Across the Mersey - Annie Groves [2]
It was a perfect August day with warm sunshine, and so it was no wonder that the ferry boats ploughing their way across the Mersey to the sandy beaches of New Brighton had their full complement of two thousand passengers apiece, Jean acknowledged.
Their mother had always joked that her twin daughters had chosen to make their appearance on the hottest day of the year. Mam had been dead for nearly ten years now, worn out by looking after a husband who had never recovered properly from being in the trenches, and the birth of a third child when she had been in her late forties. She and Vi had been in their teens when their sister, Francine, had been born. Francine was closer in age to their children than she was to them.
The ferry was approaching the Seacombe landing stage. As always the thought of seeing her twin was filling Jean with a mixture of pleasure and discomfort. Pleasure at the thought of being with the sister she had been so close to as they grew up, and discomfort at the thought of being with the person that sister had become.
‘Lou, just look at you,’ she complained to the younger of her twins as Sam gathered his family together. To one side of him Luke mimicked his father’s proud stance and protective eye for the girls’ welfare as they queued to get off, all of them holding on to the gas masks the Government had issued, and which they were supposed to carry at all times.
‘Where’s your hair ribbon?’ Jean asked Louise. The twins were devils for losing their hair ribbons, no matter how tightly she tied them on.
‘It’s in my pocket.’
‘What’s it doing there? It should be on the end of your plait.’
‘Sasha pulled it off.’
‘No I didn’t,’ her twin defended herself immediately, giving Louise a swift nudge in the ribs.
‘Grace didn’t fasten it properly,’ Louise amended her story, both the twins giggling as they exchanged conspiratorial looks over this patent fib.
‘I don’t know!’ Jean shook her head with maternal disapproval. ‘No one looking at you would ever think you were grown-up girls of fourteen. The minute we get off here, I’m going to have to redo that plait of yours.’
Luke looked so handsome in his new suit, navy blue just like his dad’s. Sam might have shaken his head, but she’d reminded him that Luke was young man now – old enough to be called up to do his six months’ army service in a month’s time when he reached his twentieth birthday. He’d been apprenticed to an electrician friend of Sam’s since he’d left school and as soon as he was out of his apprenticeship Sam was going to put him forward for a job with the Salvage Corps. That couldn’t happen soon enough for Jean. Working in the Salvage Corps was a reserved occupation, and so he wouldn’t be sent off to fight.
Not that the men in the Salvage Corps didn’t face danger. In the last year alone, three men Sam worked with had lost their lives in the course of their work.
The ferry finally docked, allowing the passengers to stream off. Everywhere Jean looked she could see happy families determined to enjoy themselves, the girls and the women in their best summer frocks and the men in their suits, whilst the children were equipped for the beach with their buckets and spades.
‘Do you remember when we used to bring our four here for the beach?’ she asked Sam nostalgically.
‘How could I forget? They took that much sand back with them, you’d have thought they were building a second Liverpool bar,’ he laughed, referring to the sand bar beyond the docks.
‘Do you remember that time you put Luke up on that donkey and it ran off with him?’
‘Scared me to death, but he managed to stick on like a regular little trooper,’ Sam agreed.
‘And then when the twins buried their doll and couldn’t find it?’
‘I remember when that sister of yours turned up with her two and little Jack, and he wandered off. She didn’t half give him a pasting when she found him.’
A sudden sadness clouded Jean’s eyes, causing Sam to touch her arm and mutter awkwardly, ‘Sorry,