The Seven Streets of Liverpool Read online

  For Lord Alan and Lady Eileen Jordan

  The Seven Streets of Liverpool

  Maureen Lee

  Contents

  Cover

  Dedication

  Title

  Contents

  Prologue

  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

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Also by Maureen Lee

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Bootle, Liverpool

  Millennium Eve

  Penny was lost. Although the sign told her she was in Pearl Street, it was nothing like the Pearl Street she’d known more than half a century ago. Instead of two rows of terraced houses facing each other, now the street consisted of small semi-detached bungalows with tiny gardens front and back. There had either been massive redevelopment or she was in the wrong Pearl Street, the wrong Bootle. Had she come to the wrong city altogether? How many Liverpools were there on the planet?

  A young woman was approaching with a stroller. The small child inside was snuggled inside too many clothes to tell if it was a boy or a girl.

  ‘Excuse me, but do you know how long these houses have been here?’ Penny enquired as she neared. ‘And what happened to the bar on the corner? The King’s Arms, I think it was called.’ Or it might have been the Queen’s Arms; she wasn’t sure.

  ‘I dunno, luv,’ the woman said vaguely. ‘I’ve only lived here a couple of years. You need to ask someone older.’

  ‘Oh yes, I should have. But thank you anyway.’

  ‘That’s all right, luv.’ The woman began to walk away, then turned. ‘Are you from America?’

  ‘Yes; New York.’

  ‘I thought so. I’d recognise an American accent anywhere.’ She walked a few more steps and turned again. ‘Is that coat mink?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Jaysus.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘I never thought I’d see a mink coat in Pearl Street.’ She laughed, and the child in the pushchair laughed with her. ‘Can’t stop or I’ll be late picking up me little girl from the party. Ta-ra, luv.’

  Ta-ra! The word was familiar. Mom used to say it sometimes. ‘Ta-ra,’ Penny called, though the woman was already out of earshot. It sounded odd on her tongue.

  What was she supposed to do now? It was a horrible day and the sky was already growing dark. Despite the coat, she felt cold. She had expected to find the street exactly as she remembered, and had thought that if she knocked on enough doors she would be bound to find someone she knew from old – or who knew her or someone who remembered her. When she’d lived there, it had seemed as if everyone in Bootle knew everyone else – was even related in some way. But the world is a very small place when you’re a child. She’d been a fool to come. Caitlin had told her to wait in the city centre hotel by Lime Street station, from where she would collect her.

  ‘We’re meeting for a party in the cottage in Melling later,’ she’d said on the telephone when Penny had rung from America a few days before. ‘You and I can have dinner first.’

  Penny could vaguely remember the cottage. It seemed an appropriate place for a party on Millennium Eve. She imagined the new century dawning over the trees in the garden where she’d played with Eileen’s little boy, Nicky. Eileen had been Mom’s best friend in Bootle.

  Her father had lived around here too, though not in Pearl Street. Mom had told her years ago, not long before she died, that Arthur Fleming, her husband at the time Penny was born, who had later been killed in the war, hadn’t been her father. Her real father had had other children, so she had half-sisters in the area, a half-brother, nieces and nephews.

  Penny turned a corner and there was a bar – a public house, they called them in England. But it had been closed down and was a horrible sight, with lengths of wood nailed across the smashed windows and the broken door. Its name was no longer visible.

  ‘Are you the King’s Arms?’ Penny asked the building, but there was no answer. She would have died of shock if there had been. She wandered like a lost soul around another corner and found herself in a wide road full of neglected commercial buildings. This run-down place had played no part in her long-held memories of Bootle – until something familiar about the huge walls on the far side reminded her that it was the Dock Road, the ‘Docky’. It had once been the busiest road on earth, bursting with traffic, bustling with strangely dressed individuals from all five continents, and thick with the various aromas from exports and imports of every description that came and went in and out of the mighty docks.

