The Mersey Daughter

by Annie Groves

  ‘Midshipman Callaghan.’ Frank attempted to be formal, and knew he should go straight back to his desk, but couldn’t resist sharing his news. After all, if he couldn’t tell Danny, then who could he tell? And who else would be in a better position to appreciate it? He hurried to describe what had just happened.

  ‘Blimey! Sublieutenant Feeny!’ Danny teased. ‘Seriously, mate, that is good news. An officer from Empire Street – that’ll show ’em.’ He shook his friend’s hand. ‘It’s not a secret, is it? I can write and tell our Jack and our Kitty? They’ll be made up.’

  ‘No, it’s not a secret. It’ll be public any day now – certainly before any letters reach them.’ Frank’s heart beat painfully in his chest at the thought of Kitty getting the news. In different circumstances he would have loved to have rushed to tell her himself, to share the joy of well-earned promotion with such a special girl. But that was not to be. ‘How are they doing?’ he forced himself to ask.

  If Danny noticed any awkwardness in the question, he didn’t acknowledge it. ‘Jack was back earlier in the summer, of course, but we don’t know where he is now, although from his last letter he seems to be fine. He’s hoping for a spot more leave soon. Kitty’s doing well, living it up in London.’

  ‘Is she still friends with that doctor?’ Frank asked, his cheeks flaming, certain that Danny would know he was forcing himself to sound casual.

  Danny nodded. ‘Yes, it’s Elliott this and Elliott that these days. He goes down to see her whenever he can, apparently. She says she hopes to meet his parents soon, as they don’t live that far away from her billet.’

  ‘And she never comes home to visit?’ Frank asked. ‘Not even to see Dr Elliott?’ He tried not to sound too obviously jealous.

  Danny gave his friend a careful look but didn’t ask any questions. It was none of his business. ‘No, not since she left in March,’ he said. ‘She never gets much leave and I reckon they are working them hard down there. You know how it is, it’s the same here, the women are doing men’s jobs and have to make sure they are as good as or better than the men they are replacing. From her letters I don’t think she has a lot of spare time, and I don’t blame her for spending it getting to know London. Good for her. Shall I say you were asking after her?’

  Frank swallowed. ‘Yes, do give her my best.’ Inwardly he blanched. He knew that sounded stuffy and formal, but what could he say? Kitty was clearly getting on with her own life. ‘Well, I must be going, Danny – or should I say Midshipman Callaghan? See you around.’

  Danny saluted again with a broad grin. ‘See you then, Sublieutenant Feeny-to-be.’

  Frank grinned back, and then ploughed on down the corridor, as always making the extra effort not to limp. He couldn’t bear anyone to glance at him with pity. Pulling back his shoulders, he told himself not to let the encounter ruin the enormity of what had happened in the commander’s office. He was to be promoted; his efforts had been recognised – he should be on top of the world. And yet, it would have been so much sweeter if he had had someone special to share it with – and in his heart that someone special was always Kitty. He recalled the way her hair curled, the spark in her bright eyes, the way she had always teased him as they grew up together, and then how he had realised his feelings for her were changing, growing into something more profound, more tender. That was before he’d lost his leg. Now she could not be expected to be interested in him – or not in that way, not romantically, not physically. He simply was not the man he used to be. He should feel glad she had found happiness with this doctor fellow. He should be man enough to wish them good luck and all the best, for heaven only knew it was tough going to find time for love in the middle of a devastating war. Nonetheless, he had to acknowledge that what he actually felt towards Elliott was bitter jealousy, for winning the heart of the woman he ached to confess that he loved.

