A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin

by Helen Forrester

  ‘She asked me if I thought I was deserving of help,’ Martha had wailed to Mary Margaret. ‘Deserving? And me trying to make one egg stretch round six kids this morning, and little Colleen still sick in Leasowe Hospital and I can’t even get to go and see her.

  ‘And I didn’t have much luck selling me rags in the market, this week, neither.’

  She cleared her throat and spat onto the paving stones.

  ‘As if it’s our fault if there’s no work and the men get drunk when they draw their unemployment or their Public Assistance or their wages. Wouldn’t they need a little bit of somethin’ to cheer them up if they was workless? Or a glass or two to ease their thirst, after all the sweat they lose when they do work?’

  She glanced miserably round the darkening court. ‘Do they think we enjoy it?’

  Mary Margaret laughed weakly. ‘Oh, aye. I think they do. They think that if we didn’t like it, we’d leave it. Or if we weren’t lazy, we’d clean it up.’

  Martha looked at her aghast. ‘And how do they think we’d do it with no water to speak of and the lavs spilling over all the time? And me broom is worn out. And if we leave, where are we going to go? I’d like to know that. We’ve got to be close to the docks for Pat and Thomas’s sake.’

  ‘Martha, love, they don’t know nothin’. You have to go and tell them and hope for the best.’

  ‘Well, I got the boots in the end,’ Martha responded, a hint of triumph in her voice. ‘They’re second-hand, and they’re too big for him – he’s got a wad of newspaper in them, so he don’t trip up and have a fall. It’s so easy to fall in a ship.’

  Amongst the hapless community strode, occasionally, an elderly Catholic priest, his biretta crushed down on his bald head, his long black robes nearly brushing the filthy ground. Women were afraid of him, as were some of their husbands, because behind him stood the wrath of God, who did not like sinners who drank at the Baltic Fleet or the Coburg, or who had suspiciously small families which might indicate a form of birth control in use.

  Yet, the priest and his assistant, Father James, were sorely grieved by the suffering they saw daily in their crowded parish, already famous as a surviving remnant of the worst slums in Britain. All they could do was to preach obedience to God’s will, acceptance of the circumstances to which men were born, and the glories of the life to come.

  Many of their male parishioners spoke disparagingly of them. But none of the women would hear a word against them. In their hearts, they rarely doubted the Church’s teachings and they clung to them as the only ray of hope in their lives.

  They dearly loved the younger priest, Father James, who was so gentle that some of the women thought he was a saint; and they loved and respected him as they would a saint.

  Like most of her female neighbours, Martha often wept as she considered all the problems of her life, particularly in winter. Her feverish prayer, addressed to the Virgin Mary, was that she should not become pregnant again. It was surely sinful to beg such help from a Holy Virgin. But if She did not understand the affairs of women and how hard life was, who else was there?

  Having her latest baby, little James, named after the priest, had left her feeling very exhausted. He was a sweet-tempered child and was known affectionately throughout the courts as Martha Connolly’s Number Nine.

  How Number Nine was surviving his infancy was a mystery to Martha. She had not been able to feed him herself, and he never really thrived on tinned milk; even now, with his second birthday coming up, he was nought but skin and bone and protruding stomach. But, then, life was like that. You couldn’t do much about it: God sent children. But, sometimes, He also took them away again.

  The Church said that nobody was supposed to love anyone more than God himself – and Martha felt uneasily that God might be jealous of her beloved Number Nine. In quiet moments in her busy life, she prayed almost daily that He would never take him.

  FOUR

  ‘I’ll Take a Whack at the Lee Jones’

  January to March 1938

  In January of 1938 it was so cold that small boys and girls were able to make slides on the pavements. Frozen puddles were used as a base, and each child took a short run and then slid the length of the puddle, and gradually the slide lengthened to five or six feet. Though sometimes they fell, nobody seemed to get hurt and it was a marvellous way in which to have unexpected fun without skates.