  And this was the Docky now, empty of everything; deserted. It was all very depressing.

  Why had she come to Liverpool anyway? Penny asked herself. It was just that the girls, her daughters, had gone to welcome in the twenty-first century from the snowy slopes of Breckenridge, Colorado, taking with them husbands, kids and even a few in-laws. Penny and Steve had been invited, but had refused.

  ‘Your father and I will do something together,’ she had told them. Like throw a dinner party, go out with friends; something.

  Except that Steve, her husband of thirty-two years, eight months and three weeks, had decided to treat himself to a new wife now that there was about to be a new century and hadn’t bothered to tell his current wife until the week before. Penny was aware that their marriage had gone stale a long time ago but hadn’t thought they were the sort of couple who got divorced.

  Well, she wasn’t going to spoil the girls’ holiday by informing them that their father had decided to make a fool of himself with a girl younger than themselves. Nor did she fancy spending Millennium Eve alone in New York. No, she’d go to Bootle instead. Also, there was the vaguest memory of a promise made at a party the day the war had ended nearly fifty-five years ago.

  ‘Let’s all meet on the eve of the next century,’ someone had said. Penny had been very young and couldn’t remember who, only that it had been a man’s voice. He might be dead by now, or at least very old. There were others, like her, too young to make the promise, but maybe, like her, they remembered the words.

  In Pearl Street, the woman with the stroller was returning, holding the hand of a little girl of about five who was carrying a giant red balloon. Another woman was accompanied by two boys who were somehow managing to have a balloon fight.

  When she saw Penny, the first woman said in a loud voice, ‘I told everyone at the party I’d just met an American woman in Pearl Street wearing a mink coat. I don’t think they believed me.’

  Penny smiled and pretended to pinch herself. ‘I’m quite real,’ she said.

  Someone else had appeared in the street, a woman of about Penny’s own age, formally dressed in a grey suit, walking quickly, grinning widely. To Penny’s astonishment, she was also waving furiously, as well as shouting at the top of her voice.

  ‘Penny Fleming! I just knew it was you. “An American woman wearing a mink coat.” Who else could it be? Why didn’t you stay at the hotel? I would have come and collected you. You were bound to get lost around here. All that’s left of the old Pearl Street is the name.’

  The woman stopped in front of Penny and she was seized in a strong pair of arms and a
lmost hugged to death.

  ‘Are you Caitlin?’ Penny asked. They’d started writing to each other about five years ago. ‘Your snapshot doesn’t do you justice.’ She was a rosy, jolly woman with a glorious smile.

  ‘We must get computers, start emailing each other,’ Caitlin said. ‘Did you know you can send photos by email? Only if you’re very clever, mind, but we can always learn.’

  ‘I’d like that,’ Penny said with enthusiasm.

  ‘And you’re not the only one who remembered what was said at that party the day the war ended, about meeting up on Millennium Eve. It was Uncle Sean’s idea; he’s seventy-six but still going strong. We’re expected at Nicky’s house in Melling at seven o’clock. It’s where we went to shelter in the worst of the Blitz. Do you remember? Nicky’s me Auntie Eileen’s lad, still living in the same house, like.’

  ‘I do remember, yes. But what are you doing around here anyway?’

  ‘I thought I told you, I’m head of St James’s School in Marsh Lane. We’ve just had a kids’ party in the church hall.’ She hugged Penny again. ‘Oh, isn’t this the absolute gear!’

  Chapter 1

  Pearl Street, Bootle

  Christmas Morning 1942

  It was still dark, though the misty half-moon provided a little illumination and the shape of the apparently lifeless street was just about visible, the damp slates gleaming slightly. A stranger cut off from humankind for the last three and a half years would have found something odd about the windows – every single one dead black and decorated with some sort of tape stuck to the glass in a diamond pattern. The tape was to protect the glass, to keep it in one piece even if shattered by a bomb exploding in the vicinity. In fact, a bomb had landed where numbers 19, 21 and 23 used to be, making a neat gap and providing extra space for children to play. Someone had planted a tree right in the middle, and people were waiting anxiously for it to grow.

