The Girl From Barefoot House Read online

  The shop assistant put the goods in a paper bag, and they were quickly making their way towards the exit because Mam was worried she’d spend money she hadn’t got when a voice said, ‘Why, if it isn’t Mabel Flynn.’

  Mam went very red and nearly dropped the tray. ‘Mrs Kavanagh. Hello,’ she said awkwardly.

  ‘You’re looking well, luv.’

  ‘Ta,’ Mam gulped.

  Mrs Kavanagh seemed exceptionally nice, and Josie couldn’t understand why Mam was so embarrassed. She was small and plump, with a round, kind face, pink, cushiony cheeks and brown eyes that shone with good humour. Her blue coat was extremely smart. It had a fur collar and fur buttons, and she wore a little blue veiled hat made from the same material as the coat tipped precariously over her right eye. Her hair was brown and tightly waved. Josie waited to be introduced. It was the first thing Mam did when they met someone new. ‘This is Josie, me little girl,’ she would say proudly. Today, though, Mam said nothing.

  ‘How’s the job going, girl?’ Mrs Kavanagh asked kindly.

  ‘The job?’ Mam faltered. She was holding Josie’s hand so hard it hurt. ‘All right, I suppose.’

  ‘I was surprised to hear you’d given up Bailey’s Chemists – wasn’t Mrs Bailey teaching you to dispense the prescriptions? – to become a live-in nanny, but according to your Ivy you love it there. Where is it over the water, luv? I forget now.’

  ‘Er, Greasby.’

  ‘And I suppose this is one of your little charges.’ The woman beamed at Josie.

  ‘Yes. Oh, yes. This is Josie.’

  ‘You’re very pretty, Josie.’ She bent down and took Josie’s hand. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘I’ll be four in May.’

  ‘I’ve got a little girl who’ll be four next week. Her name is Lily, and she should be standing right beside me, except she’s wandered off, as usual. Lily,’ she called. ‘Lily, where are you?’

  Mam seemed to have found her voice. ‘I didn’t know you’d had another baby, Mrs Kavanagh.’

  ‘Well, five’s an uneven number, luv. Me and Eddie decided to make it six, but that’s our lot. I’d’ve thought your Ivy would’ve told you on one of her visits. Oh, here she is, our Lily. Come on, luv, say hello to Josie here.’

  A girl came bouncing up, a mite smaller than Josie. She was very like her mam, with bright pink cheeks and sparkling eyes. Her slightly darker hair fell to her waist in a mass of tiny waves. To Josie’s surprise, her coat was exactly the same as her mother’s – blue with fur buttons and collar. She wore a different sort of hat, a bonnet tied under her chin.

  ‘Hello, Josie,’ the girl said obediently. Her face was alive with mischief.

  ‘Hello.’ Josie twisted her body shyly. She wasn’t used to children, and had never had a friend. Mam had been the only friend she’d ever wanted, but she would have quite liked to get to know Lily Kavanagh.

  However, that was not to be, because Mam said in a rush, ‘We’d better be getting back to Greasby. I only came over to do a bit of shopping, seeing as it was such a nice day, like. Come on, Josie.’

  Mrs Kavanagh looked disappointed. ‘I thought we could have a little natter over a cup of tea and a scone. I’ve missed you in the street, Mabel. Everyone has.’

  ‘That would have been the gear, Mrs Kavanagh, but I really must get back.’

  ‘Oh, well, some other time, then. Tara, luv. Tara, Josie. Where’s your manners, our Lily? Say tara.’

  Lily’s eyes gleamed impishly at Josie. ‘Tara.’

  ‘It’s not fair. Oh, it’s not fair a bit,’ Mam raged as they walked quickly out of Blackler’s into the bright spring sunshine. Her face was very red. Josie had to run to keep up, and kept bumping into people on the crowded pavements. A shopping basket nearly sent her flying. ‘As if I’d’ve given up me good job in Bailey’s to be a nanny, for God’s sake. But I suppose our poor Ivy had to come up with something to explain why I wasn’t there no more. After all, I was forced to think up all sorts of lies meself, else the truth might have killed the poor woman. Mind you, I never thought she’d turn against me the way she did. She’s me sister, after all. I thought she’d stick by me.’

  ‘Mam!’ Josie panted. She had a stitch in her side, and felt confused. What on earth was Mam on about? Which poor woman might the truth have killed?

