The Leaving Of Liverpool Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 - DUNEATHLY, IRELAND

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7 - 1930

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11 - 1935

  Chapter 12 - 1936

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15 - 1941

  Chapter 16 - 1942

  Epilogue

  She got out of bed and sat by the window. Right now, she wasn’t quite sure where she was. Was that a forest across the road lit by the occasional lamp? Cars drove by and she wondered what time it was. What was she doing here? Whose house was this? What had happened to Mollie?

  ‘My name is Annemarie Kenny,’ she said aloud. ‘I have a sister and three brothers and I come from a village in Ireland called Duneathly.’ She shivered and felt desperately cold.

  After a while, she returned to bed. When next she woke, it was daylight, she was Anne Murray again, and had no memory of the previous night, just a slight pain in her chest that had gone by the time she sat down to breakfast.

  Maureen Lee’s award-winning novels have earned her many fans. Her recent novel, The Leaving of Liverpool, was a Sunday Times top 10 bestseller. Maureen was born in Bootle and now lives in Colchester. Find out more at: www.maureenlee.co.uk.

  The Leaving Of Liverpool

  MAUREEN LEE

  Orion

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  AN ORION EBOOK

  First published in Great Britain in 2007 by Orion Books.

  This ebook first published in 2010 by Orion Books.

  Copyright © Maureen Lee 2007

  The right of Maureen Lee to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the copyright, designs and patents act 1988.

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  eISBN : 978 1 4091 3229 5

  This ebook produced by Jouve, France

  Orion Books

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House

  5 Upper St Martin’s Lane

  London WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  For Liverpool, my home town.

  So fare thee well, my own true love

  When I return united we will be.

  It’s not the leaving of Liverpool that grieves me,

  But my darling when I think of thee.

  Author unknown

  Chapter 1

  DUNEATHLY, IRELAND

  February 1925

  Slowly, carefully, Mollie closed the door of the Doctor’s house so that the catch made a scarcely audible click. She picked up the suitcase and whispered, ‘Come along now, Annemarie, we’re going to see Hazel.’

  ‘See Hazel,’ Annemarie said dully. It was neither a question nor a statement, merely an echo of her sister’s words. Annemarie had been in a stupor since the ‘thing’ had happened just over three weeks ago.

  Mollie put her finger to her lips, though there was no need: Annemarie was unlikely to speak again. The girls walked across the deserted square, frost skimming the buildings on all four sides like icing on a cake. There wasn’t even a breath of wind on the still, February night. ‘Be careful how you walk, darlin’; the ground’s horribly slippy,’ she warned through her already frozen lips. They were both warmly dressed in thick winter coats, boots and woolly hats. Mollie buried her chin in her knitted scarf and saw her sister had had the sense to do the same.

  She’d waited until the clock struck twelve before leaving the house, knowing that almost everyone in Duneathly would be fast asleep in their beds. The shops had closed hours ago and the window of the butcher’s was bare, though cakes remained on display in the baker’s - Roddy Egan was forever trying to palm off stale cakes. A notice had been pasted on the window of Mrs Gerraghty’s dress shop - ‘The Latest Paris Fashions in Stock’, which was nothing but a big lie. Only the old and the partially blind bought anything from Ena Gerraghty, whose clothes were far too old-fashioned for anyone born within the last fifty years.

  A cat ran in front of them, making Mollie jump and Annemarie squeak. It was the giant tabby that belonged to Mr O’Rourke, the solicitor, who’d called it Kitty after his long-dead wife, even though it was a tom who’d fathered enough kittens to fill a barrel during his long and dissolute life.

  ‘It’s all right, darlin’.’ Mollie squeezed her sister’s arm. ‘Look at the sky: it’s desperately pretty.’ The sky was the colour of dark-blue ink and looked just as fluid. Stars twinkled plentifully, big ones and little ones, and some so close together they resembled scraps of spangled net. ‘Those stars are millions and millions of miles away,’ she told her sister, but Annemarie didn’t answer.