  Of course, adults whose balance was not nearly so good swore at them roundly as, hurrying along the pavement, they sometimes skidded and fell. Children who did not often laugh would shriek with merriment, as huge black skirts suddenly ballooned on the pavement or men ruefully rubbed their bruised behinds.

  Men and boys who were able to obtain a pair of skates, no matter how ancient, skated on frozen ponds, and, as the exercise warmed them up, they temporarily forgot their hunger.

  Though Martha’s school-age children were usually kept home from school during such bitter weather, they could not play on the slide created outside the court’s entry: they had only tattered canvas plimsolls or were barefoot. All of them were suffering from itchy chilblains on their heels and toes; some of these had burst open and had become infected. To wear any kind of shoe over them caused considerable pain.

  They screamed when Martha boiled up one of the cleaner rags from her stock prepared for the market, wrung it out and slapped the resultant hot poultice onto an offending chilblain, to cleanse it by drawing out the pus.

  Instead of being out in the street, therefore, the children were daily crouched together on the floor, in front of the small fire in the range in the Connollys’ room.

  It seemed to weary Mary Margaret that one of them, at least, would be grizzling miserably after Martha’s poulticing efforts, and be told sharply by their mother, ‘Shut up, or I’ll give you something to cry for.’

  This threat would reduce the whining for a little while, unless another child, in the confined space, accidentally knocked the treated foot. Then there would be howls of pain and an immediate exchange of blows between offender and offended. Martha would slap both, and further wails of woe would ensue.

  During this winter, Martha unfailingly invited Mary Margaret, her mother, Theresa, and her children to share the warmth of the Connollys’ fire, and Mary Margaret was extremely grateful for this. She dreamed, however, of having a room of her own with a fireplace or a paraffin heater; it would be so much quieter; and the more sickly she grew, the more she longed for peace.

  She sat on the Connolly family’s only chair, her sewing on her lap, as she hemstitched men’s white handkerchiefs. Her daughter, Connie, was also kept out of school because she, too, had no shoes; nor had she a jacket to wear over her cotton dress.

  Too young to go to school, Minnie tended to wander up to the attic to visit Mike and Alice. She was a welcome small diversion to the childless couple.

  Pugnacious Dollie, her eldest, rarely joined them: she had plimsolls to wear and was hurried, protesting, off to school, just to get rid of such a quarrelsome child. But even she could not always face the cold outside without a jacket: she would dig her heels in, like a stubborn cat refusing to be put in a cage, and would sit sullenly on the house’s staircase, until finally Martha would have pity on her and let her into her room.

  If Martha did not seek the steamy warmth of the public wash house, in order to launder her rags ready for market, she usually sat on an orange box near the fire, with Number Nine on her knee.

  By special arrangement as to which day it was to be, her rags were hung out to dry on the clothesline outside. The line belonged to the Flanagans’ Auntie Ellen. It was stretched across the court from her house and was anchored to the wall of the Connollys’ house. The cloths dried quite well even on a really cold day, but were a problem when it rained; at such times they were piled over a piece of string stretched across the range in Martha’s room. Patrick always grumbled that their bulk took up far too much space.

  As Mary Margaret chatted with Martha, she sewed
with feverish speed, barely looking at her work as the needle flashed in and out.

  When Dollie was present, she received, very reluctantly, a lesson in how to hemstitch: Mary Margaret hoped that, soon, she would be adept enough to earn a penny or two by helping her. Connie, her second daughter, aged six and a half, was quite proud that she, too, could already thread a needle and do clumsy running stitches.

  Even if they had boots or shoes, coats or shawls, few women or older girls ever joined in the sliding games; at best, they had babies to look after, food to find, rags to sell in the market or flowers or chewing gum to hawk at the street corners.

  Looking like a series of waddling black turtles in their shawls, some older girls and women, like Sheila and Phoebe who lived in the front room on Mary Margaret’s floor, trooped off to work at picking cotton or oakum. Others, like Mary Margaret, took in sewing to do as sweated labour in their homes: sewing men’s cotton handkerchiefs yielded threepence a dozen; finishing buttonholes or decorative embroidery which needed more skill yielded a fraction more per piece.

