Put Out the Fires (16 page)

He seemed to be out a lot lately, she thought. She saw little of him, even during the weeks she was on morning shift.

Some nights she’d gone to bed by the time he arrived home, but at least he was always sober, so she didn’t mind in the slightest how long he spent away.

“Tony,” she called, “come on, under the stairs.”

Tony went in search of Snowy. “I wonder what Nick’s doing?” he said as they settled down on the mattress. The kitten hated the raids and was already curled up, shivering, on Tony’s knee.

“I’ve no idea, luv.” It was ages since he’d mentioned Nick.

“Spitfires fly over to France and strife the enemy.”

“Strafe, luv, not strife. Then I expect that’s what Nick’s doing,” she said in a tight voice.

She did her best not to think of Nick. There were times when she wondered if he was still alive—he could die and she’d never know. It would be his next-of-kin who would be informed, in other words, his mother in the USA, not Eileen. It was hard to put him out of her mind for a while, but soon awareness came that tonight’s raid was like no raid before and Nick was forgotten. It sounded as if the entire Luftwaffe had been sent to bomb the living daylights out of Liverpool.

In wave after wave they came, for hour after hour.

Eileen thanked God she was on mornings and could be with her son. She did her utmost not to show her fear, though every now and then she ducked and clutched him in her arms whenever a bomb screamed to earth close by.

Tony, incredibly, didn’t seem bothered.

“That was a near miss, Mam,” he’d say excitedly every time the house shuddered.

There was a lull around midnight. Eileen emerged to make a cup of tea, along with Snowy, who scratched at the door to be let out. She was just filling the kettle when Francis came in.

“Where on earth have you been?” Eileen asked.

“Just having a drink with a few mates,” he explained briefly. “Jaysus! It’s bedlam out there.”

“Is there much damage?” Eileen asked.

“Quite a bit, but mainly on the docks. According to a warden I spoke to, the other side of Liverpool has caught the worst of it. I reckon this is the longest raid yet.”

“And the heaviest!” Eileen shuddered. “Now as you’re here, I’ll just pop over the road and see if our Sheila’s all right.”

It was as clear as daylight outside. The silence seemed ominous, as if a promise were hanging in the air that the carnage was likely to begin again any minute.

Eileen drew the key on its string through the letter box of her sister’s front door and went inside, but stopped halfway down the hall. The children were singing in their shelter under the stairs.

“Sing a song of sixpence

A pocketful of rye.

Four and twenty blackbirds,

Baked in a pie.

When the pie was opened . . . ”

Their young voices sounded pure and innocent as they rang through the house. Sheila had given birth to all her six children in the double bed upstairs, brought them into the world full of the hope, as all mothers were, that they’d grow up into a better and more prosperous world than she and Cal had known. Instead, Eileen thought bleakly, Cal was sailing the treacherous waters of the Atlantic, with death in the form of German U-boats poised and ready to pounce at any time of the day or night, whilst at home, his entire family were equally at risk.

The children had finished the nursery rhyme. “That was the gear,” cried Sheila. “I reckon your dad might well have heard it if he’d been listening hard enough. Now it’s your turn to pick a tune, Siobhan.”

Incredibly, Sheila’s voice was steady and quite cheerful.

Eileen turned on her heel and left the house, closing the door as quietly as she could. She felt it wiser not to intrude on her sister and the children just at the moment.

She was walking back when Mr Harrison emerged from the coalyard at the end of the street. He usually spent the raids in the stable comforting Nelson. The sounds drove the poor horse hysterical.

“Look, Eileen!”

He was pointing up into the sky behind her. Eileen turned. Some distance away over the docks, a parachute was drifting silently to earth. She felt her heart turn over.

Was the heavy raid a lead-up to the invasion everybody had been expecting for months, ever since France had fallen?

They both watched as the parachute disappeared behind the black roofs, then came a blast louder than anything heard before. Eileen felt as if the ground were about to open up beneath her. Nelson whinnied, terrified, and Mr Harrison hurried back to calm him.

“There, boy!” Eileen heard him say as she ran indoors.

Francis was white-faced and shaking. “What the hell was that?”

Eileen explained what she’d just seen. “It was a bomb on a parachute.”

