The Girl From Penny Lane (9 page)

It was still very early. The sun, a red ball occasionally glimpsed between the buildings, seemed to promise another fine day. How lovely it would have been had she been asked aboard the canal boat, given a job, and more bacon sarnies, told she might stay with them! But things like that only happened in stories, in real life you were likelier to get thumps than kisses, so she’d better start moving. Sary never got up till noon, especially when she’d had a skinful the previous night, but the eleven-year-old twins Arnold and Robert – known as Amy and Bob to their friends – were often abroad far earlier and had been known to visit the canal for the purpose of either nicking off the boats or fishing in the turgid water with a bit of string and a bent pin.

‘All they’ll catch will be colds in the head,’ Mrs O’Rourke used to say when Kitty explained why her brothers were somehow never expected to work as she did. ‘They’ll grow up bad, those two.’

Kitty thought they were pretty bad already, but you couldn’t altogether blame them. Sary didn’t much like any girls, but she did adore the twins, so they got their own way with everything, waxed fat on their own thieving and Sary’s sporadic generosity, and never gave a thought to the sister who had pretty well brought them up, save to tell tales of her to their mother whenever the opportunity arose.

So where’ll I go, then? Kitty asked herself, looking round the early-morning street, already beginning to bustle as the night-shift got ready to leave the factories and the day-shift began to stream in. What’ll I do today? By ’eck, that sarny were good – I wouldn’t mind another one jest like that! And I’ve got the ’alf dollar an’ all – I could get me some grub to set me up for the day.

It was strange to know that the day was her own, and whether it was the unexpected kindness of the boat-people or the comfortable fullness engendered by the bacon sarny, Kitty was beginning to feel that her life was on the up-and-up, that there was hope for her, a future, even. Other girls left home and prospered! Boys, too – did not her favourite book,
Her Benny
, tell the story of two Liverpool kids from the slums who made it to better things? The uncomfortable thought that little Nellie, the book’s heroine, had died and gone to heaven before real good fortune came to Benny was easily dealt with; Benny was the eldest, as she was, so she was bound, like Benny, to be all right, to make her fortune, and to live happily ever after.

But not, of course, if the twins found her and told Sary, nor if either Sary or her father came across her. All they would consider would be how many bones they should break before tossing her remains into the River Mersey for the fishes to nibble. They’d brand her a thief no matter that she’d handed over the money and told them where the trimmings were to be found. Oh well.

She was walking along the pavement when a woman drew level with her. As she did so she glanced down at Kitty, sniffed suspiciously and produced from her handbag an embroidered hanky, which she pressed defensively to her nose. She also increased her speed, plainly eager to get past the younger girl as quickly as possible.

Reckon I niff a bit, Kitty thought unconcernedly, for was she not always dirty and unkempt? She glanced down at her stained and filthy shirt, then looked again. Oh dear Lor’, she thought, look at them ’ands!

They were not only black, they were striped, where the bacon fat had run down. Kitty guessed that her chin was probably fatty too, and she remembered that at home, unless her mother was up betimes and chased her out, she usually did her best, without soap or a flannel, to wash her face and hands under the pump shared by all the houses in the Court. And if you wanted anything, you were more likely to get it if you were at least clean.

There’s the deserving poor, someone had said to Mrs O’Rourke in Kitty’s hearing, and there’s the squalid, idle drunkards and wife-beaters. Charity isn’t any use to the latter, they abuse it or drink it; the former hate being the recipients of it but at least use it to escape from the poverty trap. So if she wanted help from anyone, Kitty reasoned, she had better set about becoming deserving poor right away.

Kitty returned to the canal. She knelt on the bank and rubbed at her hands and arms until they were pink and only lightly smeared, then she doused her face and rubbed that too. And finally, because it was a lovely morning and the sun was shining on the water – and also because her nits were itching her something cruel as they wandered across her scalp – she ducked her whole head in the canal and held it there for two or three lung-bursting minutes, then sat back, gulping air and squeezing water, dirt and even one or two nits out of her tangled locks.

