Kitabı oku: «Across the Mersey»

ONE

Saturday 19 August 1939, Wavertree, Liverpool

‘Come on, you four. Hurry up, otherwise we’re going to miss the ferry and then we’ll be late. And don’t forget your gas masks,’ Jean Campion called up the stairs to her son and daughter.

She exhaled a small sigh of relief mixed with irritation when she heard her daughter Grace calling back down, ‘Just finishing putting the ribbons in the twins’ plaits, Mum.’ This was followed by the thumping of her son, Luke’s, size tens on the landing.

‘Stop worrying, love,’ her husband chided her mildly. ‘We’ve got a good hour yet before we need to be there, although why that sister of yours can’t bring her family over here to Wavertree to celebrate your birthdays for once I don’t know.’

‘Vi’s always liked putting on a bit of a show,’ Jean reminded her husband with a small smile.

‘Doing a bit of a show-off, more like,’ Sam grumbled. ‘Doesn’t she realise that folks have got better things to do, with the country on the brink of war?’

Jean put down her handbag and went over to him, putting her hand on his arm.

Sam worked for the Liverpool Salvage Corps, a unit of skilled tradesmen originally set up by the city’s insurance companies. The Salvage Corps specialised in recovering goods from, and minimising the losses at, commercial premises damaged by fire and ‘other perils’.

The Salvage Corps worked closely with Liverpool’s Fire Brigade, and there had been many evenings over this last year when Sam had had to attend meetings and exercises to help prepare the Salvage Corps for the important role it would have to play if war was declared. As well as working for the Salvage Corps, both Sam and his son, Luke, like so many others determined to do their bit, had signed up for part-time Air-Raid Precautions duties with their local ARP post, and the year had been busy with preparations for a possible war with a shower of information leaflets from the Government covering everything from the evacuation of children from cities, to the sandbagging of vulnerable buildings; the making of blackout coverings to ensure that no buildings showed lights that could be used by night-time enemy bombers seeking a target; the building of air-raid shelters and a dozen more precautions.

War! The threat of it lay across the whole country like a dark shadow that everyone had been hoping would go away. Now they could hope no longer, Sam said. Not with the Munich crisis and everything.

Every garden seemed to have cultivated an air-raid shelter, and for those who didn’t have the space to build one, there were the public shelters. Everyone had got used to the sight of ARP wardens; ARP warden posts, the Territorial Army Reservists doing their drills, and every housewife had fretted and complained about fitting blackout-fabric-covered frames to their windows at night.

‘Come on, Sam,’ Jean coaxed her husband. ‘I know how you feel about our Vi, and I know that the ferries and that will be busy, what with it being such a nice day and the kiddies still being out of school, but we’ve always gone over to her on our birthday.’

‘Aye, we have, but that doesn’t make it right,’ he agreed, giving her the same smile that had caught at her heart all those years ago when she had first fallen in love with him. ‘You’re a softie, lass, and you allus have bin,’ he told her affectionately.

Ignoring her husband’s comments about her twin – after twenty-three years of marriage it would be a fine thing indeed if she didn’t know that he didn’t much care for her sister’s husband or the way in which they lived – she straightened his tie, which was new, like his worsted suit. She had bought it in the half-price sale at Blackler’s Department Store, along with a new suit for Luke. Forty-five shillings apiece they’d cost, not that she’d told Sam she’d spent that much, but she’d had a bit put by and the suits had been too good a bargain to miss, even though Sam had grumbled that it was daft buying him a suit when he only ever wore one for church and his last one, bought five years ago, still fitted him. She stood back to check that Sam’s tie was just right, her head on one side.

There was one thing for sure, she admitted proudly, whilst her twin sister might have the posh house ‘over the water’, as the local saying went, on the other side of the River Mersey in Wallasey, where the well-to-do folk lived, and a husband who by all accounts was making more money that he knew what to do with, her Sam still was and always had been the better man of the two, and not just because even now, at forty-seven, he still stood six foot tall and had a good head of thick dark hair on him. Vivienne’s Edwin might have the money and his own business, and all the fine new friends he was making now that he had put himself up for the council, but her Sam had the nicer nature. He was a good husband and a good father too, even if the elder two had started complaining that he was more strict that he needed to be and that other youngsters their age were allowed more freedom.

