‘Lillibet will really thank you for that,’ Doris laughed. ‘She hates that cod liver oil.’
‘Tommy’s the same,’ Sally agreed. ‘But I tell him he won’t grow up big and strong like his dad if he doesn’t have it.’
‘Well, Dr Ross that’s to replace old Dr Jennings would certainly agree with you there. He was up at the hospital yesterday and I heard him saying how important it was for kiddies to have it.’
‘What’s he like?’ Sally asked. ‘Only he’s going to have his work cut out if he’s to be as well thought of as Dr Jennings.’
‘You’re right there, Sally. A good man, was Dr Jennings. Thought a lot of him, folks round here did. This new doctor’s a lot younger than I expected. A Scot he is, an’ all, and a bit what they call “dour”, you know: doesn’t say much and looks a bit down in the mouth. He’s moving into Dr Jennings’s old house, of course, since he’s taking over the practice, but I don’t know if we’re going to see him looking after us like Dr Jennings did. I remember Dr Jennings telling me once when my Frank was little, and I’d bin crying me eyes out on account of him being poorly and me not being able to afford to have a doctor round, that I wasn’t to worry because he always charged them patients wot were a bit better off a little bit more so that he could do right by them as didn’t have enough to pay him to come out. Ever so good like that, he was. That’s why everyone loved him so much. There’s many a mother round here has a lot to thank him for, and I can’t help wishing that the old doctor had stayed on until after Molly has had her baby.’
‘I remember when Harry was a few months old how he had that terrible chest and I was worried sick. Came out to him straight away, Dr Jennings did, and wouldn’t take a penny,’ Sally agreed, looking lovingly at her two sons.
Like many boys, they were inclined to be a bit too adventurous at times, but they were loving little lads as well as stout-hearted. They were her pride and joy, and woe betide anyone who ever said a word against them. There was nothing she would not do to keep them safe and give them the very best that she could.
‘Don’t you go tempting fate now saying that,’ Doris warned her, breaking off as the back door opened and her daughter-in-law, Molly, called out a cheerful greeting.
‘My, Sally, you look glam,’ she announced.
Sally pulled a small face. ‘I’ve just bin down the Grafton, practising with the Waltonettes.’
‘You’ve got a lovely voice, Sally,’ Doris joined in. ‘If you was to ask me I’d say there’s not many about that can sing as sweet as you can. I was listening to you in church the other Sunday. Fair lifted me heart, it did, to hear you.’
‘Frank’s mam’s right, Sally, you have got a lovely voice,’ Molly reiterated ten minutes later as they walked down the Close together at a pace slow enough to accommodate Molly’s advancing pregnancy. Sally was pushing Harry in the pushchair she had swapped her pram for, and Tommy walking sturdily alongside them, restrained by the reins Sally was keeping a firm hold of. ‘You could be one of them girl singers wi’ them bands that tour the munitions factories and go on the wireless, and no mistake.’
‘No, I couldn’t, Molly, because that’d mean travelling around a bit and I couldn’t leave my two little ’uns. It’s bad enough as it is, but I can’t afford not to work, and I’d have to anyway just as soon as Tommy reaches five, and he’s three now.’ Sally knew she sounded defensive, but she couldn’t even tell Molly, her closest friend, about the shameful secret that woke her up in the night and set her heart pounding with sick dread.
‘Five – that’s another two years away yet, Sally. I hope this war’s over before then.’
‘Don’t we all, but it doesn’t much look like being, does it?’ Sally was relieved the conversation had moved away from the subject of her work. ‘I reckon if it was about to be over then we wouldn’t be having all them Americans pouring into the country, would we?’
‘No, you’re right,’ Molly agreed. ‘My Frank was saying that there’s bin a fair bit of trouble in some of the pubs between the Americans and the British servicemen, fights and that.’
Sally bent her head ostensibly to check on Tommy’s reins but in reality to conceal her expression from her friend. However, as though she had guessed what she was feeling, Molly apologised immediately.
‘Oh, Sally, I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. Me and my big mouth, going on about my Frank when you still haven’t heard anything from your Ronnie.’
She’d always had a soft heart, had Molly, and always been ready to put others first, Sally knew. ‘It’s all right, Molly. After all, it’s not your Frank’s fault that he’s on home duties whilst my Ronnie got posted overseas.’ Sides, your Frank’s got that bad hand of his and there’s many that would have just sat back and let others get on wi’ doing their duty for them, not like your Frank, who practically begged the barracks to find him some work. Your Frank’s a good man – Ronnie always said so. Do you remember when Frank and Johnny Everton first joined up and they was asking my Ronnie what it was like to be in the army on account of him already being there?’
Molly nodded.
‘That reminds me,’ Sally went on. ‘I heard the other day that Johnny’s back in Liverpool. Seemingly he’s with the bomb disposal lot.’
When Molly didn’t say anything Sally didn’t pursue the subject. After all, Molly had been engaged to Johnny at one time, even if the engagement hadn’t lasted very long. Then after Dunkirk, when Johnny’s unit had been posted to home duties, Johnny had somehow or other ended up working with one of the army rescue teams at the same time as Molly was with the WVS.
They had reached the gate to the neat small house Sally had been renting since the beginning of the war, and which she now thought of, like the Close itself, as her home far more than she had ever done the noisy terrace in Manchester where she had grown up.
‘We’ll be back to dark evenings come the end of next month when we lose double summer time. I can’t say that I’m looking forward to it,’ Molly commented.
‘Me neither,’ Sally agreed. She had more reason than most to dislike the dark nights. You always got some nosy ARP warden asking you who you were and where you were going, just when you didn’t want those kind of questions. ‘Harry will be two the first week in October, and the last time my Ronnie was home was just after Dunkirk. Tommy was only a baby then and Harry not even born.’
When Molly reached out and squeezed her arm sympathetically, Sally shook her head.
‘Don’t pay any attention to me, Molly. I’m just having a bit of a bad day, that’s all. It’s this war. It gets to us all at times, and don’t we know it? I reckon that having a bit of a party for Tommy and Harry, like I said the other week, will cheer us all up. What with Tommy being born the day war broke out I can’t bring meself to have a party for him, somehow, and that don’t seem fair, so I thought I’d mek it up to him by having one for both of them together. Besides, it meks sense to have one party for them both, especially with all this rationing. You could bring your two round and I’ll have the other kiddies from the Close in as well. I’ll ask Daisy Cartwright if she wants to come with her lads, and since Harry isn’t that keen on eating up all his egg allowance every week, I reckon he won’t mind me using a couple of them to make a bit of a cake. I’ve got some sugar put by, and I dare say Edith will let me have some of her homemade jam. Bless ’em, the little ’uns deserve all the fun we can give them.’
Molly agreed. With three years of war behind them, and increasingly stringent rationing giving her children a bit of fun was something that every mother wanted to do.
Despite it being only September, recent heavy rain meant that the house felt chilly and slightly damp, making Sally dread the coming winter, and think longingly of the days when coal had been plentiful and she would have been able to leave