Down Daisy Street (35 page)
Kathy jumped to her feet, realising as she did so that she was glad of the excuse not to have to make a definite promise that she would return to the house. After all, there was no need for her to do any such thing; Mr Philpott would probably be in Liverpool for several days. ‘Help yourself to anything you fancy, Mr Philpott,’ Kathy said recklessly. She supposed she could always do a bit more baking if Mr Philpott took her literally and gobbled up half the preparations for the funeral tea. ‘I’ll see you later then.’ The others were hustling her out of the door but she suddenly remembered that she had said nothing about Mr McCabe’s death and turned back. She hurried across the kitchen and bent over Mr Philpott. ‘I didn’t have time to tell you what all the baking was about, Mr Philpott. Jimmy McCabe’s dad was killed in one of the raids; his funeral’s on Friday.’
Mr Philpott opened his mouth to speak but Kathy shook her head at him and hurried back across the room, joining the others in the yard with a distinct sense of relief. There was something about Mr Philpott which niggled away at the back of her mind, though she could not remember exactly what it was.
Outside, they made for the street and were soon chattering about a number of things, though Kathy took the opportunity to explain to Alec who Mr Philpott was and how he came to be sitting in their kitchen. They had divided into two couples to walk along Stanley Road and presently, seeing Jane and Jimmy entwined ahead of them, Alec put a casual arm round Kathy’s shoulders. He grinned down at her, saying: ‘We’re going to have a grand evening, the four of us, and if you ask me there won’t be a raid tonight. Bomber pilots don’t care for cloud because they can’t see what they’re bombing, and if they drop below it they’re within range of the ack-ack and they can fly into tall buildings and barrage balloons and so on. Now where should we go to eat when the performance is over?’
It was a good film, made perfect for Kathy because after ten minutes or so Alec had taken her hand. I’m nearly nineteen and this is the first time I’ve ever let a boy hold my hand in the flicks, she told herself, half guiltily. I’ve always been so determined to have a career, to be a person in my own right, that I’ve never given even a thought to courting or marriage. And yet, ever since I first saw Alec, I’ve felt quite differently about him from the way I’ve felt about any other bloke I’ve ever met. And when he touches my hand, or looks down at me and smiles, my tummy sort of squeezes up and I go hot and cold and – and I just want to be close to him. I might ask Jane if this is love, but somehow I don’t think I shall. It’s – it’s a very private feeling, not the sort of thing you talk about, not even to your mam, or your best friend.
When they emerged from the cinema, the cloud cover overhead was beginning to break up so that occasional silvery shafts of moonlight fell upon the blacked-out city. During the performance, they had once or twice heard the thrum of the heavy bombers passing overhead, but though there may have been the odd bomb or incendiary dropped the alert had not sounded. Because of Kathy’s tardiness they had decided not to have a full meal before the showing of the film. After it, however, they meant to eat, so they went along to a restaurant on Stanley Road, which did a main course and a pudding for one and tenpence a head. They were chattering away, the two men telling the girls what they knew of life in the WAAF and making them laugh with stories of some of the exploits they had heard of, when the alert sounded.
‘Oh, Christopher, there go Moanin’ Minnie, and that’s the end of our meal,’ Alec remarked.
Kathy glanced around the restaurant and saw that the staff were ushering people out of the door. Presumably, there were no cellars here, and since the place consisted largely of huge glass windows it was clearly unwise to try to remain.
‘Eat up, girls,’ Jimmy ordered, shovelling food into his mouth as fast as he could. ‘We’d best get you two into a shelter and then Alec and meself will go along to the nearest wardens’ post. Ah, here comes the waitress to collect our money, but we’ve not had our puddin’ yet. How much will they knock off for an uneaten puddin’ do you suppose?’
‘Nothin’, you cheeky young devil,’ the elderly waitress said, overhearing, snatching the almost empty dinner plate from under Jimmy’s nose as she spoke. ‘You may not have ate the puddin’ but we’s had to cook it, so pay up, please; then we can all gerrout of here afore them nasty Germings start a-bombin’ of us again.’
Jimmy and Alec began to argue vociferously, but it was no use. They paid up rather grudgingly, Jimmy remarking that he’d be back for his puddin’ as soon as the All Clear sounded. As they left, Kathy saw that the friendly clouds had completely disappeared and the full moon was shining down upon the city yet again, illuminating everything far more efficiently than the searchlights were lighting up the darkness above. She tugged at Alec’s arm. ‘We might as well be on the stage,’ she said in a hushed voice. ‘They’ll be able to pick out the places they want to bomb as easy as anything. Oh, why don’t the clouds come back and hide us?’
