Coming Home to the Four Streets

by Nadine Dorries

  Peggy sounded more confident than she felt and little Paddy could hear the guilt in her voice. Maura had always helped her to manage her money, for money was a mystery to Peggy. It slipped through her fingers and, unable to add up very well, she had no idea how.

  ‘Go on, lad, off to school, no dawdling. Why are you the last to leave?’ asked Peggy as she slapped his cap onto his head and pushed him out of the door.

  ‘Oh Mam, my bag!’ he said, ducking under her arm and clattering up the wooden staircase. ‘Max, Max, quick,’ he hissed as he pulled out the box from under the bed. Max opened the lid himself and little Paddy dropped him into his knapsack. ‘Here you go, pobs,’ said little Paddy, opening his hand with the pobs he had kept from the bowls. He smiled as the rat made short work of his breakfast and slipped into the knapsack.

  ‘For goodness’ sake, Paddy,’ said Peggy as he walked back into the kitchen. ‘What’s got into you?’ And she thrust him out into the cobbled yard. She was in a hurry to finish the half-smoked Woodbine big Paddy had pinched off and left on the kitchen table, Peggy pushing him out of the door before he had time to slip it behind his ear. The effort of the morning, the sheer agony of getting big Paddy out and down the steps, the worry of making the bread stretch, the shame of begging milk from Eric… it was all almost too much. But at least Paddy was in work, all the kids were at school and she had half a Woodbine to look forward to with her broken biscuits.

  ‘Ah, bliss,’ she said as she bent over the flame in the range and lit the ciggie. She sank into the chair and inhaled deeply. All she had to do now was find her way through the day.

  She kicked off her slippers and rubbed at her bunions as she thought through her options. She would ask Kathleen for help first. If that didn’t work, she would have to go and see Sister Evangelista and hope to God she didn’t send her to the priory. She could do without a lecture from the priest today, seeing as she hadn’t been to mass for over two weeks. But she was the only woman in the street who had no footwear except slippers for the outdoors, a mark of shame that even Peggy felt as she knelt for communion. It was the lack of a proper pair of shoes that kept her from mass, but how could she tell either Sister or the priest that? She drew hard on the last shred of the Woodbine and savoured the hit of the tobacco entering her lungs. All she was missing was tea, her very best friend, food in the cupboard, fuel in the coal-hole, a means to pay the rent and the coalman, a pair of shoes, regular milk from Eric, sixpences for the leccy and the reassurance that big Paddy would be in work every day, for life to be a whole lot better than it was right now.

  ‘Is that too bleedin’ much to ask for, is it?’ she asked the statue of the Virgin Mary, perched next to the clock and then, flooded with guilt, blessed herself and uttered a quick succession of Hail Marys. ‘Ah, Maura, you were so much better with the words than me,’ she said.

  Maura would do the talking with Sister Evangelista when Peggy was desperate for a winter jumper for one of the children, or a jumble sale coat. And then she had a thought which was so warming she rose and pushed the chair under the kitchen table. She would call into Kathleen’s and ask her to help her write another letter to Maura though she hadn’t answered her last one, yet. And maybe Maura might just send her a postal order in time for the carnival, because without the means to get her shoes back from the pawnshop, the shame would keep her from attending that too. The effort of standing had made her back twinge again and her eyes filled with tears.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ she said to herself, ‘you’ll manage, don’t cry.’

  Chapter Five

  All Malcolm Coffey wanted was to run his very lucrative little business, be a good host and to be left alone. His happiness in life was derived from the new television he had installed in his sitting room, the pools he filled out once a week, mass on Sunday, his morning tea with the Daily Post and his nightcap of the dark rum, courtesy of Captain Conor, which he kept in his Jacobean sideboard.

  Malcolm had been amazed to see Biddy Kennedy so early and with her Mary Malone, whose cheeky brother, Malachi, was Malcolm’s chief suspect as being his milk thief. He was as much a scallywag as Mary looked saint-like.

  Now Biddy tapped the empty hook on the coat rack behind the kitchen door. ‘Hang your coat here, Mary,’ she said, ‘then get the kettle on.’ Mary, eager to please, obeyed instantly. ‘Have you any word from Captain Conor?’ Biddy asked Malcolm and a look of concern crossed his face.

