Free Three Women of Liverpool by Helen Forrester Page B

fields, I expect. It’s a deal safer’n staying here overnight.”
    David nodded. Except for an occasional shout to a child to mind himself, the procession was strangely quiet. There was a dull acceptance in the passing faces, framed in dusty, tousled hair. Dragging boots made a slow shuffling sound on the gritty street.
    “They’ll be back in t’ mornin’, bright and early no doubt,” remarked Arthur, “to check on their homes – and sent t’ kids to school – if the school’s still there.”
iii
    Mari and her friend, Dorothy, went to the Saturday, children’s programme at the cinema that afternoon and then went home to Dorothy’s house for tea.
    While his mother sat on the front step, nursing Michael and enjoying the sunshine, and Ruby and Nora played skipping on the pavement, Patrick sloped around the alleyways, hoping to find Mari. Unsuccessful, he irritably teased his father’s fighting cocks and for his pains got a long scratch on the back of his right hand.
    Conor Donnelly’s area had been mercifully free from incidents on the previous night, so while he had a comparatively quiet day, he wandered down to the Hercy Dock to see if he could find an American sailor off a tanker, with nylons or lipsticks for sale. Both fetched good prices on the black market.
iv
    As Gwen bustled into her home about eight o’clock that evening, she felt more energetic than she had done for some days. A few hours of good sleep, despite the noise of the raid, had restored her, and she had enjoyed at Blackler’s the close feeling of unity amongst her companions, engendered by their joint dislike of the large influx of sightseers and ill-intentioned riff-raff into the town.
    Mari was sitting alone, by the fire, slowly turning the heel of a sock, one of a pair she was knitting as a contribution to a parcel being made up for the men of the King’s Regiment. Two of the girls in the class had fathers serving in it, stationed at Hull. Mari was a good knitter, having been taught by her mother as soon as she could hold a pair of butcher’s skewersand a ball of wool.
    “Yer dad not in?” Gwen inquired, as she once more returned her best hat to its box.
    “No.” Mari paused, needle in stitch.
    Mari was feeling a little less panic-stricken about Patrick. She had stuck close to Dorothy all day, and after tea they had rearranged Dorothy’s doll’s house and put up new curtains in it. Mr Hale, Dorothy’s father, who had to go to a chapel meeting, had kindly walked her home, since it was on his way. They walked slowly because he limped; Dorothy said he had been wounded in the First World War at a terrible place called Passchendaele, and, as had sometimes happened in her grandfather’s house, Mari was reminded that the results of war stayed on and on, long after the battles were finished. Did it mean, she wondered fearfully, that her life would be different after the war? Would she, all her life, drag a foot or, much worse, be jeered at because she had been disfigured? She nearly choked, when she remembered that her grandfather had once told her that he had a friend kept permanently in hospital because he had almost no face.
    She had thought about this, as she sat quietly knitting; it was all mixed up with a hodge-podge of ideas about Patrick. To her relief, her figure had not swelled up as she knew a pregnant woman’s did, so she had begun to think that being caressed all over by a boy’s exploring fingers did not produce a baby, and that was a relief; she had heard of girls who had committed suicide because they were pregnant and did not have a proper husband.
    The explosive feelings that Patrick had aroused in her must mean something, though. She longed to ask her mother about it, but dared not. Could such an exciting feeling really be wicked? She wondered if she could ask Aunt Emmie; after all, she was engaged and must know something about it.
    As Gwen put the kettle on for tea, she was not particularly worried about David; he