Mourning Doves (18 page)

‘Hasn’t she ever heard of Margaret Sanger? She wrote a book at the beginning of the war on the need to limit families – and before her, there was, for years, a Malthusian League which spread information about how to do it. Really, Celia! English women should come into the twentieth century.’

Celia emptied and rinsed the washing-up basin. Then she sought a towel in the same drawer that had yielded the tea cloth, and slowly wiped her hands. She was blushing, as she admitted, ‘I’ve never heard of any such thing. And I don’t think Phyllis has.’

‘Humph. A couple of years ago, a lady called Marie Carmichael Stopes wrote a very clear book about it. I am sure it must be available in Liverpool. Poor Phyllis should read it – she doesn’t need to tell her husband!’

While Celia slowly digested this information, Edna folded the cloth she had been using, then realised that it was very wet and shook it out and draped it over the side of the sink to dry. With reference to Phyllis, Edna suggested diffidently, ‘It might be a good idea if she first talked to her husband!’

‘Him?’ Celia’s laugh was scornful. ‘He’s the most thoughtless man you can imagine.’ Then she added anxiously, ‘I’ve only seen Phyllis once since little Timothy was born. I wonder if Mother and you could manage, if I went over to Liverpool to see her tomorrow afternoon? I could tell her then. As you know, Dorothy will be here for a few hours to help you. And I should really go and see if the furniture has been put into the barn – and that it’s all there.’ Her voice was heavy with anxiety. ‘And whether Winnie and Dorothy have cleaned the house properly, so that it is ready to be shown to the nursing home lady.’

‘You had better ask Mother.’ Edna relapsed into her usual melancholy silence, and wandered out of the kitchen and went upstairs, presumably to smoke and to put away the clothes lying on her bed.

Though Celia felt relieved that she had made some headway with Edna, she was overwhelmed with the work which would have to be done on the morrow. Could she, somehow, persuade her mother to go into Hoylake to buy food? The shops would surely send anything she chose – she had
seen errand boys trailing around on their delivery bikes when she had been in the village before. And then someone must at least make the living-room fire and keep it up, so that they could cook, someone would have to wipe the mud from the lobby and sweep up the kitchen, make the beds; perhaps Dorothy would do those jobs just for tomorrow.

And we must decide what to do about the garden.

Every time she mentally went through the list and considered its long-term implications, however, the jobs came back to her.

Already tired to death with the effort of the previous few weeks, she wanted to scream.

Impulsively she yanked open the back kitchen door, stiff from new paint, and stared into the wilderness of the back garden.

Fresh sea air blew in upon her, making her skirt and apron billow. It caught at tendrils of her hair and blew them out of their confining pins. She thankfully lifted her tired face to it. A full moon in a sky empty of cloud gave good illumination.

In all her visits to the cottage, she had always walked towards Hoylake, never towards the sea – she had simply been too busy. And it was not cold this evening, she thought. Spring is here.

Left on the back of a chair was a shawl, discarded by her mother in favour of her heavy velvet house jacket. She snatched it up and whipped it round her shoulders. Her outdoor shoes lay, waiting to be cleaned, on a piece of newspaper by the kitchen door. She kicked off her house slippers and slid her little feet into them. Not bothering to tie the laces, she stepped out of the house and closed the kitchen door softly behind her. There was no back gate, so she ran round the side of the house.

When she reached the front gate, she turned right and
right again, so that she faced the sea. A narrower lane continued before her. Bending to the wind, she joyfully took it.

Half stumbling over her loose shoelaces, she ran down towards the sea wall.

Between the cottage and the ocean, a huge dyke guarded the common land from the inroads of the remorseless sea, and she could hear the gentle slap of the waves rippling against the other side of this concrete embankment. The tide must be nearly full, she thought with sudden happiness.

Before climbing the embankment, she paused to catch her breath.

The moon lit up the coarse grass of the common and the rough surface of the dyke. A pair of oystercatchers, disturbed by her hurrying footsteps, fluttered out of the grass, to rise and then settle a little further away, to await the turn of the tide, when they would go hunting over the bare damp sand.

Faintly she could hear young voices calling to each other. It sounded as if a party had come out to enjoy a swim in the moonlit sea.

Feeling a little envious, she hitched up her skirt and climbed the steep land side of the embankment. The tide was coming in quite fast, she noted. Further out, towards the horizon, great waves foamed over the Hoyle sandbank.

She glanced to her right, where in the near distance, the Leasowe lighthouse, long disused, stood like a ghostly monument to forgotten seamen. The old castle beyond it was invisible, as was the new clutter of makeshift shacks, bereft of water or sanitation, which had, during the past
year or two, been built by poverty-stricken homeless people on what was common land. A faint glow on the horizon marked where Liverpool lay on the other side of the Mersey Estuary.

