The Angels of Lovely Lane (16 page)

Jake swung a basket around by the handle. ‘Just keep your hand on your tackle while you’re talking to her,’ he laughed. Then, bent almost double and pushing his shoulder and his full weight against the cart, he began to push the trolley past Dessie and across the cobbled yard towards the theatre block, negotiating the dips in the yard with the skill of a man twice his age.

Dessie watched him go. Without removing his fingerless gloves, he took his tobacco tin out of his pocket, lifted the lid and removed a roll-up he had made when he was eating his breakfast earlier that morning. A small flame illuminated his face as the loose Rizla paper caught alight. Slowly exhaling the smoke, he smiled with satisfaction as Jake successfully manoeuvred the trolley in through the heavy theatre block doors.

‘Has Jake taken a trolley on his own?’ asked a porter lad, approaching Dessie with a mug of tea in his hand. ‘Here, Tom sent this out to you. He said you would be freezing your knackers off out here.’

Dessie laughed. ‘Blimey O’Reilly, everyone is suddenly very interested in the welfare of my wedding tackle.’

The lad looked confused. ‘Why, what did Jake say? He shouldn’t be pushing that trolley on his own, Mr Horton, he’ll make the rest of us look bad. If Matron thinks one lad can manage a full basket, she’ll ask you to sack half of us.’

‘Never mind about that, lad. Let’s get inside where it’s warm. Then I can tell you lads who is working where today.’ As Dessie threw his cigarette stub into a puddle, the lad pressed him further.

‘What did Jake say about your wedding tackle, Mr Horton?’

‘I have to go and see Matron and he was worried that she might chop it off, if I’m not careful. With Matron being a bit sharp like. It’s not my tackle Matron is after, though. She would have no interest in me or any man, even if he was Laurence Olivier himself, I am absolutely sure of that.’

‘What do you mean, Mr Horton?’

The lad was fourteen and straight out of school, the son of a soldier Dessie had served with during the war. It was the Merseyside way. On the docks, in the hospital and in the factories. Workers looked after their own. The lad waited for a response.

‘Nothing, lad,’ said Dessie. ‘Nothing at all.’

*

Jake almost threw the linen into the theatre linen store and then whizzed down the corridor towards the sitting room with the empty basket. He could have leapt for joy when he saw that the theatres were busy and there were no consultants in the room. He knocked on the kitchenette service door and Martha opened it, with a tea towel in her hands.

‘What are you doing here? You’ll get me shot, you will.’ Despite her stern tone, her smile lit up her eyes, telling Jake she was delighted to see him.

‘Got a cuppa?’ he asked. ‘I have news, Martha, and I’m bursting to tell you.’

‘Go on then, what?’ said Martha, pouring boiling water from the urn into the teapot.

‘I think Dessie is going to give me a job as an under-porter.’

Martha’s face lit up. She threw the tea towel on to the table and clapped her hands together.

‘Dessie said that? Jake, that’s the gear. Can I tell me mam when I get home?’

‘Well, it has to go through Matron first, she has to approve it, but it’s what Dessie wants to happen. You know what this means, don’t you, Martha?’

Martha looked at Jake with a blank expression on her face and dropped her hands into her apron pocket. ‘No, what? Well, I suppose it means you’ll have more money, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes, but it’s not just that. It means that I will be able to plan for my future.’ He didn’t dare say
our future
. He didn’t want to push Martha too quickly or scare her away.

‘Well, fancy that,’ said Martha, putting the heavy earthenware teapot on to the table. ‘A man of means, you’ll be.’ Her heart was beating faster but it had taken a dip of disappointment when Jake had said
my
and not
our
.

‘I don’t know about that, but won’t it be great? You won’t be walking out with a porter’s lad any more, I’ll be a proper under-porter. They are making new jobs now, you know. There’s going to be a porter just for the theatres, they’re getting so busy.’

Martha crossed her arms and smiled at Jake’s enthusiasm. ‘There’s no stopping you, is there? You’ve only just found out you’re going to be made an under-porter and already you’re casting your eye elsewhere.’