  The greatest problems of a woman who sewed white material was that she had to keep her hands clean and, also, own an iron in order to press the finished work: it had to be returned in a reasonable state to the man who employed her.

  All the women in the court were acutely aware that, each day, pennies for food had to be found somewhere. In too many families, men smoked and drank regularly and women not infrequently: it was the only relief they had from the misery of their lives, lives which they regarded as absolutely normal, fixed and inevitable.

  According to any one of them, the best you could do was to squeeze what you could out of the far distant world of Them. Unable to explain very coherently to Them the pressure of their days, they would sit meekly in front of a nurse or a nun or a social worker and accept the interviewer’s assessment.

  Behind the social workers’ backs, Martha and Mary Margaret would laugh at their suggestions that, if they did not drink or smoke, they might save a little money to improve their lot. If their requests for specific help were refused, they simply begged somewhere else. In truth, the problems the women faced were so huge that it was beyond the scope of any individual to do much to right them.

  Men put their small hopes on choosing a winning horse in the day’s races or winning a game of pitch-and-toss – or the football pools. Unfortunately for their families, in the majority of cases they lost.

  Martha thanked the Virgin Mary and the saints regularly that Patrick did not drink his way through all the Public Assistance he received when out of work; he gave her at least half and shared his cigarettes with her. She screamed at him regularly for more. But in her heart she loved him and understood his need to get something for himself out of his thankless existence, even if he was at home on Public Assistance.

  As a result of being kept out of school as a girl, to look after her siblings, Martha herself could neither read nor write. This put a severe limitation on how she could earn a living or understand what was going on in the world outside the confines of the waterfront. She trusted to the constant gossip in her little community to keep her informed on the latest news.

  She would say determinedly to Mary Margaret or Alice Flynn or anyone else who would listen, ‘You gotta get on with life.’ And, with constant hefty sighs, she did.

  She did her best to keep the family alive from day to day, and Patrick did his best to control his urge to hit her when she yelled at him.

  It grieved her that this very morning, despite the bitter wind bringing warning icy blasts of cold into the court, Patrick had gone out, as usual, with only bread and a cup of tea in his stomach, to stand around in the open at 7 am, waiting at a dock gate amid a crowd of others.

  Amongst the rags for sale which she collected from better homes, from dustbins, or from the local pawnbroker as unsaleable junk, she had found a badly worn man’s woollen pullover. Patrick had thankfully put it on under his shirt so that its disrepair did not show.

  A little smile had broken the deep lines of his chapped face, as she had stood watching him pull it down and tuck it into his trousers. He sadly inspected the holes in the elbows and the ragged cuffs.

  ‘It’ll keep your chest a bit warm,’ she assured him.

  ‘Ta, ever so,’ he said unexpectedly with a sly grin, as he reached for his grey collarless shirt.

  As he tucked in his shirt, she saw for a moment the young man she had married. She thought how lucky she had been to marry a man who was often kind and rarely beat her, despite her own merciless nagging of him.

  When he had picked up his docker’s hook and had gone, she had sat by the fire on the orange box, nursing Number Nine for a few minutes. He had been fussing much of the morning, despite the piece of crust she had given him to chew. The boil he had on his bottom must be troubling him, she decided: he would feel better when it burst.

  She wrapped her shawl round him, and he snuggled into her breast, but she was dry and could not feed him.

  Finally, when he seemed a little comforted she let him slip down from her knee to join the other children.

  Despite the cold, Kathleen had opted to escape to school, so Martha instructed Bridie, aged twelve, ‘Now you mind him, and don’t let him bother Auntie Mary Margaret. I’m going up to the Lee Jones.’

  Bridie was deeply involved in a game of I Spy with Mary Margaret’s girls. She looked up sourly through straggling rat tails of hair, cunning brown eyes gleaming as if she were about to say something vicious. But, after a moment, she silently shifted herself to make space for the child to sit by her; she then raucously rejoined the game.

