Free Three Women of Liverpool by Helen Forrester

the extraordinary sensations within her.
    About midnight, David staggered in and thankfully plunked down his heavy tool-box.
    “Worked late and then I had to walk home,” he told them as, regardless of the guns roaring outside, they scuttled round to get him his supper. “There’s a proper raid on down town. The sound of the planes diving, as I come along, give me the willies, they did. Hope our Em’s all right.”
    Gwen had forgotten entirely about Emmie and now she paused, tea caddy in hand, a twinge of conscience striking her.
    “Anyway, we can’t do anything about her,” he went on practically, as he sat down to his fish pie. “We should go to bed. They’re not bombing round here – too busy with the town to bother us.” He turned to Mari and said with a grin, “Your room’s a deal safer with the window being boarded up. Maybe young Patrick did you a good turn.”
    Mari stared at him for a second, her smile frozen on her face. Then she said diffidently, “I suppose he did.”
    Gwen climbed nervously into her bed and pulled the clothes over her head, to shut out the sound of chugging aeroplane engines. Two hours of sitting on the basement steps had made her back ache and to lie down was a blessed relief. David put his head on his pillow and began to snore immediately. Mari lay quietly in the stuffy darkness of her room and wondered what had really happened to her. Could you have a baby if a boy touched you?
    None of them heard Emmie’s flagging footsteps, when she came in. Groaning sleepily, they got up again at six o’clock in the morning and were astonished to find her sound asleep in David’s chair, a cold cup of tea beside her on the bookshelf.

SATURDAY, 3 MAY 1941

     

     
     
i
    Gwen stared unbelievingly at the shattered windows of Blackler’s store. She seethed with indignation. An attack on Blackler’s was, she felt, an attack on her personally. It was her store.
    She glanced along its usually immaculate frontage. Little piles of swept-up glass stood waiting to be shovelled away. The gaping holes which had once been windows filled with merchandise labelled with large, cheerful notices of special bargains, had been cleared; only one or two, where the glass, by some fluke, remained intact, still bravely displayed for the benefit of the weekend invasion of shoppers from Wales a collection of special offers.
    And the Welsh were coming in in force. Dressed in their best, they came by train and bus not only to buy but to make holiday, joining shoppers from the Liverpool suburbs, in touring the damage wreaked on the city and viewing the roaring fires. People from slum and suburb alike walked into cafés and grocery shops whose fronts had been blown out, and stood around feasting on food not yet salvaged. Rowdy groups, dodging the already harassed police, calmly looted anything they fancied, laughing and joking and getting drunkon wines and spirits they found in the grocery stores. Not a few owners defended their little broken shops with cricket bats, battered symbols of integrity.
    As, later on, she snipped lengths of material for a customer who spoke, with disgust, of the behaviour of a group of hooligans she had seen, Gwen said bitterly, “You’d think we was a circus, the way they gape – and a free-for-all. Rob their own mothers, they would.”
    “Aye,” the customer agreed heavily. “Who’d have believed it?”
ii
    David usually finished work at twelve noon on Saturdays, and Gwen had left a dish of stew in the oven for his midday meal. It grew dryer and dryer and finally shrivelled up on the plate, because David had not, that morning, been pursuing the incredible intricacies of the plumbing of the Royal Infirmary. He had, instead, been pounced on by his supervisor, immediately upon his arrival, and had been sent by taxi out to Bootle, together with his mate, Arthur, a grizzled ancient, back in the work force after four years of retirement.
    “Bloody chaos out there,” the supervisor had