The Seven Streets of Liverpool (13 page)

She recalled that when she’d become pregnant with Nicky, she and Nick had only made love once and it had seemed like a miracle; last night they had made love twice. She would say more prayers and light more candles in the hope that another miracle might happen.

Sean Doyle had been spoilt for most of his life. He was a handsome lad with dark gypsy looks and an appealing disposition, and was the apple of his dad’s eye. His mam had died not long after he was born, and his elder sisters, Eileen and Sheila, adored him. In their eyes he could do no wrong.

Though neither his dad nor his sisters had approved when Sean fell in love with pretty Alice Scully, who had a serious limp, five younger brothers and sisters and a mother at death’s door.

They disapproved even more when Sean and Alice married not long after he had been called up and joined the Royal Air Force. He was only just nineteen and Alice two years younger. Mrs Scully had died not long afterwards and Sean had taken the entire family under his wing. By a stroke of good fortune, the family had acquired the best house in Pearl Street, number 5, which had once belonged to Jessica Fleming and was the only one with an electric stove. It was there that Alice had given birth to their first child, a boy called Edward, who was now fourteen months old, and who his father had so far never set eyes on.

Everyone missed sunny, good-natured Sean: his wife, his dad, his sisters. But, as they said to each other every time his name came up, which was usually several times a day, ‘Knowing our Sean, he’ll be having a grand old time in the RAF.’

They were wrong.

Sean had been surprised to find he didn’t much like being in the forces. He had always considered himself to be as popular with the men as with the girls. He’d had loads of mates at work, yet he didn’t really fit in the RAF. His problem was he took it much too seriously. He wasn’t able to treat death as lightly as the other men.

He had trained to be an airframe fitter, and at the present time was responsible for the mechanics of the aircraft operating from Hal Far airfield in Malta, where he’d been posted almost a year ago. By then, most of the heavy raids inflicted on the island by the German air force had ceased. The siege of Malta was over and it wasn’t quite such a dangerous place to be.

Not that death worried Sean; he wasn’t a coward. If he was killed, then it was what fate had in store for him. His dad and his sisters would look after Alice and the son he had never seen. After all, Alice had coped before he came on the scene and she’d cope again if he was no longer there.

Sean had grown up, become a man, without realising how desperately vile and cruel war could be. It was hard to watch the Spitfire pilots, some younger than him, flying off to provide protection for the planes that were bombing Italy, knowing that a large number would not be coming back. Some even laughed as they flew off to almost certain death. There was a phrase for it, ‘like lambs to the slaughter’. It upset Sean almost to the point of tears – tears that he had to keep well hidden.

It was such a terrible waste of lives. It was heinous, it was murder, it was crazy. When he witnessed the air raids, whether from close by or at a distance, he wasn’t just aware of the planes flying overhead, the sound of the explosions as the bombs landed; he visualised the casualties, the blood and the mutilated bodies, the families being torn apart, the hideousness of it all. He couldn’t get his head around men committing murder; not just the Germans, but his own side too, who were terrorising enemy cities night after terrible night.

After a while, he realised he should have been a conscientious objector. But he wouldn’t have had the courage. His dad would never have been able to hold his head up in Bootle again if people had known how his son felt. There wasn’t a single person he could confide in about his feelings.

He was regarded as a quiet young man, a bit withdrawn, who kept himself to himself. He wouldn’t have dreamt of accompanying his comrades to a brothel, sleeping with another woman when Alice was waiting for him at home. Instead of the life and soul of any gathering that he had once been, he had become a rather stuffy, sanctimonious sort of person that his younger self wouldn’t have cared for.

Sean didn’t know exactly what date it was, only that it was early in January and the year was 1944. The dawn sky in Malta was dark blue, though the blue was fading fast along with the stars. A pink blush had appeared on the horizon. The sloppily shaped moon seemed to be blinking on and off as if it held a message for him in code. At least he could still appreciate beauty. It seemed odd for it to be so lovely and warm in January when back in Bootle it would be freezing.

