Read the book: «Daughters of Liverpool»

ONE

December 1940

‘I called in at the Salvage Depot to see Dad on my way over here, and he was telling me that you’re going to have some girl billeted on you.’

Jean Campion looked up from her annual task of anxiously working out if the Christmas turkey she had ordered that morning from St John’s Market was going to be too big for her gas oven, to look at her son, her hazel eyes warm with maternal love.

She loved all four of her children, but Luke was the eldest, tall and dark-haired, like his dad, Sam, and her only son – a man now, not a boy any longer, with the experience of Dunkirk behind him and a year in the army.

‘Yes, that’s right.’ Jean pushed her still brown hair back off her face, her cheeks flushed a soft pink from her exertions.

The kitchen was the heart of the Campion family’s home. Modestly sized but warmly furnished with all the love that Jean and Sam gave their family, it shone with the pride Jean took in her home.

Her kitchen was her pride and joy, newly refurbished the year before the war had started. A gas geyser on the wall next to the sink provided Jean with hot water for all her domestic tasks, and was ‘extra’ to the electric immersion heater upstairs in its own cupboard next to the bathroom. She and Sam had distempered the walls themselves, painting them a cheerful shade of yellow that made Jean feel as though the sun was shining even when it wasn’t.

Sam had got the well-polished linoleum cheap from a salvage job he’d been on, and had fitted it himself, in the bathroom as well as the kitchen, and Jean kept it as shiny and as spotless as her pots and pans.

Jean was a careful housewife and she’d been thrilled when she’d spotted the remnant of yellow fabric with its red strawberry pattern on it, which she’d bought for the kitchen curtains.

The big family oak table had come from a second-hand shop, and Jean and Sam had reupholstered the chairs themselves.

‘She’s supposed to be arriving this evening, but you know what the trains are like. Your dad wasn’t keen on us taking someone in but, like I said to him, it’s our duty really. We’ve got two spare rooms now, after all, with you in the army and based at Seacombe, and Grace training to be a nurse and living in at the hospital, and only me and your dad and the twins here. Mind you, your dad said straight out that it would have to be a woman, on account of Lou and Sasha.’

The mention of his fifteen-year-old twin sisters made Luke smile.

‘Well, I hope whoever she is that she likes jitterbug music,’ he told his mother.

‘I’m putting her in what was the twins’ room now that they’ve moved up into Grace’s old room in the attic,’ said Jean, ignoring his teasing comment about the twins’ devotion to their gramophone and the dance music they played on it. ‘It will be more fitting. I could have done wi’out her arriving the week before Christmas, mind, but there you are.’

‘In uniform, is she?’ Luke asked.

Jean shook her head. ‘No. She’s going to be working at the old Littlewoods Pools place off Edge Lane, where they censor the post. You know where I mean.’

Luke nodded. ‘They’ve got going on for two thousand working there now, so I’ve heard.’

‘Well, never mind about her,’ Jean said, ‘let’s have a proper look at you.’

They had the kitchen to themselves, otherwise Jean would not have risked embarrassing her tall handsome soldier son by subjecting him to the kind of maternal scrutiny that more properly belonged to his schooldays, minus a brisk demand as to whether or not he had washed behind his ears, but the truth was that she was concerned about him.

It might be over six months since Dunkirk but Jean knew that her son had still not got over the heartache he had suffered then.

It was thanks to Grace that she knew how he had been led on and then let down by the very pretty, socially ambitious nurse he had been hoping to become engaged to. According to Grace, Lillian Green had never had any intention of getting seriously involved with Luke and had simply used him. She and Grace had done their nursing training together and she had boasted right from the start that she had decided to train as a nurse only because she wanted to marry a doctor. A decent ordinary young man ready to give up his life for his country wasn’t good enough for her, and she had told Luke as much when he had gone to the hospital to see her on his return from Dunkirk.

How much the experience of the British Expeditionary Forces’ retreat to Dunkirk, and its subsequent evacuation from its beaches, was responsible for the sometimes remote and grim-looking young man who had taken the place of the laughing boy Luke had been, and how much the heartbreak inflicted on him by Lillian was responsible, Jean didn’t know. What she did know, was that it made her heart ache to see her once carefree son turned into a man who looked at the world through far more cynical eyes, and who sometimes betrayed a sharp edge of bitterness towards love and romance.

