The Seven Streets of Liverpool Read Online Free PDF

surname and was living in Burtonwood until the conflict was over, when she and her little daughter Penny would move to the United States. Jessie came and went from the street like a yo-yo, having lived there on three separate occasions, most recently in Miss Brazier’s old house.
    Now, two other women were living in number 10: the Taylors, mother and daughter. Mrs Taylor was about forty and her daughter looked as if she hadn’t long left school. Both wore black a lot, as if someone close to them had recently died, presumably Mr Taylor. No one knew why they were there, or where they had come from. They were a quiet pair and were keeping themselves very much to themselves.
    At least they were until Aggie Donovan managed to trap the daughter directly outside the house, where she questioned her mercilessly for a good half-hour.
    ‘Her name’s Phyllis and she’s from some place near Hull,’ Aggie later confided breathlessly to Brenda Mahon. ‘Her mam’s a nurse and she’s got a job in Bootle hospital. And you’ll never guess why they’ve come.’
    ‘Because the mother’s got a job in Bootle hospital?’
    ‘No.’ Aggie glared at her neighbour. ‘It’s something else. Guess.’
    ‘I’m hopeless at guessing,’ Brenda confessed.
    ‘Her dad, Mr Taylor,’ Aggie said in a hushed voice, ‘came to work in Bootle after the war started and has never been seen since. He just disappeared off the face of the earth,’ she finished dramatically.
    ‘I know a Mr Taylor in Southey Street,’ Brenda said. ‘He’s about a hundred years old.’
    ‘It’s not him, they’ve checked,’ Aggie said impatiently. ‘They think he might have got caught up in an air raid and lost his memory, like. It was in a picture, Random something.’
    ‘ Random Harvest ,’ Brenda supplied. ‘With Greer Garson and Ronald Colman. I saw it last year.’
    Aggie dismissed this observation with a wave of her well-worn wrinkled hand. She had lived almost eighty years without having seen a single picture and was none the worse for it. Anyroad, real life was far more interesting. ‘They’re just going to wander round Bootle looking for him,’ she told Brenda. She rather liked the phrase. ‘Wander round,’ she repeated.
    ‘He might be dead,’ Brenda remarked.
    ‘In that case, someone would have told them; a copper, like. I mean, he’d have had his identity card on him.’
    Brenda agreed that this would have been likely. She escaped from Aggie and went to relay the news to Sheila, while Aggie looked for someone else to tell.

    The Taylors weren’t the only new arrivals in Pearl Street. The house at the top of the street used to be the dairy, but now that the country was on rations and people were required to register with a single grocer, it couldn’t exist selling nothing but milk. So the dairy closed, the farmer’s son who ran it and lived upstairs returned to live on the farm, and a billeting officer in Birmingham arranged for a Mrs Lena Newton to take over the flat. It had been swiftly redecorated and some items of new furniture provided. The dairy part was left empty.
    The street had already decided that Lena was as plain as the proverbial pikestaff. With her frizzy brown hair, round glasses and evidently nervous disposition she looked rather like a lost owl. Most people found this rather endearing, so it wasn’t all that surprising that she’d managed to cop a fella – to prove it, there was a wedding ring on the third finger of her left hand.
    Back in Birmingham Lena had been employed as secretary to an accountant, but had recently been directed by the Ministry of Labour to work for the manager of a small engineering firm in Hope Street, Liverpool, which manufactured propellers for the Royal Navy. His need of a secretary was far more urgent than that of a mere accountant – what were they doing towards the war?
    The move suited Lena ideally. Her husband, Maurice, was a merchant seaman and Liverpool was the port to which he