Jean knew perfectly well that by ‘other people’, Luke, who was coming up for twenty, and Grace, who was just nineteen, were referring to their cousins.

There was no getting away from the fact that whilst she and Vivienne were twins, and as alike as two peas in a pod on the outside, twenty-three years of marriage to two such very different men meant that they were now very different on the inside.

Family was still family, though, which was why she had bullied and cajoled hers into a state of freshly scrubbed neatness and their best clothes, ready to make the journey across the Mersey, from their pin-neat three-storey terraced house on Ash Grove in Wavertree to the much larger house on Kingsway in Wallasey Village, where her sister and her family lived. The Borough of Wallasey might include New Brighton and Seacombe, but as Jean’s sister was fond of saying, so far as she was concerned, it was Wallasey Village that those in the ‘know’ recognised as the ‘best’ address in the borough.

At last they were ready to leave, the back and the front doors were locked and they were free to set off down towards Picton Road to catch the bus that would take them to the Pier Head and the landing stage for the ferry terminal at Seacombe, from where they could catch another bus inland to Wallasey Village itself.

‘Ta, thanks, love.’

Jean shared a proud parental look with Sam, as Luke gave up his seat on the Royal Iris, one of the two ferries that sailed every quarter of an hour between Liverpool and Seacombe, to a harassed-looking young woman holding a young child and both their gas masks.

Jean was proud of all her children, but there was no getting away from the fact that your first always had a special place in your heart, she acknowledged.

Whilst Luke took after his dad, and had inherited his height along with his thick dark hair and bright blue eyes, Grace took after her side of the family, and had inherited the same petite, shapely figure, rose-gold curls and dark blue eyes as Jean’s younger sister. The twins, though, Louise and Sarah, with brown hair, hazel eyes and freckled noses, were herself and Vi all over again.

It was a perfect August day with warm sunshine, and so it was no wonder that the ferry boats ploughing their way across the Mersey to the sandy beaches of New Brighton had their full complement of two thousand passengers apiece, Jean acknowledged.

Their mother had always joked that her twin daughters had chosen to make their appearance on the hottest day of the year. Mam had been dead for nearly ten years now, worn out by looking after a husband who had never recovered properly from being in the trenches, and the birth of a third child when she had been in her late forties. She and Vi had been in their teens when their sister, Francine, had been born. Francine was closer in age to their children than she was to them.

The ferry was approaching the Seacombe landing stage. As always the thought of seeing her twin was filling Jean with a mixture of pleasure and discomfort. Pleasure at the thought of being with the sister she had been so close to as they grew up, and discomfort at the thought of being with the person that sister had become.

‘Lou, just look at you,’ she complained to the younger of her twins as Sam gathered his family together. To one side of him Luke mimicked his father’s proud stance and protective eye for the girls’ welfare as they queued to get off, all of them holding on to the gas masks the Government had issued, and which they were supposed to carry at all times.

‘Where’s your hair ribbon?’ Jean asked Louise. The twins were devils for losing their hair ribbons, no matter how tightly she tied them on.

‘It’s in my pocket.’

‘What’s it doing there? It should be on the end of your plait.’

‘Sasha pulled it off.’

‘No I didn’t,’ her twin defended herself immediately, giving Louise a swift nudge in the ribs.

‘Grace didn’t fasten it properly,’ Louise amended her story, both the twins giggling as they exchanged conspiratorial looks over this patent fib.

‘I don’t know!’ Jean shook her head with maternal disapproval. ‘No one looking at you would ever think you were grown-up girls of fourteen. The minute we get off here, I’m going to have to redo that plait of yours.’

