiny back garden.

‘Your mam allus loved them,’ he had once told Molly when she had admired the scent of some roses, his arthritis-damaged fingers gently touching the velvety soft petals.

And he was not the kind of man to go off to the pub of a Saturday night, leaving his young motherless daughters to the care of a neighbour
like some men in his position would have done. Instead, in winter the small family had gathered around the wireless after Saturday night’s supper, whilst in the summer the girls had gone down to the allotment with their father.

‘You’ll never guess what’s happened at the factory today, Dad,’ June announced once they were all sitting down and eating.

‘Aye, well, you don’t want to go getting on the wrong side of that Miss Jenner,’ Albert warned his elder daughter after she’d finished telling him with relish how she had outwitted the new supervisor. He knew June could be a firebrand at times.

Molly could see the worry in her father’s eyes and vowed silently to do what she could to keep June from baiting Miss Jenner. No one else would take on a machinist who had lost her job for cheeking a superior.

Once the meal was over and everything cleared away, and their father had set off for his allotment, Molly ran upstairs to comb her hair. She knew she couldn’t put off the visit any longer.

Johnny’s mother and sisters lived three streets away from Chestnut Close, down a narrow backstreet. Its double row of small terraced houses were of poor quality. Unlike the houses on the close, those of Moreton Street did not have gardens or indoor bathrooms, but had to make do with small dank back yards and outside privies.

Two tow-headed little boys, playing in the dusty street, stopped their game to watch Molly until a
young very pregnant woman, with untidy hair and wearing a grubby apron, called out to them to get themselves inside.

Moreton Street had a slightly rank smell, and Molly tried not to wrinkle her nose at it. On the cul-de-sac they had the benefit of more modern housing, the allotments, with their smell of fresh earth and air, and even the scent of roses from some front gardens. Not that some of the residents of Moreton Street didn’t make an effort. Several of the houses had freshly donkey-stoned steps and clean windows with neat curtains hanging in them, but unfortunately Johnny’s mother’s house wasn’t one of them.

Molly climbed the steps and knocked on the shabby door.

She could hear sounds of people talking inside the house, but it seemed an age before the door was finally opened to reveal the elder of Johnny’s younger sisters, Deirdre, her hair in curling rags, and a grubby brassiere strap visible as she clutched at the front of her dressing gown.

‘’Ere, Mam, it’s our Johnny’s fiancée,’ she called back to the darkness of the cluttered hallway.

Molly’s tender heart couldn’t help but pity Johnny’s mother, with her nervous air, her hands disfigured and reddened from her cleaning job at the hospital. It must have been so hard to bring up three children alone with only one wage coming in. It was no doubt because their mother had had to work such long hours cleaning that Johnny’s
sisters were the way they were. The fact that their mother was out at work all day and most evenings meant that they had had far more freedom than most girls in the area, whose parents kept a much stricter eye on them.

‘Well, I never … we wasn’t expectin’ you, otherwise—’

‘Give over fussing, Mam,’ Deirdre objected. ‘If she’s gonna marry our Johnny she’s gorra get used to us the way we are, instead of expectin’ us to put on a lorra fancy airs.’

‘Deirdre, you pig, if you’ve bin using my rouge, I’ll skin yer alive.’ Heels clattered on the stairs, barely covered by a threadbare runner, as Johnny’s other sister, Jennifer, came downstairs, her hair carefully curled to emulate the style favoured by the film star Jean Harlow, her flimsy short skirt all but showing off her knees.

‘’Ere, Mam, me hem’s coming down. Have you gorra safety pin, so I can pin it? Only me other one needs a wash, and I ain’t got nuttin’ else to wear, like.’

‘Perhaps it might be better to sew it,’ Molly couldn’t help suggesting.

‘Give over,’ Jennifer laughed, giving a dismissive shrug. ‘I ain’t gor any time for that. I’ve gorra meet me new fella in ten minutes and I don’t want no other girl pinchin’ him from us ’cos I’m late. Gizz us a woodie, will yer, Deirdre?’ she demanded. ‘I’m gasping for a fag.’

‘You’re gonna have to cut that out if we’re going
to have a war,’ her mother warned her. ‘Fags’ll be on the ration as well, you mark my words.’

‘Then I’m just gonna have to find a fella to get them for me, aren’t I?’ Jennifer told her, blowing out a cloud of smoke that made Molly’s eyes smart, before asking, ‘So what’s brought you round here then, Molly?’

‘I was just wondering if your mam needed any help with her blackout curtains.’

‘Blackout curtains – just listen to ’er,’ Jennifer laughed. ‘We ain’t gonna be wasting our time messin’ around with nuttin’ like that; brown paper and sticky tape is all we’re gonna be doin’. Bloody hell, Deirdre, have youse been pinching my scent again?’ she demanded, sniffing the air as Deirdre attempted to walk past her.

‘So wot if I have, an’ all?’ Deirdre responded sulkily. ‘You took me last pair of nylons, didn’t yer?’

‘Hurry up and get yerself ready if yer coming down the dance hall wi’ me ’cos I ain’t gonna be waitin’ for yer. Yer want ter come with us, Molly? … Catch me tying meself to one fella like you have with our Johnny … Why don’t yer come wi’ us on Saturday?’ Jennifer asked.

‘It’s kind of you to ask, but me and June are going looking for some material for her wedding dress.’

‘Well, if it’s fabric you’re wantin’, there’s a shop off Bold Street as sells all the best-quality stuff right cheap, on account of it having fallen off a
lorry, if yer takes me meaning,’ Jennifer added with a knowing wink.

Molly didn’t make any response. It was impossible to grow up in Liverpool and not know about the brisk black market that existed, with so many goods passing through the docks, but Molly didn’t want to get involved.

She could see through into the back room where the tea things were still on the table. The smell of cheap scent and stale chip fat was making her long to escape, but politeness kept her where she was.

‘They’re good girls really, my Deirdre and Jennifer,’ Johnny’s mother told Molly almost apologetically when both her daughters had gone to finish getting ready to go out, ‘but they’re young and they gorra ’ave a bit of fun, like. Mind you, I’m right glad our Johnny’s going to wed you, Molly. You’re gonna be good for him. Not like some as I could name as would only cause him a lorra trouble.’ Her mouth tightened slightly.