Put Out the Fires (31 page)

“It’s terrible, but I can’t really remember what mine were like.” It had all seemed like a dream at the time, and there’d been nurses in the maternity home to do everything for her.

Siobhan appeared and Sheila buttoned the girl’s coat with her free hand. “You’ll get your death of cold, going out like that,” she scolded. The house quietened down somewhat after the older children left.

The baby drained his bottle and Sheila hoisted him over her shoulder where he seemed to crouch, looking oddly masculine in his long white flannel gown. She began to rub his broad back. “What’s going to happen to him?” she asked again.

Ruth didn’t answer immediately. She looked down at her hands and noticed her fingers were knotted tightly together. “Dilys wanted me to have him,” she said.

The little girl climbed onto Sheila’s knee and began to rub the baby’s back along with her mother, and it gave a mighty burp. “You clever little chap!” Sheila said delightedly.

“That was all due to you, Mary, luv. You’ll make a dead good mam when you grow up.”

“Can we keep him, Mam?” a voice asked from under the table.

“No, luv. He belongs to someone else.”

“Do you think they’ll let me have him?” As soon as she’d set eyes on the baby, Ruth knew she had to keep him.

She’d even had the strangest feeling that he was already hers, that he had nothing to do with Dilys.

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“The authorities that deal with such matters, adoption societies or -whatever they’re called.”

Sheila looked puzzled. “What’s it got to do with them? If Dilys said you were to have him, then you should. There’s a woman in Garnet Street who brought up another woman’s baby when she had a girl and not the boy she really wanted, and one of me mates from school lived with her grandma right from when she was born. All you need to do is get him registered, that’s all.”

Ruth shook her head. “I want it to be official. I couldn’t bear it if someone took him off me in a few months’ time.”

She would be heartbroken enough if he was taken from her now. With a flash of illumination that left her reeling, she knew that was why Dilys had bravely struggled through the birth, alone and virtually silent in the dark, so Ruth would find the baby in her own bed and want to keep it. In hospital, it might have been whisked away in a stranger’s arms. The poor girl had been told what to expect and knew when she went to bed she was in labour.

What was it she’d said when Ruth offered to buy a nightdress? “I won’t need one.” Perhaps, you never know, she’d felt contractions in Spellow Lane and deliberately had herself thrown out so she’d have an excuse to come back to Pearl Street, drawn instinctively to Ruth, the only person who cared. No, she couldn’t possibly let someone else have Dilys’ baby.

“What about Ellis? She’s his grandmother,” she said.

Sheila snorted rudely. She lifted the baby off her shoulder where he’d gone to sleep and stared at his grumpy, old man’s face. “If there was a chance of Ellis getting her hands on this lovely little bugger, I’d kidnap him meself,” she said flatly. “She won’t want anything to do with him, I know that for sure. Here, take him back, and I’ll make us all a cup of tea.”

Ruth stretched out her arms eagerly for her baby.

In February, the entire country decided that as far as the war went, things were definitely looking up. Morale, though never low, began to soar. Lloyds of London, it was reported, were laying odds of five to two that peace and victory would be theirs by June that year, and at last it looked as if the marauding, murderous U-boats were being brought under control. Tobruk was taken by the British and Australians, and Mussolini was being hammered into the African ground. In Ethiopia, which had been conquered by Italy in 1936, the exiled Emperor Haile Selassie was brought back by the British whilst they continued to drive the enemy out. Italy, it seemed, was beginning to fall apart.

What did it matter then, with victory on the horizon, that there wasn’t enough meat to fill your rations, or the greengrocers had hardly any vegetables, except potatoes, and even less fruit, and the sweetshops stayed closed for days for lack of sweets to sell?

“We shall pull through,” Winston Churchill assured the people, “we cannot tell when or how, but we shall come through. None of us has any doubts whatever.”

In Pearl Street, Kate Thomas went to see Ruth Singerman as promised. She was astounded to find Dilys gone, and the baby being held firmly in the arms of a beautiful woman with shining eyes and dark red hair who looked rather like a Madonna as she stared down at the child. It was the first time Ruth and Kate had met.