  The moon was a perfect circle, and clear enough for its craters and mountains to be visible. She wondered if people lived there. If so, what sort of clothes did they wear? Did they live in houses, the same as on earth? It worried her a little, the moon, the way it illuminated the whole square, making everywhere as clear as daylight. If someone saw them . . .

  She comforted herself with the thought that, even if someone did see them, they were unlikely to knock up the Doctor and inform him his girls were out for a midnight stroll.

  Wally McMahon came staggering out of the doorway of O’Reilly’s pub where he’d probably been sleeping since the place closed. He didn’t notice them. Wally consumed so much ale he wouldn’t have noticed a crock of gold had it stood in front of him on his way home from O’Reilly’s.

  The girls trudged on, a silent Annemarie following a few feet behind her sister, though a few weeks ago she would have been dancing ahead, her lovely face animated, talking ten to the dozen, wanting to know where they were going and wasn’t it exciting to be walking through the moonlight and didn’t the sky look too magical for words? You’d never guess she had something wrong with her heart, though the Doctor insisted it wasn’t serious as long as she remembered to take her drops every day. Otherwise, there was a chance she’d have a heart attack or a stroke. There were two bottles of digitalis in the washbag on the top of the suitcase, which was making Mollie’s shoulder ache. It was stuffed with clothes, every single garment she and Annemarie possessed, all packed in the last sixty minutes so no one would see and wonder what they were up to. Clothes might cost the earth in America and it would be a shame to leave them behind.

  There was a light on in Sinead Larkin’s cottage. Sinead was a dressmaker and women came from as far away as Kildare to order their bridal gowns and bridesmaids’ frocks, not to mention the occasional pageboy outfit. She made all Mollie and Annemarie’s clothes, as well as Mammy’s when she was alive. Mollie imagined the tiny dressmaker treadling away like a mad woman while she fed yards of glorious silk or satin under the flashing needle of her Singer sewing machine.

  She breathed a sigh of relief and changed the suitcase to her other hand when they left the environs of the village. Ahead lay a narrow country lane with hedges
on either side, the icy surface gleaming like a silver ribbon in the moonlight. About half a mile on, the land curved to the left and Mollie knew that when they rounded the curve, they would come to her brother Finn’s house. Finn was an accountant, away in Dublin on business at the moment, and it was his wife, Hazel, who was helping Mollie and Annemarie escape from the horror of Duneathly.

  The suitcase was getting heavier and heavier: Mollie had to resist the urge to open it and fling half the clothes into the hedge. She breathed another sigh of relief when, at last, Finn’s house came into view.

  ‘Nearly there, Annemarie,’ she said encouragingly.

  The garden gate creaked when it was opened and, barely a second later, Hazel flung open the front door. ‘You’re here! I’ve been listening for the gate.’ She ran down the path and kissed them warmly. ‘Come on in, the pair o’yis. I’ve tea on the brew.’

  Mollie put the suitcase down with a puff. ‘I’ll swear both me arms are at least six inches longer.’

  ‘And so they are.’ Hazel laughed. She was tall and boisterous, brown-haired and brown-eyed, and graceful, despite the huge, bulging stomach in which the Doctor’s first grandchild lay. She clapped her hand to her mouth. ‘I should be crying, not laughing. This is a tragedy, not a joke.’

  The girls followed their sister-in-law into the cosy kitchen where the table was set with three cups and saucers, sugar and milk, and a teapot covered with the cosy Mollie had knitted as a present a year ago when Hazel and Finn married. She hadn’t liked Hazel at first. She was too big, too bossy, too capable. She knew the best way of doing everything and didn’t hesitate to tell people what it was. The Doctor loathed her. Perhaps it was this that had made Mollie look for Hazel’s good side. It wasn’t hard to find, for her brother’s wife was also generous to a fault, always ready to lend a hand when it was needed, and possessed of an incredibly kind heart.