By now, all was quiet. Forty-three aircraft had taken off around midnight, and thirty-seven had returned, one with a badly damaged propeller, which had been removed. The men, including Sean, who’d been on night duty would stay until eight o’clock, when the day shift took over and they could go back to their quarters and sleep. In the meantime, there was always the hope that the missing aircraft might still turn up. So far, there’d been no radio contact.

Sergeant Ellis, who was in charge, needed two men to go and collect a new propeller from the stores a few miles inland.

‘If you go now, the roads will be clear and we can get it fitted by tonight. Later, you could get stuck behind a bloody horse and cart the whole way there and back. There’s bound to be a religious festival of some sort.’ There were religious festivals for one saint or another virtually every day in Malta.

The sergeant scanned the group of rather bored men, all anxious for a kip. ‘Doyle, you can drive, and Maitland, you go with him. While you’re there, you can fill the truck up with petrol.’

Sean’s heart sank. He couldn’t stand Alfie Maitland, a loud-mouthed individual who was incapable of having a conversation without peppering it with four-letter words. Even worse, he was a drinker and had been swigging rum all night, as was his habit, something the sergeant was unaware of.

‘I’ll go with Doyle, if that’s all right, Sarge,’ offered Bernie Roberts, who was a far more reasonable human being and also a sort of friend of Sean’s. He winked at him now.

But Sergeant Ellis turned down the offer. Having made his decision, he wanted it followed to the letter.

Neither Sean nor Maitland spoke much on the way to the maintenance unit. The other man made a few remarks that Sean regarded as inane, and rather crude, while continuing to sip at his bottle of rum.

When they reached the unit, Sean drove through the open doors of a large hangar to the part where he knew the propellers were stored. The night staff were on duty, and a couple of them had appeared by the time Sean braked. He handed over the chit Sergeant Ellis had made out, and the new propeller was quickly secured on the back of the truck, a blade protruding from each side.

‘You’d best get in the back,’ Sean said gruffly to Maitland. ‘Make sure the propeller doesn’t fall off.’ No matter how well it had been tied on, it could work loose as the truck was driven along the island’s bumpy dirt roads.

‘Get stuffed, Doyle.’ And to everyone’s surprise, Maitland leapt into the truck and sat behind the steering wheel. When Sean attempted to drag him out, he started the engine and the truck began to move, in desperation, not wanting to be left behind, Sean managed to pull himself on to the back with the propeller.

‘Hang on!’ yelled one of the maintenance men as Maitland picked up speed and drove like a maniac towards the doors of the hangar. They had been opened wide enough to allow the truck in, but weren’t wide enough to let it out now that it had a propeller loaded on the back.

‘Stop, you bloody idiot!’ screamed the man.

Maitland responded with a jubilant yell as the cab of the truck burst through the hangar doors. The blades of the propeller were caught on both sides with such force that the rope securing it snapped, and it was thrown off the back of the truck, Sean with it.

And then everything went black.

Chapter 11

Kate had had a lovely time in Norfolk, and was thrilled because she’d heard from Lily, her eldest daughter.

‘I told her where I would be at Christmas and she sent a card and said she’d like to come and see me. She suggested next Saturday. Would you mind, Eileen?’ Lily was twenty-one and worked as an admissions officer in a military hospital in Essex. ‘She can sleep with me.’

It was Kate’s second night home, and she and Eileen were sitting lazily in front of the dying fire at almost midnight. Napoleon was purring on Eileen’s knee, keeping her warm. Nicky had been fast asleep in bed for hours.

Eileen said she felt offended to be asked. ‘Of course I wouldn’t mind. This is your home at the moment, isn’t it?’

Kate happily agreed that it was. ‘When she comes, I’ll try and get something special for tea.’

‘Would you like me to go out so you and Lily can have the place to yourselves?’

Now it was Kate’s turn to claim to be offended. ‘Just as if! It might be my home, but it’s your house, isn’t it? Anyway, I’d like you to be here in case there are any embarrassing silences, which you can fill with idle chatter.’

