September Starlings (56 page)

Laura, please write to me sometimes. I know it must be hard for you to find the time, but I would love to hear from my dearest friend, even if you scribble just a few words on a postcard. I am praying for you every night, so make sure you pray for me.

I was with Tommy-gun when she died peacefully some weeks ago. I visited her while a nurse stayed with Mammy, and Tommy asked about you, but I did not tell her about the piece in the paper. She remembers you as a dear little girl with a terrible loneliness in your face. The funeral was well attended – Agatha came over from England and the church was filled to bursting by Irish nuns and relations of the lovely lady. Now, she was a real nun,
because she simply believed and made believing an act of will. Whereas I always asked too many questions, so I finished up sitting here in a draughty kitchen with my mother upstairs waiting for the end, my father down the road drinking himself senseless.

I will be back, Laura, that’s a threat. There’s something I want to do over in England, but I’ll need a barrel of cash to fund it. Still, if it’s God’s will as well as mine, then it will happen.

My fondest love to you, also to Gerald and Edward.

Your friend and sister, Confetti-Goretti.

I placed the letter on the white tablecloth in my white room, picked up my pen, wrote a reply. We had been here for three weeks now, and the boys had settled reasonably well. Yet I was lonely, felt almost as isolated as I had as a child. The shopkeepers were pleasant and helpful, but I had met few other people until today. Today, the house next door had spat out one set of tenants and taken in another family. Two of the children had spoken to me, so I allowed myself to hope for contact from an adult neighbour. I finished the letter, wrote two pages of my embryonic True Hearts romance, made use of the remaining daylight.

When dusk fell, I went into the yard and listened. It had been an interesting and very noisy day so far, and I wasn’t convinced that the excitement was over. A tousle-haired child stared at me, head and neck completely visible above the dividing wall. No child of that age could possibly have legs of such length. ‘What are you standing on?’ I asked.

‘A bucky.’ The locals often left the
t
off the end of a word. And it must have been one huge bucket. I reached up on tiptoe, peered over the wall, saw that the child was on an upturned dolly-tub.

I studied the dirt-streaked face. ‘Where’s your mother?’

It waved a hand towards the house. ‘She’s lookin’ fer nits. I don’t like it when she looks fer nits. Can I cum in your ’ouse?’

‘I don’t: think so.’

A small, agile woman leapt through the doorway, pounced on the child. ‘Get over here, this minute if not sooner,’ she said, the tone strident and determined. ‘I’ve got to do your head.’

‘I told yer,’ announced the child, directing this accusatory remark at me. ‘She scrapes me ’ead. I ’aven’t got no nits.’

The mother bared her incisors at me. She was tiny, and her hair was bleached not quite to the roots. These were dark brown, almost black, and the lank blonde strands were as lifeless as cotton wool. ‘Hello,’ she said, her accent less pronounced than the child’s. ‘I’m Liddy. Liddy Mansell.’

‘Laura Thompson.’

‘I got moved here today. They put all the social problems in this street. That’s what they call us, social problems. Have you seen any more of these?’ She pointed to the child. ‘Only I’ve six, so they take some keeping up with.’

‘I’ve seen just this one. Oh, I talked to a couple earlier on, but I don’t know where they are now.’

‘Halfway to bloody Manchester, I shouldn’t wonder.’ She dragged the infant down from its perch, pulled a fine-toothed comb through the mousy mop, scrutinized the remaining teeth on the worn plastic weapon. ‘That’s you off the list till next week, then. Where’s the rest of the kids?’

The small body held back the tears, wriggled, escaped, fled into the house. ‘They’ve no patience with nit-combs,’ she said pleasantly. ‘Where are you from?’

‘Bolton. And you?’

‘Halewood. Some buggers down there didn’t like the cut of my jib, so I’ve been shifted. They’ve moved me away from my man, that’s what they’ve done. How can I
take this lot down to Halewood, eh? Well, he’ll just have to come here, that’s all.’

This was beyond my comprehension. If Liddy had a loving husband, then why had she been sent to Seaforth without him? ‘They don’t usually split families,’ I ventured.

She stared at me, seemed to be trying to assess my worth. A loud sigh escaped from the small body, seeming to leave her even tinier. ‘He’s their dad, but we’re not married. See.’ She approached me, climbed onto the tub, made it possible for me to flatten my feet, which were aching after being on tip-toe for so long. ‘See, he’s a lodger and I’m not.’