  ‘So you see, Mrs Kerrigan, we always keep the urn topped up, and then you can fill the kettles from here.’ Mrs Delia Moyes, veteran of the WVS, demonstrated how the system worked, eyeing her latest recruit with some apprehension. Young Mrs Kerrigan didn’t somehow seem the type to be able to lift large amounts of boiling water around in a confined space. Still, she would be a tonic for the exhausted men in uniform, and that was a fact. Her hair was swept up in the latest style, she wore peep-toe sandals even though there was an autumnal chill in the air, and from her nipped-in waist it was scarcely believable that she was mother to a little boy. Her presence would brighten the utilitarian canteen, sandwiched as it was between bomb-damaged buildings right in the centre of Liverpool. Despite the salvage teams’ best efforts, the place often filled with dust. Nancy Kerrigan would help to ensure the hard-working servicemen’s rare moments of leisure were as pleasant as possible. What the equally exhausted servicewomen would make of her was another matter entirely, but Mrs Moyes reckoned you couldn’t please everyone at once, and it was best to concentrate on one thing at a time. ‘Do you think you have got the hang of it, Mrs Kerrigan?’

  Nancy nodded vigorously, even though she was by no means sure. She hadn’t joined the volunteer staff here to heft around heavy equipment; she could have done that back in Bootle, but that would have meant working under the sharp eyes of her mother and sister-in-law. Pushing back a stray strand of her vivid Titian-red hair, she told herself that if she had dealt with tricky customers at George Henry Lee, the big department store where she’d worked before she’d had Georgie, then she could easily manage this.

  Nancy had signed up to the WVS on a whim, partly to get out of her mother-in-law’s gloomy house, where it got more depressing by the day. Sid’s mother had never exactly been the life and soul of the party, but she’d taken to the role of suffering martyr with a vengeance. Never had sorrow been so loudly and consistently proclaimed. Nancy screwed up her eyes at the very thought of it. All right, so Sid had been a POW almost since the fighting had started, but he was still alive, he was receiving Red Cross parcels and was probably a damned sight safer than most of them were, she told herself crossly. He hadn’t had to endure the Liverpool Blitz for a start and, even though the raids had almost stopped for the time being, who knew when they might begin again? Hitler hadn’t managed to destroy the docks, though not for want of trying, and so they would still be a magnet for the Luftwaffe’s attentions. Sid might be in a cell somewhere – truly Nancy had little idea where he was or what the living conditions might be like – but he wasn’t forced to share a stinking, overcrowded cellar with a load of neighbours he couldn’t stand.

  Nancy had retreated into her shell immediately after the hideous events in the Adelphi Hotel, when she’d ended up lying in a pool of blood on the elegant bathroom floor instead of living it up with Gloria. The shame and disappointment had been bad enough, but then she had been utterly drained after the miscarriage. She’d tried to tell herself it hadn’t happened, but her body told her otherwise, and she’d been weak and shaky for longer than she wanted to admit.

  She would rather have died than tell her mother-in-law what had happened, knowing the reaction she would have faced if Mrs Kerrigan had known that the young woman living under her roof had been having a sneaky affair. It would have been even worse to have confessed to her own mother what had been going on, as Dolly had very strict views on the sanctity of marriage, even if one half of that marriage wasn’t around. Rita wouldn’t have been much better. Reluctantly, Nancy had had to admit that the Adelphi had been the best place for it to have happened. There would have been no chance of her passing off the baby as legitimate, and she had to convince herself that everything had worked out all right in the end – even if in her quieter moments she wondered what the child would have been like. There was no point in thinking about that, though – what had happened had happened.

  At least it was all but impossible to shock Gloria. How she missed her best friend and wished she were still around. But Gloria had gone back down south after the rest of her highly successful singing tour, and her latest letter had said sh
e’d been approached by ENSA, the Entertainments National Service Association, which had been set up to entertain the troops. Nancy sighed with envy. How she would have loved to see the world, doing nothing more than wearing beautiful dresses and singing every night, before being taken to dinner in the most glamorous hotels. She blithely ignored the less exciting parts of the job which Gloria had told her about: the weariness that came from living out of a suitcase, always having to smile and maintain the professional front, shaking hands with the most odious and pompous officials, living in fear of the voice giving out.

