Queen of the Mersey (23 page)

‘Thank goodness I didn’t agree to a divorce, otherwise the allowance would have stopped.’ No, she didn’t miss Roddy the slightest bit, she said when Queenie asked. ‘I’ll soon have a replacement, won’t I? At least he won’t fall in love with another woman and leave me.’ She was convinced the baby would be a boy.

Queenie didn’t say he would, one day. It wouldn’t happen for a long time and perhaps Laura would be resigned to the idea by then. ‘Have you decided on a name yet?’

‘No. One of these days a name will hit me and I’ll know it’s the right one.’

Hester couldn’t wait for her little brother to arrive, but couldn’t understand why she was forbidden to mention the forthcoming baby when she wrote to her daddy. Roddy sent his daughter a letter about once a month.

‘It’s because I want it to be a surprise,’ Laura told her. ‘And I don’t want Daddy worrying about me when he’s being sent on dangerous missions to France.’

Mary was beside herself with jealousy. She wanted a little brother like Hester, but when she demanded her mother have a baby, Vera merely dissolved into gales of helpless laughter, setting off a delighted Sammy who was on her knee. ‘I’m sorry, girl. It’s just not on.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I’m too old, Mary. At fifty-six, I’m well past it.’

‘It’s a disgusting suggestion, anyroad,’ Iris said with her usual disdainful sniff. ‘As if your mam and dad would get up to that sort of thing,’ the sniff said.

Vera grinned. ‘There’s nothing disgusting about it, I may be past having babies, but that’s the only thing I’m too old for.’

Laura’s baby arrived on 1 October, early in the afternoon. A glorious sun shone out of a clear blue sky, though it was unusually cold for the time of year. The last few weeks, Vera had been sitting with the heavily expectant mother when everyone was out, which Laura claimed unnecessary, although she welcomed the company.

The contractions were coming every half hour when the women decided it was time to catch the tram to the maternity hospital, Laura in the pink elephant dress, which she already had plans to alter in time for Christmas. At 3.15 p.m., after a relatively pain-free delivery, she gave birth to a six-and-a-half-pound baby boy.

A beaming Vera came back with the news only minutes before Queenie arrived home from work. ‘He’s a smashing little chap,’ Vera enthused. ‘She’s still not sure what to call him.’

‘I’ll go and see her straight away.’

‘Can I come with you?’ Hester asked eagerly.

‘Can she?’ Queenie looked at Vera who shook her head.

‘I’m sorry, luv, but children aren’t allowed on the ward. I don’t know why. I suppose the hospital has a good reason.’

‘I’ll give Mummy your love,’ Queenie promised the dejected little girl who was longing to see her new brother.

She sat on the tram, watching the cold sun sink down in the sky, unable to stop thinking about the baby she herself had carried inside her body for eight whole weeks. Since Laura had become pregnant, her own baby had assumed a sort of identity. It had been a girl, it had to have been a girl; a boy might have looked like Carl Merton. She hated having to admit, even to herself, that it might have been for the best that the baby had been killed, just as its father had been killed, in an accident. An accident in name only; it had been a murder carried out by two small girls.

Yet, sometimes, she wished she hadn’t lost the baby. But then what would she have done? How could she have admitted to Laura, to everyone, that something she’d convinced herself was a dream had actually happened? They would have thought her dead stupid. She would sooner have run away, brought up her daughter on her own, had someone of her own to love, except the daughter might have been a son, and how could she raise a child who would have been a constant reminder of the man who’d raped her?

The thoughts of what might have been chased each other round her head until she felt dizzy and nearly missed her stop.

When she reached the hospital, visiting time hadn’t started. She stood in the queue and shortly afterwards was joined by Ben Tyler, who’d also heard the news when he came home from work.

Laura was sitting up in bed, nursing her son. If only Roddy could see her now, Queenie thought. She’d always thought Laura pretty, but now she looked quite beautiful, her wavy hair tumbling over her large, brown eyes, her cheeks glowing rosily. A look of quiet happiness radiated from her face. She smiled when she saw her visitors.

‘Isn’t he lovely?’ She held out the sleeping baby for them to see, to admire.

‘Isn’t he absolutely perfect?’

‘Perfect,’ Queenie breathed. The tiny boy was very pale, long lashes quivering slightly on delicate white cheeks. His short hair was the colour of pure gold.

