Daughters of Liverpool

As she followed the other passengers out onto the platform Katie wrinkled her nose against the smell of smoke and cold air.

The station was very busy. Every platform seemed either to have a crowd of people standing on it waiting for a train to pull into it, or passengers crowding onto it from a train that had just pulled in.

As Katie joined the queue for the ticket barrier, she was glad of the warmth of her winter coat. All around her she could hear people speaking with an unfamiliar accent, so very different from the cockney she was more used to. She had been told that Liverpudlians were friendly and welcoming. She hoped that that was true.

She was so afraid of having made the wrong decision and having to admit that to her parents. She loved them dearly but their quarrels had coloured Katie’s childhood and as she grew older they had obliged her to take on the role of peacemaker, both parents appealing to her to support their points of view. Katie felt as sorry for her glamorous excitable mother, denied a proper outlet for her theatrical talents, as she did for her poor father, who was so afraid of losing her. If the relationship between her parents was what happened when a person fell in love, then Katie had decided falling in love was definitely not for her. She wanted no truck with it and even less with passionately jealous men.

They had been shocked when she had told them what she had done.

‘You’re going to Liverpool to read letters?’ had been her father’s disbelieving comment, followed by his signature crashing of his hands down onto the keys of the ancient upright piano that took up far too much room in their small rented London house. Her father always used the piano to express his feelings. ‘But I need you here.’

He had been dressed to go out to ‘work’ when she had told them, wearing his immaculate band leader’s white tie and tails, his hair slicked back with brilliantine.

Now Katie smiled as she handed over her ticket, and was relieved to receive a warm smile back from the burly uniformed ticket collector.

In looks Katie took more after her mother than her father, having her mother’s dainty build and expressive heart-shaped face with high cheekbones and a softly shaped mouth. Her colouring, though, was her father’s. She had his hazel eyes and the same dark gold hair that turned lighter in the summer sun.

She had been working as her father’s unpaid ‘assistant’ ever since she had left school, organising his diary, attending rehearsals with him, making notes for him from the comments he made about various members of the two different bands he worked with, some of whom were foreign and inclined to break out into their own language in moments of stress, so that as well as her knowledge of modern music Katie also had a smattering of Italian, Polish and French.

There was nothing about the history of modern dance and song music that Katie didn’t know, from every word of every popular song for the last decade or so, to the name of every composer of those songs, and the names of every member of the country’s most popular dance bands.

Sadly, though, whilst her father and her mother could both sing with perfect pitch, Katie, whilst loving music every bit as passionately as they, had a voice that was completely musically flat, a voice incapable of being raised in song; a voice that had caused both her parents, but especially her father, to demand that it was never ever heard attempting to sing a single note because of the pain it would cause him.

Katie might not have a ‘voice’ but she did have a good ‘ear’ – and, so she was pleased to think, a good awareness of how wearying artistic temperament could be, especially to those on the receiving end of it.

Katie treated her inability to sing as philosophically as she treated the quarrels between her parents – what else after all could she do?

‘Yes, Katie, your father is right,’ her mother had told her. ‘You can’t possibly go to Liverpool.’

‘I have to,’ Katie had told them both, patiently explaining that it was her duty, but diplomatically not explaining how she had slipped the all-important consent form under her father’s nose when he had been signing some business letters she had typed for him.

She had seen the job advertisement in one of the London papers, asking for young women with ‘some specialist knowledge’ on a list of subjects that had included music, and had written off before she could change her mind.

She had been so excited when she had received a reply requiring her to present herself at the address given in the letter for a formal interview.

It had seemed such a grown-up and important thing to do when she had had it explained to her that because of her knowledge of popular music the Government wanted her to work in Liverpool for MC5, the ‘secret’ organisation where letters to and from certain countries were censored and checked for hidden messages. The fact that she could speak and write a small amount of French and Italian was apparently an added bonus. The stern-looking official who had interviewed her had told her that spies were very clever in the ways in which they made contact with one another, often using devices such as mentioning in their letters something as seemingly innocent as popular music, their references a code containing secret information. Her task would be to read such letters and look for anything within them that seemed suspicious.

