Someone to Trust Read online

  Someone to Trust

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Copyright

  With love to John, whom I met in a ‘Picture Palace’. And those like us, who found their escapism – thrills, tears, laughter, romance and adventure – via the magical Silver Screen.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank Bob Harrington and the Beacon Archives Group, as well as Hugh McKinley, Elsie Shimmin, Gladys Thomas, Mrs E Conroy, Dolly Lloyd, Mr John Hewitt, Ron Simmons, Mrs Hull and Dot Gallagher, for helping me with my research. It was much appreciated.

  Although I have done my best to get my facts right there were times when I needed to use a little poetic licence. Court 15 mentioned in the book existed, but due to so much of old Liverpool having been destroyed by bombs or rebuilt by the City’s Corporation, I had to use what I knew of other courts to describe it. If I’ve got it wrong, please forgive me.

  Chapter One

  Lucy ran as fast as her legs could carry her along Great Homer Street, trying to shut out the sound of breaking glass and the shouts and cries of men, women and children fighting over clothes and boots looted from shattered shop windows. There was no one to stop them on this August bank holiday weekend of 1919 because the Liverpool bobbies were on strike. The sky was overcast and thunder rumbled in the distance. The air was hot and clammy, and perspiration ran down her flat chest beneath the well-washed, too-tight calico bodice of the secondhand navy blue frock her mam, Maureen, had purchased from Paddy’s Market last year. Lack of regular nourishment caused her to look younger than her twelve years but helping to support their small family had matured her in other ways.

  She raced past the North Star pub, clipping the kerb with a pram wheel. A drunk sprawling in the gutter reached up to touch her skirts, causing her to swerve to avoid him. She almost lost control. The boarded-up window of Mr Bochinsky’s draper’s shop came up to meet her and she put out a hand to ward it off. One of her plaits, fastened with string, hit her in the face and for a moment she could not see where she was going and grazed her cheek on the sooty brickwork of a wall.

  Her brother Timmy yelped and dropped the pair of boots clutched against his chest to cling grimly to the sides of the orange box attached to the wheels in which he squatted on unsold bundles of firewood. Fruit and vegetables bounced several inches in the air before landing between his booted feet, braced against the inside corners of the box. Boots which were too large for him, boots which had once belonged to a relative, boots split across the toes and with the sole coming away from the uppers. They squashed an apple.

  ‘Yer going too fast, our Luce,’ he cried. ‘Yer’ll have us over!’

  ‘Shut up! We’re nearly there,’ she panted, swerving to avoid a disreputable-looking woman with a bulging shawl bundled against her chest with goodness knows what concealed inside it. ‘Think of Mam’s face when she sees what we’ve got!’

  She pushed the cart along Bostock Street, a thoroughfare of mixed housing and shops built in Victorian times. Some dwelling places had cellars and attics and had been turned into lodging houses; others were simply two ups, two downs or parlour houses. Between the Methodist Mission Hall and Mr Moore’s lodging house was the entrance to Court Number 15 where her grandmother’s home lay.

  Lucy’s pace slackened as they came within sight of the passageway next to the Mission Hall. Of the youths who normally hung about beneath the gas lamp in the evenings there was no sign. No doubt they were busy among the looters.

  There was a gnawing anxiety in Lucy’s chest as she began thinking of her gran. She went past the ash bins and the privies shared by the court dwellers, careful not to get a wheel jammed in the gutter running through the centre of the court, carefully steering round the cast-iron drinking fountain in the middle. The foul air hung heavier here than out on the streets, trapped as it was on four sides by buildings. The lower half of some of the houses had been whitewashed in spring but was already dingy with the soot from thousands of chimneys. She thought of her grandmother, lying in the stifling hot room under the eaves, and remembered the sound of her breathing that morning when she’d stood outside the old woman’s room, listening to the doctor telling her mother that Gran didn’t have long to live. Lucy was convinced if they had not had to move from Everton Heights then her grandmother would not be on her last legs now.