She turned to pick up a cup and saucer from the tea trolley and as she did so Jake caught the ties on the back of her apron. Feeling braver than he ever had in his life before, he spun Martha round and without even thinking about what he was going to do, he kissed her.

As he pulled away, he looked down into Martha’s flushed face.

‘Don’t tell anyone,’ he said half shyly, ‘but that was me first kiss. I don’t think there will ever be another like it, even if you let me kiss you every day, Martha O’Brien. Was it your first too?’

He looked intently into her face. Jake was in love with Martha and he wanted her to know it. He wanted to marry her and he had to fight every instinct he had not to ask her there and then. Martha’s eyes filled with tears.

‘Eh, what’s up? Didn’t you like me giving you a kiss, then?’ He put his arms round her and buried her face in his chest, holding her tight. Martha could feel the coarse cotton of his porter lad’s coat against the side of her cheek and she was glad that her face was hidden, so that Jake could not witness her shame. She breathed in deeply. He smelt of fresh linen and Wright’s coal tar soap. How could she tell him that it had not been her first kiss? Mr Scriven had robbed him of that.

Jake pushed her gently away from him, his face creased in concern.

‘Of course it was my first kiss,’ she said as she wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands.

Embarrassed by her tears, she could feel her face burning with the shame of the memory. She had dreamt of this moment and now, here it was, it had happened. Jake Berry, the best-looking boy in Liverpool, had just kissed Martha O’Brien. She would never tell him that it had been Mr Scriven who had pawed her with his impertinent hands and slobbered with his wet mouth all over her face. She would banish that memory from her mind and never think of it again. It would not affect her. It would always be Jake who kissed her first, as far as she was concerned. She would banish both the memory and the moment to the wilderness. It never happened, Martha thought to herself. It never happened, it was all in my mind. All I have to think is that it never happened, and it didn’t.

Jake grinned at Martha, and she grinned back.

‘Where’s me second?’ she said cheekily.

Jake beamed from ear to ear and pulled her towards him again. Martha smiled. Mr Scriven could not rob her of this. Of this tenderness. Of Jake’s eagerness or this, her second kiss.

*

Nursing Director Emily Haycock lived in a bedsit. It was an upstairs room in a terrace house just off Lark Lane. The room was dull and depressing and the only thing of any beauty to speak of was the view out of the window and across the park overlooking the lake. This morning, the inner window was coated in a thin layer of ice, which obliterated the view and made the room feel smaller and more dismal than it already was. A grey gloom hung in the air and Emily shivered as she struggled to wash herself all over from a bowl of water she had fetched from the grey and chipped stone sink in the bathroom. The lodger in the next room had an unpleasant habit of impatiently banging on the door and pressing his face up against the opaque glass to see who was inside, and Emily had now taken to scuttling across the brown and cracked linoleum on the landing to bring a bowl back to her bedroom.

There was no electricity this morning and so she couldn’t even make a hot drink on her Baby Belling. As she dried herself down, she swore that the time had come to find new lodgings. Things were becoming progressively worse and the landlady refused to do anything about the damp patch that had appeared underneath the windowsill. On at least two evenings this week Emily had had to light the candles because the electricity had suddenly gone off, plunging her into darkness. When that happened, it reminded her of the war, and that was the last thing she wanted. Emily had her own demons to live with.

As director of nursing, she wore her own clothes for work, with a white coat for protection when she visited the wards. However, she missed her sister’s uniform. Life was so easy when she didn’t have to give a second thought to what she wore. Fastening the buttons on the cardigan of her caramel-coloured twinset, she peered closely at herself in the cracked mirror hanging over the blocked-up fireplace. The silver had long since degenerated and peeled from the back. It was so grey and mottled she could barely see her face in the glass, but she could see her blonde curls as they bobbed and bounced on her shoulders.

‘Thank you, God, for my natural curls. See, Mam, I did eat all my crusts,’ she whispered to her reflection. Her shoulder-length hair took minimum effort to pin up at the back, before she was ready to place her hat on top and brave the air outside, which felt warmer than it had in her bedsit.

