A Liverpool Lass (17 page)

Not that Lilac resented this, because she did not. The way out and up is through education, Nellie told her severely. Polish up your writing so it’s clear and neat, keep practising reading until you can manage even the biggest words in the papers and you’re on the right road.

She didn’t say where the right road led, but Lilac saw that she meant it led to a better life and that suited her just fine. Months ago, when Nellie had first left her, she had decided to be rich one day. To marry well, to have a spanking red motor car, a large house with lots of servants, and a steam yacht. And being an intelligent child, she used her eyes whenever she went out and ticked off in her own mind what she most wanted from life. She saw, too, that a good many people, who must want these things as well, somehow managed to fall by the wayside, for Liverpool contained a great many
very rich people as well as numberless poor ones. So you had two choices, to stay down or go up, and she agreed with Nellie that up was best, and if you had to be good at things to go up then good at things she would be.

But she realised, too, that being very pretty indeed would help her. Already there were children at the Penrhyn Street School, which she attended with other girls from the area, who were using their looks to better themselves, or at least to make money. One of the girls, Doris, who was the same age as Lilac, would go behind the high brick wall with really big boys, for a ha’penny. And Maybelle, even prettier and only a year or so older, spent a lot of time cruising up and down the docks, earning money from the soldiers and sailors she met there. Lilac was not sure what she did to earn the money, but Maybelle assured her that being pretty meant you did better than a penny a go, and a penny a go seemed riches to Lilac.

When she tried to get Nellie’s opinion of these means of bettering oneself however, Nellie said firmly that Doris and Maybelle were bad girls and that she, Lilac, would do things properly and come off better than all of them in the end.

To make sure of this, Nellie paid for private mathematics lessons for both of them. Because Art had been a good friend to Lilac since Charlie’s wedding, and now helped her with her work as well as keeping an eye on her out of doors, Nellie prevailed upon the tutor, a pale young man called Claud Norton who suffered from asthma and terrible acne, to let Art attend the lessons too. And Claud was happy with the arrangement, especially since Art turned out to be a mathematical genius, so that their sessions, Claud said, were the most rewarding ones he taught.

And Lilac made friends, lots of them, and brought them home to the court to play in the relatively safe area within the walls. It might be smelly in summer and icy in winter, but at least the courts were not through ways, so there was little traffic, either on wheels or afoot, which meant the children were safer than on the open streets.

What was more, in Coronation Court Lilac saw and recognised not only poverty but quite often, the cause. Because of the war there was less unemployment, but some men and women still drank to excess, hit each other, beat their children, ruined their own lives and the lives of those around them. There was fecklessness, too: women who had never been taught to market frugally, eke out a little meat with a lot of vegetables, cook cakes and make soup instead of buying them. Such women were spent up by mid-week so their children went hungry three days out of the seven, and all for the want of management. Some men were just as bad; they would spend their spare time in the pub or lying in bed instead of finding another means of making a few pence. They bought new boots and chucked out the old because they were too idle to mend the soles, they spent a couple of day’s wages on impressing their mates instead of putting the money into the teapot on the mantel.

Nellie had a lot of small boxes into which she and Lilac put spare money. Some for clothing, some for shoes, some for Christmas and birthdays, some for trips and treats. Her friend Annie’s mum, working in the munitions factory in Cazneau Street, earning good money for the first time in her life, might laugh at them as she spent, spent, spent, but Mrs O’Grady wouldn’t be going to the theatre come Christmas or to the seaside next July. The posh coat she’d bought from Cheap
Jack’s down the Scottie would be in pieces in a twelve-month whilst a coat of good material, lovingly altered by Nellie, would be outgrown but never outworn.

So Lilac was learning – faster perhaps than even she knew. And enjoying every moment of it.

