No matter how carefully she carried the battery down the steep, narrow staircase, the acid always slopped onto her black serge skirt and sometimes onto her swollen, bare ankles. It burned badly both skirt and skin, so that her garments were much more darned than those of her neighbours. There was, also, the fear that the leg burns would go septic, which they occasionally did.
The infection necessitated hot poultices made from rags, so a piece of cleanish linen was begged from Martha and boiled in a pan of water on Alice’s primus stove. The water was squeezed out, with much wincing because of the heat. Then the steaming poultice was slapped onto the sore. The recipient invariably shrieked with pain as her tender skin was scalded.
This treatment was repeated until the sore was declared clean, a matter of several days.
During this miserable period, Mike often consoled his suffering wife with tots of smuggled rum given him by seagoing relatives.
In Martha’s opinion, a casualty of the Battle of Mons was entitled to male company and plenty of rum. Furthermore, he was married to kindly Alice: so, when Patrick vanished up the stairs, Martha would content herself with a final furious threat from the bottom step. She swore that there would be further mayhem if he didn’t get up betimes in the morning and get himself to work.
Seated by the invalid on one of the family’s two chairs, a Woodbine dangling from one corner of his mouth, Patrick, too, was sometimes given a small tot of rum. Glasses in hands, both men were at their happiest when they could hum along with the radio to old wartime songs. It did not matter whether the songs belonged to the Boer War or to the Great War. Occasionally cigarettes were removed from lips, while they belted out a particular favourite, like ‘Goodbye, Dolly, I must leave you’.
Alice did not always share their enthusiasm and sometimes sought temporary refuge from the noise on the front doorstep. There, she would hear from a fuming Martha about Patrick’s failure to do all the days of work offered to him. They decided that men, on the whole, were a real cross to bear.
Alice had reason to know this. From time to time, she wept over poor Mike, who often became irascible because of his enforced confinement and his sexual impotence.
Though she was now at work and did not hear the news so often, she sometimes picked up bits of information from it. She was able to tell the other women about the impending distribution of gas masks and the instruction which would be given on how to use them. This information struck fear in the hearts of all who heard it.
Nobody had forgotten about the use of gas in the last war, and most people knew a man who had died as a result of it or who was still struggling from its effects.
‘Maybe the man what was painting the kerb was right,’ Alice added nervously.
When Bridie overheard the conversation, she interrupted it. ‘We was shown in school. I can put on a gas mask.’
Her mother rounded on her. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
Bridie shrugged. ‘You never asked me.’
It was Alice, on her way to work at the ship chandler’s, who, a few days later, met the postman on the doorstep. He inquired if Patrick was at home.
‘He’s at work, and his wife’s at the market,’ Alice replied.
The postman hesitated. The front door had an opening through which letters could be dropped onto the floor of the hall. But he knew, from experience, that they could be easily lost in such a house – and that could cause an inquiry to be made. He preferred to hand the missive, if possible, to the addressee.
As a wounded veteran, Mike received more letters, official or charitable, than most of his neighbours, so the postman was acquainted with Alice. He asked if she would take the letter in.
She liked the trim little man in his neat navy-blue and red uniform, popularly known in the court as His Nibs. She cheerfully agreed, took the missive from him and tucked it down the neck of her blouse to rest safely between her breasts.
As he made a note of her name so that, if necessary, the letter could be traced, he said, ‘Be sure to give it to Mr Connolly himself. It’s got the City coat of arms on the back of it – it could be important.’
‘Oh, aye,’ she promised. Inside, she felt suddenly sick. A letter from the town hall? What could that mean, other than an eviction notice preceding slum clearance?
After she returned home from work, she retrieved the letter from between her breasts, and, with a heavy heart, turned it over and over in her hand. She did not show it to Mike: no need to worry him yet, she decided, and laid it on a shelf beside her mugs.
As she prepared tea for Mike, she listened anxiously for the return of Martha or Patrick.
While she was sitting by Mike’s bed, sharing bread and jam and tea with him, she finally heard Martha open the door of her room and greet Mary Margaret.
On the excuse of getting some more water from the pump, she picked up the kettle and ran downstairs.
Martha was standing swinging her empty basket and talking to her friend, who, as usual, was hemming in the light of Martha’s window. At Mary Margaret’s feet, Number Nine was curled up on an old coat sound asleep, unaware of the struggles of his babysitter.
Seated cross-legged on the floor was Dollie, also hemming, though rather slowly.
Even after the allotment had come through, she had continued to be kept at home sporadically, to sew.
‘Because your mam is sick and you got to help her a bit,’ her relentless grandma had told her, despite her mother’s gentle protests.
Mary Margaret was slowly realising, however, that she could not work as fast as she used to. She had decided that it would be as well if Dollie became adept at sewing as soon as possible; if her mother died, she might, with such a skill, manage to maintain herself and thus keep out of the hands of Them.
At Alice’s unheralded entrance, Martha swung round.
Alice smiled at Mary Margaret, and then said to Martha, a little breathlessly, ‘I’ve got a letter for your Patrick. The postman left it with me to give him. Will you tell him when he comes in? It’s from the town hall.’
‘Mother of God!’ exclaimed Martha. ‘And what would that be meaning?’ She reached out to take the letter from Alice, shades of Norris Green running through her head.
Alice immediately said, ‘It’s on me shelf upstairs.’
Martha looked surprised that she had not brought the letter down with her, so Alice added apologetically, ‘I got to give it to Patrick only. His Nibs has got me name down in his notebook, seeing as I took it in.’