Luke looked so handsome in his new suit, navy blue just like his dad’s. Sam might have shaken his head, but she’d reminded him that Luke was young man now – old enough to be called up to do his six months’ army service in a month’s time when he reached his twentieth birthday. He’d been apprenticed to an electrician friend of Sam’s since he’d left school and as soon as he was out of his apprenticeship Sam was going to put him forward for a job with the Salvage Corps. That couldn’t happen soon enough for Jean. Working in the Salvage Corps was a reserved occupation, and so he wouldn’t be sent off to fight.

Not that the men in the Salvage Corps didn’t face danger. In the last year alone, three men Sam worked with had lost their lives in the course of their work.

The ferry finally docked, allowing the passengers to stream off. Everywhere Jean looked she could see happy families determined to enjoy themselves, the girls and the women in their best summer frocks and the men in their suits, whilst the children were equipped for the beach with their buckets and spades.

‘Do you remember when we used to bring our four here for the beach?’ she asked Sam nostalgically.

‘How could I forget? They took that much sand back with them, you’d have thought they were building a second Liverpool bar,’ he laughed, referring to the sand bar beyond the docks.

‘Do you remember that time you put Luke up on that donkey and it ran off with him?’

‘Scared me to death, but he managed to stick on like a regular little trooper,’ Sam agreed.

‘And then when the twins buried their doll and couldn’t find it?’

‘I remember when that sister of yours turned up with her two and little Jack, and he wandered off. She didn’t half give him a pasting when she found him.’

A sudden sadness clouded Jean’s eyes, causing Sam to touch her arm and mutter awkwardly, ‘Sorry, love, I wasn’t thinking.’

Jean nodded and made herself smile. Best not to think of that other little one, baby Terry, who had come too soon and lived for such a short space of time, nor of how poorly she had been. He would have been nine now if he had lived, the same age, give or take a couple of months as Vi’s Jack.

Jean started to frown. She couldn’t help feeling guilty about Jack sometimes. Vi had claimed that she wanted another child, but Edwin certainly hadn’t, and Jean didn’t think they would have had him at all if she hadn’t been carrying her poor little Terry. Vi had always had that competitive streak in her that meant that whatever she, Jean, as the eldest, did, Vi always had to try to outdo her.

‘Come on, you lot, hop on and look smart about it,’ Sam said. He waited until they were all on the bus and sitting down before getting on himself and telling the conductor, ‘Six to Kingsway.’

‘Turn round so that I can redo that plait,’ Jean instructed Louise, ignoring the protests she made when she replaited her hair quickly and tightly, while warning the twins, ‘Now remember, you two. If your auntie Vi offers you a second piece of cake you’re to say “No, thank you”. I don’t want her thinking that they don’t know their manners,’ she told Sam, answering the unspoken question in the look he was giving her.

‘Huh, chance’d be a fine thing. Mean as they come, your Vi is. Besides, she isn’t the cook you are, love, so I doubt they’d want a second piece.’

‘Go on with you. It will probably be shop bought and fancy,’ Jean told him, but his compliment had touched her, and it was no good her pretending that she wasn’t pleased to have him praising her home cooking and not Vi’s fancy shop-bought cake, because she was.

‘More money than sense, the both of them,’ Sam told her. ‘Look at the way Edwin’s gone and bought that young idiot Charlie his own car.’

‘It’s for his job, on account of him putting Charlie in charge of the office.’

‘Aye. It makes as much sense as giving him a fancy title for doing what amounts to nowt, if I know young Charlie.’

Jean looked anxiously at her husband. She knew that it hurt Sam that he couldn’t give their own children the same luxuries their cousins enjoyed, even though he tended to disapprove of Edwin’s business practices and the way he treated those who worked for him. Edwin owned a small business that fitted pipe work in Merchant Navy vessels, and the current threat of war had brought an increase in the amount of work Edwin was being asked to do and consequently an increase in the money he was making. But no increase in the wages he was paying his men, as Sam had remarked to Jean.

