Her Heart's Desire

by Vivienne Dockerty

  It saddened Charlie, but made him proud, when sometimes his mother talked of the man whom he remembered, but never really knew. According to Jane, his parents had met on the promenade at Blackpool. His father, a sea-going man who had voyaged to most of the new world by the time he was thirty, had decided on a trip to the northwest seaside town, which was fast becoming popular with the masses. He and a mate had travelled on the railway from Liverpool to Preston, then had gone on the branch line to stay at one of the boarding houses that had sprung up along the front at Blackpool.

  Jane had been walking with a friend, a woman she knew from a nearby village and had been friends with since a child. A sudden strong gust of wind had blown the diminutive Jane, who stood at just over five feet, into the path of the strolling sailors. She had been caught in the arms of James Wilson, who had been giving her admiring glances as he had walked behind. After utterances of confusion and embarrassment, the four had repaired to one of the shelters that the town’s people had erected for the shielding of locals and visitors from the whooshing wind that could catch one unawares off the Irish Sea. They had spent the next few hours in each other’s company. Within weeks, James, or ‘Jimmy’, being known as a fast worker, had taken Jane Oakes, a spinster pushing thirty, to be his lawful wedded wife and set her up in a one-up-one-down cottage near his family home in Birkenhead.

  In 1878, when Charlie was seven, after his father had been discharged from the ship that had visited Australia, India, China and America during its voyage of the past two years, they heard that Jimmy had been one of those who had perished. The ferryboat he was on, when he was coming back from visiting one of the many seamans’ clubs in Liverpool, had collided with a clipper ship anchored in the middle of the Mersey during thick fog. His body was never found, no doubt swept out into the Irish Sea on a fast flowing tide. All they had left was his sea chest, which was kept upstairs on the little landing, along with various papers that had been found inside. Why he was on the ferryboat that was bound for Egremont, no one ever knew, given as the family lived nearer to the Tranmere landing stage. Being as Jimmy was an honourable man, it was decided that, because of the fog, he had boarded the wrong vessel.

  Feeling full from the generous helping he had taken, Charlie took his plate to the small scullery and rinsed it under the tap, which only spewed cold water. He left it in the stone sink for his mother to swill with boiling water from the kettle the next morning. Although epidemics of cholera and typhoid were few and far between now that the corporation had installed sewer pipes and built a waterworks locally, Jane was an avid washer of plates, cutlery and their persons and had petitioned for their landlord to install an outside flushing lavatory. Now that the Lake Vyrnwy Reservoir was up and running, people were a lot more confident about the quality of their water supply.

  Charlie sat in his armchair and glanced at his newspaper, glad of the light from the oil lamp because messing about with candles was such a chore. It was November and still mild considering it would be Christmas in a few weeks time, though there had been a lot of rainfall that year. He thought back to the fearful storm that July, when a lifeboat on its way to helping the crew of a stricken ship capsized, with two of the crew missing. A newly built ship was also towed by a tug from Greenock and went down off Port Erin in August. No wonder people who lived in the area joked that they should have been born with webbed feet.

  His newspaper was full of the generosity of a man named George Fowler, a provision merchant from nearby Rock Ferry where Charlie’s beloved, Lily Griffiths, lived. He had bequeathed £20, 000 for the establishment of a hospital for incurables in Liverpool and another £4, 000 for other good causes too. What it must be like to be rich and live the grand life, thought Charlie, his mind quickly going to Lily again, as he imagined them married and living in a great house built in the Cheshire countryside. She’d want for nothing; he would employ servants and they would go on holidays to Paris and Rome and their children would attend the very best of boarding schools. He would buy his mother a smart detached dwelling in Bidston, with a view that would extend as far as the Irish Sea and over the Mersey to Liverpool. Poor Mother. It had been hard for her, all these years without a husband. She might have married Alf Hewitt, a mate who had gone to sea with Jimmy and who had kept coming to visit on his shore leaves to ask if there was anything he could do to lighten her heavy load. But Jane had only room for one in her heart and that was her one and only son.

