Across the Mersey - Annie Groves [1]
‘Aye, we have, but that doesn’t make it right,’ he agreed, giving her the same smile that had caught at her heart all those years ago when she had first fallen in love with him. ‘You’re a softie, lass, and you allus have bin,’ he told her affectionately.
Ignoring her husband’s comments about her twin – after twenty-three years of marriage it would be a fine thing indeed if she didn’t know that he didn’t much care for her sister’s husband or the way in which they lived – she straightened his tie, which was new, like his worsted suit. She had bought it in the half-price sale at Blackler’s Department Store, along with a new suit for Luke. Forty-five shillings apiece they’d cost, not that she’d told Sam she’d spent that much, but she’d had a bit put by and the suits had been too good a bargain to miss, even though Sam had grumbled that it was daft buying him a suit when he only ever wore one for church and his last one, bought five years ago, still fitted him. She stood back to check that Sam’s tie was just right, her head on one side.
There was one thing for sure, she admitted proudly, whilst her twin sister might have the posh house ‘over the water’, as the local saying went, on the other side of the River Mersey in Wallasey, where the well-to-do folk lived, and a husband who by all accounts was making more money that he knew what to do with, her Sam still was and always had been the better man of the two, and not just because even now, at forty-seven, he still stood six foot tall and had a good head of thick dark hair on him. Vivienne’s Edwin might have the money and his own business, and all the fine new friends he was making now that he had put himself up for the council, but her Sam had the nicer nature. He was a good husband and a good father too, even if the elder two had started complaining that he was more strict that he needed to be and that other youngsters their age were allowed more freedom.
Jean knew perfectly well that by ‘other people’, Luke, who was coming up for twenty, and Grace, who was just nineteen, were referring to their cousins.
There was no getting away from the fact that whilst she and Vivienne were twins, and as alike as two peas in a pod on the outside, twenty-three years of marriage to two such very different men meant that they were now very different on the inside.
Family was still family, though, which was why she had bullied and cajoled hers into a state of freshly scrubbed neatness and their best clothes, ready to make the journey across the Mersey, from their pin-neat three-storey terraced house on Ash Grove in Wavertree to the much larger house on Kingsway in Wallasey Village, where her sister and her family lived. The Borough of Wallasey might include New Brighton and Seacombe, but as Jean’s sister was fond of saying, so far as she was concerned, it was Wallasey Village that those in the ‘know’ recognised as the ‘best’ address in the borough.
At last they were ready to leave, the back and the front doors were locked and they were free to set off down towards Picton Road to catch the bus that would take them to the Pier Head and the landing stage for the ferry terminal at Seacombe, from where they could catch another bus inland to Wallasey Village itself.
‘Ta, thanks, love.’
Jean shared a proud parental look with Sam, as Luke gave up his seat on the Royal Iris, one of the two ferries that sailed every quarter of an hour between Liverpool and Seacombe, to a harassed-looking young woman holding a young child and both their gas masks.
Jean was proud of all her children, but there was no getting away from the fact that your first always had a special place in your heart, she acknowledged.
Whilst Luke took after his dad, and had inherited his height along with his thick dark hair and bright blue eyes, Grace took after her side of the family, and had inherited the same petite, shapely figure, rose-gold curls and dark blue eyes as Jean’s younger sister. The