As for Nellie, she too was learning, for she found that, having managed to numb the pain of losing Davy and parting from her son, she had somehow numbed her capacity to feel other, gentler emotions. She loved Lilac but no longer agonised over her and could only feel vaguely sorry for Aunt Ada’s loss, though she knew that Aunt Ada missed her family badly. For they had all gone now, the young people as well as poor, crippled Uncle Billy. Bertie had gone for a soldier and so had Matt and Fred, though they were strictly speaking under age still. They all wrote home, their letters which had once been full of hope and excitement now reflecting only homesickness and a longing to leave the horrors behind them and return to Merseyside once again. Hal was at sea, on HMS
Laurentic
; she was a troop carrier for the Canadian Expeditionary Force, beating across the Atlantic and docking in Liverpool every couple of months. Hal did get home therefore, but seldom came back to the court for more than a word or two when he was home on leave. He had married to spite his family as the saying goes, a blowsy, feckless girl called Liza. Bessie said Liza was no better than she should be and besides, she never washed, but Hal seemed happy enough. Charlie was in France, Jessie was making parts for ship’s telegraphs in Birkenhead and Lou had joined the Women’s Forces and was stationed in Calais where she worked with the Army Service Corps.

So Nellie’s new job, as a trainee nurse in one of the many hospitals springing up all over the city, was a great help to her, taking her mind off her own worries, making them seem as trivial as, in fact, they were. She was soon a valued member of the ward, the nurses realising she was keen and intelligent. She worked long hours and never grumbled, never took her mind off her job, went home to work again on Lilac’s reading and writing, knitted gloves and socks for the troops, was always to be found doing the dirtiest jobs with the least fuss.

And it brought its own reward, as so often happens. Nellie, numbed with tiredness, seeing that no matter how she might suffer others suffered infinitely more, hardly ever thought of Davy. And if, sometimes, she woke and lay with her eyes closed and imagined that behind her lids was a light and airy room with a long, low window, that outside the window there shone the silver sea, the black, fanged rocks, the bite of grey shingle, if there was a small figure paddling in that sea, digging in that shingle, then she never let it make her unhappy. The baby was Bethan’s ... he would be six months now, eight months, a year, more. Sitting up, crawling, staggering uncertainly to his feet ... walking, talking! Calling Bethan mam, and the old folk nain and taid.

But it was a dream, another life, nothing to do with Nellie McDowell, who scraped her hair into a bun and scrubbed up and then went through to the wards to help the overstretched nurses with the dressings, carting the dirty stuff away in buckets, wheeling in the tea-trolley, always smiling determinedly, pushing her own worries into the background, always happy, the tommies said approvingly. They did not – could not – know that this Nellie was just a hollow shell, stumbling
through life somehow, waiting for her wounds to heal even as they waited to be made whole again.

And in the meantime she loved her work and made friends, in particular Lucy Bignold, who had married her sweetheart in September 1914 and been widowed only two months later. Lucy worked hard too, but everyone knew why she threw herself into nursing. No one knew about Nellie’s loss, yet she and Lucy seemed drawn to one another and grew close. Both, Nellie reflected, needed to forget the past, to turn over the book of life and start work on the new page. So she too threw herself wholeheartedly into her work and began, at last, to forget.

But she was still not happy. In the back of her mind was the ache of her loss; first Davy, then the child. She was so alone. Lilac was a comfort, she was her beloved daughter, yet she was not a part of Nellie, not flesh of her flesh, and she was too young and self-centred to enter fully into Nellie’s feelings – indeed, she was too young to confide in. Besides, one day she’ll marry and go and I’ll be alone again, Nellie thought sometimes as she scrubbed floors and burned dressings and helped the nurses to move an injured man from his back to his front or from his front to his side. Oh I wish I could fall in love like all the other girls do!

But it was as though, within her, some young and vital part had been frozen into numbness by Davy and the baby. She did her work with enthusiasm, but at home she seemed to lack the zest which had at one time characterised everything she did. She wrote to Bethan and got notes in reply reassuring her that the child was well and happy. She taught Lilac to cook and to keep house and went with Aunt Ada to put flowers on Uncle Billy’s grave. She knitted for the troops and for Charlie’s littl’uns.

And then, one cold day in January, she went onto
the ward to find a new intake had been brought in during the night.

Lucy, bustling into the changing room, waved to her as she changed into uniform, and then came across as Nellie was struggling to tie her white apron strings behind her.

‘Here, let me do that. The new patients are part of the crew of the
Laurentic;
she was torpedoed a couple of nights ago, in the Channel,’ Lucy said briefly, tying the strings of Nellie’s apron and straightening her frilled collar.

