Daughters of Liverpool

by Annie Groves

  He’d better see what the twins wanted. He had to go down to the warehouse anyway.

  Conscious of the unpredictability of women in general and the jealous nature of the chorus girl in particular, Kieran ushered the twins outside onto the pavement.

  ‘I was just about to go down to the Queen’s Dock to check that the warehouse is ready for tonight,’ he told them, grinning at them as he offered, ‘Fancy coming with me? Then you can have a bit of an extra practice.’

  Since he was already walking towards the main road the twins had no option other than to follow him.

  ‘We want to ask you something,’ Lou told him.

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ he commanded her, checking the traffic before reaching out and taking hold of Lou’s arm with one hand and Sasha’s with the other.

  Kieran might fancy himself as a dashing young man about town but old habits die hard, and Kieran’s mother had insisted on her first-born taking responsibility for his younger siblings from a very young age, threatening Kieran with all manner of punishments if anything should happen to them whilst under his care. As a result Kieran had developed several robust methods of ensuring that his brothers and sisters remained in one piece, one of which was to grab hold of them whenever a road needed to be crossed.

  Several roads, busy with buses and other traffic coming from the docks, needed to be crossed before they reached the desolation of the bombed-out streets and buildings that lay close to the docks, all of which the twins were dragged ruthlessly across, depriving them of any opportunity to ask the question they had sought Kieran out to ask.

  They were both thinking about it, though, and Sasha, always the more cautious of the two of them, was growing increasingly conscious of the fact that at home their mother would be wondering where they were, and that if they weren’t careful and didn’t get back soon, they’d be in trouble and probably forbidden to go out tonight.

  They were walking south along the dock road now, past the overhead railway. She could hardly communicate this concern to Lou, though, not seeing as they weren’t speaking, and not with Kieran there.

  By the time they walked down Chaloner Street to where it met Parliament Street, and the Queen’s Dock was in view, a surreptitious look at her wristwatch told Sasha that it was seven o’clock. Her heart gave an anxious thud. Their mother was going to be furious. Tea was at six thirty sharp.

  Pain squeezed Sasha’s heart. Kieran liked her best, she knew he did, and it was mean of Lou to say he didn’t, but right now she wanted to be at home and keeping out of trouble much more than she wanted to be here.

  She pulled free of Kieran’s grip. ‘I’m going home.’

  Lou stared at her sister. It was never Sasha who made the decisions. That was her role. There was only one reason why Sasha wanted to go home and that was because she knew that she, Lou, was right and that Kieran liked her best, but she didn’t want to let Lou have the triumph of being able to say ‘I told you so’.

  ‘You go then,’ she told her twin. ‘I’m going with Kieran to look at the warehouse.’

  They never ever did anything separately, and it was a funny feeling going off with Kieran whilst Sasha went home. Lou hung back and turned round just as Sasha reached the corner of the street and did the same.

  ‘You haven’t forgotten that I’m relying on you two tonight, have you?’ Kieran asked her. ‘A pair of real stars you two are going to be. Especially in them costumes we got made up for you.’ He winked at her and grinned. Lou smiled back but her heart wasn’t in it somehow. Funny that all she’d wanted for ages now had been to be on her own with him without her twin, but now that she was, all she could think of was Sasha, going home without her. If anything should happen to Sash …

  They had almost reached the warehouse. Lou stopped walking.

  ‘What’s up?’ Kieran asked her.

  ‘I’d better go and catch up with Sasha,’ Lou told him, hurrying after her twin without any further explanation.

  Kieran watched her go, standing with his hands on his hips.

  Females – there was no understanding them.

  * * *

  In the end Lou had to run to catch up with Sasha on one of the maze of narrow streets leading off Parliament Street, which was the quickest way back to Edge Lane, because the minute Sasha heard her twin calling her name she stopped to look round at her and then continued to walk – very fast without waiting for Lou to catch up with her.