  Now Nancy felt fully recovered and ready to try something new. She knew very well what her family thought of her choice and why they suspected she’d picked this particular canteen, but she didn’t care. Of course it would be lovely to be back in the centre of the city, even if much of it had been blown to smithereens by Hitler’s bombs. It was important to show that the people of Liverpool weren’t afraid, for a start. She didn’t intend to be cowed. It would take more than a few nights of utter destruction to stop her going shopping, searching out where was still open and what bargains were to be had. It wasn’t impossible, just much more difficult than before, but that made the hunt all the more satisfying. Besides, she reasoned, none of her family would turn down the offer of a bolt of new fabric, even if it was a little fire-damaged. That was exactly the sort of thing she’d be best placed to find.

  She also felt starved of male company. She was only twenty-one; she didn’t want to be cooped up indoors, missing out on the best days of her life. She liked dressing up and the admiring glances she got when she did so. Stan Hathaway didn’t know when he was on to a good thing, she thought grimly, tossing her head a little at the memory of him, his warm hands, his intimate suggestions. He’d proved to be a faithless heartbreaker, but at least she’d had fun. While she wasn’t going to rush to make that sort of mistake again, it wouldn’t do any harm to meet a few men her own age. They needed cheering up: everyone said so.

  ‘If you’re sure you know what we’ll be doing, I’ll open up,’ Mrs Moyes said now, wiping her hands on her sensible print overall. She handed her latest recruit a pinafore to tie around her slim waist. ‘Take this, Mrs Kerrigan. We don’t want to ruin your pretty dress, now do we?’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Moyes,’ said Nancy dutifully, knotting the pinafore’s fabric at the back, mindful that she wouldn’t easily replace her frock if it did get damaged. It was from 1939, but she’d carefully mended it and sewn on new buttons at the neck to bring it as up to date as she could, and she didn’t want that effort to be for nothing. Now that clothes rationing had come in, it was all the more important to make the most of what she already had.

  Mrs Moyes was ushering a group of young men across the room to the counter where Nancy stood waiting. ‘Now here are some gentlemen just arrived from America,’ she beamed. ‘I expect they’re thirsty, aren’t you, boys?’ Her tone was motherly and comforting.

  Nancy perked up at once. America was officially neutral but, thanks to the Lend Lease Agreement, under which the United States had promised to supply the Allies with equipment and other help, more and more service personnel were arriving in Britain. Some people complained about them, saying they were too loud and brash, but Nancy intended to give them the benefit of the doubt.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, her eyes gleaming. ‘Now, how exactly can I help you?’ She peeped up at them from under her hair in its victory roll and her voice was anything but motherly. From the reactions she could observe, she immediately knew she’d made the right decision in coming here.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Rita hurried along what had once been a bustling shopping street at the heart of Bootle, although it was barely recognisable after the bombings of earlier in the year. She couldn’t imagine that it would ever thrive again. So many of the landmarks of her childhood had gone or been severely damaged: churches, the street market, the Town Hall, the theatre, the boys’ school. Once this war is over, she thought, where are people going to earn their keep? There’s no more dye works and the Bryant and May match factory has taken a pasting. Not that she would have chosen to take a job there. She wouldn’t want to be around the sulphur all day. She remembered all too well being frightened as a child when she’d seen women with phossy jaw caused by the white phosphorus used to make the matches, whose victims had to have their jawbones removed; even though times had changed, it still sent a shiver through her.

  Rita loved nursing, and on a day like today she thanked her lucky stars she could do the job she felt she was born for and serve her country while doing so. She was good at it, she knew. Her patients responded to her and her colleagues valued her highly. It wasn’t being big-headed to recognise this. She hummed to herself. Now that things had calmed down and the pace of work was steadier, she was back to being happy at the hospital. She’d even found time to speak to Dr Fitzgerald, who she knew had seen a lot of Kitty over the summer. He had talked of her friend with such animation that she could tell he was deeply smitten. Rita was pleased for Kitty. She’d made her break and it was working out well for her.

