Three Women of Liverpool by Helen Forrester Read Free Book Online

of an eyelid did she show her own nervousness.
    The gunfire was heavy and the quick thump-thump of bombs hastily discharged was unnervingly close. From a table in the corner near the kitchen door came the piercing sweet sound of a mouth organ. Almost immediately a strong tenor voice joined in with the words, She’ll be comin’ round the mountain when she comes . There was a general roar of voices raised to sing what she would be wearing when she came, and Emmie tut-tutted to herself, as she dried dinner plates at record speed for the countess. What would Lady Mentmore think of suchnaughty words, worse than anything she had heard since she left school? Proper wicked little boys’ words they were. Through the open door, she glimpsed the men’s faces, red from exposure or yellow from too much confinement below decks. They glowed with pure mischief as they thought up new verses, each bawdier than the last. Doris gave the countess a watery smile and the countess unexpectedly chuckled.
    The canteen closed at midnight, but most people there stayed on until the All Clear sounded about one o’clock. The volunteers murmured that they hoped all the ferry boats had not been sunk. “You can’t walk on water,” one laughingly remarked. Doris hoped the trams out to Bootle would still be running, and Emmie, who could walk home, hoped fervently that she would not be accosted by thieves, because she had just been paid. She transferred her pay packet from her handbag to her coat pocket and checked that her hat pin was still under her lapel; too many petty thieves, either singly or in small gangs, haunted the ill-lit streets and she was always nervous.
    The light of the fires in the city made the shadows of the buildings still standing look even blacker than usual. She glanced at the sky. It was flushed in several directions and the smell of burning tobacco and smouldering rubber was thick in the air. Service vehicles of various kinds, with shaded headlamps, moved like dark ghosts. Except for two drunks helping each other along, there seemed to be no pedestrians. She began to run.

FRIDAY, 2nd MAY 1941

     

     
     
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    At half-past one on Friday morning, when Emmie let herself into her brother’s house, an overwhelming smell of soot greeted her, but when she had lit a candle in the hallway, she was thankful to see that everything looked much as usual. She went straight upstairs, undressed and crept thankfully into bed.
    At six o’clock the sound of Gwen’s alarm jerked her awake, and she heard Mari next door clamber out of her creaky bed. Yawning, she crawled out herself, poured water from her ewer into a hand-basin on the wash-stand and splashed her face with it.
    As she dried herself with a worn white towel, she whipped back the blackout curtains and saw a cheerful sun in a pale blue sky. Behind the houses across the back alley, the sky was flushed, but she argued hopefully to herself that it could be because the sun had not long risen. She hurried into an old cotton frock.
    In the living room, the curtains were already drawn back, and David Thomas was kneeling on the hearth rug, clearing the ashes and soot from the hearth. “’allo, la,” he greeted her amiably, between small, persistent coughs. “Proper mess, eh? Soon get t’ fire goin’, though.”
    Emmie agreed. Every srick of furniture was covered with a fine film of soot. It clung to the bronze Roman soldiers ornamenting each end of the high mantelpiece; it had coated the net curtains at the window and the fancywork runner across the middle of the table; even the four precious oranges in the fruit bowl on the sideboard were black. Gwen was going to be hard to live with today, she thought wryly.
    David gave a sudden enormous sneeze and little puffs of soot rose round him.
    Emmie clicked her tongue. “I’ll get the floor cloth and wipe down the table and chairs, so as we can have brekkie,” she said briskly. “Has the milk come?”
    “I haven’t looked.”
    Emmie went