The Girl From Barefoot House (3 page)

‘We did games this avvy, and Catechism this morning,’ Josie said importantly. ‘Did you know the Pope cannot err? What does err mean, Rose?’

Rose shrugged. ‘Dunno, luv. I’m a downright eejit, me. I can’t even read proper.’

‘Honest? Me mam reads books all the time, big thick ones,’ Josie bragged. ‘She gets ’em from the library.’

‘Oh, we all know how clever Lady Muck is.’ Rose sniffed and looked annoyed. She went on, a touch of spite in her voice, ‘But she weren’t clever enough to check if her chap was wearing a johnny, were she?
I
always do. The chaps hate using ’em, and only an eejit would take them at their word. Now look where it’s landed her.’

‘Where’s that, Rose?’

‘Up shit creek without a paddle, that’s where.’

Josie was about to ask if shit creek was anywhere near the Pier Head when an agonised scream came from upstairs.

‘Mam!’ Josie would have recognised the sound anywhere. In her panic, she dropped a custard cream in the half-drunk tea, and almost fell in her rush towards the door.

‘Wait a minute, luv,’ Rose leapt to her feet. ‘Oh, dear God. I should’ve locked the effin’ door,’ she groaned.

At first, Josie couldn’t make out what was happening when she burst into the attic room, half expecting to find Mam being murdered and ready to defend her with her life. The terrifying scene that met her was possibly worse. The bed had been covered with a black rubber sheet on which her mother lay, legs bent and wide apart. Between them was a pool of dark red blood. Mam, her teeth bared and the whites of her eyes glinting madly, was struggling to escape from Maude, who had her pinned down by the shoulders. A strange old woman was crouched at the foot of the bed. She got to her feet as Josie rushed in.

‘That should do it,’ the woman said, and at the same time Mam shrieked, ‘Get our Josie out of here.’

‘I’ll get her.’ Rose arrived, breathless. ‘Come on, luv.’

But a terrified Josie dodged the grasping arms. She slithered past Maude and threw herself on top of her mother who screamed again. Both began to sob loudly.

The old woman, oblivious to the commotion, said in a hoarse voice, ‘That’ll be a quid.’

‘You should’a been a butcher, Gertie,’ Maude said tersely, releasing Mam, who made no attempt to escape, but fell back on to the bed, still sobbing. ‘I hope that instrument o’ yours was sterilised.’

Gertie ignored her. ‘I’d like me rubber sheet back if you don’t mind. I’ll wash it meself at home. Oh, and you’d better get the girl some Aspro. She’s likely to hurt for a couple of days.’

Mam did more than hurt – she caught an infection. Her temperature soared, she tossed and turned, moaned in her sleep and said things that Josie couldn’t make sense of.

‘Don’t touch me, else I’ll tell our Ivy,’ she would wail hysterically. Or, ‘If me sister finds out, it’ll break her heart.’

It was like a nightmare, Josie thought during the night as she cuddled against the hot, damp body, made worse when the air-raid siren went several times. Its unearthly wail sent shivers up and down her spine. The drone of German planes sounded in the distance, and she held her breath, praying they wouldn’t get closer. Maude said bombs had dropped on Birkenhead and Wallasey. Five people had been killed.

For eight whole days, Mam stayed in bed, only getting up to use the po, which was ‘like a hot knife being stuck
in me guts’, she said tearfully to Maude. Josie flatly refused to leave her side for more than a few minutes. She sat on the bed, making little soothing noises and gently stroking the burning cheeks.

‘I don’t know what I’d do without you, Petal,’ Mam said when she was lucid. Several times a day she would ask, ‘Would you mind taking that little glass and nipping downstairs to ask Maude for a sup of whisky? It’s the only thing that helps with the pain.’

‘She’s drinking more than ever,’ Maude said worriedly one day, after inviting Josie into her horribly smelly room – according to Mam, Maude had yet to discover the virtues of soap and water. Yesterday’s make-up smudged her anxious, good-natured face, and she wore the filthy dressing-gown with both pockets hanging off that she wore all day. Because she hadn’t combed her hair, the bald patch was more noticeable than usual. ‘I thought she’d vowed to give it up.’

Josie tut-tutted and shook her head, very grown up. ‘She vows that nearly every day, Maude.’

‘She’s been doing it for years.’ Maude grimaced and waved her cigarette. ‘It’s me own fault. I was the one that got her started. I mean, you can’t sit in the ale house half the night and only sup lemonade. And your mam’s far too respectable to walk the streets. At least with a pub you know exactly who you’re getting. But I never thought she’d take to the drink like a duck takes to water.’