  Delighted to be included in a big girl’s game, Number Nine joyfully tried to chant, ‘Spy! Spy!’

  Martha got up. Bridie was a real tartar. She wished, with a sigh, that her daughters were as passive as those of Mary Margaret – except for Dollie, of course. Dollie was like Bridie, a proper cross for any mother to bear.

  She took a large metal ewer from a corner and screwed its lid on tighter to make sure it still fitted. Then she said to Mary Margaret, ‘I’m going to have a whack at the Lee Jones. See if I can get some soup. Where’s your jar? I’ll try to get some for you.’

  Mary Margaret nodded and ordered, ‘Our Connie, you go and get it – it’s in the wooden box.’

  After several wails from the upstairs room of ‘I can’t find it, Mam,’ and shouts of further direction from Mary Margaret, Connie came pounding down the stairs, and handed to Martha a big, old-fashioned sweet jar with a screw-on lid. Its exterior was still grubby from its previous visits to various soup kitchens.

  ‘Soup?’ she inquired hopefully, pale-blue eyes wide.

  ‘Can’t promise, love. They may run out.’

  Connie was not yet seven years old, but she already understood the power of Them. They were people who decided how your life would be lived. They themselves lived in faraway parts of Liverpool called Princes Park or Orrell or even further away in places called Southport and Blundellsands. Sometimes they lived across the river, and you could watch them coming off the ferries each morning, to work in the big buildings by the Pier Head. One of the buildings there always seemed special to her; it had two huge dicky birds perched on the top of it, and she dreamed that, one day, she might travel on the ferry and have fancy clothes and a fancy job in that very building.

  As she quietly handed the jar to Martha, she reflected that They did sometimes give you bits and pieces to help you out – but not always.

  At Martha’s remark, her face fell, and Martha chucked her under the chin. ‘Cheer up, chick. Auntie Martha’ll do her best for you.’

  But Connie did not smile. With the back of her hand, she simply rubbed the mucus off the end of her nose and turned back to the fireplace, to rejoin the game of I Spy. Connie was learning, slowly and reluctantly, the deadly acceptance of life that her mother had.

  To facilitate transporting the ewer and the big jar, Martha stowed them in an old perambulator, kept in a r
ecess behind the building’s front door. It was very difficult to get the pram in or out of the recess without opening the door of her own room to make enough space, so it was fairly safe from theft.

  The pram was the most useful possession she had; it not only carried Number Nine, Ellie and Joseph whenever she had to take them out, but it could hold a hundredweight of coal or a pile of old bedding bought for tearing into rags. Without it, she knew she would find it difficult to function.

  She bumped the pram down the front steps, lifted her shawl over her head and went out to face the elements and the world of Them.

  FIVE

  ‘Me Pore Feet’

  January 1938

  The water in the freezing puddles squished through the cracks in her boots, as she trudged slowly up to Limekiln Lane, the site of the office of Lee Jones’ League of Welldoers. She had not recently approached the League for help and she hoped that she would not be noticed as a regular beggar: she had learned from experience that one should not go too often to the same place; they got tired of you.

  If the League’s premises had been closer to her home, she would have sent the younger children themselves to beg a meal; they would almost certainly have been fed. But there was food for Patrick, Brian and Number Nine to think about, too; the weather was so bad that she feared that they might become ill if they did not get something hot to eat: Tommy and Joseph were already coughing badly, and all the children were snuffling with colds.

  Like Patrick and the children, she had chilblains on her heels; they seemed more than usually painful today, and she muttered, ‘Christ, me pore feet!’ as she trod on a cobblestone and the frayed lining of her boot caught the sore spot. She would give a lot, she thought, to have a thick pair of socks to cushion them.

  As she plodded along, she sighed one of her gustier sighs. If she did not count little Colleen in hospital in Leasowe, there were eight people ahead of her in the family, all of whom could do with socks. Patrick was always the first to get them, also the first to be fed – because he was the breadwinner, or was supposed to be, thought Martha with sudden asperity, as she considered her own ceaseless efforts.