The Leaving Of Liverpool

by Maureen Lee

  In the kitchen, Mollie put a lump of lard in the frying pan and was slicing the potatoes when Mike Bradley appeared in the doorway. ‘I’ve just remembered something: your husband was a policeman and he was murdered. I take it you didn’t get married again, otherwise you wouldn’t be on your own on New Year’s Eve?’

  ‘You’re right, I didn’t. There’s no need for me to be on my own: I have four lovely children who are having a wonderful time in Ireland where I’ve just spent Christmas, but I decided I wanted to do war work.’ The potatoes went in the pan and began to sizzle. She wondered if Brussels sprouts had ever been fried before. ‘I came to live with Agatha last September and work in the same factory as she does.’

  ‘Good for you,’ he said admiringly. He looked at the food. ‘I’m starting to drool. I’d better go away before I embarrass myself.’

  Ten minutes later, she gave him the meal along with a bottle of brown sauce, a piece of bread, ‘to wipe the plate with’, and a slice of Christmas cake for afters. ‘It’s the oddest Christmas cake you’ll ever eat. It’s made with marmalade because dried fruit has virtually disappeared from the shops, and it isn’t iced. Did you know there is a government order restricting “the placing of sugar on the exterior of any cake after baking”?’

  ‘I didn’t know that, no.’ He began to tuck into the food. It reminded her of another time she’d watched a man attack a meal with such enthusiasm, but couldn’t quite bring the incident to mind, until she recalled it was Zeke Penn in Charlie’s - he’d called it a ‘diner’. She’d never heard of him again. Each night, Harry Benedict had taken him back to the Adelphi, worried someone would steal his coat. She didn’t think about Harry nearly as much as she did Tom, she realized; he’d played a much smaller part in her life.

  ‘Penny for them?’ She looked up. Mike had finished eating and the plate had been wiped clean. ‘I think I can say without fear of contradiction that that was the best meal I’ve ever had. My congratulations to the chef.’

  She fluttered her eyelashes. ‘Thank you.’

  He enquired about her children and she told him all about them, then asked what he did in the Army.

  ‘I’m a translator. Why I have to do that in the wilds of Scotland is a mystery to me. I expected to work in London, but the Army have a language section up there. I keep applying for active service, but they keep turning me down. I was a language teacher before the war and can speak French, German, and Spanish, so I suppose I’m more useful to them that way.’

  They took turns answering each other’s questions. It kept their minds off their own problems. Mollie liked him and guessed he liked her, but there was a distance between them. They’d been thrown together by circumstance and the likelihood was that they would never see each other again after tonight when he was there for her and she for him.

  Just before twelve, she turned on the wireless and they listened to Big Ben herald the arrival of the New Year. She hoped he wouldn’t feel obliged to kiss her and was relieved when he just nodded and said, ‘Happy New Year, Mollie.’

  ‘And the same to you.’ She nodded back.

  Not long afterwards, Agatha and Phil came home. Phil was delighted to see his old friend and the two men staying up talking after the women had gone to bed - they were due at Garston Electrics that morning.

  When Mollie went into the kitchen ready for work, Phil had gone and Agatha was making porridge for the children’s breakfast. ‘Don’t go in the living room,’ she whispered. ‘Mike’s fast asleep on the settee.’

  When they returned that night, Mike had left. ‘Back to Scotland,’ Agatha surmised.

  Mollie’s life resumed its normal, regular pattern: work, a visit to the pictures at least once a week, and a trip to Duneathly once a month. Every other Saturday afternoon, she met her sisters-in-law in the Kardomah for coffee. Sundays, she took Agatha and Blanche’s children to the park while Agatha made the dinner. She had trouble thinking up things to tell the children in her weekly letters, which were beginning to get very repetitive, until one day something happened in the office that enabled her to fill three whole pages.

  It was Friday, the busiest day, and Dolly had accompanied Mr Parrish to the bank to collect the wages. Half an hour later, she returned without him.

  ‘I only turned me back a minute,’ she said tearfully, ‘but when I looked he’d disappeared.’

  ‘With the wages?’ an alarmed Mollie enquired.

  ‘Oh, yes, he’d already collected them.’

