The Liverpool Trilogy

by Ruth Hamilton

  Eileen lowered her head for a moment. Denial would be completely inappropriate; this was an intelligent woman who deserved truth. ‘Sorry about your childhood, Marie. And yes. He nearly got me, but I value myself too highly because of my family, mostly my kids. He is a very attractive and desirable man. My opinion is that he’s never been technically unfaithful to you, because he wouldn’t risk his standing in the community. Selfish, isn’t he?’

  Marie’s smile was almost radiant. She had found pleasure. She was now using him just as he had used her. ‘I do love him,’ she admitted. ‘But sometimes I don’t like him one bit.’ She hid her blushing cheeks with both hands. ‘Now I’ve learned the mechanics of everything, I enjoy him.’ These words were blurred slightly by her fingers. ‘And I think he’s aware that I’m inwardly critical of his performances. There’s a chance I might start awarding marks out of ten.’

  Eileen made a remark about a shoe and a foot, and both women had to stifle their laughter when Marie became rather anatomical and almost vulgar. She had never before enjoyed the kind of bawdy chat so treasured by females when free of their partners. Men were supposed to be the ones with crude minds, while women were expected to be gentle, careful and sweet.

  ‘… so she booked him in at the vet’s.’ Eileen was nearing the end of a ridiculous Scotland Road fable about a man whose body was unusual. ‘Their name comes up, and they go in the surgery. Finally, soft lad sees all the pictures of dogs and cats on the walls, and realizes he’s not in the doctor’s. And she says to him, “Look, either that goes or I go. There isn’t room for three in our bed.”’

  ‘So what happened?’ Marie asked.

  Eileen shrugged. ‘Some say the vet did the job, some say the wife did it with pinking shears – well, she didn’t want his wotsit to fray, did she? I’ve heard he emigrated to Australia, that he joined a freak show, that they got divorced.’

  Marie threw her pinafore over her head and howled. Women could do this talking thing. They didn’t need to be propped up in the corner of a taproom, pint of ale in one hand, cigarette in the other. All she and Eileen required was tea and the comfort gained from opening up minds and hearts at a dining table.

  Eileen was enjoying herself. She’d seldom had a close personal friend, because, like ugly people, the unusually pretty were to be avoided. Today, she had come to plead for her daughter, and she had gained something for herself. ‘You’ve come on a lot, Marie Bingley. From mouse to lioness is quite a stride.’

  ‘I have an admirer, too,’ Marie whispered. ‘He’s pleasant, older than God, on the plump side and with beautiful pianist’s hands, but he’s very, very boring. Tom is never that. In fact, he’s probably the most exciting creature I’ve ever known, because I’m never sure. I don’t know where he’s been, what he’s done, who he imagines I am while we’re making love. Since I finished the treatment, I manage not to mind, because I can be selfish. It’s my turn now.’

  ‘Not before time.’

  ‘Are you sure? Am I not being terrible?’

  Eileen shrugged. ‘No. Like I said, the shoe’s on a different foot.’

  ‘Don’t start that again. You know where that shoe took us a few minutes ago. If I laugh any more, I’ll need to rearrange some underwear.’

  ‘Oh, I know what you mean. I once laughed so hard my waters broke. And I wasn’t even pregnant at the time.’

  Gloria walked in to gales of laughter. She stood in the doorway, folded her arms and glared at not one but two out-of-order mothers who didn’t care in the least about her tragic life. Her very, very best friend had let her down in the worst sense. Her brother, her twin brother, was an oinker, a pig who had tried to have sex with said very, very best friend. And people thought it was funny?

  Marie mopped her eyes. ‘Sorry, darling. I know you’re miserable, but we were just letting our hair down a little. We’re feeling the strain, you see.’

  ‘Sorry about that.’

  Eileen stood up. ‘Right. Coat on, please. You’re coming with me. You have to meet Spoodle, who’s gorgeous, and I’m sure my daughter, also gorgeous but sulking, would love to see you.’

  ‘Then why didn’t she come here?’

  The visitor marshalled her thoughts. ‘She’s looking after Miss Morrison and trying to train Spoodle. I came here to fetch you because you have more sense than Mel does. She might be brainy, but she can be daft.’

