A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin Read online

  While he ate, Martha poked the fire, and then made a fresh pot of tea, courtesy of Mary Margaret, who had given her a couple of spoonfuls of tea leaves in thanks for bringing her the soup and bread. She laid two mugs on the floor beside the range, where they could be visible in the firelight. She then sat down close to Patrick on yet another sturdy fruit box, used for storing coal.

  Inside the box were a few lumps of coal, which Mary Margaret had also given her. Since Mary Margaret’s room did not have a fireplace, she cooked what little she had to cook on a primus stove. When she did not have paraffin for her stove, she would put a stew pot beside Martha’s on Martha’s fire.

  Mary Margaret’s Dollie thought it was a great game to follow a coal cart round the local streets and pick up any lumps that the coalman dropped. When he lifted the one-hundredweight sacks from his cart and carried them across the pavement to pour the contents down the coalhole in front of each terraced house, she would listen for the clang of the lid being put back onto the hole, and for the weary man to shuffle away. Then she would race over and pounce on any small bits she could find. Sometimes, when the horse moved with a jerk to the next house, a few pieces would roll off the back of the cart. Quick as a cat after a mouse, she would garner these, too, before any other child could beat her to it. She would bring it all back to her mother in an old cloth bag.

  Her mother promptly gave the coal to Martha in thanks for being allowed to share her fire. She would tell Dollie, ‘Without your Auntie Martha, I don’t know what I’d do, I don’t.’

  As Patrick finished the last ladleful, he gave a small sigh of relief, and handed the bowl back to his wife. She put it with the ladle on the mantel shelf: if it had stopped raining by tomorrow, she would take out anything to be washed to the pump in the court and rinse it there.

  She picked up a potato from the box top and, with a little smile, handed it to him. He tore it into pieces and ate all of it, including the skin.

  After he had finished eating, he belched and then sat for a while staring silently at the glowing embers.

  When Martha felt he was rested enough, she broached the subject which was worrying her most. She asked, ‘Did you know that Court No. 2 is to be emptied? That means that our Maria and George has got to move.’

  Patrick belched again, and then said, ‘Oh, aye. George told me. They’re getting a new house in Norris Green.’

  ‘What’s he going to do out there?’

  Patrick gave a grim laugh. ‘Go on Public Assistance. He’ll have to sling his hook.’

  Martha nodded. George would, indeed, have to hang up his docker’s hook for ever, if he was to live so many miles away in a suburb with no places to work and no transport. Even if there were a bus to take him down to the docks, how could he afford bus fares on a docker’s wage? It was ridiculous.

  ‘Can’t they find a Corpy flat nearer here for them?’

  ‘Na, Corporation flats is all filled up. All the court houses is being cleared, as you well know.’

  He stirred uneasily. ‘I heard some more today, though. They’re going to build air-raid shelters outside in the street all along here, right across the pavement from the front entry.’

  ‘Holy Mary! What for?’

  ‘They reckon there’s going to be a war. And what’s more, they’re going to pull down the wall of our court, so we’re open to the street.’

  ‘Humph, and where are they going to put the rubbish bins? They’re fixed in the wall.’

  ‘Don’t ask me. Maybe the council will give us a bin or two. They must reckon that if there’s no wall, we can run into the shelter real quick.’

  It did not strike either of them that the Public Health Department had viewed the statistics of the recent influenza epidemic with anxiety. Unable to bulldoze the remaining unhealthy courts until more City housing was built, they were using a cheap remedy, the removal of the enclosing wall, to get some cleaner air to circulate in the crowded court.

  Martha gave a little laugh of relief as her fear of being moved receded. ‘They must be expecting that this court won’t be moved for a while, if they’re building us a shelter.’ She chuckled. ‘We’d have a right job all of us getting through the entry at the same time, that’s for sure – Alice Flynn upstairs is that fat she has to edge through it sideways already. Why aren’t they moving us to Norris Green?’

  ‘Dunno. I suppose they haven’t built the houses yet.’

