Yes, Mama

by Helen Forrester

  Polly looked round wildly. ‘Aunty! Aunty Kitty, what’s to do with her? Can’t you do somethin’?’

  Perched on her stool like a roosting crow, her great-aunt said heavily, ‘I think it’s gaol fever.’

  Polly drew back from the bed in horror. ‘Has anybody bin to the Dispensary to ask the doctor?’

  ‘Billy’ll go as soon as it’s light – mebbe somebody’ll be there.’ She looked down at the terrified girl. ‘You come away from ’er, duck. You can’t do nothin’, and you might catch it.’

  Mary let out a sudden wail, ‘Aye, we’ll all die unless we’re lucky – and our Billy wouldn’t come over and ’ave hisself washed and ’is clothes boiled.’

  ‘Now, Mary, don’t take on so. Time enough for that later.’ This from Mrs Fox, Bridie’s distant kinswoman and the family’s landlady, who, to her credit, had come down from her ground floor room to see if she could help.

  But Bridie was beyond help. She died before midnight in the arms of her old aunt, her half-nourished body unable to withstand the ravages of the terrible disease.

  In the first light of morning, as they listened to the unearthly sound of keening coming from the Tysons’ cellar, her Catholic neighbours formed an uneasy knot on the far side of the court; occasionally, one or the other of them would cross themselves.

  They whispered questions to each other, and, finally, a woman ran across to the iron railing guarding the cellar steps. She leaned over. Great-aunt Kitty was sitting exhausted on the bottom step, and she asked her, ‘What’s to do?’

  The old woman looked up and replied, without hesitation, ‘Typhus, I reckon. It’s our Bridie, dead from typhus.’

  The woman flung her hands across her chest, as if to protect herself, her face a picture ofhorror. ‘Jaysus, save us!’ she screamed.

  At her shriek, panic went from face to face. People not yet up leapt from their palliasses to the windows and flung them up, as the woman turned and spread the news. Nobody came near the cellar, tending instead to bunch themselves in the far corners of the foetid yard and draw comfort from excited talk with each other.

  James wept unrestrainedly, not only because he had lost his wife, but also because she would have to be given a pauper’s funeral, the last great humiliation.

  ‘’Aven’t even got a sheet to wind her in,’ he sobbed bitterly. ‘Will they ’ave to strip ’er?’

  ‘Aye, for their own safety, they’ll have to take everything of ours off ’er and burn it,’ Great-aunt Kitty told him. ‘They’ll bring a shroud, though.’

  III

  Though his neighbours did not come near him, it seemed to James that that day, the rest of the population of the city tramped through his miserable dwelling.

  Money being a terrible necessity, Billy was sent, weeping, off to work. On his way, he ran to the Dispensary to put a note, written by Great-aunt Kitty, through the letter-box. An anxious doctor arrived within the hour. He confirmed Great-aunt Kitty’s diagnosis.

  He said he would inform the Medical Officer of Health immediately, so that the court could be fumigated and cleansed in an effort to contain the disease.

  As he was going out of the court, he was stopped by a middle-aged man who wanted to know if the disease was typhus. The doctor said it was and that the authorities would assuredly do their best to stop others getting it. He explained about fumigation to get rid of fleas and other vermin.

  When this information was passed to the other inhabitants of the court, they were very upset, and they blamed Mrs Fox, James’s landlady, for harbouring Catholic Bridie’s Protestant husband, a man who was known to have attended Methodist revival meetings.

  ‘It’s the wrath of God, it is, strikin’ at us for havin’ a heretic here,’ one old biddy raged.

  Fear of catching the disease by touching anyone who had been near the corpse, however, forestalled the donnybrook which might otherwise have ensued. They contented themselves by shouting obscenities at James and Billy whenever they emerged. Father and son, wrapped in their own grief, hardly heard them.

  Billy longed for Polly to comfort him, but after her mother died, Great-aunt Kitty persuaded Polly that, for her own sake, she should return to the Woodmans’ house. ‘Good jobs is hard to find,’ she told her practically, as she held the younger woman to her. ‘Your Dad and Mary and me, we’ll manage. Away you go, now. And change your clothes and wash them.’

