The Seven Streets of Liverpool (21 page)

‘I can’t imagine Phyllis having anything to do with it, Sheil. She’s far too nice and sensible.’ Eileen kissed Theo’s red cheek – he was still pretty cross about what had happened that morning. ‘Me dad’ll have a fit when he finds out. He never liked Doria.’

‘Only because she spoke posh,’ Sheila said. ‘He can’t stand people who speak posh.’

‘He liked Nick.’

‘Nick spoke well, not posh. There’s a difference. You know, Eil, Brenda needs to know about this. She doesn’t like missing anything. I’ll ask one of the kids to knock and tell her you’re here.’ She went to the front door. The house was unnaturally quiet at the moment. The Reilly children were enjoying the last days of the school summer holiday, and every single one of them, including Mollie, the baby, who was eighteen months old, were playing in the street, Nicky with them.

Sheila returned, and in no time at all, Brenda had joined them wearing a thimble. ‘I’ve been doing a bit of embroidery,’ she informed them.

For the second time that day, Eileen described the events of the morning, this time to Brenda, who was duly shocked and amazed. ‘Oh well, there’s none so strange as folk,’ she said when Eileen had finished.

‘It’s “queer”,’ Sheila corrected her. ‘ “There’s none so
queer
as folk”, not “strange”.’

Brenda squinted. ‘Are you sure, Sheila?’

‘Sure I’m sure.’

‘You’re both wrong,’ Eileen said, exasperated with the pair. ‘It’s “there’s nowt so queer as folk”, not “none”. Anyroad, does it matter?’

‘It doesn’t matter in the least,’ Brenda said, and Sheila agreed.

Chapter 17

Phyllis and Doria spent only three days in Colchester, along with four other girls of roughly the same age – three entirely wasted days where all they did was fill in forms and read pages of rules and regulations, which eventually had to be signed. They all had a successful medical and were issued with uniforms, including everything from peaked caps and massive overcoats to thick woollen stockings and hideous knee-length bloomers. The other girls came from all over the country: Glasgow, Birmingham, a little village somewhere in Cornwall and another village in Wales.

‘I don’t think I can walk in flat shoes.’ Doria clumped across the dormitory, her footsteps extra loud on the wooden floor.

As Phyllis had never worn anything
but
sensible flat shoes, she wasn’t bothered.

On the fourth day, they were told they were being sent to an Army Training Centre in Islington, London. All six recruits were delighted, having expected to be sent somewhere in the depths of the countryside.

Furthermore, they weren’t travelling to London on the train, but in a lorry with a canvas cover and benches on each side. This, they considered when they climbed aboard wearing their uniforms for the first time, was to be their first real taste of army life. In fact, the journey was hideously uncomfortable: the benches were hard and the lorry’s wheels had solid tyres, so every single bump in the road could be felt.

‘I’m glad that’s flamin’ over,’ said Hazel, the girl from Glasgow, when they alighted. ‘Me bum’s lost all sense of feeling.’

Even so, they had arrived in London feeling like proper soldiers, and that night they slept like logs.

Their first drill the following morning wearing khaki tops and shorts was little short of hopeless. The instructor, a tall man with the build of a heavyweight boxer and a moustache that made him look as if he was wearing a bow tie on his upper lip, became exceedingly cross. Doria was the first to giggle, and after that no one could stop. With every mistake they made, they only giggled more.

They returned in high spirits to the women’s quarters, changed their clothes, ate lunch, and in the afternoon attended a lecture on map-reading, to which they listened attentively.

Doria, who was familiar with the centre of London, took them to a cinema in Leicester Square, where they saw
The Fleet’s In
with William Holden, with whom they fell madly in love, and Dorothy Lamour, whose perfect figure they envied.

When they emerged, it had grown dark and they could hear people singing, not a wartime song for a change, but ‘Somewhere Over the Rambow’. They found that a big crowd had collected in a place that Doria said was called Piccadilly Circus.

‘It’s where tourists gather in peacetime,’ she told them. ‘There’s usually a statue of Eros on the top of the steps, but he’s been put in a safe place in case he was struck by a bomb.’

They sat on the steps around the absent statue and joined in the singing, then caught a bus to a Lyons Corner House, where they had supper.

They were six healthy young women who were having the time of their lives, attracting smiles from members of the female population and admiring whistles from the men. Phyllis, however, found the unlit city streets spooky, much more so than in Bootle, where it was never this crowded. There was something distinctly nerve-racking about rubbing shoulders with so many complete strangers whose faces couldn’t be seen. You’ll get used to it, she told herself.

‘Well, if this is the army,’ Doria said on the bus back to Islington, ‘I wouldn’t mind being a female soldier for the rest of my life.’