  Three steps led up to their front door, which stood ajar. Lucy placed both her arms round her brother and hoisted his skinny frame out of the box. With his help she managed to drag the orange box on wheels up the steps and indoors.

  ‘Is that you, Lucy?’ called her mother, a soft Irish lilt in her voice.

  The girl took an orange from the box and gazed upstairs. ‘Yes, Mam! Can I come up?’

  ‘No, best not!’

  ‘But I’ve got something for Gran,’ said Lucy, holding the orange to her nose and sniffing it with a pleasure that bordered on the ecstatic. ‘It’ll make her better.’ She began to ascend the rickety, dark stairway.

  Timmy took an apple and followed, clipping her heels. ‘It’ll make her better,’ he echoed, his golden hair glowing like a halo in the darkness.

  ‘Have the pair of you got cloth ears now?’ Their mother Maureen’s slender outline loomed at the top of the stairs, arms outstretched to either side of her, forming a barrier. ‘No further,’ she said firmly. ‘Your gran’s not up to visitors.’

  ‘But we’re not visitors, we’re family,’ said Lucy, mouth drooping at the corners. ‘She’ll want to see us and know what we’ve done.’

  ‘She won’t know you, you eejit!’ Maureen shook her auburn curls. ‘Besides the priest’s with your gran right now – but maybe I’ll come down a moment and see what you’ve got.’

  The priest! thought Lucy. What was she thinking of having a priest in the house when they hadn’t set foot in St Anthony’s since last Christmas?

  ‘We’ve loads,’ said Timmy, beaming up at her. ‘Loads and loads.’

  ‘Loads of pennies?’ Maureen lifted him and hugged him tightly. ‘My, you’re the spitting image of your daddy.’

  Watching them both, Lucy felt an ache in her chest, remembering the days following the sinking of the Lusitania. Every German-sounding shop had been smashed and raided. She’d been bewildered by the violence as she had been dragged through the streets by her mother to the shipping office. The sight of the mourning women, black shawls pulled over their heads as they wept and wailed for husbands, sons and brothers had left an indelible impression on her. Maureen had behaved no differently and yet a short while later when Lucy’s paternal grandparents had visited and suggested she accompany them to Cobh in Ireland, where her husband Lawrence’s recovered body had been taken for burial, she had refused to go with them.

  ‘So how much money have you made?’ asked Maureen now, smiling. ‘I spent ages chopping wood last night. I hope you’ve sold all the bundles?’

  Lucy avoided meeting her mother’s eyes, scratching at a patch of scurvy at the corner of her mouth, think
ing swiftly.

  ‘Don’t do that! You’ll have it bleeding,’ said Maureen, frowning.

  The girl laced her hands in front of her and pinned on a bright smile. ‘You said we needed fruit, Mam! Well, we’ve brought you some. Fruit’ll make it better, you said. So we’ve oranges, bananas and apples. Isn’t that good?’

  Maureen drew her chin in against her neck, squinting at the apple Timmy was tapping against her collar bone. ‘And where did you get them from?’ she said softly.

  ‘We didn’t steal them, Mam!’ Lucy’s voice was scandalised. ‘But hardly anyone’s buying firewood today. Everybody’s on the streets. The fruit was rolling all over the pavement and in the gutter.’ She took a potato from the box. ‘See! Spuds as well!’

  ‘And I’ve got a new pair of boots, Mam,’ shrilled Timmy, almost squeezing the life out of her as he wrapped his arms round her neck. ‘They were in the gutter, too!’

  Maureen’s lips tightened as she freed herself from her son’s embrace. She put him down and tapped a foot on the cracked linoleum at the bottom of the stairs. ‘Is it that my children are thieves?’ she asked in a soft, silky voice.

  ‘No, Mam!’ Lucy shook her head wildly. ‘We didn’t take anything out of the shop windows!’

  ‘Keep your voice down! The priest’s upstairs,’ hissed Maureen. ‘You certainly didn’t pay for any of this stuff. Is it that you’re saying it dropped from heaven, my girl? That it’s a gift from God?’

