Her determination wilted. She began to cry again, quietly so as not to disturb the other women in the room.
‘I thought I’d seen it all,’ she wept. ‘But I never dreamed of a place like this.
‘Dear Holy Mary, Mother of God, get me out of this hellhole. Intercede for me dear Mother, I beg you!’
NINETEEN
‘It’s Clouding Up, I Tell Yez’
January to June 1939
The sleet of January and rain of February 1939 gave way to the penetrating winds of March and longer daylight hours. April followed with a mixture of heavy showers alternating with fleecy clouds chased by the sun’s rays. Though an improvement on the spring of 1938, these changes in weather passed almost unnoticed over the roofs of Court No. 5.
No crocuses poked their heads up between the paving stones. In the surrounding streets, no trees existed to put out soft green buds. In Church Street in the city centre, a girl peddled small bunches of violets for ladies to pin into the fox furs draped round their necks. Martha noted these. Of all the inhabitants of Court No. 5, only Martha, searching for sources of rags and then selling them in the market, ever saw daffodils or any other flowers, and these were usually in the gardens of homes holding auction sales.
As 1939 progressed, the international political situation became increasingly threatening. In faraway London a worried Ministry of Health, which knew barely anything about the real suffering of the north of England, quietly ordered one million burial forms to be dispatched to the local authorities of the larger cities. In their turn, in May 1939 the local authorities had discussed piling up a store of cardboard coffins; and subsequently the City of Liverpool, much to the irritation of the occupants of Court No. 5, finally pulled down the wall which blocked it off from the main street.
‘It lets all the wind in from the river,’ fretted frail Mary Margaret, as she sat on the step to get a breath of air before going back to her sewing. She pulled her shawl tightly round her, her hands too cold to hem a handkerchief outdoors.
One morning, at Martha’s suggestion, Mary Margaret asked Joseph Duggan, the old pickpocket who lived in the second-floor back room in which he had been born, to carry her chair downstairs to Martha’s room and set it by her window so that she could sew her handkerchiefs as long as the daylight lasted. Sheila and Phoebe had recently become rather short with her, because, if she was sewing by their window on the few days they had off, their privacy while the daylight lasted was invaded.
Because Patrick was subsequently so cross about his privacy being intruded upon, Martha was thankful that she had not asked him to move the chair.
Previously, if Patrick was at home and Mary Margaret was visiting Martha, she thoughtfully removed herself to her own room or to that of Sheila and Phoebe.
Now, as the price of food climbed steadily, the necessity for Mary Margaret to continue to sew far into the evenings in order to help to provide for her little family meant that the presence of his wife’s friend in his room infuriated Patrick. On days when he had no work, or money to spend at the races or in a pub, he liked to lie on the mattress and snooze in the afternoon.
Martha pleaded, ‘She’s so desperate to do her sewing – and so ill – I couldn’t refuse her, could I now?’
Reluctantly, Patrick grunted agreement. The woman would not last long.
Mary Margaret’s eldest daughter, Dollie, was even more outraged when she was frequently kept away from school and made to sit cross-legged on the floor beside her mother and put her rather imperfect knowledge of hemming to work. It was not that she liked going to school; it was rather that she would be made to work at home – and would not receive a penny for it.
Grandma Theresa had made sure she did as she was told. She had assured her that unless she worked she could not be fed, would not be fed.
A frightened Dollie knew that Grandma Theresa never issued an idle threat. Furthermore, whenever she got the chance, she loved to eat.
Muttering many rude verbal protests under her breath, she took up her needle. Because she was angry, her first handkerchief had to be painstakingly unpicked and rehemmed and, despite her mother’s gentle protests to Theresa, she did not share the other children’s meagre lunch.
When the school attendance officer, his own handkerchief at his nose, came to see why Dollie was not at school, Mary Margaret snatched a piece of linen out of Dollie’s hand and, in the nick of time, pushed it under herself. She made her own illness the excuse for the child’s absence.