The dormitory had enough beds for ten girls, but only the six who’d arrived the day before from Colchester were living there at present.

Phyllis was finding it hard to sleep after such an exciting day, but she also, much to her surprise, found herself shedding quite a few tears. She was badly missing her mother and, even more surprisingly, her ne’er-do-well father, and was thinking how nice it would be to be living in Beverley, where it wasn’t even faintly exciting, with Mum and Dad asleep in the next bedroom. She could have gone to college and taken the new Higher Education Certificate in preparation for university.

She was doing her best to keep the tears as unobtrusive as possible when she realised that the girl in the next bed – Doria was asleep on her other side – was crying quite noisily. It was the girl from Birmingham; Effie, her name was.

Phyllis slid out of bed and knelt on the floor beside her. ‘What’s the matter?’ she whispered, as if she didn’t know.

‘I feel so miserable,’ Effie whispered back. ‘I really wish I hadn’t joined up.’

It wasn’t in Phyllis’s nature to say ‘So do I’ and share the girl’s misery. Instead she said stoutly, ‘Don’t worry. You’ll soon get used to it. We all will.’

‘I can’t imagine ever liking it,’ Effie sniffed.

‘You will, I promise.’ Phyllis squeezed her shoulder and hoped she was right. ‘Another month and you’ll be enjoying every minute. Shall we have a bet on it?’

The girl had stopped crying. ‘A bet! If you like.’

‘A shilling!’ Phyllis chuckled. ‘I bet you a shilling that four weeks today, life in the army won’t exactly feel like a bed of roses, but you’ll be laughing yourself to sleep at night, rather than crying.’

‘Oh, all right then.’ Effie brought her hand out from under the bedclothes and they shook on it.

Phyllis had only been back in bed a couple of minutes when she heard a noise as if a motorbike was on the dormitory roof, making the building reverberate. She raised her head, expecting the other girls to be awake, but none had moved, not even Effie, who must have fallen asleep instantly.

It was one of those pilotless V-1 planes! She’d read about them in the paper and heard about them on the BBC news. Immediately after D-Day, just when everyone had thought the war was practically over, the evil, murderous V-1 had started to fall all over London. They’d been nicknamed ‘doodlebugs’ and had already killed hundreds of people.

She pulled the bedclothes over her head, as if a sheet and a few layers of blankets would protect her if the plane decided to drop on the barracks and explode, but after a while the noise faded and there was a subdued explosion some distance away. The doodlebug had found another target for its victims that night.

The following Sunday, Doria’s brother Peter caught the first train out of Euston to Liverpool Lime Street, arriving at Eileen’s cottage not long after eleven – Eileen had written and told him that his sister had joined up, leaving her baby behind. Once her family and friends in Bootle had been to Mass, they too would turn up, bringing contributions towards dinner. Jack Doyle was already there, having arrived on his bike at dawn. He was picking the fruit that was ripe enough, and would sweep up the autumn leaves later. It was a damp, sunless day, and he and a warmly wrapped Nicky, who was helping, appeared now and then like ghosts out of the shroud of fog that covered most of the garden.

A lamp had been switched on to make the living room look slightly more cheery. Eileen was hoping she wouldn’t have to light a fire and use precious coal as early as September.

Peter was meeting his nephew for the first time. ‘How old is he now?’ he asked Eileen. The baby was sitting on his knee, scowling at him and the world in general.

‘Ten weeks,’ she told him.

‘Does he always look this unhappy?’

‘He’s not unhappy; he’s just not very pleased with things.’

‘That sounds like unhappy to me,’ Peter jigged the baby up and down. ‘Did he miss Doria when she left?’

‘He didn’t give any sign of it.’ Eileen shook her head. ‘I mean, he’s looked like that since he was born. I’ve taken him to the clinic and they confirmed he is a perfectly healthy baby. He might have three-month colic, in which case another few weeks and he’ll be smiling at everybody.’

‘It’s nice being an uncle. I’ve never held a baby before.’ He hoisted Theo on to his shoulder and stroked the back of his head. ‘Now that he’s actually born, and she has a flesh-and-blood grandson, my mother worries that she and Dad should be doing something about him.’

‘Such as?’ Eileen asked warily.

‘I don’t think they know, but they’re pretty fed up with Doria and your precious husband.’

‘There’s no need for them to do anything,’ Eileen told him firmly. ‘Doria left him with me.’ If there was any argument about it, she had Doria’s note to prove it.

‘You don’t mind having him?’

‘I love having him. Nicky does too. And don’t forget, Theo has relatives here. Nicky is his half-brother.’

‘Does that mean you and I are related in some remote way?’

He was flirting with her. She could tell by the way his blue eyes sparkled and his mouth twisted in an appealing way that she was determined to resist. ‘You and I aren’t related in any way at all,’ she informed him, and was relieved when her dad came into the kitchen with Nicky, wanting to know if there was a cup of tea going.

