A Liverpool Lass (20 page)

The eight of them walked back to town together, then separated on the main road, the girls turning left, the men right. Stuart and Sid lingered though, for a moment’s quiet conversation with the girls.

‘That was jolly, wasn’t it?’ Stuart said quietly to
Nellie. ‘You’ve not played in the snow like that before, have you?’

‘No,’ Nellie admitted, shaking her head. ‘I never had the chance to play like a kid when I was one, but ... oh, it was the best thing I’ve ever done!’

‘We’ll do it again,’ Stuart promised. ‘Look, Nell, can I write to you? Because in a few weeks I’ll be at the Front, getting ready to report the spring offensive, and unless I’m wounded again I might not get back to the coast for months.’ He glanced further along the lane, to where his companions were tactfully waiting, eyes fixed ahead. ‘Sid’s a grand fellow, he’ll want to keep in touch with Lucy, I bet. What about it? Can I write?’

‘Of course; I’d like it very much,’ Nellie said shyly. ‘Give me your address and I’ll write to you, as well.’

‘Grand.’ Stuart fished in the pocket of his greatcoat and drew out a stub of pencil and a crumpled piece of paper. ‘Fire ahead, then ... Nurse Nellie McDowell ...?’

Nellie told him her address, then he wrote down his own name and the address she should use. He tore the paper carefully in half and gave her his details, then tucked the rest of the page into his pocket.

‘There we are, all sorted, and I’d take a bet that Sid and Lucy have just exchanged addresses too,’ he said, grin- ning at Nellie. ‘Will you have an afternoon off again next week? Care to risk having tea with me? Well, why should- n’t we make it a foursome, you and Lucy, me and Sid?’

‘We would have to since nurses aren’t allowed out alone, but only in pairs or small groups,’ Nellie pointed out. ‘Only we really aren’t supposed to speak to officers, Stuart.’

‘Hmm, I forgot. The American nurses are positively encouraged to go about with us; much healthier, I think. Still, in the circumstances it might be more politic
to meet somewhere quiet. Remember the copse we passed a while back?’

‘What’s a copse?’ Nellie asked. Stuart squeezed her hand lightly, then touched her chin with the point of his finger. She felt her cheeks redden but pretended not to notice, continuing to look questioningly up at him.

‘What a townie it is! A copse is a small wood, just a cluster of trees.’

‘I don’t mind being a townie,’ Nellie observed. ‘Lucy used to live in the real country, out at Crosby, before she came to work in the hospital. She knows all sorts that I don’t. But I know more about the city, you see.’

‘I shouldn’t tease you,’ Stuart said remorsefully. ‘You girls do such a wonderful job, and most of you only kids ... do you remember the copse, though?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘Well, Sid and I will hang about in those trees in a week’s time, from about two o’clock. If you can’t come that’s too bad, but if you can it would be ... well, it would be fun. I know a little farmhouse where they do real cream teas ... you look as if you could do with feeding up.’

‘We could all do with it,’ Nellie pointed out. ‘You’re too thin, Stuart.’

‘Nonsense, I’m a strapping fellow!’ Ahead of them, Lucy turned and beckoned imperatively. The sun had quite gone from the sky now and the grey of evening was giving way to darkness. ‘Oh, you’d best go, my ... Nell, I mean. Try to come, next week!’

Nellie nodded, squeezed his hand, turned away ... then turned back. She looked hard at the lean, quizzical face which was not handsome or fascinating but which seemed so familiar, so reliable. Then she stood on tiptoe and pressed her cheek to his for a fleeting second before running off down the road to join Lucy.

‘What was all that about? Nellie McDowell, you’re a dark horse,’ Lucy exclaimed. ‘I’ve known you a good while now, but I didn’t know you could laugh like that, or play in the snow like a child! If you ask me, this afternoon has done you more good than a couple of days in bed!’

‘It has,’ Nellie said fervently. ‘Just being with – with them – helped me to forget the war altogether for a few hours. And I’ve never played like that in my whole life – it’s wonderful to ... to romp, and not to have to wonder what’s for dinner, or whose wounds need dressing, or how I’ll manage if my pay’s held up again.’

‘I know what you mean. I liked Sid most awfully, too. As much as you liked Stuart, and you needn’t pretend that it wasn’t him who made your afternoon so wonderful because I know better. He’s a grand young man and Sid Fuller’s another. Do you know, Nell, this afternoon for the first time since John was killed, I looked at another man and found I wanted to know him better? So Sid and I are meeting next week. And I bet you’re meeting Stuart, too.’