The next stop would be theirs. Jean could feel the familiar fluttering in her tummy. She did so hope that Vi wasn’t going to be in one of her ‘difficult’ moods.

Vi, or Vivienne, as she now insisted on being called, stood in her bay window of her bedroom, craning her neck so that she could see as far down Kingsway as possible through her net curtains. Brand new, her nets were, and how she was expected to keep them looking like that if she was going to have to have those nasty blackout frames put up every night she didn’t know. You’d think that living here in Wallasey there’d be no need for that kind of thing, not like down in Liverpool with its docks, or Wavertree where Jean lived. Edwin had been furious when he’d had to have his beautiful lawn dug up so that they could get their air-raid shelter put in and she didn’t blame him. Luckily they’d been able to put it out of sight of the house at the bottom of the garden behind the apple trees.

Jean and her family should be here soon. She lifted her hand and patted her newly permed hair. Jean might be the elder by ten minutes but she, Vi, felt far superior. She looked down at her new dress. Silk not cotton, and a birthday present from Edwin. Edwin was doing very well for himself with his business and she’d done very well for herself in marrying him, as Edwin himself liked to remind her. Vi’s mouth thinned slightly.

Jean would never have been able to manage a husband like Edwin. Where were they? She had told Jean half-past two. Perhaps she ought to have insisted that Edwin and Charlie should drive down to the ferry terminal to pick them up, but Edwin was in one of his moods, complaining that Charlie was spending far too much time enjoying himself and not enough doing what his father paid him to do, which was to sweet-talk their customers, and she hadn’t wanted to provoke any further ill-tempered outbursts. She just hoped that Bella would remember that she had promised to help her with the tea and not linger at the tennis club. A fond maternal smile replaced Vi’s frown at the thought of her daughter, Isabelle. Privately she had always felt sorry for her twin having three daughters who were all so inferior in every way to her own Bella. Grace looked far too much like their younger sister, Francine, for Vi’s liking, and they all knew where those kind of looks had got her! Singing on a stage for her living was most certainly not what she wanted for her daughter. And as for Jean’s twins, well, they were fair enough but she doubted that they were going to grow up anything like as attractive as Bella, with her large blue eyes and her soft blonde hair, and most of all her sweetly dutiful manner. Vi’s chest swelled with maternal pride and triumph. Everyone who met Bella remarked on the sweetness of her nature and her modesty. It was no wonder that she was so popular.

She could see a familiar group of people walking down the road. Yes, it was definitely them, and her sister was wearing the same frock she had worn for their birthday tea last year. It was just as well they had only moved here to Kingsway this spring. She certainly didn’t want her new neighbours talking behind her back about the fact that her sister was coming to visit her wearing a year-old frock. You’d have thought that Jean would have had a little more thought for her new position, Vi thought crossly as she stepped back from the window and hurried downstairs.

Her husband and son were both in the front room. Edwin was reading his newspaper whilst Charlie was standing in front of the fireplace, looking bored.

‘I don’t know why you had to invite them here, Vi. You know what a busy time this is for me, with the business expanding and my duties with the ARP.’

‘I suppose you’d have preferred us to go to them, would you?’ she challenged him, continuing without waiting for him to answer, ‘I couldn’t believe it when Jean actually suggested that she should do the tea this year.’

‘Where’s Jack?’ Charlie asked, ignoring his mother’s comment.

‘I’ve just seen him outside, although he should be upstairs doing his homework.’ Vi’s mouth thinned again.

‘Here’s Bella,’ Charlie announced, as a car drew up outside.

‘Looks like Alan Parker has brought her home.’

Alan Parker was the only son of a fellow local councillor, with whom Edwin had become friendly. Councillor Parker was a very influential and well-to-do man, and although neither of them had said anything, Vi was well aware that she and Edwin were thinking that Alan Parker would make a very good husband for their daughter.

‘I hope she’s remembered about the tea and doesn’t invite Alan in.’

