The Girl From Penny Lane (16 page)

Kitty had been longing to put the dress on all day, but Johnny had been firm. A clean dress could only be worn by a clean person, he explained, so she had waited. But now the moment had arrived, and in the first milky grey of dawn, she slid the dress down over her head and Johnny did up the buttons at the back.

Kitty looked down at herself. It was a blue and white checked dress, gingham she thought the material was called, and though a little long, it fitted well. She turned to face Johnny, half-expecting some masculine rudeness, but Johnny looked at her slowly and carefully, walking all round her as though her appearance was truly of interest to him.

‘You look real good, real pretty,’ he said at last. ‘Tomorrer I’ll git a blue ribbing for your ’air. Put the boots on an’ we’ll go along to Mrs Bridge’s eating place, down by the Albert Dock. She starts at six, it must be near on that now, and she does a lovely lentil an’ spud broth. An’ you get ’alf a loaf with it, as well as a mug o’ tea.’

The two of them wandered slowly down to the docks, Kitty in her new boots as well as her new dress, which was a good reason for their lack of speed. The boots felt strangely heavy and unnatural, but Johnny assured her she would come to appreciate them, in time.

Mrs Bridge had a tiny wooden shack with three tables and twelve chairs, but she gave the youngsters two large plates of her broth for tuppence and sent them to sit by the water to eat since all her chairs were taken.

‘Bring back me plates,’ she warned them, but comfortably, with a smile. ‘Who’s your little pal, Johnny?’

‘She’s Kitty; she’s a good kid,’ Johnny said proprietorially, as though he had known Kitty for years, if not actually raised her personally. ‘We’re off on the tramp later today.’

‘Oh ah? Where you thinkin’ of headin’ for, this time?’

‘This time we’re headin’ for Wales,’ Johnny said. ‘Ain’t that right, our Kitty?’

Kitty thrilled to the casual possessiveness in his tone.

‘That’s right, Johnny,’ she echoed. ‘We’re headin’ for Wales!’

Chapter Six

With Nellie and Stuart gone and the Mattesons about to depart, Lilac began to be very dependent on her friends. But Polly was courting, Liza had an evening job serving behind the counter in a fish and chip shop on St James Street, and visiting Marie Springfield meant cramming into her cramped little house and ‘minding’ the kids whilst Marie’s Mam and her sisters went down to their local pub. What was more Ella, the sister who had just given birth to twins, had a rather dubious reputation – she ‘walked’ Norfolk Street of an evening, folk said – so Lilac was uneasily aware that Nellie would disapprove of too close a friendship with the Springfields.

She had found lodgings, though she did not think she cared for them much. It was a once-smart house in Great Nelson Street, handy, the landlady said, for the library, the art gallery, St George’s Hall, and other such refined places of culture. But it was also near Lime Street – Lilac could hear the trains arriving and departing from her lonely room – which made her think wistfully of Nellie.

She had not heard from the handsome Alan Blake, what was more. It was all very well telling herself that she’d not expected to hear, but it did not do much for her self-confidence. It was the first time that any man had virtually stood her up, and to make matters worse Art, who had always danced attendance on her, suddenly seemed to have found better things to do with his time. Had someone been advising him that she would never fall into his arms if he hung about her, but might do so if he withdrew a little, Lilac wondered indignantly. Well, if so, he would presently get a big surprise, for she was doing well enough without him. As for Alan . . . if he walked up to her in the street she would pretend she couldn’t tell him from Adam, which would teach him a lesson, him and his posh relatives and his big transatlantic liner!

Work was far more absorbing than she had expected, however, and far harder, too. Lilac, who had done extremely well at school and was generally thought of as bright and able, was horrified at the difficulty she encountered in managing her machine. She was afraid of pushing the sacking too far in case the needle went through her finger, the smell of the raw material made her sneeze and her eyes seemed to run constantly. She told herself she was not mechanically minded, but no one else thought twice about taking their machine to pieces when something went wrong and putting it together again so that it worked. Also, the other girls in her room worked at twice the speed and seemed to her to be entirely fearless, and the supervisor, a harsh-faced, tight-mouthed harridan called Mrs Loose, took an instant dislike to her newest employee.

