Free Liverpool Angels by Lyn Andrews Page A

don’t know if he’ll ever work again or even walk. They were taking him straight to hospital. Had an ambulance waiting.’
    Maggie shook her head sadly, thinking how easily it could have been John. ‘I wish you’d look for a job ashore, John. It’s so dangerous down in that stokehold.’
    He shrugged. ‘Jobs ashore have their dangers too, Maggie. How many men are killed and injured on the docks, the railways or down the mines?’ He paused and smiled at her. ‘Well, let’s not let it put a damper on things. I got the kids the presents they wanted. I bet Eddie’s had you demented?’
    Maggie rolled her eyes. ‘That’s a bit of an understatement but I hope you didn’t spend too much on them.’
    ‘It’s a hard world, Maggie. Let them enjoy their childhood: it doesn’t last long. In a couple of years Eddie will be leaving school. I don’t begrudge what I spent and it’s good to be home to be able to see their faces. That’s a real treat for me.’
    She smiled at him. ‘I know and we’re all really looking forward to Christmas Day. Mind you, I’ve plenty to do tomorrow.’
    ‘Well, I’ll be here to keep my eye on them all, particularly Eddie,’ he promised as he stoked up the fire, thinking wryly that tending fires and furnaces was something he was indeed expert at.
    It was bitterly cold the following morning. A slight dusting of snow had fallen during the night and had been covered by a layer of hoar frost, making the cobbles of the steep streets on Everton Ridge lethal underfoot to man and beast alike. Pedestrians clung tightly to the handrails whilst the carters put down cinders and sacking for their horses, knowing that a broken leg meant not only the loss of the animal but the loss of livelihood too.
    ‘You’ll have to be careful when you’re out and about today, Maggie, it’s easy to slip and fall,’ John warned as he looked at the frost and snow covering the yard.
    ‘Don’t I know it and haven’t I already had words with our Eddie over it! He was out there in the street with Agnes’s two lads making a slide ! I ask you! Did he want half the neighbourhood falling and breaking arms and legs and ending up in hospital for Christmas? I asked him. I sometimes wonder what he’s got for brains but those Mercer twins are as bad. Jimmy had even brought out a shelf from the oven to slide on until Agnes came out and belted him and took it back inside.’
    John smothered a grin. It was something he’d done himself as a lad and he’d not given a thought to folk’s safety any more than Eddie and his mates had. ‘I’ll go out and put the cinders from the fire on it, Maggie. They’ll give people a bit more grip.’
    ‘And I want the girls to go down to Isaac’s. He’s very partial to mince pies, so I’ve made him a dozen,’ Maggie informed him.
    ‘I didn’t think they celebrated Christmas,’ John mused aloud.
    ‘They don’t, they have something called Han . . . Hanukkah or something like that instead. I think it means the “Festival of the Lights”. Oh, but he’s getting very frail now and his eyesight is ruined with all those years of sewing.’ She sighed. ‘I feel sorry for him – he’s been good to me. Still, that wife of Harold’s is very good to him and he likes to see our Alice and Mae and they’re fond of him too. They call him “Uncle Isaac”. I suppose they look on him as a sort of grandfather figure, seeing as they never knew one of their own.’
    ‘It must be very . . . odd, Maggie, seeing everyone celebrating Christmas and not being part of it all. Not even believing in it.’
    Maggie pondered this; she’d never really given it much thought before. ‘I suppose they’ve got used to it. It must have seemed very . . . strange to him when he was a little lad just come to this country. I expect everything was odd and unfamiliar to him then, but he’s been here so long now that I for one forget he wasn’t born here. And I never think of him as being