She was not getting through. ‘Oh,’ I answered hopefully.

She glanced over both shoulders, then looked straight ahead, as if she could see right through me. ‘I’m a Catholic.’

‘Ah.’ A dim light dawned. ‘He’s Orange Lodge?’

‘Well, he’s from a lodge family. His ma hates Catholics. So we can’t get wed till she’s dead, because if we did get wed, it would kill her.’

I held back a flippant remark about two birds and one stone, waited for her to continue.

‘Any road, we had all these kids, me and Jimmy. Now, his old girl has had the whole lot of them round to visit her every Sunday, but she’ll not let me past the front gate. It’s like they’ve all been conjured up or born through some immaculate conception thing, because they’re not allowed to have a mother. Truth is, I was quite happy to carry on and wait till she was dead, just have Jimmy on a part-time basis. But’ – again she looked over her shoulder – ‘then I got trouble from the other side as well.’

‘Really?’

She nodded, gave me a better view of the dark roots. ‘The Catholics. They started sending the priest round. Now, I can’t be doing with priests. They walk in your house without knocking and start a conversation about the
price of fish, but they always finish up wanting donations for the church fund and a list of your sins. Well, my sins were usually crawling all over the floor and swinging from the priest’s clothes, so I didn’t need confession. Anyway, I took no notice. Till the windows got broke. They didn’t like me going with a Protestant, and they didn’t like me being loose. So they broke me windows.’

Somehow, I knew just by looking at Liddy Mansell that the broken windows were not the end of the story. At 5 feet and very few inches, she was not one to back down. ‘What happened then?’

‘I belted three or four faces. Might have been half a dozen, I can’t remember. I’m bound over to keep the peace, so they shoved me here, right at the other end of bloody Liverpool. This must be the corporation’s idea of birth control.’

I liked her right from the start. Within ten minutes, she was sitting in my front room, dipping what she referred to as a suggestive biscuit into a mug of tea. ‘Well?’ she asked after sweeping the crumbs from her chest. ‘What have you done to finish up here?’ She jumped up, pinned an ear to the party wall, hammered with her fist. ‘Mary? Stop that lot bloody wingeing, will you? We’re trying to have a conflagration in here.’ She marched back to the chair, winked at me. ‘It’s all right, I say the wrong words on purpose. Or on purple, as my Jimmy calls it. You haven’t answered my question.’

There was no sense of throwing caution to the winds, because I had seen right away that Liddy Mansell was a salt-of-the-earth type of person, too straight for her own good, a pure moralist whose morals would never stand up in the eyes of those Christians whose sight was diminished by dogma. She was ‘loose’ with her favours, loyal to her man, a woman whose ascent into the heavenly firmament would be heralded by a guard of honour comprised of all God’s angels. Liddy was simply good. So I told her.

The little jaw dropped during the tale, hung slack for a few seconds after I’d finished relating the condensed
version. She pulled herself together, dug with a spoon for the dregs of biscuit in the base of her mug, ran the other hand through the bleach-murdered hair. ‘It was even in the
Echo
,’ she said. ‘And the
Daily Mirror
. You could write all that down and flog it, it’s better than
Peyton
bloody
Place
.’ She licked the soggy crumbs out of the spoon.

I smiled at the idea. ‘No, I’m sticking to the True Hearts.’ I told her of my plan, of the painstaking labour I had undertaken. ‘It’s all in longhand.’

‘Jimmy’ll get you a typewriter,’ she volunteered generously. ‘He can get most things, working on the docks.’

‘A typewriter on the docks?’

‘Well, there’s offices, queen. Or he might get his hands on something he could swap for a typewriter.’ The little chest swelled with pride. ‘He can get you an elephant if you want one.’

‘No thanks. The yard’s not big enough.’ It was amazing how quickly she had absorbed and dismissed my lurid story. It occurred to me that Liddy Mansell was all but beyond shock, that she must have seen a great deal of life before I came along. ‘Would I be receiving stolen goods?’ I asked.

‘Yes. Why, does it bother you?’