‘Me hubby’s at sea,’ she whined. ‘And me so sick – it’s TB, you see. And I’ve nobody else to turn to.’ She was careful not to mention the existence of Grandma Theresa, busy mending sacks in a local warehouse.
During the previous winter, as the little family fought its way through the dreadful eight weeks before Mary Margaret’s allotment came through, Theresa had contributed to the family the whole of her ten-shillings-a-week old age pension, and, in addition, had found a job that nobody else was desperate enough to want to do; it brought in a few extra shillings.
‘I see,’ the school attendance officer had responded through the thickness of his handkerchief. He was used to this kind of excuse regarding absences of eldest daughters. As long as it was a girl who was kept at home, attendance was rarely enforced, except after very prolonged absence; lots of girls missed school every Monday: they looked after their siblings, while their mother took the washing to the public wash house. It was a different matter if it was a boy who was absent.
Full of resentment, her eyes cast down, Dollie stood silently beside her mother during this exchange, not daring to say a word.
The officer retreated, with the admonition that Mary Margaret should make some other arrangement as soon as possible.
Out in the street, he took a huge breath of air polluted merely by factories, trucks and horse manure. As he scribbled a report in his notebook, he wondered how the court inhabitants survived at all.
Even when Thomas’s allotments came through, Mr O’Reilly at the corner shop refused Mary Margaret any further credit; he said he could not risk it: she owed too much already. She must first pay off her existing bill.
Jock, Satan Hisself, was occasionally persuaded by Theresa to let the payment of rent slide: he had many seamen amongst his tenants and understood this hiatus when seamen’s families were sometimes reduced from abject poverty to almost destitution. Once the man’s allotment of about half his wages began to be paid by his shipping company, he could sometimes squeeze some of the rent out of their enterprising wives. Arrears, however, continued to accumulate and would not be made up completely until the happy return of the seaman with, it was sincerely hoped, almost half his wages still in his pocket. As far as Satan Hisself was concerned, the secret was to find out the expected date of the man’s return and then pounce on him before the entire population of the court retired to the local pubs or cafés to help him spend his money.
As he resignedly made a note that Thomas Flanagan was on a tramp steamer, date of return, therefore, unknown, the London authorities took notice of the loss of civilian lives during the Spanish Civil War and increased their request for burial forms. They theorised that, if war broke out and London and other big cities were bombed as Bilbao had been, casualties would be even greater than they had first estimated.
During 1939’s lovely summer and after the rubble of the broken wall had been shovelled into lorries by a gang of labourers and had been driven away, Alice Flynn went out one morning to buy some milk. She was puzzled to find another gang of men marking the edge of the pavement with white paint.
Mystified, she asked, ‘What on earth are you doing that for?’
One man slowly eased himself upright and winced at the pain in his back. He grinned. ‘What do you think?’
‘I dunno.’ Alice smiled back at him; he was a nice-looking youngster.
‘It’s for the war.’
Alice burst out laughing. ‘You don’t fight wars with paint, you silly bugger.’
‘It’s so as you can see the pavement.’
Alice continued to chuckle. ‘There isn’t no war.’
‘There’s going to be, Missus. It’s clouding up, I tell yez.’ He bent to smooth a drip of paint off the end of his brush into the pot. He then gestured at her with the brush. ‘You can see it coming. And you know what they’ll do first?’
‘No.’ Alice was suddenly sobered.
‘They’ll turn all the lights off – and you won’t be able to see nothing. White paint’ll help you find your footing.’
‘You’re kidding me. Streets is dark enough already.’
‘No, I’m not kidding, Missus. Lights on – and the Jerries’ll see us from above and be able to aim straight, when they come in the night to bomb us.’ He pointed heavenwards. ‘Lights off, they won’t be able to find us in the night.’
A pang of real fear went through Alice, not for herself but for her invalid husband, Mike, bedridden in the attic.