‘Very handsome,’ Ben agreed. ‘Has he got a name yet?’

‘Yes, Augustus.’ Laura stroked a miniature white hand.

Queenie and Ben looked at each other in horror. A name like Augustus would be a burden the child would have to carry for the rest of his life. It was almost as bad as having a twisted arm. Everyone would make fun of him at school.

‘Mummy’s name was Augusta,’ Laura went on, ‘but she never liked it. People used to call her Gussy, so I shall call him Gus.’

‘Gus is nice,’ Queenie said, relieved.

‘Gus is OK,’ agreed Ben.

Three weeks after Gus was born, the tide of war at last began to turn in favour of Britain and its Allies. In North Africa, the battle of El Alamein was being fought. Allied troops, under the leadership of a new commander, General Montgomery, had sent the enemy into full retreat, while the Australians retook ground in New Guinea.

‘Now is not the end,’ Winston Churchill said on the BBC in response to this heartening news. ‘It is not even the beginning of the end, but it is perhaps the end of the beginning.’

Chapter 8

Tuesday, 8 May 1945. VE Day.

At long last the war in Europe was over and the jubilant population poured out on to the gaily decorated streets to celebrate. They cheered every faded Union Jack, ate too much, drank too much, and sang ‘When The Lights Go On Again’, ‘Rule, Britannia!’, and every other song they could think of. On that never-to-be-forgotten day, many millions of hands were shaken and millions of cheeks were kissed. Next morning, there were a record number of hangovers.

But not everyone felt like celebrating. On some windows, the curtains were tightly drawn; the war would never be over for those inside who had lost their loved ones.

Vera and Albert Monaghan sang and danced as loud and as long as anyone in Glover Street. Seven of their lads had gone to war and seven had survived, but wouldn’t come home until Japan had been defeated. They were to return eventually, one at a time, thinner, a bit harder, and with bitter memories that would stay with them for the rest of their lives, fading a little with the passage of time.

Billy, who’d spent four years in a German prisoner of war camp, would find it more difficult than his brothers to readjust to civilian life.

It was in 1943 that something unexpected and quite miraculous had occurred. A telegram had arrived at number seventeen sent via the Red Cross. Vera had opened it with dread in her heart, too upset to notice that the envelope was addressed to Mrs I. Monaghan, not to herself and Albert.

‘Am fit and well,’ the message read. ‘Love, Dick.’

‘Iris!’ Vera screeched. ‘IRIS!’

‘What?’ demanded a weak voice from the bedroom where Iris was lying down with one of her heads.

‘There’s a telegram come to say our Dick’s alive. He’s alive, Iris.’

‘What?’ The voice was no longer weak. Iris appeared at the top of the stairs.

Her face had never looked so animated since the day she’d married Dick. All of a sudden, she was pretty again, the headache gone or forgotten. ‘I knew he was alive,’ she croaked. ‘I just knew. I could feel it in me bones. Oh, Vera!’ She ran downstairs and threw herself in Vera’s arms and the two women hugged as they’d never done before and took turns to dry each others’ eyes.

Later, it turned out that when Dick’s submarine had been torpedoed in the Ionian Sea, he and two other seamen had escaped through the hatches, lungs bursting as they rose to the surface, and found themselves close to the Greek island of Cephalonia. One of the men drowned during the long swim towards land, but Dick and the other man survived, dragging themselves on to the shore, where they were found by a Greek woman, Melania. The island was occupied by the Italians, they learnt. Melania and her friends bravely hid the two sailors from the enemy, cared for them, fed them out of their own meagre rations.

It was almost two years before the Resistance was able to smuggle the men off the island. They were taken by boat to Turkey, a neutral country. After reporting to the British Embassy in Ankara, arrangements were made to take them back to England.

From the day the telegram came, Iris never had another headache, and discovered she had a beautiful son, whom she’d sadly neglected. Never again was she heard to complain – the wireless could be on full blast, but Iris didn’t care. In fact, it was Albert’s turn to have a moan. He was thrilled to pieces his eldest son was alive, but did Iris really have to go around the house singing hymns at the top of her voice?

‘We always knew she was a bit odd,’ Vera reminded him.

‘I’m not sure if I didn’t prefer her the way she was before,’ Albert grumbled.

‘At least she was quiet.’

