That Liverpool Girl Read online

‘Oh, give over. It’s not just us. Every family in the country’s going to be in a bit of a mess.’ She raised a hand when he opened his mouth to continue the rant. ‘Neil, just stop it. I don’t want anybody to go, don’t want anybody to fight. You won’t be called up, because you’re turned forty, so stop it. Anyway, all this has to be taken out on Hitler, not me, not Chamberlain, not England. We’re all frightened and in the dark, and it’ll get worse before it gets better. Like I said, it’s everybody from Land’s End to John o’ Groats, but God help them in the south, because they’re nearest to hell. Now, go and stamp about on the land, because I’ve listened enough, and I’ve baking on. My bread doesn’t thrive when somebody’s in a bad mood, and we want to send some decent stuff up to Willows for when she comes on her visit.’

  Neil picked up his cap and slammed out of the house. Not for the first time, he wished he could get his hands on enough money to buy this place. His dad had farmed it, and Neil had taken over. He knew every animal, every pleat and fold in the land, every ditch and hedge – a bloody woman? Adam Pickavance had been as much use as a damp squib, but answering to the agent of an absent man was one thing; having a woman in charge would change matters. Or would it? Perhaps she might leave everything in the hands of Keith Greenhalgh, who was a fair man, knowledgeable about the estate, and unlikely to be called up, as he was well into his forties while his occupation could sit nicely under the umbrella labelled essential and reserved.

  In the top field, Neil stopped and surveyed a domain he had always considered his own. As far as he could see in any direction, the land belonged to Willows. The hamlet known as Willows Edge nestled in a dip, and all the houses therein were tied to the estate. Keith Greenhalgh had done his best, but the funds left in his care by Adam Pickavance had been insufficient to cover anything beyond bare essentials, and the dwellings were in need of attention. A flaming woman, though . . .

  ‘Morning, Neil.’

  It was the man himself. ‘Keith. I was just thinking about you.’

  Keith joined him and both men leaned on a fence. ‘How’s it going?’ the agent asked.

  ‘As all right as it can go. Conscription hangs over the field hands like a thundercloud, and a Scouse woman’s taking the reins. Couldn’t be better.’

  Keith chuckled. ‘Look. I shouldn’t know this, and I shouldn’t be telling you, either, but the old man left a fair sum, didn’t fritter it all away. She might pull us out of ruin.’

  It was Neil’s turn to laugh. ‘Oh, aye? And one of my pigs has just floated down tied to a purple parachute. The bloody woman’ll be all lipstick and shoes, because she’s a townie. I guarantee she’ll think more about her perfume than she will about folk. These city women know nowt about owt.’

  ‘If you want to know what’s in her head, she’s been talking about bringing evacuees from Liverpool, because they live near the docks. Seems quite a sensible type to me, and no spring chicken, or so I’m told.’

  Neil shook his head thoughtfully. Down below, in the large hollow that contained Bolton, children were living among factories and smoke, but they weren’t going to be brought up to the tops, were they? Oh no. The place was going to be overrun by Scousers. The invaders would be useless. They would have no idea of husbandry, because the only animals they would have seen were dray horses, and he pictured the hordes in his mind’s eye running through fields and flattening crops. ‘Bloody wild, they are. They pinch what they want, run about barefoot, and—’

  ‘And that doesn’t happen in Bolton? You’ve not had much to do with the bottom end of Deane Road and Derby Street, then? I have relatives down yon, Neil, and they struggle. Their kids aren’t perfect. Hungry children steal, because when push comes to shove we all would if we stood alongside real hunger. Get off your high horse, lad, before you take a fall.’ He tapped his forehead, then his mouth. ‘Keep that open, and that closed. Until she arrives this afternoon, we’ve no idea what she’s made of. But I can tell you this much for nothing – the owld fellow loved the bones of his brother, and the lady is that brother’s daughter. Open mind, buttoned lips. Think on.’ Keith walked away.

  Neil knew that Keith and Jean were right. He was carrying on like a two-year-old in a tantrum, when in reality he was no more than a speck in the cosmos. Everybody mattered. Everybody was the same in the sight of God. Willows Home Farm was no more important than the next, and he had been blessed with a sensible wife. Two daughters, they had. For the first time in his married life, Neil was glad that he had no son.

