Daughters of Liverpool

‘No,’ Katie told her firmly and truthfully.

‘Well, that’s good then, ’cos that means that the two of us can go out dancing together.’ Carole winked and added mock virtuously, ‘I reckon it’s our duty seein’ as there’s a war on and all them poor lads in uniform need a bit of female company to cheer them up. The Grafton’s the best dance hall there is. You’re certainly never short of a partner. Loads of lads, there are, round here,’ Carole continued enthusiastically. ‘All sorts – locals, uniforms, even some of them Canadians wot’s come over to help with the fighting. You can go out with a different one every night if you want. The soldiers are my favourites.’

‘I’m not interested in dating soldiers,’ Katie began firmly.

‘Oh, hoity-toity! After an officer then, are you? Well, you’ve certainly got the looks and the style.’

Katie opened her mouth to tell her that she wasn’t interested in getting involved with any man full stop, but before she could do so Carole had changed the subject.

‘What kind of digs have they put you in? Some of the girls are staying at the Young Women’s Christian Association.’ Carole pulled a face and giggled. ‘That’s not my cup of tea at all, but luckily I’ve got an auntie who lives local and I’m staying with her.’

Katie thought ruefully that the Christian Association would probably be as horrified at the thought of hosting Carole as she was at the idea of having to stay there, given the other girl’s outspokenness on the subject of young men. But although Carole’s outlook on men was very different from her own, there was something about the other girl’s bubbly friendly personality that Katie couldn’t help liking.

‘I’ve been billeted with a family. I haven’t met them all yet but the mother is very nice, and I’ve got a lovely room.’

Her bedroom was lovely, and she had been thrilled last night when Jean Campion had shown her up to it, explaining that it had originally been the twins’ bedroom but they had moved up to the attic floor into their elder sister’s room and so Jean had taken the opportunity to refurbish the room a bit.

‘You’ve got Grace’s bed, and dressing table and wardrobe,’ she had explained to Katie, ‘but my Sam’s given the walls a fresh lick of distemper. I wasn’t sure about duck-egg blue at first. I thought it might be a bit cold-looking.’

‘It’s very pretty,’ Katie had told her truthfully, earning herself another warm smile, before Jean had continued, ‘And then I made up the rag rugs from a couple of bags of offcuts of fabric I got from a mill sale. Go a treat with the paint, they do, with them being blues and yellows. The blue silk eiderdown and the curtains came from my sister Vi. She lives across the water in Wallasey.’

Katie had been thrilled to have such a pleasant room. There was also a pretty bedroom chair, and a view of the garden and the allotments beyond it from the window.

‘We can have a proper chat when we knock off to go to the canteen for our dinner,’ Carole told Katie now. ‘I’d better show you how we work otherwise we’ll have one of the supervisors down here. They sit over there at those desks you can see on that bit of a dais,’ she added, jerking her head in the direction of a railed-off raised-up section of the room where people sat at single desks instead of around a table.

‘Going home for Christmas, are you?’ Carole asked as she passed a small pile of opened letters to Katie. ‘Only I was thinking that I could get us both tickets for the Grafton’s big Christmas Dance. I’ve seen them advertised, and I reckon if we don’t jump in now it could be too late.’

Again, without waiting for Katie to reply, she rattled on, ‘Now what you do with these ’ere letters is you read them and if there should be anything in them that doesn’t quite gell, like, then you tell me for now.’

Dutifully Katie started to read the first letter, in which its writer referred to having been in London and having danced at the Savoy Hotel to the sound of Carroll Gibbons and the Savoy Orpheans.

Katie had often heard the Orpheans play and an unexpected wave of homesickness hit her. At home right now her father would just be getting up, grumbling about the noise from the street, which would have woken him up, complaining that no one seemed to realise that those who worked into the early hours of the morning needed to sleep in.

Her mother would be sitting at the kitchen table wearing one of her theatrical, and totally unsuitable for a shabby London terrace, ‘robes’ and before too long the pair of them would be bickering.

‘Summat up? Only you’ve been staring at that letter for nearly five minutes.’

Shaking her head in answer to Carole’s query, Katie put the letter to one side.

She was just over halfway down the pile when she found it: a letter written in bold spiky handwriting, in which, out of the blue, the writer referred to Gracie Fields singing ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’, when surely everyone knew that it was Vera Lynn who sang that particular song. It could simply have been a mistake, of course, but it made sense to check.

‘I’ve just noticed this,’ she informed Carole, pointing out the error.

Carole grinned at her. ‘Good for you. The top brass always check out newcomers by giving them a little test to see if they are as on the ball as they’ve made out.’

Leaning across Katie, she waved the letter in front of Anne and told her triumphantly, ‘She spotted it straight off.’

‘Well, thank goodness for that,’ Anne smiled. ‘We’ve been desperate for someone to fill in for Janet since she decided to join the ATS.’

A bell suddenly rang, making Katie jump.

‘Don’t worry, it isn’t one of Hitler’s bombs. It’s only the bell for the first sitting for lunch,’ Anne reassured her. ‘Carole, you and Katie can go first sitting today, but make sure you’re back on time,’ she warned them.