  Mollie had visions of Mr Parrish on his way to the Scilly Isles to buy the cottage he and his late wife had always wanted.

  Mrs Havelock was told the news and immediately called the police. When she was questioned, Mollie didn’t mention the Scilly Isles and neither did Esme, even if it meant they were protecting a criminal.

  Two hours later, Mr Parrish’s black attaché case containing the wages was brought into the office by a different policeman. Apparently, the old man had had a dizzy spell outside the bank. Someone had called an ambulance and he’d been taken to hospital.

  ‘He was dead anxious that you should get this,’ the policeman said.

  ‘How did Mr Parrish manage to collapse and be taken off in an ambulance when all you did was turn your back a minute?’ a furious Mrs Havelock demanded of Dolly, whereupon Dolly confessed she’d been talking to her friend who worked in a sweet shop a few doors away.

  ‘But Mr Parrish knew where I was,’ she wept.

  ‘Anyway,’ Mollie wrote at the end of her letter, ‘I won’t be bringing Dolly home to see you because she’s been given the sack. Mrs Havelock would have sacked Mr Parrish, too, but he’s needed in the office, dizzy spells or no dizzy spells, and from now on, me and Esme are to collect the wages.’

  She finished with loads of kisses and a reminder that it would soon be Easter and she would be home for four days.

  It was a few days before Easter, and they’d hardly been in the office an hour when the telephone rang. Esme answered and handed the receiver to Mollie. ‘It’s for you.’

  Mollie took it, expecting the call to be an internal one, someone with a query about their wages. ‘Mollie Ryan speaking,’ she said crisply. It sounded much friendlier than ‘Mrs Ryan’.

  ‘Mammy, it’s Brodie.’

  It was the first time she’d had a call from Duneathly at work. ‘What’s wrong, darlin’,’ she asked fearfully.

  ‘Mammy,’ her daughter said breathlessly, ‘Uncle Finn’s run away and Auntie Hazel’s lying on the bed, all still and quiet like. I think she might be dead.’

  ‘Finn’s run away?’

  ‘Gone away, then.’ The young voice shook. ‘He told Auntie Hazel he was going this morning before he went to work. He said he was never coming back again. As soon as he closed the door, she screamed and ran upstairs.’

  ‘Dear God!’ She felt her blood run cold. ‘Is Megan there, darlin’?’ Megan would be more capable of dealing with the situation.

  ‘She’s gone to school. Everyone’s gone. I only came back because I forgot my needlework and it was then I heard Auntie Hazel and Uncle Finn shouting at each other. I didn’t like leaving Auntie Hazel on her own, but I don’t know what to do,’ she finished helplessly.

  ‘Make Auntie Hazel a cup of tea,’ Mollie told her, ‘and put loads of sugar in it. She’s not dead, darlin’, I promise. Does anyone come today to help with the cleaning?’

  ‘Not on Wednesday, no.’

  Mollie thought hard. ‘In that case,’ she said eventually, ‘telephone one of the women from Hazel’s sewing circle - there’s a Madge and a Carmel and a Theresa - and ask one of them to come over. You’ll find the numbers in the blue book on Finn’s desk in his office. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

  ‘All right, Mammy. Shall I go to school or not?’

  ‘It’d be best if you stayed at home today, Brodie, so you’ll be there for Auntie Hazel if she needs you.’ She put the telephone down. ‘You bastard, Finn,’ she whispered. ‘How you could have brought
yourself to do something like that to Hazel, I shall never know.’

  For a while, she sat staring into space, thinking about her sister-in-law, wishing now she’d told her about Yvonne so that Finn’s leaving wouldn’t have come as such a shock. But if Finn had stopped seeing the woman as he’d promised, it would have only upset her when there’d been no need.

  How was this going to affect her own life? Drastically, she supposed. She couldn’t just go to Duneathly and stay with Hazel a couple of days. Finn walking out of her life was worse than him dying. It was impossible to imagine how devastated her sister-in-law must be.

  She went into Mrs Havelock’s office. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but there’s a family crisis and I have to go away.’

  ‘Will it be for long, Mollie?’