She would be working alongside other girls, she had been told, and under a supervisor, to whom she would be able to refer any letter that might arouse her suspicions.

She had felt so proud and pleased with herself when she had been offered the job but now, after nearly eight hours on a train that had seemed to crawl from London to Liverpool, she was beginning to wonder if her parents had been right and she had done something very silly indeed.

Now that she was in Liverpool, instead of feeling relieved Katie was actually beginning to feel slightly shaky and uncertain. If she had stayed at home she would have been accompanying her father tonight to the well-known London hotel where one of the bands he conducted would be playing. Instead of having merely a semi-stale cheese sandwich to eat, she would have been able to look forward to a delicious supper from the hotel restaurant.

Now that she was through the ticket barrier Katie put down her case in order to get her bearings, and then almost lost it in the surge of people milling around her.

As she reached to retrieve it, a young man in RAF uniform beat her to it, handing it to her, giving her a wink and a smug grin as he did so.

‘That will cost you a kiss,’ he told her cheekily.

‘Then you’d better put it back,’ Katie replied sharply, ‘because you won’t be getting one.’

He looked as shocked as though a kitten had suddenly shown the teeth of a tiger, but Katie was unrepentant. Give his type an inch and they’d try to take a mile. Well, not with her, they wouldn’t. People – men – thought that just because she was small and dainty-looking that she was a pushover. Well, she wasn’t, and she wasn’t going to be either.

Picking up the case the airman had put down, Katie turned her back on him and made her way towards the exit.

‘Will ’Itler be bombing Liverpool again before Christmas? Read all about it,’ the newspaper vendor outside the station bawled.

Katie stared at the headlines. She didn’t really know very much at all about Liverpool or about it being bombed. She’d been too busy soothing her parents’ fears about their ability to manage without her to worry about any bombs.

‘What’s up, love?’ the news vendor asked her.

‘Oh, nothing …’

‘If it’s directions you’re wanting then you’d better go and ask at the WVS post back there in the station,’ he told her. ‘They’ll probably give you a cup of tea an’ all …’

It was good advice. She knew that she had been billeted with a Mrs Jean Campion in somewhere called Wavertree, but she had no idea just where that was, other than that it was close to the place where she would be working, which was apparently off a road named Edge Lane.

The women in charge of the WVS post were every bit as helpful as the news vendor had promised, although there was no tea.

‘We’ve run out,’ the plump grey-haired woman standing beside the tea urn apologised to Katie. ‘I dare say your landlady at your billet will have something nice and hot waiting for you, though. It’s the bottom end of Wavertree you’re wanting, just over the border with Edge Hill. You can take the bus or even walk it, although walking will take you a good half an hour or so, and uphill as well,’ she told Katie informatively.

Katie thanked her.

* * *

It was dark and cold, and the Liverpool night air smelled alien. Katie had walked past the Royal Court Theatre just as the stage door was opening to admit a group of chorus girls smelling faintly of greasepaint, sweat and that once known never forgotten smell of dusty dressing rooms, excitement and nerves that she always associated with her mother, even though the only visits her parent now made to theatre dressing rooms were to see old friends from her own stage days.

That wasn’t homesickness she was feeling, was it, because if it was then it had better be on its way, Katie told herself stoutly as she wrapped her long scarf more tightly around her neck and marched determinedly past the theatre.

The WVS had given her the number of the bus she would need and the name of the stop to ask for to get off. There was quite a queue already waiting at the stop, young women mostly chattering away in an accent that Katie’s acute ear quickly had her mimicking inside her head.

She gathered from their conversation that they were shop girls on their way home from work. They sounded jolly, their conversation mixed with lots of laughter. Katie hoped that the people she would be working with were as pleasant.

