Laceys of Liverpool

He began to kiss her more passionately and she couldn’t find the strength to push him away – perhaps the truth was she didn’t want to find it. She wished she weren’t so sensible, so religious, so cautious, that she could find the courage to live with him openly and not give a damn about being respectable and what anyone thought. Or that she were harder, like John, able to leave the people she loved behind without a second thought.

But she was none of these things. She was Alice Lacey, who had four children, who lived in Amber Street, Bootle and owned her own hairdressers’. Somehow Alice knew she would never escape these simple facts, because deep down in her heart she didn’t want to. She was her own jailer, bound by conventions she would never break. Even her love for Neil, which was far greater than she had ever admitted either to him or to herself, wasn’t enough to change her.

He was carrying her into the bedroom and she didn’t protest.

‘We didn’t know last night we would never make love again,’ he whispered, ‘and I’d like the last time to be special. Promise you’ll never forget me, Alice.’

Maureen Lee’s award-winning novels have earned her many fans. Her recent novel, The Leaving of Liverpool, was a Sunday Times top 10 bestseller. Maureen was born in Bootle and now lives in Colchester. Find out more at:
www.maureenlee.co.uk
.

Cover

Title

Copyright

Dedication

About the Author

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Also by Maureen Lee

The woman lay listening to the rain as it beat against the hospital windows. She and Alice hadn’t picked a good night to have their babies. As had become the custom in Bootle over the last few months, there’d been an air raid, a bad one, and they’d all been moved down to the cellar. Alice’s lad had been born only minutes after the All Clear, at a quarter past eleven. Her own son had arrived almost three hours later, so they’d have different birthdays. Later, there’d been an emergency. Some woman had been found in the rubble of her house about to drop her baby. Since then, things had quietened down.

In a bed opposite, her sister-in-law was fast asleep, dead to the world, like the other six women in the ward. ‘Why can’t
I
sleep like that?’ the woman murmured fretfully. ‘I can never sleep.’ Her mind was always too full of plans for the future, schemes: how to get this, how to do that. How to make twenty-five bob last the whole week, including paying the rent and buying the food. Oh, how she’d love new curtains for the parlour! But new curtains, new anything, were an impossible dream.

Unless she stole something, pawned it, bought curtains with the money. She’d stolen before, her heart in her mouth, sweat trickling down the insides of her arms. The first time it was only a string of beads that looked like pearls. The price ticket said a guinea. The pawnbroker
had offered a florin, which she’d accepted gratefully and bought four nice cups and saucers in Paddy’s Market.

One day she’d walked all the way into town and nicked a cut-glass vase from George Henry Lee’s, which she kept on the mantelpiece, though she was the only one who knew it was cut glass. Billy thought it was just a cheap old thing. The silver candlestick she’d robbed from Henderson’s had paid for a nice mat in front of the parlour fireplace. Some things she kept, some she pawned. She’d become quite skilled at shoplifting. The trick was to stay calm, not rush, smile, make your way slowly to the door. Stepping outside was the worst part. If spotted, it was the time you’d be nabbed. But she’d got away with it so far.

The woman didn’t care how she looked as long as it was respectable, or what she ate, but she liked pretty things for the house: curtains, crockery, cutlery, furniture. Furniture most of all. She’d give anything for a new three-piece: velveteen, dark green or plum-coloured. She licked her lips and thought about brocade cushions with fringes, one at each end of the settee, on each of the chairs.

Most of all, she’d like a nice big house to put the lovely things in. She was sick to death of living in a two-up, two-down in O’Connell Street. But if curtains were an impossible dream, then a big house was – well, out of the question. Being married to a no-hoper like Billy Lacey, she was just as likely to fly to the moon.

She shoved herself to a sitting position. The red light on the ceiling cast a sinister glow over the ward, over the prone bodies beneath the faded cotton counterpanes. ‘It looks like a morgue,’ she thought. Paper chains crisscrossed the room and she remembered it was Christmas Eve. ‘Everyone’s dead except me and that fat bitch in the corner snoring her head off.’

The clock over the door showed a quarter past four. A cup of tea should arrive soon. Alice, who already had three kids, all girls, and knew about such things, said the tea trolley came early, around five o’clock, which seemed an unearthly time to wake anyone up. In the meantime she’d go for a walk. If she lay in bed till kingdom come, she’d never go asleep.

The rain was lashing down, making the windows rattle in their frames. It drummed on the roof and she hoped Billy would keep an eye on the loose slates over the lavatory. She’d been at him to fix them for ages, but would probably end up fixing them herself. She fixed most things around the house. Her lips twisted bitterly when she thought about Billy. His brother, John, had stayed in the ozzie with Alice until an hour before their lad was born. He’d only left because the girls were being looked after by a neighbour who was scared of the raids. But Billy had left
her
on the steps outside the ozzie when she was about to have their first-born child. Off to the pub, as usual. He didn’t know yet if she’d had a boy or a girl.

