Lights Out Liverpool (33 page)

‘We haven’t done anything, I swear,’ she protested vainly. They’d been out together once, to the pictures, where Nick merely put his arm around her and kissed her when he took her home. Eileen was slightly scared by her feelings for Nick, and not a little bewildered. She held herself at a discreet distance, not ready yet for anything deeper.

‘Come off it, Eileen,’ Doris hooted. She turned to the girls. ‘You should see him! He could’ve had
my
keks off in the first five minutes.’

One day, Eileen decided to turn the tables on her tormentor. ‘You’re all talk, Doris,’ she said scathingly. ‘I bet five bob you’re a virgin, and you’ll still be one the day you get married.’

Doris pretended to look offended. ‘How dare you call me a virgin! What a terrible thing to say. A woman with my experience!’

‘Describe what a man’s thingy looks like, and we might believe you,’ Theresa screamed.

Doris began to describe a man’s thingy in gory detail. ‘It’s about six inches long and covered in hairs …’

‘No, it’s not!’

Alfie came into the workshop just then, and Carmel shouted, ‘Show Doris your thingy, Alfie. She’s got the description all wrong,’ and Alfie promptly turned tail and departed.

By now, Eileen was doubled up with laughter over the lathe. ‘Youse lot!’ she gasped. ‘I’m really glad I came to work here. It’s better than a finishing school.’

At two o’clock, when she got on the bus to go home, Pauline remarked, ‘You look smart. Are you off to meet your feller?’

Eileen was wearing her navy-blue coat and beret, and had doused herself with Chanel scent to hide the unpleasant smell of the cooling liquid. ‘I’m going with one of me neighbours to the Public Assistance,’ she told Pauline. ‘She’s too scared to go by herself.’

At Annie’s instigation, Rosie Gregson had applied for a supplementary allowance from the army, but the army didn’t consider themselves obliged to pay until the child was born and Rosie had received a letter ordering her to attend the Public Assistance office at half past three that afternoon. As Annie would be working, she’d asked
Eileen
to go along. Poor Rosie was petrified.

Rosie was waiting by North Park when Eileen alighted from the bus. She was a tall, almost unbearably thin girl with a long mournful face and pale grey eyes. Her four-month pregnancy was scarcely noticeable beneath her shabby coat.

‘Rosie! Are they the best shoes you could find?’ Eileen remarked, when she noticed the gaping holes between top and sole of the thin patent leather court shoes. They were entirely unsuitable for the arctic conditions which still persisted. In fact, there’d been a heavy snowfall the night before, and although the snow had vanished from the pavements, the surface was wet and slushy.

‘They’re the only ones I’ve got,’ whispered Rosie. Her voice rarely rose above a whisper.

‘What size do you take?’

‘A six.’

‘That’s a pity. I take fives, otherwise I’d have given you a pair. I usually throw mine away before they reach that state.’

The office was situated in a large house in a wide pleasant road lined with bare trees. Eileen and Rosie were shown almost immediately into a high ceilinged room where three people sat behind a long table – two men and a woman in a tweed hat with a fox fur around her shoulders – a pile of papers in front of each. A chair had been placed in the middle of the room facing the table.

The man sitting at the centre of the three looked up. He was about fifty, his expansive form clothed in a black pin-striped suit.

‘Mrs Gregson?’

Eileen pushed Rosie forward.

‘I’m Mr Molyneux, Chairman of the panel. Please sit down.’ He nodded curtly towards the chair, then
turned
to Eileen. ‘And who are you?’

‘A friend. I’ve come with her.’

‘I can see that, but I’m not sure if I can allow you to stay. I think it might be preferable if you remained in the waiting room.’

Eileen’s hackles rose immediately. ‘Well, I think it would be preferable if I remained here. That’s what you want, isn’t it, Rosie?’

Rosie, hunched petrified in her chair, nodded weakly.

‘Does the panel agree?’ Mr Molyneux looked down at his colleagues. The woman glanced at the papers in front of her through a pair of lorgnettes, as if she expected to find her response printed there.

‘I don’t see that it would do any harm,’ she said in a strangulated voice.

The other man looked like a tortoise with a high starched collar into which his entire head seemed to shrink. His chin emerged from the circle of white and he muttered in a squeaky voice, ‘I have no objection.’