She had been told that the exact nature of her work would be explained to her once she had presented herself at her place of work. She had been given the name of the person she was to report to tomorrow morning and had been warned that she was not to discuss the nature of her work with anyone.

The bus arrived, disgorging some passengers before taking others on. By the time Katie got on there was only one seat left, but when she saw the heavily pregnant and not very young woman getting on behind her Katie offered it to her and was rewarded with a tired smile, and a grateful, ‘Ta, love. Gawd, but me legs are aching. Never thought I’d see meself in this condition again at my time of life, but there you go. Got me like this before he went off to war, my Bert did, and now he’s living the life of Riley in some army camp and I’m here like this.’

Katie listened politely. The people of Liverpool weren’t so very different from their neighbours in London, by the sound of it, for all that they spoke with a very different accent.

‘Here’s your stop, love,’ the conductor eventually warned her as the bus started to slow down.

Picking up her case, Katie thanked her and stepped down onto the platform.

The blackout made it impossible for her to see anything of her surroundings as she followed the WVS lady’s instructions and crossed the road, shining her torch to find the opening to the street she wanted, before heading down it.

The house where she was billeted was down at the bottom of the road. Now she was feeling a bit nervous, Katie admitted as she knocked on the door. After all, she had never lived anywhere other than at home. What if the people she was billeted on didn’t like her, or if she didn’t like them? What if …?

Her increasingly apprehensive thoughts were put to flight as the door was opened by a slender, attractive-looking woman of her mother’s age, wearing a clean pinny over a brown skirt and a camel-coloured twinset, who greeted her with a warm smile, her hazel eyes twinkling.

‘You’ll be Miss Katherine Needham, who’s billeted with us,’ she said. ‘Come on in, you look fair frozen. I’ve kept back a bit of tea for you and if you don’t mind the kitchen it’s the warmest place in the house. Yes, just put your case down there for the minute. I’ll get my Sam to take it up for you later. Oh, if you were wanting to freshen up perhaps …’

‘No. That is …’ It was so unlike her to feel shy and tongue-tied that Katie barely recognised herself. ‘I mean … please call me Katie,’ she managed to get out as her hostess led her down an immaculately clean and shiny hallway smelling of lavender polish, and into a wonderfully warm kitchen that smelled deliciously of soup, making Katie’s stomach rumble, much to her embarrassment.

The kitchen was empty, although it was plain that Mrs Campion had a family, from the number of chairs around the big table, and the size of the soup pan on the stove.

As though she had guessed what she was thinking Mrs Campion informed her, ‘Sam, my husband’s, gone off to an ARP meeting, so that will give us time to get to know one another a bit before he gets back. The girls, my twin daughters, are upstairs in their room. I’ll call them down to meet you once you’ve had a chance to have a cup of tea and a bowl of soup. Take you long to get here, did it?’

‘About eight hours.’

‘Well, you get your coat off, love, and make yourself comfortable.’

Jean didn’t know quite what she had expected, but it certainly hadn’t been someone as young as this, a girl no more than eighteen, and so small and dainty she looked as though a puff of wind would blow her over. Nice manners, though, Jean thought approvingly, and lovely and clean, with that shiny hair and those well-scrubbed nails. Her shoes were well polished too, and her coat a good sensible cloth, obviously bought to last, instead of being some skimpy fashionable thing like the twins always wanted to have.

Jean had taken trouble with her own appearance. She was wearing her second-best Gor-Ray skirt and the smart twinset that Grace had persuaded her to buy three years ago in Lewis’s winter sale, having had it put to one side for her mother as ‘staff’ were allowed to do.

Jean had always stressed to her own children the importance of being neatly turned out and taking a pride in themselves. Her young billetee looked just as she ought, Jean decided approvingly.

‘It really is kind of you to go to so much trouble, Mrs Campion. If you can just show me where I’m to put my outdoor things …?’