  Lucy seized on the idea, although as a family they’d had little to do with the church since her father was killed, but they had Scripture in the elementary school she attended so she wasn’t completely ignorant where religion was concerned. Her eyes gleamed. ‘Didn’t teacher tell us only last week that it says in the Bible that God provides for the poor and hungry?’

  Her mother was silent a moment then the slightest of smiles lifted the corners of her mouth. ‘Who’d be a mother trying to bring up her children these days? Put those back in the box and go wash your hands. Take Timmy with you and we’ll talk about it later.’ At that moment the priest called her name and she hurried upstairs.

  Reluctantly Lucy dropped the potato and orange in the box and, taking her brother by the hand, passed through the kitchen to the scullery which had no window or outside door because there was no backyard. She lit the candle stuck to a cracked saucer with melted wax before whipping the cloth from a bucket of water which stood on the draining board next to a shallow stone sink.

  Carefully she poured water into an enamel bowl. Then with a piece of rag she washed her brother’s face and hands, drying them with a rough towel. She washed her own hands and face before standing on a stool and taking a comb from a shelf. She replaited her hair which, when newly washed, had the glow of a freshly dropped conker – but that didn’t happen often because soap was in short supply in this household. Then she set about bringing some order to Timmy’s tangled curls. ‘There,’ she said at last, pleased at the result. ‘I think we’ll do if we have to face the priest.’ And she blew out the candle.

  Two hours later the children were seated with their mother at the table in the kitchen. Maureen was dividing three oranges into quarters. She then divided them into eighths. ‘Too large and they’ll sting your scurvy,’ she murmured, sharing out the pieces equally on a large plate, cracked and brown in places from the heat of the oven.

  Lucy was feeling dreadful. She had wept when her mother broke the news that her gran was dead; she hadn’t thought she’d be able to eat due to feeling so sick, but she’d had no food since breakfast so was feeling half-starved. ‘Can we start, Mam?’

  The woman’s green eyes rested on her daughter’s tear-stained, freckled face. ‘Why is it you have freckles? You’ll never be a beauty like me if you don’t grow out of them. Not that you appear to be growing at all. At your age I already had curves and everyone thought me a beauty. I had lovely white skin and roses in my cheeks… That’s Irish air for you. Sometimes I wish Mammy and Daddy’d never left our home in County Cork and brought us to Liverpool.’ There was a catch in her voice.

  Lucy felt that sinking feeling that came over her every time her mother said that kind of thing. It made her feel ugly and she despaired of ever being attractive to boys.

  Maureen sighed. ‘No, I’m not the girl I used to be.’

  Lucy knew this was her cue. ‘You’re still beautiful, Mam.’ She had lost count of the times she had said those words.

  ‘No, no, no!’ Maureen rose from the table and went to gaze at her reflection in the fly-spotted mirror which hung over the fireplace. She had a heart-shaped face the same as Lucy but her skin these days held an unhealthy pallor. ‘I’m only a pale imitation of the girl I used to be. I’m not getting the good food I used to eat in Ireland and I’m not breathing that clean fresh air.’

  ‘You enjoyed the spare ribs and cabbage from Maggie Block’s.’ Lucy’s stomach rumbled just thinking of that mouthwatering dish.

  ‘That was over a week ago.’ Maureen returned to her seat, picking up a segment of orange. ‘But perhaps we can spoil ourselves once I’ve my hands on the burial money.’ She paused to eat the fruit before adding, ‘You must never take what doesn’t belong to you, children… but seeing as how we don’t know which shop this fruit came from we can’t return it. Now eat slowly – never rush a treat – and when I get the burial money we’ll give a penny to the ex-soldier with no legs.’

  ‘What about the boots, Mam?’ asked Timmy, gazing up at her hopefully.

  ‘You can’t keep them.’ There was regret in her voice.

  Her son’s face fell.

  ‘Don’t look like that!’ Maureen reached out and touched his cheek. ‘They’re far too big for you, Timmy.’

