The Mersey Mothers by Sheila Riley Book Read Online And Epub File Download
Overview: Liverpool 1953
January sees the dawn of the Queen Elizabeth’s Coronation year as the mothers of Reckoners Row unite in preparation for the celebration of the new Queen.
Meanwhile Evie Kilgaren is dreaming of her summer wedding to Danny Harris, but trouble looms for Skinner & Sons with a new rival trying to put them out of business, but no-one knows why....
Ada Harris is summoned to the bedside of her estranged husband, who, in his dying moment confesses to a deadly secret - he knows who really murdered Evie’s mam Rene all those years ago and the consequences are far reaching.
Has an innocent man been jailed and is there still a murderer walking carefree?
Will Evie get the happy-ever-after she so longs for with Danny? And will The Mersey Mothers unite and still be friends?
The Mersey Mothers by Sheila Riley Book Read Online Chapter One
WINTER, JANUARY 1953
Twenty-five-year-old Evie Kilgaren put away the last of the Saturday reports, closed the filing cabinet drawer and sighed. Looking out of the office window across the cobbled yard, she felt as gloomy as the darkening sky, knowing the accounts she had just finished were nowhere near good enough to keep Skinner & Son going for much longer. Focusing on the shapeless black clouds scudding across an ashen sky, she tried to keep such thoughts at bay. But Evie knew that ignoring them would not make her and Danny’s troubles go away. Something had to be done. But what?
Turning from the window, Evie put the cover over her typewriter, tidied her desk and made sure all was neat for Monday. Hoping that next week would be better, the scant work she had done this morning didn’t merit coming into the office on a Saturday. But her brother, Jack was in Korea doing his National Service, he had been there for the last two years; Lucy, her sister, was working in Madam B’s, training to be a hairdresser, and Danny, her fiancé had gone on a long-distance delivery, so there wasn’t much point in staying at home on her own.
Locking the office door and securing the huge double gates of the yard, she shivered when the bone-chilling gale whipped up from the choppy River Mersey and snatched at the woollen scarf covering her head. She had to bend forward to catch her breath as the eddying wind clawed at her clothes and whipped swirling papers and empty cigarette packets across the debris and along Reckoner’s Row towards the house she had lived in all of her life – except for that time when her mother’s lodger threw her out onto the street, and she had to be rescued by Sergeant Danny Harris. The man she was now engaged to marry.
When he left the army, Danny had bought the haulage firm, from his stepfather Henry Skinner, for the grand price of one pound. And since then, Evie and Danny had been working hard to make the haulage business pay, but it was far from easy.
Evie worried about Danny going on the delivery to a firm on the far side of Manchester. He didn’t usually go so far from Liverpool, but he was in no position to turn down work of any kind, no matter what day or distance. Since Lenard Haulage opened along Regent Road known the world over as the dock road, a few months ago, business in Skinner’s haulage yard had suffered an almost fatal blow. It didn’t help matters that Danny had been sent on a number of hoax calls either. The order to go and pick up deliveries from warehouses along the dock road were met with blank-faced foremen scratching their heads, not knowing by whom, or even why, he had been hired, although the dockets looked real enough.
Evie wished she could do something to help build up the business. Danny was doing everything he could to keep his head above water, but with work slowing to a crawl, there was barely enough to go round, and there was a danger that he may have to lay men off who had worked in the yard longer than he had.
‘I could put an advert in the paper,’ she’d told Danny last night. ’Using my post office box number should bring in new accounts for me to pay bills.’ But she hadn’t been prepared for the pained look in his eyes, and she knew, when she saw the muscle in his jaw twitch, that he was doing his best to keep a cool head.
‘I know you want to do all you can, love, but this is my worry, not yours.’ It was the way he had said love, which tore at her heart. The word sounded so distant, like something you would say to a stranger. Thanks, love, do call again. And Evie feared he might be having second thoughts about their summer wedding. Maybe even having second thoughts about marrying her – full stop. He had always said he wanted to build an empire before he settled down and Evie had told him she would help him. But how could you build an empire on nothing but hopes and dreams – and keep a family going? It was impossible, and wasn’t helped by the fact that Lenard Haulage had a dozen wagons and drivers, many more than Skinner’s did. So why did Lenard want this yard too? They had recently made an offer which Danny had refused. Evie had her suspicions, of course. Skinner & Son was situated in Summer Settle, prime dockland, close to the warehouses and waterfront. It would be the cherry on Lenard’s cake.
