Paddy sat on a stool. It hadn’t been easy, any of it. For a start, there was a whole dynasty to think about, and she didn’t know half their names. Muth, Daddy, Paddy and her siblings had been the last to be shipped out of Ireland, and all the others seemed to have been gone for years. Muth had been a useful sort of person in the house, and Paddy had pulled her weight on the land, as had her father, brothers and sisters, so they had been kept on until Ganga had saved that final pile of cash. ‘Just me, now,’ he had declared. ‘And I’ll be grand, so. In a few months I’ll be with you. Micky Malone’s missus will do me a bit of baking, and I’ll be down to the ferry boat quicker than a bull at a cow, so I will.’
With her head in her hands, Paddy placed her elbows on the huge wooden drainer next to the sink. Ganga had died in the old country. Muth hadn’t thrived. Liverpool had crushed her with its crowds, its noise, its busy-ness. At the beginning of the Great War, she had taken to her bed and faded away. After a short period of mourning, Paddy’s generation began to disperse, marry and move to various parts of England. ‘Including London,’ Paddy whispered. ‘To hell with London and its gangs.’ But she should know where her siblings and their offspring were. Too busy working, too busy establishing Kev’s stall on Paddy’s Market, the business that had provided the funds for Scouse Alley.
She’d married Kev, and had borne three children. Her brothers, Peter and Callum, were lost for ever. Her sons, Martin and Jack, were similarly doomed. No God would ever forgive the deeds performed by members of those East End gangs. Paddy had learned about her brothers only when two more generations had joined them. The situation had been further clarified by newspaper accounts. Reading about her own son in jail for GBH, seeing his photograph on the front page … Oh, God. That a child of hers could beat halfway to death an old jeweller who refused to pay protection money … ‘Stop this,’ she told herself.
Maureen was still here, but two of her sons had followed Uncles Peter, Callum, Martin and Jack to hell. Reen had married today, and Seamus had moaned about his white satin cap. ‘I’m glad you weren’t with us, Daddy.’ Paddy’s father had followed Muth to heaven within a year, and Paddy felt glad that he hadn’t survived to a great age to see the performance here tonight.
What next? Maureen and her husband Tom might well be in danger. Their sons Finbar and Michael were definitely as safe as if standing in quicksand, while poor little Seamus, Maureen’s precious afterthought, must be protected at all costs. And what if the London lot knew about other members of the clan? They lived all over the place, and Paddy hoped they were, for the most part, decent and honourable folk doing jobs, raising families, living the ordinary, acceptable life.
She raised her head and looked round the huge room. No matter what, cauldrons of scouse must be ready by Monday lunch time, soda bread must be prepared, with tea or cocoa to finish. For the first time in many a year, Paddy wished she’d stayed in Ireland. She had never been one to look back in anguish, to complain about the English, to mourn the loss of a prettier, greener home. Children got educated here, got jobs, got on in life. She had good company, shops, a business to run.
Maureen. Ah, she would calm down quickly enough, because she’d never manage without her mother. Paddy and Maureen were close, and this was a serious problem, far too tangled and dangerous for Maureen and Tom to handle. But who could manage the unmanageable? Where to start, where to go, what to say?
Oh, God. It was complicated. They had to find out what had been stolen from whom and by whom. Three men, whose provenance remained a mystery because they were dead, would be missed within hours or days. Were they from London? Were they northerners hired by the big boys down south? Would more come to look for the disappeared ones and should a weapon be acquired for Tom? How long did it take for an old woman to go mad in a big kitchen with only her thoughts for company?
No matter what they’d done, Fin and Michael were family. ‘I suppose that’s how Mrs Kray reasons with herself,’ Paddy said out loud. ‘She ignores what they do, yet she’s reputed to stand up for women everywhere. No, no, I can’t go to her for help. Low profile, Paddy,’ she told herself.
‘Talking to the walls again, love?’
She jumped, a hand pressed to her chest. ‘I thought you’d gone home, Kev.’
He shook his head. ‘I’ve been wandering round in circles outside, kept meeting meself on the way back. No, Paddy. I’ll go nowhere without you at a time like this.’ He sat on another of the stools and rolled a cigarette. ‘What the blood and sand are we going to do about this little lot?’ he asked.