  Weeping all the way, Polly obeyed.

  IV

  Knowing that the undertaker would not touch the corpse unless it was washed, Great-aunt Kitty, assisted by a frightened, sobbing Mary, took off the dead woman’s clothes and gently sponged her down; her jaw was bound with strips torn from her petticoat and two pennies, provided by Great-aunt Kitty, were placed on her eyelids after Kitty had closed them. They had nothing better to cover her with, so they spread her thick black skirt over her. With her arms crossed over her breast, Bridie looked, in her nakedness, a dreadful travesty of the woman she might have been.

  The undertaker and his assistant were by no means as inhumane as James had feared. They wrapped his wife’s remains in a coarse shroud and laid her carefully in a rough coffin. Mary had shamed her husband, Mike, into coming to help to carry her coffin, and he did help James and Billy to lift it out of the court and to lay it in the undertaker’s horse-drawn van.

  Alerted by Mrs Fox, the landlady, a local Roman Catholic priest arrived, just as the van was about to move off. He scolded James for not calling him earlier, so that Bridie could have received Extreme Unction before her death. James simply stared at him unseeingly. He made no objection, however, when the priest undertook to read the service for the committal of the dead; and the four men trudged through the uncaring streets, following the slow clip-clop of the horse’s hooves.

  V

  Early the following morning, an extremely perturbed sanitary inspector arrived at the court; he knew only too well how major diseases could sweep through parts of Liverpool. He had not yet gone through all the houses, when he was followed by the midden men to empty the rubbish from the midden and a rat catcher to check for rodents; it all caused no little stir amongst the fuming, fearful inhabitants.

  The house in which James lived would have to be fumigated, the inspector announced, which meant all the twenty-one inhabitants would be homeless for a day while the smelly job was done. The same people would all have to be examined by a physician. Mrs Fox felt free to have a strong attack of hysterics and allow herself to be comforted with sips of rum provided by her sympathetic neighbours.

  Though in one way the neighbours were angry with James for his heresy and the upset which they believed it had caused, they also enjoyed the excitement of being the centre of so much attention; it gave them something new to talk about and they felt suddenly important. They were sorely disappointed, however, to hear that there there would be no Wake.

  The rent collector representing the absentee landlord, having heard from the sanitary inspector in extremely strong language about the state of the property, felt the need to look as if he were doing something about it, and sent Mrs Fox once more into hysterics. He not only demanded that James be kicked out of his cellar, which, several years back, had been condemned by the sanitary authorities and boarded up, but gave Mrs Fox and her numerous tenants notice to quit.

  Stout and ferocious, the landlady took her fight with the rent collector outside, where she screamed, ‘I never miss me rent, you stinking bugger – and do you think I’m goin’ to let me own flesh and blood sleep in the streets when I got a cellar wot only needed the boards takin’ down?’

  The rent collector backed, only to find himself hemmed in by a delighted crowd. Arms outflung, Mrs Fox appealed to them, stressing her own kindness and humanity. She threw herself down at the rent collector’s feet, as he tried to protest that the house was overcrowded. Enjoying herself thoroughly, Mrs Fox turned on her back, to kick her heels like a child in a tantrum and reveal legs like the pillars of St George’s Hall.

  T
he subtenants began to gather closer round the beleaguered man. ‘Want to swallow a fist full o’ knuckles?’ inquired a bony youth, thrusting a leathery clenched hand into his face. Another man laughed. ‘Throw ’im in the midden,’ he suggested, while Mrs Fox screamed louder and a dazed James watched from the top of his cellar steps.

  The rent collector turned, pushed his way through the jubilant crowd and fled.

  Mrs Fox turned off her screams immediately. Triumphant, she rose from the cobbles and shook out her skirt. She simpered at the younger men, and said sorrowfully, ‘Charity it was, to let the cellar to our Bridie, seeing as how ’er ’ubby int what he might be.’ She sniffed slowly and dramatically, ‘Out of love of God and love of ’er, I did it, pore dear.’

  ‘Well, put him out,’ snarled a wizened hunchback.

  Mrs Fox looked down at him. ‘I’ll think about it,’ she responded loftily, and went back into her house.’

