The Runaway (14 page)

‘Well, Caitlin has gone back to Ireland, but I’m still here,’ Dana said cheerfully. She put her arms round Polly’s thin shoulders and gave her a hug. ‘Come on, tell me why you’re crying like a fountain.’

Polly, whose tears had miraculously stopped flowing, immediately began to weep again. ‘She give me the push,’ she said bitterly, through her tears. ‘Old Ma Griffiths, I mean. She said I were late this mornin’ but I weren’t, honest to God I weren’t …’

The tears began to flow more copiously than ever and Dana tightened her hold on the younger girl’s shoulders. ‘So you’ve lost your job, but you’ll soon find another,’ she said. ‘It’s not the end of the world, Poll. Look at me – I’ve lost a whole tea room, to say nothing of my best friend, but I’m pulling myself up by my boot straps and mean to start up again one day.’

‘But they’ll kick me out of me lodgings if I can’t pay the rent, and I ain’t got no money, norra penny piece,’ Polly wailed. ‘I axed the old griffin – that’s what we call old Ma Griffiths when she ain’t listenin’, which ain’t often – if I could have the wages owed, and she said she wouldn’t give me nothin’. But I’m sixteen now, too old for
the girls’ home, so I moved into these lodgings a fortnight back … the woman what runs ’em is a right terror, she’d see me sleep on the street sooner than wait for the dole to come through – if they pays dole to someone my age, that is. Oh, Dana, what’ll I do?’

‘Well, for a start you can come back with me to my rooms and I’ll buy us both fish and chips and we’ll share a pot of tea and talk about jobs,’ Dana said. ‘Would you like that? My rooms aren’t much, but …’

‘I’d love it,’ Polly said eagerly. She looked shyly up at Dana. ‘I used to watch you and Caitlin through the winder when you had the tea room, and when it was bein’ turned into a restaurant I follered you and saw you goin’ into a flat on Wentworth Street. Only after a few weeks, when I didn’t see you working in the restaurant, I went to the door of the flat to ask how you was gettin’ on and a big fat woman in a fancy apron answered. I axed her if she knew where you’d gone, but she just said “Back to Ireland” and shut the door in me face, so a’course I believed her and never looked for you no more.’

‘Well, never mind,’ Dana said. She sniffed. ‘I was going to ask your Mrs Griffiths if she could do with another kitchen worker or a waitress, but if she’s in a mood to sack you I doubt she’d consider taking anyone else on. I say, Poll, what’s that awful smell? I was just thinking that the Hag would never have stood for it.’

Polly sniffed too, then shook her head. ‘I dunno,’ she admitted. ‘But do let’s gerrout of here! The Griffin might pop out o’ the kitchen door any minute.’

Dana agreed to this and the two of them hurried out of the yard, along the jigger and on to the main road, but when at last they reached Temperance Court Polly
tugged at her companion’s arm. ‘The smell’s bad here, too,’ she hissed. ‘What’ve you gorrin your coat pocket, Dana? I
think
the pong’s comin’ from you!’

Dana was about to refute this calumny indignantly when she plunged a hand into her pocket and felt the paper-wrapped plaice fillets and brown shrimps. Giggling, she told Polly she was sure the fish had been fresh when the stallholder had given it to her, but in the warmth of her pocket it had begun to smell very fishy indeed. And this was soon proved correct when the girls looked behind them and realised they were being closely followed by half a dozen mangy-looking cats. Dana began to laugh, then tossed the fish down on the cobbles. The cats were on it like lightning, and it was with considerably lighter hearts – and in Dana’s case pocket – that the two girls entered the house.

Dana unlocked and ushered her unexpected guest inside, where Polly immediately began to admire the room and the way Dana had furnished it. To make it seem more like a living room and less like a kitchen Dana had bought old basket chairs which were quite comfy, and the plain deal table was hidden by a lace cloth. Polly agreed with Dana that it was a pity there was no running water and no electricity or gas laid on, but thought the round blue bowl standing on the side table was ideal for washing up dirty dishes, the paraffin stove would throw out a good heat in winter and candle or lamp light was much prettier – and cheaper – than electricity would have been. Dana had grown fond of her room and was usually glad to be alone in it when her day’s work, whatever that might be, was done, but now she found Polly’s admiration very heart-warming, and instead of being
slightly ashamed of the shifts she had to employ to get a hot meal occasionally she felt proud of her ingenuity.