About thirty feet out, a dozen or more people were cavorting in the water and splashing each other.

Holding down her skirts with one hand against the whipping wind and clutching her shawl with the other, she glanced to her left. Far on the horizon lay the dark hump of Wales pinpricked by an occasional light. Between it and her, she knew, lay the treacherous mouth of the River Dee with its infamous shifting sands waiting to drown the unwary.

A sharp shout from the water drew her eyes back to the bathers, and she was startled to realise that they were all naked.

She was immediately shocked and disapproving. She had swum many times herself at Rhyl, but always garbed, like other bathers, in a black woollen bathing costume, which, though it showed her figure, certainly covered her from neck to knee. And in Rhyl there were always bathing machines, drawn by horses a few feet into the sea itself, where one could change one’s clothes and then slip discreetly into the water. Here, she could clearly see in the moonlight the bouncing breasts of women and the flash of male buttocks as men dived under the waves to tease the women.

‘Come on, girl! Hurry up. Take your clothes off and come in,’ said a male voice behind her, and someone gave her bottom a playful smack as if to encourage her to go down to the water.

She spun round.

A totally nude man was rocking on his heels in front of her. She was appalled, and her mouth fell open in a gasp.

She had never seen a naked man before, and his hairiness revolted her. A shock of black hair, a huge black
moustache, a black doormat on the chest which tapered down over a protruding stomach to a bunch of hair out of which dangled, instead of the fig leaf on statues, the appendage which Phyllis had once tried to describe to her. Heavy hairy legs and huge ugly feet reminded her of an ape in the zoo.

As he snatched merrily at her shawl, he became, suddenly, a menace. ‘Come on, now. Don’t be shy,’ he urged, breathing the smell of beer into her face, as he danced lightly in front of her to keep himself warm. ‘All the other girls are in already.’

‘How dare you!’ she hissed frigidly, clutching her shawl close to her neck.

He was a little nonplussed. ‘Well, what are you here for? You don’t have to be such a prude. Come in and have some fun. Don’t be silly.’

But, in panic, she dodged round him and was gone, slipping and sliding down the concrete slope towards the cottage, regardless of torn stockings or loose shoelaces, running along the shadowed lane, panting with fear.

For a moment, he stood watching her while he shivered slightly in the wind. Then he shrieked, ‘Tally-ho! Tally-ho!’ and, with arms waving, ran sure-footed down the slope after her.

His hunter’s cry was apparently heard by other males, who answered promptly from the water side of the embankment. Two more men scrambled, dripping, to the top.

Regardless of the sudden cold of the wind on their bare skins, all three followed the fleeing figure down the lane, whooping joyfully as they went.

Celia glanced back and screamed in pure terror, her belief in the friendliness of her new neighbours gone.

O Lord! No back gate to the cottage garden. She shot round to the front, straight into the arms of another man.

In pure hysteria, she screamed again and again and
struggled in a pair of strong arms, while her shocked mother, who had heard her, pushed hard in order to open her bedroom window, stiff from its new paint.

Suddenly the window gave, and Louise was nearly precipitated out of it. ‘Celia,’ she shrieked. ‘What on earth’s going on?’

Strolling up and down in front of the cottages while he enjoyed a last smoke before bedtime, Eddie Fairbanks had hardly time to stuff his pipe into his jacket pocket before he caught the fleeing young woman in his arms.

‘Jesus! What’s up, luv?’ he gasped, as three satyrs came tearing round the hedge, shrieking, ‘View halloo!’ as if they had sighted a hunted fox, to resolve themselves in seconds into three slightly shamefaced young men stopped in their tracks.

They shivered in the wind.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ Eddie demanded furiously of them over Celia’s shoulder. ‘Get out of here, you stupid bastards. Frightening a decent young woman to death!’ He glanced down at Celia. ‘It’s all right, luv. It’s all right.’ He glared again at the young men fidgeting uncertainly before him. ‘Now you get going and get yourselves covered, or I’ll call the military police, I will.’

An exclamation from the bedroom window caused the men to look up. They were being viewed with horror by a portly lady in a nightgown and frilly bedcap. Behind her loomed another female, who was tittering loudly.

The titters did it. They turned and fled as quickly as they had come, while Celia clung to Eddie, her face buried in his shoulder as if he were her father. At the sound of his voice, she had ceased to scream, but she was still shaking with fright.

‘Come on, luv. They’ve gone.’ He felt behind his back,
to open the Gilmore front gate. ‘I’ll take you in to your mam. She’ll make some tea for you. The boys don’t mean no harm – they was just teasing you, I bet.’ Holding her firmly, in case she fainted, he eased her up the garden path.

It was Edna, in a dressing gown, who opened the door to him, while Louise, wrapped in a quilt, stumped slowly down the staircase, saying crossly, as she descended, ‘Celia! What are you doing outside at this time of night?’