  Rita knew she had other reasons to be happy too. Only yesterday, when she’d popped round to Danny’s to check if he needed anything from his ration book in case his shifts prevented him from going to the shop, he’d passed her a new letter from Jack. Rita glowed at the thought. Jack had written that he hoped his promised leave would be soon. ‘With luck it’ll be for a decent amount of time,’ he’d said. ‘You know I can’t tell you precisely when it’ll be, as we don’t know from one day to the next when and where we’ll be needed, but I’m hanging on for the day when I can see you again. You are the most important person in my life and I can hardly wait to be there with you.’

  Rita was grateful to him for not repeating his idea that she should divorce Charlie. She allowed that he had been right to raise it as a possibility, and that plenty of women in her situation would have agreed to take that step, but she couldn’t bring herself to do so. Not only would it be deeply shocking to her family and friends, it went against her most profound beliefs. It tore her apart, but not even with the promise of Jack’s love and his strong comforting arms around her would she cross that line. It would bring her what she longed for most in the world, and yet she would be betraying herself in doing so. It would taint their future. She hoped he would not mention it again when he came home. She screwed up her eyes for a moment. She didn’t know how she could bear the waiting, the intense craving to see him again.

  The upside was that she wouldn’t have to worry about his offer to lend her money now. It was hard to credit it, and yet the spring in her step was partly due to what had happened when she’d come off shift that afternoon. She’d arranged to meet her main supplier for the shop and, as his office was closer to the hospital than to Empire Street, she had gone to see him there. She had been armed with a fresh set of figures that Ruby had compiled. The young woman hadn’t been wrong – she really did have a talent for spotting patterns in the complex columns of income and expenditure that Rita so dreaded. There was no way on this earth that Ruby would have met the supplier in person, but her suggestions had done the trick. She’d come up with an amount that Rita could afford to pay and that the supplier was able to accept. After all, Rita reasoned, it wasn’t in his interests for her to go out of business; this way they both benefited. Ruby had proved herself, and Rita could rest easy for once, on this score at least. She wondered if she could buy Ruby something special to celebrate. She had had so few treats in her young life, and she surely deserved a little present. What a shame the main shopping street was in such a state, even after the salvage teams’ efforts to clear it.

  Maybe she could ask Nancy to find something in the city centre. Her sister would like nothing more than a reason to go bargain hunting, Rita was pretty certain of that. Or perhaps she would offer to take Ruby to the farm to visit the children? Ruby often spoke about them, and Rita made sure she shared Michael and Megan’s letters with her.
Yes, that would be perfect. She would speak to Pop about it. In fact, thought Rita, she could do that now, as he wouldn’t be on ARP duty for a few hours yet. Rounding the corner near her parents’ house, she thought she could hear the sound of him practising his accordion.

  She tried to remember the last time she’d heard him play. Before the war, he’d loved to keep them entertained at home, or to join in if anyone was on the piano down at the Sailor’s Rest. Recently he’d been so busy with his ARP work that he’d scarcely had a moment to go back to his favourite old hobby. She hoped he’d decided to take it up again – she loved to listen to him and sing along to the choruses of the songs they all knew.

  ‘Rita.’ She stopped dead in her tracks, her reverie shattered. A cold shiver ran down her neck. Who was that? Did somebody whisper her name? Or had she been mistaken?

  Carefully she looked round. It was still daylight but the shadows were long, casting the pavement into darkness, making it indistinct. There was nothing to be seen. The gutters were filling with the first of the falling leaves and the remains of the rubble from the houses that had taken a battering all around. She couldn’t make out any human form. Don’t be daft, she said to herself, you’ve been thinking about Jack and now you’ve gone and conjured up that noise you thought you heard in the back yard that time. There wasn’t anything there then and there’s nothing there now.

  A noise came again and she swung around sharply. Was it her name, or was it a piece of scrap metal rolling over in a gust of wind? There was a slight movement towards the edge of her vision and she turned her head, but it was a rag caught on a rusty nail poking out from a gateway in the wall. Then came a shuffling, but again there was no sign of anybody.

  I could kill that cat, Rita swore. That’s what it’ll be. I’ve a good mind to go down to the Sailor’s Rest, find out who actually owns it and tell them to feed it properly. It’s always hanging around this end of the street, trying to beg scraps. Well, I’m not having it.