When she had first come to England she had not been able to cook, but once she and Caitlin had opened the tea room it had been only common sense to bake their own bread, cakes and scones. There had seemed no possibility of baking in this room, however, until she had remembered her mother’s camp oven, which they had taken on picnics or shooting parties. It was simply a tin box which would stand over a fire or on top of a paraffin stove, and could be used to bake bread, scones or pies, though one had to watch it carefully for it was a tricky business getting the temperature right.

Polly gazed at the camp oven with awe, as indeed she had gazed at everything: the rag rugs on the floor, the pretty curtains at the window, which had once been an evening dress, sold by Mrs Capper of Paddy’s market for two shillings and converted into curtains with much painful labour, for Dana was no seamstress. There were pictures on the walls, and Dana even showed Polly the colourful chamber pot which matched the basin and ewer on the elderly marble-topped washstand and made it unnecessary to go to the outside privy when the rain was tipping down or the cobbles were covered with ice.

‘Oh, Dana, you’ve made it lovely. Ain’t you clever?’ Polly exclaimed. ‘If I ever get a room of me own, I’ll do it up just like this one. They never taught us nothing useful at the home, ‘cept how to hem sheets and knit squares for blankets.’ She walked over to the pictures on the wall. ‘Ain’t these lovely! Oh, I wish I lived in the country! Where’s they of?’

Dana winced. ‘Where are the scenes they show, you
mean,’ she corrected. ‘To be honest, Poll, I don’t really know. They might be figments of the artist’s imagination, but myself, I think they’re real places. They’re only prints, of course, but I liked them so much that I bought them with money I should’ve put in my savings account.’

‘Oh, I like them too, and I’m sure they’re real places, not figgywotsits,’ Polly said, her nose only an inch away from the nearest picture. ‘I bet they’re all places in Ireland; Ireland’s beautiful. We had a teacher when I were in the home what came from Kerry, and he said Ireland was the most beautiful place in the whole world.’

‘So it is,’ Dana said unguardedly and immediately wished she had not, for it laid her open to Polly’s next question.

The younger girl turned away from the pictures and fixed her wide blue gaze on her friend. ‘Why
did
you leave, Dana?’ she asked curiously. ‘Caitlin told everyone that she left because her sister stole her feller, but I never heered you say anything about your home or your fambly.’

‘I left because Ireland is a poor country with very little to offer in the way of employment,’ Dana said slowly. ‘After my father died I had to earn my own living, so I came to Liverpool to find work. The rest is history.’

‘Didn’t you have no brothers or sisters?’ Polly asked, but before Dana could answer the younger girl smacked her own hand and grinned ruefully at her companion. ‘Oh, I’s real sorry Dana. If you’d have wanted to tell folks, then you’d have done it months ago. Don’t you heed me, queen; all Scousers is nosy by nature.’

Dana got to her feet. ‘It’s all right, but I don’t like to think about the past. And now how about those fish ’n’
chips? The shop on the corner said
Frying at six
, so I reckon if we go right away we’ll be at the head of the queue.’

Later, when the fish and chips were only a memory and the washing up and clearing away had been done, the girls sat in the basket chairs whilst Dana read aloud the job advertisements in that night’s
Echo
. After a while, however, Polly sighed and got to her feet. ‘It’s time I were off,’ she said sadly. ‘You’ve done me a power o’ good, Dana; thanks ever so. But I’d better see if I can gerra bed in the YW, just for tonight, you know. And on Monday I’ll try for some of them jobs you read out an’ I made a note of.’ She went across the room and took her coat from the hook near the door. ‘I’ll let you know how I gerron. Cheerio for now.’

Dana opened her mouth to wish Polly luck and say goodbye, and found quite different words emerging. ‘Oh, Poll, there’s no need for that. I sold Caitlin’s bed, I’m afraid, but we could top to toe it in mine if you like. And I do think we should go to your lodgings and explain what’s happened to your landlady; no point in her calling out the scuffers to find her missing tenant when you’re with me. Then, with tomorrow being Sunday, the two of us can take a walk along all the busiest streets. Most shopkeepers put a card in their window when they want staff, so you never know, we might both get fixed up.’

Polly, halfway into her coat, struggled out of it and flung it on the floor. Then she ran over to Dana, a huge smile breaking out on her small face. ‘Oh, Dana, you are good,’ she gasped, grabbing her companion’s hands and squeezing them so hard that Dana squeaked. ‘Ever since Myra left the Willows – she gorra job aboard
a transatlantic liner, lucky old Myra – I’ve not had a girlfriend to tell me troubles to, and though Ernie – d’you remember Ernie? – is a grand pal, it ain’t the same somehow.’ She hesitated and Dana saw some of the pleasure and excitement drain from her face. ‘But are you sure you want to share?’ she asked anxiously. ‘I knows you shared wi’ Caitlin, but she were posh, like what you are. I’m not. I’m nothin’.’

