The Liverpool Rose (24 page)
‘Acting like kids is all right when you
are
a kid, or when you’ve got really thick gloves on, but all it’s done for me is make my chilblains ache,’ Lizzie said, balling her hands into fists and shoving them into the pockets of her thin coat. ‘My gloves are more hole
than finger, if you see what I mean, so I left them in the kitchen ’cos Aunt Annie said she’d get Mrs Threadgold to do a good darning job on them.’
‘Pity you to chose to leave them behind on a day like this when you could do with them,’ Sally said. She pulled off one of her own thick scarlet gloves and offered it to Lizzie, then shoved her bare hand into her pocket. There! Now you’ll be a bit warmer.’
Thanks, Sally, you’re a pal,’ Lizzie said gratefully. ‘Although the first thing I’ll do when I get indoors is to put my own gloves on – if Mrs Threadgold has finished with ’em. I don’t reckon our house is a lot warmer than out in the court, unless you park yourself right in front of the fire, that is. The draughts are chronic and no matter how carefully we shut up before we go to bed, there are times when Uncle Perce comes in late after the pubs have closed and leaves every door in the perishin’ house wide open. Aunt Annie’s told him and told him, but it doesn’t make any difference.’
Sally stared at her friend through the whirling flakes, hunching up her shoulders so that the scarf round her neck obliterated everything except her round, brown eyes.
‘Mam and I saw him coming out of the pub the other night,’ she said, shooting a sideways glance at her friend. ‘We’d been to see Clara Bow and Gilbert Rowland in
The Plastic Age
– oh, Lizzie, it were wonderful, and ever so romantic. We’d not seen your uncle for ages and were real surprised because he looked quite smart. I don’t believe he was drunk. He didn’t fall down or shout abuse or anything like that, at any rate,’ she added.
Lizzie chuckled. ‘Now you mention it, he keeps himself a deal tidier than he used to,’ she remarked.
‘As you know, Uncle Perce’s gorra fearful temper and he used to hit out at Aunt Annie or me on any excuse, but now he’s usually not home until after we’re in bed, and he leaves for work later than I do so I scarcely ever see him. But he doesn’t seem to be so – so angry all the time, and it’s ages since he and Aunt Annie had a real barney, with flying fists and screechings, that sort of thing. Oh, he still gets pretty drunk from time to time, but he’s doing well on the docks and though the family don’t see much of the money, at least he doesn’t keep stealing from the rest of us. In fact, apart from mealtimes when he comes in and eats everything in sight, we hardly know he’s sharing the same house, particularly as he always sleeps in the front room so Aunt Annie can have the big bed all to herself.’
‘My mam told me, as we were walking home, that your Uncle Perce used to be a right handsome feller. She said all the girls were after him and really envied your Aunt Annie when the pair of ’em got wed. Your aunt were ever so pretty, Mam says, with lovely red-gold hair and a peaches and cream complexion. It’s a real shame what too many kids and too much hard work can do to a woman, and then there’s the drink. Once a feller starts on that . . .’
Lizzie nodded agreement, trying to stop her teeth from chattering as the wind hurled fresh handfuls of snow into her face. ‘When you see Aunt Annie’s thin grey hair and that little bun on the back of her head, it’s hard to realise it was once so long she could sit on it,’ she observed. ‘I don’t suppose I’ll ever marry, but if I do it won’t be for looks or charm or anything of that nature. I’m going for money and power meself.’
Sally laughed. ‘Ain’t we all?’ she said derisively. ‘Has it ever crossed your mind, queen, to wonder
why your uncle’s smartenin’ hisself up and goin’ easy on the drink?’
‘Oh, aye, I reckon it’s because old Mr Latimer, what was one of his drinking companions, died of the booze last August,’ Lizzie said wisely. ‘It’s enough to put anyone off, ’cos Mr Latimer had been in school with Uncle Perce, so they were about the same age. Aunt Annie reckoned it scared the old feller because he began to take more care and to drink less from then on.’
‘Maybe, but I did wonder . . .’
At this moment, they turned into the court and as they did so there was a wild shriek and snowballs came flying through the air, hitting the two girls with enough force to make them stagger back, laughing and trying to catch the little imps who had laid in wait for them. By the time they had dealt out punishment and sent the children scampering off to ambush the next court dweller to come within reach, Lizzie was so cold that her only thought was to get within doors before she froze solid. Handing back Sally’s glove, and promising to meet her so that they might walk to work together next day, she ran up the three steps, pushed open the front door, closed it carefully behind her, and made for what slight warmth the kitchen offered.