  Both women held their breath while Gloria chewed thoughtfully on a fingernail. ‘Then you go and change places with her; tell her to come here.’

  The mothers looked at each other. ‘Gloria, you will go with Mrs … Mrs Greenhalgh. She didn’t need to come here, you know. She could have left us with a completely rotten Christmas. As things are, your brother’s here, and you don’t want him listening while you try to mend a broken fence.’

  The girl started to fiddle with her hair. It was a habit repeated whenever she was perturbed. ‘I did a bad thing.’

  ‘I know,’ chorused Marie and Eileen. ‘Miss Clever Clogs will have an answer to that,’ continued Mel’s mother. ‘God knows she’s got one for everything else. I’m sick to death of getting educated by my own daughter. She’s into silly ancient laws now, Marie. Anyone in Chester can kill anyone from Wales as long as they do it with an arrow at midnight on a Sunday – something like that. Can you imagine shooting straight in pitch black? And why stop at the Welsh, for God’s sake?’

  A strange noise emerged from the youngest member of the meeting. Gloria was trying not to laugh. She turned hurriedly and quit the scene.

  Marie put a finger to her lips. Like most people, she knew all the sounds belonging to her house, and could identify and explain the slightest creak. Her shoulders relaxed. ‘Getting her coat,’ she mouthed.

  ‘Now for chapter two,’ came Eileen’s quiet reply.

  ‘Onward Christian solders. I’ll put your cake in a box.’

  Betty was a boon. She was as quiet as the grave, had been in service since leaving school, and seemed able to do the job of a gallon while furnished with just a pint. When asked about her excellent cooking, she replied by saying that she made it up as she went along. Except for Mr Collins’s meals. Mr Collins’s allocated points were pinned to the wall next to the oven, and they became known as Betty’s Bible.

  Furthermore, she cared about ‘her’ family, even going so far as to travel to Bolton to collect tins of National Dried for Maisie, who had been drinking her mother dry. She took complete charge of the binding of Gill’s breasts with bandages and, when Gill was tempted to remove these supports, it was Betty who stepped in. Yes, the breasts were hard and sore, but Maisie was fine on powdered milk, and that was going to be an end to it. ‘Time you stopped feeling like a cow wanting milking. I’ve done this for my mother several times. You’ll get through it.’

  This was when Gill discovered that quietly spoken words delivered by a taciturn person were more effective than shouted orders. Betty, a plump and rather unattractive female with a Midlands accent, meant business. Aware of her unappealing exterior, she empowered herself in domestic circumstances. Her whys and wherefores were of no importance; she was a godsend and a treasure.

  Hilda Pickavance arrived. She had come to check on the progress of ‘her boy’ and was perplexed by his absence.

  ‘Where is he?’ she asked when the niceties were done.

  ‘Upstairs,’ Gill replied. ‘He’s doing a jigsaw, brand new, and getting his knickers in a twist because he says half the pieces are missing. Supposed to be relaxing. I think that word’s missing from his dictionary. He can’t rest. And he has to slow down for weeks.’

  Hilda went upstairs to have a word or several with him. He was seated at a small table under a window. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Come here, please. Sky, bit of cloud on it, two blobs off-set, and two holes, also off-set.’

  Thus the lady of the manor continued her war work. She knitted khaki scarves, which were easier than socks, was involved with the welfare of the Willows community and its evacuees, a
nd did jigsaws with a diabetic young man.

  The German boys were being questioned in Manchester. If they satisfied the authorities, they would be moved to Yorkshire. It seemed that several young men had ditched their planes, and they were said to be working happily and with minimal policing in farms all over England’s largest county. One or two of them were becoming friendly with the locals, and there were even tales of budding romance. Heinrich and Günter, too, were Hilda’s war work. Heinrich had arrived uninvited, had stayed for a short while as a dependant, and had left as a friend. It was a confusing life.

  She smiled to herself. Never mind. It was Christmas. And she had found Jay’s delinquent piece of sky.