  It was to Hazel that Mollie had turned when the ‘thing’ happened three weeks ago. ‘I need to get our Annemarie away from the Doctor. I’d like us to go to America: New York,’ she’d told her. ‘We’ve an auntie there, Aunt Maggie, Mammy’s sister. She’s a schoolteacher and we used to see a lot of her before she went away. She still writes to us every month. Aunt Maggie will take care of us, I know she will.’

  ‘But you’ll need passports,’ Hazel pointed out. ‘You won’t get into America without a passport.’

  ‘We’ve already got them. You won’t know, it happened before you met our Finn, but Mammy was planning to take me and Annemarie to see Aunt Maggie. Then she fell pregnant and didn’t feel well enough to travel.’ It had been disappointing at the time, but worse was to come: before the year was out, their beloved Mammy had died giving birth to her fifth child, Aidan.

  ‘But what’s this all about, Mollie, luv?’ Hazel had asked, looking puzzled, as if the import of Mollie’s words had only just sunk in. ‘What do you mean, you have to get Annemarie away from the Doctor?’

  And so Mollie was left with no choice but to explain, the words coming out haltingly with many pauses and ending in floods of tears.

  Hazel had gone deathly pale, too shocked to speak, until she said in a horrified voice, ‘You mean your father . . . ’ She paused, unable to finish the sentence, then tried again. ‘You mean your father raped his thirteen-year-old daughter?’

  Mollie nodded. Hearing it put so bluntly, yet so truthfully, only made her cry again. ‘Yes,’ she whispered.

  ‘Has he ever done it before?’

  ‘Not to Annemarie, no.’ She bit her lip. It was the wrong thing to say.

  ‘By that,’ Hazel said quietly, going even paler, ‘I take it he’s done it to you?’

  ‘Every month. He goes to Kildare to meet up with his old friends from university and comes home as drunk as a lord. It started right after Mammy passed away.’ Mollie shrugged. ‘I just close my eyes and pretend it’s not happening, but our Annemarie’s different, she’s not of this world.’ She began to cry again. ‘It’s all my fault. I stayed at Noreen, my friend’s house, to avoid him. I never dreamed he’d do it to Annemarie if I wasn’t there.’

  At this, Hazel had leapt to her feet. ‘I’ll stop him,’ she screamed. ‘I’ll give the bastard what for, and I’ll tell Finn, I’ll tell the whole of Duneathly and report him to the medical board, wherever that may be. Not a soul will ever go near him again.’

  ‘No! There’s Thaddy and little Aidan to consider. What will happen to them if he loses his job?’ Once again her eyes had filled with tears at the idea of leaving her brothers behind, but she had to get Annemarie away. If the truth be known, she was anxious to escape her father herself.

  ‘It doesn’t seem right to let him get away with it,’ Hazel had muttered, but she’d given in, said she’d find out when the next boat sailed from Liverpool to New York and where to buy the tickets. Mollie had enough money, for hadn’t Mammy left her - left all her children apart from Aidan - a whole fifty pounds each when they reached the age of sixteen? Until last July, Finn had been the only one to see the money, but Mollie had received a letter from Mr O’Rourke, the solicitor, on her sixteenth birthday. Much against his advice, she had asked for her inheritance in cash. She didn’t want it putting in a bank where she’d have a job getting her hands on it in an emergency. It had been a wise decision, for it had seemed no time since she’d laid the fifty pound-notes beneath her gloves in the drawer when an emergency had arisen.

  Hazel said now, ‘Jimmy Mullen should be along any minute. Drink your tea quickly. It’ll be a long while before you have another.’ She regarded the silent, dead-eyed Annemarie tenderly. ‘Come along, darlin’, finish your tea.’ The girl obediently picked up her cup. ‘Has she lost the power of speech?’ Hazel asked.