‘Looks like you can stop worrying, Ma,’ Charlie told her, as they watched Bella take her leave of her escort and then walk towards the house, her tennis skirt showing off the slender length of her tanned legs, her blonde hair caught back in a bandeau, and an immaculate white cardigan draped just so around her shoulders, her gas mask in the pretty matching white carrying case Vi had bought her earlier in the summer.

‘I’ll go and let her in. Charlie, run upstairs, will you, and tell Jack to come down?’

‘You’re late. Your auntie Jean will be here any minute,’ Vi warned her daughter as she opened the front door to let her in.

‘Sorry, Mummy. I would have walked home but Alan insisted on driving me and then we were later leaving than we’d planned because he wanted to get tickets for the big Tennis Club dance next weekend.’

‘He’s invited you to go with him as his partner?’

‘Yes. I’m glad Auntie Jean’s going to be here because I asked him to get four so that I could invite Grace to come along as well. I thought it would be a bit of a treat for her. She could stay here overnight so that she doesn’t have to worry about getting home.’

‘Grace? Well, that’s very thoughtful of you, darling, but I wonder if it was wise.’

‘She was saying the last time I saw her that she hardly goes out at all, only to that St John Ambulance group she’s joined.’ Bella pulled a face and shuddered. ‘I know she’s always wanted to be a nurse but I’d hate having to do anything like that. It makes me feel faint if I cut my finger. It’s bad enough having to roll all those bandages for the WVS. But at least I’m doing my bit.’

‘Of course you are, darling.’

‘Anyway, Alan’s parents have got Alan’s cousin staying with them. He’s in the RAF but he’s on leave at the moment and, of course, Alan feels he has to include him in things, so I thought that Grace could partner him.’

‘Well, yes, darling, but Grace is a shop girl, remember, for all that she’s your cousin, and I wouldn’t want her to feel uncomfortable or embarrass you mixing with your friends at the Tennis Club.’

‘Oh, there’s no need to worry about that, Mummy.’

Vi was about to warn her daughter that, on the contrary, there was every need to worry if she was to make the right kind of impression with Alan’s parents, but before she could do so the doorbell rang.

Jean looked quickly and a bit anxiously at her brood. It was a hot day and both her husband and her son were beginning to look uncomfortable in their suits. Sam was even tugging impatiently at his collar.

‘Sam,’ she hissed warningly, but it was too late, the door was opening and Vi was standing there, her attention immediately focusing on Sam’s attempts to loosen his collar.

‘Jean. At last.’ Why was it that Vi so frequently managed to sound bossy and disapproving, Jean wondered ruefully.

‘We had to wait for a bus because the first one was full with it being such a nice day,’ she explained as she and Vi exchanged brief hugs.

‘Oh dear, yes. I tend to forget how unreliable public transport can be now that I’ve got both Edwin and Charlie to drive me wherever I need to go. Really I can’t think how we went on when we only had the one car, especially now that Bella has joined the Tennis Club and is so much in demand. Come on in, anyway. I thought we’d have tea outside, seeing as it’s such a lovely day.’

‘So that the twins don’t spill tea on her carpet again is more like it,’ Luke grinned, muttering his aside to Grace as they followed their parents into the house.

‘That wasn’t their fault,’ Grace whispered back. ‘It was actually Jack who spilled the tea but they took the blame for him.’

‘Poor little tyke. It’s hard to believe sometimes that Mum and Auntie Vi are twins, isn’t it?’

‘Very hard,’ Grace agreed feelingly.

‘We’ll go straight through into the garden, I think.’

Jean exchanged looks with Sam as they all trooped through her sister’s kitchen and out into the garden. They hadn’t, Jean noted, been invited to walk through the sitting room at the back of the house and out into the garden via the French windows that Vi had showed off to her so proudly when they had first moved into the house earlier in the year. But, of course, Vi hadn’t had her new carpets put down then.

The garden, its lawns shorn as short as possible and its flowerbeds weed free and rigidly immaculate, was empty, a white cloth flapping gently on the card table set up for the birthday ‘tea’ and six deck chairs drawn up in a straight line.