‘Yes, I am,’ Nellie said quietly. All this time they had been walking up the long road which led to the hospital. ‘The only thing is, I never wanted to have to wait and worry over a man again, and if I go on seeing Stuart that’s just what will happen, until the war ends.’

‘I know. But that’s living, Nell. What we’ve been doing, you and I, is denying life, and you can’t do that and be happy. You have to risk pain and loss to gain happiness, that’s what I think.’

‘I expect you’re right. Anyway, we’ll meet them again next week. Meeting someone twice doesn’t commit you to anything.’

‘No, of course it doesn’t,’ Lucy said stoutly. But her smile was full of mischief as they turned into the hospital foyer. ‘We’re dedicated nurses who want no truck with young men!’

‘Our Nellie’s been sledgin’,’ Lilac observed as she and Art made their way through the dirty slush which was the city’s idea of a heavy snowfall. It had been white enough for an hour, then the traffic had started again and very soon the snow was being churned up and melted so that grey slush lined every roadway. ‘It sounds great fun, Art. Wish I could go sledging.’

‘Get a letter, didya? She all right?’

‘Yes, she’s havin’ a good time, though the work’s terrible hard. But she and Lucy went into the country and slid down the steep hills on a tray ... can you imagine our Nellie on a tray!’

‘She’s only lickle,’ Art pointed out. ‘Norra lot bigger’n you, young Lilac.’

‘She’s old, though,’ Lilac pointed out indisputably. ‘She doesn’t want to go getting rheumatiz, playing about in the snow.’

‘We could tek a tray and go up Aughton Street, there’s a good steep slope there, then we could sledge down,’ Art said. ‘Why go to school? Mam’ll say we ’ad a sickness if we ask ’er.’

‘Oh, I don’t know, Art. Our Nellie’s awful partickler about school. She says it’s me only chance to do better, to get an education. Only ... it ’ud just be for a day, right?’

‘That’s right, just a day.’ Art grinned coaxingly. ‘Come on, queen, let’s give it a go, eh? I’m goin’ anyway, but I’d like it better if you’d come too; I’d be real made up, Li.’

‘You would? Honest? Wouldn’t you have more fun with other lads?’

Art shook his head positively.

‘No way! With you and me, it ’ud be real fun.’

Lilac thought about school, which was boring because she was so far ahead of her class thanks to Mr Norton, and then she thought about Nellie’s description of zooming down the hills on her tray. It sounded such fun, Lilac thought wistfully, and fun was much harder to come by now that Nellie was in France. And Nellie had only been sledging with Lucy, which was all very well, but nowhere near such fun as sledging with Art would be. She still pined after Matt from time to time, but he was grown-up, fighting in the army, a thousand light years away from the lad she had once admired. Art, on the other hand, was right here. He was taller than she now, and very strong. His cowlick of brown hair still overhung his brow though, and sometimes he caught her fingers in his and held them very tight and a most peculiar feeling came swooning down into Lilac’s tummy and arrowed into the very heart of her.

‘I’ll come, then,’ Lilac said out loud. ‘We’ll skip school and go sledging, Art!’

The farmhouse tea was a great success. The two young men did not meet them as arranged exactly, since when the girls arrived at the copse they found a horse-drawn cab awaiting them and as they walked cautiously up to it Stuart jumped down.

‘Ah, you’ve managed to get away; hop in, then,’ he said briskly. ‘Sid and I decided to convey you to the farmhouse in luxury – what do you think?’

The cab, with thick straw on the floors and isinglass
in the windows, may not have been the height of luxury, but it was warm, comfortable, and faster than walking. A happy quartet arrived at their destination, paid off the cab and took their places at the table which the young men had reserved.

Conversation might have been a little stiff at first, but Nellie recounted how she and Lucy had been forced to scamper through their duties and to bribe another nurse to finish off for them with a packet of chocolate which Lucy’s mother had sent her, and this amused them and broke the ice. And the farmhouse parlour was too pleasant a place for shyness or formality. A great log fire burned in the grate, a black and white cat snoozed before it, there were soft rugs on the floor and Stuart insisted on showing their fat French hostess how to make a decent brew of tea in her tall tin coffee pot. He talked in broken French, which made them laugh, the Frenchwoman talked in even more broken English, which made them laugh more, and the tea was excellent. Home-made bread thickly spread with butter and honey, a homemade cake with chocolate topping and then cream poured over it, the famous tea made in the tin coffee pot and thin slices of pink ham with a jar of the nicest pickle Nellie had ever tasted.

