Daughters of Liverpool (2 page)

‘Have we got time to walk home past the Royal Court Theatre, do you think?’ Lou asked her twin sister, Sasha.

Sasha shook her head. ‘Better not. Mum will only start asking us why we’re late and where we’ve bin, you know what she’s like. It’s a pity that Auntie Fran has gone to London. If she was still here she’d have bin able to work on Mum for us and help us to get some stage work, p’haps in one of the Christmas pantos. After all, she said we were good enough.’

The twins exchanged disappointed looks. They were, as Jean herself often said, as alike as two peas in a pod with no one really able to tell the difference between them unless they themselves allowed that to be seen.

At fifteen they were in many ways young for their age, still very much ‘schoolgirls’, with their plaits and freckles and their giggles. But that outward youthfulness hid a shared fierce determination to follow their auntie Fran onto the stage, along with an awareness of how strongly their parents would oppose that ambition.

The jobs they would be going into in Lewis’s department store after Christmas – proper jobs with proper wages, not just the bits of work they had been doing running errands for Mrs Lucas, the elderly owner of the old-fashioned dress shop in the city centre, which was closing down after Christmas – showed what their parents wanted for them: safe steady jobs that would keep them at home until the time came for them to marry. But the twins had other ideas and dreams, which had
become all the more compelling with the onset of war and their auntie Fran’s recent visit.

On the top floor of their parents’ three-storey house in their shared attic bedroom, the twins regularly practised all the new dance steps they had seen in films, or begged their school friend, whose sister was a dance teacher, to show them, adapting them to a private shared routine they could dance in time to the new songs coming out of America, ready for the breaks they just knew they were going to get. Somehow or other …

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 her 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.