Chapter 19

‘HEY, BEAVER! ERNIE Beaver! Don’t you know you’re on perishin’ watch? Unless you want me to tip you out you’d better get on your feet and get up on deck, else you’ll find yourself on a charge. It’s just rung four bells for the change, so I’m off and you’re on.’

Cyril Huxtable groaned and opened his eyes, then sat slowly upright. Whenever somebody called him by his new name he had to remind himself not to glance around for his one-time shipmate, Ernie Beaver, whose identity he had decided on the spur of the moment to steal because he dared not go ashore in his home port under his own name. In fact, he was wary about going ashore anywhere, or had been. The reason – which still made his blood run cold – was something that had happened on a previous visit to Liverpool. Ever since the incident of the necklace – which had turned up, just as his mother had predicted, when he had finally secured another berth and Mrs Huxtable had stripped his bed of its filthy sheets so that she might take them to the wash house – he had been looking for an opportunity to do a little thieving on his own account. When the air raids had begun in 1940, he had followed the example of his drinking pals whenever he was on shore leave, and when a raid started had helped himself to anything not closely guarded before the all clear sounded. And not immediately, but soon enough, he had remembered just where he could find the most valuable loot of all.

So when his ship had next docked in his home port and a raid had started he had set off to the area where the people with money lived. When he reached the house he was heading for, he simply lumbered up the garden path, ducked under the branches of a flowering tree and, heart thumping, put a cautious hand on the kitchen door handle. He knew an old lady lived here with her niece, a simple soul who frequently left doors and windows unlocked, but he was pretty sure they would have gone into the country to escape the bombs, probably to relatives who would see them safe. In the good old days, as he now thought of them, he had owned a long ladder and had come round Princes Park on his shore leaves cleaning windows for a local contractor called Freddie Cummins. On one occasion he had looked through a bedroom window and seen old Mrs Rathbone sitting in front of her dressing table with a beautifully carved wooden box open before her. He had frozen, statue still, and had seen the sparkle of precious stones and the gleam of gold before she had closed the lid, pushed the box into the dressing table drawer and hobbled out of the room.

Greed had caused his eyes to sparkle, might have led him to throw caution to the winds then and there, but at the very moment his hand stretched out to open the window he had been hailed from below. ‘Hux! Will you get a move on, you lazy bugger! This may be beer money to you but it’s my livelihood! Come on down and go next door.’ Freddie Cummins had chuckled. ‘I keep these customers ’cos I’m reg’lar and cheap; there’s no one as mean as the rich. Go on, shift yourself.’