She bought the
Daily Post
on the way to work and on the bus searched the ‘room to let’ adverts from top to bottom. The trouble was, most of the people advertising rooms requested a ‘professional gentleman’. There was no way Emily Haycock could get round that one, unless she knocked on the door anyway and was given enough time to persuade the owner she was a safe bet and a professional to boot. She had tried it twice and had been enraged by the attitude she had encountered.

‘We prefer not to take ladies,’ the last one had said, and then she had whispered, as though anyone else could possibly have heard on the busy road, ‘We don’t want any gentleman callers traipsing in and out, do we?’

Emily wasn’t sure if she was expected to answer the question and stared in dismay at the woman who had black stumps for teeth, and was wearing a greasy wraparound apron. She could think of no response, other than to turn on her heel and walk away. She didn’t trust herself to enter into conversation with someone who questioned her morals. She had given up so much to become a ward sister at St Angelus and then to work her way up to sister tutor and director in charge of the school of nursing. The unfairness in the implication that she would behave in any way improperly almost made her cry with the pain of it.

Emily closed the paper with a sigh. In the recent past, ward sisters had lived within the hospital grounds, but the war had changed all that. Today, in any case, she had other things to think about, and the fact was her funds were limited. She had obligations to meet and one particular obligation, her uppermost priority, always came first and left her little in the way of choice when it came to her own living conditions. She had a duty to honour. A commitment and a promise to keep, and for as long as was necessary that was exactly what she would do. If it meant that she had very little to live on at the end of each month, so be it.

Making a circle on the steamy window of the bus with her leather-gloved hand, she peered out into the cold grey morning. As they turned the corner of Church Street, she noticed that the Christmas display was still lit up in the shop windows. The man next to her and the woman on the seat in front were both smoking, and Emily held her newspaper over her mouth to stifle a cough. Thoughts of the new intake, and of what the day ahead would hold, filled her mind. The first week was always the hardest. Once that was out of the way, she decided, she would put every effort into finding somewhere respectable to live, closer to the hospital to save on the bus fare. She stood and pulled on the plaited brown cord above her head to ring the bell to let the driver know she wanted to alight.

*

Dessie stood and watched as the last laundry baskets disappeared through the back door of the ward block. The whoops of the porter lads as they raced each other to be the first across the yard had made him smile, just as they did every morning. Looking over towards the school of nursing, he saw that someone else had been watching.

‘Morning, Sister Haycock.’ Dessie removed his cap and replaced it quickly as the cold air stung his scalp. He felt the familiar sensation of his heart constricting at the sight of Sister Haycock. There was something about her that made him want to remove his porter’s coat and wrap it around her. If ever there was a woman who confused him, it was Sister Haycock. She had flown up through the nursing ranks and been the talk of the hospital a year ago when she took up her new post, and yet whenever she spoke to him and he looked into her eyes he saw pain. He felt that she was vulnerable, lonely, and sad. Just like him.

‘Morning, Dessie,’ Emily shouted in response, and to Dessie’s delight, she began to cross the yard towards him. ‘It’s such a cold morning.’ Dessie felt his heart quicken as she approached.

‘How are you, Sister? You have a new intake of probationer nurses today. Are they here yet?’

‘No. I’m sure you’ll see them arrive through the back gate.’ They both looked towards the hole in the wall, where a beautiful pair of wrought-iron gates had stood until they were removed for the war effort. ‘The porter lads will let you know, I’m sure. It is always such a source of amusement for them on the first day.’

‘I’m sorry, Sister. I’ll give them all a good warning when they return from the laundry delivery. They should behave. I always tell them to be respectful to the nurses.’

‘Not at all, Dessie. I think it helps the new girls to have a bit of fun as they arrive. They always give as good as they get.’

Dessie rolled his eyes, remembering the probationer nurses from the previous intake, who had locked two of the porter lads in the furnace wood store for ‘a bit of fun’.

‘They do that. Some of them break the hearts of the lads the moment they arrive.’

Emily and Dessie smiled at each other, and for a moment her sparkling blue eyes, watering in the biting January wind, seemed to peer into his heart. Save me, Dessie almost whispered to himself.

‘Dessie, I wanted to ask you a favour.’

Dessie almost didn’t hear what she was saying. He was made speechless by her closeness, and this morning she looked so beautiful, his heart ached.