  ‘Sasha, wait,’ Lou called out. She had to stop because she’d got a stitch in her side. It was horrible round here, she decided, with so many bombed-out buildings. They’d walked along the dock road from the city centre, and she probably wouldn’t have noticed anyway, Lou admitted, because her thoughts had been on other things and Sasha had been with her, but now the windowless and doorless houses, some with their roofs gone and even their walls too, others reduced to heaps of rubble, made her feel uncomfortable and jittery. The street was deserted, its residents obviously having been moved out for their own safety.

  Sasha didn’t want Lou to catch up with her. She didn’t want to speak to her twin or to have anything to do with her. She felt funny inside, all sort of scratchy and sore, as though she wanted to shout and scream at Lou and yet at the same time as though she wanted to cry. Why was it that Lou always had to be right? Why couldn’t she be right sometimes? It wasn’t fair.

  ‘Sasha, wait up.’

  Lou was gaining on her. Well, she wasn’t going to ‘wait up’. Her head down, Sasha headed towards what she knew would be a short cut over the debris from a bombed-out building.

  Lou watched in horror as her twin ignored the danger sign placed close to the bombed building with its UXB warning painted on it, calling out frantically, ‘Sasha, no!’

  ‘Sasha, no?’ She was tired of Lou always telling her what she could and could not do, Sasha fumed, ignoring the instability of the ground beneath her feet, as she broke into a half-run, scrambling over what had once been a house and was now a pile of rubble, and coughing in the dust her clambering was disturbing. This time she was going to do what she wanted and Lou wasn’t going to stop her.

  She was so caught up in her own anger that she’d stepped onto the deceptively solid-looking soft earth before she’d even realised, and by that time it was too late because the ground was giving way beneath her feet, taking her with it.

  She tried to save herself but the speed and angle of her descent was so swift that she lost her balance, frantically reaching for the piece of metal sticking up out of the ground to stem her slide.

  Lou watched Sasha slide and then fall, her own stomach lunging in fear and despair for her twin as she raced towards her.

  By the time she reached her, Sasha was lying on her back on the ground clinging on to the projecting fin of the bomb beneath which the lower half of her body was now lying.

  White-faced, the twins looked at one another.

  ‘It’s all right, Sash, it’s all right,’ Lou told her. ‘Give me your hand and I’ll pull you back up.’

  ‘I daren’t,’ Sasha told her fearfully. ‘Lou, I’ve looked and there’s a great big hole under the bomb. If I let go I’ll fall into it.’

  ‘No you won’t,’ Lou told her firmly.

  But even as she spoke Sasha slipped a bit further, and when Lou made her way to the other side of the rubble to look, what she saw made her feel sick. Sasha was right, there was a huge crater beneath the bomb, so deep that Lou couldn’t see the bottom of it, but when some small pebbles rolled down into it they made a splashing noise, which suggested that there was water in it.

  ‘I’ll pull you out,’ Lou announced.

  ‘No, you can’t. My foot’s stuck now.’

  She was right, Lou recognised. Her fall had dislodged the loose earth and rubble thrown up by the formation of the crater and it had trapped Sasha’s foot somewhere under the unexploded bomb.

  ‘I’ll try and get it free,’ Lou told her.

  ‘No, Lou, don’t. I’m scared. Don’t leav
e me, will you?’ Sasha begged her.

  ‘Of course I won’t,’ Lou told her. She doubted that she could free her twin. And already, though it had been only a very few minutes since Sasha had first fallen, Lou was certain that Sasha had slipped a bit further towards the crater. Digging herself securely into the rubble behind her twin, Lou took hold of her twin’s belt. She couldn’t leave her to go and get help; she had promised not to leave, and besides, she was afraid that if she did Sasha might slip right into the crater and drown.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she told Sasha firmly. ‘Someone will see us soon.’

  She knew that Sasha was crying and she felt like crying herself. She searched for something to say to cheer her sister up.