She sat on the canal bank until she was pretty well dry, though her hair would probably stay dampish for a while yet, then climbed over the bridge once more and looked cautiously about her. No one so much as glanced at her. A passing scuffer, with his helmet in one hand to let the sun warm his curly dark hair, did not even see her, though he trod on her little toe with his great clumping black boots. Kitty said a few things under her breath, but continued to walk – or rather, limp – along Vauxhall Road, heading away from home, leaving the richly stinking tannery, the coal wharves and the small, familiar streets behind. She could feel the half-crown, wrapped in a bit of rag, nestling near her roped-in waist, comfortingly solid againt her bony ribs. It represented food, safety, hope. Public houses were still locked and barred but drowsy, blowsy women wrapped in big aprons were emerging from them to scrub steps and brush pavements, to shout curses at horses who left piles of steaming manure too near their doorsteps and to hail the milkman as his dozy steed dragged the milkcart up and down the small streets.

Kitty didn’t know many eating places, but everyone knew Paddy’s Market, and she did consider going there. They sold marvellous, mouth-watering food and it was cheap, too, and though she would not be able to afford even a second-hand dress she might beg or nick one, explaining – or not, of course – how she wanted to be the deserving poor and not the idle and feckless. But you could meet anyone in Paddy’s, the twins nicked all sorts from the stalls, and kids of all shapes and sizes hung about it, including half Kitty’s classmates, so it simply wasn’t safe. No, she would have to get a lot further from home before she stopped to eat again.

But if there was one thing Kitty was used to, it was being hungry and not being fed. So it was with the bright optimism still burning within her that she began the trek to another part of the city, somewhere where the name Drinkwater wouldn’t have people clutching their baskets and covering their pockets.

I’ll make me fortune, she told herself, peering interestedly into shop windows as she passed. I’ll run messages and carry shopping, I’ll scrub doorsteps and hold horses, but I’ll keep meself a deal better’n me mam ever did.

And with that thought to hold on to – and it wasn’t so very much to attain, after all – Kitty plodded on through the bright morning.

Kitty had lived in the city all her short life. She knew the streets, the canal, the gas works, the factories and the tannery, the rice and flour mills, the various railway lines and stations, the smells and the sounds of it all. But her Liverpool consisted of a smelly, crowded mile to mile and a half at the most. When she ran errands for her mother, making her way to Paddy’s Market to fetch rags or to the fruit market on Great Nelson Street, she was still more or less in her own territory. But when she went to and from the millinery shop on Upper Frederick Street, sneaked down to nick ends of timber from the yard opposite St Anne’s on Rose Place, hung around outside the Free Library on William Brown Street, too scared to go in yet longing for the books which Mrs O’Rourke used to borrow for her, she was in Indian country, a stranger in a strange land.

So, padding along the dusty summer streets and wishing that the water-cart would come along and spray her hot, aching feet, it was not so very long before Kitty began to feel herself safe from the entire Drinkwater clan. Her father was a stoker on a merchant ship which plied across the Atlantic, taking goods to the United States of America. It was a long journey and so Hector Drinkwater was away more than he was home, for which fact Kitty was frequently devoutly thankful. She knew he was a seaman of course, that Liverpool was a great port, but since she was a far cry from being a favourite child she had never been taken down to the docks to view her father’s ship from afar, nor lifted down onto the muddy sand at low tide to play with other kids in the rich, sticky mess.

Yet in a way the sea was in her blood, for the wind which blows nine days out of ten over the city was sweetened with salt, as well as with the oily, tarry, fishy smells from the docks. Kitty had breathed in the smell all her life and, indeed, knew no other.

So when she had passed, with a half-wistful glance, the end of Upper Parly, as the kids called it, she turned left along Park Lane, where those great, swaying land-ships, the trams, thundered along sounding their warning bells, and then she turned right into Beckwith Street, with the smell of the sea stronger than ever here and a strange excitement mounting in her. It was an ugly little road, too. She passed a huge building which announced that it was Heaps Flour Mills, then a shipyard, only by now the street had begun to call itself Carpenters’ Row; no wonder, thought Kitty, appreciatively sniffing the smells of sawdust, tar and engine oil, a great many carpenters must be employed to make huge ships!

She emerged from Carpenters’ Row on to Chaloner Street – and saw the overhead railway for the first time. It scared her when the train came rattling and chugging along, but then she saw the docks, and her attention was caught and held.

Ships! Water, lots of it, and when she skirted Wapping Basin and began to cross the swing bridge which looked just exactly like another piece of road – if she hadn’t been able to read she would never have known it was a bridge at all – she found the sea! Wide and blue today, with the buildings on the opposite bank shimmering in a heat-haze and looking very far away, but undoubtedly the great ocean she had read about, which divided Liverpool first from Ireland and then from the United States of America, though she was not quite certain how this division worked.