‘I’m so full I might quite easily burst,’ Lucy said at last, when the table had been cleared of everything edible and the four of them were leaning back, replete. ‘I don’t know how I’ll manage to get back to the hospital – you chaps will have to bowl me along like a hoop!’

‘We’ll walk it off,’ Nellie said stoutly. ‘What a pity this farm’s in a valley though, and not high on a hill; if it was we could sledge down to the coast on the lady’s best trays!’

Great amusement, until Nellie was helped into her coat by Stuart and Lucy was helped into hers by Sid, and the four of them set off into the icy dusk, only to find that it was slow going with the thick snow underfoot and the dusk increasing every minute.

‘We’ll be in dreadful trouble if we’re late,’ Nellie said nervously. ‘We aren’t supposed to go far from the town and they’ll never believe we could get lost in the snow.’

‘We’ll sneak you in somehow,’ Stuart said when Lucy explained that there would be someone on watch for them in the foyer. ‘If you’re in your rooms surely there won’t be any questions?’

‘Our room is a tent with twenty-six other girls in it,’ Nellie pointed out. ‘Oh well, we must put our best feet forward and try not to be awfully late.’

They did, and perhaps they were lucky, perhaps the fates do smile, sometimes, on young lovers, even if they would have denied vociferously that that was what they were. Outside the hospital foyer Stuart snatched Nellie into his arms and hugged her convulsively, then kissed the corner of her mouth with such tenderness that Nellie found herself fighting back tears.

‘Goodnight, dear Nell. Take care of yourself, and write to me whenever you get a moment,’ he commanded. ‘I’ve written the address of my paper on this old envelope because if I pass my medical – and I shall – I’ll be off in a few days. They’re sending me to Blighty for a spell, to London in fact, but I’ll be back, I promise.’

‘You stay safe in London if you get the chance,’ Nellie whispered against his shoulder. ‘Thanks for – for everything, Stu.’

‘Thank you, Nell.’ Another quick, convulsive hug
and he was turning away. ‘Go on, run in.’

She ran, fighting an absurd desire to burst into tears, for it was absurd, she had only met him twice, they were virtually strangers!

The foyer was deserted. She and Lucy shot across it and into the changing room. They were smoothing down their uniforms and back on the ward before Sister arrived to tell them to take the dressing trolley round.

The cold winter which swept across the continent in 1917 did not stop when it reached the Channel, it came right on to England. In the small room she shared with Bessie and the kids, Lilac shivered awake, to break the ice on the water in the bucket downstairs before she could wash or put the kettle on. But she did not miss the Culler, not even when she was caned in school for making off during her dinner break, nor when they ran out of coal and she and Art went thieving down at the railway depot, where the great stock of coal for the trains was always a temptation. They were chased by a night watchman and nearly caught, Lilac went flying on the frosty pavement and skinned both knees and one went septic. Anxious not to have the expense of a doctor, Aunt Ada applied fomentations so hot that Lilac wept piteously, but even so, she regretted nothing and would not have changed Ada’s harsh medical treatment for the more professional approach which matron might well have taken.

She missed Nell horribly, of course, but they wrote often and she was buoyed up by the fact that now she, like most of her schoolfellows, had someone ‘over there’, fighting for their country.

She was very happy at her new school, too, though she had been puzzled, at first, over the family’s refusal to let her go to St Anthony’s, with Art. In the end Art told her the reason himself, his eyes sparkling with mischief.

‘We’s cat’olics, and youse is dirty proddies,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Can’t ’ave a proddie bein’ taught by the good nuns!’

‘I’m
not
a proddie; at the Culler we went to the coggers in the mornings and the prods in the evenings,’ Lilac said indignantly. ‘I can choose which I want, and I’ll be a catholic, like you, Art.’

‘No you can’t,’ Art said. ‘Well, Ada’s a proddie, anyroad, and you’ll ’ave to foller her.’

Afterwards, Lilac found she was quite glad to be a ‘proddie,’ as Art put it. She and Art always walked to school together, she only having to go one street further on to reach her own place of education, and it was soon borne in upon her that much as Art loved St Anthony’s, there were things about the Penrhyn Street school which he secretly envied. There was the lovely, modern building, the excellent play area and gymnasium and the young and enthusiastic teachers, some of them only about Nellie’s age. The games were better, the teachers were warmly interested in their young charges, and altogether Lilac thought she had the best of the bargain though Art stuck to his contention that there was no school to equal St Anthony’s.