‘Maude?’ Josie was still puzzled by the scene she had encountered the day she came home early from school. There was a question she had been dying to ask for days.

‘What, luv?’ Maude said absently.

‘Was that old woman trying to kill me mam?’

Maude looked grave and didn’t answer for a while.
Then she said, ‘No, luv. She wasn’t trying to kill her. She was taking something away that your mam didn’t want, like lancing a boil, sort o’ thing.’ She patted Josie’s head affectionately as she poured whisky into the glass. ‘Take this up to her. By the way, luv, have you had anything to eat today?’

Josie’s stomach had been rumbling for hours. Mam seemed to have forgotten about food. ‘Not yet.’

‘Tch, tch.’ Maude shook her head. ‘I’ll make you a brawn and piccalili sarnie. That should fill the hole for now.’

Mam got better, but for a long while her legs felt like ‘a rusty pair of scissors’ and her movements were stiff and painful. Walking as far as Princes Park or the Pier Head was out of the question. She preferred to rest, get her strength back, though she went to the pub at night, always bringing back a visitor, because she had no choice, her purse being completely empty.

Josie offered the one and sevenpence halfpenny out of the cocoa tin. Mam burst into tears and said she was very kind, but it wouldn’t last five minutes.

During the long holiday, on sunny days, rather than seek out the friends she’d made at school, Josie preferred to wander alone down to the Pier Head where she watched children armed with buckets and spades boarding the New Brighton ferry, huge families of them, accompanied by perspiring mams and a few dads. She envied the children’s carefree faces, their obvious gaiety, and on one brilliant August day, a thought she’d never had before wriggled its way into her head. Despite the heat, for some reason she felt cold as she began to wonder about the strangeness of her own existence. Why didn’t Mam have a husband?

Thinking about it now, for the first time, on this gloriously sunny afternoon, there seemed something very odd, not quite right, about the never-ending visitors and what they did while Josie was out of the room. She knew that Mam got undressed, and they lay on the bed together, making dead funny noises, and afterwards she was paid. Sometimes the visitors grumbled she’d already cost them a small fortune in ale, and Mam would reply sharply she wasn’t available for the price of a few drinks, thanks all the same. And since the old woman had lanced the boil, whatever the men did hurt badly. Mam was often in tears when Josie went back, and in need of a drink to ease the pain. There was whisky in the cupboard now instead of stout, and she would take a huge swig straight from the bottle and go to bed, forgetting all about their usual cocoa and jam butties.

In fact, Josie was hungry a lot of the time because Mam mostly forgot to buy food. If it hadn’t been for Maude, some days she wouldn’t have eaten at all.

There were children in her class at school who smelled much worse than Maude. Their bodies, their ragged clothes, were filthy. A few had no shoes, and some of the girls didn’t wear knickers. Even so, Josie would have bet that these children’s mams didn’t get undressed for strange men. It made her feel a little bit ashamed.

She rested her arms on the rail and watched the ferry on its way to New Brighton spewing a trail of white froth. The sun glinted blindingly on the green-grey waters of the Mersey, and her eyes began to run. There was no hankie up her sleeve, so she rubbed her cheeks with the hem of her frock, and it was only then she noticed how dirty it was. It hadn’t been washed since the day school finished, and in all that time she hadn’t changed her knickers and vest because there hadn’t been
any clean ones to put on. She only had one frock that fitted, and Mam had promised ages ago to get another from the market. And she needed shoes – the ones she had on now pinched badly.

Josie didn’t know why she should suddenly think of Lily Kavanagh in her lovely blue coat, but she did. The day they’d met was as clear as crystal in her mind, and she thought how nice it would be to have a mam like Mrs Kavanagh, who would remember to feed her and make her clothes, and would never allow her to wear shoes that hurt.

Mam was lying on the bed, fully dressed and fast asleep, when she got home, and Josie thought how beautiful she looked with her rich brown hair spread over the pillow. Her cheeks were pale, and she wondered if they would ever be rosy again.

As quietly as possible, she removed her clothes, then carefully took her nightie from under the pillow and put it on. She went over to the sink, where a heap of dirty clothes underneath waited to be washed, and turned on the tap. The water was cold, and she had been strictly forbidden to touch the fireguard so she couldn’t warm it on the hob, and, anyroad, the fire was out. She smeared soap on the frock, and her small frame quivered as she rubbed the material together.

