The Liverpool Rose (2 page)

Lizzie sidled in through the door, scuffing her feet in the thick sawdust and wrinkling her nose at the smell of blood. It would have been easier to have obtained some bones, she knew, had she been buying meat of some sort as well, but it was clear from the small amount in her pocket that Aunt Annie was a trifle short this week. However, if she could just make sure it was Joe who served her and not Mrs Staunton, she might be lucky.

The fat shawl-clad woman in front of her took a newspaper-wrapped parcel of chops off the battered wooden counter and turned to leave and Lizzie allowed another woman to take her place, pretending she had dropped a coin into the sawdust at her feet, until Mrs Staunton was safely engaged with the new customer. Then she gave Joe her most engaging grin. ‘Gorrany bacon bits, Joe? Six penn’orth would be grand,’ she hissed, pulling her money out of her skirt pocket. ‘And – and a marrer bone or two, for stock?’

Joe turned away, saying over his shoulder: ‘I’ll pick
you out some nice ones, chuck,’ as he made his way into the back, presently returning with an untidy parcel which clearly contained more than six penn’orth of bacon bits. Neither Lizzie nor Joe made any comment, however, she merely giving him a grateful smile as she handed over the cash.

Leaving the shop with the canvas bag a good deal heavier than it had been, Lizzie felt well satisfied with her first purchase. She did not know what proportion of the parcel was bacon bits and what marrow bones, but knew that Joe would not cheat her. The parcel would probably prove to contain a good deal more than six penn’orth, however it was made up.

Humming a tune beneath her breath, Lizzie sauntered along Juvenal Street, turning left when she reached Cazneau. She kept to the left-hand pavement for the right-hand one was bounded by the back of the market and offered no diversion in the way of shop windows. Presently she crossed the road and dived down Great Nelson Street, turning into the market and beginning to examine the fruit and vegetables displayed on the stalls on either hand.

Lizzie, along with most other Liverpool children, loved the market. The delicious smell of fruit and vegetables and the rich repartee in which the stallholders indulged were enough to keep her happy for a whole morning, but since she had sensibly bought the two penn’orth of potatoes and carrots first, she decided that she would have to get a move on or by the time she reached home her arms would have stretched until her fingers grazed her ankles. Chuckling at the thought of how absurd she would look with arms like a chimpanzee’s, she bought a couple of pounds of peas and some onions from a fresh-faced country woman, graciously accepted a
bruised but perfectly eatable orange from the stallholder and set off for home. When she reached Scotland Road, she stood her canvas bag down for a moment and squatted on the pavement beside it, peeling and eating her orange. She half wished she had let Sally come along, since they could have shared the orange, but on the other hand, the delights of a whole fruit rarely came her way and Sally, she knew, had oranges whenever she fancied them. The joys of being an only child were considerable, Lizzie thought, remembering the first seven years of her own life when her mam and dad had spoiled and petted their little daughter. Still, Lizzie knew she was lucky to have Aunt Annie; but for her mother’s sister taking her in, she would have ended up in one of the many orphans’ homes in Liverpool, just a number amongst other numbers, kept from the streets and the warm and bustling life which she so loved, confined to an ugly uniform, short walks through the streets in a supervised crocodile, and with no choice but to obey the adults who had her in charge.

Lizzie finished the orange, spitting the pips into the palm of her hand and shoving them into the stained pocket of her skirt. Once, long ago, her father’s family had farmed on the Wirral in Cheshire and her mother had often teased her for her love of growing things. There was little enough soil to be found in the courts off Burlington Street, but whenever Lizzie could scrape together enough to fill an empty conny-onny tin, she would plant something in it. As a result, Aunt Annie’s front parlour had a window sill crowded with strange plants, of which her aunt was rather proud, though it was Lizzie who watered them, turned them daily so that they grew straight and did not lean towards the light, and generally fussed over
them. If I could grow an orange tree, Lizzie thought longingly, perhaps I could be like Sally and have an orange whenever I fancied one. She fingered the orange pips; there were five. Imagine five orange trees flourishing in Aunt Annie’s front parlour, their fruit as brightly glowing as any sun!