He was young yet though, Jean comforted herself. Plenty of time for him to meet someone else, a girl who would give him the real love he deserved. At least she hoped there would be plenty of time.

To distract herself from such worrying thoughts she asked, ‘Will you be getting any leave over Christmas, do you think, now that Hitler has stopped dropping bombs on us every other night?’

It was over two weeks now since they’d last been woken from their sleep by the sound of the air-raid sirens, and everyone was hoping that situation would continue.

‘We haven’t been told yet, Mum – at least not officially – but the word is that we should get a couple of days off, so with a bit of luck I should be home on Christmas Day, at least.’

‘Oh, I do hope so, love, especially with Grace and Seb going down to spend Christmas and Boxing Day with Seb’s family. Oh, did I tell you that she’s had ever such a nice letter from them, saying how pleased they are about her and Seb getting engaged and how much they’re looking forward to meeting her? I must say I was pleased. I don’t mind admitting that I was a bit worried when she first started talking about Seb, on account of him being related to Bella’s late in-laws.’

Luke agreed. He was well aware, of course, of the full story, but he knew how fiercely protective his mother was of them all. And not just of her own children and husband. She was equally protective of her twin sister, even though, in Luke’s opinion, neither his auntie Vi and her husband, Edwin, nor his cousins, Charlie and Bella, deserved his mother’s staunch loyalty.

So far as Luke was concerned, his auntie Vi was a snob, his cousin Charlie a bragging fool, and his cousin Bella a spoiled and very selfish young woman. A young widow now, he reminded himself since her husband and his parents had been killed when a bomb had fallen on their house last month.

Luke was glad that his auntie Vi’s social aspirations meant that they didn’t have to see much of her and her family, who lived across the water from the city of Liverpool in posh Wallasey Village. Of course, Luke himself was also living across the water now, seeing as he was based at Seacombe barracks, close to Wallasey and New Brighton, and, like them, accessed by the ferry boat.

‘I’d better get back to the barracks. It will take me half an hour or so to walk down to the ferry,’ Luke told his mother, returning her hug and then shrugging on his army greatcoat, with its recent addition of his corporal’s stripes. ‘Our sergeant gave me a few hours off on account of all the extra time we’ve had to put in clearing up after the bombs, seeing as it doesn’t take me long to nip home, but I don’t like taking time off and leaving the other lads to it. It’s all right for me being stationed at Seacombe barracks and so close to home, but some of them haven’t seen their families in weeks.’

Luke had changed so much since the outbreak of war, Jean acknowledged as she waved him off. Sam was tall and broad-shouldered, but Luke was now both taller and broader than his dad, his boyishness stripped from him by the experience of war.

More than anything else she wanted this war to be over and her children kept safe, but Churchill had warned them that they were in it for the long haul. Jean shivered at the thought. She should be counting her blessings, she scolded herself. Her children were all safe and well, and here in Liverpool where she could see them, and put her arms round them to reassure herself that they were safe. Unlike some. She didn’t need to look at the damage the Luftwaffe’s bombs had caused in the city to remind herself of the cost in human suffering of this war.

Her ten-year-old nephew Jack, legally the son of her twin, Vi, but in reality the illegitimate child of their younger sister, Francine, had been killed outright when a bomb had been dropped on the Welsh farmhouse to which he had been evacuated.

Sadness clouded Jean’s eyes as she set about wiping the already immaculately clean oven, before refilling the kettle ready to put it on the boil when her family started to arrive home.

Unlike some housewives, at Sam’s insistence Jean did not wear a scarf over her shiny brown curls when she was doing her housework.

‘You’ve got a lovely head of curls,’ Sam had told her gruffly the one and only time she had attempted to cover them inside the house. ‘One of the first things I noticed about you, them curls and that smile of yours.’

Jean paused in her cleaning, a tender smile curling her mouth. She’d been so lucky in her husband and her marriage. She started to hum softly under her breath, and then stopped, her smile fading, remembering how Francine had always sung around the house as a young girl.

Poor Francine. Vi hadn’t been pleased at all when their younger sister had returned to Liverpool from Hollywood, where she had been living and working as a singer, since she had left England in disgrace after giving birth to her child.

