The Liverpool Rose (5 page)

‘Well, that’s where you come in,’ Geoff said quickly, eager to make his point before they all began to shuffle into the dining room. When Brother Mark was in charge, there was no knowing how he might rearrange the seating, deliberately parting friend from friend on the grounds that this would mean less chattering and fooling about at table. ‘Suppose you say, next time you’re visiting on a Saturday, that your gran’s asked you to bring a friend along? That would mean we could leave here together and arrange to meet somewhere at around eight o’clock – if you are out for tea that is. Then I could nip along to Cranberry Court and see me pals and come back in with you, no harm done. What do you think?’

‘Seems all right to me,’ Roy said, but he sounded doubtful. ‘What about your tea though, our Geoff? You can’t rely on this Grey family wanting an extra mouth to feed.’

‘Oh, I reckon they’re the sort of family who wouldn’t grudge me a plate of scouse, seeing as how Mrs Grey handed out butties this afternoon,’ Geoff said airily. He felt that to get away from the Branny now and again, particularly on what appeared to be legitimate business, would be worth any number of missed teas. What was more if he got away for a whole day, he and Lizzie could earn themselves a few pence in the morning and spend the afternoon in some pleasant manner with some coppers in their pocket for a drink and a bun. ‘Don’t you worry about me, old feller. When are you going out next?’

Roy was about to reply when the double doors leading into the dining room were opened from the inside by one of the boys on monitor duty. Despite the
fact that they had been formed into a queue, the boys promptly broke ranks and surged forward. Considering the type of tea which awaited them Geoff thought ruefully, this wasn’t a particularly sensible way to behave. There would be large jugs of tepid tea, platters of bread and margarine, and presently the monitors on duty would come round with tureens of stew, usually as tepid as the tea and with a thick skimming of fat on the surface of the dish. This would be doled out sparingly to each boy and would be followed by a dish of rice pudding, semolina, spotted dick or stewed apple, depending on the cook’s fancy. But even this repast would be denied them until they had reformed their queue and entered the dining room in a suitably chastened fashion.

Brother Mark, standing just inside the door, yelled at the boys and drove them back into the hall. Geoff, seeing the brother punching and shoving at the boys who had broken ranks, hoped devoutly that Brother Mark’s feet were getting as trampled as his own.

Presently, with order restored, the boys at last gained their places. Geoff, as he had feared, had been separated from his friends and was seated at a table with much older boys, but at least this enabled him to think. He had a good deal to think about, what was more.

The day had been a surprise right from the start, he told himself as the monitor poured tea into his tin mug. He had slipped out with every intention of meeting up with Sid and Tom, because they were the nearest he ever got to finding out how normal boys, not those who lived in orphanages, managed their lives. Accordingly, he had hung around on the corner of Netherfield Road and Prince Edwin Lane and sure enough, after about twenty minutes or so, the boys
came slouching round the corner, quickening their pace as they reached the main road.

Sid and Tom looked a bit alike but in fact were not brothers, as Geoff had first supposed. They were bezzies, however, and it is never easy for a third person to become accepted by two best friends. Geoff realised, almost from the first day they had allowed him to go along with them, that this was for convenience – theirs – rather than friendship. They were a wild couple, up to all sorts of mischief, and only allowed him to go along as look-out, if they needed one, or for some other purpose which suited their plans. That very morning they had given him an empty jam jar and sent him into the Gaiety Cinema on the Scottie, in order that he might hold open one of the fire doors for Sid, Tom and several others to enter without paying. It was odd, Geoff reflected now, how extremely difficult it was for a boy who lived in an orphanage to pal up with boys who did not. There could be no reciprocal visits should you be lucky enough to be asked into someone’s home, and anyway most kids lived in crowded little streets where everyone knew everyone else; thus it was not necessary for such children to look for friends amongst the boys in the Branny. Furthermore, most of the boys in the Home had no desire to make friends out of it. They had relatives so that they knew considerably more about the life lived by ordinary people than Geoff did. It would have struck them as peculiar in the extreme had they realised how desperately he longed to see ordinary homes.

