The Girl From Penny Lane (20 page)

Kitty set off. The driveway down to the road was long and the hedges overgrown, but the gate swung smoothly enough on its hinges and she had the dog on her length of rope trotting beside her. She and the dog had shared the bread and cheese, which seemed to give Patch the idea that they were friends. Kitty, who had longed for a dog without any expectation of even knowing one, got enormous satisfaction from the dog’s mere presence and when, after walking at least two miles, they came to a neat grey farmhouse with geese strutting in the yard and a man with a full bucket in each hand crossing the road towards them she had no hesitation in hailing him.

‘Mister, I’ve come from the farm up the road a ways; Maldwyn’s in a spot o’ trouble . . .’

The man stopped walking and set his buckets down, then smiled at her. ‘Mornin’, lass. What you doin’ wi Maldwyn’s Patch, then?’

Kitty hadn’t realised she had been afraid of the sort of reception she might get until the man was so matter of fact and friendly. Then she had to fight to stop her voice wobbling as she told her story.

‘So me brother Johnny’s there now, an’ me an’ Patch come for ’elp,’ she ended. ‘We think ’e’s real badly, mister. ‘Is foot’s ’orrible, raw an’ ’orrible.’

The man picked up his buckets again and motioned her to open the gate. ‘Right, I got you,’ he said briskly. ‘Don’t take no notice of them old geese, just stay close. Get the missus I will, she wass a nurse before we wed.’ A young man in a worn cap and labouring clothes came out of the byre carrying a long pitchfork and Kitty’s new friend raised his voice to a bellow. ‘Eifion, get in the motor an’ go for a doctor; Maldwyn Efans ’as ’ad a nasty accident. Like to lose ’is foot, by the sound.’

The young man propped his pitchfork against a wall and turned away without a word; presently Kitty heard the roar of an engine and a motor car came round the corner of the building. The young man raised a hand to them, roared something in Welsh, and was gone up the drive. Kitty’s companion turned to her and stuck out a hand.

‘Dewi Jones,’ he said. ‘Bronwen’ll come . . . stay you here.’

‘I’m Kitty and me brother’s Johnny,’ Kitty supplied. ‘I’d best start back, mebbe.’

Dewi Jones shook his head.

‘No, wait on. I’ll fetch out the trap, see, and we’ll be at Maldwyn’s place in a trice.’

He disappeared into the farmhouse. Kitty sat down on the bench alongside the door and waited, with Patch sitting beside her, leaning against her knee. The geese, which had rushed forward as soon as they saw her but had retreated again when their master shouted at them, began sidling towards her once more, round bright eyes fixed on her face, big orange beaks agape with hisses.

But Kitty was no soft city-dweller, not now, not after three months of country living. Besides, she had Patch. She waited until the leading bird was no more than a foot away, then she leaned forward and slapped it decisively across the chops. The gander, thoroughly thrown off balance, weaved for a moment, then came on again, so Kitty mentally targeted the heart area and kicked out with both feet. She got it right in the middle of its soft, bulging breast with sufficient force to send it staggering, and counted the black bruise from its beak as nothing when the gander, after a long and doubtful look at her, suddenly turned tail and waddled off, taking his numerous wives with him.

‘There y’are, queen,’ Kitty told Patch, who was watching the geese retreat with great interest. ‘A clack over the bloody lug works wonders, whether it’s a feller or a goose!’

‘I told him to call for me when his ship comes in, and he said he would, and it’s this very evening,’ Lilac said, feeding a length of material expertly into the hungry maw of her machine and turning it to form the bottom of the sack. ‘So if you want to take a look at him, Bertha, now’s your chance!’

‘I bet ’e’s ’andsome,’ Bertha said wistfully, zipping round a completed sack and throwing it on to the pile. ‘You’re ever so pretty, chuck, the prettiest gal in the room.’

‘We’re all pretty,’ Lilac said. ‘And we’re all different. But Alan
is
handsome, only . . .’

‘Only what, chuck?’

Lilac shrugged and zipped her own sack out of the machine, snatching up another piece of material and feeding it in almost in the same movement. In the months which had elapsed since she had started here she had finally become as quick and expert as any other girl in the room and, when she thought about it, was proud of the fact.

‘Only I’m not sure I want to marry anyone, or even go steady with anyone! Believe it or not, Bertha, I like me bit of independence and anyway, I’ve only known Alan a couple of months.’

‘A couple of months!’ The girl on Lilac’s other side, a short, broad-faced girl with slavic cheekbones and slanting, dark eyes, laughed. ‘Why, that’s a lifetime for someone like our Bertha! You mek it sound like a couple of minutes, queen!’