  ‘But I’ll grow into them, Mam,’ insisted the boy. ‘I’ve never had boots that fit me.’

  She laughed. ‘It’ll take you six years to grow into them boots.’

  ‘You can pawn them at Dalglish’s,’ said Lucy eagerly. ‘And with the money you can buy him a better secondhand pair and still have some money over.’ She turned to her brother. ‘That’s OK with you, isn’t it, Timmy?’

  The boy nodded vigorously as he sucked noisily at a slice of orange.

  Maureen raised neatly arched dark red eyebrows. ‘You’ve got it all planned, have you, my girl? And how do I explain to Mr Dalglish how I came by a brand new pair of boots?’ She picked up the offending items: lovely, brand new, uncracked leather with steel caps.

  ‘Say they fell from heaven, too?’ said Timmy with relish, wriggling in his seat.

  Lucy hid a smile but was unsure how her mother would take that remark. She was relieved when Maureen laughed. ‘I shouldn’t have said that. The trouble with you children is you’re apt to remember the things I’d rather you forgot. Eat your orange now. It’ll do you good.’

  ‘Poor Gran!’ sighed Lucy. ‘I wish she could have tasted this orange.’ Her eyes filled with tears and she couldn’t hold them back. They trickled down her cheeks and into her mouth to salt the orange. ‘Why did she have to die? I’ve only one gran left now and I never see her.’ She sighed, only able to hazard a guess as to why her other grandparents had not been in touch since her mother had refused to go with them to Ireland. It could be simply down to Maureen’s having been unable to pay the rent on the larger house up near St Edward’s College on Everton Heights so being forced to move in with her parents a few doors away. Maybe Lucy’s other grandparents hadn’t been told the new address. Only then hadn’t her mother’s father been killed in an accident, and her Uncle Mick, Maureen’s younger brother, gone off to war? It wasn’t until the end of hostilities, when Maureen lost her job in munitions and Gran became ill, that they’d moved again, to this dingy little house which they all hated. Still, at least they had a roof over their heads and due to the firewood round were managing to pay the rent.

  Maureen’s hands stilled. Then almost feverishly she said, ‘Now you mustn’t be wishing your gran back. She’s gone to her rest.’

>   ‘It isn’t easy, Mam, when yer sad,’ said Lucy, wiping her face with the back of her hand.

  ‘Don’t I know it! Didn’t I lose your daddy and my daddy in the last five years? And when I was your age I lost two brothers and a sister to the fever! The only people I have left now are our Mick and you two.’

  Lucy would have liked to have mentioned her father’s parents but decided it would be a waste of time; still, she would never forget the day her father had taken them all on a train to the other side of the country to show his baby son to his parents before sailing away on the Lusitania, never to return.

  There was still a vivid picture in Lucy’s mind of a white-painted house with ruby velvet curtains gently moving at the open windows. The sea breezes had been so strong, her father had laughingly said they could blow you all the way across the North Sea. There had been a grandfather who’d smelled of fish and had a ruddy face. He’d given Lucy a whole shilling. And there was a plump lady with soft brown hair whose worried eyes were forever resting on her son. Even so she’d a smile for Lucy and had cuddled her new grandson. She had baked slabs of sticky ginger cake for them.

  Lucy’s Irish gran on the other hand had made sweets and toffee apples and sold them to the queues outside the theatres and new picture palaces. It was she who had built up the firewood round which Lucy had taken over when Gran became too ill.

  Maureen put a hand to her head and her eyelids drooped. ‘Anyway, that’s enough talk, my girl. There’s things to do. In the morning I’ll be needing to make the funeral arrangements. I’ll write a letter to our Mick right now and you can post it for me. Maybe it’ll hasten his demob.’

  ‘It’s mad out there on the streets, Mam,’ said Lucy, reluctant to face the crowds again.

  ‘Tush, girl! Don’t be fussing. You’ll be fine.’

  Lucy wondered how her mother could be so sure but knew it was a waste of time arguing. She went and found Timmy and herself a banana to share.

  * * *