‘Yes, it’s a bomber’s moon,’ Alec agreed and Kathy realised, for the first time, that both young men must have looked on a moonlit night such as this with approval when they were in their Blenheim and heading for a target over Germany. How odd it must seem to them now to be the attacked instead of the attackers! The roles had been reversed indeed and she thought, fleetingly, how dreadful it would be if they were killed by the bombers even now beginning to appear across the Mersey.
Jimmy looked behind him to make sure they were following. His arm was once more round Jane’s waist and his face very close to her friend’s mass of golden curls, though in the moonlight these shone pale as silver. ‘We’ll make for the shelter under the Co-op that you were talking about earlier,’ he said to Kathy. ‘You’ll be snug enough down there.’
But when they reached the shelter, Kathy suddenly made up her mind that she would not go below, for it was easy to see that the shelter was already crammed to capacity and, what was more, something of Mr Philpott’s dislike of enclosed spaces seemed suddenly to infect her. At the foot of the steps, she turned briskly round and hurried up them again, dragging Alec with her. ‘I’m not going down there, not tonight,’ she said decisively. ‘It’s going to be a bad night, with the moon at the full and so many aircraft overhead. I’ll stay with you two, and do whatever I can to help.’ She looked up into Alec’s face, trying to smile. ‘Women are as good as men any day of the week; Jane and me’s going to be Waafs, so we might as well start fighting the war right now!’
It was a dreadful night, particularly bad for north liverpool and the docks. Jane had quite agreed with Kathy that they should not go to the shelter, so the two girls worked side by side, doing everything that was asked of them. Their tasks varied enormously, from carrying around jugs of hot tea to workers desperately engaged in fire-fighting, to roping off bomb-damaged buildings and helping to move rubble where they could hear the voices of those buried beneath it. By the time day dawned and the All Clear had sounded, they were beginning to see the extent of the damage. The roads were white with splintered and shattered glass; in some streets, blast had seen to it that not a single window had stayed in situ. Fires smouldered or roared, according to how recently the incendiaries had fallen, and the roads were impassable. Tramlines had been severed and stuck up at unusual angles, as threatening as snakes to vehicular traffic. Water mains spouted, telephone lines were down, electricity cables fizzed, spat and went dead and chaos reigned.
Kathy and Jane, their best clothes ruined and their skin blackened by smoke and dust, met Alec and Jimmy by a WVS van which was dispensing hot drinks and sandwiches to the workers. ‘Mornin’, girls,’ the two young men chorused. They were as black as Kathy and Jane, but grinned wearily, their teeth flashing white in their filthy faces.
Jimmy handed the cup of tea he was cradling to Jane, and took another from the counter. ‘I guess it’s about time you two went home and got cleaned up. Then you can both have a few hours in bed. There’s no point in me goin’ back home. I’m so tired, I doubt if I could sleep a wink.’
‘We’ve been at that shelter under the Co-op, the one we tried to get you to use,’ Alec said, reaching for a cup of tea and handing it to Kathy. ‘It’s terrible; the worst yet, I should say. The building next door collapsed on to the shelter and the roof caved in. There were little kids . . .’ He shuddered. ‘Well, no point in talking about it but we’ve got to go back as soon as we’ve finished this cuppa. I don’t suppose we’ll be more than an hour or two, but by God, when we saw it, we could only be thankful you’d refused to go below.’
‘I am
not
going home to sleep until you do,’ Kathy said firmly. She drank her tea and handed the mug to a grey-haired WVS worker whose eyes were red-rimmed with tiredness, but who wore a bright smile as though it were a part of her uniform. ‘Come on, you two, let’s be gettin’ back to the Co-op. Jane and I may not be able to heave concrete blocks about but we can help shift the smaller stuff.’ There was a token attempt from both men to get the girls to go home but when they saw it was not going to be successful they gave up and the four of them returned to do what they could to help those still trapped. Eventually, some of the workers gave a cheer and began to help people from the wreckage. Many were injured but others were unhurt and reported, as they scrambled out through the tiny gap, that there were a number of dead.
not
going home to sleep until you do,’ Kathy said firmly. She drank her tea and handed the mug to a grey-haired WVS worker whose eyes were red-rimmed with tiredness, but who wore a bright smile as though it were a part of her uniform. ‘Come on, you two, let’s be gettin’ back to the Co-op. Jane and I may not be able to heave concrete blocks about but we can help shift the smaller stuff.’ There was a token attempt from both men to get the girls to go home but when they saw it was not going to be successful they gave up and the four of them returned to do what they could to help those still trapped. Eventually, some of the workers gave a cheer and began to help people from the wreckage. Many were injured but others were unhurt and reported, as they scrambled out through the tiny gap, that there were a number of dead.