When Dana had first made the suggestion she had done it simply to help the other girl, but now she realised that she missed Caitlin’s company more than she had ever allowed herself to admit. She had truly enjoyed Polly’s visit and knew life would be a lot more fun if it was shared with another girl. To be sure, she and Caitlin had been of an age and Polly was only just sixteen, but she was streetwise in a way that Dana herself was not. So she smiled reassuringly at her friend, thinking even as she did so that Polly looked more like a twelve-year-old child than a young woman. ‘You’re certainly
not
nothing; you’re a broth of a girl so you are,’ she said in a stage Irish accent. ‘We’ll be pals and partners from this moment on, and if ever we have enough money to start our own tea room I’m sure, together, we’ll make a success of it.’ She shot out a hand and Polly seized it at once. ‘Shake, partner!’

Dana and Polly stayed up far later than either would have done under normal circumstances, but at last they stopped chattering and got into their nightgowns. They had visited Polly’s landlady, an unpleasant steely-eyed woman in her fifties, who had actually demanded that Polly should pay her a full week’s money since one of her beds would now be unoccupied. But Polly, flushed
with the triumph of one who has made her arrangements and need no longer fear sleeping on the streets, would have none of it. ‘I paid you a week in advance, so I owes you nothin’,’ she had said briskly. ‘And you’ll let that bed by noon tomorrer, Sunday or no Sunday. Just remember, I could’ve lit out and left you wonderin’ whatever had become of me, ‘cept me pal here thought it weren’t fair on you.’

The landlady would probably have argued, but Dana had seized Polly’s skinny little arm and the two of them had headed back to Temperance Court, heedless of the woman’s turkeycock gobbling as she shouted abuse after them before banging her door with enough force, Polly said, to break its hinges.

Now, however, safely tucked up at opposite ends of the single bed, with Polly using a cushion for a pillow and Dana feeling all the satisfaction of one who has done a generous act and been thanked for it, the girls snuggled down. ‘Oh, Dana, today’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me, and I thought it were goin’ to be the worst,’ Polly said ecstatically. ‘It makes me think o’ somethin’ that teacher I telled you about used to say.’ She clasped her hands and closed her eyes, as though to conjure up the teacher’s very words: ‘
When one door closes, another opens
. Oh, ain’t that so true!’

And that, Dana thought long afterwards, was where it all began.

Chapter Five

THE DREAM BEGAN
at once, the scene instantly recognisable. Dana found herself standing in the wilderness that had once been the rose garden. She glanced around her; great leggy roses, taller than herself, reached for the sky and the sweet scent of them mingled with that of a large rosemary bush which stretched across the weedy bed. Ivy had its stranglehold on once beautiful shrubs and trees, and the gravel paths were green with grass, gold with buttercups and white with daisies. But the wilderness was not her destination; her hand was already on the latch of the green door in the high brick wall which surrounded the McBrides’ kitchen garden. She pushed open the door a crack and listened intently, but could hear no sound. Cautiously, she pushed the door wider, smiling to herself as it swung soundlessly beneath her hand. She and Con had oiled the hinges only the previous day so they could nip in and help themselves to a few strawberries or a pod of peas without the betraying shriek which the hinges had previously given. The kitchen garden was old Arthur’s pride and joy, so if he was already at work she would offer to give him a hand, but she knew the old man always went along to the house first where her mother would make him tea
and a couple of thick bacon sandwiches, saying that at Arthur’s age one should never start work on an empty stomach.

Dana had been woken early by the sunshine stealing through a gap in her bedroom curtains and falling across her face, and had crept down the winding spiral stair leading to the kitchen. The room had been quiet and deserted, the gingham curtains still drawn across and the fire in the Aga just a dull glow. In the middle of the table was a loaf of her mother’s homemade bread and a pat of butter, and this gave her an idea. She loved radishes, especially the long red and white ones which had a peppery bite of their own, her father always said. If she could just sneak into Arthur’s garden she could help herself to a bunch of radishes, go back to the kitchen and make a large and delicious sandwich, well salted, and eat it sitting on the mounting block in the stable yard, waiting for Con to wake up to the new day.