How could they possibly compete with Lenard’s set-up with his motorised wagons? Skinner and Son mostly had horses, which were far slower. They had only one motorised wagon and needed more in order to compete. But to be able to buy wagons, they had to have money. An insurmountable situation, which Evie could see no way out of, and had foregone a proper wage to help sustain the business. She had even taken on confidential accounts to supplement her income, like she had done in the far-off days when she was studying to become a certified accountant. Taking on work for a number of businessmen through a post office box address to keep business private on both sides. Men who didn’t want their income made available for one reason or another.
So, desperate means called for desperate measures, and with Lenard Haulage taking over a large slice of the road transport cake, she was in no position to be fussy. Especially when, each day, she saw Danny’s happy-go-lucky spark diminish a little bit more.
This yard was his life. His stepfather, Henry Skinner, had kept it going through the depression in the nineteen-thirties, then during the war; he’d risked being blown off the dock road in his effort to deliver produce to wherever it was needed.
Danny, a proud man, a good man, who would help anybody in difficulty, could not keep secrets from her. And she wasn’t about to let his business go under if she could possibly do something to help it flourish. She had a duty as his fiancée and his bookkeeper to ease his burden. Even suggesting they wait a little longer to marry. Although the thought of it broke her heart, she was ever so thankful when Danny refused to entertain the idea.
He'd told her he would marry her tomorrow if he could. But he knew that preparations were being made for the coming Coronation of the new Queen at the beginning of June, so they decided to marry at the end of June. Her day was going to be the one she deserved, he said, even if he had to work all the hours God sent to earn the money to pay for it. Which was all well and good, she thought, but what if there was no work to be had?
Evie, pragmatic through necessity, was not one for making extravagant gestures and would be happy with a quiet wedding. Just a few close friends, like Connie and Angus who ran the Tram Tavern and their two little ones, and of course Mim, Connie’s mother. Then there was the family, Meggie and Henry, Danny’s birth mother and stepfather, and Evie’s brother Jack and sister Lucy… And what about Ada Harris? And Grace? And Bobby? The family Danny had thought of as his own before Bert Harris blew the whole thing spectacularly out in the open three years ago.
But Danny would not hear of a quiet wedding day. He was determined to make sure she got her big splash. The only question in Evie’s mind was how he was going to afford it and keep his men in work? The answer was beyond her.
Nothing much had changed round here, the same people lived in the same houses, rarely moving out of the area they knew so well. Some of the young men had gone off to do their National Service, like her twenty-year-old brother Jack, who had been in Korea for the last two years. National Service had been lengthened from eighteen months, because of the Korean war, when troops from North Korea invaded South Korea and the United Nations Security Council had sent armed forces from America and Great Britain to aid South Korea.
The wind howled like a banshee as Evie hurried, head down, along Reckoner’s Row, eager to get her front door open. Once inside, she put her backside to the door to close it in the damp, swollen wood, keen to get a good fire going for when Lucy came home from work.
In the back kitchen, Evie emptied her wicker shopping basket of a paper parcel containing scrag-ends of mutton and some cheap chuck beef, which, although it would need a long time cooking in the oven would make a very tasty casserole mixed with the pot-herbs and potatoes she’d managed to buy that morning, and she was looking forward to getting a hearty meal on the go, making a thick crust to go on top.
On a day like this her sister would enjoy a hot meal to come home to and Danny, if he managed to get back from the delivery job out in Netherford, would too when he made his usual after work visit. Evie shivered; those rough, narrow country lanes did not bear thinking about in this weather and she hoped Danny’s clapped-out truck that had seen better days years ago was up to coping with this deluge.
* * *
‘That’s a dark, sinister sky if ever I saw one,’ Lucy said to her best friend, fellow apprentice Rachel McAndrew, who was hanging damp towels over anything that would allow them to dry while turning on the hairdryers in the dressing-out cubicles to dry them for the afternoon clients.
‘Dark and sinister…’ Rachel scoffed light-heartedly. ‘Have you swallowed a gothic novel?’ Rachel laughed and Lucy pulled back the pink-frilled net curtain draped decadently across the wide window of Madam Barberry’s Coiffure. A posh-sounding name for the ladies hairdressing salon on busy Stanley Road leading into town, as everybody called the centre of Liverpool.
‘We’re usually mad busy at this time on a Saturday,’ said Lucy, who would rather be tending to a client’s hair than mopping floors, which is what the senior stylist, Madam Barberry, would instruct her to do if business was slack. ‘This horrible weather is obviously putting people off having their hair done today.’
‘Would you pay to have your hair done on a day like this, because I know I wouldn’t,’ Rachel said, and Lucy gave her friend a playful shove.