So he had made friends with Sid and Tom, hoping that one of these days they would unbend towards him and ask him to visit them. He knew that they lived somewhere in the rabbit warren of tiny houses
in the mean little streets, alleys and courts which surrounded Prince Edwin Lane, but he did not know exactly where. He had never dared to suggest that he might go home with them – indeed, they seldom seemed to go home, preferring the life of the streets to whatever domestic delights awaited them – but he waited in vain for a casual invitation from one or other of the boys. He had hinted, of course, offering to carry a nicked roll of lino back to Sid’s place for him, suggesting that he might run back for something forgotten if they would tell him where their homes were, but this had always been either ignored or brushed aside; there was obviously going to be little chance there.

Accordingly, when the three of them had met up earlier in the day, Geoff had had very little expectation of attaining his goal. Indeed, as Lizzie had predicted, he felt there was more chance of seeing the inside of a police station when in Sid’s company than the inside of an ordinary home. So when the boys had run off, leaving him to lug Lizzie’s messages, he had not really regretted their loss. They were dangerous company and though he would have stuck by them had he thought that there was the remotest chance of a really close friendship developing, he had begun to realise he was wasting his time.

In all his dreams of acquiring a friend from an ordinary household, however, Geoff had never considered meeting or befriending a girl. Girls, so far as he was concerned, were a completely alien race, as foreign to him as though they spoke a different language and came from a different world. The only female members of staff at the Branny were Cook, who weighed twenty stone and hated boys; Mrs Fletcher, the housekeeper, who was thin and sour,
had a flourishing moustache and seldom mixed with the children; and Ethel and Ellen, the elderly charwomen whose combined age, Geoff thought, probably rivalled Methuselah’s.

There were no girls at St Mark’s school, of course, nor were there any female teachers. In fact the only other women with whom Geoff came into contact were the shrill-voiced usherettes at the Saturday picture show and one or two shop assistants, who might smile as they handed over a purchase he had made.

He rarely thought of girls, therefore, except as persons to be avoided. He saw them as he walked along the street: giggling little groups of them perched on a wall, or crouching over one of their weird pavement games. They would look up at him, give what he assumed was a knowing smirk, and then the heads would draw close and stifled giggles would break out once more. Convinced that they were laughing at him, Geoff positively disliked the local girls and would never, for one moment, have dreamed of getting to know one.

Yet that very day, and by the merest mischance, he had fallen in with Lizzie. He had glanced disparagingly at her: a thin waif of a child with fair hair, large blue eyes which had flickered over him scornfully, and a small, jutting chin which should have warned him of her determination, he thought now, if nothing else. She had been wearing a ragged cotton dress whose colour had faded from what had once been blue to a dreary grey, and she could not by any stretch of the imagination have been called pretty. Yet Geoff acknowledged that she had an appealing face, particularly when she smiled and her entire countenance lit up and softened. He had not wanted to carry her wretched messages, nor to go with her to her
home, because if there was one thing he was convinced of, it was that no girl would ever invite an unknown boy to accompany her indoors. Which just proved, he thought now, spooning the thin gravy into his mouth, that no one ever knows what is in store for them. He had gone into Lizzie’s home, met her aunt, helped to chop vegetables and to carry water the way ordinary boys must do daily, and had then walked through the streets with her, chatting idly as though they had been friends for years. In other words, the breakthrough for which he had always longed had come out of the blue, without any real effort on his part. Now that he came to think about it, he had been so blind to the opportunity he had nearly mucked it up by being extremely rude to Lizzie. He shuddered inwardly to think how easily he might have stalked off in high dudgeon, letting Tom pick up the canvas bag.

However, this had not happened and he had made a new friend and enjoyed a thoroughly interesting day. In all his wanderings, he had never actually entered a court before, being wary of the gangs of kids to be found playing there and of the dark dinginess of the surroundings. Courts were tiny closed communities in which they all knew one another. He had always assumed that a stranger entering one would be immediately mobbed and possibly thrown out on his ear.

‘Finished, have ya?’ The dining-room monitor’s voice in his ear made Geoff jump and clutch the edge of his plate protectively.