  Muffled sounds were coming from the docks by the nearby river. Bangs and bumps, voices, as if activity of some sort was being carried out in the darkness, most likely a ship being loaded or unloaded. An occasional seagull squawked.

  There was an air of permanence about the way every door in the street was firmly closed, as if they would never open again.

  But one did, and a small child, a boy, appeared, wearing striped pyjamas and carrying a scooter. His feet were bare. With an air of quiet determination he put one foot on the toy and began to scoot up and down the pavement like a tiny ghost, until a woman in a nightdress came rushing out of the still open door and shouted something in an outraged voice. She grabbed the boy by the scruff of his neck with one hand and the scooter with the other and pushed them both inside, then closed the door gently, without a sound, not wishing to disturb the neighbours any further.

  And so the street remained, showing no sign of the people who lived there, until fires were lit inside, the first flames turning into narrow ribbons of smoke that puffed out of the chimneys. Children opened their presents while the grown-ups got dressed. Seeing as it was Christmas Day, most were in excellent spirits.

  At number 16, Sheila Reilly was watching her house gradually being turned into a rubbish tip as her six children unwrapped their presents and let the paper and boxes drop to the floor. Fortunately, being wartime, there was little wrapping paper to be had, or the tip would have been even bigger. Sheila was nursing eighteen-month-old Oona, currently the baby but about to be overtaken by a little brother or sister who was expected to arrive very soon.

  Old paper chains decorated the walls and a home-made Christmas tree stood on the sideboard. These, like everything else in the house, had previously belonged to Sheila’s sister Eileen, who now lived in Melling, a village on the outskirts of Liverpool. Sheila and her ever-increasing family had once lived at number 19, where the tree now grew, or attempted to. Fortunately, no one had been at home when the bomb had dropped.

  The kids’ pressies weren’t up to much. It wasn’t only wrapping paper there was a shortage of, but just about anything else you could think of, unnecessary things like children’s toys being top of the list.

  Sheila’s dad had made the lads a truck out of orange boxes – Lord knows where he’d got the wheels from. He’d rubbed it down and painted it bright red. Ten-year-old Dominic, the eldest child, had decided it was a fire engine, and was now pushing it in and out of the kitchen, through the living room and into the parlour while his younger brother Niall provided the sound effects and four-year-old Ryan tried to climb inside it.

  ‘Honestly, Sheil, I don’t know how you stand it.’ Brenda Mahon lived a few doors away. She and Sheila had been friends since school. Brenda had a nice face, though she knew she was no oil painting. Sheila, on the other hand, was as pretty as she had always been, though rather plumper – and it wasn’t just because of the forthcoming baby. Despite her normally placid nature, the current noise was setting Brenda’s teeth on edge.

  ‘You can go home if you like,’ Sheila said. ‘Me, I’m used to it.’ In fact, she loved it. The only thing that was stopping Christmas Day from being perfect was the fact that her darling husband wasn’t there to celebrate with them. Calum Reilly, a merchant seaman, risked his life on a daily basis on foreign seas where thousands of men had already lost their lives in the freezing waters.

  ‘I only came to make sure you’re all right, Sheil,’ Brenda said, hurt. She had brought her girls, Monica and Muriel, who wore identical frocks made out of a man’s green velvet dressing gown that Brenda, an expert dressmaker, had bought from a jumble sale. The frocks had cream crocheted collars and cuffs. The girls cowered behind their mother, unused to such close contact with boys.

  The boys had so far ignored the ribbed scarves and matching hats that Brenda had knitted for them. She’d made dolls for Sheila’s girls, Caitlin and Mary, who were playing house underneath the table, where the dolls had already been fed and put to bed twice.

