Put Out the Fires (8 page)

“I boiled the kettle for some cocoa earlier on. Would you like a bit of toast for your supper?”

“No, ta, I’m not hungry, but I’d love some cocoa.” She remembered she’d eaten nothing since breakfast, but the thought of food made her feel sick.

“Put your feet up, princess,” Francis called. “I reckon you need a rest after all that hard work.”

It was strange, really strange, but no matter what a person might have done in the past, even if they’d nearly murdered you on one occasion, it was difficult to remain cold and aloof when the person was making a determined effort to be friendly. Indeed, after the frosty reception she’d had from Nick, it was almost pleasant to have someone fussing around attending to her needs—even if it might only be a pretence, she quickly reminded herself.

“The work’s not hard once you’re used to it,” she said. “I really enjoy it. In fact, I was made chargehand today.”

Meeting Nick had pushed everything else to the back of her mind and she’d actually forgotten.

Francis came in with the drinks. “Chargehand, eh?” He chuckled. “That’s quite a responsibility. Y’know, luv, I’m not going to be in hospital for long having me eye done.

I’ll be well enough for work once me discharge comes through in a few weeks” time. There’ll be no need to keep on with your job once I’m earning a wage again and getting a pension from the army. You can take it easy at home.”

Eileen did her best to remain calm. “I don’t want to take it easy, thank you, Francis,” she said coldly. “I didn’t go to work just for the money. I wanted to do me bit for the war effort and I’ve no intention of giving it up.”

“If that’s the way you want it, princess, it’s fine by me,”

Francis said easily.

Hard luck on you if it weren’t, thought Eileen. “By the way,” she said, “in case you forgot, the Mersey Docks & Harbour Board have been paying your wages ever since you were called up and I haven’t collected a penny.

There’ll be a nice little windfall waiting for when you go back.”

“Perhaps we can buy something for the house?” Francis suggested.

“There’s nothing I need.” The all-embracing “we” made her squirm inside. “How’s Tony been?” she asked.

For the first time, Francis looked slightly peeved. “I’ve scarcely seen him since he came home from school. He popped in a minute about five o’clock to collect something, and I thought he might stay once he saw me. ‘Stead, he went over to Jacob Singerman’s. Jacob brought him back just in time for the raid and we sat under the stairs till the All Clear. Seemed a bit late to me for a lad of his age.’

“I don’t think bedtimes are relevant any more, Francis.

No-one’s had a decent night’s sleep since the bombing started.”

He smiled. It was a dazzling smile, warm and utterly convincing. “I reckon you’re right,” he said. “Though there’s no need for Jacob to look after Tony from now on.

I can take care of me own son.”

“I don’t think so, Francis,” Eileen said as firmly as she could whilst under the influence of the smile. “Let’s leave the arrangement as it is, if you don’t mind. It means you can come and go whenever you please. I don’t want Tony left on his own under any circumstances, not with all these raids.

It’ll only be every other week when I’m on the late shift.”

“Anything you say, princess.”

He was, she thought wryly, like putty in her hands.

“Was the raid a bad one?” she enquired. “You can’t hear much in Dunnings’ basement.”

“George said Great Homer Street caught it really bad, and they got the Carlton Cinema in Moss Lane.”

Eileen shook her head. “I don’t see the point in bombing innocent civilians,” she said. “No-one expected the war would come so close to home.”

Francis had almost wished he was back in the safety of Alexandria during the raid. “Maybe it’ll stop soon. As you say, there’s no point.”

But the air-raids didn’t stop. As September wore on, the raids lasted longer and became more deadly. At first, it was London’s East End that got the brunt of Hitler’s wrath, and the poorest of the poor lost what pitiful few possessions they had, as tenements and entire communities were razed to the ground. But it seemed that no major port, no city, was to be spared the terrible carnage, as the Luftwaffe swept across the dark skies to deliver their nightly load of terror.

Incredibly, people actually became used to the eerie wail of the siren. It soon became a part of their lives. Some made for the public shelter, others for the Anderson shelter in the garden, or their own makeshift affairs—under the table or the stairs. There were those who completely ignored the warnings and stayed in their beds and boasted they could sleep through the worst raid, or carried on with what they were doing, determined not to let Hitler disrupt their lives.

