Lime Street at Two. Helen Forrester

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СКАЧАТЬ up, sooner or later, for the Army or the Navy; he might just as well remain a merchant seaman, and earn better wages.

      Based on my utter frustration, a dull anger at Harry surged in me. He was old enough not to be amongst the first to be conscripted. We could have been married by now and had some happiness together; I could have been carrying his much desired baby. The fool! The stupid idiot, to go and get himself killed! I was terribly, unreasonably furious at him.

      In those wild moments, I gave no thought to the fact that unless freighters went to sea, to carry on the country’s trade, we would soon starve. I also forgot that, though Harry often complained about the conditions under which seamen lived aboard ship, basically he enjoyed going to sea; like everyone else, he hoped the war would soon be over. Few civilians knew enough of the true situation to realise that it was bound to drag on for years. Wars are very easily started; the problem is in bringing them to a close.

      Now Harry was gone, and I had not the faintest idea what to do, as I struggled to help women equally distressed. My mind refused to concentrate; my body longed for rest, preferably eternal rest. Normally I was always hungry; now I sometimes found it difficult to eat.

      Even Mother noticed my unusual dullness and told me to stop looking so sulky. ‘Laugh and the world laughs with you,’ she would say, so truly, ‘Cry, and you cry alone.’

      ‘It’s easier for her,’ I would think sullenly. ‘She’s doing quite nicely now.’ I forgot that she had been through an earlier war, a war which had been in many ways much worse.

      ‘Why aren’t you going dancing?’ Fiona asked.

      I looked at her blankly for a moment, and then replied, ‘I’m too tired – the office is so busy.’

      I don’t think that Father noticed anything much. He tended to live a life of his own amongst his friends from the office; Mother never accompanied him either to the public houses or to the concerts and plays to which he went. Sometimes he would inquire of Tony or Brian what they were doing in their spare time. Not infrequently, he had a tremendous row with Mother, usually on the subject of money.

      He may possibly have noticed that, at that time, I was not quarrelling much with Mother, and consequently the house was quieter. I was too exhausted to face her verbal barbs, and no matter what she did, I accepted it and did my best to cope with the consequences.

      On the Saturday on which I had exclaimed so explosively in the office about the lunacy of the war, I worked all day, and arrived home just as Mother was putting on her retrimmed, turban-type hat before going to the cinema. She was peeking at herself in the broken piece of mirror on the mantelpiece. It was still the only mirror in the house and was consequently very precious. During the war, mirrors were hard to obtain.

      She nodded to me, buckled up the belt of her leather overcoat and picked up her handbag. ‘Back at eleven,’ she threw over her shoulder, as she went through the back door.

      As I took off my own coat, I listened to the click-click of her high-heeled shoes on the stone flags of the back alley. I remembered how, as a child, I would lie in bed after Edith, our nanny, had tucked me up, every limb tensed, eyes screwed tight in case those clicking heels came upstairs. Nothing made her crosser than to find that Alan and I had failed to go to sleep promptly at six o’clock. An extremely nervous child, I was afraid of the dark, afraid of the flickering shadows made by the candle which Edith always left on the dresser, but, most of all, I was afraid of my stormy mother.

      While I put together a meal for myself, Father leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. It was a habit he had acquired after a heart attack which he had suffered at the age of thirty-three. Now, he was dozing while he waited for the arrival of his friend, Tom, a school teacher, still in his late twenties. Before Tom had gone to attend a Teachers’ Training College, he had worked in Father’s office, and, despite the difference in age, they had interests in common, including Father’s long-standing study of French history; they also argued about politics by the hour.

      I knew that they would go to town, to drink in The Vines in Lime Street and in other public houses. Ye Hole in Ye Wall was another of their favourite haunts. Once Tom took Father to Ye Cracke in Rice Street, and subsequently, if Father was alone, he always went there. It had a tiny parlour with a transom labelled The War Office over its entrance. Men used to sit there and refight the Boer War, and no doubt Father refought the First World War in the same place. He really enjoyed exploring the many quaint taverns in Liverpool. He would come in about eleven o’clock, gravely drunk, and proceed, with care, upstairs to bed, to sleep it off in time for his Sunday morning pint at nearby Peter’s, another of his favourite public houses.

      Father woke up from his nap, and sat cracking his fingers for some minutes. He looked up at me. I was seated at the table, a sheet of cheap writing paper in front of me.

      ‘Are you not going to a dance?’ he asked.

      ‘No. I thought I’d write to Alan. He must be having a terrible time at Biggin Hill; it’s been bombed like anything.’

      Father nodded agreement. Though he could write well and amusingly, he rarely wrote to any of his children while they were away, and I think that in many other houses this task was left to the womenfolk.

      ‘He’s ground staff; he should be able to take cover,’ Father said heavily.

      I wondered at Father’s indifference to the danger his sons were in while they were in the Services. Perhaps, after the horrors of trench warfare in the First World War, bombing, aerial combat and the dangers at sea seemed petty in comparison.

      Mother had heatedly forbidden me to write to or visit our little evacuees while they were away. ‘You’ll do nothing but upset them,’ she had accused me.

      Despite my protests, she was so vehement that I never did write.

      Alan was my old and trusted friend, as well as my brother, and she knew better than to come between us. I wrote to him as often as I could. He did not always reply, for reasons which were painfully obvious from the headlines in the newspapers. The Battle of Britain was in scarifying flood. His base, Biggin Hill, was an airfield of crucial strategical importance and a frequent target of the Luftwaffe. He had continued to be trained as ground crew, had been promoted to Leading Aircraftsman, and did not normally fly. Our inadequate number of Spitfires and Hurricanes had, however, at all costs, to be kept in the air, and boys like him worked like devils to do it; at night he often slept under the aircraft on which he had been working, because time was so precious.

      In the gorgeous summer of 1939, he went away a gangling youth. When we opened the door to him on his first leave in January, 1940, it was as if a young giant stood on our doorstep. He seemed to have grown a foot in height, his shoulders had broadened, and his face was that of a man. Though thin, he was healthier than I had ever seen him.

      As we sat around our frugal fire, he told us that he had done six months of square-bashing, drilling very much as if he had been in the Army; then he had gone for further training in the maintenance of aircraft.

      On his more recent leave, he had divulged, ‘Some of the crates we have to deal with look more like colanders than aircraft when they land. And we have to get them back up again within hours.’

      ‘And the crews?’ I asked.

      ‘We’re losing an awful lot,’ he replied, his face strained and sad.

      I had guessed at the losses; we were getting Air Force families in the office, as well as those of seamen. Tears welled at the back of СКАЧАТЬ