‘I’ll take them for you for now, love. Time enough to get used to our ways once you’ve got something warm inside you.’

Katie’s grateful smile illuminated her whole face. It was such a relief to discover that she was billeted with someone so obviously kind and decent. Up until now she hadn’t realised how much she had been worrying about where she might end up. There would be no dusty corners or damp beds in this house, Katie knew, and hopefully no raised voices and fierce quarrels either.

Trouble? Keeping her a bowl of soup? As she hung Katie’s coat up on the hall coat stand, all Jean’s maternal instincts were aroused. Something told her that this wisp of a girl needed a bit of good northern mothering.

‘You’re to call me Jean and my husband Sam,’ she informed Katie after she had returned to the kitchen, ladled a good helping of soup into a bowl and brought it over to the table for her. ‘I’ll let you have your soup and then I’ll tell you a bit about us, although I don’t expect you to remember all our names right from the start. Got brothers and sisters yourself, have you?’

‘No, I’m an only one.’

‘Well, your parents are going to miss you then. Me and Sam have four. Our Luke’s a corporal in the army and based here at Seacombe barracks on home duty at the minute. Although he was at Dunkirk.’

Katie looked at Jean. ‘You must be very proud of him,’ she said quietly and simply.

‘That we are,’ Jean agreed. ‘Me and his dad both, although my Sam didn’t take too well to it when Luke told us that he’d joined up. Sam had got a job lined up for Luke in the Salvage Corps, you see, working alongside him.’

Katie nodded understandingly.

It wasn’t like her to talk so intimately about her family to a stranger, Jean acknowledged, but there was something about her young billetee that made it easy to do so. She had a quiet but dependable air about her that said that she knew how to respect a person’s confidences. And, of course, Jean was hugely proud of her son.

‘Of course, there’s no one prouder of our Luke now than his dad,’ Jean continued. ‘And as luck would have it the two of them often get to work together, what with Sam and the Salvage Corps doing their bit to help clear up the mess after the bombings, and the soldiers stationed at Seacombe doing the same.

‘Then there’s our Grace,’ Jean continued. ‘That’s our eldest daughter, who’s training to be a nurse and lives in the nurses’ home. She’s just recently got engaged, and her fiancé, Seb, is a wireless operator with the RAF. Then there’s our two youngest, Lou and Sasha – twins, they are – they left school a while back but they’ve been waiting for jobs to come up at Lewis’s department store, where our Grace used to work. They’re starting there after Christmas. You’ll get to meet them all soon enough, of course, especially the twins.’ Jean gave a small sigh.

Jean loved her family, Katie could see that, but she had also heard in her voice her special love for her son, and her concern for her younger daughters.

‘Now, you’re to treat this house like your own home whilst you’re here with us, Katie, and seeing as I’ve got a daughter of my own not much older than you, I want you to know now that if you should get any problems you need to talk over with someone, I’m always here to listen. It isn’t easy for you young ones having to move away from your families to do war work, we all know that.’

To Katie’s embarrassment something had happened to her that she hadn’t suffered in years. There was a lump in her throat and tears were threatening her vision. Quickly she blinked them away.

‘You’re very kind,’ she told Jean huskily, and meant it.

TWO

It was now almost half-past nine in the morning and an hour since Katie had arrived – early – at the large Littlewoods Pools building, off Edge Lane, which had been taken over by the Government to house its wartime postal census operation. She’d presented herself to the clerk on duty and given the name of the person she had been instructed to ask for. From the corridor where she had been told to wait, Katie had watched a stream of people – women, in the main, and not wearing any sort of uniform but instead dressed in their ordinary daytime clothes – entering the building and going about their business. She had been able to see into the large room on the other side of the corridor, where women had been settling down at long tables to work. The large windows allowed in plenty of daylight and Katie had also seen that there was plenty of overhead lighting, essential, she had guessed, when handwriting had to be read very carefully.

