some pretty trimmings: a lace collar, or a contrasting belt. Mrs Verey had said approvingly, ‘You’ve got a proper sense of style, Rosie, and no mistake. That’s something that can never be bought.’
‘Well, you might be all pally with them, Rosie, but there’s a lot of folk in Liverpool who are a bit more patriotic,’ Nancy announced sharply. ‘My dad was saying only the other night as ’ow we don’t need the likes of Eyeties and Fascists over here eating our rations and that.’
Rosie had no idea why Nancy kept picking on her the way she did. From her very first day at the shop, Nancy had gone out of her way to be unkind to her and get her into trouble. Rosie could still remember how, on her first morning, Nancy had told Rosie to iron a fragile satin dress satin side up, which would have ruined the garment completely if one of the other girls hadn’t stopped her just in time. When Rosie had said innocently that she was following Nancy’s instructions Nancy had claimed that Rosie must have misunderstood her. But it hadn’t been until later in the week when Ruth, one of the girls, had overheard Nancy telling Rosie that Mrs Verey wanted her and that she was to go down to the showroom right away, that Rosie realised that it wasn’t kindness that was motivating Nancy to take an interest in her but quite the opposite.
‘Rosie, you just tek no notice of anything Nancy tells yer to do, wi’out checking wi’ one of us first,’ Ruth had warned her. ‘We all know that Mrs Verey doesn’t allow us girls to go down into the showroom in our workroom clothes, and looking untidy. I reckon Nancy has a mind to get you into trouble so that Mrs Verey decides to get rid of you. She’s allus bin a bit like that, has Nancy. She’s got a real nasty streak to her, if you ask me.’
Now Rosie tried to avoid Nancy and not get drawn into arguments with her. She didn’t want to risk losing her job, not whilst she was still only a trainee assistant, to give her job its proper name. Rosie’s working day was filled with a variety of jobs that included making sure the floors were kept free of dust, especially in the workroom, learning how to press the delicate fabrics, making sure that clothes that had been tried on by customers were put back properly in the correct place, and just occasionally, under the stern eye of one of the more senior girls, being allowed into the shop to serve those customers who had come in for some small item such as a pair of stockings or some handkerchiefs. But now she couldn’t just stand there and let Nancy get away with saying what she had.
‘That’s not fair,’ Rosie repeated. ‘Some of the families, like the Volantes, the D’Annunzios, the Santangellis and the Chiappes, have been in Liverpool for fifty years and more.’ Although she wasn’t Italian, Rosie had grown up amongst the immigrant Italian families who inhabited that part of the city known as ‘Little Italy’, the heart of the Italian community in Liverpool. Rosie knew how proud Liverpool’s Italians were, both of their roots in the Picinisco area of Italy, poor farming country between Naples and Rome, and of their English home from home. The first immigrants, men in the main, driven out of their home country by poverty, to look for work to support their families wherever they could find it, had worked hard, saving what they could to send home, and returning there in the summer to help tend the family farms. As soon as they were able to do so, they had brought to Liverpool their wives and children, and a tradition had built up of the Italians marrying within their own community and adhering as much as they could to the ways of the old country.
The Italian immigrants had always been made welcome and were able to find work because they possessed wonderful artistic talents. Rosie had been told how in the early days of their arrival, in Lionel Street, a number of Italian families had converted their cellars into little workshops where they made beautiful and intricate figurines and statues, sometimes working in marble. These skills were passed down from one generation to the next. Those unskilled men amongst the earlier immigrants had been prepared to undertake almost any type of work to support their families. One of their occupations was knife sharpening, and Rosie had often heard how proud the Gianelli and the Sartorri families were of the fact that from humble beginnings they had developed commercial businesses within the city, offering their knife-sharpening services to hotels and restaurants.
As new immigrants arrived from Italy, those who were already established welcomed them, taking them in as lodgers and helping them to establish themselves in turn, so that a closely knit community began to develop. Ever watchful for an opportunity to earn a living, one man, Vincenzo Volante, set up in business hiring out handcarts and larger carts for transporting barrel organs. Vincenzo could speak several languages and so he took on the responsibility of helping the newcomers who could not speak English.
As la Nonna, the grandmother of Rosie’s best friend, Bella, had told Rosie with great pride, the Italians coming from the homeland were extremely gifted artistically and musically, and soon the streets of Little Italy were warmed by the songs of the old country and the laughter of its people.
Those who pushed their barrel organs around the city entertaining the public, quickly realised that there was a market for the ice cream they had enjoyed at home in Italy, and so certain families set up small businesses in their homes making ice cream. Raphael Santangelli in particular was famous for his ice-cream business, starting from humble beginnings in Gerard Street, and selling his ice cream first from handcarts pushed around the streets, and then, as the business became more successful and he could afford them, via three-wheeler ice-cream carts. Now the Santangellis were well known and respected, and their motorised ice-cream vans were seen everywhere in the city. La Nonna was very proud of her own family’s distant connection to the Santangellis, to whom she was a cousin several times removed. She had boasted to Rosie, though, that her own recipe for ice cream was just that little bit better than that of the Santangellis, owing to a ‘secret’ extra special ingredient she had learned at her own grandmother’s knee and which she only intended to pass on to her daughters on her deathbed.
The Chiappe family was also famous for its ice-cream business. They had a well-known ice-cream shop near the Gaiety Cinema in Scotland Road, and another branch at 8 Feather Road, owned by Angelo Chiappe, who was a great friend of Bella’s father. In the winter, when no one wanted to buy ice cream, the sellers sold roasted chestnuts instead.
Many Italian men found work in the catering trade in Liverpool’s hotels, and in 1939, when Romeo Imundi had retired from Romeo’s, the grocery store owned and run by the Imundi family on Springfield Street, the whole community had turned out to wave him off back to Picinisco.
Knowing what she did about the length of time the Italian families had been established in Liverpool, and just how much they had contributed to the city in different ways, and how much they cared about it and about one another, it shocked and disgusted Rosie to hear Nancy speaking so nastily about them, and she was fully prepared to say so. Nancy, though, wasn’t prepared to listen.
‘They’re still Eyeties, though, aren’t they?’ she insisted.
‘Don’t pay no mind to Nancy, Rosie,’ Ruth said quietly as Rosie carefully hung up the dress, ready to start work on it in the morning. ‘I dare say Nancy’s had her fair share of Gonnelli’s ice cream and Podestra’s chips in her time.’
Rosie managed a small smile, more out of politeness than anything else. It made her so angry when she knew how hard the Italians worked to hear them being run down so unfairly.
‘Nancy’s being so unkind, Ruth,’ she replied fiercely. ‘You should have seen how proud the Italian folk in our street were when their boys joined up. St Joseph’s Boxing Club was practically empty, so many of the boys who go there had enlisted. The Fuscos a few doors down from us lost their only son at Dunkirk,’ she added quietly. Her eyes clouded at the thought.
The whole country was still in shock over the dreadful news they had all heard about the British Expeditionary Force, the very best of the country’s experienced soldiers. Trapped when Hitler had swept into Belgium and then France, the British soldiers had been forced to retreat to the French beaches of Dunkirk. Thousands of them had died there and thousands upon thousands more would also have perished or been taken prisoner had it not been for the brave men who had risked their own lives over and over again to sail across the Channel to bring their fellow countrymen safely home.
Rosie had seen the newsreels, showing that valiant