  VI

  The Roman Catholic priest mentioned to the minister of the Wesleyan chapel in Scotland Road that there had been a case of typhus in the parish; they were well-acquainted with each other and often cooperated in schemes to improve the lives of the teeming parish. James was not a member of his chapel but the minister had met him at a Revivalist meeting once and had visited him a few times over the years. Now, without hesitation, he struggled into his shabby jacket and walked down to the court dwelling.

  It always took him all his courage to enter closed courts; if the attitude of the Roman Catholic inhabitants should turn ugly, there was only the single narrow exit. When he arrived, however, the only people in the court appeared to be two housewives, buckets in hand, gossiping by the water tap, their children playing in the dirt at their feet, and two labourers shovelling out the midden.

  To avoid others getting the disease, Bridie’s burial had been necessarily fast and Billy had gone straight from her funeral to work, because the need for money was desperate. When the minister knocked on the cellar door, Mary with her suckling baby at her breast, answered it. James, nearly out of his mind with pain in his back, was seated, teeth clenched, on a bench. In the light of a guttering candle, the room looked even barer than usual, because both the straw palliasses had been taken away to be burned.

  Pushing her straggling black hair back from a tearstained face, Mary invited the minister to enter, and James rose slowly from his bench. ‘Come in, Sir. Sit down, Sir.’ He pointed to a stool opposite him.

  James was sober, observed the minister with relief; temperance vows sometimes got forgotten, and the homes he visited would be packed with drunken, wailing relations, not to speak of the corpse propped up in a corner so that it could view the proceedings.

  He found that talking to James was rather like addressing a corpse. The man sat as if deaf, hearing nothing of the minister’s homily on accepting the Will of God or the subsequent prayers delivered by him. Only when he was leaving did James bestir himself.

  As he dumbly followed the minister to the foot of the steps, he suddenly broached his worries about Billy. He said, ‘Our Billy is only a young ’un yet; me daughters is all right – one married and one in service.’ He cleared his throat, and the minister paused to listen. ‘He’s a good lad. If aught should ’appen to me, would you look out for ’im? Mary here ’as her own to care for – and more to come, no doubt. There’s nobody to look for our Billy.’ He laid his hand on the minister’s arm, and implored, ‘Don’t let ’em put ’im in the Workhouse, ever.’

  The minister nodded, ‘I’ll do my best. You know, Billy should come to chapel and then we can keep an eye on him.’

  ‘We don’t have no money to give – and no half-decent clothes to wear – and Billy’s Mam raised ’im more of a Catholic, like.’

  ‘Well, you’ll probably live a long time yet,’ replied the minister briskly, ‘and you’ll see the boy safely started yourself.’

  ‘Oh, aye. Maybe.’ He let his hand drop from the minister’s arm, and half turned away.

  The minister felt a stirring of guilt; James was the type of person John Wesley had first tried to succour. He hesitated, and then said, ‘I’ll ask one of our lay preachers to make a point of visiting you.’

  ‘That’s proper kind of you.’

  Mary had said nothing during the visit, but when the visitor had left, she buttoned up her black blouse, hitched the shawl more tightly round the sleeping baby, and said, ‘I’ll go ’ome to make a bit to eat. You and Billy come over and share with us. I’m goin’ to wash Billy’s clothes, anyways, tonight, and you stay over with us, till you find somewhere else to live.’

  ‘Ta, luv,’ James responded dully, as she ran up the steps.

  He closed the door and then stood in the middle of the room and looked round him. Without Bridie and her piles of fents, the place was desolate. Beside the stool, the stripped truckle bed gave not even a remembrance of her. A few dishes and two saucepans, with the gutted candle in a bottle, cluttered the deal table, the water bucket underneath it. From nails in the walls hung James’s docker’s hook, unused for a year, the rope he used to tie wood from the river into bundles, and his ragged jacket. A mouse ran across the floor.

  He was shaking with hunger and pain, but there was no food. He continued to stand uncertainly for a minute. Then he moved the stool to a more central position.