‘Nothing.’ Paddy raised her shoulders. ‘I’ve had the sack from me daughter. She says she’ll manage.’
Kev sputtered on trapped hysteria. ‘Our grandsons, Pads.’
‘I know.’
‘And our sons.’
‘And my brothers, yes, yes, I know. Three generations of heroes. But we have to sit tight and see what happens. However, no matter what Maureen says, we go to Ernie Avago’s tomorrow even if it means missing Mass.’ She sighed deeply and rose to her feet. ‘Come on, lover boy. Let’s go and listen to the eejit grandson-in-law beating the hell out of our spare bed.’
‘Paddy, he’s a good lad.’
‘I know, I know. Just leave me something to laugh at, would you?’
They locked up. Kev stepped away from the door, but Paddy stayed where she was.
‘Pads?’
She inhaled deeply. ‘You know when you’re thinking about something, and something else moves into your head? And the second something has nothing at all to do with the first something? I was thinking about the second something earlier on, but it jumped through a hoop in the middle of my new first something. I wonder do I have dementia?’
Kev shook his head. It was a good job he understood Irish. ‘No, love. If you’ve got dementia, God help the rest of us – you’re the clearest thinker for miles. What is it?’
‘Caravans.’
‘Come again?’
‘That’s how they did it. When there were too many of us in the house, I mean. There was a big stone-built barn with one of the long sides missing. That’s where they slept, I suppose. In painted wagons. We used to play in the last one. I think there were four or five of them at one time, then all but one were gone, as were uncles, aunties and so forth. We stayed for years, as I already told you many a time. Ganga minded us well, you know. Strong man. Survived the worst potato blight when he was young, brought his family through some bad times.’
Kev waited for her to reach the end of the path she was currently treading.
‘The aunties and uncles will be dead by now, but I’ve cousins out there somewhere. And second cousins, too.’
‘Are you starting a gang of your own, Pads?’
She tutted. ‘No, but there’s safety in numbers. We must advertise.’
‘Under lost and found?’
She clouted him with her handbag. ‘Under personal messages, you dope.’ She paused. ‘Tom did wrong in the eyes of the law, but right in the cause of justice and for the sake of family. We would all have been dead. Now, that’s the sort of strength Ganga had. Never a penny to his name, too busy sending everyone over to England.’ She leaned on the door. ‘And no one could read or write. They were supposed to stay in Liverpool and in an Irish community where they might be found by word of mouth. But they didn’t. Their kids grew up, married and sallied forth. I’ve had tales from hereabouts, so I know roughly where they are, but I need to look for them.’
‘Why, Paddy?’
‘No idea. Let’s get home.’
I saw them, saw what they did. Set fire to a car with three people in it. But I was busy myself, and I’ve plenty to hide. Cheap tart this time, just a nylon scarf and a pair of poxy earrings, probably Woolworth’s best. ‘Will you step into my parlour, said the spider to the fly …’
Two
The natives were becoming restless again. Smithdown Road, always a hive of activity at weekends, had slipped with the rest of the co
untry into a chaos made for teenagers, by teenagers, no adults allowed. Grown men could be seen standing in shop doorways scratching their heads and wondering, not always silently, why they’d bothered to fight in the second war. ‘Keep your bloody creepy shoes off my door,’ yelled many a shopkeeper while washing his paintwork. Teddy boys swaggered along swinging heavy chains. These lads were noisy, greasy, ill-dressed, ill-mannered, up to their quiffs in testosterone and determined to impregnate anything that moved.
There had been a shift, a slight rocking of the planet’s axis, because youth had grabbed life by the throat without warning. There was a silent synchronicity at the start. With no obvious discussion on the subject, they had suddenly appeared, males as gaudy imitations of Edwardians, females in wide skirts that hung to mid-calf. These were signals; from now on, older people would be forced to heed the requirements of the young. Curfews imposed by parents didn’t always work. There was new music, a new order that was decidedly disordered. Earth had tilted, and nothing would ever be the same again.