  Spoodle became the bridge between the two girls. Gloria fell in love the moment she saw him, and she begged to use the phone long before sitting down to talk to Mel. She told her mother she wanted a spoodle, and that she could get the phone number of the poodle owner from Keith. So that was that. Instinct told Gloria that she could get what she wanted if she struck now.

  They climbed the stairs and sat side by side on Mel’s bed. The visitor opened the batting. ‘I’m sorry, Mel.’

  ‘So am I.’

  ‘How can I mend what I did?’

  Mel expressed the opinion that the mending might be fun. They could start a trend, but they needed to be careful of slander. ‘Then, when enough lies have been told, we do a gullibility chart.’

  Gloria pondered before answering. ‘There’s him.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My brother, of course. Pete the perfect. He’ll be bragging about the things you actually did.’ She paused. ‘What did you actually do?’

  Honesty was the only viable policy. ‘Everything but the deed.’

  ‘Everything?’

  ‘I think so, though there may be stuff I don’t know about.’

  Gloria’s cheeks blazed like a lighthouse in the dark. ‘He’ll brag about that.’

  Mel shook her head thoughtfully. ‘He won’t. Because I carry a certain knowledge, a confidence he would hate me to disclose. Don’t ask, Gloria, because I did make a promise.’

  Mel closed her eyes for a few seconds, and he was crying like a baby wanting the breast. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what I am,’ he sobbed. ‘I love you, Mel, but there’s something …’ He raised his head. ‘Sometimes I think I like boys.’ Mel had cried with him for what had seemed like hours. No matter what, Peter. No matter what, I’ll be here for you.

  She opened her eyes and smiled at Gloria, who was in the here and now. ‘It’s enough for you to be sure I know something that could almost run him out of town. I can’t and won’t say anything more to you, but I am going to speak to Peter. This mess wants cleaning up before we go back to school.’

  Gloria agreed. ‘But don’t forget to sew up my brother’s mouth.’

  ‘I won’t forget.’

  ‘Mel?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Was it … nice?’

  ‘Yes.’ And no more was said. They fell back into friendship as if there had been no rift, and spent the rest of the day at Gloria’s house bullying Tom and Marie until Tom finally crumbled. ‘Get in the bloody car,’ he snapped. ‘I phoned. There’s one left. It’s female and will need to be neutered.’ When his daughter opened her mouth to tell him to make haste before someone else bought the animal, he held up a hand. ‘I’ve reserved the dog for two hours. And you can pick up after it, madam. I see enough of the mucky side of life without cleaning up after half a poodle.’

  ‘A half-poodle,’ his daughter said. ‘That is the correct term. It’s a whole dog.’

  ‘I’m sure it is,’ he mumbled between clenched teeth.

  Thus it came to pass that Gloria Bingley acquired Pandora, sister to Spoodle. The girls removed the S, I, E and L from spaniel, and added Dora, who had been one of Gloria’s grandmothers. Pandora was reborn, and with her came the one item left after the opening of the box. In legend, Pandora hung on to hope. In reality, this puppy and her brother cemented a friendship that would last a lifetime.

  *

  My dear Miss Pickavance,

  I think I’d rather like to be a journalist. Interviewing people is great; I seem to have the knack of getting them to talk. It’s important, because so many will become nothing more than statistics once the war ends. The recording of individual statements will make people from Civil Defence real.

  Hilda glanced out at the near-dawn of Christmas Day. It was bone-chillingly cold, and stars still twinkled, so there would be no cloud cover for a while. If the evacuees wanted snow, it would not arrive until afternoon, she believed. The Bolton area was famous for heavy falls and drifts, and the Liverpool children were looking forward to a white-out.

  For a few precious minutes, Hilda was enjoying solitude in the company of Mel’s letters. The girl wrote weekly, and was producing an intelligent young person’s view of a city at war. Together with her brother’s paintings, perhaps a package might be formed? ‘Stop it,’ she ordered herself sharply. ‘Let them walk first, and allow them to choose their own pace when running begins.’

  Her name is Barbara Scott, though she prefers Babs. A casualty nurse, she has seen at close quarters some horrible things. One man arrived in an ambulance, most of him on a stretcher, the right lower leg a separate item poking out of a bucket. He’s doing well, thank goodness. The thing that upset Babs most was a blinded child whose whole family died. Babs’s sister is going to try to adopt the little blind girl.

