Through the Storm
The third for Patrick
Maureen Lee
Contents
Teaser Chapter: Lime Street Blues
Cal recalled, yet again, the incident which had occurred only hours before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, although he hadn’t known that then. There’d been a full moon that night and the seas were friendly, flat and glistening like the smoothest of silk. He was on the night watch and several ships in the convoy were clearly visible, including one of their naval escorts … Suddenly, without warning, the
Magnolia
erupted in front of them. It exploded like a firework, showering sparks and flames. Cal quickly went outside. He could hear the crackle of burning and the sizzle of red-hot metal as parts fell back in the water. He could hear men shouting and screaming for help …
‘What are you thinking about, luv?’ asked Sheila.
‘Nothing,’ smiled Cal. How could he tell her, when he knew she was already worried sick? But it dismayed him when she said there was ‘nothing happening’. It had been the same in the pub, where all the talk was of the football match that afternoon, as if they’d grown so used to their country being at war, it was so much part of their everyday existence, they no longer took any notice of what was going on elsewhere unless tragedy hit their own particular family …
A slice of hazy yellow sun had begun to peep over the grey slate roofs of the small cul-de-sac. The blue sky was cloudless, heralding a fine late September day. There was a slight breeze, and a salty smell hung in the air, fresh and bracing. In the distance, a ship’s hooter sounded on the River Mersey, a deep, sonorous sound, and two seagulls came swooping down, squawking raucously. They perched side by side on the gutter of the King’s Arms, their eyes raking the ground below for scraps. Seeing nothing, they took off again, even more noisily.
Pearl Street was gradually waking up. Blackout curtains, upstairs and down, were drawn back and smoke began to curl lazily out of the chimneys as fires were lit to boil water for the first cup of tea of the day. The tea would be only half as strong as people would have liked – two ounces a week, which was all the ration allowed, didn’t last long if you drank it strong. Even if you drank it weak, you were quite likely to run out before next week’s ration was due. Few people complained. They knew too many merchant seamen from Bootle who had lost their lives in the struggle to keep the nation fed.
Dishes rattled, a welcome sound to those awake and still in bed. They snuggled further under the clothes in order to savour the last few peaceful minutes before getting up for work or school.
Every house shook briefly as an electric train left
Marsh
Lane station and clattered along behind the roof-high railway wall at the far end of the street. The trains ran to Liverpool one way and Southport the other.
It was a peaceful scene, tranquil, despite the disparate noises; the boats, the trains, the gulls, and the people inside the houses much appreciated waking up to the sounds they knew so well after the carnage and destruction of the past year, culminating in the May Blitz, when Liverpool had been subjected to an entire week of saturation bombing. The centre of the city had been left a veritable wasteland of dust and debris. In Bootle alone, nearly a thousand people had been killed or injured, and many thousands more had lost their homes along with everything they possessed. Scarcely a house had been left undamaged in some way.
Until that fateful May, there’d been thirty houses in Pearl Street, a terrace of fifteen each side, the front doors opening directly onto the pavement. Now there were only twenty-seven, and an ugly gap on one side where numbers 19 to 23 used to be. They were gone as smoothly as if they’d been cut away from their neighbours with a giant knife, leaving only a crater surrounded by a jumble of broken bricks, smashed slates and jutting beams as a sign that houses had ever stood there. A bedroom fireplace remained, looking pathetic and incongruous, halfway up the wall of number 17, which was miraculously intact. The broken windows, the lost slates, the smashed front doors in the rest of the street, had long since been repaired or replaced in the mammoth and united effort to get the town back on its feet.
The air-raid siren still went occasionally. Everyone felt the same awful hair-raising sensation when they heard its unearthly wail, and waited anxiously for the soothing drone of the All Clear. Planes rarely got through nowadays, much to their relief. No-one, even if they lived to be a hundred, could have got used to the
almost
nightly raids which had terrorised Liverpool for so long.
It was incredible, people said to themselves and each other, that all this was due to one power-crazed man, Adolf Hitler, who had turned the entire world inside out and upside down and now had virtually the whole of Europe in his evil, vice-like grip. Great Britain had been left to stand alone, with the alarming threat of invasion ever present until June, when Germany invaded Russia, which diverted Hitler’s attention away from the British Isles.
The sun was becoming less hazy as it rose higher in the sky. It shone directly through the upstairs windows, and those in bed felt the welcome warmth on their faces.
In the coalyard next to the railway wall, Nelson the horse munched his oats contentedly as Bill Harrison began to load the cart with sacks of nutty slack and coke, which was sometimes all he could get in wartime. Fuel was in short supply and the Government had recently urged people to share their firesides with their neighbours.
A stout uniformed figure came marching round the corner, whistling cheerfully, and began to deliver letters. The figure was no longer a cause for astonishment or mirth or both; people had got used to seeing a woman doing the job of postman by now. In fact, the population had got used to women doing all sorts of strange things since the war began.
Two girls virtually fell out of the front door of their house, giggling hysterically. They linked arms and ran down the street and around the corner, already late for the bus to work.
Another door slammed and a small man in overalls emerged who tipped his soiled tweed cap, winked at the postwoman and said, ‘Good morning, Vera.’
‘Morning, Dai.’
Dai Evans always tried to time his exit so he would
come
face to face with Vera Dodds. There was something about a buxom woman in uniform, particularly when she wore trousers …
‘Lovely day,’ he ventured.