  ‘It’s real funny that they’ve found a way to make room for an air-raid shelter, but they can’t build new houses for us right here.’

  ‘Maybe they’ve stopped building houses everywhere and are doing air-raid shelters instead?’ suggested Patrick.

  Martha leaned forward to put her empty mug on top of the oven. ‘Is there really going to be a war, Pat?’

  ‘Oh, aye. I believe so.’

  ‘But Thomas said as Mr Chamberlain was talking with Adolf Hitler, and thought Germany was being reasonable.’

  Patrick shrugged, and then said shrewdly, ‘Na. All he’s doing is get us a bit of time to build tanks and guns. He’ll sell the Czechs down the river to do it, you’ll see.’

  ‘Will you have to go for a soldier, Pat?’

  Pat laughed. ‘Me? Na, I’m too old.’

  ‘Well, praise all the saints for that. And our Brian is too young?’

  ‘Oh, aye.’ He glanced round the dark room. ‘Where is the lad?’

  ‘He’s working late – it’s Thursday. And Tommy’s gone down to see his pal. They’ll be back just now.’

  Their father heaved himself up from the chair. ‘Well, I’m going to turn in. I’ll be working tomorrow.’

  He knelt down and moved little Joseph further across the mattress. He winced as he laid himself down, turned on his side and closed his eyes. He was asleep in seconds.

  Martha sighed, got up, took an old coat from a hook on the front door and laid it over him. She then rearranged Number Nine’s blanket to cover his sister Ellie as well. She would not lie down herself until she had decided what to do about breakfast – she would have to go out again into the cold, that was for sure.

  She stood uncertainly, her toothless mouth tightly clenched as she looked down on the sleeping children and her snoring husband. She had not a crumb left to give them for breakfast, and, as she had sat patiently waiting for Patrick, this fact had been gnawing at her, almost outweighing her fear of being whisked off to Norris Green.

  After the children’s fighting that afternoon she had not wanted to leave home until Patrick returned. She reckoned that Mary Margaret alone could not reasonably be expected to watch them all tonight; she really was not well, and this knowledge added to the painful ache of Martha’s own hunger and to her other worries – Kathleen, for example. She’d have to give the girl a good talking to: she must be taught to take care of the kids better.

  She turned, and quietly padded up the stairs and through Sheila and Phoebe’s room to reach Mary Margaret.

  Her friend was asleep on her narrow camp bed in the far corner, her head pillowed on a roll of rags, her shawl wrapped tightly round her.

  By the light of a candle, the girls were playing very quietly close to the entrance to Sheila and Phoebe’s empty room. Martha hissed at her daughters to come down and settle for the night.

  In chorus, they hissed back that they weren’t making any trouble and why couldn’t they play longer.

  ‘Because your dad’s home, and he wants you downstairs and sleeping – now! Meself, I got to go down to the corner shop for a few minutes. You come on right now – or do I have to get your father to you?’

  At this awful threat to tell Mr Connolly, Dollie Flanagan picked up the grubby cards and shuffled them neatly together. If Mr Connolly was home, probably her father soon would be from the pub. He could deliver a slap a good deal harder than the one Mrs Connolly had given her – and suppose Mrs C told her father about her behaviour that afternoon?

  ‘You’d better get going,’ she told her guests with a sigh, and g
ot up off the floor.

  With Martha’s brood safely wrapped in bits of blanket, they were each allotted in irritable whispers a piece of floor on which to sleep.

  Finally, Martha warned, ‘Now, our Kathleen, you’re in charge, remember? Brian and Tommy will be in just now.’

  ‘Oh, Mam!’ protested Kathleen, as she reluctantly spread herself as close to the fireplace as she could get without her mother noticing that she was hogging most of the heat.

  ‘Shut up and go to sleep. You’re the eldest. And mind you don’t wake your father.’

  Martha picked up her shawl from the back of the chair and wrapped it tightly round her. When she opened the outer door, she flinched at the cold. Her long walk up to the Lee Jones had tired her, but desperation drove her out again.