She and Rachel had both started working at the same time for Madam Barberry, or Mrs Bouffant as Rachel called their employer who would not be out of place on the parade ground of the local army barracks. They quickly became friends, even though they were as different as black and white in personality. Lucy and Rachel were the same slender size and shape but there the similarity ended. Lucy daydreamed about owning her own salon one day, while harum-scarum Rachel wanted nothing more than to find a nice boy to marry and get out of her mother’s overflowing house of six children and befuddled grandma, who didn’t know what day it was half the time.
Rachel and her family were a bit scatty and sometimes raucous, but Lucy loved the hustle and bustle of their house, next door, knowing her own was a bit quiet and sedate with just her and Evie rattling around, especially now that their Jack had been posted to Korea. The McAndrews had only moved in last year and Lucy thought they were a breath of fresh air in the small row of houses opposite the canal.
‘D’you think a lemon rinse would brighten this up?’ Rachel asked, flicking her high, ponytail.
‘I think it would,’ Lucy answered, ‘but I can see two problems there, three if you count your dad.’ Lucy ignored Rachel’s raised eyebrow, knowing her friend would not have a bad word said about her boisterous family. ‘First, it’s nowhere near summer, so we’ve got no sun to help the lemon juice along. And second, you can’t buy a lemon for love nor money!’
‘That’s true.’ Rachel’s shoulders slumped, and she twisted her fringe into a small curly sausage.
‘Why don’t you just comb some peroxide through it?’ Lucy asked.
‘I combed peroxide through my fringe when I first started here, and when Dad asked what happened, I told him the sun had lightened it.’ Rachel pulled a face in the mirror, safe in the knowledge her employer was in the staff room having her lunch while she and Lucy continued to hang up the towels. ‘The next morning Dad gave me half a crown and told me to ask Mrs Bouffant to take the sun out of my hair.’ Both girls laughed at the thought.
‘Half a crown?’ said Lucy. ‘I’d have done it for free.’
‘I spent the half crown and rubbed black boot polish on the front.’ Rachel could hardly get the words out for laughing. ‘I looked like Al Jolson by the end of the day!’
By the time they had stopped laughing, all thoughts of the driving rain and howling wind had disappeared.
‘It’s not that me da’s old-fashioned,’ Rachel said as the laughter ebbed away, ‘it’s just that he doesn’t like me messing with me hair.’
‘Highly unlikely when you are in this profession,’ Lucy teased, noticing her pal’s ash blonde hair had grown dull over the winter.
‘I wish I was born with your titian-coloured hair,’ Rachel said. ‘Redheads are impulsive, irrational, quick-tempered, passionate and revolutionary.’
‘That sounds more like you than me,’ replied Lucy, pulling a face in the mirror at her mane of glossy auburn curls. ‘Maybe you should have been a redhead.’
‘Yes,’ Rachel sighed, talking through the mirror, ‘I could just see myself with a golden mane of tumbling tresses.’
‘Now who’s swallowed a book?’ Lucy laughed. ‘Our Evie doesn’t mind what I do to my hair, although she’s not as particular as me about her looks.’
‘Oo, go on, now, don’t let her hear you say that.’ They both laughed again, but not for long when they heard the click of Madam’s heels on the linoleum covered floor next door.
‘You sound like my parents,’ Rachel moaned, ‘you don’t know how lucky you are not having a mam and dad laying down the law,’ Her tactless words sounded harsher coming from her lips than they did in her head and Rachel’s face suddenly suffused with a deep red tinge. ‘Oh, Lucy, I am so sorry, I didn’t mean that the way it came out!’
‘I know you didn’t,’ said Lucy, who knew her friend’s thoughts usually came into her head and went straight out of her mouth like a helter-skelter ride. ‘Our Evie’s like a mam since our own mam…’ Lucy didn’t want to think about how her mother had been found dead in the local canal, six years ago, and her da – her good shepherd – had been wrongly locked away in a hospital, accused of her demise.
The laughter died, as always when she thought of her father. For, as much as she was sure she would have loved her mam had she known her better, the truth of the matter was, Lucy hardly knew her at all, having been evacuated to Ireland as a baby with her brother, Jack, at the beginning of the war in 1939. She didn’t see anything of her mam, Rene, for years. Not until two years after the war ended. Rene had evicted the lodger, Leo Darnel, at Christmas, so she could bring her and Jack back to Liverpool, and, then a few weeks later, her mother went out one night, and she never came home.
But she had seen the man she now knew was her da every day back in Ireland. He tended sheep on the neighbouring farm, hence, that was why she called him her good shepherd, who told her stories of a handsome prince who married a beautiful princess and lived happily ever after, until the ogre declared war and separated the prince from the princess and their little ones. Then, the little prince and princess were sent to the land of milk and honey to be cared for by kindly relatives. And the mighty prince knew he must survive to save them all and be reunited with his beautiful princess.
