Daughters of Liverpool

by Annie Groves

  ‘I’ll take them for you for now, love. Time enough to get used to our ways once you’ve got something warm inside you.’

  Katie’s grateful smile illuminated her whole face. It was such a relief to discover that she was billeted with someone so obviously kind and decent. Up until now she hadn’t realised how much she had been worrying about where she might end up. There would be no dusty corners or damp beds in this house, Katie knew, and hopefully no raised voices and fierce quarrels either.

  Trouble? Keeping her a bowl of soup? As she hung Katie’s coat up on the hall coat stand, all Jean’s maternal instincts were aroused. Something told her that this wisp of a girl needed a bit of good northern mothering.

  ‘You’re to call me Jean and my husband Sam,’ she informed Katie after she had returned to the kitchen, ladled a good helping of soup into a bowl and brought it over to the table for her. ‘I’ll let you have your soup and then I’ll tell you a bit about us, although I don’t expect you to remember all our names right from the start. Got brothers and sisters yourself, have you?’

  ‘No, I’m an only one.’

  ‘Well, your parents are going to miss you then. Me and Sam have four. Our Luke’s a corporal in the army and based here at Seacombe barracks on home duty at the minute. Although he was at Dunkirk.’

  Katie looked at Jean. ‘You must be very proud of him,’ she said quietly and simply.

  ‘That we are,’ Jean agreed. ‘Me and his dad both, although my Sam didn’t take too well to it when Luke told us that he’d joined up. Sam had got a job lined up for Luke in the Salvage Corps, you see, working alongside him.’

  Katie nodded understandingly.

  It wasn’t like her to talk so intimately about her family to a stranger, Jean acknowledged, but there was something about her young billetee that made it easy to do so. She had a quiet but dependable air about her that said that she knew how to respect a person’s confidences. And, of course, Jean was hugely proud of her son.

  ‘Of course, there’s no one prouder of our Luke now than his dad,’ Jean continued. ‘And as luck would have it the two of them often get to work together, what with Sam and the Salvage Corps doing their bit to help clear up the mess after the bombings, and the soldiers stationed at Seacombe doing the same.

  ‘Then there’s our Grace,’ Jean continued. ‘That’s our eldest daughter, who’s training to be a nurse and lives in the nurses’ home. She’s just recently got engaged, and her fiancé, Seb, is a wireless operator with the RAF. Then there’s our two youngest, Lou and Sasha – twins, they are – they left school a while back but they’ve been waiting for jobs to come up at Lewis’s department store, where our Grace used to work. They’re starting there after Christmas. You’ll get to meet them all soon enough, of course, especially the twins.’ Jean gave a small sigh.

  Jean loved her family, Katie could see that, but she had also heard in her voice her special love for her son, and her concern for her younger daughters.

  ‘Now, you’re to treat this house like your own home whilst you’re here with us, Katie, and seeing as I’ve got a daughter of my own not much older than you, I want you to know now that if you should get any problems you need to talk over with someone, I’m always here to listen. It isn’t easy for you young ones having to move away from your families to do war work, we all know that.’

  To Katie’s embarrassment something had happened to her that she hadn’t suffered in years. There was a lump in her throat and tears were threatening her vision. Quickly she blinked them away.

  ‘You’re very kind,’ she told Jean huskily, and meant it.

  TWO

  It was now almost half-past nine in the morning and an hour since Katie had arrived – early – at the large Littlewoods Pools building, off Edge Lane, which had been taken over by the Government to house its wartime postal census operation. She’d presented herself to the clerk on duty and given the name of the person she had been instructed to ask for. From the corridor where she had been told to wait, Katie had watched a stream of people – women, in the main, and not wearing any sort of uniform but instead dressed in their ordinary daytime clothes – entering the building and going about their business. She had been able to see into the large room on the other side of the corridor, where women had been settling down at long tables to work. The large windows allowed in plenty of daylight and Katie had also seen that there was plenty of overhead lighting, essential, she had guessed, when handwriting had to be read very carefully.