  Thinking of his mother spurred Charlie to his feet and out into the backyard, where the privy and the wooden lean-to lay. The cart, really a large barrow and needing all of Jane’s strength to push it when loaded with her tin pails and the last of the season’s dahlias and chrysanthemums, was up against the brick wall that separated their yard from next door. She had sheltered her containers under it and Charlie decided to leave them there – they’d be full of rainwater if he loaded them for her that evening. He went inside to bring out the coal scuttle and by the light from the kitchen window he filled it full of slack to tamp down the fire.

  “Can I get yer another?” asked a rough looking man, who was leaning up against the bar at The Grapes downing his tankard of beer, as Charlie passed him by to go to the lavatory in the backyard.

  “No, yer all right, Ernie,” he replied, lapsing into the local dialect, as he didn’t want to sound as if he was a cut above the chap.

  “Yer mammy not like yer out too late then?” It was said to rile the young upstart, who lived a few doors away from him. Rumour had it that he had been given a cushy job in the development department at the shipping yard, while he, Ernie, was a lowly labourer.

  Charlie carried on to the backyard and ignored the jibe. The man was out for a fight; he was one of those who couldn’t hold his beer and could get nasty.

  “I’m on me way ter meet me mam from the town hall, Ernie,” Charlie said pleasantly, as he came back, having to pass the man by if he wanted to leave by the front door. “She had a job on this evening, some sort of charity do.”

  “Aye, they’re full of their damn charitable works, them nobs who own the shipping lines and the factory owners, who’ve never done a hard days graft in their feckin’ lives. None of it comes to me and our Betty.”

  Charlie could have said, “Well you have employment and it isn’t up to the great and the good to support your ever increasing brood of children.” Nor could he point out that Ernie should have been home with said wife and children instead of giving most of his wages to the brewery. The man was easily angered and if it wasn’t him who caught a punch in the mouth, it would be his wife, God bless her, when her husband finally made it home. “I’ll say goodnight,” he said, nodding also to the barman who had served him earlier on.

  “Well, I’ll keep me money in me pocket then,” Ernie said, belying his words by holding out his tankard to the barman for a refill. “Yer’d best get off, little mammy’s boy. Yer don’t want yer botty slapped by yer ma.”

  Charlie ignored the great guffaw of laughter that followed him through the door, as other labourers from the shipyard joined in Ernie’s brand of levity. ‘Turn the other cheek’ was Charlie’s motto when others tried to rile him and up to now it had served him well.

  The back streets were quiet as he sped along them towards the town hall in Hamilton Square, except when he had to pass the ale houses, which stood on nearly every corner on his way. Noisy men spilled out onto the pavements, their faces animated in the dull glow of the recently erected gas lamps, as they laughed and joked with their inebriated mates. Small ragged children played in the gutters, whilst older ill-clad boys hung around in groups. He quickly passed the market place, a building erected in 1845 that had served the people of Birkenhead with produce from the outlying farms and fisheries of the Wirral for many years. Vagrants slept under the tarpaulins purloined from the outside stallholders, who frequently used them as shelter on rainy days. A shabby looking man scavenged through abandoned containers, no doubt looking for a meal from the discarded food not fi
t for selling on the next trading day.

  Charlie checked his watch, as he saw from the few lights in the town hall windows that the janitor had been shutting down in an effort to lock up the building for the night. He sighed, as he remembered that Jane had said she couldn’t be sure of her finishing time.

  “Early doors,” said the night watchman, not moving from the warmth of his brazier, situated as it was in the shelter of one of the portico buildings, a mixture of sumptuous dwellings for the rich or offices for wealthy merchants. “‘Is ‘onourableness was away forty minutes ago.”

  Charlie nodded, feeling deflated that his noble act of accompaniment had been thwarted, though deep down he thought it had might have been the fact that his mother was walking back with Mary that had inspired his journey. Mary was what could be called ‘a comely lass’; she had good childbearing hips according to his mother, who didn’t really want her son to marry anyone, but if it had to be so, she wanted a woman who would give her lots of grandchildren. A little older than Charlie, Mary had never been on his list of eligible girls to consider as producer of the next generation of Wilsons. Top of the list had always been Lily, but just in case his senses had got it wrong and she went ahead and married into the gentry, Mary, though second best, could be his choice of bride.