‘I’m good at idle chatter,’ Eileen said with a smile.

‘Maybe so, but you’re not very good at hiding the fact that something pretty awful happened while I was away,’ Kate said drily. ‘Whenever you think I’m not watching, you look dead miserable, as people say in Liverpool. What’s wrong, love?’

Eileen sighed, but was relieved to be able to share the news about Nick with someone. ‘He’s having an affair with an eighteen-year-old girl and she’s pregnant,’ she explained in a rush. ‘They’re about to move in together.’

Kate literally went pale with shock. ‘I can’t even bring myself to imagine what you must have said when he came home at New Year. I mean, how did you manage not to kill him?’

‘I didn’t say anything.’ Eileen was aware how inadequate she must appear in other women’s eyes. There were many who wouldn’t have let Nick in the house – even if it was his house. ‘He doesn’t know I know. I want him back,’ she said fiercely. ‘I’m not prepared to give him up without a fight – and I’m fighting in the only way I know how.’

‘And did it work?’ Kate looked doubtful. ‘The fighting?’

‘I don’t know. I might not know until the war is over and it’s time for him to choose.’

‘It seems she, the girl – what’s her name?’

‘Doria.’

‘Doria has a very big advantage over you – she’s with him all the time. Whereas you …’ Kate paused.

‘I only see him when he feels like it.’ Eileen shrugged. ‘Then I’ll just have to fight harder, won’t I?’ She had written Nick a long, tender letter, but had no idea what to do next. It all felt very limp. ‘I really should go to London and face him.’ Or should she? ‘I never dreamt I’d end up fighting for Nick.’

On Saturday morning, Kate went to the station to meet Lily. Mother and daughter returned to the cottage in tears, having experienced an emotional reunion. Lily was a pretty young woman, very like her mother must have been at twenty-one.

With Nicky’s help, Eileen had set the table for lunch – home-made potato soup, a one-egg omelette each with slices of fried potato, and apple charlotte for afters. It was quite a decent spread for wartime.

‘We grow our own potatoes,’ Eileen explained, ‘so we have loads. And loads of apples too. I would have liked to make an apple pie, but we haven’t any lard. Our neighbours occasionally give us eggs.’

‘It was a lovely meal.’ Lily patted her stomach. ‘Thank you very much.’

Eileen took Nicky upstairs, where she managed to find lots of things to do, leaving Kate and Lily to discuss in privacy the tragic story of their lives so far – a mother and her daughters separated for years due to the evil nature of the husband and father. While she dusted and tidied drawers, she couldn’t help but overhear snippets of their conversation.

‘Dad said you kept having affairs with different men,’ Lily said.

‘Oh, but that’s not true,’ Kate protested.

Then later, ‘He told us you never really wanted children.’

‘I would have liked
more
children, darling, but he’d already turned against me by the time I had Maisie.’

Maisie was Kate’s youngest daughter. Eileen paused in the middle of rearranging the ornaments on the dressing table to reflect that it wasn’t just wars that made people unhappy and turned their lives upside down: people of ill will were quite capable of doing the same thing. Her own first husband, Francis, had been that sort of man. She shivered just thinking about him.

She could have easily cried, but didn’t want to upset Nicky, who was in his favourite place in the world – sitting in the middle of the double bed playing with his teddy bears. She hugged him and told him she loved him very much.

‘I love you too, Mum,’ he assured her. He picked up the tiny teddy that Lena Newton had brought him months ago. ‘But I love little Pip best of all.’

It was a Saturday afternoon at the end of January when Jack Doyle remarked to his daughter Sheila, ‘Y’know, luv, I haven’t heard from our Sean for quite a few weeks.’

‘Well I haven’t heard from him for nearly a whole year,’ Sheila complained. She was attacking a mountain of ironing. The younger children were being unnaturally quiet and the older ones had gone to the matinee at the Palace in Marsh Lane to see
Deadwood Dick
. ‘In fact, I’ve only had about two letters since he was called up, and then they were written on a titchy scrap of paper.’

