Daughters of Liverpool by Annie Groves Page A

dark hallway of her home, the boy at her side.
    There had been plenty of moments when she had feared that they wouldn’t make it, but they had.
    Wave after wave of planes had come in over their heads, heading for the docks, where they dropped their deadly cargo. The north side of the city seemed to be ringed with fires lighting up the night sky.
    The worst moment was when they had walked past a newly bombed house and Emily had seen the tears sliding down the faces of the children standing outside it, making oily tracks through the soot from what had once been their chimney. They had been inside when the bomb had hit, Emily had heard one of the children telling their rescuers, taking refuge under the table they had put under the stairs, just like the local ARP man had told them, and now their granddad was dead and their mam taken off to hospital.
    As she and the boy had turned into Emily’s own road, she had heard a thin reedy elderly female voice calling out, ‘Tiddles, where are you?’
    Emily’s father had had electricity installed in the house at the earliest opportunity, and its welcoming light banished the shadows from the hallway.
    Gently pushing the boy in front of her, Emily headed for the kitchen where mercifully the Aga was still on and the kitchen warm.
    She had expected the boy to be overawed by the house, but instead he seemed to take its comforts for granted.
    ‘You can sit on here whilst I stoke up the Aga and put the kettle on,’ Emily told him, pulling a chair out from the table but removing the cushion from it before letting him sit on it. ‘But no moving off it, mind,’ she warned him. ‘I’m not having you messing up my house, filthy like you are.’
    He was trying to stifle a yawn, his face white with fatigue, and Emily had to harden her heart against the pathetic sight he made.
    ‘I know you’re tired,’ she told him, ‘but I’m nothaving you sleeping between my nice clean sheets until you’ve had a bath.’
    He still hadn’t spoken, but he was listening to her and watching her.
    Quickly Emily banked up the Aga. She was tired and hungry, but she couldn’t eat without feeding the boy as well and he certainly couldn’t eat using her clean china in the filthy state he was in, so she would have to wait until she had made sure he was bathed and clean.
    ‘Come on,’ she told him. ‘Come with me.’
    In the airing cupboard she found some old towels that she kept for the theatre because of all the greasepaint that Con managed to get on them. It never washed out properly, no matter what instructions she gave them at the laundry.
    ‘Here’s the bathroom,’ she told the boy, opening the door to show him. ‘I’ll run you a bath and then you’ll take off your clothes and get in it and give yourself a good scrub.’
    Normally Emily stuck rigidly to the letter of the law, but the boy was so dirty he was going to need two baths, not just one, and she certainly wasn’t going to let him put those filthy clothes back on. He’d have to sleep in one of Con’s old shirts tonight.
       
    It was gone midnight before Emily finally climbed into her own bed. The boy, bathed, fed and wearing an old flannel shirt that trailed on the floor behind him, was tucked up in bed in the spare room with a hot-water bottle to keep him warm. There’d been a black rim round the bath like she’d kept coal init, and when she’d washed his clothes, his vest had fallen apart in her hands, it was that full of holes. Poor little mite. She’d been surprised to see what a nice-looking lad he was once he was clean, but it was beginning to worry her that he wouldn’t speak. Could it be that he was deaf and dumb? There’d been a girl when she’d been at school whose sister had been like that, and her family had made signs to her when they wanted to tell her something, Emily remembered.
    She yawned tiredly and reached out to switch off the bedside light, only realising as she did so that Con hadn’t come in. Well, his