  ‘It wasn’t true what I told you about Kieran,’ she told Sasha abruptly. ‘About him preferring me.’ Lou knew that Sasha was listening to her even though she didn’t say anything. ‘He only said it because he thought I was you, because I played a trick on him like we used to do when we were little and changed places. He even called me Sasha,’ Lou continued.

  It wasn’t true. Kieran had told her that of the two of them it was her he liked best, but that did not matter now. Nothing mattered now more than keeping Sasha alive until help came.

  Sasha could feel her eyes burning with fresh tears. She knew that she must be going to die because Lou had lied to her to make her feel happier. She knew Lou had lied because Kieran had never called her Sasha. His pet name for her had always been Sassy. ‘My little Sassy’, he had called her. Not that that mattered any more. Sasha closed her eyes. She’d give anything to go back to before they had ever met Kieran, and she and Lou had been happy dancing together in their bedroom.

  Grace smiled to herself as she walked onto the ward past a trainee in mid yawn and struggling to keep awake, who looked at her with envy whilst blushing with guilt.

  Grace too had once dreaded nights and wondered how on earth she would stay awake. She must remember to send the probationer for a cup of coffee once she’d taken over from the day shift.

  Her own neck ached slightly from sleeping lying on her stomach with her face pressed into the mattress and her pillow wedged behind her head, just in case a bomb fell. Everyone, it seemed, had horror stories to tell of the injuries those asleep sustained in bombings, especially to their unprotected faces.

  It seemed a lifetime ago now since she had been a probationer, although in reality it was only a matter of months. In wartime, though, as Grace was beginning to learn, a day could be a lifetime and bring about the end of many lifetimes, she acknowledged. It was a sobering thought, all the more so with the wards so full of casualties from the last two nights’ bombings that you had to dodge between beds filling the corridors.

  ‘Ah, there you are, Campion,’ Sister announced with relief. ‘Follow me, and I’ll go through the new admissions with you.’

  The ward was men’s surgical, and the beds were filled with men who had either had or who were waiting for operations.

  ‘We’ve got twenty-four new admissions, all of them suffering injuries of one sort or another from last night’s bombing raid, some of them serious, one or two, sadly, that I suspect will prove fatal, despite the best efforts of our surgeons.’

  It took well over half an hour for them to reach the end of the ward.

  ‘This is the last one,’ Sister told Grace, moving towards the last bed. ‘This poor chap who looks as though he’s been ten rounds with a prizefighter is suffering from concussion. A soldier, we think, since he was brought in in uniform but since he didn’t have his jacket on there weren’t any papers on him so we’ve no idea who he is. An ARP warden found him wandering around, and so far he hasn’t been able to tell us anything about himself.’

  ‘Well, I can tell you who he is,’ Grace told her, after looking at the man in the bed. ‘He’s my cousin Charlie.’

  Once she had explained exactly who Charlie was to Sister’s satisfaction, whilst admitting that she had no idea what he might have been doing in Liverpool, Sister told her that she’d better go and see the almoner to tell her that they now knew the identity of this patient so that his parents could be informed of his whereabouts.

  ‘Will he be all right?’ Grace asked the sister worriedly. Sister’s pursed lips reminded her that she was being unprofessional. ‘The patient is suffering from concussion, Nurse,’ Sister told her firmly. ‘Therefore we must hope that he makes a full recovery and regains his memory.’

  Charlie stirred and muttered as though somehow he sensed he was being discussed, but he didn’t open his eyes.

  That was all she needed, Grace thought grimly, her auntie Vi arriving on the ward and demanding to see her son.

  The almoner’s office was a fifteen-minute walk away from the ward, and Grace had to wait ten minutes to see her before she could tell her about Charlie. Then there were forms to be filled in, and the details to be checked by the almoner to make doubly sure they were correct, before Grace was allowed to go back to the ward.

  They were frantically busy, and whilst she’d been gone the new junior had gone into a blue funk, burst into tears and had had to be sent to the nurses’ home to calm down, which left them a junior short, and three patients due back on the ward from the operating theatres.