Eileen noticed a row of chairs lined up against the wall. She dragged one forward and plonked it firmly next to Rosie.

Mr Molyneux immediately took charge of the proceedings and began to question Rosie closely. How much rent did she pay? What did she spend on food? On clothes? On fuel?

Determined not to interrupt unless it became absolutely necessary, Eileen let the girl give her own stuttering replies. Even when the Chairman demanded to know what sort of soap she used and if she spent money on powder and lipstick, Eileen gritted her teeth and said nothing.

After a slight pause in the proceedings, the woman on the panel asked Rosie how long she’d been pregnant.

‘Nearly four months,’ the girl whispered.

‘Mmm!’ The woman raised her lorgnettes and studied her papers. ‘Your husband, I take it, was home on leave in September?’

The insinuation was obvious. Eileen could hold her tongue no longer. The woman, who talked as if she had a plum in her gob, was suggesting someone else might have fathered Rosie’s child.

‘How dare you!’ she gasped. ‘What right have you got to say such a thing?’

Mr Molyneux gestured impatiently. ‘Please let Mrs Gregson reply to the question.’

‘No!’ Eileen said fiercely to Rosie. ‘Don’t answer, luv. They wouldn’t ask such a question if they had decent manners.’ She turned on the woman and in an angry voice demanded, ‘Would you like it if someone asked if you’d had it off with another man?’

‘Please!’ The Chairman raised his hands in an effort to calm the situation.

‘As I see it,’ said a squeaky voice and the little man, who had remained silent so far, popped his head out of his collar, ‘Mrs Gregson is here because she cannot live on seventeen and sixpence a week, plus the seven shillings she gets off her husband, which is scarcely surprising. Once her baby is born, she will get a further five shillings off the army. I propose we allow her that five shillings in the meantime.’ He smiled benignly on Rosie. ‘Have you had your special green ration book, dear? There’s extra rations for expectant mothers.’

Rosie nodded numbly, wondering what all the fuss had been about.

‘I go along with that,’ the Chairman said in a relieved voice. ‘How about you, Mrs Woodhouse?’

The woman looked aggrieved. Sniffing audibly, she
adjusted
her fur, and suggested Private Gregson contribute towards the five shillings, but even the Chairman looked perturbed at the idea. Before Eileen could open her mouth to express her outrage, he said reasonably, ‘My dear lady, he is already left with a mere shilling a day.’

‘Not much to pay a man willing to die for his country,’ the other man remarked with squeaky sarcasm.

Rosie was told she would receive an official letter confirming the five-shilling allowance, and the two women left. As they walked down the path, Eileen had already begun a tirade against officialdom in general and the panel they’d just confronted in particular, when a squeaky voice shouted, ‘I say!’ and they turned to find the little man hurrying towards them. He thrust a pound note into Rosie’s hand. ‘Do me a favour, dear. Buy yourself a pair of stout shoes on the way home.’

‘Oh, well,’ Eileen said grudgingly. ‘I suppose they’re not all bad.’

It was snowing again when Jessica Fleming and Jacob Singerman arrived at St Catherine’s Dock and found the troopship on which they were due to take part in a concert had already sailed.

‘I’m terribly sorry.’ Colin Evans, the concert organiser hurried towards them. ‘Last minute orders from on high, I’m afraid. They were local men, the Royal Tank Regiment, on their way to Egypt, though they left a day earlier than expected.’

Jacob felt bitterly disappointed. He and Jess had ready an entire new repertoire of popular songs which they’d been rehearsing for days;
Wish Me Luck as You Wave Me Goodbye, The White Cliffs of Dover, There’s a Boy Coming Home on Leave
, and as a finale, the song
everybody
loved,
We’ll Meet Again
.

‘Oh, well, never mind,’ he sighed, ‘though I was really looking forward to it.’

‘We’ve another concert on Saturday,’ Jessica said soothingly, thinking Eileen Costello would be relieved that Francis had left the country.

‘Can I give you a lift home? It’s the least I can do,’ Colin offered, noticing the way the old man was shivering in his thin overcoat.

They both accepted gratefully. On the way, Colin told them that the Entertainments National Service Organisation, known as ENSA, was becoming more organised. The Government had begun to realise the importance of concerts to the morale of the troops and the workers, and was gradually taking the organisation under its control.

