said with great bitterness, ‘It will never be over – it will go on and on.’
How right he was. The war died down amid exhausted European populations, only to blaze up in Korea, Vietnam, India, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Egypt and Israel, while embers smoulder and threaten Africa and strange outposts, like the Falklands.
In October, Sylvia celebrated her twenty-first birthday with a party, one of the first grown-up parties I attended.
Her plump, patient, little mother must have collected bits of rationed food over many months. Someone had contributed a bottle of blackcurrant wine of surprising strength; unaccustomed to alcohol, we all became quite merry.
On my twenty-first birthday, the previous June, Mother’s employer, a baker, hearing that I was approaching my majority, baked for me an exquisite little birthday cake. It was a rich fruit cake, which he had decorated himself with delicate flower wreaths of white royal icing. It was illegal to make such an extravagant cake, and he must have taken the ingredients from some illicit hoard stored away at the beginning of the war. He presented the cake to Mother as a gift.
The family had joined together to buy me a leather shopping bag, popularly known as a zipper bag. In these bags, carried by almost all business girls, were transported makeup, lunch, a change of shoes and stockings for wet days, a novel to read on the bus or train, and innumerable oddments like safety pins and aspirins. I was delighted by the gift; they must have hunted through most of Liverpool’s many shops to find such an article.
I arrived home from work, that evening, about eight o’clock. The family had given up hope of my arrival, assuming that I was working late and was having a snack in the office. They ate the sandwiches and scones which Mother had kindly provided to celebrate the day. The cake, however, was kept untouched.
I remember being moved almost to tears at the effort that had been made to find me a gift and a cake. I immediately cut the cake and passed it round the family. It was strange to eat cake for my birthday – but no dinner!
Small financial problems which, looking back, seem laughable, presented me with dreadful headaches.
In the early part of the autumn I forgot to switch off the cloakroom light before leaving the office.
The room had no blackout curtaining, and the light blazed forth across the old, walled garden at the back of the building. Our outraged warden reported it, and the Society was fined seven shillings by the local magistrate. This amount was deducted from my wages at the rate of one shilling a week, and for nearly two months my already penurious state was reduced to near disaster; I remember being torn between a decision to walk to work and thus wear out my precious stockings, which would have to be replaced, or nurse my current pair of stockings along, by hooking up the ladders with a fine crochet hook and darning and redarning, so that I could ride on the tram to work. It was a very long seven weeks.
It always astonished me that Mother never got fined for similar offences. The warden frequently remonstrated with her about the lack of curtaining over our back bedroom windows and the consequent glow of candlelight through them, a glow which in his opinion would guide the Luftwaffe straight to us. Perhaps because he was a neighbour he was loath to report her. Towards the end of the war, she did buy some second-hand curtains and put them up, but I suspect that she rather enjoyed baiting the unfortunate warden.
It was on a foggy day in late November that, after a heavy raid, I was very tired and decided to travel the whole distance to work by tram. On the first tram I took, to the city centre, the clippie told me that the whole system had been disorganised by the air raid, and that I might get a tram to Bootle more easily from the Pier Head.
At the Pier Head, the Transport Supervisor was about to dispatch a tram to my destination. It was evidently the first tram which would travel along Derby Road that morning, and I heard him tell the driver, ‘The police say the timber yards is burnin’ fierce. I tried to telephone, but the wires must be down ’cos I couldn’t get through, and nobody seems to know what’s really happening. So you mayn’t get to the end of the line.’ He paused uncertainly, and then ordered, ‘Go as far as you can. There’s no end of people as will be going on and off shift at the other end.’
The driver, his face almost purple from constant exposure to the elements, wound a huge scarf round his neck and climbed wearily on to his unprotected platform. He tinged his bell irritably with the toe of his boot, and his clippie threw away her cigarette end and skipped quickly on to the back platform. I followed her more sedately. The rush hour had not yet begun, so I was the only passenger.
The clippie was a gaunt woman in a navy-blue uniform, too short at the sleeves. She collected my fare and handed me a ticket. Then she closed the door of the passenger compartment and sat down opposite to me, to have a cosy gossip on the hardships and dangers of being a tram conductor.
‘I’m that scared sometimes at night, with no proper lights, like, and the pubs let out. It’s all right if they’re merry drunk, if you know what I mean; the worst that’ll happen is that they’ll be sick all over the floor. But if they’re bevvied and ready for a fight, or if they start to slobber all over you, well! And me man away in the Army, an’ all.’
I sympathised with her. I wondered if I could do her job. Cope with drunks, and the impertinence she would endure as a woman doing a man’s job? I doubted it.
While, out of the corner of her eye, she watched the scenes of destruction that we passed, she smoked incessantly. ‘Lot of fires,’ she remarked, and then added with a sigh, ‘I’d rather be in an air raid, at times, than face some of the men as gets on this tram.’ With the heel of her flat, laced-up shoe, she ground a cigarette end into the floor.
‘Couldn’t you get a better job?’
‘Well, it’s handy, ’cos I do split shifts, and in between I can get home to see to the kids. And the pay’s good – for a woman.’
When the tram slowed, at a point where men were still hastily clearing pieces of debris from the tram lines, she got up abruptly.
‘I’ll ask Hisself how he’s doin’,’ she said, and strode forward between the bench seats, which faced each other the length of the vehicle. She shoved back the door which connected with the driver’s platform, and smoke rolled into the passenger compartment; the poor driver must have been nearly blinded by it. I hastily pulled out a cotton handkerchief and dabbed my smarting eyes. In seconds, I could barely see anything myself.
The tram stopped.
Shadowy firemen and wardens bobbed round the vehicle and shouted up to the driver. As the result of their encouragement, the driver edged the tram forward, tinging his strident bell persistently.
As we sailed slowly past, a warden called up to him, ‘The overhead wires is still up all the way. It’s a bloody miracle.’
The tram stopped again. From behind the hanky pressed to my nose, I peeped at the stout back of the driver. A warden had swung himself up on to the platform beside him. The warden’s face was black with soot, his eyes and mouth a startling red.
‘I can’t see a thing in front of me,’ the driver protested.
‘I’ll get down and walk in front of you,’ the warden offered. ‘I’ll watch for anything on the line.’ He hopped down on to the road again, and shouted up to the driver, ‘Now, mind you listen hard for me – and don’t, for God’s sake, run me down. You can see better than you think – it’s more steam than smoke now.’ Then his voice came more faintly from the cloud of vapour. ‘Couple o’ hundred yards and you’ll see all right. And they’ll have this bit o’ trouble damped down by the time you come back.’
Once again the tram eased forward. It seemed a very long two hundred yards.
When visibility improved, the warden left us with a brisk wave of his gloved hand, and the driver accelerated. Timber flamed and crackled,