The Grafton Girls - Annie Groves [78]
Again her mother and uncle exchanged looks, this time more anxious ones. It was so unlike Jess to be so irritable.
‘Well, if you aren’t seeing him, and seeing as how you’re worrying about young Billy, why don’t you slip down the street and have a word wi’ him?’ her uncle suggested.
‘I’m not worrying about Billy Spencer – why should I be? He means nowt to me.’ Jess stood up, pushing back her chair, her face hot with temper and misery. ‘I’m going upstairs,’ she told them. ‘One of the girls fell and slipped this afternoon, and dropped TNT all over the place. Stank to high heaven, it did, and it’s given me a rotten headache.’
‘All right, love, you go up and I’ll bring you a nice cup of tea later,’ her mother offered her comfortingly.
Did they really think that Billy would listen to her? Angrily Jess climbed the stairs. Of course he wouldn’t. No! He’d rather kill himself trying to show off to some girl he wanted to impress. And to think that there were folk living in Liverpool who said that the GIs were show-offs.
SIXTEEN
Tiredly Ruthie turned into Chestnut Close. After her shift had finished she had gone up to Wavertree to collect their meat rations – not that there had been much left at the butcher’s when she had finally got there. Only a bit of neck end of lamb and some heart. She had been hoping she might be able to get a bit of chicken to tempt her mother’s meagre appetite. She had heard the girls at work talking about the things they had got on the black market, and even though a part of her had been shocked by this, another part of her had envied them, especially when she had heard one of them talking about the meat her brother had got from a friend of a friend who worked down on the docks.
‘Come from one of them American ships, it did. I’ve heard as how the men up at Burtonwood leave enough food on their plates to feed a whole family for a week.’
Ruthie knew that that must be an exaggeration, but she had heard and understood the resentment in the other woman’s voice. Sometimes, like now when she was tired and feeling low, it felt like she had been hungry for ever. And it was no good trying to kid herself that a thin stew made up out of a bit of stringy meat and some vegetables was just as good to eat as a proper roast because it wasn’t. Her father had always enjoyed his Sunday roast. She could see him now, beaming with pride as he sat in his chair, his shirtsleeves rolled up as he prepared to carve the joint. There were delicate slices for her and her mother, and thicker ones for himself, over which he would pour the thick gravy her mother had made to go with the roast potatoes and Yorkshire pudding. Ruthie could feel her mouth starting to water. But it was no good longing for what she knew they couldn’t have. Every extra scrap of food she could get had to go to her mother, who was so frail and in need of nourishment. She herself could always get a meal at the factory, she reminded herself.
One of the girls there had commented only that morning that it made no difference the government bringing in sweet rationing since there were no sweets to be had the length or breadth of the country.
‘Not unless you’re walking out with a Yank,’ another woman had pointed out curtly. ‘They’ve bin handing out chocolate along with nylons and the like to them as doesn’t mind betraying our own brave lads and going out with them.’
‘Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it?’ another woman had spoken up angrily. ‘Some of us have no choice who we go out with, because the Yanks are here and our lads aren’t.’
‘All the more reason not to have anything to do wi’ ’em, if you ask me. Come over here, they ’ave, bragging and showing off – aye, and earning five times wot our boys are getting for digging up a few fields to make runways for their ruddy planes whilst our boys are getting killed in ruddy Africa.’
‘Well, it stands to reason that they’re gonna need runways, otherwise how are they going to fight? I’ve heard they’re doing that much work up at Burtonwood you’d think the whole of the ruddy American Air Force was