  ‘I’m sorry, Petal. Am I going too fast for you? I’m the worst mam in the whole world.’ She slowed down considerably, but remained just as angry. ‘I’m glad we were all done up in our best gear and I had me beret on, not that horrible brown thing. Did you see the lovely coats they had on? Mollie will have made them, as well as them dead smart hats. She makes all the kids’ clothes, including the boys’. Mr Kavanagh – Eddie, that is – owns the haberdashers by Woolworths in Penny Lane, so she gets the material cheap, like. She was ever such a good friend when I was little. I used to have me tea in their house until our Ivy came home from work. Their Stanley’s only three years younger than me.’ She stopped dead in the middle of the street. ‘I would have liked a cup of tea and a natter, I really would, but I was scared she’d guess what’s what.’

  ‘What is what, Mam?’

  ‘Never mind.’ Mam sighed. ‘You should be wearing coats like Lily’s, not other kids’ cast-offs from Paddy’s market. There was money left, hundreds of pounds, and half of it were mine. Mollie Kavanagh made the frock for me first Holy Communion, something you’ll be needing yourself in the not too distant future, and where are we going to get that from, I’d like to know?’

  Josie had no idea. Nor did she know why the day, which she had anticipated being so enjoyable, should have turned so sour, all because they’d met nice Mrs Kavanagh and her daughter, Lily.

  Then the day became even worse. Mam noticed they were standing outside a pub. She said, ‘Hang on a minute, Petal. If I don’t down something quick to calm me nerves, I’m likely to bust a blood vessel. Sit on the step, luv. I’ll be out again in the twinkling of an eye.’

  True to her word, Mam was only a short while in the pub, and when she came out she looked much calmer. But she had claimed that drinking was a curse, that she was determined to stop altogether so she could get a job and a little house. This was the first time Josie had known her to drink during the day.

  2

  Josie had been at Our Lady of Mount Carmel elementary school a year when Britain declared war on Germany, and everyone began to make a desperate fuss about things. But apart from food rationing and people having to wear gas masks over their shoulders, war made little difference to their lives as far as Josie could see. All the windows had crisscross tape to protect against bomb damage – not that anyone thought there was the remotest chance that bombs would fall. Tall Kate and fat Liz had ‘pulled themselves together’ and gone down south to work in a factory making parts for aeroplanes. But Josie and her mam remained in Huskisson Street, where these days there were always a few bottles of stout kept in the sideboard cupboard, and the little house hadn’t been mentioned in a long while.

  Josie didn’t mind, not very much. They still went to Princes Park and for rides on the ferry. She liked school, and could read quite well. Night-times, when Mam was out – and she was out longer and longer these days – she looked through books with Teddy and taught him the words she knew.

  After the war started, Mam’s visitors were mainly young men in uniform – some gave Josie a penny, or even a threepenny bit, as they were leaving. She put the money in a cocoa tin to save up for a house.

  On the last day of the summer term, the children were allowed home early. They whooped out of the gates, blissfully excited at the thought of no more school for six long weeks. Josie ran all the way home, burst into the house and was halfway up the first flight of stairs when Irish Rose emerged from her ground-floor room. She was a tiny woman – ‘petite’ Mam called her – with lovely ginger hair, and would have been dead pretty if she hadn’t had such a dreadful squint.

  ‘Josie,’ she called urgently. ‘Come in with me a minute,
luv. Your mam’s got someone with her. She wasn’t expecting you just yet.’

  ‘Why can’t I wait on the stairs, like always?’ Josie hadn’t realised Mam had visitors while she was at school.

  ‘I think your mam would prefer it if you waited with me. It might take a while. Come on, luv,’ Rose coaxed in her soft, lilting voice. ‘The kettle’s on, and I got half a pound of broken biscuits this morning – most of ’em are cream.’

  At the mention of the biscuits, Josie returned downstairs. She loved Rose’s big room, with its fancy net curtains and red silk tasselled lampshade. Rose had spent several days sticking tape to the tall windows in a highly complicated pattern. The linoleum was purple with a pattern of trailing vines, and the red and blue striped wallpaper, with its sprinkling of embossed gold flowers, was a relic of the importer of rare spices – faded, torn in places, but still incredibly grand. During the summer, the marble fireplace was filled, as now, with tissue flowers that Rose had made herself. A patchwork quilt covered the single bed, and the sideboard was packed with statues, holy pictures and photos of Rose’s numerous sisters and brothers and other relatives back in Ireland, who would all ‘drop stone dead’ for some reason if they knew what their Rose was up to on the mainland.

