Across the Mersey

Across the Mersey
Annie Groves

From the author of ‘The Grafton Girls’ comes the story of one Liverpool family preparing for the onslaught of World War Two, while trying not to fight among themselves.Jean and Vi are twins but couldn’t be more different. Jean’s proud of her honest, hardworking husband and their children, but there’s never a penny to spare. Vi’s equally proud of her husband’s new role as a local councillor and their elegant new house, and has raised her children to expect the best.As war breaks out, agonising decisions must be faced. Should the oldest children enlist? Should the youngest be evacuated? All the traditional certainties are overturned. Then the twins’ own younger sister, singer Francine, returns home unexpectedly and stirs up the past, even in the midst of present danger.This is a tremendous saga of fighting spirit and family closeness, and the belief that even though today is full of destruction and pain, there is hope for a better tomorrow.

ANNIE GROVES

Across the Mersey

Copyright (#u552e237b-1524-5b96-b3e0-efdbf7f0f612)

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2008

Copyright © Annie Groves 2008 Annie Groves asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © September 2008 ISBN: 9780007283736

Version: 2017-09-12

For all those whose hearts are in Liverpool,

no matter where their lives may have taken them

I would like to thank the following for their invaluable help:

Teresa Chris, my agent.

Susan Opie, my editor at HarperCollins.

Yvonne Holland, whose expertise enables me ‘not to have nightmares’ about getting things wrong.

Everyone at HarperCollins who contributed to the publication of this book.

My friends in the RNA, who as always have been so generous with their time and help on matters ‘writerly’.

Tony, who as always has done wonders researching the facts I needed.

Contents

Title Page (#uc585fd19-0162-51c5-94be-4215586f0df2)Copyright (#u544ec220-b163-5c2c-995d-69eda82730ba)Dedication (#ufb48bcd4-03da-54cb-8679-e5d6bc0fd142)Epigraph (#u3a1bb0dd-2a4a-551c-be50-e66a8942bab1)Chapter One (#u1bf3034c-2b40-5bbd-bf6d-d53ce7259cd2)Chapter Two (#u3cef1971-9880-5d8c-8c79-d1371bd30dc6)Chapter Three (#u00bb7bd5-0f88-5fd8-a8a6-b8d8e9b318e3)Chapter Four (#ud99330e0-8cd4-5803-94aa-92dcb5023ae3)Chapter Five (#u7e3a3c26-8a1f-5f7a-8802-520f282cd4c6)Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

ONE (#u552e237b-1524-5b96-b3e0-efdbf7f0f612)

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.