Liverpool
January 1919
Even after four years of war, the devastation was inconceivable. Pat found himself turning to look the other way, out across the Mersey estuary, rather than be forced to contemplate it; the bitter winter wind whipped at his thin overalls and made his eyes water, but the iron shades of sky and seawater were blissfully free of horrors.
“Time to get to work, lad,” said Joe, behind him. He heard the older man drag a bolus of phlegm out from the depths of his sinuses and hock it towards the stagnating, flotsam-choked dock water, several dozen feet below. For just the tiniest of moments, he considered pretending he hadn’t heard; but standing on top of a warehouse wasn’t going to put food on the table unless you did what you’d been sent up there to do. He sighed, and turned back, bracing himself for the sight.
The gaping maw of the funnel, embedded halfway through the warehouse roof, was terrifying enough; the wind rang faintly inside of it, tearing off flakes of rust and of red and black paint that had spent months blistering and corroding in the salt air. It was grotesque, unnatural; like the poor souls you saw limping around the city, missing arms and legs and worse. Yet it was a picnic compared to what lay beyond, in the ruins of Huskisson Dock No.1. His eye travelled the length of the funnel, to the ruined and half-sunken hulk of RMS Lusitania wallowing in the soiled water. He copped a good eyeful of her in her full ruin – her heat-blistered paint, her shattered superstructure, the gaping holes in her deck where the fire had burnt through, the drunken slant of her two remaining funnels – and felt his stomach lurch. He swallowed hard, feeling the awful burning of stomach acid pushing up his gullet, and turned away again.
He wished he hadn’t; the tide was out, and the skeletal remains of L61 had been revealed again in mid-river. The effects of nine months of the Mersey Estuary’s infamously violent currents were starting to have their effect – the canvas skin and gasbags had long been stripped away, and the internal metalwork was slowly being torn to pieces. The zeppelin lay where the guns of Fort Perch Rock had brought her down the night she had wrought her own devastation on Lusitania, one more hazard to shipping to go with the mines and shipwrecks that littered Liverpool Bay. He shuddered visibly.
“Come on, kidder, we haven’t got all day.” Joe always sounded gruff at the best of times, but lately he’d been constantly angry. Everyone seemed angry these days – or upset, or shell-shocked; the devastation of the German drive to the sea, and the vindictiveness of the Armistice Britain and her allies had been forced to sign in the Palace of Versailles, seemed to have knocked the fight out of folks who had lived through four years of attritional trench warfare, rationing and zeppelin raids. It was as though the world had shaken for a moment beneath their feet, and sent all that they had known tumbling and crumbling around them.
Maybe it was guilt that motivated theses feelings – guilt for cheering their sons and brothers and fathers off to war; guilt for staying behind to do the jobs that still needed doing; guilt for believing the lies and propaganda that the bastards in Parliament had shoved their heads full of, and for partaking in it so readily; guilt for having survived. He couldn’t tell for certain, but he was sure Joe was cursing himself for not signing up for the Pals back in ‘14, when he was already pushing fifty and had a safe job on the docks. God alone knew Pat felt that guilt weighing on him, and he hadn’t even been old enough to fight.
And all that might be true, but standing around ruminating on it wasn’t going to get the damn job done.
“You realise how lucky we are to have this,” growled the elder as Pat turned to retrieve his tools from the saggy canvas bag he had hauled to the rooftop. It wasn’t a question, but Pat nodded vigorously in response. Work had dried up almost completely since the Armistice; it was why Joe, with almost forty years’ experience on the docks, was now joining Pat on a scrapping job that might last them a few months at most. He thought of Mary, his distraught, widowed sister, supporting a child on an Army pension and a few pennies from taking in laundry and what little their parents could spare to help them; and then he remembered the young lad over the road, who had gone to war a strapping, ruddy giant of a man and returned four years later broken and emaciated after taking a lungful of German gas near Antwerp, who had shut himself in the cupboard under the stairs out of shame that he could no longer offer a contribution to the household.
The hatch in the roof clanked open, and a shaven head poked out accompanied by as much of the attached shoulders as the space would comfortably allow. A boxer’s face, with two small, piggy eyes in it, swivelled to look at them both in turn.
“You boys doin’ oh-kay uppa-here?” the newcomer said in the machine-gun style of one who thinks his grasp of the language is better than it actually is. Joe just grunted in response.
“Yes, thank you Benny,” said Pat quietly. The Italian newcomer grinned and nodded, a gesture which looked far more malevolent than he had probably intended.
“I gotchu coffee waitin’ when you-a ready,” he said, going back down the ladder. The hatch slammed shut behind him, echoing around the abandoned dock.
“Benny Muscles,” said Joe, shaking his head, in what was – for him – a tone of wonder. Pat wondered if it was because of the Italian’s unbelievable stories of his escape from the clutches of D’Annunzio’s Arditi, or his unwavering yet misguided belief in the nigh-miraculous quality of his coffee. Nobody ever had the heart – or possibly the nerve – to tell the big man they could still taste the acorns.
