A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin Read online

  Woollen socks wore out so quickly, she would moan to Mary Margaret, and, though she could darn, she did not always have wool to do so.

  As she approached the Lee Jones’ League of Welldoers’ shabby brick building and saw the length of the queue, she quailed. Despite a cup of tea for breakfast and eating up a piece of crust that Number Nine had abandoned, she felt faint.

  So great was the number of people lined up patiently alongside the building’s wall that a policeman stood there to keep order. It would be a long wait.

  She went to the end of the queue and leaned against the wall for support, while she mechanically wheeled her pram backwards and forwards at her side, as if she were rocking Number Nine to sleep in it.

  There were many charities in Liverpool which tried, each in its inefficient way, to ease the city’s horrifyingly intense poverty. Unlike some other cities, the deprivation of its poorer citizens was blatantly obvious to the ladies who came in from the suburbs to shop and to the menfolk who had offices in the centre of the town.

  In the heart of the city, the interfusion of the two streams of inhabitants, the poverty-stricken and the fairly well-to-do, was impossible to escape; it flowed through the shopping areas and then the business districts, flooded along the dock roads and the Pier Head. And many a kind soul tried to do something about it.

  Amongst some of the upper classes, there was still, also, the latent folk memory that, if something was not done about the suffering, there might be a revolution – like the French one, with its nasty guillotine and baskets of bleeding heads.

  Amongst the dreadfully poor, Lee Jones was, perhaps, the most beloved benefactor. It was said that he squandered nearly all his fortune in order to help, but hardly made a dent in the need. As few others did, he understood, also, that not only was food for the body needed, but also some happy times to lighten the burden of misery.

  As she leaned against the wall, eyes closed, and tried not to faint, Martha remembered a day when he had brought into the court, on a wheelbarrow, a gramophone accompanied by records of popular songs. She smiled slightly, as she recalled with what enthusiasm she and her neighbours had poured out of the houses and nearly burst their lungs as they sang old Victorian music-hall songs along with the scratchy gramophone records. It had been a really good afternoon, with rays of summer sun creeping their way in between the close-packed housetops to light up the jolly faces.

  Her Brian, now pedalling his way round delivering meat for the butcher, would still whistle the same songs as he went. The boy had been thankful, also, to join the boxing club which Mr Jones had started, to give the lads something to do of a Saturday morning. Now, though Brian had to work Saturdays, he still went to practise on a Wednesday night. Patrick had said that Brian was good at it, Martha mused.

  Real nice lad, our Brian, she thought. When delivering to houses which did not have distrustful cooks, who weighed in his presence everything he delivered to them, he would sometimes take a sausage or a chop from one of the white, loosely wrapped parcels, and secrete it inside his shirt.

  When Martha made a half-hearted protest at its being theft, he would say stoutly that if she saw the pounds and pounds of meat which he delivered, she would know that it would never be missed. She would thankfully drop the rather black-looking offering into the soup pot.

  Sometimes, on a Saturday night, when a bit of tripe or shin of beef did not look good enough even to go into sausages, Mr Beamish, his employer, would give it to him, with the strict admonition that it should be cooked immediately he got home. The two assistant butchers whom Mr Beamish employed would snigger as Brian wrapped the gift up, but the lad did not care – food was food.

  The queue, mostly women, but with a few flat caps interspersed, shuffled along slowly. She moved with it, keeping her back to the wall for support, pushing the pram alongside her.

  ‘Atternoon, Mrs Connolly,’ said a cracked voice at her side.

  Martha blinked in surprise, and made an effort to straighten up. The voice of the local illegal moneylender in a charity queue?

  ‘Atternoon, Mrs O’Dwyer,’ she responded cautiously.

  She looked fearfully at the four-foot-high ancient crone, who was, equally, the bane and the person of last resort of all the housewives in the courts. She herself owed her a shilling from last Saturday. She had borrowed it in desperation. Patrick had had only two days’ work that week, and she had not even bread in the house. She had agreed to repay one shilling and threepence for the loan by next Saturday.