  After a wait of ten minutes or so she had been escorted down a corridor to the office of the manageress. By this time Katie had been feeling horribly nervous, and she hadn’t felt any better when the manageress had summoned a stern-looking older woman, Miss Edwards, to show Katie where she would be working and explain the nature of her work.

  Miss Edwards had a rather schoolmarmish manner and a clipped way of speaking that had alarmed Katie at first, but Katie was a sensible girl and not given to being ‘nervy’, and after listening quietly to Miss Edwards for several minutes Katie had deduced that the older woman wasn’t anything like as frightening as she had first appeared, but was instead merely determined to make sure that Katie understood the serious nature of the work she was going to be doing.

  ‘The mail is opened and sorted according to content, and then passed on to those readers who specialise in specific contents. If necessary – that is to say, should a piece of mail contain something that arouses a reader’s suspicions – then she refers that piece of mail to her supervisor.

  ‘Everyone has her own identification labels, which carry her own personal number, and a label must be attached to every piece of mail a person checks, identifying her as its checker. At this point I must remind you that it is a strict rule that nothing that happens within these walls is discussed with anyone else.’

  Katie nodded in acknowledgement of the severity of the embargo.

  ‘Since your field of expertise is, I believe, contemporary music, it is letters containing any references to such music that you will be required to read and either pass as unremarkable or hand on to your supervisor should you come across anything suspicious. You will, of course, be reading only those letters written in English. We have separate sections dealing with letters written in other languages.’

  Katie got the impression that being an expert in a foreign language ranked much higher in the department’s pecking order than merely having knowledge of contemporary dance music.

  ‘Right now, follow me and I’ll take you to the table where you will be working,’ said Miss Edwards briskly, turning on her heel to march down through the rows of tables without waiting to see whether or not Katie was following her.

  The Littlewoods building was large and the room in which she was going to be working very long, and Katie was slightly out of breath by the time she had caught up with Miss Edwards, who had come to a halt beside one of the tables.

  Eighteen or so girls were already seated around it, their heads bent diligently over their work. Each operative had a basket full of letters and another one into which they obviously put the letters once they had read them, plus a smaller tray with a red warning sign on it. Miss Edwards explained that it was into this smaller tray that Katie should put any letters that struck her as suspicious.

  Katie was introduced to Miss Lowndes, a pretty, placid-looking, fair-haired young woman wearing an engagement ring, who Katie guessed was in her early twenties, and who was in charge of the table.

  ‘Come and sit down here next to me so that you can watch how we work,’ she told Katie, pulling a small face and adding, once Miss Edwards had left, ‘We all call one another by our first names on this table. I’m Anne.’

  ‘I’m Katie,’ Katie told her, obediently pulling out the chair next to her and settling herself on it.

  There were too many girls seated round the table for her to be able to memorise all their names in one go, but she could remember that the tall thin girl with mousy brown hair who was sitting
on the other side of her was Flo, and that the girl next to her with red curls and a snub nose was Nancy, and the girl on the other side of Anne – a stunning brunette with creamy skin and cornflower-blue eyes was Allie – short for Alison, whilst the girl opposite her with her serious expression and fair hair was Mabel.

  They seemed a friendly bunch, most of whom had originally worked for the pools company, and who Katie learned had been selected to do this special war work because of their ability to spot very quickly when ‘something wasn’t right’.

  ‘It’s a trick you learn fast when you’re checking the pools,’ Anne explained to her. ‘Folk think that it’s easy, but you need to be pretty sharp and to have a good head for figures.’

  Figures and logic, Katie suspected.

  ‘To start with, you’ll be working with Carole here. She’ll show you the ropes,’ Anne told her, indicating a giggly, curvy girl with red-gold curls, who quickly informed Katie that Liverpool was just about the best place to have been posted because of the excellence of its famous dance hall, the Grafton.

