Child of the Mersey. Annie Groves
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only inches from the bobby’s face and her determined expression told him he was out of luck if he thought he was going to take the shortcut to an arrest today.
Tommy stood watching, his face lit with delight. With a bit of luck Kitty would forget all about finishing his wash.
‘We have reason to believe—’ the bobby began.
‘I don’t care what you’ve got, you’ve got no right to come crashing into decent people’s homes. If you haven’t got a warrant you’re not going any further, so get out of my kitchen and leave us honest folk to our work, will you!’ With that, slightly built as she was, Kitty pushed back the surprised constable and urged him down the lobby and out of the front door. Slamming it shut, she dusted her hands and vowed that she would have more than a little word with Danny and her father when they deigned to show their faces again.
‘And you …’ Kitty arrived back in the scullery, looking menacingly at Tommy, ‘get those hands washed. Your tea will be ready in five minutes.’ Tommy washed his hands in double-quick time. He was not going to argue with Kitty when she was in this mood. If asked, he would not be able to describe the rising admiration he now felt for his sister. She was only a slip of a girl, but she had the courage of a lioness.
‘We were just having a game of pitch-and-toss in the back alley, there …’ Danny stilled the hunk of bread that was heading towards his mouth and nodded towards the wall that separated the house from Pop Feeny’s stable. Danny and his father had crept back into the house while Kitty got the dinner onto the table. It was a simple meal of beef suet pudding with boiled potatoes and cabbage. Money for food was often scarce but Kitty was adept at stretching her housekeeping money out and she had inherited her mother’s talent for cooking as well as for watching the pennies. She could often be found at the local market on a Saturday evening, haggling with the stallholders and usually getting the best prices.
Kitty hadn’t forgotten about the incident earlier but the worry over the housekeeping money was still unresolved and she bore down on her younger brother.
‘I don’t care about the game. What about the money in the tin?’ she asked Danny, who let out a long exasperated sigh.
‘That was just a loan, Kit. You know I’ll put it back before the rent man comes.’
‘It’s a bit late for that. He’s been and I’ve paid him and now I’ve got nothing left.’ Kitty knew this wasn’t true, thinking of the money that Sid had popped in her pinny, but she wasn’t ready to let Danny off the hook. Her hands were in their usual position on her hips and she leaned towards him. She wanted answers, not excuses.
‘You haven’t?’ Danny’s pale face was a picture of disbelief. Kitty nodded.
‘He promised he’d be our lookout, but he was nowhere to be seen.’ Danny nodded towards young Tommy. ‘I was on a winning hand when the bobbies came. Someone scooped all the stake money – I’m not sure who but I’ll soon find out.’
‘A fat lot of good that will do me.’ Kitty was angry now. ‘What am I supposed to do when I have to go into the shop and tell old-misery-on-the-hob Mrs Kennedy that I don’t have the money to pay me bill?’
Kitty would tell him about Sid Kerrigan dropping the money into her pocket later, but for now, he could sweat. Danny had a job as a stevedore on Canada Dock but he ducked and dived, did a little bit of this, and a little bit of that, and up to now he had stayed just the right side of the law, but sometimes only by the skin of his teeth. Kitty worried how long it would be before his luck ran out and there would be no going back. She noted her shifty-looking father, his head buried in the Evening Echo, making no attempt to meet her eyes. How was she ever going to instil some morals in Danny if his father only encouraged him in the opposite direction?
‘I’ll get your money,’ Danny said in a reassuring voice, trying to calm Kitty down. It wouldn’t do to get her all steamed up before he told them all his news. It was going to be bad enough once he told her. He was going to join up!
‘Well, you just make sure you do, Danny Callaghan, otherwise you’ll be going to visit Mam up in heaven – if they’ll have you! We do not have the money to throw away on fines if you are caught gambling, Danny.’ Kitty took the plate from under his nose, refusing to acknowledge his look of disappointment that told her he had been about to mop up the remaining gravy with his bread. She stacked the plate on top of the others on the battered wooden tray. ‘I warned you not to bring trouble to this door, Danny, and I mean it.’ She gave her younger brother a murderous look.
‘I told our Tommy it would be worth a couple of coppers if he kept dixie,’ Danny said, as if his brother’s failure to keep a lookout for the law was the reason they’d got in this mess.
‘Don’t blame Tommy – you had no right,’ Kitty fumed. ‘I am trying to bring him up decent. The way Mam would have wanted.’ She was taking no lip from Danny now.
Danny knew, judging by the determined look in her dark eyes, that Kitty was not in the mood for being soft-soaped. As she impatiently shoved a fine wisp of dark wavy hair behind her ear he took a chance and said, by way of explanation, ‘You know what it’s like, Kit: payday on the docks the lads wanted a little flutter. Percy the Greek was nowhere to be seen, so they decided on a game of pitch-and-toss. But where was our Tommy, who was supposed to be lookout …?’
‘Danny was here with me, where he should have been, and not with you lot of scallywags picking up bad habits.’
‘It wasn’t my fault,’ Tommy whined. ‘I had a sore throat.’
‘Another one?’ Danny’s brows puckered. ‘You’ll have to get him seen to, Kit.’
‘If you two didn’t gamble and drink our money away, I might be able to afford a doctor.’ Kitty looked at her little brother. She didn’t know whether it was his bad start in life but Tommy had a very weak chest and still seemed to pick up whatever was going. The summer months saw an improvement but they’d had a few close shaves with him in their time and Kitty worried about him constantly.
‘All right, Kitty, that’s enough now.’ Her father tried to assert his authority, which she respected when he was sober. It was a different matter when he was falling over drunk, as he would have been if the dice school had not been scattered.
‘How am I expected to bring Tommy up the right way with you two leading the example?’ Kitty asked her father. ‘If it wasn’t for Jack and me, goodness knows what would have become of him. I don’t know where me mam got you two from, but it was definitely the same place!’
‘Sorry, Kit,’ her father and her brother said in unison, and as usual, she relented.
‘I don’t want to get a cob on with you,’ she said as if talking to young children, ‘but you both squander what little money we have.’ She’d only own up that she had the money in her pocket after the pub shut. They could live without it for once in their lives.
‘Jack won’t be happy, will he, Kit?’ Tommy said piously, giving Danny cause to glare.
‘Mam would be horrified.’ Kitty knew the mention of her mother always brought a wave of contrition. ‘And if you bring the bobbies to this door again, either of you,’ she said, pointing at them with the knife she was about to put on the tray, ‘I will tell Jack.’
‘Sounds like she’s at the end of her tether,’ Danny whispered to his father when Kitty took the tray out to the scullery.
‘I heard that, and I am,’ Kitty called. Then coming back into the room and nodding to Tommy she said, ‘You go and have a lie-down, you look awful.’ She looked at his untouched plate of suet pudding.
‘I wouldn’t mind a bit of a lie-down,’ he said without complaint, so unlike him as he loved to be outside.
‘Is he sickening for something?’ Danny asked, his eyebrows meeting. Kitty tilted her head to one side to get a better look at Tommy’s downturned face. These things came on so fast with Tommy and they disappeared just as quickly