Three Women of Liverpool by Helen Forrester

had done a lot of overtime recently.Both mother and daughter jumped apprehensively, however, when someone thumped on the front door.
    “Your dad? Hurt?” Gwen exclaimed.
    As they ran along the passage, getting in each other’s way in their sudden sense of urgency, they heard Conor Donnelly outside, shouting, “Mrs Thomas! Mrs Thomas!” Gwen reckoned that if the warden brought the news, it must be bad. She flung the door open, letting out a little light from the candle on the hall table.
    “Get in, get in,” Conor ordered testily. “Enough light to guide them from Berlin.”
    He hastened over the doorstep and shut the door behind him.
    “What’s to do?” Gwen asked anxiously, while Mari’s blank little face went whiter than usual.
    “Och, it’s all right,” he answered, seeing their frightened faces. “Yer husband rang the post, from Bootle, to say he mayn’t be back till tomorrer night.”
    “What? Bootle? What’s he doin’ there?”
    “It’s terrible out there, missus. They need every man they can get.”
    “How’ll he get his dinner?”
    “Same as the firemen and everyone else workin’ out there. From the WVS canteen, I ’spect.”
    “He’s too old to be gallivanting round out there. He needs his sleep.” Gwen’s voice was angry.
    Conor’s deep blue eyes registered such scorn that Gwen quailed slightly. “So do we all. We’re none of us youngsters, Mrs Thomas.”
    She was disconcerted at the snub, and her irritation at this man and his slovenly family increased. She said tightly, “Well, thank you for bringing the message. I don’t know why he didn’t phone earlier.”
    “Phones out of order, like everything else,” he replied, fully aware of her distaste of him.
    Gwen went slowly back to the living room and sat down on a footstool close to the fire. It was wasteful to have a fire in May, but she justified it by cooking on it, and now, suddenly, she was grateful for its comforting warmth. For the first time in her life, the idea that she might be widowed occurred to her; Conor’s description of the dire straits of Bootle had struck home; accidents happened in such awful situations.
    While Mari made tea and toast for their supper, the virtues of her patient lumbering husband surfaced in her mind. She remembered, with a pang, the sturdy Welsh youth who had proposed to her, as they walked soberly in Princes Park after chapel. They had had to wait seven years before they could afford to be married, and, sipping tea beside the fire, she wished they had not wasted their youth. Why, she wondered bitterly, had she been so coldly virtuous? And now it could all end in a holocaust in Bootle.
    She and Mari had lain in bed a scant hour, when the air raid warning dragged them out again. “We’ll get dressed in the living room,” Gwen said resignedly. “It’ll be safer down there.”
    “Poor Aunt Emmie,” Mari exclaimed. “Stuck down town again.”
v
    Ellen Donnelly blasted furiously all them Jerries and their ilk, as she, too, that Saturday night shepherded her family down the cellar steps.
    During the day, she had hauled a mattress down into the dank basement and on this she persuaded Ruby, Nora and Brendy to lie down to sleep. It was not quite so safe as sitting on the stairs, but as she remarked, “Beggars can’t be choosers.”
    Patrick sat moodily on the top step, watching his mother nurse Michael to sleep again. The candlelight caught the whitehairs amongst her brown mop and deepened the lines on her shiny red face. He felt a sudden twinge of pain that his mother was growing older. Though she was always demanding to know where he had been and what he had been doing, he loved her with a passion that frightened him sometimes. He was inordinately jealous of his father, and, when his father struck her, he boiled with inward anger that he was too small and cowardly to defend her. When I’m bigger, I will, he always told himself. He resented the succession of babies that occupied her lap,