  ‘I can see that you’re not hitched up regular, like, with someone ’cos you’re not wearing any rings,’ Carole informed Katie, ‘but how about a steady? Have you got one?’

  ‘No,’ Katie told her firmly and truthfully.

  ‘Well, that’s good then, ’cos that means that the two of us can go out dancing together.’ Carole winked and added mock virtuously, ‘I reckon it’s our duty seein’ as there’s a war on and all them poor lads in uniform need a bit of female company to cheer them up. The Grafton’s the best dance hall there is. You’re certainly never short of a partner. Loads of lads, there are, round here,’ Carole continued enthusiastically. ‘All sorts – locals, uniforms, even some of them Canadians wot’s come over to help with the fighting. You can go out with a different one every night if you want. The soldiers are my favourites.’

  ‘I’m not interested in dating soldiers,’ Katie began firmly.

  ‘Oh, hoity-toity! After an officer then, are you? Well, you’ve certainly got the looks and the style.’

  Katie opened her mouth to tell her that she wasn’t interested in getting involved with any man full stop, but before she could do so Carole had changed the subject.

  ‘What kind of digs have they put you in? Some of the girls are staying at the Young Women’s Christian Association.’ Carole pulled a face and giggled. ‘That’s not my cup of tea at all, but luckily I’ve got an auntie who lives local and I’m staying with her.’

  Katie thought ruefully that the Christian Association would probably be as horrified at the thought of hosting Carole as she was at the idea of having to stay there, given the other girl’s outspokenness on the subject of young men. But although Carole’s outlook on men was very different from her own, there was something about the other girl’s bubbly friendly personality that Katie couldn’t help liking.

  ‘I’ve been billeted with a family. I haven’t met them all yet but the mother is very nice, and I’ve got a lovely room.’

  Her bedroom was lovely, and she had been thrilled last night when Jean Campion had shown her up to it, explaining that it had originally been the twins’ bedroom but they had moved up to the attic floor into their elder sister’s room and so Jean had taken the opportunity to refurbish the room a bit.

  ‘You’ve got Grace’s bed, and dressing table and wardrobe,’ she had explained to Katie, ‘but my Sam’s given the walls a fresh lick of distemper. I wasn’t sure about duck-egg blue at first. I thought it might be a bit cold-looking.’

  ‘It’s very pretty,’ Katie had told her truthfully, earning herself another warm smile, before Jean had continued, ‘And then I made up the rag rugs from a couple of bags of offcuts of fabric I got from a mill sale. Go a treat with the paint, they do, with them being blues and yellows. The blue silk eiderdown and the curtains came from my sister Vi. She lives across the water in Wallasey.’

  Katie had been thrilled to have such a pleasant room. There was also a pretty bedroom chair, and a view of the garden and the allotments beyond it from the window.

  ‘We can have a proper chat when we knock off to go to the canteen for our dinner,’ Carole told Katie now. ‘I’d better show you how we work otherwise we’ll have one of the supervisors down here. They sit over there at those desks you can see on that bit of a dais,’ she added, jerking her head in the direction of a railed-off raised-up section of the room where people sat at single desks instead of around a table.

  ‘Going home for Christmas, are you?’ Carole asked as she passed a small pile of opened letters to Katie. ‘Only I was thinking that I could get us both tickets for the Grafton’s big Christmas Dance. I’ve seen them advertised, and I reckon if we don’t jump in now it could be too late.’

  Again, without waiting for Katie to reply, she rattled on, ‘Now what you do with these ’ere letters is you read them and if there should be anything in them that doesn’t quite gell, like, then you tell me for now.’

  Dutifully Katie started to read the first letter, in which its writer referred to having been in London and having danced at the Savoy Hotel to the sound of Carroll Gibbons and the Savoy Orpheans.

  Katie had often heard the Orpheans play and an unexpected wave of homesickness hit her. At home right now her father would just be getting up, grumbling about the noise from the street, which would have woken him up, complaining that no one seemed to realise that those who worked into the early hours of the morning needed to sleep in.