‘What’cha doing, luv?’ Mam murmured in a slurred voice.

‘Just washing me frock, Mam. It’s awful dirty.’

She had thought Mam would be pleased. Instead, she sat on the edge of the bed, burst out crying, and called herself every name under the sun. ‘I’m the worst mam who ever lived,’ she sobbed. ‘I don’t deserve you, Petal. I’m neglecting you something awful. There’s hardly a
woman in Liverpool who wouldn’t look after you better than me.’

A strange feeling, a sort of painful ache, began to roll down Josie’s body, starting at the top of her head and finishing at her toes. She could hardly speak for the huge lump in her throat. She didn’t care what Mam did for a living, and if Mrs Kavanagh and Lily came and begged her on their bended knees to come and live with them, nothing on earth would make her go. She loved Mam, and always would, with all her heart and soul, and never more so than at that moment. They would never be parted. One day, they would get their little house, even if it took all the years until she went to work herself.

She flung herself across the room on to her mother’s knee and began to cover her face with kisses.

‘Oh, your hands are wet, and they’re all cold,’ Mam shrieked, as she fell back, laughing, on to the bed.

Josie sat on her chest, looking down. She could see her own reflection in the dark blue eyes. ‘I love you, Mam.’

‘And I love you, Petal. I love you so much it hurts. Now, just give us a minute to sort out me head, then we’ll do the washing together.’

The noise was so great, so penetrating, that Josie felt as if her brain were rattling in her head – the steady drone of the planes in the sky above, the sharp answering crackle from the ack-ack guns on the ground. Then came the bomb.

This raid was worse than any she’d known before. The others hadn’t felt so close, so personal. The bomb sounded as if it had fallen right outside the house, and everywhere shook. The dishes rattled on the table, the rafters creaked and layers of dust drifted downwards. The
candle went out, and the room was pitched into blackness.

Josie pulled the covers over her head and grabbed Teddy, shakily telling him that everything was going to be all right, though she had never felt so frightened and desperately wished that Mam were there to whisper the same comforting words to her. She wondered why the bed shook, then realised it was she herself who was shaking, and her teeth were chattering, and she was holding poor Teddy so tightly that he was almost being strangled.

Another bomb screamed its way to earth, and Josie screamed with it, then screamed again when a hand removed the blankets, and she couldn’t see who it belonged to in the dark.

‘Josie,’ Mam said urgently. ‘It’s all right, luv. It’s only me. Them Jerries have never struck so close to home before.’ She lit the candle, and Josie, frozen, petrified, saw that she was alone. Mam picked her up and cradled her in her arms. ‘There, there, luv. I came the minute that first bomb landed ’cos I was out of me mind with worry.’

‘Don’t leave me again, Mam,’ Josie cried hysterically, clinging to her mother. ‘Don’t leave me by meself again.’

‘Don’t fret, luv. I won’t.’ Mam stroked her face tenderly. ‘If we’re going to go, we’ll go together. I couldn’t live without my little girl, my Petal.’

Mam stayed in for three nights in a row and finished off the whisky. There were no raids, but her nerves were on edge. ‘This can’t go on,’ she kept saying. ‘I’m stuck in a rut, taking the easy option.’ She couldn’t sit still, and talked frequently about ‘getting a proper job. I might take a look around tomorrow’. They could move out to
Speke or Kirkby, where she could work in a munitions factory. The wages were good. Though Josie would have to change schools. She said this in a tired way, as if it were an insurmountable problem.

‘I don’t mind, Mam.’ Josie was thrilled at the idea of living in what she imagined was the countryside, preferably plumb in the middle of a bluebell wood, like a girl in one of her stories. At the same time she recognised with a very adult awareness that Mam was searching for ways
not
to go to Speke or Kirkby.

During that summer holiday, Josie had come to terms with several things. The oddness of her life, for instance, the peculiar thing, the precise nature of which she was still not sure of, that Mam did for a living. What hurt most was knowing that, although Mam sincerely meant it when she said she couldn’t live without her and that she loved her more than anyone in the world, she didn’t love her quite enough to get the proper job she was always on about, to move somewhere different. Perhaps it was the drink that had weakened her spirit, made her lose the courage she might once have had. What’s more, Mam wasn’t fit to work in a munitions factory unless she stopped drinking, something which Josie had given up all hope of happening. Kate had written to Maude. She worked on something complicated called a capstan lathe. It was all highly responsible, very difficult, and needed careful precision. But Mam’s hands shook when she poured a cup of tea.