Daughters of Liverpool

by Annie Groves

  Walking home past one of the most famous of Liverpool’s theatres, the Royal Court was part of their secret plan. A plan that involved them being seen and offered the opportunity to audition for a show, in which they would so impress the right people that they would be whisked off to Broadway to become overnight stars.

  The train had slowed down preparatory to pulling into Liverpool’s Lime Street Station. Katie Needham wriggled a little apprehensively to the end of her seat. It had been a long stop-and-start journey from London to Liverpool, and the train was full with a mix of young men in uniform and other non-services travellers like herself. Naturally, the precautions necessitated by being at war meant that there were no lights on inside the train to illuminate the December late afternoon gloom, but Katie was too nervous to want to read, even if there had been enough light to enable her to do so.

  She smoothed the fabric of her navy-blue skirt, glad of the warmth of the cherry-red jumper she was wearing. She had taken off her navy-blue woollen coat along with her matching wool beret, and her cherry-red hand-knitted scarf and gloves, a present from an elderly neighbour, when she had got onto the train, folding up her coat and her scarf and rolling her beret and her gloves to stow them carefully in the pocket of her coat before putting them on the luggage rack above her head along with her small case.

  ‘Soon be there.’ The pleasant woman in her thirties, who had chatted to her during the journey, informing her that she was travelling to Liverpool to see her husband, who was on leave from the navy, gave her a brief smile but Katie guessed that her travelling companion’s thoughts would be on her husband and the happy reunion that lay head. No one asked too many questions or gave away much information in these security-conscious times, and Katie had been relieved when the navy wife had accepted her own vague but proud statement that she was going to Liverpool to do ‘war work’.

  Now, though, Katie’s thoughts were more apprehensive than happy. Had she done the right thing? As the train rattled over the points and into the station, Katie admitted that she didn’t know whether to feel pleased with herself or downright scared. She knew what her parents would want her to feel, she acknowledged, as, along with the other occupants of the compartment, she stood up and started to put on her outdoor clothes. The looseness of the wedding ring on the finger of the woman seated next to her reaffirmed the effects of the anxiety and hardship the whole country was experiencing, with 1941 only just around the corner and no end to the war yet in sight.

  The train jolted to a halt with a hiss of steam and a squeal of brakes, causing everyone to reach for something to hold to steady themselves. Katie and the navy wife exchanged final smiles and then went about the business of straightening hats and wrapping on scarves.

  Katie’s parents had made it plain enough to her that they were far from pleased about her decision to leave home to go to do war work in Liverpool when, according to them, they needed her at home to help them.

  To keep the peace between them more like, Katie thought ruefully.

  It wasn’t that Katie didn’t love her parents –she did – but she didn’t have any illusions about them. When her best friend at school had said enviously that she wished that her mother had been an actress and her father a famous band leader, Katie had had a hard time not telling her how much she wished that her parents were more like her friend’s: that her mother wore a pinafore and worried about mealtimes and muddy kitchen floors, and that her father went off to work in the morning and then came home at five o’clock.

  Where other parents seemed to manage to have calm ordered lives, her parents seemed to prefer chaos and quarrels.

  Her father was fiercely jealous and had insisted on her mother giving up the stage when they had married, whilst she in turn vented her frustration on him with outbursts of temper during which crockery was thrown and threats to leave were made. As a young child Katie had been dreadfully afraid that during one of their quarrels both her parents would leave and that she would be forgotten and left behind.

  As she followed the other passengers out onto the platform Katie wrinkled her nose against the smell of smoke and cold air.

  The station was very busy. Every platform seemed either to have a crowd of people standing on it waiting for a train to pull into it, or passengers crowding onto it from a train that had just pulled in.

  As Katie joined the queue for the ticket barrier, she was glad of the warmth of her winter coat. All around her she could hear people speaking with an unfamiliar accent, so very different from the cockney she was more used to. She had been told that Liverpudlians were friendly and welcoming. She hoped that that was true.

  She was so afraid of having made the wrong decision and having to admit that to her parents. She loved them dearly but their quarrels had coloured Katie’s childhood and as she grew older they had obliged her to take on the role of peacemaker, both parents appealing to her to support their points of view. Katie felt as sorry for her glamorous excitable mother, denied a proper outlet for her theatrical talents, as she did for her poor father, who was so afraid of losing her. If the relationship between her parents was what happened when a person fell in love, then Katie had decided falling in love was definitely not for her. She wanted no truck with it and even less with passionately jealous men.

  They had been shocked when she had told them what she had done.

  ‘You’re going to Liverpool to read letters?’ had been her father’s disbelieving comment, followed by his signature crashing of his hands down onto the keys of the ancient upright piano that took up far too much room in their small rented London house. Her father always used the piano to express his feelings. ‘But I need you here.’

  He had been dressed to go out to ‘work’ when she had told them, wearing his immaculate band leader’s white tie and tails, his hair slicked back with brilliantine.

  Now Katie smiled as she handed over her ticket, and was relieved to receive a warm smile back from the burly uniformed ticket collector.

