Laceys of Liverpool [antikvár]

Prologue CHRISTMAS 1940 I'M ii/y ' U i ; I The woman lay listening to the rain as it beat against the hospital windows. She and Alice hadn't picked a good night to have their babies. As had become the custom in Boode over the last few months, there'd been an air raid, a bad one, and they'd all been moved down to the cellar. Alice's lad had been born only minutes after the All Clear, at a quarter past eleven. Her own son had arrived almost three hours later, so they'd have different birthdays. Later, there'd been an emergency. Some woman had been found in the rubble of her house about to drop her baby. Since then, things had quietened down. In a bed opposite, her sister-in-law was fast asleep, dead to the world, like the other six women in the ward. 'Why can't I sleep Uke that?' the woman murmured fretfuUy. '1 can never sleep.' Her mind was always too fuU of plans for the future, schemes: how to get this, how to do that. How to make twenty-five bob last the whole week, including paying the rent and buying the food. Oh, how she'd love new curtains for the parlour! But new curtains, new anything, were an impossible dream. Unless she stole something, pawned it, bought curtains with the money. She'd stolen before, her heart in her mouth, sweat trickling down the insides of her arms. The first time it was only a string of beads that looked like pearls. The price ticket said a guinea. The pawnbroker ! . I - I. • . ; V, ¦ t '. ir 10, r < ' ' •' • ' I ¦,