‘Don’t tease, Lily,’ Lilac said. She had a special fondness for Lily, whose parentage – Liverpool mum and Chinese dad – always made her think of her friend Polly. ‘It isn’t long; not for me. I’d known Art O’Brien for years, not weeks . . . and I still couldn’t make up me mind to marry him!’

‘I t’ink it’s a pity you didn’t,’ Doreen muttered. Doreen was dark of hair and eye, bewitchingly pretty, and easily the most spiteful of the twenty-four girls in the sewing room. ‘Per’aps we’d of ’ad some peace if you’d gone on goin’ steady wi’ that O’Brien feller.’

‘There wasn’t any point, not if he wanted to marry and I didn’t,’ Lilac said. ‘Besides, we were just a couple of kids. It wasn’t a – a proper relationship, not like with Alan.’

‘’Cept you don’t want to marry Alan, either, by all accounts,’ Lily pointed out. Her machine whined and clattered slowly to a halt. Lily swore colourfully and reached for a new reel of the coarse brown thread. ‘Damn, it snapped. I reckon we lose more time re-threadin’ these bloody things . . .’

‘I might want to marry him,’ Lilac said defensively. ‘Anyway, I’m going down to London at Christmas to see me sister Nellie and the new baby. Perhaps I’ll make up me mind then.’

‘Aye, and when you see the lickle gal – what’s ’er name? Elizabeth, that’s it – you’ll see dere’s a’vantages to famblies.’

‘I know there are, Bertha,’ Lilac sighed. She still missed Nellie fiercely, though they wrote a couple of times a week and she rang the small house in Balham at least once a month. ‘I expect I’ll marry one of these days . . . I just wish . . .’

‘What, luv?’

‘Don’t arst ’er,’ Doreen cut in. ‘She’ll tell you all over again ’ow she can’t mek up ’er mind . . . jest don’t arst!’

The other girls laughed and Lilac, smiling ruefully, continued with her work. The nicest thing about making sacks and bags, she had concluded weeks back, was that they didn’t need a lot of concentration. You could let your mind wander where it willed whilst your hands and your body continued to feed the machine, see to it when it stuck, repair it when it failed and fetch it fresh material when it ran out. All in all, apart from the fact that you were run off your feet half the time and standing all day, it wasn’t such a bad job.

‘Want more material, Lilac?’

Stubby the warehouseman, only he should rightly have been called a warehouselad since he was no more than five foot tall and only in his teens, came thundering into the room, arms full of sacking. Everyone knew he was sweet on Lilac so there were covert grins, but Lilac just smiled and said she could do with a yard or two, and after he’d left relapsed into her thoughts once again.

Christmas wasn’t very far off. Another ten days and it would be upon them. Alan would be home for a couple of days but she wouldn’t be able to see him since she was going down to London to visit Nell and Stuart. And Elizabeth, of course. Nellie’s letters were full to bursting of Elizabeth, telling Lilac the exact colour of her hair, the brightness of her eyes, the way she smiled.

She would miss Alan, of course. Christmas was a time for friendship, for being with the people you love . . .

Art. She’d not seen hide nor hair of him since that stupid, worrying quarrel. She hadn’t
meant
any of the things she’d said and she was sure he hadn’t meant the things he’d said, either. Only . . . bad and silly things had got said, feelings had been hurt . . . she’d gone back to the Court a couple of weeks ago, but though she’d seen Mrs O’Brien she hadn’t liked to ask. The old devil had looked so sly, like a cat with the cream.

Christmas was a time for making up. She couldn’t remember who had said that, but she was sure someone had. So why not make up with Art? Oh, she was going out with Alan, some people might even say she was going steady, but this wasn’t about that sort of thing at all, this was about friendship, about love, not about . . .

Love? Did you say love? Oh, but I didn’t mean
that
kind of love, Lilac reminded herself hastily, I meant the comfortable sort of love your have for a feller you’ve known all your life, the feeling that you want to be with him, that nothing you say or do can be wrong, that, together, you could go anywhere, do anything.

Lilac’s machine coughed, grunted, stopped. Lilac stared into space. Love? What
was
love, exactly? Wasn’t it the exciting, fizzing sort of feeling you got when a handsome young man paid you compliments, taught you to dance the Charleston, kissed you in the queue to get into the Gaiety cinema on Scotland Road or squeezed you in the back-row doubles at the Smithdown Picture Playhouse? Yes, that was love; it had to be, it was what all the girls talked about, dreamed about – wasn’t it?

‘Li, yon bugger’s stopped! Wake up, queen!’

Hastily, Lilac took the crumpled piece of material out of her machine, straightened it, rethreaded the needle and set it going again.