  She quickly shut the door behind her and looked up at the tiny patch of sky visible between the enclosing court housetops. It had stopped sleeting, and, far above her between dark shadows of cloud, she glimpsed a single star.

  Despite her despair, she thought, ‘Perhaps it’s my lucky star. At least They won’t turn us out come tomorrow.’

  NINE

  ‘Old Folk’s Home? Feels More Like a Bleeding Gaol’

  1965

  ‘You know, Angie, when I had to go down to the corner shop that night, I was more worried than I’d been in years.’

  Angie acknowledged the remark with an absent-minded nod. She was attending to Pat, the comatose patient in the next bed who had to be turned every two hours. She impatiently whipped back the curtain drawn round her and pulled the bedclothes off her.

  Martha was sitting up in her bed watching her, while she gratefully sipped the illicit mug of tea which Angie had brought up for her. Nowadays, every time the grossly overworked nursing aide came into the bedroom, which held five invalids, Martha would remorselessly continue the story of her life: it was as if, by doing so, she gave some meaning to her current existence.

  Today was no different.

  ‘For one thing, Angie, I was real worried about Them pulling down the wall between us and the main road. It meant that any stranger could walk in on the court. We’d always been safe in that court ’cos you knew everybody. You knew who to warn the kids about, who’d steal, even which women was giving the men the eye. And all the women watched out for the kids.

  ‘And that was the evening I realised that me Number Nine – that’s James – was the last kid born there: no new tenant had come in for years. It would only take two empty houses in Norris Green or Dovecot or some other place to rehouse Mary Margaret’s and my families. Then all the single people living there would be told – legal, like – that they must find themselves places to live, and, bingo, They could empty the whole court and pull it down.

  ‘I didn’t feel safe at all, I didn’t. Not about nothing.’

  She paused to take another slurp of tea, while Angie braced herself, heaved and successfully turned over the hapless Pat. Despite her coma, Pat screeched with pain.

  Martha winced. She carefully put her empty mug down on the smelly Victorian commode next to her bed.

  Then she went on more vaguely, as if anxious to justify the growth of old fears, ‘They’d been closing off the courts in the north end of the town for years: them houses in the north end was only ten feet by ten feet, one room to a floor. They was much more crowded than us – and they was a long way off from us.

  ‘But when George and Maria in the very next court to us was to be moved, it suddenly seemed as if me hour had come.’

  She flung her arm across her heart, as if to indicate her shock. ‘And I knew I’d have to go and see Maria, poor dear, fight or no fight. Couldn’t leave a sister to face eviction alone. In the end, I didn’t have time, I were that harassed. Weeks later, I walked all the way to Norris Green to see her in her new house.’

  Angie did not respond. She looked down at Pat, and hesitated: her undersheet was soaked; the bed should be stripped. Then she pulled the woman’s blankets over her. Leave the bedding to the night nurse, Mrs Kelly, to change. Let her do something for once, other than sleep on the visitor’s settee in the hallway – ignoring the cries of the patients, according to the sufferers themselves.

  Martha watched Angie with the same fascination as a rabbit might exhibit if faced with a snake about to eat it; she dreaded becoming entirely helpless, as were the rest of the women in her room. How would she bear the pain?

  She eased herself down into her bed, as if to evade the issue.

  Angie turned to Martha.

  Ignoring her monologue, she warned her, ‘Bath before breakfast for everybody tomorrow.’

  Over the edge of her top sheet, Martha stared at Angie with disgust. ‘Do I have to?’ she asked irritably.

  ‘Yes, doctor’s coming round.’

  ‘Strewth! Who cares? I don’t need no doctor. All the bloody fuss, just because the fucking doctor’s coming.’ She turned her face to the wall, and growled, ‘What with not being allowed out of bed, being here’s like being in a bleeding gaol, it is.’

  ‘Come on, Martha. No bad language, please.’ A weary Angie’s voice sounded cold and mechanical.

  ‘Fuck you,’ muttered Martha, and pulled the bedding over her head. Suddenly, silently, she began to cry.