  But behind all these worries at the front of his mind, there was a dark place he scarcely dared to visit. In spite of propaganda in newspapers and on cinema screens, the mood of the country was not good. Hitler was reputed to have thousands of fighter planes, hundreds of bombers. He could wipe out Britain in a day if he so chose. These fields, this pure, green, velvet beauty, could soon belong to a crowd of goose-stepping foreigners, so why worry about a few bloody Scousers? An invasion by Liverpool was infinitely preferable to the other possibility.

  Fruit-pickers were busy denuding trees in the orchards. Cows grazed in the distance, and even further away, on higher ground, sheep looked like little flecks of cotton wool against the hillsides. In a place as beautiful and peaceful as this, it was difficult to imagine war. But he remembered war. He had fought in it, had survived, though it had taken many men from these parts. The war to end all wars had been the subtitle of the previous mess. Men had come home after doing the impossible, after climbing over dead comrades in mud-lined trenches, after losing limbs, sight, the ability to breathe . . . Neil nodded. They had come home to grinding poverty, had fought to their last ounce of strength to live in a country that didn’t deserve them. ‘And now we do the same, and we come back to the same. Land of hope and glory my bloody backside. If I go, I’ll be fighting for Jean, Stella and Patty.’

  Yet a small corner of Neil’s heart held a picture of a good, quiet man with a stammer, a soul so fine and true that almost every Englishman admired and loved him. His brother, the one with all the airs and the swank, had buggered off with the ugliest woman imaginable, leaving a sibling in poor health to run the family shop. Bertie, now George VI, his wife and daughters, they deserved saving. But even they couldn’t sort out the nitwits at Westminster. Which was just as well, in a way, because the King favoured Halifax, while the country needed Winnie. Chamberlain would have to go. Yes. The cretins in the Commons should have listened. To Churchill.

  Right. He had a horse with a limp, a sow with a sore teat, and a wife who was fed up with him. He would walk to the vet’s to ask for a visit on behalf of the first two, and he would find some nice apples for Jean. She made a lovely apple pie, did his Jeanie . . .

  A car arrived in Rachel Street. A novelty, it attracted small children like flies until the driver sounded the horn, at which point they dispersed and stood in a jagged line on the opposite pavement, only to shift again when Nellie Kennedy and her daughter emerged from their house.

  Hilda Pickavance, who had been waiting for her new friends to put in an appearance, gathered together pieces of shattered nerve and stepped outside. This was all getting a bit too much for her. She was to have a meeting with a Keith Greenhalgh, agent and steward for the estate known as Willows. The only men with whom she’d had contact thus far were her father and her employer at the laundry. She thanked goodness that older children were at school as she placed herself in the front passenger seat, smiling tentatively at the driver, who had left his seat in order to open the door for her. When he had settled her two companions in the rear of the vehicle, the man returned and pulled away.

  Cheering children chased them as far as the Rotunda theatre, where they fell away and turned to go home.

  ‘Miss Pickavance?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m Jay, really John Collins. There was a spate of Johns when I was born, so I got reduced to Jay.’

  Hilda couldn’t lay her tongue against one sensible syllable, so Nellie helped her out. ‘My granddaughter’s
reduced from Amelia to Mel, and it never done her no harm. She’s at Merchant Taylors’. That’s the best public school, and she won a full scholarship. Very clever girl, our Mel. And beautiful like my Eileen.’

  Eileen dug her mother in the ribs. ‘Stop showing off,’ she mouthed. It was always the same with Mam when she met someone for the first time. She said her own name, then waded in over her head with Mel’s success. Her granddaughter was top of the class in most subjects; she was going to Cambridge if a source of money could be found, and she did lovely calliography. Time after time, Eileen had corrected the word to calligraphy, but Nellie was happier with the extra syllable, as it sounded posher. She had quite a collection of home-made words, and she used them deliberately and without mercy.

  ‘She can sing and all,’ Nellie said now. ‘Voice of an angel.’

  ‘How would you know?’ Eileen asked. ‘For one thing, you’re tone deaf, and for another, you’re biased. Why don’t you brag about the other three, eh? One of them put Sally Wray’s tea-rose-coloured directoire knickers up a flagpole – I don’t know which of them, but I’ll get to the bottom of it.’

  ‘Or the top,’ said Hilda, her back shaking with laughter. ‘Flagpole? Top?’

