New Book - The Seven Streets of Liverpool - Pearl Street 4 - by Maureen Lee (Pages 1 - 80)

First Published: 2014

This novel starts on Millenium Eve.

 Fifty years have passed since the war raged the country, and Penny, Jess Fleming's girl, returns to Bootle. She has lived in New York most of her life, and she has her own family, but her husband decided to leave her for someone else after thirty years. Penny is to meet Caitlin, Sheila's Reilly's daughter, and Nicky Stephen, Eileen's son, and they are going to celebrate the millenium in the cottage in Melling.

The next chapter takes us back to 1942. It is Christmas. Sheila is expecting her seventh child, and that Christmas Eve she gives birth to a baby girl, Molly. Brenda is still her best friend, and continues working as a seamstress. Sheila misses her sister who lives in Melling, and even though they meet at the weekend, it is not the same. Eileen is not going through a good time. Nick is not a happy man, and he only seems interested in his son, but not in her. He spends the week in London and returns home at the weekend. However, Nick starts an affair with a nineteen-year-old colleague, Doria Mallory, and he starts making excuses why he can't go back to Liverpool at the weekend. Eileen is worried and thinks that something is wrong, and her family and friends are also suspicious. Doria's brother, Peter, doesn't like how his sister is with Nick, so he goes to Melling, and as Eileen is having a garden party, he joins and meets her. From the first moment Peter is besotted, and then he decides that he wants to marry Eileen, so I imagine he has a plan to cause havoc on the marriage. I am angry with Nick. Eileen is a good woman, but Nick is proving to be nothing but a scoundrel. He feels guilty but his guilt is not enough to make him stop seeing Doria.

There is a new neighbour in Pearl Street. It is Lena Newton, whose husband is also a sea merchant, so she is often on her own. What she longs for is a baby, but it hasn't happened in the ten years that she has been married to Maurice. We understand that she married him because there was nobody else. Lena befriends Sheila and she is happy surrounded by children. As Lena likes films, she regularly goes to the cinema, and that is how she befriends George Ransome, who lives in Pearl Street and is the one who found Tony and Francis. George and Lena become friends, first going to the cinema together and then meeting in the evenings, and soon people start rumouring that there is something between the two of them.

Freda Tutty gets upset when she finds a man sleeping in her box room. She fears that her mum, Gladys, is back to her old tricks, but the young man, Tom Chance, explains that he met Gladys in midnight mass and when he explained it was too late to go to the hostel, she offered her home for the night. Freda is taken by the young man, and she invites him to share dinner with the family, and Tom eventually stays as a lodger. Freda, who is now thirteen, feels drawn to him and she is certain that when she turns sixteen, she will marryTom.