Eddie ignored the older woman and said to Edna, ‘She’s had a proper scare, Ma’am. Take care of her.’

‘Who were they?’ Edna asked, as quite gently, she helped a weeping Celia across the threshold, and passed her to her scolding mother.

‘They’re probably ex-servicemen, Ma’am. There is a number of big houses round here as is nursing homes, so to speak – there’s one full of blind, waiting to get into St Dunstan’s. This lot was probably mostly shell-shocked or in for treatment for illness or gas in the trenches.’ He sighed heavily. ‘There’s so many of them that it’s easy for them to get out at night, and they come out to the pubs – and people stand them drinks – and they pick up the local girls.’ He looked at the shrewd brown eyes before him, lit up by the oil lamp hanging in the hall. ‘You know how it is.’

‘I do have some idea,’ Edna responded dryly. ‘Though I cannot imagine what made Celia go out.’ She gathered her dressing gown more tightly round her thin figure, and Eddie stepped back down the step. Then he hesitated, and said, ‘Be careful of Miss Celia – she’s gone through a lot lately. And done a lot.’

‘It has been a difficult time for all of us, Mr Fairbanks.’

He was dismissed. He absently took his pipe out of his pocket, and looked at it. ‘Oh, aye. It’s a hard time for everybody. Good night.’

He plodded slowly down the path, carefully shutting the gate after him and went back to his empty house.

As he knocked the dottle out of his pipe on the top bar of the fireplace and then refilled it with fresh tobacco, he thought of the silly naked youngsters he had just told off.

‘Half crazy with what they’ve been through,’ he considered. ‘Under twenty-five, I bet, but with four years of bloody war already behind them. Hell-bent because life don’t mean much to them any more. Nerves shot; lungs ruined.’

As he tamped down the tobacco in his pipe, he sank slowly into his easy chair.

He was reminded suddenly of the earl in whose gardens he had served so faithfully. With three sons killed, when the old man died the earldom would probably die out – or go to some far-distant cousin safe in the Colonies. Proper cut up, the old earl had been. But maybe it was better than having them come back as crazy as the lads who had chased Miss Celia.

You could hate the aristocracy and the middle classes as much as you liked, he pondered sadly, but you had to admit that their families had paid a frightful price in the war – if you thought of the losses in proportion to numbers. And they were the educated, the future leaders – Eddie was very feudal in his outlook. In his book, rank had its obligation to provide leaders, as it had done since time began, and keep in line young louts like the men who had chased poor Celia.

There were thousands of working-class lads who never saw a battlefield, he ruminated – and thank goodness for that – safe in factories and works, they had been. And a tremendous number had been turned down by the army doctors as being physically unfit for service; rotten food, rotten housing, polluted rivers and air had wreaked havoc on the health of those who lived in the slums of the cities – and yet that very bad health had actually saved them from being flung into the furnace – it was strange how bad luck could become good luck, he mused.

But as long as he could stand up and walk, there was no excuse for an earl’s son not to fight – or, come to that, for the boys who volunteered from Liverpool offices – the work they did in banks and insurance offices, shops and professions could be done by women. Likewise, the work of men on the farms. Boys like them simply answered the call to the colours and joined the Liverpool Pals – and knew they were going out to die, like Mrs Gilmore’s boys next door, though one of them hadn’t gone to France – he’d been drowned with Lord Kitchener, Miss Celia had told him.

The thought of young George Gilmore’s drowning reminded him of the lads like his own son, merchant seamen who had drowned in thousands, sent to the bottom by submersibles – submarines, they called them now – the devil’s work.

As he remembered the expressions on the faces of the scandalous young men he had chastised, his mood lightened and he chuckled. They had looked such utter fools. How Miss Celia had panicked – and her a brave little thing if ever there was one.

Then he told himself that it was no laughing matter; despite the cold wind on their damp naked bodies, they might have managed to rape her. They’d probably leave a few babies in the district before the military got round to putting them back into barracks or into better treatment in military hospitals.

But barracks and hospitals, wherever nurses and doctors could be found, were still full of the terribly wounded, unlikely to get better – or, if they did, with lives foreshortened by years in the trenches.

And their womenfolk – how were they managing? He knew a number of mothers and wives already harried to death by the need to care for helpless, crippled servicemen – and on miserably small pensions, to boot. Or widowed with young children and no man to help to look after them.
Betty Houghton was lucky that she had her father, Ben Aspen, to keep a hold on young Alfie.

He pulled himself up. ‘Tush, man. You’re getting morbid – it’s too much being by yourself,’ he chided himself. ‘Maybe it’s good that you’ve got some neighbours at last.’

He heaved himself out of his chair and went across the room to find his bottle of rum.