  In looks Katie took more after her mother than her father, having her mother’s dainty build and expressive heart-shaped face with high cheekbones and a softly shaped mouth. Her colouring, though, was her father’s. She had his hazel eyes and the same dark gold hair that turned lighter in the summer sun.

  She had been working as her father’s unpaid ‘assistant’ ever since she had left school, organising his diary, attending rehearsals with him, making notes for him from the comments he made about various members of the two different bands he worked with, some of whom were foreign and inclined to break out into their own language in moments of stress, so that as well as her knowledge of modern music Katie also had a smattering of Italian, Polish and French.

  There was nothing about the history of modern dance and song music that Katie didn’t know, from every word of every popular song for the last decade or so, to the name of every composer of those songs, and the names of every member of the country’s most popular dance bands.

  Sadly, though, whilst her father and her mother could both sing with perfect pitch, Katie, whilst loving music every bit as passionately as they, had a voice that was completely musically flat, a voice incapable of being raised in song; a voice that had caused both her parents, but especially her father, to demand that it was never ever heard attempting to sing a single note because of the pain it would cause him.

  Katie might not have a ‘voice’ but she did have a good ‘ear’ – and, so she was pleased to think, a good awareness of how wearying artistic temperament could be, especially to those on the receiving end of it.

  Katie treated her inability to sing as philosophically as she treated the quarrels between her parents – what else after all could she do?

  ‘Yes, Katie, your father is right,’ her mother had told her. ‘You can’t possibly go to Liverpool.’

  ‘I have to,’ Katie had told them both, patiently explaining that it was her duty, but diplomatically not explaining how she had slipped the all-important consent form under h
er father’s nose when he had been signing some business letters she had typed for him.

  She had seen the job advertisement in one of the London papers, asking for young women with ‘some specialist knowledge’ on a list of subjects that had included music, and had written off before she could change her mind.

  She had been so excited when she had received a reply requiring her to present herself at the address given in the letter for a formal interview.

  It had seemed such a grown-up and important thing to do when she had had it explained to her that because of her knowledge of popular music the Government wanted her to work in Liverpool for MC5, the ‘secret’ organisation where letters to and from certain countries were censored and checked for hidden messages. The fact that she could speak and write a small amount of French and Italian was apparently an added bonus. The stern-looking official who had interviewed her had told her that spies were very clever in the ways in which they made contact with one another, often using devices such as mentioning in their letters something as seemingly innocent as popular music, their references a code containing secret information. Her task would be to read such letters and look for anything within them that seemed suspicious.

  She would be working alongside other girls, she had been told, and under a supervisor, to whom she would be able to refer any letter that might arouse her suspicions.

  She had felt so proud and pleased with herself when she had been offered the job but now, after nearly eight hours on a train that had seemed to crawl from London to Liverpool, she was beginning to wonder if her parents had been right and she had done something very silly indeed.

  Now that she was in Liverpool, instead of feeling relieved Katie was actually beginning to feel slightly shaky and uncertain. If she had stayed at home she would have been accompanying her father tonight to the well-known London hotel where one of the bands he conducted would be playing. Instead of having merely a semi-stale cheese sandwich to eat, she would have been able to look forward to a delicious supper from the hotel restaurant.

  Now that she was through the ticket barrier Katie put down her case in order to get her bearings, and then almost lost it in the surge of people milling around her.

  As she reached to retrieve it, a young man in RAF uniform beat her to it, handing it to her, giving her a wink and a smug grin as he did so.

  ‘That will cost you a kiss,’ he told her cheekily.

  ‘Then you’d better put it back,’ Katie replied sharply, ‘because you won’t be getting one.’

  He looked as shocked as though a kitten had suddenly shown the teeth of a tiger, but Katie was unrepentant. Give his type an inch and they’d try to take a mile. Well, not with her, they wouldn’t. People – men – thought that just because she was small and dainty-looking that she was a pushover. Well, she wasn’t, and she wasn’t going to be either.

  Picking up the case the airman had put down, Katie turned her back on him and made her way towards the exit.

  ‘Will ’Itler be bombing Liverpool again before Christmas? Read all about it,’ the newspaper vendor outside the station bawled.

  Katie stared at the headlines. She didn’t really know very much at all about Liverpool or about it being bombed. She’d been too busy soothing her parents’ fears about their ability to manage without her to worry about any bombs.

  ‘What’s up, love?’ the news vendor asked her.

  ‘Oh, nothing …’

  ‘If it’s directions you’re wanting then you’d better go and ask at the WVS post back there in the station,’ he told her. ‘They’ll probably give you a cup of tea an’ all …’

  It was good advice. She knew that she had been billeted with a Mrs Jean Campion in somewhere called Wavertree, but she had no idea just where that was, other than that it was close to the place where she would be working, which was apparently off a road named Edge Lane.

  The women in charge of the WVS post were every bit as helpful as the news vendor had promised, although there was no tea.

  ‘We’ve run out,’ the plump grey-haired woman standing beside the tea urn apologised to Katie. ‘I dare say your landlady at your billet will have something nice and hot waiting for you, though. It’s the bottom end of Wavertree you’re wanting, just over the border with Edge Hill. You can take the bus or even walk it, although walking will take you a good half an hour or so, and uphill as well,’ she told Katie informatively.