  Though the repayment was not yet due, a fearsome apprehension went through her. If she failed to pay this woman, her threats of disclosure to the relieving officer of undeclared earnings, or a hint to a husband that his wife was being unfaithful, whether true or not, or a whisper to an employer of a small theft, like Brian and his chops, could play havoc with a family.

  There seemed to be nothing that she did not know, nothing that she could not use to coerce money out of petrified borrowers. What was she doing here?

  Thoroughly enjoying her client’s obvious fear, Mrs O’Dwyer grinned toothlessly. Martha’s shocked expression was very satisfying to her: fear was part of her stock in trade.

  She was actually hunting for a debtor who had vanished mysteriously while still owing her five shillings, a very big debt. It had occurred to her that the woman might, on such a bad day, surface at the one place where she was likely to get food, the Lee Jones. She had not had any luck, but had decided, since she was there, she would beg a meal for herself.

  ‘Mr Connolly not doing so well, eh?’ she inquired of the paralysed Martha.

  Martha’s hands under the ends of her shawl were like ice, and her feet in her sopping wet boots felt that they would never move again.

  Holy Mary, help me, she prayed.

  It did not occur to her that she need not answer the moneylender’s question, that her polite salutation was sufficient. Her mouth opened and shut soundlessly as she groped for words.

  She was saved by a sudden ripple of shuffling down the line. The policeman on duty shouted, ‘Move along there, now.’

  Like well-trained dogs on leashes, the patient queue wended its way slowly through a doorway and into a narrow passageway, where they were, at least, out of the wind and sleet. Martha quickly pulled the pram in behind her.

  She glanced back and saw, with relief, that she was the last to be let into the passage. The moneylender was looking up sourly at the policeman, who was holding her back. Mrs O’Dwyer could not command any particular respect in a charitable organisation; she was merely another old woman who would be let in from the cold as soon as there was room.

  Martha was greeted by a superb smell of cooking, and a smiling young woman who kept the applicants in single file as they surged down the passage. She then passed them to an older lady seated at a table. Their names and addresses, with brief reasons for their being there and the number in the family, were noted.

  When Martha explained that she was trying to get something to eat for two big families, there was a pause, and she realised with a sinking heart that anybody could make that excuse in order to get a double ration.

  ‘Me friend has the TB, Miss. It would be the death of her to come out on a day like this,’ she pleaded.

  ‘Is she a widow?’

  The implication that Mary Margaret’s husband could have come on her behalf silenced Martha.

  She reluctantly muttered, ‘No.’

  She watched the lips of her interlocutor tighten, and wondered frantically if there was anybody among these charming-looking ladies who would understand that married men rarely came to such charities, unless they wanted something for themselves; it was the wife who scrounged, begged, borrowed or stole to cope with the needs of their huge families.

  Yet another lady was called and a whispered conversation ensued. The new lady, elderly, dressed in black, ran her fingers through a card index as she checked on Mary Margaret’s name. The card evidently told her something more than the na
me. She looked hesitantly at Martha. Then, with genuine pity at the sparrowlike creature before her, she said, ‘We’ll make an exception today – the weather is terrible.’

  Martha’s eyes filled with tears. She said with genuine feeling, ‘God’s blessing on yez, Miss.’

  The lady smiled at the weeping woman, and said, ‘I hope times get better for you soon.’

  In relief, Martha cried quietly to herself most of the long way home. In the pram, she had the huge bath-water ewer and Mary Margaret’s jar, both full of soup right up to their lids, and almost too heavy to lift. In addition, in big brown paper bags lay three two-pound loaves of bread, two for her own family and one for Mary Margaret’s, and a pile of potatoes baked in their jackets.

  The fact that the potatoes had been cooked told her that They understood the predicament of those who often had nothing with which to cook: no coal, no gas, no wood, no fireplace, no nothing.

  Some of Them was real nice, she snivelled to herself. In her gratitude, she even forgot the excruciating pain of her chilblains.

  SIX

  ‘Stop It, or I’ll Put the Boot to Yez!’