  She remembered the liveliness of the court compared with her current desolation. Full of kind folk, it had been. Helped you out. Made you laugh. Even she herself had managed to make Maria and George laugh at their predicament, when eventually she went to commiserate with them over their move. Both George and Maria in their almost empty new dwelling had welcomed her with open arms.

  Now there was nobody, not even Jamie, her beloved Number Nine.

  TEN

  ‘Them Protties’

  January 1938

  Before stepping into the street on her way to the corner shop, Martha hesitated in the arched doorway of the court to allow her eyes to adjust to the single gaslight above her head. There were few people about on such a dank night.

  In the distance, she could see the lights from the pub windows making a welcoming pool of warmth on the wet pavement. She stared at it wistfully, and then turned the other way and proceeded past the barber’s, now closed but with a body tightly crouched for shelter in the doorway, past the Chinese restaurant, haunt of numerous prostitutes in search of of an ever-shrinking number of seamen with money to spend.

  She turned the corner that flanked the entrance to the sail maker’s loft, where Mary Margaret, dearest friend, had once worked when she was young and strong – a place where, normally, canvas awnings, tents and other needs of modern seagoing ships and yachts were still patiently stitched. Mary Margaret had been taught the trade by her father as she was his only surviving child – she must have been one of the few women who had undertaken such heavy work, thought Martha. There was, however, at present no light in any of its tall windows, because there was little reason to work late, nowadays.

  In the darkness, Martha clicked her tongue at the hollow sound of her own heavy footsteps as she passed the shut door. Anyway, Mary Margaret, poor dear, was too sick now to do anything so arduous.

  Two men eyed Martha and then eased past her on the narrow pavement. She increased her speed.

  As she opened the spring door to the corner shop at the end of the street, Mr O’Reilly was edging his way between three customers being served at the counter by his wife. Thin, bald, garbed in a fairly clean white apron, he was sweeping the wooden floor of his grocery shop.

  Martha stood shivering directly in the path of his broom, unsure how to approach him amongst so many chattering customers.

  He stopped his broom in mid-sweep and stared at the small, black bundle of womanhood. Martha Connolly!

  Trouble, he knew it. And she still owed him two shillings from last week. Play it carefully, he adjured himself.

  The courts, with their tight knot of casual labourers and merchant seamen, were the main problem of his life. Yet, if, on the day the men got their Public Assistance
or even a bit of a wage, he could squeeze out of them what they owed him, they were a very profitable part of his business.

  For example, their wives bought single ounces of lard or margarine: a fourpenny pound of margarine, cut into sixteen one-ounce pieces at a penny a piece, or a sixpenny pot of jam, sold by tablespoonfuls at a penny a spoonful, represented a wonderful profit; it helped to cover inevitable bad debts. At the same time, this splitting up of jars, packets and bags for his clients’ benefit, gave him an enviable reputation for kindly helpfulness.

  ‘Evening, Mrs Connolly,’ he greeted her carefully, as he leaned on his broom.

  Martha gulped. ‘Evenin’, Mr O’Reilly,’ she replied, as two of the customers picked up their baskets and turned to depart. They knew her, and, as they edged past to get to the door, they greeted her quite cheerfully.

  She smiled faintly at them, jealous that they had full shopping baskets. She did not even own a shopping basket, only a laundry one in which she carried her rags for sale in the market.

  When they had gone and the third customer seemed safely involved with Mrs O’Reilly at the counter, she muttered, ‘Could I have a word with you, John?’

  Resignedly, Mr O’Reilly turned and led her to the far end of the little counter, beside the bacon slicer.

  ‘I was wondering,’ she began cautiously, as he leaned his broom against a pile of boxes of Sunlight soap stacked against the wall, and turned towards her. ‘I was wondering if you could let me have a loaf of bread and some bacon bits – on the slate, till tomorrow night?’

  He looked down at her without expression. Then he said firmly, ‘You still owe us two bob from last week.’

  ‘I know, John – but I always do pay…’ she whined.

  ‘Not always. I’ve had to write it off more than once.’

  ‘Come on. Not that often.’