‘There’s even a suggestion entertainers won’t be called up,’ he chuckled.

‘That’s a worry off my mind,’ Jacob remarked dryly.

‘Pretty soon, I’ll be in a position to send a car to collect you and take you home.’

After they’d been deposited outside the King’s Arms, Jacob said, ‘I think I’ll have an early night. Sometimes, I forget I’m an old man who needs his rest.’

‘We all forget that, Jacob,’ Jessica said warmly. She’d become fond of Jacob Singerman over the last few weeks. Despite his apparent frailty, he had the energy of a man half his age. It was depression that laid him low from time to time, but never low enough not to turn out for one of the concerts which they took part in two or three times a week.

They said goodnight and Jessica went indoors. She sat listening to her neighbour as he pottered around in the kitchen, then heard him climb the stairs to bed. The Welsh people on the other side were quiet for a change,
though
there’d be the usual ructions later on when Dai came home drunk. Jessica decided to have a bath. Arthur was in the King’s Arms and wouldn’t be home until ten o’clock.

She spread a newspaper on the floor in front of the fire and fetched the long tin bath which was hanging on a hook in the yard. The bath was covered in snow and she gave it a thump. The snow fell off, but a rim of ice remained. As she began to fill the tub with pails of hot water from the kitchen, she sighed, remembering the blue and cream bathroom in Calderstones. Still, things hadn’t turned out all that bad. In fact, she was having quite an enjoyable time, perhaps better than she would have had in the WVS with her old acquaintances, though she remained determined to get away from Bootle, no matter how long it took.

When the bath was full enough, she sprinkled in the last of her bath salts and wondered if she could afford more. Not that brand, for sure. Maybe they sold bath salts in Woolworths.

She folded a towel over the edge of the bath to rest her head on, removed her clothes and sank gratefully into the steaming water. She smiled, imagining what those old acquaintances would think if they could see Jessica Fleming lying in a tin bath in front of the fire in Pearl Street! What’s more, she bathed only once a week nowadays, instead of daily. No wonder the poor were accused of being dirty, she thought indignantly, when they had to go through all this palaver to keep clean.

Jessica began to hum as she soaped her body, raising one long shapely white leg, then the other. An unexpected thought came to her as she washed her full, still firm breasts.
What a shame!

What a shame that no-one touched them nowadays except herself!

She and Arthur still slept apart, and although she was happier nowadays, more content, she couldn’t for the life of her imagine them coming together again, not in
that
way. Yet, the strange thing was, she found Arthur more attractive than she’d done for a long time. As if not wanting to stand out amongst his new friends, his ‘mates’ as he called them, he’d actually acquired a flat cap. Often, he went out without a collar and tie. His silk suits and shirts remained unworn in the wardrobe. And instead of Jessica feeling disgusted, Arthur actually became more desirable in her eyes. But even so, as she lay in bed at night, longing to go to him, to slip into his arms, something held her back. ‘
He
should come to
me
,’ she told herself.

Arthur still surprised her. He’d actually offered to instal the electricity she so desired and Jack Doyle, who’d wired his own home, was helping. Jessica glanced at the wall beside the door where a little channel had been dug ready for the wiring. There was a newspaper on the sideboard, the
Daily Herald
, which Jack must have left behind that morning. Due to the appalling weather, the men had been laid off the docks and he’d come around, ‘To get on with a bit,’ as he put it, after Arthur left for work.

Jessica found herself even more disturbed by Jack than by Arthur. She couldn’t take her eyes off the rippling muscles in his bulging arms as he chipped away at the wall. They said little to each other. Jack Doyle had always been a taciturn man, almost churlish. Even when she made him a cup of tea, he scarcely spoke. She wondered what he’d say if she told him she’d once been in love with him? Die of embarrassment, she thought with a little smile.

The water was beginning to cool, which was a shame, because she was enjoying daydreaming in front of the fire. She got to her feet, and was standing in the bath when the key sounded in the front door.

Arthur!

She glanced around for her dressing gown and realised she’d forgotten to bring it down. In a panic, she reached for the towel and knocked it in the water. She was about to grab the tablecloth, when she realised this was the chance she’d been waiting for, the chance to get Arthur back. He couldn’t resist, surely he couldn’t resist, if he found her naked and waiting. She could hardly breathe at the thought.