  ‘I’m not really sure.’ She had a feeling it was likely to be for ever. Hazel had looked after her own and Mollie’s children for long enough. It was time she had a bit of looking after herself.

  At first, Hazel appeared to be coping marvellously until Easter Sunday when they all went to Mass and she looked as if she were about to fall apart. It was something she’d expected to do with Finn until one of them died but, from now on, Finn would go to Mass, not just on Easter Sunday, but every other Sunday, with an entirely different woman.

  It was on that day that something inside her sister-in-law died: not just her heart, but her spirit. She was incapable of making decisions, she couldn’t remember things, and found it hard to use the telephone. There were occasions when she forgot the children’s names.

  ‘Why are you still here?’ she asked when Mollie had been in Duneathly a week.

  ‘I’m back for good, aren’t I, darlin’? I only said I’d be away six months.’

  ‘I can’t remember you saying that.’

  That was because it wasn’t true. Mollie hadn’t gone away for any specific length of time, but she knew Hazel would be upset if she thought she’d come back because of her. ‘I was getting a bit fed up with Liverpool,’ she lied.

  ‘Honest?’

  ‘Honest.’ She’d already written to Mrs Havelock to say she wasn’t coming back and had asked Agatha if she would please send the clothes she’d left behind.

  In the summer Megan turned sixteen. She left the convent and transferred to the Misses O’Mara’s Commercial College in Kildare. Both Mollie and Hazel were relieved when it appeared she’d fallen out of love with Patrick. Joe decided he would like to be a farmer when he grew up. He started to work weekends on a farm owned by Matthew Collins, an old friend of Finn’s, earning himself quite a bit of pocket money as a result. Brodie wanted to be a ballet dancer and Tommy prayed the war would last until he was eighteen so he could join the Navy.

  ‘I want to drive a submarine,’ he told his mother.

  ‘Hi, Bobby? Bobby, this is John. Anne’s had a boy. Congratulations - Dad!’ He chuckled. For some reason he found it highly amusing that Bobby had become his stepfather.

  Thousands of miles away in London, Bobby Gifford’s heart gave a huge lurch. Now he was a real father. ‘Can I speak to her?’ he asked.

  ‘She’s asleep. The doctor gave her something. She’ll call you when she wakes up.’

  ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘She’s fine,’ John said heartily. ‘I don’t know why women make such a fuss about having babies. It seemed real easy to me. Oh, here’s Christina with Franklin. Hold on a minute. Let’s see if he says something. He was screaming fit to bust earlier.’ They’d decided to call the baby after the President if it was a boy, and Eleanor after his wife had it been a girl.

  Bobby listened intently. A voice said, ‘Congratulations, Bobby,’ but he took that to be Christina, not Franklin. He thanked Christina, and said, ‘He didn’t utter a word,’ when John came back on the line.

  ‘He’s asleep, that’s why. Just went out like a light.’

  ‘Is someone playing the piano?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s Herbie. He’s here with Ollie. They came to be with Anne when she had the baby.’

  The Blinkers weren’t just a family; they were a tribe. Once you’d joined, you became a member for life. Just because Anne and Herbie were divorced it didn’t mean she’d stopped being a Blinker; and by marrying Anne Bobby had become Blinker, too. Franklin was now the youngest member of the tribe.

  ‘What does he weigh?’ he enquired. He didn’t know why size should be so important, but people always seemed to quote weights when a baby was born.

  John said he had no idea. ‘Anne will tell you. Oh, and by the way, she said next time she wants a girl. Will you be in this afternoon?’

  It wasn’t afternoon in London, but evening. Bobby said nothing on earth would persuade him to move outside the four walls of his apartment until his wife had phoned. ‘Give her my love,’ he said, ‘and kiss Frankie for me.’ It would be another three months before he would kiss his son for himself. He was flying to New York for Christmas and had never looked forward to anything quite so much in his entire life.

  In November, Mollie was the only one who stayed up to hear the special announcement promised from the BBC. It was midnight by the time Bruce Belfrage, the newsreader, came on to announce triumphantly that British troops had attacked the Germans at El Alamein and the enemy were in full retreat. It was more than three years since the war had started and this was Britain’s first victory.