‘I know, luv,’ Jack said patiently, ‘but he sent them on your birthday, if I remember right. The lad can’t be expected to write letters to every single member of his family. He writes to Alice and to me, and the ones he writes to me are for you and our Eileen too. Anyroad,’ he continued, annoyed at the interruption, ‘it was well before Christmas that I had the last letter, and there’s been nowt since.’

Sheila looked worried. ‘
That
long! Maybe he’s been posted somewhere else. You said, didn’t you, Dad, that there wouldn’t be much more need for him to be in Malta; that he’d be sent to Italy soon, or back home?’

‘If that was the case, luv, he’d have written to us like a shot.’ Jack frowned. He was getting really worried about Sean. He got to his feet and groaned along with his creaking bones. ‘I’ll go and see Alice, see if she’s heard.’

Number 5 wasn’t just the best house in Pearl Street; it was probably also the cleanest and the shiniest. Alice Doyle, Jack’s daughter-in-law, was in the kitchen in the middle of drying the dishes when he went in, rubbing a dinner plate with such zeal he thought she could well make a hole in it. Little Edward was seated by the table, playing with a wooden train set. A delicate child of just over a year, he wasn’t nearly as robust as Eileen’s Nicky or Sheila’s lads. Jack patted him affectionately on the head and the child blew him a raspberry. Should anyone dare to call him ‘Eddie’, Alice would correct them, saying in a stern voice, ‘His name is Edward, if you don’t mind.’

‘Hello, luv,’ Jack said guardedly to his son’s wife. At twenty, she was less than half his age, and half his size, yet she scared him witless. A tiny wisp of a girl with the face of an angel, she had more character in her little finger than most people had in their entire bodies.

At the sound of his voice, she turned upon him like one of those whirling dervishes he’d heard about. Her long skirt flared, exposing the specially made boot she wore because her left leg was three inches shorter than the right. ‘Have you come about our Sean?’ she demanded.

‘Yes, I have.’

‘Have you heard from him, then?’

‘No, I haven’t, luv.’

She collapsed on a chair as if all the air had gone out of her. ‘I’d’ve come to ask if you’d had a letter, but if you’d said no then I’d only have been more worried than I was already. I was hoping you’d had a letter and mine had gone astray. D’ye know what I mean, Mr Doyle?’

He hadn’t the faintest idea what she meant. He also wished she’d stop calling him ‘Mr Doyle’ and call him ‘Jack’ instead, but he’d given up suggesting it. ‘I just hope there’s nothing wrong,’ he said.

‘There can’t be anything wrong,’ she cried passionately. ‘I won’t
let
there be. Sean’s all right, I’m sure of it. The good Lord will have been keeping an eye on him.’

Jack Doyle hadn’t an ounce of faith in the good Lord keeping an eye on anyone. If that was the case, then why hadn’t he been keeping an eye on the millions of people who’d already died in this bloody awful war? He thought it best to keep his trap shut in front of Alice, who had a fearful temper.

‘Our Harry got his call-up papers the other day,’ she said. She already had one brother, Tommy, in the army.

‘Well I doubt he’ll be in for long,’ Jack assured her. ‘The war’s bound to be over by this time next year.’

‘That’s what they said this time last year,’ she pointed out.

Jack escaped, but not before promising to come round straight away if he heard from Sean, and Alice promised to come and see him if she got a letter first.

In London, Nick Stephens had received an item of news that had come as a bit of a shock. The bedroom of the apartment he rented in Birdcage Walk was extremely small. It had been perfectly adequate until he’d met Doria. Even then, a young, healthy man and woman having to occupy a single bed had been more of a pleasure than an inconvenience, but it was beginning to feel a bit cramped now that she was pregnant. They would certainly require a bigger space once the baby was born.

It seemed as if they’d been extraordinarily lucky when a ground-floor flat with two bedrooms became vacant in the same building directly after Christmas. Nick applied for it immediately, Doria gave in her notice at her own flat – she had long ago left the family home in Wimbledon – and she and Nick prepared to move in together.

