A Liverpool Legacy Read Online Free PDF Page A

have survived without help, Pete had come to her aid. He’d been her saviour, her mainstay and prop, and he’d taken care of her ever since. She needed him now desperately. Pete had been kind and generous to everybody but particularly to her and Sylvie. They’d wanted for nothing. He’d been a loving husband, always smoothing out any little problems or difficulties she had.
    When finally Millie went to sleep she, too, had a nightmare in which she relived the storm that had caused Pete’s death; she woke up sweating and agitated.
    She was frightened and worried that she wouldn’t be able to keep his business running. Who was going to run it now? Millie had been thrown out of the cosy niche she’d lived in and was floundering. She couldn’t imagine how she’d cope without him.
    She couldn’t lie still any longer, she got out of bed and went down to the kitchen but she didn’t want any more tea. She stared out of the window feeling lost, but finally went back to bed, cold and miserable. However impossible it seemed, she would have to cope.

Chapter Four
    Millie’s mind went back to 1928, to the days before she’d married Pete. She’d been Millie Hathaway then and those had been tough times, very tough, but she’d managed to survive. She’d faced an acute shortage of money through the years of her youth and there’d been nobody better at making one shilling do the work of two, but it was as though juggling with the pennies had scarred her mind and she now needed affluence to feel secure.
    Her early childhood had been happy though she’d never known her father except in the photograph her mother Miriam had kept on her dressing table. He’d been killed in the Great War. Her mother had always worked in Bunnies, one of the big Liverpool department stores, and loved her job, but they’d never had much money.
    When Millie was reaching her fourteenth birthday and was due to leave school, Mum had asked Bunnies if they would employ her daughter. They’d agreed, although business was not good at that time. Thereafter, they’d both set off to work in the mornings wearing their best clothes and looking smarter than those who lived in similar rooms nearby. But her mother was no longer feeling well. Her health was beginning to fail, and though she went to the doctor, he didn’t seem to help much.
    Millie had not been able to settle at Bunnies. Although employed as a junior sales assistant, most of her time was spent unpacking new stock and pressing the clothes before they were put out for sale. She was not allowed to work anywhere near her mother and was at the beck and call of other more senior staff. She ran errands, wrapped purchases and made the staff tea.
    ‘You have to start at the bottom,’ her mother told her. ‘I did. You’ll soon start serving customers, just be patient. At least you’ve got a job.’ She had, and many of the girls she’d left school with had not.
    Then she met Ryan McCarthy who lived nearby and worked for William C. Maynard and Sons who owned a factory down in the dock area. He brought her little gifts of luxury soap and tins of talcum powder that smelled heavenly, and beguiled her with stories about his job. He was seventeen now and working for the sales manager; he told her he was learning how to run the sales department. They were sending him to night school and he’d have to take exams but in a few years he’d have a job that paid a decent wage. He meant to go up in the world.
    ‘If you don’t like what you’re doing,’ he said, ‘why don’t you apply for a job with the company I’m with? They’re a very good firm to work for.’ He showed her a copy of the Evening Echo where they were advertising an opening for a school leaver to help in the laboratory attached to their perfume department.
    Her mother hadn’t been too pleased but she knew Millie wasn’t happy at Bunnies. She’d done well at school and wanted a job with better prospects. ‘Lab work appeals to me,’