  “I was wondering where you’d got to,” said Jane, when Charlie eventually made it home after his fool’s errand. “I were that glad to have Mary for company tonight. We were just coming around the corner of Argyle Street and one of the warehouses had gone up in flames! It must have only happened in the last half hour, as the firemen had only just got there. We had to drop back to the New Ferry Road or we could have been burnt to cinders.”

  “Well, would you believe it, I was down that way myself looking out for you and Mary, but I wasn’t near Argyle Street or I would have seen the fire too. It’ll be one of them arsonists, I’ll be bound. Got a grudge against something or other. Is that a brew you’re making, Mother? I’m parched.”

  “Sit yourself down and I’ll pour you a cup. I must be getting old, that walk back from work tonight fair jiggered me.”

  “You do too much, Mother; now I’ll be earning a man’s wage you can cut down a bit. Perhaps you could give up the waiting on and concentrate on what you’d like to do instead.”

  “You’re a good lad, Charlie. I don’t know what I would have done without you when your father drowned like he did. Having you here gave me a purpose to carry on. I never understood why his family cut us dead, though, after he’d gone. I would have thought they’d have rallied round a widow and a little lad.”

  “Takes all sorts. They’ve got their own lives to lead and no doubt they thought you were capable of getting on with yours.”

  “I sometimes see your Aunt Emily visiting her parent’s grave at the cemetery. She never buys her flowers from me, just nods my way as she passes by.”

  “Like I said, it takes all sorts. She’s a way to come from Wallasey, so maybe she’s in a bit of a rush to get back to her family.”

  “Yeah, you’re probably right. Well, I’ll be away to my bed. I’ll nip to the allotment early enough, then be ready for church by eight o’clock. I assume you’ll be coming with me.”

  Charlie nodded, then settled into his chair, sipping his drink as he let the day’s events unfold before him. The excitement he felt whilst watching the busy shipping on the River Mersey had never left him. Since he was a child he would find himself drawn to his spot by the landing stage, where he scanned the sides of the nearer vessels for the name and its home port, then avidly read the Lloyds Shipping Gazette to see the country or countries that the ship and its crew had come from. In the small area that he called his bedroom (half of an upstairs room that he shared with Jane, divided by a heavy curtain), his collection of past copies of the gazette sat waiting for perusal in his father’s old sea chest, along with Jimmy’s papers of discharge and indenture and a book of romantic poetry. The latter was hidden from his mother, as she would have called him a sissy. It was a busy port, the City of Liverpool, across the river from his home. Lives were affected by the ebb and flow of decisions made by the shipping lines, the merchants with their warehouses who stored their imported goods from exotic places so far away and the economic vagaries that might force a man to take his family to one of the new colonies, to seek a better life.

  He let his thoughts wander again to his beloved Lily, still in denial over the hurt he had felt when she had spurned him that day. It didn’t do to let such hurts fester; he must drink from the cup of life that was always half full.

  Chapter Three

  “Does my hair look silly with this ribbon in it, Ellen?” asked Lily, as she and her sister sat on Lily’s bed staring into the dressing table mirror, waiting for Lawrence to visit.

  “You always look pretty to me, Lily,” said Ellen wistfully, wishing she had the beautiful chestnut tresses that her sister had, instead of thin, lank, mousy hair that looked as if it always needed washing. “Why don’t you wear that cream flower comb that Bertha bought you last Christmas if you aren’t happy with the ribbon? It will go very well with that blouse and skirt that you are wearing. Cream and brown go well together, don’t you think?”

  “I wore this the last time Lawrence came to tea,” Lily pouted. “What will he think when he sees me wearing it again? He’ll think that I don’t get enough dress allowance, that is what he will think.”