‘Hang on a second,’ he protested, realising that he had still some stew on his plate. He leaned forward and took a slice of bread, swiped it round the plate, collecting the rest of the stew on it, folded it over and thrust it into his mouth. Speaking thickly, he said:
‘You can have the bleedin’ plate now, la’. There’s not enough left for a cat’s lick so you might as well take it back to the kitchen. What’s for puddin’?’

‘Murder on the Alps,’ the monitor said, smacking his lips. ‘Since you was last to finish, young feller, we’ll start serving up now.’ He whisked Geoff’s plate away but left his spoon and fork – it was generally understood that one set of what Father Brannigan called ‘eating irons’ should last the whole repast.

Presently, with a bowl of semolina decorated with a daub of jam, Geoff began dreamily mixing the pudding into a pink mush while he contemplated the home he had visited that afternoon. Lizzie’s Aunt Annie was a large woman, but surely it could not be just this fact which had made the room seem so small? Despite the heat of the June day, there had been a big fire in the kitchen grate and he realised that Aunt Annie would have to put up with the heat in order that her family might have a cooked meal. What was more, apart from the creaking basketwork chair and the large, scrubbed wooden table, there had been very little furniture in the room. He had tried to take everything in without appearing unduly nosy, and it had not been difficult. He recalled a stained calendar hanging on one wall, a battered tin clock on the mantelpiece above the fire, and two rough, and obviously home-made, wooden benches. He wished he had thought to ask Lizzie if he might take a peep into the parlour, since that was where the family would be sitting this evening. He was pretty sure she would have unquestioningly opened the door for him. But he had not thought of it, so now he could only imagine what the Greys’ other room was like. Geoff did not repine, however. Having at last discovered that girls were every bit as nice as boys –
probably nicer than most – he was savouring the warm and pleasant feeling that he now had a friend he could visit whenever he was able to do so. Next time he would ask to see the parlour, might even go upstairs, take a look at the bedrooms.

His spoon, squeakily scraping up the last smear of Murder on the Alps, reminded him that the meal would soon be finishing with yet another grace. Father O’Malley, who was Father Brannigan’s deputy, was hurrying up the monitors, eager that the bowls might be collected and carried through to the kitchen for the staff to deal with. Once that was done the boys would be at liberty for a couple of hours before bedtime. There would be organised activities in the back yard, if you could call it that, for it was large enough for the playing of energetic games, and one of the masters would probably accompany the older boys to the Whitley Gardens where they might amuse themselves for an hour or so. Geoff enjoyed the impromptu games of football, cricket and various other past-times, but tonight he thought he would go with the older boys. Despite having spent the whole of supper time thinking about his afternoon, he still had to make up his mind whether this new friendship would fit into his Plan.

For ever since Geoff had been five years old, he had been working on his Plan. Even at five, he had realised that those who are clever, determined and somewhat ruthless are the ones who end up at the top of the heap, and despite the disadvantages of being a foundling and living in an orphanage, Geoff was determined that he would do well for himself one day. Because of this, he had always worked extremely hard at school and had done more than his share of homework when lessons finished for the day. A
teacher had realised early that Geoff was a natural mathematician and had encouraged him, in every way possible, to pursue his understanding and love of figures. Because he worked hard, he was popular with all the teachers and with most boys in his class as well, since he was never averse to helping anyone who asked for assistance, even doing the work for them if they proved too stupid to understand it. After all, it did not matter to Geoff if the whole class got good marks; he did not intend to compete with his fellow orphans for the sort of jobs the Branny thought suitable for their station. Railway porters, deckhands, street cleaners and gardeners were the usual occupations offered to Branny boys, with the occasional clerk’s or shop assistant’s, if a past boy proved to have the mental capacity for such work.

Geoff, however, intended to aim higher than that. He was a member of the free library and spent some of his spare time there, studying the newspapers which were set out on big stands for anyone to read. He always turned to the Situations Vacant column and was learning what a multitude of different jobs existed, though it appeared that one had to start at the bottom first in order to do well.