  ‘Oh, heck,’ groaned Nellie dramatically. ‘You’ve woken a sleeping giant here, Eileen.’ She poked Hilda’s shoulder. ‘Oi, clever clogs. Might be top for flagpole, but it’s bottom for knickers, so hang on to your ha’penny, missus.’

  But Eileen ploughed onward. ‘Our Bertie and the horse – that’ll go down in history down Cazneau Street and Scotland Road. I mean, I know he’s only six, but per-lease. Hiding a carthorse between a small tin bath and a bloody mangle? He has to have come from a different planet. If he hadn’t been born at home, I’d swear they’d given me the wrong baby.’

  The driver pulled into a kerb, dried his eyes, and swivelled as far as possible in his seat. ‘You two should be on the wireless,’ he moaned.

  ‘We haven’t got one,’ came Nellie’s quick reply. ‘We had one, like, but it never worked since our Philip stood on it to reach a shelf. He’s been on the wireless, but he fell off.’

  Jay drummed his fingertips on the steering wheel. ‘And I suppose when he tried tap dancing, he slipped into the sink? The old ones are always the best, right?’

  Nellie pretended to glare at him. ‘This is all we need, a clever bloody Woollyback. You talk slow, but you get there, don’t you, lad?’

  He sighed. ‘Look. Getting there’s what it’s about today. We’ve miles to go, and we’ll not get there at all if I can’t see for laughing.’ He pointed to the new boss of Willows. ‘And this lady has business to discuss, but she’ll get yonder all red-eyed and daft if you don’t stop this malar-key. All right?’

  Nellie and Eileen shrugged. ‘Please yourself,’ said the former. ‘It’s not every day you get free entertainment thrown in, like, but we’ll shut up.’

  They would probably have shut up anyway, because the journey was becoming interesting. They saw decent terraced houses in Lowton, stared at winding gear that took men down into half a dozen pits on the route round the hem of Wigan, knew they were nearing the mills when they noticed tall chimneys ahead.

  Jay parked again. ‘And there you have it, ladies. If you look beyond the town, you’ll see hills on three sides. They protect the cotton, keep the damp in, you see. The mills have to be boiling hot and wet, or there’d be a lot of spoilage. No hills on the Manchester side, so it’s more a ladle than a bowl. Anyway, look over to the left a bit, Miss Pickavance. A massive piece of land up yon is yours. Your forefathers toiled for that, just to get out of the town. So, welcome home.’

  Hilda was staring at the inheritance of which her beloved father had been deprived.

  ‘Miss Pickavance?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘My parents would have loved to live up there. They had a hard life. Not as hard as some, but . . .’ She put away the rest of the words. ‘Let’s go. I want to get this over and done so that I can go home. Because my thinking will probably start after the meeting.’

  They trundled down Derby Street towards town. In shabby alleyways that ran off on each side, there was poverty that mirrored conditions round Scotland Road. Infants ran barefoot, some of them scarcely dressed. The shops on the main road were neglected and tacky, and had very few items on display in their windows. On several corners stood small covens of women in black, ancients who still dressed like Victorians, skirts reaching their ankles, grey shawls covering their blouses. They inhaled snuff from small boxes, or sucked on white clay pipes. Every other building seemed to be a public house. Yes, this bit was home from home for Nellie and Eileen.

  In town, Jay pointed out the open market.

  ‘It’s not open,’ Nellie said. ‘It’s shut.’

  ‘Open as in the open air, and don’t pretend you didn’t already understand,’ was his reply. ‘It works Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. The enclosed market, Market Hall, is down by the side of Woolworth’s.’

  ‘Right. And where’s this here Willows?’

  He pointed. ‘A good ten miles out that way.’

  ‘Any shops?’ Eileen asked.

  ‘Well.’ Jay rounded the corner into Bank Street to begin his climb up to the moors. ‘Elsie Openshaw got herself turned into a post office. She had to pass a test for that, but the mail’s not delivered. I collect the stuff for Willows, and Willows Home Farm and some of the tenant farms, but them who live on the Edge collect their own. She sells a few basics like soap and lamp oil. People from the Edge use her more than we do.’

  ‘Ooh, I wouldn’t like to live on the edge,’ said Nellie. ‘What if we fall off?’

  Jay chuckled. ‘It’s just a word, just a name. When the place was first bought, them there cottages were probably on the edge of Willows land, but it’s been expanded since them days.’