  The kettle was already simmering on the hob, the tea was quickly made and the broken biscuits emptied on to a plate.

  ‘You can dip your bicky in your tea if you want, luv,’ Rose said kindly, before proceeding daintily to dip her own. Rose was always dressed up to the nines from early morning. Today, she wore a lovely maroon crêpe dress with sequins on the bodice. Her cheeks and lips had been painted the same colour as the dress, and her lashes were two rows of stiff flies’ legs. She regarded Josie searchingly with her good eye. ‘And what did you get up to at school today?’

  ‘We did games this avvy, and Catechism this morning,’ Josie said importantly. ‘Did you know the Pope cannot err? What does err mean, Rose?’

  Rose shrugged. ‘Dunno, luv. I’m a downright eejit, me. I can’t even read proper.’

  ‘Honest? Me mam reads books all the time, big thick ones,’ Josie bragged. ‘She gets ’em from the library.’

  ‘Oh, we all know how clever Lady Muck is.’ Rose sniffed and looked annoyed. She went on, a touch of spite in her voice, ‘But she weren’t clever enough to check if her chap was wearing a johnny, were she? I always do. The chaps hate using ’em, and only an eejit would take them at their word. Now look where it’s landed her.’

  ‘Where’s that, Rose?’

  ‘Up shit creek without a paddle, that’s where.’

  Josie was about to ask if shit creek was anywhere near the Pier Head when an agonised scream came from upstairs.

  ‘Mam!’ Josie would have recognised the sound anywhere. In her panic, she dropped a custard cream in the half-drunk tea, and almost fell in her rush towards the door.

  ‘Wait a minute, luv,’ Rose leapt to her feet. ‘Oh, dear God. I should’ve locked the effin’ door,’ she groaned.

  At first, Josie couldn’t make out what was happening when she burst into the attic room, half expecting to find Mam being murdered and ready to defend her with her life. The terrifying scene that met her was possibly worse. The bed had been covered with a black rubber sheet on which her mother lay, legs bent and wide apart. Between them was a pool of dark red blood. Mam, her teeth bared and the whites of her eyes glinting madly, was struggling to escape from Maude, who had her pinned down by the shoulders. A strange old woman was crouched at the foot of the bed. She got to her feet as Josie rushed in.

  ‘That should do it,’ the woman said, and at the same time Mam shrieked, ‘Get our Josie out of here.’

  ‘I’ll get her.’ Rose arrived, breathless. ‘Come on, luv.’

  But a terrified Josie dodged the grasping arms. She slithered past Maude and threw herself on top of her mother who screamed again. Both began to sob loudly.

  The old woman, oblivious to the commotion, said in a hoarse voice, ‘That’ll be a quid.’

  ‘You should’a been a butcher, Gertie,’ Maude said tersely, releasing Mam, who made no attempt to escape, but fell back on to the bed, still sobbing. ‘I hope that instrument o’ yours was sterilised.’

  Gertie ignored her. ‘I’d like me rubber sheet back if you don’t mind. I’ll wash it meself at home. Oh, and you’d better get the girl some Aspro. She’s likely to hurt for a couple of days.’

  Mam did more than hurt – she caught an infection. Her temperature soared, she tossed and turned, moaned in her sleep and said things that Josie couldn’t make sense of.

  ‘Don’t touch me, else I’ll tell our Ivy,’ she would wail hysterically. Or, ‘If me sister finds out, it’ll break her heart.’

  It was like a nightmare, Josie thought during the night as she cuddled against the hot, damp body, made worse when the air-raid siren went several times. Its unearthly wail sent shivers up and down her spine. The drone of German planes sounded in the distance, and she held her breath, praying they wouldn’t get closer. Maude said bombs had dropped on Birkenhead and Wallasey. Five people had been killed.

  For eight whole days, Mam stayed in bed, only getting up to use the po, which was ‘like a hot knife being stuck in me guts’, she said tearfully to Maude. Josie flatly refused to leave her side for more than a few minutes. She sat on the bed, making little soothing noises and gently stroking the burning cheeks.

  ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you, Petal,’ Mam said when she was lucid. Several times a day she would ask, ‘Would you mind taking that little glass and nipping downstairs to ask Maude for a sup of whisky? It’s the only thing that helps with the pain.’