Smiling at her own fancies, Lizzie got to her feet and heaved at the canvas bag once more. It was dreadfully heavy, and dreadfully awkward too so that when she tried to take two hands to it, it made walking forward impossible, banging into her legs and forcing her to change its weight from hand to hand and even, at one point, to tow it along the pavement like a recalcitrant dog which simply sits down whilst its owner heaves on its lead.

She was engaged in this undignified pastime when she noticed the boys. By now she had reached Burlington Street, and ahead of her three husky boys were kicking a round stone or ball of some kind along the pavement, passing it from one to the other and considerably inconveniencing the passers-by. Lizzie hesitated; she had no particular desire to get her ankles or her canvas bag kicked, either by mistake or on purpose, and she knew a good deal more than she liked about the horseplay indulged in by her cousins. From the look of them, the boys ahead were in the sort of mood to enjoy either teasing her or, should she get in their way, simply trampling her underfoot. What was more, despite the fact that they were nearing Cranberry Court, she did not think that the boys came from this neighbourhood. Certainly she had no recollection of ever having seen them before. So she loitered, continuing to pull the heavy bag along the pavement, albeit slowly.

All might have been well had not one of the boys
got a little ahead of the other two, dribbling the ball, which he then kicked hard in the direction of his companions. Too hard, as it turned out. Both boys dodged the missile and it shot past them and landed, with a painful crack, on Lizzie’s bare ankle.

Lizzie promptly forgot caution, her hard-earned knowledge of boys, and her desire to stay out of trouble. For a moment, she simply squeaked and tried to nurse her ankle, dropping the bag as she did so, but then a flood of invective rose to her lips and she told the boys what she thought of them, saying things which would have whitened her mother’s hair, had she been alive to hear them.

Oddly enough, this masterly reading of their characters did not seem to infuriate two of the three boys, but filled them with what looked rather like admiration. The tallest of them, a fair-haired boy, in ragged kecks and shirt, whistled. He wore a checked cap on the back of his head and boots which appeared to be several sizes too large for him. Lizzie saw that, despite his size, he was no more than fifteen or sixteen and his two companions probably a year or so younger. The boy nearest her, however, was scowling. He was dark and stocky, with eyebrows that met in the middle and a square, pugnacious chin. He came towards her, bending to pick up the ball and examining it as though he feared Lizzie’s ankle had done it no good. ‘What was you doing, acting as goalie, when no one so much as asked you to join in the game?’ he said aggressively, glaring at her. ‘You’d got no call to interfere with us, lerralone giving us a mouthful and using language a docker wouldn’t stoop to. Just who do you think you are?’

‘I were attacked, that’s who I am,’ Lizzie said ungrammatically. She glanced down at the vegetables
rolling around the pavement. ‘Look what you’ve done with your bleedin’ ball! Them’s me aunt’s veggies and that, what she’s been waiting for half the morning. You slowed me up anyway, ’cos I dare not try and pass you – you were taking up the whole perishin’ pavement between the three of you and now me aunt will think I’ve nicked a few fades from the vegetable market instead of buying good fresh stuff.’ She picked up a sorry-looking turnip, which had gathered a good deal of dust before coming to a halt in the gutter, and displayed its bruised and battered complexion to the scowling boy. ‘Look at that! No one would take that for a fresh turnip, not now.’

‘Well, you can’t have done them messages much good yourself, dragging that bag along the pavement as though there were coals in it,’ the scowling one remarked. ‘Why didn’t you carry the bag like a Christian? You ain’t done that much good, either,’ he finished, eyeing the dirty canvas bag disparagingly.

‘Oh, leave off, Geoff,’ the fair-haired boy said amicably. ‘Them’s a lot of messages for a bit of a girl to carry and that bleedin’ cricket ball is hard as a stone – you can still see the mark on her leg, so it must have hurt.’ He bent down and began to scoop vegetables back into the bag, and after a moment’s hesitation both his companions began to do likewise, although the scowling one did so with a bad grace. Lizzie, meanwhile, sat herself down on the dusty pavement to examine her wound and saw that it was already turning blue and puffy and hurt horribly when she touched it.

When all the vegetables were back in the bag, she struggled to her feet, giving a gasp of pain as she put her weight on her right leg. She looked pathetically up at the tallest of the boys, saying tremulously: ‘I
think me leg must be broke. It hurts something terrible when I try to walk. Oh, oh, what’ll I do? Me Aunt Annie will tear the hair from me head if I don’t get these veggies home soon.’