  A few days later, Agatha telephoned. ‘Listen, Moll,’ she said. Mollie listened and could hear church bells ringing in the distance in celebration of the Army’s success. After so much time spent in the darkness, a sliver of light had at last appeared on the horizon.

  Early in December, Agatha wrote, enclosing a letter addressed to Mollie. ‘It’s from Mike Bradley,’ she wrote. ‘Phil recognized his writing.’

  Mollie examined the envelope. The writing was large and firm, businesslike, without any of the whirls and curls she was inclined to use herself. She wondered what he had to say to her. His address was written on the back, a place in Scotland she’d never heard of.

  She’d thought about him quite a lot in the months - almost twelve - since they’d met, though hadn’t expected to. The time they’d spent together had been very pleasant. They’d found a lot to say to each other and she’d begun to wonder - no, hope - that one day she’d see him again. He had a wife, but she’d got the impression the marriage was over.

  It appeared, when she opened the letter, that Mike thought more or less the same as she did:Another New Year’s Eve is almost upon us, and I wondered if I came to Liverpool if we could meet: go to a dinner dance, or perhaps a party with Agatha and Phil? I would very much like to meet you again, Mollie. In case you are bothered at the idea of going out with a married man, Gillian and I have agreed to divorce. I understand she would like the ‘husband’ she was living with to become permanent. Like you, I am Catholic and divorce is strictly forbidden, but I have no idea how I am supposed to stick by Gillian till ‘death do us part’, when she has found someone else.

  The letter went on to describe where he was billeted, the surrounding countryside, which was ‘desolate and forbidding’, and his longing to play a more active part in the war. He found his present role very boring. ‘I don’t exactly want to kill a German,’ he wrote, ‘but so far I haven’t even set eyes on one.’

  He finished by saying he hadn’t forgotten the meal she’d made him: ‘I still drool when I think about it. Nor have I forgotten you, Mollie, and I sincerely hope I will see you again very soon. Your friend, Mike.’

  Mollie wrote straight away so he would get the letter in good time. She said she hadn’t forgotten him, either, and also looked forward to them meeting again, though it couldn’t be on New Year’s Eve as she was in Ireland. She told him about Hazel and Finn, what her children were up to, what Duneathly was like, and how sometimes she longed to be in Liverpool where everything seemed to be happening.

  She went out to post it and hoped it wouldn’t be too long before she got a letter back.

 
; Christmas came and went, but it wasn’t quite as merry as usual; it was the first the Kenny children had known without their father. Hazel put on a brave face, but went to bed early on New Year’s Eve, unable to stand the thought of seeing in the New Year without a kiss from Finn.

  Finn wrote and asked if the children would like to come and see him and Yvonne in Kildare. It was left to Mollie to phone and tell him that every single one had refused. ‘Perhaps next Christmas, Finn,’ she said. ‘By then, they might have got used to the idea of their father walking out on their mother.’

  Nineteen forty-three brought more good news. The mighty German Army appeared to be losing ground in Russia. In North Africa, it had retreated as far as Tunisia and the Americans were making advances in the Pacific. As the months passed, it became increasingly obvious that Germany and Japan would lose the war, but that the Allies would take a long time in winning it. It was going to be a slow, agonizing process and millions more lives would inevitably be lost.

  At Easter, Megan left commercial college and went to work for a solicitor in Kildare where she made loads of friends. Brodie, fifteen, said she’d also like to go to the same college when she finished school.

  ‘But I thought you wanted to be a ballet dancer?’ said a disappointed Mollie.

  ‘I’m not good enough to take it up as a career; the teacher said.’

  ‘Perhaps you’d like to become an actress. There’s bound to be an acting school in Dublin.’

  ‘I’d sooner work in an office, Mammy.’

  Mollie had thought it was the other way around: that it was children who wanted to do adventurous things and the parents who preferred them to have good, safe jobs.

  She saw little of Joe, who spent more time on Matthew Collins’s farm than he did at home. Tommy was the only one who didn’t want to stay in Duneathly when he left school and was still bent on joining the Navy, even if the war was over by the time he reached eighteen. This was a bit too adventurous for his mother, who knew she’d worry herself sick every minute he was away. He was growing more and more like his father, and sometimes she felt he was the only child she had left.