Vi had been even less pleased when Fran had started to question the way in which Vi and Edwin had been treating the little boy they had vowed to bring up as though he were their own. Jean suspected that Fran had been within a heartbeat of really throwing the fat into the fire and insisting that she wanted to take Jack back and bring him up with a proper mother’s love, when the poor little lad had been killed.

Jean’s heart ached for her younger sister. Poor Fran had been more misled and deceived than bad, and only sixteen when she had given birth to Jack. In many ways Jean blamed herself for the unhappiness both Fran and her son had endured. If she herself hadn’t been so poorly at that time she would have been able to do more and would have taken Fran’s baby on herself.

Fran was in London now, having volunteered for ENSA, the group of performers who entertained the troops. She had written to Jean to tell her that she would be working over Christmas but that she wasn’t allowed to say where.

That must mean she’s overseas, Jean guessed.

Much as she loved her younger sister and felt sorry for her, in some ways Jean was relieved that Fran wouldn’t be able to spend Christmas with them.

Her own twin daughters were going through a phase when all they wanted was to go on the stage themselves, and having their glamorous Auntie Fran around, talking about the shows she was going to be in, wasn’t really what Jean wanted them to hear at the moment, especially not when Fran herself had already said that she thought their dancing was good enough to get them on stage.

Sam, who could be protectively strict with his children if he thought it necessary, would never entertain the idea of them going on stage, especially not with there being a war on, and all sorts of men likely to be ogling every girl they saw dancing around in a skimpy costume.

Thinking of the twins made Jean hope that their billetee wouldn’t be too put out by the noise the pair of them made with their gramophone records and their dancing. The nice young woman who had come to see her about her spare room had told her that her boss – ‘Mac,’ she had called him, explaining that his real title was ‘Officer Commanding Beds’– would be thrilled to have such a clean bedroom in what was obviously a very well-run home, to add to his list of billets.

‘Flannelling you, she was,’ Sam had laughed when Jean had reported this comment to him later.

‘No such thing,’ Jean had insisted firmly. ‘She was telling me that some of the rooms she’d been to see weren’t fit to house an animal, never mind a decent young woman.’

Vi had, of course, sniffed disparagingly on being told that Jean was to have someone billeted on her, announcing that she would never be able to let some stranger sleep in one of her own beds. By rights Vi, with her three empty bedrooms now that her son and daughter had left home, should have put her name down for billetees but with Edwin on the local council she had boasted to Jean that she had managed to avoid doing so.

‘Just look at the situation at Bella’s,’ Vi had told Jean crossly, at the service for those who had lost their lives in the same bomb that had killed Bella’s husband and his parents. ‘Newly widowed and still having to have living with her those Polish refugees she was forced to take in. Not just one of them either, Jean,’ Vi had complained bitterly. ‘There’s the mother and the daughter, both of them adults and eating their heads off, and the mother’s got that son of hers expecting to stay at Bella’s whenever he comes to visit.’

Privately Jean’s sympathies lay with her niece’s billetees, who, from what she had learned of them on the single occasion she had met them, had seemed very pleasant, especially the son, Jan, who was in the air force and had taken part in the Battle of Britain.

There was no denying that her sister was a snob and a social climber, Jean admitted now, as she went back to her cleaning, rubbing fiercely at the kitchen sink taps. The war meant it was getting harder now to buy proper cleaning things. Not that Jean would ever waste her money on fancy cleaning stuff when a bit of a wipe with vinegar could do the job just as well.

Vi’s snobbery didn’t seem to have brought her any happiness so far as Jean could see. Even as a child Vi had been one of those people who was never satisfied or happy, unless she was sure that she had the best of things, and could look down on others, and she was just the same now.

* * *

‘Have we got time to walk home past the Royal Court Theatre, do you think?’ Lou asked her twin sister, Sasha.

Sasha shook her head. ‘Better not. Mum will only start asking us why we’re late and where we’ve bin, you know what she’s like. It’s a pity that Auntie Fran has gone to London. If she was still here she’d have bin able to work on Mum for us and help us to get some stage work, p’haps in one of the Christmas pantos. After all, she said we were good enough.’

The twins exchanged disappointed looks. They were, as Jean herself often said, as alike as two peas in a pod with no one really able to tell the difference between them unless they themselves allowed that to be seen.

At fifteen they were in many ways young for their age, still very much ‘schoolgirls’, with their plaits and freckles and their giggles. But that outward youthfulness hid a shared fierce determination to follow their auntie Fran onto the stage, along with an awareness of how strongly their parents would oppose that ambition.