The middle-sized boy, the one who had not yet spoken, bent and seized the canvas bag. ‘Where d’you live, queen?’ he asked gruffly. ‘I’ll carry your messages home for you, seeing as it was me what dodged out of the way of the ball. I should of stopped it, but it were coming so bleedin’ fast . . .’

The tall boy gave an exaggerated sigh but shook his head. ‘No, Tom, let our Geoff carry the bag, then you and me, being almost of a height, can make a chair and get the young ’un indoors.’

This was going a good deal further than Lizzie thought desirable, for though her leg certainly did hurt, she was well aware that it was merely bruised and not broken in the slightest. Besides, she had no desire for the boys to walk into the house and tell Aunt Annie how she had been dragging the messages along the pavement. What was more, if Uncle Perce were home, there would almost certainly be trouble. Her uncle was a strange man, pleasant enough when sober, but a raging devil when he had drink in him. Many a time Lizzie had hidden beneath the blankets on her little truckle bed while, in the room below, her aunt and uncle shrieked and fought until one or other of them triumphed.

Accordingly, as the boys bore down upon her, she said, affecting an air of wonder: ‘Well now, if that ain’t the strangest thing! The pain’s ebbing fast – I do declare, I believe I
can
walk after all.’

All three boys grinned, Geoff with the infuriating air of one who’d known she was lying all along. ‘Well, if you ain’t going to carry the girl, Sid, then I’m
damned if I’ll lug her bleedin’ bag all the way to – to wherever she lives,’ he said truculently. Lizzie thought, balefully, that Geoff would probably grow up to be like her Uncle Perce, or possibly worse, since the feller seemed to be in a perpetual bad temper, even when sober as a judge.

Geoff dumped the bag on the pavement but it appeared that Sid, as the eldest of the three, held considerable sway over them, for without losing his smile he said in a quiet but dangerous voice: ‘You’ll do as I say, young ’un. You’ll tek the lady’s bag wherever she wants you to tek it, do you hear me? Sid Ryder’s the boss and what I says goes, remember?’

Lizzie waited for Geoff to object, or even to storm off in a temper, but instead he bent and hefted her bag once more, though she distinctly heard him mutter as he did so: ‘Lady? I don’t see no lady, only a bleedin’ little kid what hasn’t had a wash for a week by the looks of her.’

Lizzie considered replying sharply, but decided against it. The bag was heavy and although her leg was only bruised it would not be improved by having to bear the weight of her shopping as well as that of her own small person. So she pretended she had not heard the remark and limped ahead of Geoff while the two older boys disappeared out of sight amongst the hurrying Saturday crowds.

Although Lizzie had not noticed her, Chinky, as she was always known, had been an interested observer of the whole scene from her position ten yards behind the boys. She often followed them around though they seemed totally unaware of her, as indeed she meant them to be. She followed them for a good reason: when he was in the money, Sid occasionally
handed out the odd ha’penny to any child who was down on their luck and by a dint of crossing his path every now and then, she had managed to become the temporary owner of several ha’pennies.

Chinky was a pathetic scrap of humanity, the unlovely result of a brief union between a Chinese seaman and what the more respectable women of the courts called ‘a part-time prozzie’. Chinky’s mam, whom she scarcely remembered, had gone off with some feller when she had been no more than four, leaving her little daughter to the untender mercies of a neighbour, already cursed with eleven kids of her own and neither time nor patience for an extra mouth to feed. When she was seven, Chinky had heard Aunt Lily, as she had been taught to call her foster mother, telling a friend that she meant to dump Chinky in one of the orphan asylums which abounded in the city. She knew little enough about orphanages, but had a shrewd idea that she would not enjoy such a restricted life. Accordingly, she had taken herself off very early each morning, never going home – if you could call it home – until late at night when the reluctant foster mother and her family were already in bed. She lived on any scraps she could pick up from Aunt Lily’s pantry, but mostly she fed herself, wheedling bits of food from stallholders and shopkeepers, good-hearted publicans, or the men who always saved some of their carry-out for the street kids who clustered around them when the factory gates opened to spew them into the street at the end of their working day.