There was a nurse in the glass cubicle at the end of the ward where a sprig of mistletoe hung over the door. She was at a desk, head bent, writing. The new mothers were expected to remain confined to their beds for seven whole days, not even allowed to go to the lavatory, but the woman slid from under the bedclothes and crept past, opening one half of the swing doors just enough to allow her through. The nurse didn’t look up.

The dimly lit corridor was empty, silent. Her bare feet made no sound on the cold floor. She crept round corners, through more doors, dodged into the lavatories when she heard footsteps coming towards her. The footsteps passed, faded, and she looked both ways before coming out, hoping it wasn’t someone on their way to
her ward who’d notice the empty bed, though it was unlikely. The hospital was understaffed. Some nurses had joined the Forces, or gone into better-paid jobs. There were a lot of part-timers and older nurses who’d retired and come back to do their bit.

She arrived at the place that had been her destination all along: the nursery. Five rows of babies, tightly wrapped in sheets, like little mummies in their wooden cots. Most were asleep, a few grizzled, some had their eyes wide open. Like her, they couldn’t sleep.

Her own baby had been whisked away because of the emergency and she’d barely seen him. Now she did, she saw he was a pale little thing. He looked sickly, she thought. There was yellow stuff in his eyes. As she stared at her sleeping child, she felt nothing. She was twenty-seven, older than Alice, and had been married longer. But she hadn’t wanted a baby. The sponge soaked in vinegar she’d inserted every night, which Billy knew nothing about, hadn’t worked for once.

The child couldn’t possibly have come at a worse time. Just when she’d worn Billy down, ranted at him mercilessly for month after month, until he’d conceded that letting his missus get a job wasn’t a sore reflection on his masculine pride. Not with a war on and women all over the country working in ways they’d never done before. Why, there were women in the Army, on the trams, delivering the post, in factories doing men’s jobs.

It was a job in a factory on which the woman had set her eye, making munitions. You could earn as much as four quid a week, three times as much as Billy. And as she said to him, ‘Any minute now, you’ll be called up. What am I supposed to do then? Sit at home, twiddling me thumbs, living on the pittance I’ll get from the Army?’

His face had paled. He was a coward, not like his
brother John, who’d volunteered when war broke out, but had been turned down because he was in a reserved occupation. John was a centre lathe turner, Billy a labourer. There was nothing essential about
his
menial job. John, anxious to make a contribution towards the war, had become a fire-watcher. Billy carried on as usual and haunted the pubs waiting for his call-up papers from the Army to land on the mat.

She’d only been in the munitions factory a fortnight, packing shells. It was hard work, but she liked it. If she felt tired, she thought about the pay packet she’d get on Friday, about the things she’d buy, and soon perked up. Then she discovered she was up the stick, pregnant and, stupid idiot that she was, she told the woman who worked beside her and next minute everyone knew, including the foreman, and she’d got the push.

‘This is not the sort of job suitable for a woman in the family way,’ the foreman said.

The woman glared through the glass at her baby. She hadn’t thought what to call him. She wasn’t interested. Billy wanted Maurice for some reason if they had a boy, but she had no idea if Maurice was a saint’s name. Catholics were expected to call their kids after saints. Alice’s girls had funny Irish names and she didn’t know if they were saints either. The new kid would be called Cormac. ‘No “k” at the end,’John had said, smiling. He humoured his silly, dreamy wife something rotten.

Where was Cormac? There were cards pinned to the foot of each cot with drawing pins. ‘
LACEY
(I)’ it said on the cot directly in front of her. Her own baby was ‘
LACEY
(2)’. Alice had yet to see her little son. It had been a difficult birth and she’d been in agony the whole way through. John had been close to tears when he’d had to go home. Afterwards, with seven stitches and blind with pain, Alice had been given something to make her sleep.

Her own confinement had been painless – she wouldn’t have dreamt of making a fuss had it been otherwise. She hadn’t needed a single stitch. Her belly still felt slightly swollen and she hurt a bit between the legs, that was all.

Even though she didn’t give a damn about babies, the woman had to admit Cormac was a bonny lad. He had dark curly hair like his dad, and he wasn’t all red and shrivelled like the other babies. His big brown eyes were wide open and she could have sworn he was looking straight at her. She pressed her palms against the glass and something dead peculiar happened in her belly, a slow, curling shiver of anger. It wasn’t fair: Alice had the best Lacey, now she had the best son.

From deep within the bowels of the hospital, she heard the rattle of dishes. Tea was being made, the trolley was being set. Any minute now, someone would come.

The woman opened the door of the nursery and went in.

Alice Lacey sang to herself as she swept a cloud of Florrie Piper’s hair into the corner of the salon. ‘Away in a manger, no crib for a bed . . .’ She brushed the hair on to a shovel and took it into the yard to empty in the dustbin.