Vera said there was no pleasing him. Dick was alive, Iris was happy, and that was all that mattered.

Just as people had quickly become accustomed to the war, they just as quickly got used to the peace. Many women were angry to lose their well-paid work in factories when the men came home, wanting their jobs back. They found it hard to get used to being housewives again, no longer the breadwinners. Men found it equally hard to return to wives who’d become far too independent in their absence, not prepared automatically to do their husbands’ bidding or be regarded as second-class citizens because they were women. In some families, a private war had to be fought before they could become adjusted to peace.

In July, Eric and Ben Tyler returned to Newcastle. Brian was still in the RAF

and no one knew when he would be demobbed. It was more than a year since Brian had come home on leave and told Queenie that he’d met someone else, a girl called Ellen. He hoped she wasn’t too upset. Queenie wasn’t the slightest bit upset. She wrote regularly to Jimmy Nicholls, now a private in the Army, and one of the troops who’d stormed the Normandy beaches on D-Day. Jimmy was in Berlin, a member of the British Army of Occupation of the Rhine. His letters back were misspelt and badly written, but each one was more passionate than the last. He loved her, missed her. Could they please get engaged as soon as he came back?

‘I suppose I do love him in a way,’ Queenie had to concede. ‘He’s so incredibly kind and generous. Responsible too, and very mature. Look at the way he cares for Tess and Pete. He’d make a marvellous husband.’

Laura wasn’t sure if that was a good enough basis for marriage. But no one could have loved each other more than she and Roddy, and look how they had ended up.

‘I’ll tell him I will marry him,’ Queenie said. ‘In fact, I’ll write this very minute. After all, so far, I’ve never met anyone half as nice.’

‘You’re a peach of a girl, Laura Oliver,’ Eric told her on his last night in Glover Street. ‘We couldn’t have found anyone better to share a house with if we’d tried. Roddy’s a very lucky fellow. I suppose he’ll be back any minute?’

‘He’s in Paris,’ Laura lied, ‘trying to link up families who were separated during the German invasion.’

‘I think I read something about that in the paper.’

Laura had read it too. It seemed an ideal excuse to explain Roddy’s non-appearance. Only Vera and Queenie knew the truth, although she would have to tell Hester soon that her daddy wasn’t coming home.

‘It was through you I met Winnie,’ Eric said. ‘I’ll always be grateful for that.’

Winnie was going back to Newcastle with Eric, and Joe Corcoran was destined to return to an empty house. Winnie had paid a couple of months’ rent so it would be there for him.

‘Do you think I’m awful,’ Winnie had asked, ‘leaving Joe in the lurch?’ Her conscience was obviously bothering her, but not enough to make her stay.

‘I don’t know. It’s not something I could bring myself to do.’

Roddy had done it to her and she would never have got over it if Gus hadn’t come along. Her heart went out to Joe Corcoran.

‘That’s because you’re too respectable.’

‘It’s because I can’t bear to hurt people.’

She’d hurt Ben though. Not deliberately. She’d done nothing to make him fall in love with her. He looked quite desolate when they said goodbye for the last time.

‘I’ll never forget you,’ he said dully.

‘Nor me you.’ She wanted to tell him that one day he’d fall in love with a woman who would love him back, that they’d get married, have children, and live happily ever after, except, in her experience, life wasn’t like that.

Not long afterwards, Iris Monaghan and Sammy moved in upstairs so the small family would have a place to themselves when Dick came home. In no time at all it was hard to believe the Tylers had ever lived there.

Laura had spent the years since Gus was born quietly at home. Gus would be four in October, a well-behaved, rather solemn little boy, with Roddy’s fair hair, blue eyes, and fine features. He had a sharp, curious mind. On one occasion, Laura had had to take him outside in the pouring rain so he could watch the water gushing through the grid into the drain.

‘What happens to it now?’ he wanted to know.

‘It goes into the sea,’ Laura replied vaguely.

‘Can we go and see where it comes out?’

‘I don’t know where that is, sweetheart.’ Neither did anyone else she asked.

When Gus was taken to Seaforth shore, he dug holes, as deep as he could, with his little tin spade, in the hope of reaching the other side of the world. He took the eyes off his teddy bear to discover what lay behind and was disappointed to find just more brown fur.

‘What’s behind my eyes?’ he asked his mother who had to confess she wasn’t sure, other than the rest of his head.