  ‘She’s drinking more than ever,’ Maude said worriedly one day, after inviting Josie into her horribly smelly room – according to Mam, Maude had yet to discover the virtues of soap and water. Yesterday’s make-up smudged her anxious, good-natured face, and she wore the filthy dressing-gown with both pockets hanging off that she wore all day. Because she hadn’t combed her hair, the bald patch was more noticeable than usual. ‘I thought she’d vowed to give it up.’

  Josie tut-tutted and shook her head, very grown up. ‘She vows that nearly every day, Maude.’

  ‘She’s been doing it for years.’ Maude grimaced and waved her cigarette. ‘It’s me own fault. I was the one that got her started. I mean, you can’t sit in the ale house half the night and only sup lemonade. And your mam’s far too respectable to walk the streets. At least with a pub you know exactly who you’re getting. But I never thought she’d take to the drink like a duck takes to water.’

  ‘Maude?’ Josie was still puzzled by the scene she had encountered the day she came home early from school. There was a question she had been dying to ask for days.

  ‘What, luv?’ Maude said absently.

  ‘Was that old woman trying to kill me mam?’

  Maude looked grave and didn’t answer for a while. Then she said, ‘No, luv. She wasn’t trying to kill her. She was taking something away that your mam didn’t want, like lancing a boil, sort o’ thing.’ She patted Josie’s head affectionately as she poured whisky into the glass. ‘Take this up to her. By the way, luv, have you had anything to eat today?’

  Josie’s stomach had been rumbling for hours. Mam seemed to have forgotten about food. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Tch, tch.’ Maude shook her head. ‘I’ll make you a brawn and piccalili sarnie. That should fill the hole for now.’

  Mam got better, but for a long while her legs felt like ‘a rusty pair of scissors’ and her movements were stiff and painful. Walking as far as Princes Park or the Pier Head was out of the question. She preferred to rest, get her strength back, though she went to the pub at night, always bringing back a visitor, because she had no choice, her purse being completely empty.

  Josie offered the one and sevenpence halfpenny out of the cocoa tin. Mam burst into tears and said she was very kind, but it wouldn’t last five minutes.

  During the long holiday, on sunn
y days, rather than seek out the friends she’d made at school, Josie preferred to wander alone down to the Pier Head where she watched children armed with buckets and spades boarding the New Brighton ferry, huge families of them, accompanied by perspiring mams and a few dads. She envied the children’s carefree faces, their obvious gaiety, and on one brilliant August day, a thought she’d never had before wriggled its way into her head. Despite the heat, for some reason she felt cold as she began to wonder about the strangeness of her own existence. Why didn’t Mam have a husband?

  Thinking about it now, for the first time, on this gloriously sunny afternoon, there seemed something very odd, not quite right, about the never-ending visitors and what they did while Josie was out of the room. She knew that Mam got undressed, and they lay on the bed together, making dead funny noises, and afterwards she was paid. Sometimes the visitors grumbled she’d already cost them a small fortune in ale, and Mam would reply sharply she wasn’t available for the price of a few drinks, thanks all the same. And since the old woman had lanced the boil, whatever the men did hurt badly. Mam was often in tears when Josie went back, and in need of a drink to ease the pain. There was whisky in the cupboard now instead of stout, and she would take a huge swig straight from the bottle and go to bed, forgetting all about their usual cocoa and jam butties.

  In fact, Josie was hungry a lot of the time because Mam mostly forgot to buy food. If it hadn’t been for Maude, some days she wouldn’t have eaten at all.

  There were children in her class at school who smelled much worse than Maude. Their bodies, their ragged clothes, were filthy. A few had no shoes, and some of the girls didn’t wear knickers. Even so, Josie would have bet that these children’s mams didn’t get undressed for strange men. It made her feel a little bit ashamed.

  She rested her arms on the rail and watched the ferry on its way to New Brighton spewing a trail of white froth. The sun glinted blindingly on the green-grey waters of the Mersey, and her eyes began to run. There was no hankie up her sleeve, so she rubbed her cheeks with the hem of her frock, and it was only then she noticed how dirty it was. It hadn’t been washed since the day school finished, and in all that time she hadn’t changed her knickers and vest because there hadn’t been any clean ones to put on. She only had one frock that fitted, and Mam had promised ages ago to get another from the market. And she needed shoes – the ones she had on now pinched badly.