She stood stupefied in front of the workman who had bent once more to his task, stolidly dipping his brush into his tin of paint.
She watched him slosh further rough oblongs along the pavement edge.
Not another war? She felt an overwhelming sense of helplessness. In the background of her busy life, she had heard Mike’s wireless babble about someone called Adolf Hitler, but she had dismissed it as a lot of male political drivel. Was it all true? It couldn’t be, could it?
Since nothing warlike happened during the next few days, and, after she had discussed the strange conversation with Martha, both women decided that the workman had been teasing her and she had been frightened by a pot of paint.
She forgot her fears. Martha had said with a laugh, ‘Whoever heard of turning the streetlights off or painting the pavement white to fight a war? Soldiers with their legs wound round with puttees fight wars.’ Even the rumour of the building of an air-raid shelter out in the street made more sense than turning lights off or painting kerbs; and there was, as yet, no sign of the shelter.
Alice returned to her usual problem of making an army pension stretch to cover a slow, but remorseless, increase in the price of food that summer. Loath as she was to leave Mike to manage by himself, she found a part-time job cleaning the floors of a ship chandler’s store: the previous cleaner, a younger woman, had volunteered for the Auxiliary Territorial Service.
Meanwhile, Theresa continued to mend sacks, despite the steady payment of the allotment.
Theresa would never forget walking down to the shipping office to collect Mary Margaret’s first allotment payment during the previous winter. As the widow of a sail maker, she had had no direct experience of shipping offices or the kind of officialdom she might face: she feared she might not receive the allotment if, at any point, she made a mistake.
Found wandering in a huge Edwardian office building, she had been directed to a mahogany counter over which she could just peep. She had explained to a clerk on the other side of the counter that her name was Theresa Gallagher and she had come to collect her daughter’s allotment. ‘Mrs Flanagan, that is.’
The clerk checked a list. In an accusing voice, he queried her name.
She was scared as he leaned over the counter to see her properly, but she faced him without flinching; she was inured to being treated like muck.
‘Me son-in-law arranged for me to collect it for her because she’s proper sick with TB.’
‘I have no record of it. What is her husband’s first name?’
‘Thomas.’
‘Mrs Flanagan must come herself.’
‘I tell you, she’s sick.’
‘Many people with tuberculosis are quite mobile.’
Theresa stared at him stonily. ‘Mary Margaret can’t barely walk.’
She made no movement to slink away. Instead, she suggested, ‘Ask your boss.’
Pinch-mouthed, the irate clerk went in search of his manager, while the queue behind Theresa became restive. They muttered as the delay lengthened, and shuffled their boots on the wooden floor. The muttering slowly became loud remarks on the inhumanity of shipping agents. Other clerks, though safely defended by the high mahogany counter, became short-tempered, as they dealt with other queues of black-shawled women, some of whom could neither read nor write: they signed with a cross, witnessed by the clerk, for the cash handed to them.
Theresa steadied herself by clinging to the counter, so that the clerks on the other side were faced with two rheumy blue eyes, a greasy, yellowy-white tumble of hair over a dark forehead and ten dirty claws.
When she glanced hastily back at the increasing queue, the woman behind her saw a dark visage which had never had more than a cursory wipe since she was born, a figure thin and frail, a tattered black shawl drooping over a tiny body. Her only sign of cleanliness was a large white pinafore, carefully washed for this important occasion.
It was a familiar sight, and the woman behind her, who was younger but did not look much better, smiled sympathetically at her plight.
The clerk returned with a bald-headed, bustling man who ignored Theresa, as he riffled through papers on the counter. Then he looked up, and asked the name of Thomas’s ship.
She told him in a very loud, though quavery voice, as if he were deaf.
‘She’s in the wrong office. She should be downstairs.’ The man turned and hurried away.