The jobs they would be going into in Lewis’s department store after Christmas – proper jobs with proper wages, not just the bits of work they had been doing running errands for Mrs Lucas, the elderly owner of the old-fashioned dress shop in the city centre, which was closing down after Christmas – showed what their parents wanted for them: safe steady jobs that would keep them at home until the time came for them to marry. But the twins had other ideas and dreams, which had become all the more compelling with the onset of war and their auntie Fran’s recent visit.

On the top floor of their parents’ three-storey house in their shared attic bedroom, the twins regularly practised all the new dance steps they had seen in films, or begged their school friend, whose sister was a dance teacher, to show them, adapting them to a private shared routine they could dance in time to the new songs coming out of America, ready for the breaks they just knew they were going to get. Somehow or other …

Walking home past one of the most famous of Liverpool’s theatres, the Royal Court was part of their secret plan. A plan that involved them being seen and offered the opportunity to audition for a show, in which they would so impress the right people that they would be whisked off to Broadway to become overnight stars.

The train had slowed down preparatory to pulling into Liverpool’s Lime Street Station. Katie Needham wriggled a little apprehensively to the end of her seat. It had been a long stop-and-start journey from London to Liverpool, and the train was full with a mix of young men in uniform and other non-services travellers like herself. Naturally, the precautions necessitated by being at war meant that there were no lights on inside the train to illuminate the December late afternoon gloom, but Katie was too nervous to want to read, even if there had been enough light to enable her to do so.

She smoothed the fabric of her navy-blue skirt, glad of the warmth of the cherry-red jumper she was wearing. She had taken off her navy-blue woollen coat along with her matching wool beret, and her cherry-red hand-knitted scarf and gloves, a present from an elderly neighbour, when she had got onto the train, folding up her coat and her scarf and rolling her beret and her gloves to stow them carefully in the pocket of her coat before putting them on the luggage rack above her head along with her small case.

‘Soon be there.’ The pleasant woman in her thirties, who had chatted to her during the journey, informing her that she was travelling to Liverpool to see her husband, who was on leave from the navy, gave her a brief smile but Katie guessed that her travelling companion’s thoughts would be on her husband and the happy reunion that lay head. No one asked too many questions or gave away much information in these security-conscious times, and Katie had been relieved when the navy wife had accepted her own vague but proud statement that she was going to Liverpool to do ‘war work’.

Now, though, Katie’s thoughts were more apprehensive than happy. Had she done the right thing? As the train rattled over the points and into the station, Katie admitted that she didn’t know whether to feel pleased with herself or downright scared. She knew what her parents would want her to feel, she acknowledged, as, along with the other occupants of the compartment, she stood up and started to put on her outdoor clothes. The looseness of the wedding ring on the finger of the woman seated next to her reaffirmed the effects of the anxiety and hardship the whole country was experiencing, with 1941 only just around the corner and no end to the war yet in sight.

The train jolted to a halt with a hiss of steam and a squeal of brakes, causing everyone to reach for something to hold to steady themselves. Katie and the navy wife exchanged final smiles and then went about the business of straightening hats and wrapping on scarves.

Katie’s parents had made it plain enough to her that they were far from pleased about her decision to leave home to go to do war work in Liverpool when, according to them, they needed her at home to help them.

To keep the peace between them more like, Katie thought ruefully.

It wasn’t that Katie didn’t love her parents –she did – but she didn’t have any illusions about them. When her best friend at school had said enviously that she wished that her mother had been an actress and her father a famous band leader, Katie had had a hard time not telling her how much she wished that her parents were more like her friend’s: that her mother wore a pinafore and worried about mealtimes and muddy kitchen floors, and that her father went off to work in the morning and then came home at five o’clock.

Where other parents seemed to manage to have calm ordered lives, her parents seemed to prefer chaos and quarrels.

Her father was fiercely jealous and had insisted on her mother giving up the stage when they had married, whilst she in turn vented her frustration on him with outbursts of temper during which crockery was thrown and threats to leave were made. As a young child Katie had been dreadfully afraid that during one of their quarrels both her parents would leave and that she would be forgotten and left behind.

As she followed the other passengers out onto the platform Katie wrinkled her nose against the smell of smoke and cold air.