  ‘I haven’t,’ he said. ‘The last I heard about the Morry was from a crew that was in here three months ago. They’d had word that Conor was sailing to the West Indies and they have pirates out there, they do. No one has had word since.’

  Biddy pursed her lips, and tutted as she removed her cigarettes from her pocket. ‘Everyone is in a right state. Maisie has been moaning that there’s no material for the carnival frocks and Ena had to go to the doctor’s to get tablets for her nerves, convinced the Morry has sunk – apparently she said that Babs had told her a body had been washed up on a shore somewhere in the world and it was probably Conor’s.’

  Malcolm gasped. ‘No, surely not? Was that on the news?’

  Biddy took out a box of matches and shook her head. ‘Not very likely, is it? There’s a lot of ocean and a lot of sailors! But it’s been that long since she heard from him and Babs is in a flap in case her and Bill have to fund the rum for the carnival. Babs said she’ll make it up to Ena and give her a free port or two to compensate.’ Biddy sat herself at the kitchen table. ‘Get your notepad and some paper, Malcolm, we need to make a list for Mary. She’s here to clean your ornaments, not admire them.’

  ‘Biddy, I don’t need any help…’ Biddy gave Malcolm one look and his protest faded away. He made his way to the tiny reception next to the front door and returned with the pad and pen and placed them in front of Biddy, at the same time as Mary laid two cups and saucers on the table.

  ‘Would you like me to make you any breakfast, Mr Coffey?’

  Malcolm was momentarily taken aback and attempted to stutter a reply.

  Biddy sighed. ‘Oh, close your mouth, Malcolm! Honestly, she asked did you want any breakfast, not a four-course meal, and given that this is a guest house it seems to me that maybe she should start learning now. Right, a bacon and egg sandwich for Mr Coffey, Mary, with lashings of HP sauce. Let’s see if you can find your way around his kitchen. A bit of toast for me, queen.’

  Mary made no reply but, glancing around the large kitchen, set to work while Biddy turned again to an impressed Malcolm. Maybe Biddy was right; maybe he could do with the help.

  ‘Right, Malcolm, you are the only one who gets the telegrams when a crew is coming in, so can you send a telegram the other way like, to a ship? One that’s still on the water.’

  Malcolm shook his head. ‘Tramp ships like the Morry don’t have a schedule, so no one knows when they are going to turn up and they trade on the spot, but I do know the man in America who buys for Conor’s ship. I can send a telegram to him if it helps?’

  ‘That sounds like a good idea, though you’d have thought he would have got a message to Ena, wouldn’t you? But anyway, let’s go to the post office, Malcolm, and send a message to Captain Conor through this buyer fella. These streets need a haul, for no one has anything. The docks are only taking on half a pen every morning because there aren’t many ships in and those that do come in have smelted iron and lumber and you can’t toast a carnival or put a roastie in a child’s belly with that, can you?’

  Malcolm looked aghast. ‘I’ll be doing no such thing!’ he spluttered. ‘I won’t be a part of anything crooked and underhand. I’ll ask Captain Conor when his crew needs the rooms, but I won’t be mentioning a haul.’

  Biddy took a deep breath as Mary placed a teapot on the table. ‘Kathleen Deane and her daughter-in-law, Alice, have been to see me. They’re worried sick about the carnival so we must tell Conor what we need before he fills in the manifest.’

  A haul was when an agreement was reached with a captai
n and enough cargo was slipped off the ship at night to sell on the black market, with some being kept for the dockers’ families and widows. Biddy hadn’t slept well the previous night. She’d thought the days of the hunger on the streets that she’d seen during the forties were over.

  ‘I thought that with the end of the war and the busy traffic in the docks, we could rest easy, that there would be enough work for everyone forever,’ she said now. ‘But we can’t, Malcolm.’

  The smell of bacon filled the kitchen. Biddy had primed Mary on the way to Malcolm’s. ‘You’ll cook Mr Coffey breakfast for him. I need to ask him to do something he won’t want to do and, like with all men, it will be a lot easier if he is distracted by food to put in his belly.’