On reflection, Peter Mallory was much too young for her to have a relationship with, no matter how inconsequential. He was twenty-three and she was thirty-one, hardly old enough to be his mother, but old enough for it to matter.

She was even more relieved when Sheila, Brenda, Lena Newton and a whole crowd of children came marching up the path like an advancing army, and she could keep out of Peter’s way for the rest of the day.

A few days later, Brenda Mahon woke up in Pearl Street to yet another dull morning. September was normally her favourite month, but this year it had let her down. She had always enjoyed kicking her way through the crisp golden leaves that had fallen from the trees in North Park, but now they would be all wet and limp and would stick to her shoes and she could easily slip over. She had taken the girls there in the pram when they were little.

She turned over in the double bed and wished there was a man in the other half. Not for a bit of nooky or anything like that, just for company, someone to talk to, share a joke or two. She cursed Xavier, her husband, and wondered where he was. It was years since she’d heard from him – not surprising, given that she’d thrown him out after discovering he’d married another woman. He hadn’t just been unfaithful, but a bigamist on top.

Xavier Mahon had been a miniature Adonis, a man with ten hats – or was it twelve? She’d forgotten. She actually wouldn’t mind having him at home for a little while, just to prove to people that she had a husband. If she knew where he was, she’d write and invite him back for the weekend.

It gave her a fright when Tommy jumped on to the bed and began to lick her face. Well, at least there was one male in her life who she could talk to without any chance of an argument.

‘What do you want?’ she asked, sitting up and hoisting the pillow up behind her. Tommy crawled on to her knee and made himself comfortable ‘I’ll give you some milk in a minute.’ It was about time cats were entitled to their own milk ration.

For some reason, she felt out of sorts this morning. Perhaps it was because the war had gone on too long, the entire country depressed and bored witless.

There was a glimmer of pale light between the blackout curtains. That meant she could turn on the gas light and draw back the curtains without some overzealous air-raid warden screaming, ‘
Put that light out!
’ She’d go downstairs soon and make some tea; as usual, she was dying for a cuppa.

The first thing she noticed when she opened the curtains was that there was activity across the road at number 10 where the Taylors had lived; Winifred had returned to Yorkshire and Phyllis had joined the army. The woman Winifred had swapped jobs with hadn’t wanted a whole house to live in, so number 10 had been empty for a few weeks.

Brenda had her nose pressed against the net curtains, trying to make out the new occupants, when the curtains upstairs were suddenly whisked back by a familiar figure in a blue dressing gown. Brenda’s scream of delight caused Tommy to leap off the bed and hide underneath, while Monica and Muriel rushed into the room thinking their mother was being murdered.

‘What’s the matter, Mam?’

‘Nothing!’ Brenda yelled. ‘Nothing’s the matter.’ She dragged on her clothes and stumbled across the road to Sheila’s house, pulling the key through the letter box and letting herself in.

‘You’ll never guess who’s moved into number ten,’ she shouted. ‘
Never!
’

Sheila was still in her nightdress. Upstairs, the boys were having a fight and the girls were arguing. ‘Clark Gable?’ she guessed.

‘No, idiot. Guess harder.’

‘The King?’

‘No, even better: Jessica Fleming.’ Brenda spread her arms and stepped forward as if she’d just introduced the biggest star in the world to a grateful nation.

‘The red-haired one?’

‘What other Jessica Fleming do we know?’

‘Blimey!’ Sheila said. ‘Don’t forget, she’s not Jess Fleming any more, but Jess Henningsen since she married that American captain – or is he a colonel? I wonder what she’s doing back in Pearl Street.’

‘Let’s go and see.’

‘Not in me nightie, Bren. We’ll go when I’ve got dressed.’

Jessica Henningsen had been born in Bootle forty-six years ago. She was the only child of a rag-and-bone merchant, a shady character who became rich from the profits he made out of buying a precious piece of china or family heirloom from some poor old person who was ignorant of its real value as well as down on their luck and therefore desperate for a few bob. These items he would sell at a vast profit.

The business had done so well that Jessica and her father – her mother had passed away when she was a baby – had moved away from Pearl Street to live in the best part of Liverpool. After her father’s death, Jessica’s husband Arthur, a nice man but hopeless at business, had lost everything, and the couple had returned to Pearl Street, where Jessica owned several properties.

In the third year of the war, Arthur had joined the army and was killed in Egypt, and Jessica had married Major Gus Henningsen of the US Army Air Force. Now she was back in Pearl Street for the third time.

‘For goodness’ sake,’ she laughed when she opened the door and found her two old friends outside, almost hysterically pleased to see her. She sat them down and made them tea.