  ‘Almost. Sister Francis came round from the convent, wanting to know if she’d taken a vow of silence: Annemarie had always been one of her best pupils. Before . . . before it happened, she never shut up.’

  ‘Ah, and don’t I know it. A proper little chatterbox she was, and if she wasn’t talking, then she was singing - or dancing,’ Hazel sighed. She turned her gaze on Mollie. ‘You’ll write the minute you get there, won’t you, Moll? A postcard’ll do, so’s I know you’re all right, otherwise I’ll worry meself to death over the pair o’yis.’

  ‘You’re not to worry, not in your condition,’ Mollie said sternly. She pulled her woolly hat over her ears, rewound her scarf around her neck, and reached for her gloves, while Hazel helped Annemarie do the same. ‘We’ll be fine.’

  ‘Will your Aunt Maggie be there to meet you?’

  ‘Only if she gets my letter in time. If not, I’ll take a taxi to her house: I’ve plenty of money.’ By some miracle, a ship, the Queen Maia, was due to sail from Liverpool the day after tomorrow, arriving in New York in ten days’ time. Hazel had purchased two third-class tickets through a shipping agent in Kildare. They were tucked in Mollie’s bag, along with their birth certificates and the letters Aunt Maggie had sent over the years and Mollie had kept, to prove they had somewhere to stay and wouldn’t be a burden on the State.

  There was silence in the warm, comfortable kitchen. In the distance, Mollie could hear the sound of hooves on the icy road. Jimmy Mullen, whom she’d never met, was taking them to Dun Laoghaire on his vegetable cart. They would catch the midday ferry to Liverpool from there. In a few hours, all hell would break loose in Dr Kenny’s house when it was discovered his girls were missing, but no one was likely to guess they were on their way to America. The reason they weren’t travelling to Dun Laoghaire on the bus and the train like ordinary people was so there’d be no trace of their departure. The doctor’s girls would simply have disappeared into thin air. Jimmy Mullen didn’t know what day it was, so there was no chance of him cracking on.

  Hazel’s brown eyes misted with tears. ‘Look after yourselves, won’t you? I’ll be thinking about the pair o’yis all the while.’

  ‘Do I need to pay Jimmy?’

  ‘It’s already been seen to, Moll.’
/>   The gate creaked, followed by a knock on the door. She threw her arms around the ample body of her sister-in-law. ‘’Bye, Hazel. Thank you for everything.’

  ‘ ’Bye, darlin’.’ Tears were streaming down Hazel’s rosy cheeks. ‘’Bye, Annemarie.’

  They all trooped outside. Jimmy Mullen, not much older than Mollie and half a head shorter, was climbing back on to a cart laden with sacks of vegetables. He acknowledged the girls with a curt nod when they joined him on the wooden seat, cracked the whip, and they set off at a brisk pace, Hazel’s cries of ‘tara’ and ‘look after yourselves now’ gradually fading, until they could hear nothing except the clip-clop of the giant black horse and its occasional noisy sniff.

  The moon continued to shine and the stars to twinkle. The ice became thicker and the air even colder, as Mollie and Annemarie Kenny began the first part of their journey to New York.

  Mollie helped her sister on to the top bunk and tucked the bedding around her - she’d like to bet the first- and second-class cabins didn’t have such coarse sheets and hard pillows. Despite this, Annemarie promptly fell asleep.

  Mollie dragged off her own clothes, replacing them with a thick, winceyette nightie, and climbed on to the bunk opposite her sister. Clothes had been thrown on the lower bunks, indicating they’d been taken, but there was no sign of their occupants. Anyway the tops ones were best, as you wouldn’t have someone’s bottom right in front of your eyes when they used the lavatory between the bunks. Her heart had sunk to her boots when she first entered the cabin and saw it. She hadn’t expected to use the lavatory in front of strangers. A dim light, barely enough to see by, illuminated the dismal scene.