  Mary now set a plate loaded with two slices of freshly sliced bread, dripping in butter melted by the hot bacon and fried egg with rivulets of HP sauce running down the sides, in front of Malcolm. Biddy winked at her; Mary had done better than she had expected. Now she would let his initial indignation melt away and compassion take over, while the smell of bacon wreaked havoc with his resolve and the warmth of it melted his heart.

  Biddy felt the familiar pangs of pity wash over her as he took the first bite of his sandwich. His wife had been a fatality during the blitz, in the bomb that had dropped on Mill Road hospital, and their baby, not a day old, would very likely have been on her breast. They lay there still, buried beneath the concrete that covered those bodies unable to be retrieved. His parents, out shopping, had been killed in a direct hit two weeks later, so as Malcolm fought for king and country, he lost his entire family at home in Liverpool and returned to the dust-sheeted family home where the ghosts of everyone he had loved had waited in the shadows to greet him.

  Biddy watched as he bit into the doorstep and a slow smile of appreciation appeared.

  ‘Shall I pour the tea?’ Mary asked.

  Now it was Biddy’s turn to be impressed. ‘My, Sister has trained you well over at that convent,’ she said as Mary poured the tea. ‘Get a cup for yourself too. So, Malcolm, I want you to send that telegram and I want you to do it because your conscience will trouble you something wicked if you don’t when you get to hear about all the kids who have gone hungry and how the carnival had to be cancelled. You don’t want that, do you? We don’t have long.’

  ‘Biddy, you’re putting me in a terrible position. I’m not a lawbreaker and I don’t like trouble. I live my life a certain way, the proper way, with everything just so.’

  ‘Tell you what, Malcolm, you send a telegram saying Jerry Deane is in need of a usual favour. That way, you aren’t committing yourself to anything and Conor will know exactly what you’re asking him?’

  Biddy knew before the words had left her mouth that he would agree.

  ‘All right,’ he said reluctantly, ‘I’ll do it, Biddy, but on this condition: not one bit of whatever it is comes off that ship ends up in the Seaman’s Stop, do you hear? I’ll send your telegram today, for Mrs Deane is a good woman and if she has asked you, then it must be necessary.’

  Biddy smiled. Her goal had been achieved. ‘Of course I agree. And Maura and Tommy’s house is empty, so we can store it all in their wash house out the back, just like we always have. Now get your coat, Malcolm, and I’ll come to the post office with you. Mary, here’s your list. The rooms all have numbers on the door. Top and bottom each one out and then start on the dining room. You’ve done it with your mother enough times before.’

  Mary gathered up Malcolm’s empty plate and cup and obediently carried them to the sink,where she began to wash up.

  ‘Did she take a vow of silence?’ said Malcolm to Biddy.

  ‘If she had, it would be a strange thing altogether, coming from a house with nine kids, isn’t that right, Mary?’

  Mary turned from the sink and smiled. ‘I’ll get cracking once I’ve cleaned up here,’ she said.

  Malcolm grinned. ‘She may not be a nun, Biddy, but it seems you’ve brought me a saint.’

  Chapter Six

  Once the door slammed shut, Mary leant against the range and gazed around the large kitchen where she would now be spending many hours. It was bigger than her mother’s on Nelson Street and smaller than the convent kitchen at St Saviour’s where she had worked for six mornings a week since she left school at the age of fifteen. Only those who were considering taking the veil and becoming postulants were allowed to work full-time and her mother, Deirdre, had made it very clear to her that this was her destiny. Mary had promptly burst into floods of tears.

  ‘Send Malachi to be a priest, not me to be a nun!’ she had howled.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Malachi wants to be a docker like your da. What’s up with you, Mary? Jesus and Lord above, you won’t ever have a moment’s worry in your life. Full board and everything paid for, no visits to the rent office for you. Why do you think the nuns are always smiling? Not a care in the world amongst them.’

  Mary had stared at her mother, disbelieving, already knowing it was futile to object, already plotting an escape. As it was, Sister Evangelista had come to her rescue.

  ‘Mary, I see no great calling in you, but work amongst us, spend time here observing our devotions and should you feel things change…’

  Things did not change and Mary knew they never would. There was nothing special about Malcolm’s kitchen, and she concluded resignedly that, whatever its size, a kitchen was a kitchen and the stage upon which her life’s dramas were doomed to play out.