  Her mother would be sitting at the kitchen table wearing one of her theatrical, and totally unsuitable for a shabby London terrace, ‘robes’ and before too long the pair of them would be bickering.

  ‘Summat up? Only you’ve been staring at that letter for nearly five minutes.’

  Shaking her head in answer to Carole’s query, Katie put the letter to one side.

  She was just over halfway down the pile when she found it: a letter written in bold spiky handwriting, in which, out of the blue, the writer referred to Gracie Fields singing ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’, when surely everyone knew that it was Vera Lynn who sang that particular song. It could simply have been a mistake, of course, but it made sense to check.

  ‘I’ve just noticed this,’ she informed Carole, pointing out the error.

  Carole grinned at her. ‘Good for you. The top brass always check out newcomers by giving them a little test to see if they are as on the ball as they’ve made out.’

  Leaning across Katie, she waved the letter in front of Anne and told her triumphantly, ‘She spotted it straight off.’

  ‘Well, thank goodness for that,’ Anne smiled. ‘We’ve been desperate for someone to fill in for Janet since she decided to join the ATS.’

  A bell suddenly rang, making Katie jump.

  ‘Don’t worry, it isn’t one of Hitler’s bombs. It’s only the bell for the first sitting for lunch,’ Anne reassured her. ‘Carole, you and Katie can go first sitting today, but make sure you’re back on time,’ she warned them.

  THREE

  Emily could still feel her face burning hot with angry humiliation, despite the cold air that hit her when she stepped out of the stage door of the Royal Court Theatre, where her husband, Con, was a producer, and into the narrow street that ran behind the building. It was her own fault, of course. She should have known better than to be taken in by Con’s lies and come down here with the sandwiches she’d made up for him, thinking that it would save him having to go out and buy himself something since he had said he was so busy with pantomime rehearsals that he wouldn’t be able to get home for his tea. Too busy to get home for his tea, but not too busy to take the afternoon off, apparently, and not, from the look she had seen on his assistant’s face, on his own.

  Where was he now? Shacked up in some cheap hotel room with an even cheaper little slut, if she knew her husband.

  She wasn’t going to cry. Big plain women like her didn’t cry; it made them look even uglier than they already were. Besides, she was a
ll cried out over her husband and her marriage. How could she not be when she knew what Con was and what a fool she had been to marry him?

  Properly taken in by him at first, she’d been, and no mistake, a big gawky plain motherless girl, whose father had made himself a nice bit of money as a theatrical agent and who had died unexpectedly of a heart attack, leaving it all to her, his only child.

  Con had come round to offer his condolences. She could remember now how her heart had thrilled when she had opened the door of the tall double-fronted Victorian terraced house at the top end of Wavertree Village where she had lived all her life, and seen him standing on the step.

  She had never seen such a good-looking man and she had certainly never had one calling on her.

  Six months later they were married. Con had insisted that it wasn’t disrespectful and that it was what her father would have wanted.

  She had been so besotted with him by then that she would have agreed to anything, given him anything, she acknowledged. And of course she had already done both. Better for them to marry quickly just in case anything should happen, he had told her after the night he had got her so inebriated on sherry that she hadn’t even realised they were upstairs and in her bedroom with him undressing her until it was too late.

  She had been grateful to him then, too stupid to realise what it was he was really after and why he was doing what he was doing to her.

  Of course, that had all stopped once they were married and he had what he wanted, which had been access to her father’s money. Her father had more sense than her, though, and he had put most of it safely away in investments, bonds and things, and a bit of a trust fund that couldn’t be touched. And that brought her in a good income even now. Good enough to keep Con still married to her, that was for sure. Married to her but bedding other women – younger, prettier women. And they, for all their pretty faces and slender bodies, were no better at seeing through him than she had been herself. Actresses, chorus girls, singers, those were the kind that appealed to Con. Just as she had done, they took one look at that handsome face of his, those laughing eyes, that slow curling smile, that thick dark hair and those broad shoulders, and they were smitten.