Christmas on the Mersey. Annie Groves
watched from the shadows as Kitty closed the street door behind her. Even though he couldn’t see her closely, his heart had ached as he took in her dark hair and fine features. Kitty was beautiful and she didn’t even know it. Frank cursed himself for being a romantic twit. He’d walked past Kitty’s house at least a dozen times earlier on his stiff false leg. However, he couldn’t bring himself to ‘just call in’ like he always had in the past. Too much had happened since this bloody war had started. What could she possibly see in a man like him – one who was damaged beyond repair? Nothing, he imagined. He and Kitty had grown up together, and since her mother had died he’d been like a brother to her, but now what he felt for her was more than brotherly love. Something had changed between them but since he’d lost his leg he knew that he would never be good enough for her.
Dressed in his uniform of a petty officer of the Royal Navy, Frank acknowledged cheery greetings from passers-by he had known all his life. He smiled to hide his shame, but that was all that he could feel now: shame for being half the man he had been. He hated the two sticks that enabled him to manoeuvre on his new tin leg. He’d had it only a couple of months and it still didn’t feel comfortable. It rubbed like hell, and each day he had to massage the tender stump before re-dressing it ready for the false leg. Kitty would be sickened, he was sure.
However, he was glad of one thing: he had been allowed to stay in the navy – in the recently established Weapon and Radio branch at HMS Collingwood naval base – which spared him the humiliation of being invalided home.
Gulls and pigeons bullied the sparrows that swooped for scraps from the hessian sacks being carted along the busy dock road. Frank had arrived home only that morning and it was wonderful to see his family, but the constant questions and chatter were wearing him down already.
He toyed with the idea of knocking on Kitty’s door again. Seeing her up close and in the flesh would be a sight for sore eyes. He imagined her face, lit up like a Christmas tree when she was happy – God, imagining it was unbearable. But then he imagined her face as she took in his new leg. He did not want to see the pitying look in her eyes nor the exaggerated look of pleasure when she saw he was actually walking again. No, Kitty had her own life – she didn’t need to be hindered by a cripple. Frank was scared of neither man nor beast but the thought of being rejected by Kitty put the fear of God into him. Better leave things alone, he thought as he ambled along, knowing he could fight most things but he could not battle his feelings for Kitty Callaghan …
Frank’s thoughts were interrupted by a swaying woman who might well have been pretty at one time, but was now hard-looking and weary. She came towards him, scraping her heels against the stone pavement as if the effort to hold herself upright was too much to bear; she greeted him with a practised smile.
‘Hello ’andsome, fancy a jar?’ By the sound of her tired voice she couldn’t care less if he wanted one or not.
‘Not tonight, girl,’ Frank smiled politely, ‘but here, have one on me.’ He gave her half a crown and hoped she would go home to her kids, or whoever it was who was waiting there for her. She kissed him on the cheek.
‘God bless yer, lad, you don’t know what that means ter me.’
Frank could only imagine as she wended her way along the dock road. He gave a gentle laugh and shook his head. He’d called her ‘girl’. He was sure she hadn’t been a girl since Adam was a lad!
‘How did that happen?’ Dolly’s eyes were wide when she saw the gash on the side of her daughter’s forehead the day after Frank’s return.
Rita called in most days but had tried to keep out of the way yesterday. However, she wanted to hear all about Frank.
‘It happened during the raid,’ Rita lied, knowing Pop would be out on horseback looking for Charlie Kennedy if he suspected Rita had been mistreated. ‘The windows on the ward were blown in. Luckily we were over the other side but when I dived under the bed I caught it on the steel frame.’ Rita was amazed at the ease with which the lies tripped off her tongue.
‘I hope you got one of the doctors to look at it,’ Dolly said, her brows pleating. ‘Is it sore?’
‘It’s fine, Mam!’ Rita said a little impatiently, then she relented. It was normal for her mother to be concerned and so she said in a more tender tone, ‘At least I came through it.’
‘Glory be to God!’ Dolly said in her quick Celtic way, but she couldn’t help but feeling uneasy all the same. There had been no suggestion before this that Charlie was violent with her daughter, but Dolly heard the rumours, the same as everyone else, and she knew that of late he had taken increasingly to gambling and to drink. He’d been ruined by his own mother, Dolly knew, and if he ever harmed her daughter …
‘So help me, I’ll swing for him!’ she muttered out of Rita’s hearing.
‘Oh, Mam, I will miss Michael and Megan even more after having them home for the past months.’ Rita sat at the table in the kitchen of her mother’s three-bedroomed, gas-lit terraced house, situated on the other side of the alleyway from Winnie Kennedy’s corner shop.
‘Who did he say they were staying with?’ Dolly, a loving, sensible mother who was everybody’s mainstay, was pouring tea into a cup with a hairline crack, something that would never have happened before the war. The cup rattled a little on the saucer as Rita took the hot tea. It would never occur to Dolly to offer a cup of tea without a saucer. She still had her impeccable standards, even though the shortages had forced her and the rest of the country to lower them a little.
‘A woman called Elsie Lowe, someone Charlie’s mother knows … She runs a boarding house for businessmen, in Southport.’ Rita sipped at the hot tea, used to not having sugar since it became rationed last January.
‘Is she old, then?’ Dolly asked. ‘I mean, won’t the kids be a bit of a handful for a woman who has a boarding house to run?’
‘Apparently not,’ Rita answered, nodding to Nancy, who was just bringing baby George in from his nap in his pram, which was parked on the small terracotta-tiled pathway under the parlour window.
‘Did you use the cat net?’ Dolly asked Nancy, who scowled. ‘Only, you forgot it yesterday and next door’s tabby was sniffing around the pram for milk.’
‘I won’t forget again in a hurry, not after it lay on his face and almost suffocated him!’ Nancy said with venom. ‘I’ll get Pop’s gun and shoot that bloody cat!’ Pop was the local ARP warden and allowed to have a gun in the house. Not that there had been any reason to use it. They even had a white diamond painted at the side of the front door to identify this as the warden’s house.
‘Everybody in the hospital was talking about the raids,’ said Rita, trying to take her mind off her own troubles. She did not mention the fact that they had a German airman in a single secure ward with armed soldiers standing guard outside. ‘The wards have been cleared of patients who were almost ready for discharge and allowed an early release.’
The raids had people’s nerves rattling, their tetchiness showing in all sorts of different ways. In Nancy’s case she thought she had the given right to go around with a scowl on her face just because Gloria had come over the other night after Nancy had got all dolled up and told her that the dances were off for the foreseeable due to the raids.
‘I’ll go mad if they close down all the dance halls and theatres the way they did at the beginning of the war,’ Nancy said, passing her son to Rita, who wrinkled her nose before proceeding to remove his blue cotton helmet. Giving George a loving kiss on his plump little cheek brought a gurgle of baby bubbles from his smiling pink lips.
‘I love them at this age,’ Rita said, missing her own two desperately already. ‘Are you going to have him evacuated, Nancy?’
‘He’s only six months old. Children under five years old are being evacuated with their mothers.’ The question needed to be asked, especially after the latest raids, and Rita knew her mother was on pins worrying about little Georgie’s welfare; they all were.