  ‘There’s no one else on these streets who has a son for a priest or a daughter for a nun,’ her mother had begged. ‘Try harder to see a way, Mary.’

  Mary’s taking the veil would bestow upon Deirdre a degree of respectability, an elevated position that she could achieve by no other means. Not by money or birth, or influence. Deirdre would become the mother of a nun and there was no greater status to be achieved on the four streets.

  ‘I hope if our Mary does take the veil, someone writes to Ireland and tells Maura Doherty! That’ll put her nose right out of joint,’ she had said to Biddy, who kept a close eye on Mary. With no succour from Biddy, no endorsement of her plans, Deirdre played the same tune to her husband Eugene, who was equally ambivalent. Eugene was a beaten man, mild-mannered, afraid to express an opinion in his own house, so he simply said, ‘She’s a good girl, is our Mary; she will do what’s right.’

  On the rare occasion she was alone with her da, Mary would plead for his help. ‘Da, tell Mam I don’t want to take the veil – and if I did, the money Sister pays me would stop.’ Mary was paid five shillings for her kitchen toils and she handed every penny over to Deirdre.

  Eugene would fold his paper, lay it on his knee, rub his chin and reply, ‘The thing is, queen, your mam sees a way here to get one over on Maura Doherty, who always lorded it over her when we got here, from back home. Queen of the four streets was Maura. You keep working in the kitchens and just say no, if Sister asks you about your devotion. Be polite, mind, and it will all pass, you’ll see.’

  In the end, it was Biddy who came to her rescue. When Biddy told Deirdre about Malcolm needing help and the extra money Mary would earn, Deirdre, with Sister Evangelista’s blessing, reluctantly let her go. And now the Seaman’s Stop was to be her salvation, not the veil as Deirdre had hoped. Mary and her red, chapped and work-worn hands had travelled from her mother’s kitchen to the convent kitchen and now to Malcolm’s kitchen – and she wasn’t yet eighteen. She flopped down onto the still-warm chair vacated by Biddy. Leaning forward, she placed her head in her hands and rubbed her eyes.

  ‘Oh Jimmy, where are you?’ she said.

  There were no tears; they had stopped falling long ago. Sometimes it felt as though all that had happened to her in the past year was just a dream, but then at night, in the dark, she would remember, and it was as if she could hear his voice, feel his kiss, smell him. He was her first thought at the beginning of each day and her last as she closed her eyes at night.

  It was all thanks
to a tip-off from Malachi that Deirdre had caught Jimmy kissing Mary outside their back gate and she had let out a scream as she ran at the couple and prised them apart.

  ‘Have you no shame?’ she hissed as she dragged Mary through the gate into their own backyard and into the kitchen. ‘What the hell are you doing? I cannot believe what I’ve just seen. Have you lost your mind, Mary? His reputation is notorious – if your father had caught you, he’d have had his guts for garters.’

  They both knew this was patently not true, but Deirdre raged on. ‘You know he’s up before the magistrate every five minutes, don’t you? And now he’s tried to rob a betting shop, tied up a poor innocent man who was doing nothing but his job, almost killed him. He’s turned an awful corner, that boy has. No one respectable speaks to his mother because of it.’

  Mary’s eyes had filled with tears as she stared down at her feet. She didn’t care that Jimmy was regularly up before the magistrates, he had promised her he would change his ways after this last time in court.

  ‘He said he won’t do any more robbing, Mam, he’s promised me. He said he would go straight now.’

  Deirdre looked incredulous. ‘Promised you? Promised you? Did he say that to get you into his bed, did he?’ Deirdre’s expression had turned from one of anger to fear. ‘Mary, a man will say anything, anything at all if it gets his hand down your knickers, do you hear me? Robbing is as natural as breathing to the O’Prey boys and they cannot change; all they can do is rob and lie.’

  Mary had lifted her head. ‘Callum has changed – Jimmy can too.’

  Deirdre’s eyes were wild at this point. ‘Oh, ay, Callum’s not as bad as Jimmy – at least he’s down the docks, but I tell you, an old dog can’t learn new tricks. It’s in the O’Prey blood, for the father was as bad, not that Annie would ever admit it now.’