Three Women of Liverpool Read Online Free Page A

Emmie and to her husband, David.
    She was sick to death of her new, Irish next-door neighbours. A pack of sloths, she fumed. She had nearly choked when the 13-year-old boy had calmly knocked at her back door and had asked for his arrow back.
    A small bundle of outrage, thin lips drawn back overblackened broken teeth, she had hissed back, “Arrow? You ain’t gettin’ no arrow from me, young man. You’re goin’ to get a bill for seven bob for puttin’ t’glass back, and I hope your dad gives you a good beatin’.”
    Large, calculating blue eyes, fringed with long black eyelashes, looked calmly back at her. “It were an accident, Mrs Thomas – and you could say it were blown out in the last air raid and get it mended easy.” He grinned at her beguilingly, a grin that usually worked wonders with middle-aged lady teachers.
    It did not work on Gwen Thomas. She wanted to strike him with the broom she was holding; but he was as tall as she was and heavily built for his age. She felt uneasily that he might hit her back. She shook a bony finger at him.
    “And what good would that do me, beyond makin’ a liar of meself?”
    “T’ city might do it for free.”
    She slammed the door in his face.
    Bow in hand, he stood staring at the cracked black paint on the back door. All that fuss about a window, when any night the Jerries raided Liverpool hundreds of windows got broken. Old bitch.
    On the way out of the tiny brick-lined yard, he gave the cages holding David Thomas’s racing pigeons an angry shake. The pigeons fluttered madly round and round their prison in alarm. Next time he shot at a cat, he reckoned crossly, he should take a look at what else was in the line of flight. As his father often said, you live and learn.
    “Patrick! Patrick! Coom ’ere. I want yer to go a message, afore you go back to school,” he could hear his mother shouting from their kitchen. “Coom ’ere, afore I come after yez. Where are you?”
    He dropped his bow into a corner behind the lavatory in the yard and slunk uneasily into the kitchen.
    In her living room, Gwen sank on to the sofa, leaned backand flung a skinny arm across her chest. “He’s started me palpitations, he has. Mari, luv, pour me another cuppa tea and bring the aspirin bottle.”
    Mari was just putting on her school blazer, preparatory to returning to school, but she obediently ran upstairs to her mother’s bedroom to get the aspirin bottle and, on her return, poured a cup of tea from the aluminium teapot keeping warm on the hob in front of the fire.
    “I don’t suppose he meant to break the window, Mam,” she pleaded, turning a thin, well-scrubbed face towards her mother who was lying back with her eyes closed.
    Gwen ignored her plea. She shook a couple of aspirins out of the bottle, popped them into her mouth and swallowed them down with a gulp of tea. “Mind you come straight home,” she told her daughter, without opening her eye. The girl slowly buttoned her blazer and, with a sour grimace towards her mother, she left for school. Palpitations! How come every time her mother fell into a fit of rage, it was called palpitations, and when she, Mari, was angry, it was called a sinful paddywack.
    As she kicked a stone down the road towards school – her mother hated her to do anything so vulgar – she ruminated on the subject of Patrick. Though she was scared of him, she found him a fascinating subject for thought. Her school friends thought he was the handsomest boy in the neighbourhood and he was so excitingly wild – and a wicked Catholic, too. Only last week, at the end of the street, he had fought off three Protestant boys and left them all with bleeding noses. Cock of the walk, he was, thought Mari a trifle wistfully. But her mother’s warnings about men had been drummed into her ever since she could stand, and while the other girls, Protestant and Catholic alike, giggled hopefully whenever they passed him, she held back and passed with eyes cast down, her