Liverpool Daisy by Helen Forrester Page B

not getting on with the job in hand. She almost felt the playful pat on her behind that her mother would give her, to send her back into the street fight she had lost, or to comfort her when there was no bread to assuage her hunger.
    Obedient to that sharp, cheerful voice, she sniffed back her tears and surveyed the room to see what she should do first.
    Bill Donohue clumped up the stairs with his bucket of whitewash and a brush. He viewed the floor and then the rest of the room with distaste.
    “Need some new lino,” he remarked.
    “I know that,” retorted Daisy. “You tell me how to get it out of an eighteen shilling allotment.”
    Mr. Donohue put down the bucket and rubbed his hands slowly down the sides of his paint-stained trousers. He scuffed a bare piece of board showing through the offending floor covering.
    “You got a good oak floor, I reckon.” He looked disparagingly at Daisy.
    Daisy put her hands on her hips and leaned towards him. “And what good will that do me?”
    Bill sniffed so that the dewdrop at the end of his nose wobbled. “If you tore up lino and scrubbed t’ floor well — maybe scrape it where the lino’s stuck … buy a tin of dark varnish and go over it — it wouldn’t look bad at all. Dark varnish’ll hide a lot o’ marks.”
    Daisy looked again at the floor. Then she looked across at the window, over the misty river. As a child she had spent many a wet afternoon kneeling on a chair looking out of the window with Nellie, to see the ships go by. She knew the river in all its moods, she knew which company each ship belonged to because her father had taught her the funnel markings of each great company, Cunard, White Star, Ellerman’s, and a dozen others,not to speak of strange boats from far away places like China and Russia. She could remember when sailing ships still floated in the Pool of Liverpool. She suddenly envisaged this little window on the world elegantly draped with a pair of Nottingham lace curtains, the sunlight gleaming through on to a shining floor, like an advertisement she had once seen in the Liverpool Echo .
    She sighed rather hopelessly.
    “Varnish is a good idea, Bill,” she agreed. “I’ll think about it.” Then she ordered, “Do the inside of t’cupboard while you’re at it.”
    “Cupboard not included — you know that,” replied Bill stonily, as he spread out his step ladder. “Take candlestick off t’ mantel. It’ll get splashed.”
    Daisy snatched up the offending candle in its saucer and remembered also the chamber pot under the bed. She picked that up, too. “Come on, Bill,” she wheedled, looking at him with eyes slanted under long, black lashes. “You could manage the cupboard with bits of left-over paper — it doesn’t have to be perfect.”
    Bill’s moustache bristled. “It’s me time as well.”
    “How much now?” Daisy pouted.
    “Cost you another — well, another tanner.”
    Daisy made a face at his indifferent back. “All right.”
    Bill dipped his brush into the bucket of whitewash and said placatorily, without looking round, “Room’ll look proper nice.” He raised a scrawny arm and carefully ran a line of whitewash back and forth across the ceiling.
    Daisy hastily unhooked her mother’s shawl from the cupboard and, dodging a rain of whitewash drops, took it with the candle and the chamber downstairs.
    Moggie emerged from the oven, yawning and stretching first one long, skinny grey leg and then the other. Daisy let him out of the back door. She did not feed him; he hunted for himself and was adept at getting lids off dust bins to get at the contents.
    Daisy collected her breakfast dishes and the glasses from the funeral wake, and washed them up in the same basin in which she had washed herself the previous night. One basin was a necessity in a house; two would have been luxurious.
    She took a shovel and handleless bucket from under the sink and proceeded with the dusty job of clearing the ashes from the fireplace.