  January 1938

  As she carefully pulled the old pram up the front steps so as not to spill the soup, she could hear the ruckus in the house.

  She quickly loosened her wet shawl from her head, and, with one elbow, pushed open her own door. She bumped into little Number Nine who was apparently bent on escaping into the court.

  He looked up at her with a tear-stained face, and said thankfully, ‘Mam!’ as he hid himself in her skirts.

  She pushed him off and shoved the pram over the sill. She hastily backed it through her own doorway and then heaved it forward to slot it into the hall recess. As the raucous racket within rose in intensity, her expression became grim. With great care she picked up the containers of soup; their comforting warmth penetrated her blouse.

  Out of the corner of her eye, through the open door of her room, she could see that a full-scale fight was in progress between her daughter Bridie and Mary Margaret’s Dollie.

  ‘Jaysus! What’s up?’ she exclaimed, as she paused to get a better picture of what was happening.

  Tommy, Martha’s eleven-year-old, had hold of Dollie round the waist and was trying to pull her off a recumbent Bridie, to make her loose a chunk of Bridie’s hair and stop punching her in the face. Joseph and little Ellie, behind Mary Margaret’s chair, were clutching each other and screaming in unison. The two younger Flanagan girls cowered behind them, apparently paralysed at the sight of their bigger sister’s ferocity.

  Martha’s eyes narrowed as she slowly slid the soup containers to the floor by the door.

  Mary Margaret, grey-faced, stood holding onto Martha’s only chair with one hand, while with the other she clutched her sewing to her. She was shrieking, ‘Dollie, let go of her!’

  ‘She cheated,’ screamed Dollie, and hit Bridie squarely on the nose.

  As her nose began to bleed, Bridie roared in fury.

  Martha flung off her shawl, and waded in. With all the weight of her thin, muscular body behind it, she gave Dollie a resounding slap across her face. She swung her other hand and gave an equally heavy slap to Bridie’s bloodied face.

  ‘Stop it,’ she snarled, ‘or I’ll put the boot to yez.’

  Dollie let go of her antagonist and clapped her hands to her stinging mouth. She reared up and tumbled backwards over Tommy and brought him to the floor. He let out a curse which would have done credit to his father, and kicked her in the bottom. Beside herself with rage, Dollie turned on him.

  Martha leaned over her and grasped her round the waist. She lifted her bodily off the boy, turned round and shoved her out of the open front door of the house, into which the sleet was blowing steadily. She slammed the door shut on her and turned the key, in the comfortable belief that the shock of the cold would sober her. Her father’s sister, Auntie Ellen, who lived on the other side of the court, would probably take her in, listen to her and send her back home when she had sobered up.

  Bridie began to splutter to her mother a defensive explanation of the quarrel. Mary Margaret sat down suddenly on the chair and reeled in a faint.

  Impeded by all the smaller children hurling themselves towards her for comfort, Martha ignored Bridie.

  ‘Catch her, Tommy,’ she shrieked, pointing to Mary Margaret as the angry boy got up off the floor.

  She pushed roughly through the panic-stricken children towards her friend.

  ‘Now then, shut up, the lot of yez,’ she roared. ‘There’s your poor mam in a faint, now. And where’s our Kathleen in all this? Isn’t she home from school yet?’

  A muffled, scared voice from the top of the staircase outside said, ‘I’m here, Mam. I’m doing me homework.’

  ‘Well, forget it and get a cup of water for your auntie. Quick. Make yourself useful for once.’

  Quaking because she was certain that, as Martha’s eldest daughter at home, she would be blamed for the uproar, Kathleen tucked her exercise book and pencil into a corner of a stair. She scrambled down and hastily did as she was bidden: the water pail with a cloth over it was kept close against the staircase wall, so that it would not be knocked over. She dipped a grubby enamelled mug into it and handed it, dripping, to her mother over the heads of the whimpering younger children.

  Except with regard to Bridie, who was using the front of her frock to wipe her bloody nose and whose anger was reduced to a wail for attention, order was being restored. Even Dollie’s hammering on the outside door was easing off.