Lucy would listen to his stories every day and imagine what it must be like to live in a castle by the river.
The thought brought a lump to her throat, and Lucy hurried to the stock cupboard to find methylated spirits to clean dried hair lacquer off the mirrors. It was early afternoon and the sky darkened, growing murkier by the minute. With a flash of lightning, the heavens opened, and Lucy had never seen rain so heavy or intense; you could hardly see the road outside for the rainstorm.
Even for the end of January, the storm was a force to be reckoned with, and the howling gale was making it almost impossible to walk for the few brave souls who had ventured out and got caught up in it all. Watching from the window, Lucy saw stooped pedestrians battling against the elements and she shivered. The busy road, which was normally packed with people, looked desolate for a Saturday afternoon. Obviously busy housewives, who were usually out buying their rations, had more sense than to brave this weather and were staying near their coal fire today.
‘Come away from that window and collect the towels ready for the bagwash,’ said Madam Barberry as she came into the salon from the staff room next door. ‘I doubt we will be busy this afternoon.’
Rachel rolled her eyes. ‘Why didn’t she say that before we put them all out to dry,’ she hissed through perfect, straight white teeth, ‘and where’s that flaming Saturday girl, this is her job not ours.’
‘She went home for her dinner and didn’t come back,’ answered Lucy.
‘I can’t say I blame her, neither would I given the chance.’ Rachel went into the back room for the laundry basket, and Lucy wondered if they would have to stay here all afternoon on the off chance they might get a client.
‘Are you going to enter the Apprentice Finals this year?’ asked Lucy when Rachel came back into the salon. ‘You’ve got the flair.’
‘I don’t know.’ Rachel looked despondent. ‘You are much better at that kind of thing than me. I’d rather be the model than the stylist.’
‘Right then,’ said Lucy with determination, as if her mind had finally been made up. ‘In that case, I’ll ask Mrs Bouffant if she will put my name forward and you can be my model.’
‘That’s the ticket!’ Suddenly Rachel cheered up and was much chirpier, but only for a moment. ‘I suppose we’ll have to lug all the towels to the baggy,’ she said, dragging the towels off the egg-shaped hairdryer hoods and pushing them into the laundry basket.
‘It’s not so bad,’ Lucy said. ‘I would rather put towels into a washing machine than brush and mop the floor.’ All she had ever wanted to do was to become a ladies’ hairdresser and, one day, run her own salon. But her salon would not be run like an army barracks, like Mrs Bouffant’ s. ‘When I get my own salon, I’ll get the laundry collected and the towels will be brought back all clean and neatly folded.’ She could see it now. Her salon would be all shiny, with glossy worktops, and open plan like one of those posh ones in town. ‘I’ll employ a cleaner as well to brush and mop the floors and fill up the shampoo and conditioner containers.’
‘I suppose you’ll have a waitress to bring Earl Grey tea in delicate porcelain cups, too?’
‘Certainly not, I’ll have champagne fountains, like Mr Teasy-Weasy.’ Lucy closed her eyes and dreamed out loud. ‘Raymond – that’s Mr Teasy-Weasy to you – has gilt mirrors and crystal chandeliers.’ Mr Teasy-Weasy, a famous hairdresser with a salon in Mayfair styled the hair of the biggest celebrities.
‘I read that article too, in one of those dog-eared magazines.’ Rachel, not to be outdone, added, ‘His French accent isn’t real, you know.’
‘Really?’ Lucy giggled. ‘Why does he speak like that then?’
‘To bring in more clients – sorry, female clientele – but don’t let Madam know. She thinks he’s the best thing since perm lotion. I’d have to learn the language first, but I would love to learn all about his colouring techniques,’ said Rachel, who’d left school with sufficient qualifications to secure her indentures with Madam.
Lucy couldn’t help but laugh at her best friend’s pragmatic outlook. But what Rachel lacked in ambition she made up for in creative flair, she could match colours with the best of them given the chance.
‘One thing I am determined to do is own a salon as good as any of the posh ones in town,’ said Lucy. Hairdressing was her vocation, and she gained experience from practising her craft every chance she got. Gleaning ideas from magazines and movie stars. Madam had even given her two regular clients to perfect her creative skills. But Madam was most put out, when one of her own clients, asked for Lucy the following week.