After a wait of ten minutes or so she had been escorted down a corridor to the office of the manageress. By this time Katie had been feeling horribly nervous, and she hadn’t felt any better when the manageress had summoned a stern-looking older woman, Miss Edwards, to show Katie where she would be working and explain the nature of her work.

Miss Edwards had a rather schoolmarmish manner and a clipped way of speaking that had alarmed Katie at first, but Katie was a sensible girl and not given to being ‘nervy’, and after listening quietly to Miss Edwards for several minutes Katie had deduced that the older woman wasn’t anything like as frightening as she had first appeared, but was instead merely determined to make sure that Katie understood the serious nature of the work she was going to be doing.

‘The mail is opened and sorted according to content, and then passed on to those readers who specialise in specific contents. If necessary – that is to say, should a piece of mail contain something that arouses a reader’s suspicions – then she refers that piece of mail to her supervisor.

‘Everyone has her own identification labels, which carry her own personal number, and a label must be attached to every piece of mail a person checks, identifying her as its checker. At this point I must remind you that it is a strict rule that nothing that happens within these walls is discussed with anyone else.’

Katie nodded in acknowledgement of the severity of the embargo.

‘Since your field of expertise is, I believe, contemporary music, it is letters containing any references to such music that you will be required to read and either pass as unremarkable or hand on to your supervisor should you come across anything suspicious. You will, of course, be reading only those letters written in English. We have separate sections dealing with letters written in other languages.’

Katie got the impression that being an expert in a foreign language ranked much higher in the department’s pecking order than merely having knowledge of contemporary dance music.

‘Right now, follow me and I’ll take you to the table where you will be working,’ said Miss Edwards briskly, turning on her heel to march down through the rows of tables without waiting to see whether or not Katie was following her.

The Littlewoods building was large and the room in which she was going to be working very long, and Katie was slightly out of breath by the time she had caught up with Miss Edwards, who had come to a halt beside one of the tables.

Eighteen or so girls were already seated around it, their heads bent diligently over their work. Each operative had a basket full of letters and another one into which they obviously put the letters once they had read them, plus a smaller tray with a red warning sign on it. Miss Edwards explained that it was into this smaller tray that Katie should put any letters that struck her as suspicious.

Katie was introduced to Miss Lowndes, a pretty, placid-looking, fair-haired young woman wearing an engagement ring, who Katie guessed was in her early twenties, and who was in charge of the table.

‘Come and sit down here next to me so that you can watch how we work,’ she told Katie, pulling a small face and adding, once Miss Edwards had left, ‘We all call one another by our first names on this table. I’m Anne.’

‘I’m Katie,’ Katie told her, obediently pulling out the chair next to her and settling herself on it.

There were too many girls seated round the table for her to be able to memorise all their names in one go, but she could remember that the tall thin girl with mousy brown hair who was sitting on the other side of her was Flo, and that the girl next to her with red curls and a snub nose was Nancy, and the girl on the other side of Anne – a stunning brunette with creamy skin and cornflower-blue eyes was Allie – short for Alison, whilst the girl opposite her with her serious expression and fair hair was Mabel.

They seemed a friendly bunch, most of whom had originally worked for the pools company, and who Katie learned had been selected to do this special war work because of their ability to spot very quickly when ‘something wasn’t right’.

‘It’s a trick you learn fast when you’re checking the pools,’ Anne explained to her. ‘Folk think that it’s easy, but you need to be pretty sharp and to have a good head for figures.’

Figures and logic, Katie suspected.

‘To start with, you’ll be working with Carole here. She’ll show you the ropes,’ Anne told her, indicating a giggly, curvy girl with red-gold curls, who quickly informed Katie that Liverpool was just about the best place to have been posted because of the excellence of its famous dance hall, the Grafton.

‘I can see that you’re not hitched up regular, like, with someone ’cos you’re not wearing any rings,’ Carole informed Katie, ‘but how about a steady? Have you got one?’

‘No,’ Katie told her firmly and truthfully.