  “I doubt if he’ll notice. He’ll be too busy looking at his bride to be.”

  “Oh, do you think so?” Lily’s voice was shrill with excitement. Bride to be – did Ellen think, like she did, that Lawrence might be on the brink of a proposal? She had been so looking forward to this day and hadn’t slept a wink the night before, imagining what might happen during her cousin’s visit.

  “Yes, I’m sure of it. Anyway, I’d best go back and help Bertha. It’s an exciting day for her as well.”

  Lily couldn’t see why, unless Bertha was looking forward to Lawrence’s admiration of the special cake that she had baked.

  “Tell her that I’ll be down shortly and then I’ll help her with the table in Grand-mama’s sitting room.”

  Lily proceeded to twist her hair into different styles, placing the ornate comb this way and that, then deciding to put her crowning glory into a French pleat, with the comb firmly embedded. She dreamed again of walking down the church aisle on her father’s arm, whilst Lawrence stood by the altar dressed in his very smart uniform, turning his head towards his lovely bride in frothy lace. She was still staring dreamily at her reflection when she heard the front door open, which caused her heart to beat rather quickly. She ran quickly to the landing to see if her beloved had arrived.

  “Welcome.” Lily heard her father’s booming voice, after he had opened the door to his long awaited nephew by marriage. “How did it go then? Good, good. We’ll catch up later in my study.”

  “Come in, my dear.” Lily’s mother had risen from her afternoon nap and was now standing at the side of her husband in the hallway. “I trust everything went well?”

  “Indeed it did, Aunt Hannah. I am looking forward to seeing Grand-mama and the family again, so I can tell you all about my travels.”

  Voices continued on, albeit muffled, once Lily had returned to her bedroom and the trio had climbed the stairs to Grand-mama’s quarters, where the door was closed to keep the warmth in. Lily decided to make a grand entrance, forgetting that she had promised Bertha to help. She waited until she heard her sister’s heavy footsteps and Ellen’s light ones come past her door, then clutching the red rose that she had begged from her sister in the florist shop, she followed them through the open door of Grand-mama’s sitting room.

  Her sisters, including Mabel and Henrietta, the two older ones, who still lived at home but were allowed to go out to work, were sitting on upright chairs and were suitably attired in their Sunday gowns and lacy shawls. Their heads turned expectantly in Lily’s direction as she faltered in the doorway lookin
g towards her parents, who appeared to be in serious conversation with the one that she loved. There was a strange atmosphere in the large, cluttered room and for a fleeting moment she wondered why Lawrence and her parents were standing together by the fireplace. She had presumed that the announcement of their youngest daughter’s betrothal to a favourite nephew would have been the cause of much happiness, but instead they were all looking a little glum. Maybe Bertha was going to say something to spoil it all, seeing as she had just got up from her chair and was blocking Lily’s way. Grand-mama, however, was looking happy, though a little smug.

  “Lily, how lovely to see you,” cried her handsome, smartly-dressed cousin in his sea captain’s uniform when he spotted her hovering in the doorway. He held out his hand for her to go to him, addressing her as he would a child, “My, my, you do look pretty and you are just in time for our announcement.”

  Lily’s heart began to beat very quickly; so much so, that she was in terror of falling into a faint, so she quickly rushed to be by her beloved’s side. He smiled at her impulsiveness, putting out his hand in an effort to steady her, or so she had thought. However, instead it had been Bertha whom he had been beckoning to stand alongside him, not Lily, because he was about to announce that the pair of them were to be wed. The family quickly came to their assistance as the two sisters fell against each other in the rush and Lily, being the lighter, was elbowed to the ground.

  “It will be the effects of a fever, brought on by walking down to Borough Road in the rain yesterday.” Lily could hear her mother’s muffled voice, after she came around from her few minutes of wooziness, during which time Mannion had carried his youngest daughter to her room.

  “I think you will find it is the shock of being the bridesmaid and not the bride at the nuptials,” Grand-mama remarked sourly, as she followed closely behind. “I think she quite fancied being Mrs Lawrence Patterson herself.”