back to the worktop.
He ate in silence, as the rest of the family finished their breakfast. He occasionally looked up at them, his eyes resting on George, before he carried on eating. When he had finished he left the room himself, hobbling in his usual manner towards the front room. George waited a few seconds for him to be gone, before getting his mother’s attention.
‘What was all that about, Ma?’ Elisabeth said, before he could phrase the question himself, her six-year-old inquisitiveness winning out.
Their mother continued her meticulous dish washing. Her voice had to compete with the scrape of crockery and the splash of water as she poured more into the sink from the jug she had got in from outside, but she knew well enough how to project. A skill that he expected came from having four children.
‘Don’t worry, love,’ she said quickly, but not without care.
‘But why were they arguing?’ he asked, interrupting his younger sister’s reply. He had always felt close to his mother, she cared for them all well, but she had always been honest with him and spoken to him like an equal.
Another stack of plates clattered onto the draining board. ‘They’ll be looking for young men to volunteer, I don’t doubt. Your father wants our Joe to go and give his name, join the regiment. It’s the family tradition after all.’ She paused as a blackbird flew past the window. ‘But your brother has no interest in your father’s traditions. He has other plans for his life, what with all the things that he’s learnt.’
‘I’ve never seen our dad so angry before,’ Catherine said, finally eating George’s unwanted bread and pushing the words out between mouthfuls.
Mother finished her washing up and returned to the table, taking a look at the sisters then at George where her gaze lingered for a moment.
‘You’re too young, George, or your father would be having the same conversation with you too, love,’ she said as she took a dishcloth to his cheek to wipe away whatever leftover food was lodged there. That would explain why his father had kept looking at him.
‘Now get on with you and get yourselves ready. I need to go speak to your father and try to calm him down. Up the stairs now.’ She ushered the family out of the kitchen with a wet dishcloth, and a smile.
*
Upstairs, the house was a cramped affair, with the rooms close together, leading off from a shared landing. Four children was common for a family around Liverpool, and they all had to fit into what space their parents could afford. George and Joe brought what money they could into the house, but they still slept in a shared bedroom.
George walked into the room that had been his and Joe’s for as long as he could remember, to find his clothes for work. There were three other rooms leading from the landing: their parents’, their sisters’, and a small room that they used for cleaning and getting changed. Having one changing room between six people was never easy, but they made do. There was a kind of unspoken agreement about the order of who got to go in first. Their mother was always first. Their father would shout at them and push them away if they tried to get in before her. The rest was a hierarchy of age within the family. Catherine would usually have to go downstairs and boil a tub of water then bring it up for cleaning. They would often share the same water and rub as much soap as they could afford on their bodies. They had a tin bath that they kept next to the outhouse, but that was only for special occasions.
He sat down on the thin mattress of his wire bed to wait, and the frame creaked as it took his weight. Across from him was Joe’s side of the room. Both sides were marked out as separate, and neither of them ventured to the other’s. He couldn’t help but think just how different Joe’s personal space was compared to his own. Though only a couple of feet apart, an outside observer could easily see the two different personalities in the room.
Above his bed, Joe had a couple of cluttered shelves, so full that often things fell off whenever someone opened or shut the door to their room. He had put them up himself, forever keen on being self-reliant, even when George had offered to help. The bottom shelf contained a number of books, a few were great dusty tomes. Every time George looked he suspected there were more books. Joe would smuggle them in from somewhere, George didn’t know where.
Sometimes, in the evenings he often caught Joe pulling them off the shelf one at a time and running a finger along the words while softly mumbling to himself. He thought that George didn’t notice, but he did. He often wondered what Joe was thinking, while he read the words under his breath. He seemed so separate, so distant, as if he were born to another family and had been given to the wrong parents at the hospital. There were times when George was about to ask him what he was reading, but then Joe would start another book or go to sleep.
To say he wasn’t interested in things would be untrue. However, when it came to Joe’s interests George just didn’t understand. There was a difference between them that was more than age. Unlike a lot of his peers George could read, but he found more fun in other things.
He looked back over his own bed and at his own possessions. In pride of place was his favourite landscape, and various other pictures. They were all prints that he had managed to find for very little expense or trade for with what little he had. Some were cutouts from newspapers or magazines, of particularly interesting scenes. Some were postcards. Some were larger copies of paintings of places that he had no hope of visiting. Underneath them, if you looked carefully, were some of his own sketches. They were poor in comparison, but he practised whenever he could snatch a moment. With work at the dock, time was scarce.
The changing room door opened and Catherine walked back out. She smiled at George. ‘Your turn,’ she said, shutting the door behind her. George didn’t follow into the now empty room, there was no point in him washing when he was due to go to work, he would only end up dirty again in a matter of minutes. The dirt didn’t bother him, he was used to it, but the sweat always wound him up, as it ran down his temples and pooled on his chin. Instead, he got ready for work, throwing on a pair of overalls and making sure that his boots were securely tied to his feet. A loose lace could cause a serious injury in a hurry.
*
Less than half an hour later, he was out of the front door and facing down the road. Egerton Street was a quiet street hidden just off the main road. Terraced, brick houses lined the road without break, built for the workers in the city. The Abbotts weren’t completely poor, but they weren’t wealthy either. The army gave their father a meagre pension and he had found work at the docks bookkeeping, thanks to a friend. The others brought in what they could.
Most of the houses that George could see were occupied by the families of other dockworkers. The red brick buildings trailed off down the hill, meeting at a point in the direction of the Mersey which was still covered in a grey sea-mist at this time of day.
As George stepped out of the yard, closing the wooden gate behind him and making sure the steel latch stuck, a group of young children pushed past him, their leather soles clattering on the pavement as they chattered in excitement, on their way to the local school. They played soldiers running around with their arms outstretched in mockery of a rifle. One mimed shooting at him and George pretended to be hit, falling to his knees and clutching his chest. The child laughed and ran off, and George shouted a friendly warning after them as they disappeared down the road.
Mrs Adams from next door waved as she saw George on his knees in the street.
‘Mornin’, George,’ she said, smiling. ‘Get up now, you’ll get dirt all over you.’ She carried on tending to the small trough of plants she kept in her front garden, with a pair of secateurs.