  Turning to her friend, Sheila said, ‘I was only joking, Bren. You know I love having you here.’

  ‘I worry the baby’ll come in the middle of the night or something.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter if it does. Our Dominic knows to wake up Aggie Donovan and she’ll fetch Susan Lane from Coral Street. They’ve brought all of me kids so far into the world without a hitch.’

  ‘I think I’ll make a move then.’ Brenda longed to go home. ‘Are you sure you can manage, luv?’

  ‘Sure I’m sure. You be off and start on your dinner. I can cope here.’ Sheila got clumsily to her feet. ‘I’ll just put this one in her high chair.’ Sometimes she forgot the children’s names.

  Brenda stood too. ‘I’ll be round later to help you peel the taters.’

  Sheila laughed. ‘Just because I’m up the stick, Bren, it doesn’t mean I can’t peel me own taters. And me dad’ll be round soon. He can give me a hand.’

  ‘Your dad’s not likely to peel the taters, is he? Him being a man, like.’

  ‘I suppose not. But he’ll keep the kids in line while I peel them meself.’

  By now, a few children had come into the street to play with their new toys. The little lad with the scooter was riding it legitimately, properly dressed. The toy was obviously second-hand, made to look newish with a bit of spit and polish. A girl with plaits and a skipping rope was charging up and down the pavement, rather dangerously, Brenda thought, and a boy was playing with a diabolo, obviously for the first time. She herself had been asked to make the clothes for a baby-sized doll being pushed along in a pram that had been spruced up with a coat of brown paint. A couple of women had come outside for a jangle. They waved at Brenda.

  ‘Morning, Bren. Merry Christmas,’ they called.

  ‘Merry Christmas.’

  Brenda didn’t go home after leaving Sheila’s, but knocked at the house next door. With most houses you just pulled out the key on a string through the letter box and let yourself in, but with the Tuttys you were expected to knock.

  Thirteen-year-old Freda Tutty opened the door. Her t
hin cheeks were red and there were tears of what looked like rage in her eyes. ‘What?’ she snapped.

  ‘I’ve brought you and Dicky a pressie each,’ Brenda explained, feeling as if she’d done something wrong. ‘It’s only a Juliet cap for you, luv, and a nice long scarf for Dicky. The wool’s not new, like, it’s from something I undid.’

  ‘We don’t want them, thanks.’ The girl was about to close the door, but Brenda put out her hand to stop her.

  ‘What’s wrong, luv?’ Freda wasn’t inclined to accept anything that might be regarded as charity, but she’d never been this rude before. Brenda wasn’t surprised when she burst into tears.

  ‘Me mam’s only come home with a fella,’ she sobbed. ‘She hasn’t done that in ages.’

  ‘Oh dear!’ Until three years ago, Freda’s mother Gladys had been a hopeless drunk, selling herself on the streets night after night; anything to get her hands on a bottle of gin, her favourite tipple. Her house was a pigsty, while her children, Freda and six-year-old Dicky, were mainly left to be fed and clothed by the neighbours.

  When the war started, the children were evacuated to Southport, where Freda had learnt there was a different way of living. It was much better to be clean than dirty, for example, and wearing nice clothes was a pleasure. It was a miracle how lovely her hair looked after it had been shampooed and combed. She hadn’t known it was such a nice colour. She returned from Southport with Dicky determined to change their lives.

  And by sheer willpower she had done it. Her mother had more or less been forced to get a job – she worked in the Co-op grocer’s on the vegetable counter – Dicky went regularly to school for a change, and Freda had done so well there that she had passed the scholarship for grammar school and had been at Seafield Convent since she was eleven.

  But now it seemed Gladys had returned to her old ways.

  ‘Where did she go last night, luv?’ asked Brenda. Freda usually kept a close eye on her mother’s activities.

  She was surprised at the girl’s reply.

  ‘Midnight Mass,’ Freda said sullenly.