The shock came when they were turned down on moral grounds.

‘That’s what it said in the letter,’ an astounded Nick told Doria later in the day. ‘On moral grounds.’

‘What do they mean?’ Doria enquired, puzzled. For all her expensive education, she wasn’t nearly as clever as Eileen, who’d left school at fourteen.

Nick smiled. ‘We’re not married, are we, idiot? We’d be living in sin. And the landlord of the building disapproves.’ The smile faded. Put like that, it sounded rather shameful. He thought about Eileen and the time they’d spent together in the New Year, and felt like a cad. He was behaving disgracefully, but was unable to see a way out of it.

‘We’ll have to find somewhere pretty quick,’ he said. On top of everything, he’d been given a week’s notice for his present room. He was no longer a desirable tenant; they wanted him off the premises.

The flat Nick eventually found wasn’t in nearly such a pleasant area. He would no longer be able to walk to the office. It was advertised as South Kensington, but was really on the edge of Fulham. Unlike the Birdcage Walk flat, it was much too big, having two huge rooms with high ceilings, a cavernous bathroom and a tiny alcove of a kitchen.

Doria, always easy-going, said she didn’t mind. Each day she brought another suitcase of clothes and other possessions round to Nick’s flat, ready to be moved to the new place on Friday evening when he was due to leave – or be chucked out, Nick thought drily.

They ended up having to make several journeys by bus and underground to get everything from one place to the other, taxis being rarely available even in London. Not that everything would have fitted in a single cab anyway.

The enchantment of their affair hadn’t completely vanished, but something had changed. Instead of being exciting and illicit, it had become immoral. Although Nick considered the landlord of his flat to be unnecessarily narrow-minded – after all, there was a war on and everything had turned topsy-turvy – it nevertheless made him feel uncomfortable being thrown out of his digs. It wasn’t the sort of thing that happened to a chap like him.

To make matters worse, the Jerries had started to bomb London at night again, though the raids weren’t as heavy as they had been in the early years of the war. It just made life a trial when it had been a pleasure. Doria had to leave work when the baby began to show, and there she was, stuck miles away from the West End and the shops that she loved. It was all rather unfortunate, Nick thought sadly.

It wasn’t until February was almost over that Alice received a letter from the War Ministry to say that her husband, Sean Doyle, was seriously ill in St Steven’s Hospital, South Promenade, Blackpool, Lancashire.

She had Edward’s warm coat on him in a jiffy, along with his woolly hat and a pair of mittens, but when she reached Jack Doyle’s house, he’d gone to work. Alice stamped her foot in frustration, annoyed with herself for always expecting her father-in-law to be there to help in an emergency. Years ago, Sean’s dad had fought hard to get compensation when her own dad had been killed in an accident on the docks. He’d obtained £25, which had been a boon at the time, helping the family through until her mam found a job and could provide for her family of six young children. While other people had urged her to put them in an orphanage, Jack Doyle had kept them together. Since then, Alice had worshipped him, not that anyone would ever know, and certainly not Jack himself.

After some thought, she wheeled the pushchair around to Sheila’s.

Sheila was sitting at the table doing absolutely nothing. ‘I’ve just got four of ’em off to school,’ she explained. ‘In a minute I’ll sort out the other three.’ The sound of childish laughter was coming from upstairs.

Alice waved the letter that had come that morning. ‘Sean’s in hospital in Blackpool.’

‘Is he now? Let’s see.’ Sheila grabbed the letter and quickly read it. ‘What are we going to do?’ she asked.

‘I’m going to Blackpool to see him. Here and now, like. Would you mind looking after Edward while I’m gone?’

Sheila looked shocked. ‘Oh, Alice, Blackpool’s a long way away. Would you like me to come with you?’

Alice wanted nothing of the kind. She just wanted to be left alone to find her husband, no matter how hard it might be.

‘No, ta, Sheila. I’d sooner go on me own.’ There were times when Alice’s confidence knew no bounds.