‘The
Laurentic
? Oh dear God, my brother Hal’s aboard her – Lucy, is he here?’

‘My dear, I’m so sorry, I didn’t know. You’d best go straight to Matron and ask. There were a lot of casualties, some of them in bad shape, so some may be on other wards. Go on, I’ll explain to Sister.’

Nellie hurried off and found Matron, rushed off her feet because of the number of injured – the
Laurentic
had been a troop carrier – but still sympathetic and as helpful as she could be.

‘My dear child, how dreadful for you,’ she said, patting Nellie’s hand. ‘I’ll check my lists.’

To Nellie’s bursting relief Hal had been in the hospital, though not on Ward Five, where she nursed. He had minor injuries and had been discharged in the early hours of the morning.

With that worry off her mind, Nellie returned to her own ward, but because the wounded were all sailors instead of the more usual soldiers, she found herself thinking about Davy all over again. One man had been so badly burned that they did not think he would survive and she knelt by his bed trying to get him to suck weak tea through a feeder, until she was called by Sister to take the tea-trolley round.

‘Some of these boys are in bad shape, so it’s been a busy night and you’ll be rushed off your feet today,’ Sister said. ‘I expect Matron told you that our tommies have been moved into Ward Seven, because these chaps need pretty intensive nursing. There are exposure cases, and burns ... all sorts.’

‘Were many killed?’ Nellie asked sadly. ‘It seems so wrong to be glad that my brother was saved when so many are in such pain.’

‘I don’t know,’ Sister said guardedly. ‘They don’t tell us things like that. Take the tea round now, there’s a good girl. The dressings-round will take time today, so we might as well get on as fast as we can.’

Nellie walked down the ward, pushing the tea-trolley. Tired eyes followed her, save for those who still slept. The ward was a big one with thirty beds, not an officers’ ward but one for other ranks. Today, though, there would be all sorts, she realised that. She began to hand out cups of tea, trying to keep her eyes on the man she was serving, not to let her gaze wander further down the ward. Some of these men would be Hal’s friends, she realised suddenly, and that might mean they would have known Davy, too – might even have sailed with him. Because at the outbreak of war Davy and Hal had shipped together, on the ill-fated
Milligan
, though – thank God – Hal had changed ships before the sinking of the frigate.

She approached the next row of beds, wondering whether she might make it known that she was interested in anyone who had known Davy Evans – and stopped short. A man was staring at her from under a bandage which hid all his hair and most of his forehead. One arm was plastered and he had a chest wound which had been treated and dressed. She could see a bright, dark eye, bloodshot and
puffy, a nose with a gash across the bridge, a black beard ...

She knew him without a second’s doubt. She gasped out his name, her heart beating so hard that it threatened to leap from her breast.

‘Davy! My God! But you were reported missing more than two years ago, oh my dearest, I thought... we thought...’

She was on her knees by the bed, holding his uninjured hand, such a variety of emotions pounding through her that she could not have given a name to any, save that of a sense of incredulous relief which ran like a flame through her mind.

‘Nell! My dearest girl!’ He spoke stiffly, and she saw he had lost two of his strong white teeth, that his lower lip was deeply cut. Her heart bled for him, all his faults were as nought, the deceit, her pain, what did they matter now that Davy was safe?

‘Do they know ...at home?’ Suddenly, common sense returned with a rush. She stood up, releasing his hand, albeit reluctantly. ‘Oh Davy ... I’ll get you tea. You’d best have milk and sugar, you’ll need building up I daresay.’

He laughed but when she held out the cup he shook his head, the one eye dancing in a way she remembered well.

‘You’ll have to help me; I can’t change my position for this accursed bandaging.’

She knelt by the bed again, holding the cup to his lips. He sipped, then turned his head slightly.

‘You won’t know, of course, but Nellie, I’m a married man, father of a little son. My wife’s a dear girl, takes the best possible care of my parents ... and of our little Richart. I’m sorry I never got in touch, but I knew you’d been told I was missing believed dead and I
thought it best... ’ he touched her hand, a tentative movement. ‘I loved you, Nellie, that’s God’s truth, but when I found I had a son...’