‘One of the fellers were real good, brave as a lion,’ an elderly woman told Kathy as she was heaved free of the ruin. ‘He were a seaman, only home on leave, but he were that cheerful and jolly, he kept us all laughin’. My daughter, Effie, and her five littl’uns really took to him, so they did. He were badly injured when the roof come in but he still kept cracking jokes and mekkin’ the kids laugh. When he went quiet, we thought he’d dropped to sleep but he were dead as a doornail.’
Kathy said how sorry she was and wondered whether the woman, or anyone else in the shelter, knew who the sailor was and presently, when the bodies were being brought out, asked another survivor, a grizzled man in his sixties, whether he knew anything about the seaman who had died. The old man shook his head. ‘No, queen, only what he telled us,’ he said. ‘He come back to Liverpool on leave because his ship were torpedoed but he came to this shelter because he telled us his young lady had said she would come here. Only it seems she’d not arrived – and a good thing too, for if she’d been below she’d ha’ been wi’ her young man and he was sittin’ where the roof collapsed.’ He glanced around as he spoke and pointed. ‘They’re just bringin’ him up, queen. If it’s someone you know . . .’
Kathy murmured that she was sure the sailor would be a stranger to her but went over to the stretcher and glanced down at the still figure lying upon it. For a moment she could only stare, disbelief warring with pity. It was Mr Philpott.
Kathy could not believe it at first. He had been afraid of enclosed spaces, had hated the thought of being entombed in a shelter because of the great weight of earth around and building above. But she guessed that he found it even more daunting being alone in the house in Daisy Street. The docks were so near and Kathy knew that they had been a target many times that night. She imagined Mr Philpott, in his small room in Daisy Street, yearning for the companionship that he had known aboard his frigate. He would have waited, hopefully, for her to return, as she had half promised to do, and would probably have been driven out to the shelter simply to find someone – anyone – with whom to share the hours of terrifying noise and danger which lay ahead.
Then she remembered what the old man had said. Mr Philpott had told people that he had chosen the Co-op shelter because he believed his young lady would be there. Kathy was not a conceited girl but she thought it very probable that poor Mr Philpott had been referring to her. She knew that he rather liked her, but because she thought him such a wet week she had never given him the slightest encouragement and in fact had denied, even to herself, that she was anything to him apart from his landlady’s daughter.
‘Kathy? Wharron earth are you doin’ . . . ?’ Jane’s voice broke off as she saw the still figure on the stretcher. ‘Oh, my God, it’s Mr Philpott, isn’t it? Oh, the poor feller! But wharrever were he doin’ here? I thought you said he were goin’ to kip down in Daisy Street.’
Kathy found that she was crying and wiped her eyes with the backs of both hands. ‘He was, but I think he got lonely,’ she said. ‘An old feller who chatted to him in the shelter told me that Mr Philpott came down looking for – for a girl he knew. I – I’d said we’d probably use this shelter . . . oh, Jane, if I’d gone home like I’d said I might, Mr Philpott would still be alive!’
‘You don’t want to go blaming yourself . . .’ Jane was beginning, when an arm slid round Kathy’s waist and Alec’s voice said in her ear: ‘What’s all this, then? Why’s my brave girl piping her eye?’ Alec’s gaze must have followed the direction of Jane’s glance, for he stiffened suddenly. ‘Dear God, is that the feller who was sitting in your kitchen when we called for you? Oh, Kathy, no wonder you’re crying. You know him well, of course. I am so sorry.’
Kathy sniffed and knuckled her eyes again, then straightened her shoulders and gently pushed Alec away from her. It seemed wrong to be looking down on Mr Philpott, who had said he only wanted to talk to her, whilst being cuddled by Alec. ‘Yes, I did know him well, though not well enough to even know what his first name was,’ she admitted. ‘I did tell you he was our lodger. It seems he – he came down the shelter looking for me, because I said we’d use the Co-op one if we got caught in a raid. But I never dreamed . . . he said he hated shelters!’
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