As if the enemy planes had signalled to each other it was time to re-start, the bombardment began again with a vengeance. Eileen opened the back door and Snowy shot into the house like a bat out of hell. “I’m going to bed,” said Francis.

“You’ll never sleep through this,” Eileen warned.

“I know that only too well.” He preferred to be by himself so there’d be no witness to his terror. Anyroad, if the house was hit he reckoned he’d be no safer under the stairs than in the bedroom.

Tony had fallen asleep, which was a blessing. Eileen lay beside him, partially covering his sleeping form with her own body, whilst the raid continued.

It wasn’t until four o’clock that the All Clear sounded and she emerged from the shelter feeling dog-tired. She hadn’t slept a wink all night and was due to leave for work in an hour’s time. She went into the new bathroom, ran a few inches of warm water, knelt in it, and splashed her body from head to toe in an effort to wake herself up.

Francis appeared just as she was about to put the kettle on. He looked red-eyed and equally weary.

“You should have stayed in bed and tried to catch up on your sleep,” she said. “Tony’s been asleep for hours.”

“I wanted a cup of tea.” Francis looked at her in surprise as she combed her hair. “What are you doing?”

“Getting ready for work.”

“Surely you can give it a miss for once?” he said testily.

He resented the fact she thought her work so important.

“I couldn’t possibly. Everyone else will have been up all night, same as me. What would happen if we all decided to give it a miss?”

He shrugged churlishly. “Suit yourself.”

“Why don’t you go back to bed and try to snatch a bit of shut-eye,” she suggested sympathetically, feeling he was entitled to be grumpy under the circumstances. He’d been rather preoccupied of late and she wondered why.

“I might well go back once you’ve gone,” he said.

She made herself a slice of toast. Francis refused anything to eat, but gratefully accepted a cup of tea. He seemed to have recovered his good humour.

“I’m sorry if I was short with you, princess. It’s just that it’s been a terrible night.”

“Don’t give it another thought, luv.” She glanced at the clock. “I’ll have to be off in a minute.

“Eileen?”

There was something in his voice that made her stiffen.

“Yes, Francis?”

“I don’t suppose you could lend me a few bob, like?”

There was a shamed expression on his face she’d never seen before.

“But you only got paid yesterday,” she said, astonished.

“Yes, but I owed some cash and I’ve nowt left for the week ahead.”

“How could you owe a whole week’s wages?”

She’d never questioned him in the past, not about anything, because she knew that doing so would only bring quick retribution in the form of a savage pinch which would leave her bruised for a week. Perhaps Francis remembered the old days when she did what she was told, because he no longer looked ashamed, but swallowed impatiently, as if doing his utmost to keep his temper.

“The truth is I lost a bit of money playing cards,” he muttered.

“Is that where you were last night, playing cards?”

Francis nodded. “I got a bit carried away, that’s all.”

“More than a bit, it seems to me. And where did this card game take place?”

“Rodney Smith’s,” he said through gritted teeth. If she asked him another question, so help him, he’d wallop her.

“I might have known!”

With an effort, Francis said, “Don’t worry, princess. It won’t happen again.”

“I should hope not!” she said severely. “I can let you have ten bob, but don’t forget, Francis, it’s me who pays for the housekeeping. I don’t take a penny of yours. All you have to do is pay the rent and settle the bills. I’m not prepared to subsidise gambling.”

It was hard, awfully hard, not to lash out and send her flying for daring to speak to him as if he was a schoolboy.

“Ta, luv.” Francis did his utmost to sound grateful.

She handed him a ten-shilling note out of her purse.

“That should see you through the week.”

“There’s another thing, princess . . . ”

“What’s that, Francis?”

“I keep bringing it up with your dad, but he seems dead evasive. It’s this matter of the Labour Party picking a successor to Albert Findlay when he retires at the next election. Your dad always promised it would be me, but he doesn’t seem prepared to commit himself when I bring the matter up nowadays.” He hated having to ask her, it was demeaning, but Jack Doyle didn’t appear nearly as willing as expected to be wrapped around Francis’s little ringer. In fact, Jack seemed reluctant to talk to him except when he had to.