‘Where is everyone?’ asked Jean.

‘Oh, well, with you being late, Edwin said that he might as well catch up on a bit of work. He’s been ever so busy just lately, what with the business and then all his ARP duties and the council. He’ll be out in a minute, I dare say. Bella’s just run upstairs to change out of her tennis things, and Charlie’s with his father.’

‘And Jack?’ Jean asked.

Vi tensed. ‘He should be in his room doing his homework. His last report said that he spends far too much time daydreaming. Edwin’s completely out of patience with him, but I saw he’d sneaked outside into the garden earlier.’

Her voice suggested that Jack could expect to be punished for his transgression and Jean winced inwardly but knew better than to say anything.

‘Do make yourselves comfortable whilst I go and put the kettle on,’ Vi continued. ‘Bella will be down in a minute, I expect, Grace. Bella has got a lovely surprise for you. She’s such a wonderful daughter, Jean. She got me flowers for my birthday and a bottle of scent. Edwin bought me my new frock, of course.’

‘It’s lovely,’ Jean offered dutifully.

‘Pure silk,’ Vi told her proudly, adding, ‘Oh, here are Edwin and Charles.’

Vi’s husband and son were casually dressed in cavalry twill trousers and smart sports shirts, and looked cool and fresh.

‘Yes, do take your tie off if you wish, Sam,’ Vi offered, causing Jean’s face to burn a little at the recognition that her sister was patronising her family. That Sam knew it too was evident from the tight look of anger she could see hardening his mouth.

‘I’ll come with you and give you a hand with the tea, Vi,’ Jean began, only to be told firmly, ‘I’d prefer it if you called me Vivienne from now on, Jean. Mrs Lawson, who’s in charge of our local WVS group, was saying to me only the other week, when she asked me to be her deputy, what an elegant name Vivienne is and what a shame it is to shorten it.’

Luke and Grace exchanged mirthful looks before turning away to hide their amusement.

‘Got your papers yet, Luke?’ Charlie asked, coming over to join them as the two sisters headed for the kitchen.

‘No, but I’m expecting to get them any time,’ Luke answered. ‘What about you?’

Charlie gave him a knowing grin and a wink, tapping the side of his nose meaningfully. ‘No fear of me being called up. I’ve made a smart move and joined the TA. A chap I know told me that once you’re in you’re exempt from having to do your six months, and that means that I get to stay at home and attend TA sessions a couple of times a week, whilst other chaps who aren’t as on the ball end up being send hundreds of miles away to some godforsaken army training camp. You should think about doing it yourself, Luke. Dad reckons that there’s no chance of us going to war, no matter what the papers might say. He reckons Hitler will back down. Mind you, we’re not complaining about all the doommongers, not when we’re doing very nicely thank you out of it. We’ve got that much work on we’ve had to take on extra men. Course, that means that things are a bit of a doddle for me at the moment.’ He gave Luke and Grace another wink. ‘There’s not many pretty girls that say no to a spin in a brand-new car on a nice sunny day.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought that your father would approve of that,’ Luke told him.

‘No, I dare say he wouldn’t – if he knew.’

In the kitchen Jean dutifully admired the new linoleum floor Vi was pointing out to her.

‘It’s all very nice, Vi – I mean Vivienne – but I don’t know how I’d feel about not having an outhouse to do me washing in.’

‘Oh well, as to that, Edwin insists that we send everything to the laundry. He can’t abide having wet washing hanging all over the place. He’s even talked about getting someone in to do the heavy cleaning, especially now that I’m getting so involved with the WI and the WVS. Mrs Lawson has good as said that she wants me to be her second in command.’

‘I don’t know,’ Jean marvelled, shaking her head. ‘Remember how our nan used to carrying her washing down to the wash house?’

Vi’s face changed colour and she looked over her shoulder before pushing the door to and saying quickly, ‘I’m surprised at you bringing something like that up, Jean. It was a long time ago and it’s best forgotten.’