  Sometimes Hilda wished she could be there. But, as she was constantly reminded by Nellie, she had probably saved the lives of over twenty people by bringing them here, and she was managing to educate most of them. A chuckle rose unbidden from her throat. The thefts at Four Oaks had caused some tension, because Liverpool had invaded and was, by default, the whipping boy. The thief, when finally caught through a booby trap, had been a Willows youth. Scousers were no angels, but they were mainly decent. Let Willows put that in its pipe and smoke it.

  Shock is a real illness. Some patients don’t start to shake until hours or even days after their experiences. They come in as black as coal; the only white bits are their eyes. Hundreds arrive at once and, in spite of sets of rules, the whole hospital is reduced to chaos, people spilling into wards and corridors and offices. They found a drunk in the women’s toilets. He was quite happy, but locked in for – well, goodness knows how long he was there. They had to break the door down. He was sitting guard over twelve bottles of single malt singing ‘Danny Boy’ and asking had anyone seen his Mary. His Mary is in Anfield Cemetery, but he wasn’t ready to accept, God love him.

  Mel’s interviews made everything frighteningly real, because she focused on individuals and their anecdotes, helped them talk, shared their burdens, offered sympathy and, above all, listened. Yes, journalism was a possibility. This was last week’s letter.

  The ARP currently has half a million members nationwide, but Churchill wants that number doubled. We may have won the Battle of Britain, but we are still very unsafe. America is our greatest hope; why won’t they come? Yes, I know some are here already, as are many from Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other Commonwealth countries, but we need America to become official. The unofficial Americans tend to be Air Force – they love planes and are technologically advanced, but their President is afraid of unpopularity.

  Bob Garnet is ARP. He treated me to a cup of tea in a little hut and said I was a bit young to hear his stories. So I told him I am a Merchants girl working on a project, which is true in a sense. He said they all have an area to patrol, and that they know the people who live in the houses, so they can tell at a glance who’s missing or in a shelter. They dig and dig and bring out bits of people, trying to guess who’s who and what’s what. Sometimes organs end up in buckets and guesswork comes into play, but, as Bob said, there’s a war on.

  It’s the children. He can’t carry a dead child without weeping , and he does it openly now, because he’s not the only one. The next wors
t thing, he says, is the smell of burning flesh. Well, you told me to be open and honest, didn’t you? Bob’s stomach is no longer strong , and his wife worries. They live in a place called Old Roan, somewhere on the way to Aintree.

  Sighing, Hilda rose and walked to the window. Two typically angry robins were locked in mid-flight deadly combat. So much for the air force, she said inwardly. Cows had begun lowing in the Home Farm sheds. Cows didn’t have Christmas, unless one counted a few in Bethlehem’s famous stable. Their udders were full, and milking was required. This was just another ordinary day.

  Bernie O’Hara got in the wrong queue. He was supposed to be volunteering as a messenger boy, but he found himself with a heavy helmet, leaden boots and a fireman’s uniform. He explained that he wasn’t quite fourteen, but he was told that these are desperate times, and he must get on with it. So he got on with it.

  On his first watch, the bells ‘went down’. That’s what they say when the ringing starts. Poor Bernie found himself on a fire engine rattling its way to Millers Bridge. His description to me was, ‘The whole world was on fire, and the flames were really tall. I could see Heinkels in the sky.’

  They rolled out hoses and fastened them to hydrants. A real fireman took the hose and made Bernie stand behind him. ‘Hold on,’ he ordered, ‘or we all die. There’s forty to sixty pounds of pressure coming through here in a minute. If we let go, it becomes a giant serpent and kills us all.’

  That was just the first battle for Bernie, an ordinary schoolboy. The heat was terrific. They had to cool down other buildings, because brick crumbles at a certain temperature, and some places caught fire just because they overheated. His face was burning. He couldn’t touch it, because he had the hose. So he shuffled a bit, and some of the water came back at him. His uniform was steaming. It was wet through, but the flames heated it. Burning timber flew at him, crackling as it travelled. ‘I know hell now,’ he told me. At fourteen, at my age, he has already seen hell.