“There won’t be an election till the war’s over. There’s no need, not with a coalition Government.”

“I know that, princess, but it wouldn’t hurt to have someone ready in place to take over from Albert.”

“I’ll have a word with me dad,” Eileen promised. “I’d better go, else I’ll miss the bus.”

Everyone at Dunnings was full of the previous night’s raid. Despite the fact that, like Eileen, no-one had slept, they were remarkably chirpy and full of beans. The mood was one of defiance. There was no way Hitler and his new-fangled parachute mines would prevent them from doing their job.

“Where’s Theresa?”

The women had already started work when they noticed Theresa’s lathe was standing idle.

“Perhaps one of her kids is ill,” someone suggested.

But Theresa’s mother-in-law looked after the children, Eileen recalled, feeling worried.

“Maybe she’s missed the bus. She’ll probably be along any minute.”

“She’s never missed the bus before.”

Every time the workshop door opened the women looked up, expecting Theresa to come bustling in, full of excuses as to why she was late. As the morning wore on, they kept glancing uneasily at her lathe. The conversation was forced.

“Just think,” Doris shouted, “it’ll be the first of December on Monday. We’ll have to start thinking about Christmas presents soon.”

“Aye,” yelled Carmel. “It seems no time since it was last Christmas. The year’s flown by.”

“It has that.”

The girls were having their dinner when Miss Thomas came into the canteen and sat at the end of their table. They could tell by the expression on her face that she was the bearer of bad news.

“I’ve just had a phone call from Theresa’s sister. It seems the entire family were sheltering underneath the Junior Technical School in Durning Road. The school got a direct hit and more than a hundred and fifty people were killed.” Miss Thomas took a deep, shuddering breath. “I’m terribly sorry, girls, but Theresa and her children are dead.”

Next morning, Eileen collected the ration books for the week’s shopping, which could well take up the entire morning by the time you’d stood in all the various queues.

She was dreading coming face to face with the evidence of Thursday night’s raid. It was horrible to see the wreckage of people’s homes, the heaps of dusty bricks and slates and smashed chimneys, all jumbled together with precious furniture and ornaments and personal possessions that had taken a lifetime to collect. She could never understand those people who made a special journey merely to gawp at their fellow citizens’ misery.

She called on her sister first, because it was wise to take Sheila’s ration books with her just in case the shops had some unexpected luxury in stock. Last week she’d managed, somewhat miraculously, to buy sausages—not that there’d been anything luxurious about them, she thought, remembering their anonymous taste and sawdust texture.

Still . . .

Sheila was in the living room stirring something in a pan over the fire, all flushed and starry-eyed. Calum Reilly was due home that afternoon, and she’d been over the moon all week. The younger children were playing house underneath the table.

“Cal’s already here,” she sang. “His ship docked earlier than expected. He turned up at five o’clock this morning.”

“Where is he?” Eileen asked.

“Still in bed having a lie in. He’s fair worn out, poor Cal.” She had the satisfied, satiated look of a woman who’d recently been well loved. Eileen used to feel envious of her sister—until she met Nick. She wondered if it was the Merchant Navy who’d worn Car out, or Sheila.

There was a peculiar and rather unpleasant smell emanating from the pan Sheila was stirring. Eileen sniffed and pulled a face. “Whatever it is you’re cooking, Sheila, it don’t half pong!”

“It’s jam!” Sheila said smugly.

“Jam? Where on earth did you get the fruit?”

“It’s pineapple jam.” Sheila looked even more smug.

“Would you like a taste? I’ve got a bit on a saucer. It’s nearly set.”

“Pineapple! You’re codding me, sis. I never saw much of pineapple before the war, let alone since.” All fruit was difficult to get, even apples, and oranges had disappeared altogether.

“Have some.” Sheila thrust the saucer at her. The mixture looked remarkably like chunky pineapple jam.

“What does it taste like?” she enquired eagerly.

Eileen licked her finger warily. “Have you had a taste?”

“A bit.”

“What do you think?”

Sheila collapsed into giggles. “It tastes like turnips! I made it out of turnips. Brenda found the recipe in a woman’s magazine.”

“To be honest, sis, it’s dead-awful! I hope you didn’t make me any.”