LITMIR.BIZ

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      Lena had never felt more relieved to see the familiar face of the local policeman as he grabbed her arm to steady her.

      ‘Oh, it’s nothing, Davey, just the kids having a bit of a joke on Lena on account of her being an Eyetie, isn’t that right, Lena?’ Annette challenged her.

      Lena longed to deny what she was saying, but she knew that if she did Annette would only tell her aunt and then she’d have her aunt going on at her and threatening to tell her uncle to take his belt to her.

      Tears of misery and self-pity blurred her eyes. You couldn’t miss what you’d never had, not really, and her parents had never been the loving protective sort, too interested in quarrelling with one another to bother much about her, but right now she wished that her dad was here and that he could put Annette Hodson in her place and the fear of God into her just as she was trying to do to Lena.

      Davey Shepherd had released her now.

      ‘Aye, well, no throwing stones, you lot,’ he told the now silent children. ‘Otherwise Hitler will come and get you.’

      ‘Lena’s an Eyetie and she should be locked up,’ Larry piped up truculently. ‘Me mam says so.’

      Lena could tell from the way Davey didn’t look at her that he didn’t want to get any further involved.

      ‘You’d better get on your way,’ he told her in a gruff voice.

      ‘Aye, and don’t bother coming back,’ Annette called after her as Lena made her escape whilst Davey stood watching her.

      There was brick dust on her cardigan sleeve. She’d look a fine mess turning up at work all dusty and dirty. Simone would give her a right mouthful and no mistake. The hairdresser might speak to her clients in an artificial and affected posh voice, but when they weren’t around and she was in a bad mood, she yelled at the girls who worked for her, using language so ripe it would have made a fishwife blush.

      Lena had been working part time for Simone ever since she had left school, fitting the hairdressing work in round the cleaning jobs her Auntie Flo forced her to do, and which really were part of her aunt’s own job, but now Simone had offered to take her on full time and Lena had said ‘yes’ immediately. Other hairdressers might have closed down thinking that the war would be bad for business but Simone had different ideas and she was shrewd. She had told Lena that, with all the rationing and everything else, she reckoned women would want their hair doing more than ever, and that the war could actually be good for business.

      She had been proved right. With so many women going into war work and earning their own money, they could afford to treat themselves.

      Simone had told Lena right from the start that the main reason she was taking her on was Lena’s own hair.

      ‘They’ll take one look at you, and come in here expecting to be turned out looking the same. So you just think on to make sure that you tell them wot asks that it’s this salon that does your hair.’

      Lena knew that her aunt was itching to make her leave the salon and get better-paid work in one of the munitions factories, but luckily for Lena she wasn’t old enough – yet. You had to be nineteen at least before they’d take you on, or so she’d heard. She’d heard too about the danger of working in munitions. There was a girl down the road who’d lost an eye and had her hands all burned, and that was nothing compared to the injuries some of the women got. Not that her auntie would care if she was injured.

      It wasn’t just her that Auntie Flo didn’t like, Lena knew; she and Lena’s mother had not got on very well either, and her auntie was fond of pointing out that for all that Lena’s mother had been so proud of the fact that she was in service with a posh family, that hadn’t stopped her from getting herself into trouble with the Italian who had charmed his way into her knickers.

      Lena found it hard to imagine that her mother had once loved her father. There had been no evidence of that love during Lena’s childhood. Her mother had always been criticising her husband, and Lena’s father had spent more time with his Italian family than he did with Lena and her mother. As she had grown up Lena had become used to hearing her every small misdemeanour put down to the ‘bad blood’ she had inherited from her Italian father. That had been one issue on which her mother and her auntie had been united.

      Like many of those who had been in service, Lena’s mother had been a bit of a snob in her own way, and uppity too, saying that she wasn’t having Lena growing up rag-mannered and not knowing what was what, and how to do things right. Lena’s parents had died together in the November bombings of 1940, leaving Lena with no option other than to move in with her mother’s sister, whose ideas of what was and what was not acceptable were very different from those of Lena’s mother.

      Lena could still remember having the back of her hands rapped when she’d hesitated over which piece of cutlery to pick up when her mother had been teaching her what to use.

      Witnessing this, her aunt had jeered at her mother and they’d had a rare old argument about it, Auntie Flo claiming that it was plain daft giving Lena airs, and her mother retaliating that she wasn’t having her daughter showing herself up by not knowing her manners.

      Her mother would certainly have had something to say about the state Liverpool and its people were in now, Lena thought, blinking against the gritty smoky air.

      Where the narrow streets opened off the road she was walking along, running down towards the docks she could see new gaps where last night’s bombs had hit, and people picking their way carefully through the debris as they searched for their possessions. Fires were still burning in some of the newly bombed-out buildings down by the docks, fire crews playing water hoses on them. Here, though, where the road turned upward away from the docks, the buildings were relatively unscathed, with only the odd collapsed building.

      She could see the salon up ahead. Thankfully, at least that was still standing. Lena didn’t reckon much to the chances of staying out of munitions if she lost her hairdressing job.

      After what had just happened with Annette Hodson she’d have been tempted to pack her things and take herself off. There was plenty of work around now, and she’d heard that the council was rehousing anyone who’d been made homeless. Imagine living somewhere where there was no aunt and cousin, and no Annette Hodson either. But she couldn’t leave now, could she, not now that she had met him? She had to be there for when he came looking for her on his next leave.

      A small wriggle of pleasure seized her. Hopefully next time there wouldn’t be any bombs falling and then they could make proper plans.

      He wasn’t based at Seacombe barracks, but somewhere down south. She’d found that out from his papers, which she’d found in one of the pockets of his battledress, just as she’d also found out that he was single, his full name and his address in posh Wallasey.

      Not that she’d got any need to go looking for him, because she just knew that he would come looking for her when he was next on leave.

      Annette Hodson and her woes forgotten, Lena almost skipped the rest of the way to work, her head full of happy plans for the future she was going to share with her Charlie.

      Charlie. She hugged the name to her, saying it inside her head and then in a determined whisper, Mrs Charles Firth. Lena gave another wriggle of blissful pleasure. Oh, but she could not wait to stand in front of her aunt with Charlie on her arm and his ring on her finger. That would show Auntie Flo, with all her talk of Lena having bad blood. Her Charlie had loved her dark curls and her dark eyes, and he’d love her curves too. A pink blush warmed Lena’s cheeks as she remembered just how much Charlie had loved them and how intimately. Of course, what she had let him do would have been very wrong if he hadn’t been a soldier and been at war. She tossed her head. A girl had to do the right thing by her chap when there was a war on. What if her Charlie were to be sent to fight overseas and …? Lena shivered, the joy draining from her. What if he had already gone overseas? She must not think like that. He wouldn’t go without coming to find her first. Not her Charlie. After all, he had said that he loved her and that he would marry

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