Winter on the Mersey(44)
Danny felt a surge of anger rush through him. The very idea that Tommy could be rude about their neighbour, whom he’d known and liked since he was a baby and who had always been especially kind to him, was shocking. His blood boiled at the insult to her. But he held on to his temper. ‘Of course it is. Nearly everyone who’s left is over forty, and some of them can’t lift heavy loads any more. And you know very well that the hospitals have been bombed. It’s not a cushy number.’
‘Mmmmm,’ Tommy mumbled, glancing away. He didn’t want to work in a hospital. For a start lots of people would know Sarah or Rita, so his family would find out about every mistake he made. Also, though he would never have admitted it out loud, he was a bit squeamish. He’d helped out Seth and Joan on the farm, but he had often had to look away at the more sickening moments, like when Bessie the goat had complications giving birth to her kids, or a fox got into the hen house. He didn’t think he’d last long in a hospital. There would be blood, and worse, and bad smells. He would never live it down if he fainted and someone told Sarah.
‘Maybe,’ he prevaricated.
Danny was warming to his theme now. ‘We could ask Pop if he knows of anything through the ARP,’ he went on. ‘Not you being a warden or anything, but a messenger or something like that. You’re good at remembering detail and you know your way around here like the back of your hand. What about that sort of job?’
Tommy brightened. He loved meeting lots of different people and he could always find something to say – Kitty’s main complaint, echoed by Seth and Joan, was that he could talk the hind legs off a donkey. But if he was with the ARP, then Pop would want to keep an eye on him. He was even stricter than Danny. That wouldn’t be much fun.
‘Don’t know,’ he said, swinging his leg and then stopping when he saw Danny glare. ‘Suppose it would be better than nothing. While I’m waiting around, like.’
Danny recognised that this was progress indeed. ‘All right, so maybe you think the ARP are a load of boring old codgers,’ he said, knowing the way his brother’s mind worked. ‘But a messenger of some sort, then?’
Tommy shrugged, but his resistance was wavering.
‘I know,’ said Danny. ‘What about delivering telegrams? You’d have to be quick for that, and completely trustworthy. You’re giving people the worst news they could ever have; you can’t be careless about it. You’d have to show you were level-headed and responsible. It wouldn’t be a doddle getting in.’
Tommy now looked interested, although he was clearly trying not to show it.
‘You’d need a bike,’ Danny mused.
Tommy now sat up straight. ‘Ah, come on, our Danny. You can get your hands on anything. You could get me a bike, no bother.’
Danny pulled a face. ‘It might not be as easy as that. Things are different around here to when you went away. I don’t have the contacts any more and, even if I did, I’d hesitate to use them.’
‘Danny, you could do it,’ said Tommy, eager now. ‘Go on, say you’ll try. Think what I could do if I had a bike. I could fetch things for you and Kitty while you’re at work, for a start. You’ll wonder what you ever did without me in no time.’
Danny had to stop himself from laughing at Tommy’s abrupt about-turn. ‘I suppose the General Post Office might provide the bikes. I never thought, we’d have to check.’
‘Oh, that’ll be easy,’ said Tommy airily. ‘Someone’s bound to know. Pop might, he knows everything.’
‘All right, we’ll ask him,’ said Danny.
‘But can I have a bike for home anyway?’ asked Tommy, taken with the idea now. ‘Then you wouldn’t have to worry about me getting home an’ all. Kitty wouldn’t have to sit up. We both know what she’s like,’ he said conspiratorially, suddenly all man of the world. ‘Can’t have that now, can we?’
Danny threw up his hands. ‘All right then, Tommy, we’ll see what Pop has to say and find someone to recommend you to the GPO,’ he said. ‘You win.’ But actually, he thought to himself, it was me who won that conversation. Tommy hasn’t gone running off to join the Merchant Navy and I won’t have to tell Jack the news. And, who knows, Tommy might just end up in his ideal job, for now at any rate.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Laura set down her beautiful fountain pen and reread what she’d just written. She thought it just about made sense but her mind was whirring. Perhaps she’d got it all wrong and was making a fuss about nothing. Indeed, if she didn’t have the physical evidence of the scrappy piece of paper now carefully flattened under her empty tea mug, she would have thought the whole thing was a figment of her imagination.
She couldn’t even write what she really wanted to say as the censor would block it out. Never mind, all she really needed to do was make sure it sounded sufficiently urgent for Kitty to take notice and to agree to meet her.
She stared out of the window of her new attic billet in Kentish Town, across the rooftops of northwest London towards the centre of town. How she and Kitty and Marjorie would have loved to have lived here during their training – they could have walked into Piccadilly at a push and gone to all those bars and clubs that Elliott had known. Now such venues held little interest for her. It would just be one more place to dodge the buzz bombs, the new German weapon that had been causing havoc over the summer, no doubt launched in retaliation for D-day.