  ‘Not by my uncle, I take it?’

  ‘No. He . . . er . . . he lived a different life, miss. Nice chap, never upset anybody, but he didn’t care about Willows. So it’s all a bit on the run-down side. I do my best – I’m the jack-of-all-trades, and my wife’s the jill. Funnily enough, Gill’s her name. Gillian when she goes to Buckingham Palace, but— No, she doesn’t go to any palace, I’m pulling your leg. Any road, enjoy the scenery. You’ll miss your river, but you’ll gain the countryside.’

  When they crossed the ring road, the climb became slightly more serious. They left behind shops, brick-built houses and signs of movement until they reached a place where there were stone houses on one side, fields on the other. ‘Look at the trees,’ Eileen sighed.

  ‘Yes. Wood and leaves.’ Nellie was trying hard not to be impressed. ‘What’s behind the long wall?’ she asked.

  ‘Ora et labore,’ Jay replied. ‘Pray and work. It’s a school for Church of England scholars.’

  ‘Heathens,’ Nellie sighed. ‘We couldn’t send her there. At least they’re not all Protestants where she is now.’

  They took a left fork and soon they were in real countryside. The route was interrupted from time to time by clusters of stone cottages, while the odd farmhouse sat in the distance. Cows and horses peered over hedges as if passing comment on the noise of the internal combustion engine, while bales of hay waited to be taken inside for the winter.

  ‘This is Willows Edge,’ Jay announced. ‘Don’t blink, or you’ll miss it. The house with GVI and the post box in the wall is Elsie’s. She’s also in charge of making sure nobody shows a light while the war’s on. Elsie seems to be in charge of most things round here. She volunteers herself for anything and everything.’

  ‘We’ll have to see about that,’ Nellie whispered to her daughter. ‘Nobody organizes me.’

  ‘Shut up, Mam.’

  Jay was now driving up a narrow, unpaved lane. He stopped and pointed out the farm. ‘This is the main farm, also known as Willows Home Farm. You have others, but they are leased out to tenant farmers who pay you rent. The home farm ma
intains the estate, selling produce, cattle and so forth. Neil Dyson and his wife Jean live there. They have two daughters, Stella and Patty. Neil was born in that house, took over from his dad. Very decent people, do anything for anybody, they would. But he might go sooner or later. Army, I reckon, though he won’t be called up yet, because he’s turned forty.’

  At last, Hilda spoke. ‘This is a large leap for an ironer in a Chinese laundry. I seem to be going from a room twelve by twelve to an area that defies measurement. It’s a lot to take in.’ She owned several farms. Why had she not been warned about owning several farms?

  Jay inclined his head. ‘Too true. Had things not gone the way they did, you and your mam and dad would have been here already, and you’d be used to it. But you can depend on me and Gill, on Neil and his wife, and on those who don’t get called up. After that, it’ll be all women, anyway. Land Army, so I hear. Mostly females. I’ll have to go soon enough. If Neil gets the call, my Gill will probably move in with Jean, and that will free up the gatehouse for the duration.’

  They reached the aforementioned gatehouse, and Eileen sighed. ‘Ooh, that’s lovely, Mam. Built of stone, and leaded windows, too.’ Then her attention was grabbed by the main building. ‘Jesus,’ she breathed. ‘And look at all the willow trees.’

  ‘There have to be six willows positioned like that,’ Jay said. ‘If anything happens to a tree, we need to get a new one straight away, or the crops will fail and we’ll have no luck with cattle. This is where we breed the county’s best cows and bulls; we win prizes. So we take no chances, and look after the willows. My job would be easier without them, because I cut the lawns, but there you have it. The willows stay.’

  ‘I like them,’ Hilda said. ‘But I don’t have to look after the grass, and I expect the lawn underneath all those weepers doesn’t thrive.’ She turned in her seat and addressed her neighbours. ‘Your boys could use them a tents or dens.’

  ‘They like kiddies.’ Jay grinned. ‘I know it’s a load of old wives’ rubbish, but they seem to whisper when children play under the branches. Now, the stables are at the back, between the house and Home Farm, and I reckon come spring we’ll be ploughing with horses. I’ll show you the rotation table, Miss Pickavance. With it being war, we won’t have much left fallow – just enough for the stock. Neil and Keith will keep you in the picture. Fuel for tractors will be rationed, which is why you’ll need to depend on your horses.’