I thought about this for a few seconds, recalled the occasion when, as a schoolgirl, I’d been accused of stealing a missal. Things were different now, harder. I had entered an area where survival would be confined to the fittest, and I had every intention of keeping my family fit. ‘I think not. You see, Liddy, I’ve not much money. If my children are ever threatened with starvation, I’ll go shoplifting. So it’s all the same, isn’t it? If I make money, I’ll give some of it to charity.’

She nodded enthusiastically. ‘You’re honest, girl, I’ll say that for you. I mean, you talk a bit posh like, but you know which end’s which. We just have to get through life without making a lot of folk suffer. And if we’re honest about it, we’re all dishonest. See, I’m honest enough to tell
you that I tell lies. I’ve had to tell lies to cover my back and stick hold of my children. Same as you say, you pinch from them what can afford it, and you give to them what’s in need. And Robin Hooding should start in your own house.’

The door flew open and I worried fleetingly about the boys being disturbed. A female child stood on my step, her face set in a smile that was almost disarming. ‘They won’t go to bed. ’Ello, missus.’ She dashed in, picked up a digestive, crammed most of it into her mouth.

‘No manners,’ Liddy said. ‘It’s with having no full-time dad. They’ll get manners once old Mrs Hurst passes on, because Jimmy doesn’t like rudeness.’ She grabbed the girl and pulled her down onto the chair arm. ‘This is Mary,’ she announced. ‘She’s the eldest. There’s five more if only I could find them. Mary, tell Auntie Laura about your dad.’

Mary grinned again. Her adult incisors bore scars from some disaster or other, were chipped too short for her words to be completely clear. ‘’E’s dead big, built like a sh … like a lavatory shed. An’ ’e’s got blue eyes an’ black ’air an’ ’e plays the melodeon. An’ I luv ’im.’

Liddy beamed. ‘Best man in Liverpool, is my Jimmy. We’re going to have a great big wedding when his mother pops her clogs, and all the kids will be bridesmaids and pages. Mind you, if the owld girl doesn’t get a move on, her grandkids’ll be wed before we are. She’s one of them that’ll live for ever, straight through her century and into the next. I’ll be grey before she shows signs of bad health. Never catches cold, never ails a day. Even the bloody germs are frightened of her.’

When they had left, I felt warmer and happier for having made their acquaintance. It occurred to me that neighbours were more important than family, because they were geographically closer, easier to reach. And party walls were no prison while a woman like Liddy sat on the other side. I stood on my front doorstep, wondered how many women had stood there over the years. The slab had
a dip in the middle where generations had worn away the stone. Did they stand here in their clogs and shawls while their men fought for work on the docks? Did they scurry to the shelters when the Luftwaffe vomited its cargo on this beautiful city?

The view from the house was a new one, was filled by large concrete flats that towered into the sky. Some council houses were almost finished, tarpaulins flapping over beams that waited for tiles. There was a bit of grass across the way, some swings and a slide to occupy the children. I liked it, liked the shops, the streets, the people. There was something about Liverpool, a quality I could not quite name. It was to do with friendliness, yet it was more than that. It was almost a welcome, as if this seaport still opened its arms to all newcomers. During my excursions to the shops, I had heard Irish voices, Scottish accents, a variety of Lancashire dialects. It was a meeting place, a city where a foreigner could come, lay down his head and be at home. And a part of me knew that while I might long for my own folk and for the moorlands, I would never drag myself from Liverpool, not completely.

I closed my door and I was at home.

Loving Liverpool is easy. By the time I had plucked up the courage to venture into what the locals called ‘town’, I had mastered the language, could cope in any crisis.

There are many bad moments in a young mother’s life, and one of the worst is met when two children are dragged through a city, one on reins, the other in a pushchair. But when I asked, doors were opened, when I looked harassed, there was always someone to take Gerald’s straps or Edward’s pram. I was received with more kindness than I had ever encountered before, and we wandered round Lewis’s, Lee’s, Marks & Spencer, took our time, made our purchases. The attitude to children was almost continental, because we were accepted and helped all the way. Yes, loving Liverpool is not difficult.

We sauntered down to the Pier Head while we waited
for transport, watched the gulls swooping, counted pigeons as they strutted with out-thrust chests all over the pavement. Gerald was excited by the water, wanted to stay for ever. Even Edward forgot to moan, concentrated instead on the river and the birds, especially the two stone giants that overlooked the water. ‘Liver birds,’ I said. ‘Liber birds,’ repeated my younger child.