No-one, however, got used to hearing the number of people who’d been killed the night before, or coming across an ominous gap in the street where houses had once been, where people had lived and loved, been happy or sad, and where, perhaps, they’d died.

On Merseyside, everyone was in a state of high dudgeon because the BBC made no mention of the suffering they endured. Their city was gradually being blown to pieces before their very eyes, the streets were blocked by rubble and many of the shops, factories and businesses had been forced to close. Central Station had been put out of action, along with the Mersey Underground.

T. J. Hughes, a major store, was bombed, and the world-famous Argyll Theatre in Birkenhead gutted by fire. The cathedral and many other churches, along with hospitals and old people’s homes, didn’t escape the random terror that dropped from the sky and even criminals weren’t spared when Walton Gaol was hit and I twenty-one prisoners killed, to add to the hundreds of Merseysiders already dead. The docks, the poor docks, the lifeblood of the city, were a particular target and bombed several times a night.

But no-one knew this except themselves; news bulletins merely referred to “attacks on the North West”. Scousers; didn’t begrudge the raids on London being fully reported but they would have liked recognition that it wasn’t the only city being bombed.

“Never mind,” they said stoically. “It can’t get any worse.

Chapter 4

The woman stood on the corner of pearl Street feeling as if I. her feet were glued to the pavement. She’d come so far, I hundreds of miles, yet she couldn’t bring herself to take I the last few steps home.

It was raining, not particularly heavy, but a steady penetrating drizzle that had soaked right through her coat during the walk from Marsh Lane station. She’d no idea what time it was; eight o’clock, perhaps nine, and felt weary, having spent the entire day changing trains, standing for most of the way in packed corridors.

The cul-de-sac looked narrower and shorter than she remembered it and the houses were jammed together as if they’d been forced down by a giant hand into a space far too small. It was something she’d never noticed when she lived there. On the other hand, the railway wall at the end of the street seemed taller than before. She’d never realised it was as high as the roofs and it looked rather oppressive, like the wall of a prison. The girls used to play ball against the wall when she was a child, though she rarely joined in. She was far too busy practising the piano. On the few occasions she did, everyone had been impressed by her ability to play with three balls, apparently forever, without dropping one.

In those days, steam trains had run beyond the wall, and the belching smoke used to cover the washing with little black smuts. Her father had written some years before to say the line had been electrified.

There was no moon that night. She’d already experienced the blackout, and during the journey had been concerned she wouldn’t be able to find her way in the pitch darkness. After all, it was twenty years since she’d left the street. But she needn’t have worried. An air-raid was in progress and everywhere was lit up as gaily as a carnival.

The long thin fingers of searchlights swept across the black sky, and every now and then flares fell like exploding stars and it was bright as daylight for a while. The flares were usually followed by the sound of an explosion, as a bomb was dropped by one of the planes which were occasionally caught in a probing searchlight. Barrage balloons glinted decoratively, like lights on a Christmas tree.

But the greatest illumination came from a fire, a great roaring fire, which was very close, somewhere on the docks, she guessed. She could hear crackling and was sure it must be a timber yard. The woman felt convinced she could even feel the heat from the dancing, twisting flames which leapt up into the sky, though it was probably her imagination, as perhaps was the pungent smell of burning.

The area where she stood actually looked quite pretty, the houses with their windows crisscrossed with sticky tape to prevent the glass from shattering, the wet roofs and cobbled streets, all sheathed in a glistening pink glow.

Chimneys puffed smoke which made lacy patterns against the fiery sky.

There was the sound of fire engines in the distance and of people shouting, though the area around Pearl Street was relatively quiet. There were voices coming from the public house by which she stood. She tried to remember what it was called and looked up at the sign when the name wouldn’t come to mind—the King’s Arms! Her father used to go there for a drink on Saturday nights. Perhaps he still did.