  He took down the rope from its nail, made a noose in it and tied it firmly to a meathook in the rafters. He climbed on to the stool, put the noose round his neck, kicked the stool from under him and, not very quietly, hanged himself.

  The fumigators found him the following day.

  Chapter Nine

  I

  Sick at heart, Billy went straight from work to his sister’s house, so he was spared the shock of finding his father dead.

  For fear of bringing more trouble to the court, no one there was prepared to talk to Health Officials. Faced with a wall of silent dislike, the medical officer did not manage to trace any of the Tyson family and, in consequence, was unable to quarantine them. Looking like an offended empress, Mrs Fox swore that she had never been near Bridie. ‘I got more sense,’ she told the harassed, overworked doctor.

  Defeated, the authorities sent in an additional rat catcher and had the court itself thoroughly sluiced down with water and carbolic, after Mrs Fox’s house had, over her protestations, been fumigated.

  By the time Mary’s husband, Mike, returned home from his job as stableman in a dairy, Billy, sniffing miserably, had had the first bath of his life, in Mary’s wooden washtub. While he rubbed himself dry in front of the kitchen fire, Mary heated a borrowed iron on the fire and pressed his jacket and breeches, to kill the lice and fleas. He wore nothing else, except a red handkerchief round his neck, so she did not have to heat up her clay and brick wash boiler.

  Mike greeted the boy surlily; he was mortally afraid of contracting typhus himself. He and Mary had had a tremendous row, when she had insisted that they must give a temporary roof to her father and her brother. Though he had struck her several times in the course of the quarrel, she had persisted stubbornly that it was the least they could do. To save face, he had shouted that Billy must pay his wages to him, and if her father did not like it he could get out. She sullenly agreed.

  When she had to tell Billy of their father’s death and that he would be buried in a suicide’s grave, the boy clung to her, unable to cope with the destruction of his small world. Her children played in the street, unaware of the tragedy; only her eldest daughter, Theresa, watched with sly, knowing eyes. Mrs Fox, who had brought the news, sat in Mike’s chair by the fire and wiped her eyes, said it was proper awful and had a most enjoyable cry.

  II

  Since officially there were no Tysons available to deal with poor James’s funeral, Mrs Fox undertook to cope with the city authorities. This did not stop Polly asking Elizabeth Woodman for a half-day off, so that she could follow her father’s coffin to the cemetery. Permission was reluctantly given, and she, Mary and Billy waited a few yard
s away from the undertaker’s van until the coffin was brought out of the court. They then quietly followed it, and only their prayers consigned his remains to the earth.

  Because of Polly’s absence, Alicia was allowed for the first time to go to school by herself. Elizabeth Woodman had put on weight and climbing stairs or hills made her pant, so she did not consider taking the child herself.

  ‘I simply cannot spare Fanny to go with you,’ she fretted to Alicia. ‘It’s At Home Day, and I cannot think how we’re going to manage without Polly. Go straight to school and come straight home again. And don’t speak to any strangers.’

  ‘Lots of girls go to school alone,’ Alicia assured her. ‘I’ll walk part of the way back with Ethel – she lives in Falkner Square.’

  ’is that the child who came to play with you once or twice?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve asked her several times since, but she’s so busy.’ Alicia sighed. ‘She swots a lot.’

  ‘Swot is slang, Alicia,’ Elizabeth responded mechanically. Blast them, she thought. The girl’s parents must have found out that Alicia was illegitimate; Ethel would certainly not be allowed to associate with Alicia in future. Aloud, she said, ‘Never mind, dear.’

  Alicia confirmed her mother’s suspicions by saying pensively, ‘Ethel says that her mother chooses her friends for her – and she doesn’t like it much.’

  ‘Some mothers are unreasonably fussy.’

  Alicia was sitting on a small stool facing her mother, her hands neatly folded in her lap. ‘When will Polly come home?’

  ‘She had better be home tonight or I shall be very cross with her. I can’t endure these constant absences.’

  Alicia gazed doubtfully at Elizabeth. ‘She cries a lot,’ she said. ‘I suppose parents’ funerals are important?’ She was genuinely curious. With a father and a mother whom she rarely saw and with few friends, she wondered about the relationship between parents and children.