  Katie thanked her.

  * * *

  It was dark and cold, and the Liverpool night air smelled alien. Katie had walked past the Royal Court Theatre just as the stage door was opening to admit a group of chorus girls smelling faintly of greasepaint, sweat and that once known never forgotten smell of dusty dressing rooms, excitement and nerves that she always associated with her mother, even though the only visits her parent now made to theatre dressing rooms were to see old friends from her own stage days.

  That wasn’t homesickness she was feeling, was it, because if it was then it had better be on its way, Katie told herself stoutly as she wrapped her long scarf more tightly around her neck and marched determinedly past the theatre.

  The WVS had given her the number of the bus she would need and the name of the stop to ask for to get off. There was quite a queue already waiting at the stop, young women mostly chattering away in an accent that Katie’s acute ear quickly had her mimicking inside her head.

  She gathered from their conversation that they were shop girls on their way home from work. They sounded jolly, their conversation mixed with lots of laughter. Katie hoped that the people she would be working with were as pleasant.

  She had been told that the exact nature of her work would be explained to her once she had presented herself at her place of work. She had been given the name of the person she was to report to tomorrow morning and had been warned that she was not to discuss the nature of her work with anyone.

  The bus arrived, disgorging some passengers before taking others on. By the time Katie got on there was only one seat left, but when she saw the heavily pregnant and not very young woman getting on behind her Katie offered it to her and was rewarded with a tired smile, and a grateful, ‘Ta, love. Gawd, but me legs are aching. Never thought I’d see meself in this condition again at my time of life, but there you go. Got me like this before he went off to war, my Bert did, and now he’s living the life of Riley in some army camp and I’m here like this.’

  Katie listened politely. The people of Liverpool weren’t so very different from their neighbours in London, by the sound of it, for all that they spoke with a very different accent.

  ‘Here’s your stop, love,’ the conductor eventually warned her as the bus started to slow down.

  Picking up her case, Katie thanked her and stepped down onto the platform.

  The blackout made it impossible for her to see anything of her surroundings as she followed the WVS lady’s instructions and crossed the road, shining her torch to find the opening to the street she wanted, before heading down it.

  The house where she was billeted was down at the bottom of the road. Now she was feeling a bit nervous, Katie admitted as she knocked on the door. After all, she had never lived anywhere other than at home. What if the people she was billeted on didn’t like her, or if she didn’t like them? What if …?

  Her increasingly apprehensive thoughts were put to flight as the door was opened by a slender, attractive-looking woman of her mother’s age, wearing a clean pinny over a brown skirt and a camel-coloured twinset, who greeted her with a warm smile, her hazel eyes twinkling.

  ‘You’ll be Miss Katherine Needham, who’s billeted with us,’ she said. ‘Come on in, you look fair frozen. I’ve kept back a bit of tea for you and if you don’t mind the kitchen it’s the warmest place in the house. Yes, just put your case down there for the minute. I’ll get my Sam to take it up for you later. Oh, if you were wanting to freshen up perhaps …’

  ‘No. That is …’ It was so unlike her to feel shy and tongue-tied that Kat
ie barely recognised herself. ‘I mean … please call me Katie,’ she managed to get out as her hostess led her down an immaculately clean and shiny hallway smelling of lavender polish, and into a wonderfully warm kitchen that smelled deliciously of soup, making Katie’s stomach rumble, much to her embarrassment.

  The kitchen was empty, although it was plain that Mrs Campion had a family, from the number of chairs around the big table, and the size of the soup pan on the stove.

  As though she had guessed what she was thinking Mrs Campion informed her, ‘Sam, my husband’s, gone off to an ARP meeting, so that will give us time to get to know one another a bit before he gets back. The girls, my twin daughters, are upstairs in their room. I’ll call them down to meet you once you’ve had a chance to have a cup of tea and a bowl of soup. Take you long to get here, did it?’

  ‘About eight hours.’

  ‘Well, you get your coat off, love, and make yourself comfortable.’

  Jean didn’t know quite what she had expected, but it certainly hadn’t been someone as young as this, a girl no more than eighteen, and so small and dainty she looked as though a puff of wind would blow her over. Nice manners, though, Jean thought approvingly, and lovely and clean, with that shiny hair and those well-scrubbed nails. Her shoes were well polished too, and her coat a good sensible cloth, obviously bought to last, instead of being some skimpy fashionable thing like the twins always wanted to have.

  Jean had taken trouble with her own appearance. She was wearing her second-best Gor-Ray skirt and the smart twinset that Grace had persuaded her to buy three years ago in Lewis’s winter sale, having had it put to one side for her mother as ‘staff’ were allowed to do.

  Jean had always stressed to her own children the importance of being neatly turned out and taking a pride in themselves. Her young billetee looked just as she ought, Jean decided approvingly.

  ‘It really is kind of you to go to so much trouble, Mrs Campion. If you can just show me where I’m to put my outdoor things …?’