Aunt Annie was standing at the table, making dumplings. She had bought a large lump of suet from the butcher and was crumbling a handful of dried herbs into her mixing bowl. She looked up and grinned as Lizzie entered the room. ‘Well, who is under all that snow?’ she asked jovially. ‘Just you go back outside, my fine lady, and shake it off your coat and scarf. My goodness, if this is going to keep up, you’ll want a pair of Wellington boots – I reckon those
thin little shoes, for all they’ve got extra cardboard soles in ’em, won’t last long in weather like this.’
Lizzie, aware of wet and ice-cold feet, nodded agreement and said through chattering teeth: ‘I’ll put fresh cardboard inside ’em as soon as they’ve dried out. Did you get my gloves mended?’ She went to the front door as she spoke, rid herself of the quantity of snow on her coat and scarf and returned, shivering, to the kitchen, which seemed quite warm after the chill outside. ‘Are there any messages, Aunt Annie? Have you brought water in? Only there’s no point in my taking off me coat and scarf if I’ve got to go out again later.’
Aunt Annie turned and peered at the buckets beneath the sink and Lizzie saw that despite the warmth from the fire, there was cat-ice forming on the surface of the biggest bucket. She knew that in her own little room there would be icicles hanging from the curtain rail, and that the water she would take upstairs when she went to bed would probably be solid ice by morning. ‘I brung a bucket of slack in to heap the fire up once the food’s cooked,’ Aunt Annie said. ‘Young Ivan Carruthers – he’s a good lad, he is – filled me water buckets earlier, and your cousin Herbie brung in a sack of coal yesterday. I dunno where he got it and I ain’t goin’ to ask,’ she added hastily, seeing the question in her niece’s eyes. ‘And, yes, Mrs Threadgold brought your gloves back an hour since – she’s made a real good job of them, too.’
‘That’s grand. My hands are covered with chilblains. The damned things burn when I’m cold and itch like crazy when I begin to get warm,’ Lizzie said. She lowered the wooden rack and spread her coat and scarf across it, then hauled it back to ceiling height once more. By tomorrow morning, her thin coat and
threadbare scarf would be dry enough to wear. Having done this, she rooted about in the cupboard to the left of the fireplace and found a sheet of stout cardboard and the rusty old scissors which her aunt used to cut out inner soles for thinning boots and shoes. Using the old, wet inner soles as a pattern, Lizzie soon had two fine new ones, which she laid carefully on the cupboard shelf, intending to insert them into her shoes when they were dry. In the meantime, she padded barefoot around the kitchen, laying the table for the evening meal.
Sausage and Mash, who usually made a dash for the kitchen door as soon as it opened, were ensconced in Aunt Annie’s basket chair looking, Lizzie thought, extremely smug and self-satisfied. Clem’s confident assertion that one was a cock and one was a hen had proved false for they were both hens and now laid eggs on a fairly regular basis. The previous spring, Aunt Annie had somehow managed to smuggle a neighbour’s cockerel into the house for an amatory half hour, and as a result Sausage had become broody and had produced, and reared, ten fine little chicks. Aunt Annie had wanted to keep them, but there had been a terrible scene with Uncle Perce who flatly forbade her to turn his kitchen into a poultry yard and threatened the chicks with a grisly fate if they remained on his premises. However, Aunt Annie had sweet-talked a neighbour further down Burlington Street into letting her rear the chicks in his backyard and had sold them as six-month pullets for a respectable sum the previous September.
‘I see you know when you’re well off, you great fat idle blighters,’ Lizzie said, breaking off a leaf from the cabbage she had just taken from the cupboard and handing it to the two birds. ‘It’s wickedly cold out
there. You ought to be very grateful you aren’t ordinary hens, forced to live outdoors and find a living pecking around someone’s backyard. You’re a couple of prima donnas, you are!’
By the time the lads got home, both freezing cold and loudly cursing the snow, Lizzie and Aunt Annie had the food prepared and the table laid for five people. Herbie worked for a local coal merchant, hefting sacks up on his shoulders and emptying them out into the yard of whoever had bought the coal. It was hard, sweaty work. In the summer he came home black, hot and exhausted, but in winter, because of the heavy weights he carried, he could not wrap up against the cold so usually came home grumbling that he was freezing but with runnels of sweat making white pathways through the coal dust. Aunt Annie always made him wash thoroughly before allowing him to sit down for the evening meal and today he was glad to do so, for the kettle of hot water which his mother had prepared warmed him up in a way nothing else could.