On Saturdays, girls promenaded on one side of the road, boys on the other. Someone with a whimsical turn of phrase had christened the occasion the ‘Saturday Prom’, and the title had stuck. It was colourful. Females with cash or indulgent parents displayed stiff net underskirts in many shades, and almost everyone was a bottle blonde. Several had hair from which all natural texture had been stripped by frequent applications of peroxide, while their faces looked as if they’d been plastered on with small trowels and finished off with miniature paintbrushes.
Parents might laugh at or rail against such displays, but for young females, this was serious business. They were Dianas, goddesses of the hunt. Although they presented themselves as prey, they were, in truth, the seekers of victims. Their traps were baited, their antennae set on red alert, and their radar was in tiptop condition. Scarcely aware of their goal, these fine, nubile time-bombs were in charge. They needed a boyfriend, a fiancé, then a husband. It was the law. Young women who were not engaged by the age of twenty-one were destined for the shelf. Spinsterhood was dreaded, and the idea of further education never entered their heads; it was marriage or nothing, and nobody wanted nothing.
Dresses in glazed cotton were the order of the day for girls, while boys wore their silly uniforms: long-line jackets in bright colours, thick-soled shoes, tight trousers, dazzling socks and ties like bootlaces. But an uneasiness had descended of late, because fashions were changing, and no one was sure what was supposed to come next. It was time to alter clothes and attitude again, but the new formula was still in its development stage, probably somewhere south of Watford.
Teenagers of the fifties had grabbed their chance by inserting punctuation marks in time, by taking hold of the nowhere years and using them to their own advantage. No longer did they dress as their parents dressed; no longer did they follow family patterns when it came to work. Choice was theirs; they would make up their own minds. Teenagers were a force to be reckoned with; they were challenging the mores of their elders. And their elders were bemused, to say the least of it.
‘Why?’ Theresa Compton stood in the window of the launderette. Her husband, too disabled for full-time or strenuous work, sat behind her on one of the customers’ benches. He had wiped down all the machines while Tess washed the floor. The place stank of Dettol, because Saturday evening was the big clean-up time.
‘Mad, isn’t it?’ he replied. ‘What happened, eh?’
She shook her head. The war had been over for thirteen years, and things had started to look up, but the kids had gone strange. It had all seemed to happen overnight. As recently as 1955, young people had left school on a Friday, had started work the next Monday. They followed dads to the docks, mothers to the dry-cleaning company, to the biscuit factory, to shops and offices.
But now, they seemed to have developed a disease that started with a blinding rash that covered their whole bodies. Most were too young for employment, but several of the older ones rushed away from work at the weekend and donned this strange clothing. ‘I wonder what me mam would have said about this lot?’ Tess’s mother, dead for several years, had been an Irish immigrant with no time at all for change. She’d worked hard, worshipped faithfully, died in her sleep. ‘I’ll bet she’d have clouted our Sean and our Anne-Marie. I reckon these daft swine wear their coats long to hide the splits in their tight trousers. As for Anne-Marie – she has to squash her skirts to get through a doorway.’
She moved closer to the window. Sean wasn’t visible, but Anne-Marie was acting all coy and daft in the company of a Protestant in a pea-green coat with the compulsory black velvet collar, and electric blue socks peering cheekily from under the hems of abbreviated trousers. ‘Their trousers are too short,’ Tess complained. Pea-Green had crossed the road to be with Anne-Marie, who was only fifteen. He’d better keep his hands to himself, or he’d be in serious trouble.
‘That’s to show off their socks,’ Don answered. ‘They look like they’ve all escaped from some bloody circus.’
‘Don’t swear,’ Tess said almost absently. She turned round. ‘Did you go and have a look at that carpet I told you about?’
‘I did,’ he answered. ‘And it’s horrible.’
Tess bridled. By no means a large woman, she seemed to swell when annoyed. ‘But it’s all the rage, Don. Are you sure you looked at the right one? Skaters’ Trails, it’s called. Everybody’s buying it.’