THREE (#u7c118bb9-cbea-5d60-9460-947a256bb209)

Emily could still feel her face burning hot with angry humiliation, despite the cold air that hit her when she stepped out of the stage door of the Royal Court Theatre, where her husband, Con, was a producer, and into the narrow street that ran behind the building. It was her own fault, of course. She should have known better than to be taken in by Con’s lies and come down here with the sandwiches she’d made up for him, thinking that it would save him having to go out and buy himself something since he had said he was so busy with pantomime rehearsals that he wouldn’t be able to get home for his tea. Too busy to get home for his tea, but not too busy to take the afternoon off, apparently, and not, from the look she had seen on his assistant’s face, on his own.

Where was he now? Shacked up in some cheap hotel room with an even cheaper little slut, if she knew her husband.

She wasn’t going to cry. Big plain women like her didn’t cry; it made them look even uglier than they already were. Besides, she was all cried out over her husband and her marriage. How could she not be when she knew what Con was and what a fool she had been to marry him?

Properly taken in by him at first, she’d been, and no mistake, a big gawky plain motherless girl, whose father had made himself a nice bit of money as a theatrical agent and who had died unexpectedly of a heart attack, leaving it all to her, his only child.

Con had come round to offer his condolences. She could remember now how her heart had thrilled when she had opened the door of the tall double-fronted Victorian terraced house at the top end of Wavertree Village where she had lived all her life, and seen him standing on the step.

She had never seen such a good-looking man and she had certainly never had one calling on her.

Six months later they were married. Con had insisted that it wasn’t disrespectful and that it was what her father would have wanted.

She had been so besotted with him by then that she would have agreed to anything, given him anything, she acknowledged. And of course she had already done both. Better for them to marry quickly just in case anything should happen, he had told her after the night he had got her so inebriated on sherry that she hadn’t even realised they were upstairs and in her bedroom with him undressing her until it was too late.

She had been grateful to him then, too stupid to realise what it was he was really after and why he was doing what he was doing to her.

Of course, that had all stopped once they were married and he had what he wanted, which had been access to her father’s money. Her father had more sense than her, though, and he had put most of it safely away in investments, bonds and things, and a bit of a trust fund that couldn’t be touched. And that brought her in a good income even now. Good enough to keep Con still married to her, that was for sure. Married to her but bedding other women – younger, prettier women. And they, for all their pretty faces and slender bodies, were no better at seeing through him than she had been herself. Actresses, chorus girls, singers, those were the kind that appealed to Con. Just as she had done, they took one look at that handsome face of his, those laughing eyes, that slow curling smile, that thick dark hair and those broad shoulders, and they were smitten.

Con knew all the ways there were to make a woman fall in love with him and then break her heart. He had certainly broken hers more than once in the early days, with his protestations that it was her he loved, and his pleas for forgiveness.

But not even Con’s unfaithfulness had broken her heart quite as painfully and irreparably as the discovery that she could not have children.

Emily loved children. She had ached for babies of her own, dreamed of them, longed for them and cried the most bitter of tears for her inability to conceive.

Now, a sound in the alleyway caught her attention. It often seemed to Emily that the stage door to the theatre was symbolic of theatrical life itself. The face it showed to the world on the main street was the face it wanted to be known by. Out in the front of house, where people queued to pay and watch the show, everything was shiny and smart, but go backstage, use the entrance those who worked within the theatre used, and it was a different story: peeling paint, a narrow alleyway blocked by bins, guarded by marauding cats and sometimes, poor buggers, the odd tramp poking around hoping to find something to eat. Something like Con’s unwanted sandwiches, for instance.

Emily could see a small shadow lurking by the bins. A small shadow? She frowned. Ah, yes, she could see him now, a dirty, poor-looking boy, his bare legs blue with cold, and his face pinched. He had seen her too. He looked terrified, so he wasn’t some young thief, then, hoping to grab her handbag. He was turning away from her. He looked hunted, desperate, and as thin as a stick. Emily’s heart melted.

‘Here, boy, you look hungry. You can have these,’ she told him, holding out Con’s greaseproof-paper-wrapped sandwiches to him.

He licked his lips, darting nervous looks towards her, and then down the alleyway, stretching out his hand and then withdrawing it, the look in his eyes one of mingled hunger and fear. Emily sensed that if she moved any closer to him he would turn and run.

‘Look, I’m going to put the sandwiches down here. Tinned salmon, they are, and best quality too,’ she told him inconsequently. ‘Brought them for my husband, I did, but he’s gone out. I’m going to put them down here and then I’m going to walk away. If you’ve any sense, you won’t look a gift horse in the mouth.’

She put the sandwiches down and started to move away but then something stopped her and she turned back to him.

‘There’ll be some more this time tomorrow and some hot soup, if you want it, but don’t you go telling anyone else because I’m not feeding every young beggar in Liverpool, that I’m not.’

As she walked away from him Emily was dying to turn round but she made herself wait until she had reached the end of the alleyway. When she did turn, she wasn’t surprised to see that both the boy and the sandwiches had gone.

Poor little kid. More than half starved, he’d looked. Probably lost his home and p’haps his family as well – there’d been plenty of folk who had, thanks to Hitler’s bombs, according to the papers.