Lily’s War Read Free

me bruvvers all about it in bed. I’m goin’ ta sea when I grows up.’
    ‘That’ll be nice,’ said Lily, carefully wrapping the eggs in tissue paper before coming round the counter and placing one in each pocket of his jacket. She gave him his change and opened the door, thinking that May and Ronnie should be up by now if they were to get to school on time.
    May was already awake, lying on her back with the patchwork quilt worked by her maternal grandmother up to her chin. Her long flaxen hair, freed from its plaits, spread like crinkled paper on the pillow. Since she was a tot she had refused to set foot in the shippon. She hated dirt and dust and the smells that issued from the bottom of the yard. ‘I don’t think I’ll go to school today,’ she declared gruffly. ‘I think I’m getting a chest.’
    ‘You’re going,’ said Lily determinedly.
    ‘But I don’t learn anything!’
    ‘You know it all? You know the capital of Spain and your five times table?’ Lily wrenched the quilt from her grasp and the rest of the covers followed.
    ‘Two fives are ten and Madrid’s the captial of Spain,’ chanted her sister, hunching her knees inside her nightie.
    ‘The capital of Australia?’
    ‘Sydney!’
    ‘No. Canberra.’
    ‘Why do I have to know?’ grumbled May. ‘I’m never going to go there. Now if you’d asked me the name of a Red Indian tribe I could have told you the Sioux. They were in a cowboy film at the matinee.’
    ‘Sorry, no go.’ Lily hid a smile as she dragged her struggling sister off the bed.
    She left May dressing and went into the bedroom her brothers shared. The room was a mess but that was because she had been asked to leave everything where it was. Recently Ronnie had taken up whittling and was forever making whistles and selling them to anyone who had a halfpenny. He was also football mad as were most boys in Liverpool. He was up now and kicking a football around the double bed that had come from their uncle’s farm.
    ‘Dad’ll have you if he hears you.’ Her face softened as she watched him.
    ‘He won’t hear me, though, will he?’ His expression was far from childlike in his thin face. ‘He’s drunk and snoring like a pig.’
    ‘That’s enough of that!’ She kicked the ball from beneath his foot and under the bed. ‘I just hope he’s put his leg in a safe place.’
    ‘His leg was on the landing.’ Ronnie licked the palms of his hands and smoothed his hair back with them. ‘I thought he might fall over it so I hung it by its straps on the door. It’ll make a lovely noise when he opens it.’ He grinned as he bounced out of the room. ‘I’ll make me own toast,’ he shouted from halfway down the stairs.
    ‘Thanks a lot, and use a comb for your hair in future,’ called Lily, going along the landing to her father’s bedroom.
    A pink-painted wooden leg dangled from the brass door knob. She opened the door and immediately the smell of rum mingled with the stale tang of tobacco to assail her nostrils. Her father had told her soldiers had been given rum sometimes before going over the top. She placed the heavy leg on a chair by his bed and picked up the trousers flung on the floor, glancing at the tuft of white hair showing above the old army blankets. There was no sign of him stirring. She left the room, convinced that it would be hours yet before he made an appearance downstairs.
    It was three hours later that Albert Thorpe entered the kitchen. Lily was ironing and dreaming of her tall, dark and handsome hero who would take her away from it all, and didn’t really want to be disturbed, but she put down the flat iron and stared at her father. If the photograph in a drawer was anything to go by he had been handsome once. It was hard to imagine now. Only forty-seven, he looked much older. His rumpled clothes clung to his gaunt frame and his cheeks were the colour of his tobacco-tinged moustache. The pale blue eyes seemed to be saying they wished they had not bothered