The station was very busy. Every platform seemed either to have a crowd of people standing on it waiting for a train to pull into it, or passengers crowding onto it from a train that had just pulled in.

As Katie joined the queue for the ticket barrier, she was glad of the warmth of her winter coat. All around her she could hear people speaking with an unfamiliar accent, so very different from the cockney she was more used to. She had been told that Liverpudlians were friendly and welcoming. She hoped that that was true.

She was so afraid of having made the wrong decision and having to admit that to her parents. She loved them dearly but their quarrels had coloured Katie’s childhood and as she grew older they had obliged her to take on the role of peacemaker, both parents appealing to her to support their points of view. Katie felt as sorry for her glamorous excitable mother, denied a proper outlet for her theatrical talents, as she did for her poor father, who was so afraid of losing her. If the relationship between her parents was what happened when a person fell in love, then Katie had decided falling in love was definitely not for her. She wanted no truck with it and even less with passionately jealous men.

They had been shocked when she had told them what she had done.

‘You’re going to Liverpool to read letters?’ had been her father’s disbelieving comment, followed by his signature crashing of his hands down onto the keys of the ancient upright piano that took up far too much room in their small rented London house. Her father always used the piano to express his feelings. ‘But I need you here.’

He had been dressed to go out to ‘work’ when she had told them, wearing his immaculate band leader’s white tie and tails, his hair slicked back with brilliantine.

Now Katie smiled as she handed over her ticket, and was relieved to receive a warm smile back from the burly uniformed ticket collector.

In looks Katie took more after her mother than her father, having her mother’s dainty build and expressive heart-shaped face with high cheekbones and a softly shaped mouth. Her colouring, though, was her father’s. She had his hazel eyes and the same dark gold hair that turned lighter in the summer sun.

She had been working as her father’s unpaid ‘assistant’ ever since she had left school, organising his diary, attending rehearsals with him, making notes for him from the comments he made about various members of the two different bands he worked with, some of whom were foreign and inclined to break out into their own language in moments of stress, so that as well as her knowledge of modern music Katie also had a smattering of Italian, Polish and French.

There was nothing about the history of modern dance and song music that Katie didn’t know, from every word of every popular song for the last decade or so, to the name of every composer of those songs, and the names of every member of the country’s most popular dance bands.

Sadly, though, whilst her father and her mother could both sing with perfect pitch, Katie, whilst loving music every bit as passionately as they, had a voice that was completely musically flat, a voice incapable of being raised in song; a voice that had caused both her parents, but especially her father, to demand that it was never ever heard attempting to sing a single note because of the pain it would cause him.

Katie might not have a ‘voice’ but she did have a good ‘ear’ – and, so she was pleased to think, a good awareness of how wearying artistic temperament could be, especially to those on the receiving end of it.

Katie treated her inability to sing as philosophically as she treated the quarrels between her parents – what else after all could she do?

‘Yes, Katie, your father is right,’ her mother had told her. ‘You can’t possibly go to Liverpool.’

‘I have to,’ Katie had told them both, patiently explaining that it was her duty, but diplomatically not explaining how she had slipped the all-important consent form under her father’s nose when he had been signing some business letters she had typed for him.

She had seen the job advertisement in one of the London papers, asking for young women with ‘some specialist knowledge’ on a list of subjects that had included music, and had written off before she could change her mind.

She had been so excited when she had received a reply requiring her to present herself at the address given in the letter for a formal interview.

It had seemed such a grown-up and important thing to do when she had had it explained to her that because of her knowledge of popular music the Government wanted her to work in Liverpool for MC5, the ‘secret’ organisation where letters to and from certain countries were censored and checked for hidden messages. The fact that she could speak and write a small amount of French and Italian was apparently an added bonus. The stern-looking official who had interviewed her had told her that spies were very clever in the ways in which they made contact with one another, often using devices such as mentioning in their letters something as seemingly innocent as popular music, their references a code containing secret information. Her task would be to read such letters and look for anything within them that seemed suspicious.

She would be working alongside other girls, she had been told, and under a supervisor, to whom she would be able to refer any letter that might arouse her suspicions.

She had felt so proud and pleased with herself when she had been offered the job but now, after nearly eight hours on a train that had seemed to crawl from London to Liverpool, she was beginning to wonder if her parents had been right and she had done something very silly indeed.