‘It ain’t your fault you’re a bit slow, queen,’ Bertha Harris, the loud-mouthed, short-skirted girl on the next machine told Lilac. ‘You need to start young at dis job – do as I do, folly me an’ you won’t go far wrong!

Lilac was used to broad Liverpudlian but she often found Bertha almost impossible to follow, since Bertha’s use of slang was entirely individual. Words, Bertha said once in all seriousness, meant whatever she told them to mean . . . shades of Humpty Dumpty in
Alice Through the Looking Glass
, Lilac thought, grinning to herself. ‘When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ But she kept the quotation to herself, having already discovered that though the girls in her room could all read, more or less, it was only with great effort and never for pleasure. Books are a closed book to them, Lilac concluded, chuckling inwardly. But they were kind enough, particularly Bertha, and it was through her that Lilac discovered everyone on her assembly line was at least a year younger than her and sometimes more: Bertha herself, talking her strange blend of scouse, pseudo-American slang, Cockney rhyming slang and anything else she could lay tongue to, forever at jazz concerts and dances, bringing home sailors in at least three different shades, astonished Lilac by admitting to being ‘Seventeen, come next March.’

‘They’re friendly and nice, but they’re awfully rough,’ she told Polly, who grinned and said it was a far cry from the Mattesons and admitted that in the Ellison Fancy Pickle factory, where she worked – and wept as well, since they pickled a lot of onions – the staff on the shop floor were all either young girls still wet behind the ears or old shawlies who had been doing the work forever.

So after Lilac’s first week’s work, when she had sat in the dying sunlight in her small room and written a cheery letter to Nellie, heated herself up a tin of soup on her small gas-ring, and washed out her cotton stockings and her second-best blouse, she decided to give herself a bit of a treat. She could not go and see Nellie yet because she had not been with the firm long enough to take a day or two off, and though Mrs Matteson and the doctor had urged her to go up to Scarisbrick to see them she thought it was too soon, but it would be rather fun to go round to Coronation Court and see Art’s family – his sister Etty had been a friend – and find out at the same time just where Art had got to.

Not that I’m interested in Art’s whereabouts, Lilac reminded herself, choosing a light and summery cotton print to wear, for the autumn day was warm and sunny. Since it was Sunday she got some white gloves out of her long drawer and pulled them on. She had a rather nice blue hat which went with the summery dress so she stabbed that in place with a couple of hat-pins and decided on the spur of the moment to go to morning service at St Anne’s on Cazneau Street, the church she had attended with Nellie and Aunt Ada when they had lived on Scotland Road. Whilst she was working for the Mattesons she had gone to church with them, but now she could please herself and it would be rather nice to go back, see her friends. After the service I’ll maybe go round to the Corry, she planned busily, and after that I’ll buy myself a meal at Miss Harriet Young’s Dining Room on the Scottie, and after that . . . oh, after that can take care of itself!

The service was a bit of a shock to Lilac, after several years of attending the very much smarter church on Rodney Street with the Mattesons. She had forgotten how shabby everything was, including the congregation, and how small. Even the East window, at which she had gazed in awe as a child whilst singing hymns at the top of her voice, seemed smaller and duller, the jewel colours that she remembered paler and less striking.

And though there were several people she recognised, they all seemed to belong to her aunt’s generation. The vicar was a younger man than the Revd Charlesworth, with a deep, actor’s voice and a great thatch of brown hair in place of Revd Charlesworth’s shining pate. He was very polite to Lilac, shaking her hand outside in the porch and telling her it was nice to see a new face in the congregation, but she had not enjoyed the rather sanctimonious delivery of his sermon, every word accompanied by upturned eyes and pious glances, so she murmured something conventional and eased her hand out of his damp clasp as soon as it was polite to do so.

The O’Briens were Catholics, so they would go to Mass, not morning service. Of course, Lilac thought to herself, as she left Cazneau Street, crossed into Rose Place and began to stroll slowly down towards the main road, it’s quite possible that I might meet . . . someone . . . once I reach the Scottie. She turned into Scotland Road, glancing into shop windows as she walked. It was equally possible that the Catholic service might end at the same time as that at St Anne’s, so if she continued to walk at her present pace she might presently find herself overtaken by, well, by anyone who happened to have attended St Anthony’s that morning.