The interloper gone, Joe bent to retrieve his toolbag, pausing only to hock another gob of spit over the gutter. Pat watched him do it with a careful focus, trying not to see the fire-scorched carcass behind him. Joe turned back from the edge, saw him staring at him, and scowled.
“Don’t just stand there, boy,” he growled, “we got work to do.” He strode over to the funnel and dropped his tools beside him with the unceremonious clang of the furious and impotent. “Besides, we might not get another job like this in a long time, you and me. Nor any of the lads on this job.”
“What, all of ‘em?” piped up Pat, shocked into replying. Joe just sneered.
“‘Aven’t you noticed, lad? They blame us for losing the war ‘cos we’re Catholic. Listen to ‘em, the Proddy-dogs, when they get together and talk and they think we can’t hear ‘em – ‘the Frogs and the Eyeties and the Paddy bastards stabbed us in the back ‘cos the Huns scared ‘em, and now we’ve got to suffer along with ‘em for their cowardlyness. We should’ve joined up with the Kaiser in the first place, then we’d be dictating to the Papists and all and we wouldn’t have the Yanks breathing down our necks’.” He spat again; this one landed on the cobbles, and sat undulating in the bitter wind. “You mark my words, lad, if things don’t get better soon they’ll be chasing us out of this country. Then where we gonna go?”
Pat swallowed; Joe was scary when he got agitated. “We could always go to America-”
“America?” Joe laughed bitterly. “They’re no better than this place, in fact they’re worse! Barely even got round to fighting, and they’re pissing and moaning about the money they lent us and doing horrible things to each other. You hear about what happened in Chicago? All those Polacks they burnt to death in that church?”
It was impossible not to have heard of it; the news had flashed around the city like wildfire, and people had talked about little else for a fortnight now. Whether this was a tragedy, or exactly what the pigs had coming to them, depended on whether your soul looked to Rome or Canterbury for salvation. Pat nodded solemnly, feeling suddenly woozy.
“That could be us,” snapped Joe, flinging an arm out and pointing in the direction of the city. Pat, head swimming, followed the movement instinctively; unfortunately, the Lusitania was still in the way. He focused on the wreck for an eternal moment, then his stomach lurched again, and this time he could not fight it down. He turned away, staggered to the crest of the roof, and threw up violently on the other side.
Behind him, Joe shook his head. The older man wrapped his coat tighter against himself in a vain effort to keep out the unending, freezing wind off the bay, before picking up the nozzle of the oxy-acetylene torch and sparking it to life.
The bright flame cut into the metal of the beached, broken funnel, its quiet feathering lost against the whistling wind, death rattle of the greyhound of the seas.
January 1919
Even after four years of war, the devastation was inconceivable. Pat found himself turning to look the other way, out across the Mersey estuary, rather than be forced to contemplate it; the bitter winter wind whipped at his thin overalls and made his eyes water, but the iron shades of sky and seawater were blissfully free of horrors.
“Time to get to work, lad,” said Joe, behind him. He heard the older man drag a bolus of phlegm out from the depths of his sinuses and hock it towards the stagnating, flotsam-choked dock water, several dozen feet below. For just the tiniest of moments, he considered pretending he hadn’t heard; but standing on top of a warehouse wasn’t going to put food on the table unless you did what you’d been sent up there to do. He sighed, and turned back, bracing himself for the sight.
The gaping maw of the funnel, embedded halfway through the warehouse roof, was terrifying enough; the wind rang faintly inside of it, tearing off flakes of rust and of red and black paint that had spent months blistering and corroding in the salt air. It was grotesque, unnatural; like the poor souls you saw limping around the city, missing arms and legs and worse. Yet it was a picnic compared to what lay beyond, in the ruins of Huskisson Dock No.1. His eye travelled the length of the funnel, to the ruined and half-sunken hulk of RMS Lusitania wallowing in the soiled water. He copped a good eyeful of her in her full ruin – her heat-blistered paint, her shattered superstructure, the gaping holes in her deck where the fire had burnt through, the drunken slant of her two remaining funnels – and felt his stomach lurch. He swallowed hard, feeling the awful burning of stomach acid pushing up his gullet, and turned away again.
He wished he hadn’t; the tide was out, and the skeletal remains of L61 had been revealed again in mid-river. The effects of nine months of the Mersey Estuary’s infamously violent currents were starting to have their effect – the canvas skin and gasbags had long been stripped away, and the internal metalwork was slowly being torn to pieces. The zeppelin lay where the guns of Fort Perch Rock had brought her down the night she had wrought her own devastation on Lusitania, one more hazard to shipping to go with the mines and shipwrecks that littered Liverpool Bay. He shuddered visibly.
“Come on, kidder, we haven’t got all day.” Joe always sounded gruff at the best of times, but lately he’d been constantly angry. Everyone seemed angry these days – or upset, or shell-shocked; the devastation of the German drive to the sea, and the vindictiveness of the Armistice Britain and her allies had been forced to sign in the Palace of Versailles, seemed to have knocked the fight out of folks who had lived through four years of attritional trench warfare, rationing and zeppelin raids. It was as though the world had shaken for a moment beneath their feet, and sent all that they had known tumbling and crumbling around them.