  Funny how once she had thought she’d never ever remember the right settings for ‘trays’, Grace thought with some amusement as she automatically set up the trays she knew would be needed for the evening’s treatments, her movements speedy and efficient.

  No one was saying anything but she knew they were all thinking the same thing – wondering if the Luftwaffe would bomb Liverpool again.

  She glanced at her watch. Half-past eight. With daylight saving they’d got a while yet before it got dark enough for the bombers. Ten o’clock had been the start of them coming in last night and the night before. There was no point thinking about that, though. It was almost time for a ‘bottles’ round. They were so busy she didn’t think she’d get time for her coffee break, but if she could she’d go and take a look at Charlie, Grace decided. Seb was on duty tonight so at least he’d be safe underground at Derby House.

  * * *

  ‘Sam, I’m worried about the twins. They should have been home over two hours ago.’

  They were in the kitchen, Sam washing his hands at the sink, having only just come in. He’d called home earlier in the afternoon to warn Jean that he’d volunteered to help out with the heavy lifting work needing to be done to clear away the damage and the destruction caused by the previous night’s bombs, and that he’d be late in for his tea. As he reached for the towel he saw Jean’s white face.

  ‘They were supposed to be going out tonight as well,’ Jean continued.

  ‘Maybe they went straight from work,’ Sam suggested.

  ‘No, they wouldn’t do that. They’d want to come home and get changed first.’

  Katie listened sympathetically. She’d planned to tell Jean at teatime that she was going to move out, but Jean’s anxiety over the non-appearance of the twins had made that impossible.

  ‘Katie’s already walked down to Lewis’s to see if she could see them,’ Jean added, causing Sam to give Katie a grateful look. ‘And I went down to the allotment in case they’d gone down there on their way home, thinking you might be there. I’m ever so worried about them, Sam. They would have finished work at six, they know we have our tea at half-past on a Saturday, and it’s gone half-past eight now.’

  ‘All right, love. I’ll go out and have a look meself,’ Sam told her. ‘Maybe they went to see Grace up at the hospital?’

  ‘They wouldn’t do that, not with Grace working.’

  ‘Well, they can’t have gone very far. Happen they’ve bumped into one of their pals and started chattering.’

  Jean’s smile was wan and strained. ‘Not for over two hours, Sam.’

  Luke had been thinking all day about what he’d say to Katie when he saw her, how he’d apologise first off and say that he loved her and that he hope
d she’d give him a second chance; then he’d tell her that he knew she wasn’t the sort that would cheat – because he did know that – then he’d say something about him being a fool and ask for her forgiveness, and then, and only then, would he ask her about that letter. Only he hadn’t had the chance to go and see her like he’d planned because of the bombing and all the clearing-up, and now that he had finally managed to get the sergeant’s permission to call round at home, seeing as they were in the city, anyway, it was gone half-past eight and like as not she’d have gone out for the evening with that Carole, and he’d have to wait until tomorrow to see her – if he was lucky, he acknowledged as he opened the door into his mother’s kitchen.

  Jean saw him first, exclaiming emotionally, ‘Oh, Luke, it’s you. I was hoping it would be the twins.’

  ‘Oh, thanks,’ he grinned, his smile fading when he saw the expressions of anxiety on the faces of his parents and Katie. Katie! She was here, but he mustn’t think of her and how much he wanted to be on his own with her to make things right now, with his parents looking like they were.

  It was Katie who stepped into the silence, saying what his parents couldn’t.

  ‘The twins are missing. They didn’t come home from work.’

  Luke and Katie looked at one another, and it was Luke who took comfort from the steadiness he could see in Katie’s eyes. He could see how upset his mother was and he was grateful to Katie for acting so calm and sensible instead of making things worse.

  ‘Well, we’d better go and look for them, hadn’t we? After all, they can’t have gone far,’ he said, firmly squashing his own anxiety.

  ‘That’s just what I was saying to your mother,’ Sam told him, giving him a grateful look, before going over to Jean and ushering her out of the room, obviously wanting to give her a few minutes to get her emotions under control.