After initial exclamations of awe and wonder at his size and strong build, Kate Thomas asked, “Has he been checked by a doctor?”

“Of course. I took him to be examined straight away,” said Ruth. “The doctor said he’s a perfectly healthy baby and beautifully formed.”

“And you wish to keep him?”

“That’s what Dilys wanted,” Ruth said firmly. She was conscious of the baby’s heart beating close to her own.

“Well, I see no harm in that, but what about your job? I take it you won’t be able to give up work?”

Ruth found the woman’s manner rather officious and overbearing, but Eileen had already warned her not to take any notice. “She’s upper-class and used to bossing people about and giving orders. Underneath, she’s all heart and anxious to help.”

She replied, “No, I need the money more than ever now, but Sheila Reilly - that’s Eileen’s sister-has offered to look after him while I’m at work. She’s longing to get her hands on a baby. And my father will take him for walks. Sheila’s promised to lend me a pram.”

“You seem to have everything quite nicely sorted out.”

Miss Thomas chucked the baby under the chin. “What do you intend to call him?”

“Michael,” Ruth replied. The name had come to her out of the blue and held no connotations or memories of people she had known in the past.

“As this is Liverpool, everyone will call him Mike or Mick or even Micky.”

“My father’s already pointed that out, but I shall call him Michael, nothing else.”

“You don’t need my help, after all,” Kate smiled.

“Everything’s perfectly fine.”

“Not really.” Ruth looked at the woman anxiously. “I want to adopt him. I want him to be officially mine.” She stroked the baby’s cheek. “Have you any idea what I should do?”

Kate looked dubious. “I don’t know much about these things, but I think the powers that be like children to go to married couples. I’ve no idea how they would regard a single woman.”

“But I can try, can’t I?” Ruth said eagerly.

“I wouldn’t if I were you.” Kate looked even more dubious. “I’d advise against getting in touch with anyone in authority. You know what some of these people are like, little tinpot Hitlers, if you’ll pardon the comparison.

Once they know you have the baby, they might start waving the big stick and take him away, even if it means the poor little thing being dumped in an orphanage.

Frankly, I’d keep quiet about it.” Her earnest little face split into a wide grin. “Either that, or get married. That would be the best thing of all.”

Something else happened in February, though scarcely of world-shattering importance. It mattered only to one person, but to that person, it felt like a milestone that she’d never thought she’d pass.

Eileen Costello was accepted into the Women’s Land Army and moved into the hostel, a dilapidated old vicarage, with Peggy Wilson and eighteen other land girls, where the warden, Mrs Bunce, a moody but goodnatured woman, kept them strictly in line. Eileen didn’t care about curfews; she didn’t even mind the appalling food, so different from that supplied by Edna. She knew straight away she would like it; the atmosphere was carefree and full of fun, just like Dunnings, though here the girls came from all walks of life, stretching right across the social sphere. They slept four to a room, and the backgrounds of the three women Eileen shared with couldn’t have been more different. Gillian Mitchell, intense and studious, had just finished university when the war started, and had a BA (Hons) degree in Biology, whereas Val Hanrahan, just eighteen, was the only experienced farmworker in the place, having been born on a farm in County Antrim. Pam Jones, very tall and as thin as a lath, had never worked before. She was a quiet girl, who’d married a midshipman in the Royal Navy just before Christmas, and she spent most of the time writing long letters to her new husband.

All the girls had adapted to their new environment with remarkable, cheerful stoicism. They made a joke out of their aches and pains, and the appalling conditions under which they worked.

The thing that happened, the milestone, occurred on Eileen’s second night there, when Gillian removed a Wellington boot and a mouse came scurrying out and disappeared through a hole in the skirting board.

Gillian screamed blue murder, despite the fact, as she assured them later, she’d examined many a mouse under a microscope during her course at university, but the others, the mouse by now in a place where it could do no harm to three girls who worked every day with creatures immeasurably bigger and more dangerous, fell about with helpless laughter, including Eileen Costello, much to her astonishment when the laughter had subsided.

Later that night, she wrote to Nick, an affectionate letter in which she suggested they meet. “Can you get a weekend’s leave? You could stay in the village pub. I’d love to see you.”