Rachel was still at the stage where she was putting in rollers and handing endpapers and perm curlers to Madam, which would bore Lucy to tears, and she found Madam’s style a little staid. She could probably set all her clients’ hair in her sleep, whereas Lucy was itching to get her hands on some of the ladies, whose bouffant and French pleats were set in liquid cement, and did not move, from the moment the hair was dressed until the following week when it was brushed out to be shampooed, with dry hair lacquer falling to the floor like snow.
‘Do you think, Saint Patrick’s church dance will still be on tonight?’ Rachel asked, snapping Lucy out of her reverie. They both lived for the weekend dance at the local church hall, where they would almost dance the legs off themselves, to the local band playing the latest songs. Lucy and Rachel had been practising swing dancing in Lucy’s front parlour, perfecting the lindy hop, which they were eager to try out tonight.
‘I doubt it unless this weather calms down a bit,’ said Lucy, who knew an umbrella would not stay up in this wind, ‘otherwise we’ll get to the dance looking as if we’ve struggled through a hedge backwards and I dread to think about the hair situation.’
‘D’you think she’ll let us go early?’ Rachel asked, looking over to her boss, who was flicking through a lady’s magazine, which had been on the table since the year dot.
Lucy shrugged. ‘She’ll probably have us up a ladder cleaning the light bulbs,’ said Lucy. Then, suddenly, the lights went out, plunging the salon into a dark gloom, and the two girls looked at each other. Then they looked to the ceiling.
‘Did you forget to pay the bill, Madam?’ Rachel asked, with a mischievous grin, as Lucy collected the rest of the damp towels, wondering how her best friend got away with her cheeky banter.
‘Of course, I paid the bill! You impudent girl,’ Madam answered.
The laundry basket was now full and ready to haul down the road, past the butcher’s shop, where the young butcher would stand at the window and wolf-whistle every time she walked past. And even though she loved the compliment, she would toss her head and appear to ignore him. Looking out of the window now, she couldn’t see much as the heavy deluge was lashing hard.
‘I don’t fancy taking this lot to the baggy,’ said Lucy, ‘we’re going to get soaked.’
‘I bet she hasn’t paid the bill,’ Rachel whispered insistently, and Lucy nudged her with her elbow.
‘Shush, she heard you!’ Lucy said, trying not to laugh. But their mirth was short-lived.
‘Don’t stand around like pithy on a rock bun,’ said Madam, ‘go and see if you can find the reason why the electricity is out, see if anybody else has been cut off.’
Lucy grabbed her coat and put it over her head and Rachel did the same, but only moments after their feet touched the pavement, they were soaked right through. Even the awnings outside the adjoining shops were sagging with the weight of water, all shopkeepers along the usually busy road were outside their businesses.
‘I’ve just been talking to the local bobby here ,’ said the butcher importantly looking towards the policeman standing nearby. ‘He told me all the lights are out this side of the canal. We’re on a circuit, see?’ he said, as if this was something everybody should know. ‘The electric cables have snapped due to this bloody wind and rain, and all the lights have been cut off for the foreseeable.’
‘He doesn’t look very pleased,’ said Lucy, and Rachel nodded.
‘Who’s gonna pay for my stock? That’s what I wanna know.’ The butcher pushed his rain-soaked flat cap to the back of his balding head. ‘If the lecky’ s off and my fridge defrosts, all my meat will go off with it.’
‘You could always sell it off cheap, save losing it,’ said Lucy in that cheeky but seemingly innocent way she had about her and noticed the glint in the young trainee butcher’s eye.
‘You mind your own,’ said the older butcher, who was one of the most expensive on the block. ‘I’m not gonna throw away my profits for the sake of a bit of rain.’
‘Even the telephones have been knocked out,’ said the beat bobby in his domed helmet and warm cape, ‘it’s worse than the war.’
‘Hardly,’ said Lucy, dripping from head to foot.
A short while later, they returned to the salon with the news the power would be off until further notice.
‘Well then, there’s no use standing around here like one of Lewis’s,’ said Madam Barberry, surprising and thrilling both girls with the news they were going home early, ‘so just take all those towels out of the laundry basket and drape them around the salon – on the chairs, the dryers, anywhere you can, we must have dry towels for Monday – if, by then, the electricity is back on.’ Lucy and Rachel wasted no time flinging towels over every surface and brushing the floor of hair.
‘Such a shame we didn’t get the chance to practise our finger waves and pin curls,’ Rachel told Madam, who raised a cynical eyebrow.
‘Get going before I change my mind,’ said their employer, and both girls did not need telling twice. They were in their wet coats in the blink of an eye.
‘Shall we go and see if Woolies is still open,’ Lucy asked, excited they had finished early, running head down to the large Woolworths shop along the rain-lashed road.
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