If I do hear familiar footsteps I won’t look round, I’ll pretend to be absorbed in the beautiful hats in Miss Denny’s, or the gold chains and diamond rings displayed in Murphy’s the jewellers, she decided. She by-passed Jim’s Fried Fish, which reeked of last night’s trading, and the Market Inn, redolent of stale beer and worse, and began to walk a little faster. She could hear people coming along the pavement, she would walk past Young’s Dining Room, idly, then stop a little further on and turn back, as though she’d not quite made up her mind where to eat.

She strolled on and presently heard footsteps following her; she was almost sure she knew who made them. She turned to stare fixedly into the nearest window, pretending absorption, her whole attention really focused on the maker of the footsteps, now about to overhaul her, to pass . . .

‘Well, if it isn’t our Lilac!’ The young man stopped in front of her, gently taking her hands in his. ‘What are you doing on the Scottie on a Sunday morning, chuck? Not shoppin’, that’s for sure!’

‘Art!’ Lilac said with a well-simulated start of surprise, ‘Fancy seeing you – I was sure you’d be in the middle of Mass, or off with your pals for a day at New Brighton!’

‘Just come out of St Anthony’s,’ Art said. ‘So? What are you doin’ here, our Lilac?’

‘Attending church, same as you,’ Lilac said demurely. ‘No point in trailing all the way back to Rodney Street, and anyway, I only went there because the Mattesons expected us to do so. I thought I might pop into the Court, see how everyone is, only it’s quite late and the shop windows are fascinating . . .’

‘Particularly that one,’ Art said. There was a laugh behind the words, almost, Lilac thought indignantly, as if he didn’t believe she had been happily window-shopping, with never a thought for where she was!

‘Yes, I’ve always been . . .’ her voice trailed away and she could feel the heat start to burn in her cheeks.

‘Fascinated by death?’ Art said, too smoothly. ‘J. Whitaker & Sons, Undertakers . . . that was the window you were starin’ in, I believe?’

Lilac began to giggle. Trust her to make a fool of herself and trust Art to rub her nose in it!

‘Was I? I was still thinking about the hats up the road . . . not that I wear hats more than I have to. I like to feel the wind in my hair so I thought I’d walk along the river later, down by the pierhead.’

‘Well, I’ll come along with you a ways,’ Art said.

Lilac, glancing sideways at him, saw that he was looking his best in a dark suit and white shirt, with a panama hat in one hand. He really is rather nice-looking, she thought, with a tiny frisson of excitement chasing up and down her spine, then she reminded herself that this was the Art she had known all her life and the excitement died.

‘All right. Who’s at home today, Art? Your mam and da?’

Art shrugged. ‘Dunno; haven’t been back meself yet. I’m lodging in Ullet Road now, with Tippy Huggett; remember, you met me there a few weeks back when I’d been round to take a look at the room.’

‘Oh . . . then. Yes, I remember.’ Lilac, who had assumed Art had been lurking in order to be with her, felt more than a little crestfallen. So he really had been visiting in Ullet Road! ‘Well, are you goin’ back to the Corry now?’

‘Eventually. I have to take me old woman her money or she’d never last the week,’ Art said cheerfully. ‘But how about a spot of grub first? We could go to one of the canny houses if you like, cheap and cheerful.’

There were a number of small eating houses in the courts, places where the woman of the house was a better than average cook and could earn herself a few pennies by selling the delicious stews and soups which she had been making for her kids and the rest of her family for years, ekeing out a mutton bone with every available vegetable and seasoning the food with pot herbs, grown in half a beer barrel in her back yard or even in a window box.

‘I was going to treat meself to a chump chop, potatoes and gravy at Harriet Young’s,’ Lilac said wistfully. ‘They do a lovely steamed pudding too, with candied peel and sultanas. But if a canny house suits you better . . .’

Art took her arm. His hand was warm and firm on her bare skin and she was aware of him towering over her as they set off again, back the way she had just come. I’ve always liked tall men; what a pity it’s only Art, she thought, moving a little closer to him. Eh, but it was good to see him again, good to be chatting easily to her old friend!