She’d never stop mourning Tony, she knew that, but perhaps she was beginning to learn to live with it.

Chapter 13

Brenda Mahon smiled cynically when she noticed the letter on the mat was from Xavier. His letters were becoming more frequent and more frantic ever since she’d stopped sending money. “It’s awful hard managing on seven bob a week,” he complained. “What’s happening down there? Has the dressmaking dried up or something?”

She still wrote to him regularly every Sunday, friendly little letters that she didn’t mean a word of, which completely ignored his pleas for cash. In fact, she didn’t even mention money, and imagined how frustrated he must feel when he opened the envelope and a postal order for thirty bob or more didn’t drop out as it used to and there was no explanation as to why.

It wasn’t until a couple of hours later that she bothered to read the letter and when she did, she felt herself grow faint. Xavier had a few days’ leave beginning on 10 March.

He was coming home!

Bloody hell!” she screamed. She tried to remember today’s date, but couldn’t even remember the month.

Since Carrie turned up, life was nothing but a lazy meaningless blur. In the end, she had to nip along to Sheila Reilly’s to take a look at her calendar where she discovered today was Friday, March 7, which meant Xavier would arrive on Monday. He’d given no indication of the time.

Brenda ran home and hastily lit a fag to calm her nerves.

“Bloody hell!” she said again.

“Whassa’ matter?” asked Sonny, who was playing with a feather duster.

“Your dad’s intending to put in an appearance,” she told him.

Brenda was on tenterhooks all day long waiting for Carrie to come home so she could break the news. Not that she got on all that well with Carrie lately. Relations had turned frosty since New Year’s Eve. It seemed as if the dance had reminded Carrie there were other men in the world as well as Xavier, and she was out on a date almost every night. She’d dash in, yellower than ever, plaster another layer of make-up over the one she’d put on that morning, change her frock, then dash out again to meet her latest feller.

“Why don’t you come with me?” she asked Brenda regularly. It seemed that Tom or Dick or Harry had a mate and they could make a foursome.

“I don’t want to,” Brenda would answer sourly. It was her own fault the atmosphere had changed. She no longer felt even vaguely happy as she wallowed in the pigsty that had become her home. The truth was, she felt jealous of Carrie. She knew darned well the mate wouldn’t want her.

His face would be bound to drop when plain old Brenda Mahon turned up. “Anyroad, I’m already married, aren’t I?” she said once. “Not like you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Carrie demanded.

Brenda didn’t know what she meant. She didn’t know anything nowadays. She was merely the dressmaker who lived downstairs whose entire life had been turned upside down. Some days she hated Carrie and other days she admired her tough, sparky spirit. Then there were times when she wanted Xavier back more than anything in the world, and times when she could have killed him. Why did he take a second wife? What had Brenda done wrong or not done right to make him go off and marry someone else? You never know, she thought on the blackest days, he might have a third wife by now, a Scots girl called Flora Macdonald or something, who wore a tartan dress for the wedding. Xavier would really fancy himself in a kilt.

“Seeing as how you’re so bleedin’ virtuous,” Carrie sneered on one occasion, “what are you doing with Vince?”

“He’s just a friend.”

“Huh!”

But Brenda felt too confused and depressed to argue.

Vince had turned up at the beginning of January. “I bet you’re missing something,” he said when Brenda opened the door to his knock. She stared for a long time at the rather ugly young man, neatly dressed in a belted gabardine mackintosh and tweed cap, before recognising him as the conductor on the bus on New Year’s Eve. It was the thick glasses that did it.

“Not that I’ve noticed,” she said.

He produced something bright green out of his pocket.

“Your evening bag! I put it in Lost Property, but when no-one turned up to claim it, I thought I’d better bring it round. I felt sure it would be you. If I remember right, your dress was the same colour.”

Brenda gasped. “It’s got me identity card in! I hadn’t noticed it was missing. It’s not like a proper bag, the sort I keep me purse in.” She recalled shoving it in her pocket, but it must have gone down between the back of the seat instead.

“That’s how I knew where you lived.” “It’s dead kind of you.” She felt quite overcome. “Ta, very much. Did you come much out of your way to get here?”