Since the women who came to the office usually sorted themselves out quite successfully, the clerk had assumed that Theresa’s seaman relative was in the same ship as the husbands of the two women who had preceded her. He was annoyed with himself, and spoke sharply to Theresa.
‘You heard,’ he said and turned to the woman behind her. ‘Next, please.’
Theresa had had only a cup of weak tea for breakfast, and her knees were beginning to give under her. She gripped the counter more firmly and did not reply.
Another great staircase to struggle down, another huge tiled hall to cross, probably another queue in which to wait. She could not do it. Even with the woman behind her trying to push her to one side, she could not move.
A younger woman, further back, who had been idly watching the wraith at the top of the line, saw that Theresa was shaking. She left her place in the queue, and went to the old woman. She tapped her on the shoulder.
Theresa jumped in surprise, and half turned her head.
The woman said kindly, ‘You sit on that bench over there till I been done, and I’ll take you down.’
Theresa nodded. She slowly let go of the counter, crept over to the beautifully polished bench which had been indicated, and thankfully sat down. For a minute, the office whirled around her and then settled back into place.
A number of women smiled quite benignly upon her, as they flowed slowly along in the queue: it was unusual for any of them to take a seat in such a sumptuous place, and they were pleased to see that there had been no objection to Theresa’s doing so.
The young stranger was as good as her word. After a slow and careful descent of the stairs, her hand under Theresa’s elbow to steady her, she even made sure that the old lady was at the right counter; and she remained with her until her request for the allotment had been checked against the company’s records and had been carefully counted into Theresa’s clawlike hand and she had equally carefully signed for it: she was proud of being able to write her name.
‘Put the money in your skirt pocket, love, afore you goes outside,’ the young woman advised Theresa.
Theresa saw the point and stuffed the cash well down into the deep pocket in the folds of her black skirt; no pickpocket could extract it from there.
‘Be all right now, love?’
‘Oh, aye. Ta ever so.’ Theresa smiled toothlessly.
With a great sense of unexpected opulence, she treated herself to a twopenny tram ride from the Pier Head. It dropped her near home and, through a sudden shower of sleet, she then dragged herself up a short slope to the court.
Ever since then, as long as the al
lotment was available, she had taken two hours’ leave of absence from her sack-mending to collect it. She was always proud that she had been able to cope successfully with the staff of such a big office.
TWENTY
‘Men Are a Real Cross’
July to September 1939
Patrick Connolly found himself surprisingly busy during that lovely cloudless summer; there were many more ships in port. Occasionally, he ached so much from the long consecutive hours of physical labour that he did not go to the stand: he would argue that he had earned enough that week for the family to get by on.
Instead, he sometimes took the tram out to Aintree to watch the races.
More often, he could be found in Meg’s cocoa room or in a pub. In either of these places there would be a bookie’s runner to take his bets, whether on horses or on greyhounds. If he lost a bet, a comforting mug of cocoa or a glass of ale was immediately available: its cost would be recorded on a slate hanging behind the counter, to be paid when he drew his wages at the end of the week.
He did not, of course, tell Martha about these expeditions. She did, however, nag at him for more cash, because she knew from the general gossip in the court that the docks were much busier, and she felt that he must be earning more than usual.
When he was at home, her nagging tended to send him, in fast retreat, upstairs to visit Mike in the attic, on the irreproachable excuse that he had promised old Mike; exactly what he had promised, he never told her. Sometimes, it was to deliver to the invalid winnings he had made from bets Patrick had laid on his behalf; sometimes it was merely to escape from her shrieks of rage.
To most of the men who lived in the court, Mike was a good friend. Many of them could not read very well, and Mike had far more up-to-date sports reports than did the newspapers, thanks to his radio.
The radio was itself a subject of respectful conversation, and every family longed to have one. Mike’s ran on a wet battery and a dry battery.
Getting the wet battery periodically recharged was one of Alice’s regular chores, and Mike would lie and fret until it was safely set up again by his bed.
A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin Page 15