A girl of about her own age was playing hopscotch with another girl on the wide dockside. Kitty approached them.

‘Hey, is that the sea?’ she asked, sure of a confirmatory nod. But instead, two shaggy heads shook.

‘Nah, chuck, that’s the Mairsey,’ the smaller of the girls assured her. ‘Ain’t you never seen it afore? Biggest river in the ’ole wairld, me da says.’

‘Oh!’ Kitty said. She had lost face, but the girls didn’t seem to care at all. The taller one threw her piece of slate into the crudely chalked squares and began to hop. Kitty watched for a minute, then ambled on. She had found a fish and chip shop on Chaloner Street, squeezed between the Great Western Railway goods station and a small tobacconist shop, and still had the paper which had held the chips, though she had eaten the contents hungrily within moments of handing over her half-crown and watching sadly as it was reduced to two shillings, a threepenny joe and two pennies.

She’d had a drink of water just before accosting the two girls, because there was a drinking fountain at the side of the road, so she was comfortable enough in herself. And now she began to wonder if she might find employment of some sort amongst the ships which thronged the docks, or perhaps someone needing an errand run. For in fact Kitty, a gregarious little soul, was beginning to find the loneliness of her wandering almost as trying as the fear of being picked up by the police or the dread of dying of starvation: fates which, she well knew, did befall unwanted children.

But the afternoon was wearing on and fascinating though the dockside was to one as new to it as Kitty, it was patently no place for a skinny, barefoot girl. Mostly she was ignored, but now and then someone spoke to her – not always in English, either – and a strong sense of self-preservation warned her that the men who called out to her and cajoled her with sweets to come and talk to them meant her no good and might well be as dangerous as an encounter with Sary or Hector Drinkwater.

So she abandoned the docks and wandered back into the city proper once more, this time into a better area where the houses were big and very clean and the pavements wide and well-swept.

She glanced up at the road sign nearest her.
Rodney Street
, it read.

Kitty walked on. A great many of the houses had brass plates on the door; she stopped to read one.
Dr G.B. Matteson. Member of the Royal College of Surgeons
. Wondering vaguely what the wording meant, Kitty continued. But she was getting tired and Rodney Street did not seem like the kind of place where she might find a fried fish shop, nor one of the delightful cocoa rooms where a cooked dinner might be had for sixpence – not that she intended to waste her substance on cooked dinners, of course, when chips were available for so much less. Besides, it was evening and she really ought to be finding a nice warm nook for the night, not wandering gormlessly on with no thought for the future.

So she turned and began to retrace her steps.

Chapter Four

Lilac had settled Mrs Matteson tenderly in bed, put a glass of iced water within easy reach, arranged a light shawl comfortably round the older woman’s shoulders, and gone downstairs to the kitchen to fetch up Mrs Matteson’s tray, on which there should already be a light and tempting supper. Since she was going to the house in Penny Lane for a meal she wanted to get her work over so that she could change her print gown and flat shoes for something a trifle more fashionable, but she would never have dreamed of hurrying her mistress. Nevertheless, she entered the kitchen hoping devoutly that the evening meal was prepared.

The plain cook, stomping about her domain, gave Lilac a nasty glare as she entered the room; Mrs O’Malley had found another place and the dislike Lilac felt for her was now seen to be mutual. She had already prepared two plates of food, one for the mistress and one for Dr Matteson, and when Lilac looked at the unappetising helpings she felt a cold rage envelop her. The woman had cut the cold mutton into chunks and scarcely warmed the cabbage, whilst the potatoes, small, new, toothsome, had been boiled to a miserable mush. She had made a thick, solid-looking gravy and the mint sauce, which should have been sweet and green with the well-minced herb, was last week’s, so it was brown as a cup of milkless tea. She had used one of the best plates, it was true, but there was a smear of gravy across the gold-rimmed edge and she hadn’t bothered to match up the knife and fork: the knife had a heavy pearl handle and the fork had embossed ivy leaves on its silver surface. Bullied by Lilac into at least a semblance of caring, she had put a rose in the silver vase on the tray, but the rose was half-dead and heavily infested with greenfly and the vase had smears of plate polish down one side.