Free The Seven Streets of Liverpool by Maureen Lee

would have earned ten out of ten had you pointed out that Liverpool isn’t exactly the exemplary city you describe.’
    ‘Isn’t it?’ Freda was astonished to hear it.
    ‘No, dear. It was one of the first cities to have something called a wet dock. That means it was prominent in the slave trade. Many thousands of black people were taken via Liverpool to the United States to become slaves. The conditions on the ships were deplorable, and once the slaves arrived, they were treated with appalling cruelty. Liverpool became rich through this awful business, and it’s something the city should be greatly ashamed of.’
    ‘I see,’ said Freda.
    She returned to her desk feeling both proud and as if she had been taken down a peg or two.

Chapter 6

    Summer had arrived. On a warm and sunny Sunday early in July, Jack Doyle was thrilled to see that the lettuces he had planted earlier in the year in Eileen’s garden in Melling had grown at least another inch and would soon be ready to be eaten. As someone whose lettuces in the past had always originated from the greengrocer’s, growing them himself was something akin to a miracle.
    Tiny apples and pears had appeared on the fruit trees and gooseberries on the bushes. There was even a handful of strawberries, strictly meted out one at a time to Sheila and Brenda’s children, and of course Eileen’s son Nicky. Eventually, blackberries would appear on the prickly bushes at the bottom of the garden.
    It had been a hard sacrifice to make, but Jack no longer took sugar in his tea, giving it instead to Eileen to make jams and pies. The pastry was rather hard because it didn’t have enough lard in it, but Jack loved to see Eileen lift a sweet-smelling crusty fruit pie out of the oven, or witness the jars of delicious home-made jam, of which he was always the first recipient.
    It cheered him up tremendously, feeling that no matter what Hitler did, the British people would make the best of things. The men would fight their hardest and the women would keep the home fires burning, as the song said.
    It worried him that Nick wasn’t home so often nowadays. He wasn’t sure what his son-in-law did down in London; something highly confidential and very important, he imagined. Perhaps it was connected with the recent invasion by the Allies of Sicily, the final step before reaching Italy and mainland Europe.
    Jack knew he wasn’t the only one to wish with every fibre of his being that this bloody war would soon be over. It was a wish shared by every single person in the country.

    Eileen watched from the kitchen window as her father, brow furrowed, stood beside the lettuces, lost in thought. One of the few good things that had come out of the war was her marrying Nick and moving into his cottage, thereby letting her dad loose on the large amount of land that went with it.
    She wondered if, having lived his entire life in small terraced houses with only a tiny scrap of back yard, he’d always missed having a garden. He’d taken to it as if it was something he was born to, growing vegetables like an expert. The fruit bushes and some of the flowers – the hydrangeas, carnations, delphiniums and poppies – came up year after year and might have been there for ever, for all she knew. Perennials, Dad called them. Their scent was heady and overpowering, as if she had entered a different land. On summer mornings, when she drew back the kitchen curtains and heard the birds already chirping madly in the trees, Eileen quite expected to see elves and fairies playing in the wisps of mist on the patch of lawn outside.
    Mostly the vegetables her father grew were given away – virtually every house in Pearl Street had benefited from the produce Jack Doyle had grown on his daughter’s land.
    Directly outside the window, Nicky was playing in his sandpit. The sand had come from the beach at Formby; a friend of Nick’s had brought it before he’d had to give up his car when petrol became restricted to