So if she was right and that was love, what was this dull, gnawing ache? Was it because some part of her simply needed to see Art, to be forgiven by him, to hear his voice?

‘Lilac Larkin, that last bloody sack’s got no neck, you’ve sewed clean acrost it! Oh my lor’, the gairl’s asleep an’ dreamin’ so she is!’

Lilac frowned and took the sack Mrs Loose was holding out to her. She saw, guiltily, that she had indeed sewn round all four sides. She held it up, then slung it onto the floor at her feet.

‘I’ll unpick it,’ she said wearily, words she had not had to use for weeks and weeks. ‘Sorry, Mrs Loose, it won’t happen again.’

She could go purposefully into Deacon’s Bank, not just wander in and out as she had done half-a-dozen times over the past weeks. She could go in and ask for Art O’Brien, get his address, go over to Birkenhead and see him, tell him she was awful sorry and would he please be friends again?

With the thought, an enormous rush of warmth and comfort engulfed her. The ache, which had been so persistent lately that it had become almost a part of her, miraculously lessened. She zipped the latest length of material into her machine, watched it as it became a sack, zipped it out and threw it on the pile. What a fool she’d been, standing on her dignity, telling herself that it didn’t really matter, that if Art cared he’d come to her, not wait for her to come to him. Now that her mind was made up, now that she had decided she would go to any lengths, she felt quite different – warm, hopeful, cheerful even.

It no longer worried her that Art might think less of her for the gesture. Christmas is a time for forgiveness, she reminded herself. I’ll take him a present, tell him about Nellie’s baby, ask him if he’d like to come down to London with me to see the Gallaghers!

Christmas, which had seemed only moments ago to be rather a hollow mockery, was suddenly decked with bells and bright with holly.

On the Saturday before Christmas, Lilac put on her nicest dress, a fashionable blue shift with a lace collar, and her best silk stockings. She wore her new black court shoes and her camel-hair coat with the black astrakhan collar and cuffs. She had the sweetest hat, also made of black astrakhan, which perched on her newly cut hair and made her look very fetching indeed.

‘Miss Dashing Twenties herself!’ another lodger remarked as she met Lilac on the stairs. ‘Who are you off to impress, Miss Larkin?’

‘An old friend who won’t be a bit impressed, Miss Dodman,’ Lilac told her. ‘Old friends don’t care much about clothes, but I want to look as if I’ve tried.’

‘Old man friend or old lady friend?’ Miss Dodman said with a twinkle. She was in her thirties and therefore, to Lilac, old as the hills, but she was smart, friendly and efficient. She worked in the big library on William Brown Street and she and Lilac often chatted in the kitchen or waiting outside the one bathroom. Miss Dodman frequently told Lilac that with her looks and education she could do better for herself than a factory job. Lilac was sure she was right, but reluctant to chance her luck – unemployment was still rife and a good few of her friends were out of work. So she decided she would ride out the bad times in the factory since no matter what else went by the board, it seemed that sacks and bags would always be needed. She would try for a different, more interesting job when things began to look up.

‘Man, actually,’ Lilac said. ‘See you later, Miss Dodman.’

‘Good luck,’ Miss Dodman called as Lilac ran swiftly down the rest of the stairs and across the narrow hall. ‘Have a nice day, dear.’

Lilac, making her way down Lord Nelson Street, smiled at the well-muffled passers-by, and enjoyed the sting of the cold on her cheeks, for despite the sunshine it was an extremely cold day. She turned left into Lime Street, scarcely giving the station more than a passing glance as she did so. Next week she would be catching a train from Lime Street to go to Nellie and Stu, to meet her adopted niece for the first time, to see the house in Balham, the park where Nellie walked, the trams and trains and theatres, cinemas and dance halls, all the excitements of the capital city. Yet none of it thrilled her as the prospect of meeting Art again did; she could have danced every step of the way to the ferry, except that a tram heading for the pierhead drew up beside her and it seemed downright daft not to jump aboard, climb the stair and sit on the upper deck with the wind making her eyes run whilst the sun warmed her nose into rosiness. From her lofty perch she saw Liverpool go by, the crowds shopping, the windows dressed for the holiday. At the pierhead she got down and went over to the quayside. A ferry was steaming in, people aboard lining the rail. They would be coming over for Christmas shopping – what a day they had for it, too! A pale blue sky, the brilliance of a wintry sun, the city clear of fog and sparkling like a diamond in the chilly, exhilarating salt wind. But she wouldn’t change places with the shoppers, not for a million pounds she wouldn’t – she was going to see Art and tell him she was sorry!