Maybe it was guilt that motivated theses feelings – guilt for cheering their sons and brothers and fathers off to war; guilt for staying behind to do the jobs that still needed doing; guilt for believing the lies and propaganda that the bastards in Parliament had shoved their heads full of, and for partaking in it so readily; guilt for having survived. He couldn’t tell for certain, but he was sure Joe was cursing himself for not signing up for the Pals back in ‘14, when he was already pushing fifty and had a safe job on the docks. God alone knew Pat felt that guilt weighing on him, and he hadn’t even been old enough to fight.
And all that might be true, but standing around ruminating on it wasn’t going to get the damn job done.
“You realise how lucky we are to have this,” growled the elder as Pat turned to retrieve his tools from the saggy canvas bag he had hauled to the rooftop. It wasn’t a question, but Pat nodded vigorously in response. Work had dried up almost completely since the Armistice; it was why Joe, with almost forty years’ experience on the docks, was now joining Pat on a scrapping job that might last them a few months at most. He thought of Mary, his distraught, widowed sister, supporting a child on an Army pension and a few pennies from taking in laundry and what little their parents could spare to help them; and then he remembered the young lad over the road, who had gone to war a strapping, ruddy giant of a man and returned four years later broken and emaciated after taking a lungful of German gas near Antwerp, who had shut himself in the cupboard under the stairs out of shame that he could no longer offer a contribution to the household.
The hatch in the roof clanked open, and a shaven head poked out accompanied by as much of the attached shoulders as the space would comfortably allow. A boxer’s face, with two small, piggy eyes in it, swivelled to look at them both in turn.
“You boys doin’ oh-kay uppa-here?” the newcomer said in the machine-gun style of one who thinks his grasp of the language is better than it actually is. Joe just grunted in response.
“Yes, thank you Benny,” said Pat quietly. The Italian newcomer grinned and nodded, a gesture which looked far more malevolent than he had probably intended.
“I gotchu coffee waitin’ when you-a ready,” he said, going back down the ladder. The hatch slammed shut behind him, echoing around the abandoned dock.
“Benny Muscles,” said Joe, shaking his head, in what was – for him – a tone of wonder. Pat wondered if it was because of the Italian’s unbelievable stories of his escape from the clutches of D’Annunzio’s Arditi, or his unwavering yet misguided belief in the nigh-miraculous quality of his coffee. Nobody ever had the heart – or possibly the nerve – to tell the big man they could still taste the acorns.
The interloper gone, Joe bent to retrieve his toolbag, pausing only to hock another gob of spit over the gutter. Pat watched him do it with a careful focus, trying not to see the fire-scorched carcass behind him. Joe turned back from the edge, saw him staring at him, and scowled.
“Don’t just stand there, boy,” he growled, “we got work to do.” He strode over to the funnel and dropped his tools beside him with the unceremonious clang of the furious and impotent. “Besides, we might not get another job like this in a long time, you and me. Nor any of the lads on this job.”
“What, all of ‘em?” piped up Pat, shocked into replying. Joe just sneered.
“‘Aven’t you noticed, lad? They blame us for losing the war ‘cos we’re Catholic. Listen to ‘em, the Proddy-dogs, when they get together and talk and they think we can’t hear ‘em – ‘the Frogs and the Eyeties and the Paddy bastards stabbed us in the back ‘cos the Huns scared ‘em, and now we’ve got to suffer along with ‘em for their cowardlyness. We should’ve joined up with the Kaiser in the first place, then we’d be dictating to the Papists and all and we wouldn’t have the Yanks breathing down our necks’.” He spat again; this one landed on the cobbles, and sat undulating in the bitter wind. “You mark my words, lad, if things don’t get better soon they’ll be chasing us out of this country. Then where we gonna go?”
Pat swallowed; Joe was scary when he got agitated. “We could always go to America-”
“America?” Joe laughed bitterly. “They’re no better than this place, in fact they’re worse! Barely even got round to fighting, and they’re pissing and moaning about the money they lent us and doing horrible things to each other. You hear about what happened in Chicago? All those Polacks they burnt to death in that church?”
It was impossible not to have heard of it; the news had flashed around the city like wildfire, and people had talked about little else for a fortnight now. Whether this was a tragedy, or exactly what the pigs had coming to them, depended on whether your soul looked to Rome or Canterbury for salvation. Pat nodded solemnly, feeling suddenly woozy.
“That could be us,” snapped Joe, flinging an arm out and pointing in the direction of the city. Pat, head swimming, followed the movement instinctively; unfortunately, the Lusitania was still in the way. He focused on the wreck for an eternal moment, then his stomach lurched again, and this time he could not fight it down. He turned away, staggered to the crest of the roof, and threw up violently on the other side.
Behind him, Joe shook his head. The older man wrapped his coat tighter against himself in a vain effort to keep out the unending, freezing wind off the bay, before picking up the nozzle of the oxy-acetylene torch and sparking it to life.
The bright flame cut into the metal of the beached, broken funnel, its quiet feathering lost against the whistling wind, death rattle of the greyhound of the seas.
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