Vera nodded. ‘Going to be hot, I reckon.’ She flipped through the letters in her hand. ‘Nothing for you.’
‘I weren’t expecting anything.’
‘Though there’s something for your neighbours, from America.’
‘America! I wonder what that can be?’ mused Dai.
‘And a letter for the Harrisons from their daughter in Newcastle.’
‘I hope it’s not bad news.’ The Harrisons had already lost two of their grandsons in the fighting in North Africa.
‘This looks official. It’s from the Ministry of Labour for Miss Kathleen Quigley.’ Vera showed Dai a brown envelope on which the name and address were typed.
‘Jimmy’ll have a fit if Kitty has to get a job,’ Dai grinned. Like most of the street, Dai had sized up Jimmy Quigley’s incapacity as being wholly put on, a fake. They didn’t blame him – any man able to get a pension out of those mean buggers who ran the docks was a man to be admired – but it wasn’t right, the way he took advantage of his daughter, Kitty. He’d had the poor girl running round after him like a blue-arsed fly for nearly ten years. ‘That’ll cause ructions in number twenty.’
‘We’ve all got to do our bit,’ Vera said primly.
‘I’d best be off,’ Dai said, adding casually, ‘Perhaps I’ll see you in the pub tonight, like?’
‘Perhaps you will,’ Vera replied, equally casually. A spinster in her late forties, she wasn’t sure why, but since she’d started delivering letters there were men in their dozens panting after her. She rather liked Dai Evans with his lovely Welsh sing-song voice. It was rumoured his wife, Ellis, gave him a terrible time at home.
An elderly woman opened an upstairs window, sat
her
small wiry frame backwards on the sill, and began to clean the glass with a chamois leather. ‘Morning, Vera,’ she shouted. ‘Anything interesting today?’
‘No,’ Vera said shortly. There was no way she would discuss the post with Aggie Donovan, the nosy ould bugger. She finished the street and continued with her round, just as the milkman arrived. He left the cart in Opal Street – it was impossible to turn a horse and cart round in the narrow cul-de-sac – and brought the bottles in metal containers, two in each hand.
A couple of young boys ran out of a house in front of him and began to kick a football to each other. ‘Mind the milk,’ he warned. ‘I don’t have none to spare, not with the rationing. If you break one, your mam’ll have to give up one of hers and she’ll murder you.’
One of the boys stuck out his tongue. ‘No she won’t.’
‘Oh yes she will.’
‘She won’t.’
The milkman gave up. The stable door opened and Nelson came trotting out with Bill Harrison, his face already black with coal dust, sitting behind holding the reins loosely in his even blacker hands. His eyes lit up when he saw the milkman and he pulled the cart to a halt.
‘Just in time. Our Nelson can have a word with your Daisy.’
The milkman chuckled. ‘We should let him get stuck across her one of these days. It must be lousy being a horse and the only oats you get come from a bag.’
‘We might come up with a racehorse between us.’
Nelson had already noticed Daisy waiting on the corner and whinnied impatiently for his owner to get a move on. Mr Harrison slapped his broad brown rump. ‘Giddeup, boy.’
The wooden wheels of the coal-cart rattled noisily over the cobbles and a few seconds later the two horses were nuzzling each other gently.
More people left for work, the men mainly in the direction of the docks. One or two who’d been on night shift arrived home, worn out and eager for something to eat and a good kip.
Aggie Donovan had finished cleaning the bedroom window, but stayed where she was. It was a good vantage point from where she could see everything that was going on. Her beady eyes swept this way and that as eagerly as the seagulls. She could even see into some of the bedrooms opposite if she tried.
A van drove into the street and stopped outside number 10, Miss Brazier’s old house. Two workmen got out and carried in a ladder and several tins of paint. Although Aggie had approached them yesterday, the workmen professed to have no knowledge of who the new tenants were.
‘Funny colours,’ she remarked, staring down the hall which was painted pink. As far as she could see, the living room was white, but perhaps that was just an undercoat.
‘Everyone to their own taste,’ the workman said and slammed the door when it looked as if Aggie were about to elbow her way in for an inspection.
The two boys had been joined by several others, and Aggie nearly jumped out of her skin when a football hit her bony behind with considerable force.
‘Who did that?’ she screeched. ‘I could have fell.’ She struggled into the bedroom and ran downstairs, but when she opened the door the street was empty apart from Nan Wright already sitting on the doorstep of number 1, soaking up the early morning sun in a pink hairnet and bedroom slippers, looking like a great fat wrinkled whale. The boys had vanished as if by magic.
Soon afterwards, the children started to call for each other for school. They began to leave in small groups, gasmasks over their shoulders. They went more cheerfully than they used to. Since the bombs had started
falling
, their school, St Joan of Arc’s, situated dangerously near to the docks, had closed, and now they went for just half a day to St Monica’s. It was a long walk, but better than spending an entire day being bossed around by teachers.
Aggie waited on her doorstep, hopping impatiently from one foot to the other. ‘Who kicked that ball?’ she demanded when several young lads appeared looking as if butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths.
‘What ball?’ they asked innocently.
Like the milkman, Aggie gave up. Kids today, she thought disgustedly, they had no respect for their elders. They got away with murder, unlike when she was a girl. Many’s the time she’d received a clip around the ear for merely looking at a grown-up the wrong way round.