‘Everybody’s buying shocking pink socks and sticky-out underskirts, but we’re not. Mind, you’re only too right in a way. They’re all at it, Tess, not just the kids. Furniture with daft, splayed-out legs, convex mirrors that act like something out of a Blackpool fun house – everybody looks distorted in one of them. What’s the point of a mirror like that, eh? There’s nothing solid any more. And that carpet you’re on about is as ugly as sin. They even had what they called a coffee table. It was curved upwards at each end, looked as if it might take off any minute. Hideous. Made of plastic supposed to look like wood, but it didn’t.’
‘You’ve no taste, that’s your problem.’
‘I have. Utility’s good enough for me. And there’s nothing wrong with that Axminster square up there.’ He waved a hand towards the ceiling. ‘It’s a nice flat. We don’t need carpets.’
Tess held her tongue. The second bedroom had been divided into two smaller rooms for the kids, and they were growing. She wanted a house, planned on letting the flat and continuing to supervise the launderette while Don went into estate agency in the empty shop next door.
She sighed. Menlove Avenue wasn’t far, yet it seemed a million miles from this busy road. An ambitious woman, Tess had always pictured herself in a nice semidetached with gardens, on a tree-lined avenue, among posh neighbours and with a washing machine in the kitchen rather than in a shop beneath their living quarters. The car was paid for, the launderette practically ran itself, and there was money enough for a deposit on a house and for Don’s estate agency. Well, she thought there was …
But she had just one problem: she hadn’t yet advised her husband that he was going to be an estate agent. It was a nice, clean, elegant job. All he needed was a desk, a telephone, adverts in the evening paper and someone to do the running about for him. Oh, and houses. Yes, he would need a few of those.
She looked at him. He was a good dad, a decent enough husband, a man with a total lack of enthusiasm when it came to betterment of self. Injured at Dunkirk, he had been rendered unfit to work in the building trade, but he knew enough about the business to recognize a decent house for sale. He should handle the elegant end of the market. She was thinking the word ‘elegant’ all the time, wasn’t she? But a semi on Menlove Avenue was so important. It was her goal, all she wanted, all she thought about.
‘What are you cooking now?’ he asked.
‘Nothing.’ It was probably because of Mam and Dad, God rest them. They’d slept in a gypsy caravan in a barn, children crammed together at the warmer end, the two adults near the door
. Yes, there had been a door, but it never fitted properly. Tess shivered. She remembered meals at a huge table inside the white house, an occasional bath in front of a roaring fire, the scent of apples fermenting their way towards cider, sounds like gunfire when a still decided to give up its dead in huts dedicated to the manufacture of illegal spirits. The ganga man had sent everyone to England and, because no one could read or write, everyone had eventually lost touch with everyone else. ‘I want us all safe,’ she said quietly.
‘We are safe.’
‘I want to own a house,’ she said.
‘And I want a new knee, but I’m not likely to get one, am I?’
‘You can drive. You’ve got your blessed car. What have I got? What have we as a family got? A rented flat and ten washing machines. I want a house, Don, a house of our own.’
He groaned. ‘Menlove Avenue beckoning again? Look, I can’t go out to work full-time and pay a mortgage.’
‘Yes, you can,’ she snapped. ‘You can rent next door and help folk sell their houses. Our Sean can be your assistant. It’s a clean job, a damned sight better than the one he’s got now, all motor oil and filthy nails. Have you seen the state of him when he gets home?’
Don’s mouth hung open.
‘Shut your gob; there’s a tram coming.’
He snapped his teeth together. ‘I’d need real money to put next door right. I doubt it’s seen a paintbrush this century.’
Tess turned and faced him properly. ‘There’s two ways to go about it. You can set yourself up, or you can work for Maitland and Corby. They want to open smaller branches in what they call the suburbs. We can make an appointment with them any time. There’s a basic wage, gas, electric and phone paid for by them, and you get a percentage of everything you sell.’
Don didn’t like the sound of it.
Tess didn’t like the sound of whatever was happening outside. She dashed to the door and stared wide-eyed at the scene in the middle of the road. Dozens of teenagers on massive motorbikes had driven up between the Teddy boys and their wide-skirted female counterparts on the opposite pavement. The leader held up a hand, and all the bikes stopped. He cast an eye over the multicoloured locals. ‘Look,’ he shouted, mockery decorating the word. ‘Still back in the Dark Ages.’
The Liverpool Trilogy Page 81