The woman regarded everything around her with a curious lack of emotion. Even when a bomb dropped close by she didn’t flinch, but remained, as still as a statue outside the pub, as if entirely unaware of the danger she was in. There was only one emotion the woman was capable of feeling at the moment, the same one which had kept her going throughout the last two years, and that was an implacable, all-consuming hatred of Adolf Hitler and every German who had ever lived.

She sighed, and picked a small suitcase up from beside her numb feet. It was time she went home. Even she was able to see she couldn’t stand there all night. A flare fell, closely followed by a bomb. It was stupid, if nothing else, to risk her life so near to home considering all she’d been through.

The woman crossed the street and knocked on the door of number 3. When no-one answered, she knocked again, and after a while, a voice shouted, “Coming!” She felt shocked when a very old man answered the door and wondered if she’d come to the wrong house. It wasn’t until she noticed the familiar dark-red wallpaper in the hall and the black and red linoleum, that she realised it was the right house after all, and this old man was her father.

“Hallo, Dad,” she said. “It’s Ruth. I’ve come home.”

The news flashed around Pearl Street the following morning; Ruth Singerman was back, though she wasn’t Singerman now, but had a horrible German surname, which her dad said she wasn’t to use, so she was going by her maiden name.

As was the custom, the neighbours started dropping in from early morning, out of both curiosity and a desire to offer a warm welcome to one of the street’s former residents.

Amongst those who’d known Ruth before, when she was very reserved and extraordinarily ladylike for Bootle, the general impression was that she hadn’t changed much. Of course, in the old days, Mr Singerman had spoiled her rotten, what with her mam dying when Ruth was born and her being an only child. Mind you, Jews always spoiled their children and Jacob Singerman, despite the fact he wasn’t one of those orthodox ones, was no exception to the rule. Now, Ruth seemed more reserved than ever, indeed rather cold and a mite unfriendly when people called.

As far as looks went, she was still as comely, not a bit like a Jewess with her ivory skin and long brownish-red hair still worn in plaits, though now the plaits were coiled in a bun on her remarkably unlined neck. She’d look even prettier if she smiled, which no-one had seen her do so far, but then, perhaps Ruth hadn’t had much to smile about over the last two years, they all decided sympathetically.

Everyone had heard the terrible rumours about the things Hitler was doing to the poor Jews.

Nothing had changed, Ruth marvelled. It wasn’t only the wallpaper and the oilcloth that were the same, but every stick of nineteenth-century furniture, every dish, every curtain. Her father even used the tablecloths she remembered; the brown chenille with the stringy fringe which was on all the time, and a cotton cloth with a blue border, so thin you could scarcely feel it, for when they ate. Even her bedroom was exactly as she’d left it, with the waxed lily in a glass case on the tallboy and the homemade patchwork cover on the bed. It was as if the house had been preserved as a shrine, though a shrine to what she had no idea.

Whenever people called, and they still kept coming although she’d been home for two days, her father fussily showed them into the parlour which resembled a museum, the uncomfortable chairs stuffed with horsehair, the ugly sideboard and old-fashioned piano with Lady’s fingers painted on the front. There was a hand-operated sewing machine on a small table in the corner. The parlour was even colder than the living room because there was never a fire lit and Ruth dreaded to think what the house would be like in winter. Her father seemed to have become a bit of a miser in his old age, measuring out the lumps of coke for the grate as if they were gold, and keeping the gas light so dim it was far more miserable than it need be with the nights drawing in.

Ruth was surprised at how irritating she found these economies, and even more surprised at the unexpected concern she felt for her bodily comforts. She’d been anticipating a return to the warm comfortable nest of her childhood. Instead, the house was cold and dark and, even worse, the food was meagre. There’d been mincemeat on a slice of dry bread for dinner yesterday, no dessert, and bread and margarine for tea. She wondered what sort of feast she’d be offered today.

So far, she hadn’t brought these matters up with her father. To do so, would create an intimacy she didn’t want. He would be upset and fuss around, apologising.

She wished to remain as distant as humanly possible, even though she could tell from the look in his fading, wistful eyes that he desperately longed for the resurgence of their old loving, demonstrative relationship. But that would never happen, Ruth thought resentfully. She would never be close to anyone again as long as she lived.