  Tommy had half lifted Mary Margaret so that she was leaning back in her chair. He was now doing his best to keep her from sliding down off it. He was so afraid that she would die that his face was nearly as colourless as that of the woman herself.

  He thankfully gave way to his mother, and retreated to sit on the stairs out of her way. He ignored Dollie’s slowly lessening pounding on the locked front door. Let her rot.

  Martha cooed gently to her friend, as she proffered the water, ‘It’s all right, Mary, love. Take a sip of water. I got lots of soup for you.’ She glanced at the fire which was low, but still glowed. ‘I’ll heat it for you and you’ll be all right, love.’

  She snatched a rag out of a basketful already neatly folded for the market, and dipped it into the water. Gently she dabbed Mary Margaret’s face.

  She yelled to Tommy over her friend’s head. ‘Come back and pull the mattress down from the wall. We’ll lay her on it, near the fire here.’

  Tommy slid back into the room. He called, ‘Mind out, everybody!’ and the children scattered, as he heaved the sagging mattress onto the bare floor.

  Mary Margaret showed signs of coming round, and, with Tommy, Kathleen and Martha’s help, she was gently laid down.

  Martha knelt by her and tucked her skirts and shawl around her, while she hissed in Kathleen’s ear, ‘How could you let them get into a fight like that? You’re the eldest, you should know better; and you know your auntie’s ill.’

  Kathleen, thirteen, emaciated, with a death’s-head face out of which peered huge, red-rimmed pale-blue eyes, looked back at her mother sullenly. She knew she could not win. Since her fourteen-year-old sister Lizzie had gone to be a kitchen maid in a house in Princes Road, she had not enjoyed being promoted to eldest and, therefore, responsible for all her siblings’ misdoings.

  Resentment in every line of her, she started to cry. ‘Sister Elizabeth was angry with me and says I must do me homework and she give me a pencil and book to do it in.’ Her voice faltered, as she remembered the biting remarks of her teacher. ‘The kids was all right. They were playing “I went to the market and I bought…”’

  Her mother grunted and her mouth closed in a tight line. ‘Doesn’t Sister know you’re the eldest and you got other things to do besides homework?’ she snarled, as she again dipped the rag into the mug of water and absently continued to wipe Mary Margaret’s face with it.

  Kathleen swallowed a sob. ‘I
t’s only happened just now. I heard Dollie say Bridie had missed one item – and I think Bridie had – I heard her – but she wouldn’t admit it. And in no time at all they were at it.’ She looked imploringly at Martha, as she added, ‘I thought Auntie Mary Margaret would stop them.’

  ‘Don’t you start,’ Martha ordered through gritted teeth, as the tears ran down the child’s white cheeks. ‘Your auntie needs all the help she can get.’

  She looked towards the fireplace, and asked, ‘Is there any tea in the pot?’

  Kathleen got up off her knees and reached for the teapot keeping hot on the hob by the fire. She weighed it in her hand. ‘There’s some,’ she said doubtfully, and sniffed back her tears.

  On the mattress, Connie and Minnie, their grubby faces greyer than usual, knelt near their mother’s head. They whimpered hopelessly, ‘Mam, Mam.’

  Exhausted, Mary Margaret ignored them. She had, however, heard Kathleen being scolded. She slowly raised herself on her elbow, as she whispered to Martha, ‘I’ll be all right in a minute. It’s not Kathleen’s fault.’

  ‘You stay right there, love. Kathleen’s going to get you a cup of tea. Then I’ll feed everybody.’ She turned to look for another daughter.

  When Martha had knelt down by the mattress, her younger son, Joseph, had picked up Number Nine and was now trying to make him laugh. He was promptly instructed, ‘Joe, you give Number Nine to Tommy – he looks as if he wants to pee. Then bring a few bits of coal over from the box there, to get the fire going.’

  Since the room was so crowded, Tommy had retreated again to the bottom stair, and was listening to the scene without much interest; he was, however, relieved that Mary Margaret was apparently showing signs of life.

  He obediently came in and took Number Nine to show him, yet again, how to do pee-pee in a bucket without spraying the floor.