‘Had a good day, you fellers?’ Aunt Annie said, as the four of them took their places around the table. ‘We won’t wait for your dad ’cos his’ll keep hot in the back oven bein’ as it’s a nice mutton stew, and I never know from one day to the next what time he’ll be in.’ She shivered as she spoke then began to heap potatoes on to the four tin plates. ‘Ain’t it cold, though? I hates the winter worse than I hate anything, I think. I piles on the shawls indoors and I puts two coats on and me thickest scarf and gloves when I goes out to do me messages, but me breath wets the scarf and freezes solid, and when I’ve got a basket in either hand and me nose runs, that freezes solid an’ all. Even bed ain’t the comfort you’d think, ’cos the draughts
whistle in round the window frames and the door and somehow they find their way into bed with me, no matter how many old coats and shawls I piles on top of me blanket.’
‘You want to do a job like mine, sloggin’ uphill and down dale with a bleedin’ great sack of coal over one shoulder and your feet slippin’ and slidin’ at every step,’ Herbie said morosely. ‘The only warm thing is the bleedin’ horse and he ain’t much comfort in Havelock Street. I delivered there this afternoon, to the mad old biddy what lives almost at the top. I parked the cart in Netherfield Road, ’cos I’d had a customer or two along there, but what with the snow and the ice, I judged it best to carry the coal up sack by sack. Honest to God, Mam, I were clingin’ to them metal handholds set into the houses and heavin’ meself along, but by the last sackful, I were crawlin’ on all fours, more like a bleedin’ dog than a feller.’
‘Poor old Herbie, it’s a hard life you’ve chose,’ Denis said, looking smug. Lizzie guessed that the ticket office at Exchange Station, where he was working at present, would seem a haven of warmth and comfort compared to Havelock Street on an icy day. ‘But you’re always tellin’ us the money’s good, and the perks can’t be bad. I see Mam’s burnin’ best coal again an’ I don’t suppose they asked you to pay full price, eh?’
‘You mind your own bleedin’ business,’ his brother said immediately. He dug his fork into a large potato and conveyed it whole to his mouth. Speaking in muffled tones, he added: ‘Old Jones won’t miss a few lumps of coal. After all, there’s spillage to take into account – I reckon I lose half a sack every time I parks and goes out of sight to the bleedin’ kids. They’re always on the look-out for somethin’ to nick.’
Lizzie, who had never taken so much as an empty lemonade bottle without first asking permission to do so, knew that she was in a minority here. Most of the girls working at the factory considered that they were underpaid and thought it perfectly fair to go home with the odd bottle of lemonade or gingerbeer tucked away in a pocket or handbag. And now that she thought about it, she decided that Herbie was probably right. To be sure, he was better paid than his brother, and she knew he could buy slack or the very lowest grade of coal for considerably less than Mr Jones charged the public, but it seemed a small enough thing to prig a sack of best from time to time so that his family might have a decent fire when the weather was so cold.
If Aunt Annie needed something desperately which I could get from the factory, I reckon my principles might slip, Lizzie told herself, cutting her potato into bite-sized pieces. Come to that, when Aunt sent me on messages years ago, many’s the time I was so hungry for fruit that I prigged the odd apple off a stall and never even thought I was thievin’, though I was, of course. She remembered a teacher at school, telling them the old saying, ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’, and remembered also, with a secret smile, how she had held Aunt Annie’s shopping bag below the level of the stall, and reaching up for the goods she had just bought, had carefully knocked into the open bag some other item of fruit which was within her reach.
Herbie was beginning to tell Denis what he thought of clerking as a career when the kitchen door opened and Uncle Perce appeared. He stood in the doorway for a moment to shake the snow off himself, for he was so covered in the stuff that he could have
been a snowman. Lizzie noticed that Aunt Annie did not order her husband to get rid of the snow outside but hurried at once to the stove to fill his plate with stew, then went over to help him off with his wet outer clothing. However, Uncle Perce pushed her rudely aside and dropped his wet things on to the floor. ‘Gerrout of me way, you stupid fat cow,’ he growled, and took his place at the table, looking round at his sons and niece from under bushy, lowered brows, though he did not greet any of them. Aunt Annie picked up his wet clothing and hung it before the fire.