‘Tosh! I’m as good as Patrick. You can give it to me.’
‘I’d better not, Martha. I don’t want no trouble with the Post Office. And you might open it.’
That was exactly what Martha wanted to do. ‘I wouldn’t do nothing like that, I wouldn’t,’ she wheedled.
‘No,’ said Alice again. ‘His Nibs trusted me.’
Martha’s face darkened, so Alice hastened to add, ‘I’m sorry, Martha.’
Martha crossly threw her basket into a corner and went over to the range. She picked up the poker and attacked a few smouldering embers. Then she took some small lumps of coal from the box and laid them very carefully on top.
‘I don’t see why not,’ she snarled at Alice.
Mary Margaret dropped her sewing into her lap. The last thing she wanted was a quarrel between two of her friends; she could not bear the stress of it.
Anxious to placate, she said, ‘Martha, love, it won’t be long till Pat comes in – and the kids will come back from school any minute now. Let’s have a cuppa tea and enjoy it while we got a bit of peace. Never mind the letter.’
Martha swung the hob with the kettle on it over the fire. Her lower lip stuck out belligerently, as she said, ‘I want to know what’s in it.’
Mary Margaret laughed gently. ‘We all want to know. But Alice is right, you know. His Nibs did trust her – if Pat complained that you opened it, you never know what might happen.
‘There’s Theresa now. She sometimes gets letters abo
ut her pension; if she wasn’t home, rather than chance leaving letters with someone, His Nibs might send them back. He’d say he couldn’t find her. Her pension would stop, sure as fate, while They checked that she was still alive.’
The kettle began to sing. ‘Well, he’s stupid. He can trust anybody in this house,’ Martha responded sharply, knowing full well that she was lying through her teeth.
‘Love,’ Mary Margaret pleaded. ‘You might get it from Patrick if you open his letter. And I couldn’t bear for you to get a black eye. You couldn’t read it, anyway; I’d have to – and if he were angry enough, he might hit me.’
Martha paused, teapot in hand. Mary Margaret was right – and a blow might kill her friend.
She said with a wry grin to Alice, ‘Aye, none of us wants a beating. Would you like a cup of tea before you go back up?’
‘No, ta. I left Mike eating his tea. I’d better go.’ And she thankfully ran back upstairs.
‘Where you bin?’ asked Mike.
‘Oh, I just got caught by a bit of gossip from Mary Margaret. The school attendance man’s after her to send Dollie to school.’
‘Humph.’
Downstairs, apart from Martha being rather short in her responses to Mary Margaret’s efforts at placating gossip, they did have a peaceful cup of tea.
The rattle of cups woke Number Nine. He stretched and exposed his bare bottom. Then he turned over, arched his back, and unexpectedly produced a spray of water over the women’s skirts.
‘Jamie,’ screamed his mother, giving him his correct name to show her displeasure.
Unable to do anything else to stop the tide, he hastily turned onto his stomach again and soaked the coat under him.
Mary Margaret began to laugh, and soon both women and Dollie were laughing.
Number Nine giggled.
Assured that he would not be scolded further, he finished his peeing and scrambled to his feet. His distended stomach glistened with wet.
He caught his mother’s damp skirt. ‘Butties?’ he asked innocently.
The women were convulsed with merriment.
TWENTY-ONE
‘Think About It? My Foot!’
July to September 1939
When the daylight failed, Mary Margaret and Dollie packed up their sewing and went upstairs to their room, where, by the light of a candle, Mary Margaret gave her children some bread to eat. Then she and Dollie, crouched together by the candle, began again to sew.
Soon after Mary Margaret had left, Martha’s children ate their tea of bread and margarine, and went out to play in the court.
‘Now you, Kathleen, get out there and watch they don’t go out of the court – it’s getting dark.’
‘Oh, Mam!’ wailed Kathleen. She always felt tired these days.
‘Shut up and get going.’
Kathleen went.
A few minutes later, a weary and irate Patrick came home. He passed his children without a word; Kathleen shuffled to one side of the step to allow him to pass her, but kept her head down.
Feeling the benefit of more money in the house, Martha had fed both the children and herself more generously, and she was in a better mood.
For Patrick, she had stewed some minced beef and baked two potatoes: this repast had been intended for his midday dinner. But he had done a full day’s work and, at midday, he had not returned; instead, he had bought a sandwich at Meg’s cocoa room. She now produced his plate from the oven, where it had been warming up for the past hour.
As usual, he did not greet her. He merely sat down on the chair and slowly took off his boots and tossed them into the hearth. His bare feet looked red and swollen.
As she sat on a box and watched him eat, his wife did not say a word about the letter. After the hubbub of the dockside, the silence was welcome to him.
When he had finished, he handed her the empty plate. Then he leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. In the warmth of the fire, he was about to drift off to sleep, when Martha remarked casually, ‘Alice has got a letter for you. The postman asked her to take it in, ’cos I was out.’
Patrick’s eyes opened slowly, but when the import of the remark sank in, he jerked upright, his fatigue forgotten. ‘A letter? You don’t say?’
Martha smiled a little grimly. ‘She has, and – you’ll never believe it – she wouldn’t give it to me. The postman wrote down her name and she was afraid he wouldn’t trust her again, if she give it to anybody else.’
‘Humph.’ He rose slowly to his feet, and leaned down to retrieve his boots from the hearth. ‘Who’s it from? Do you know?’
‘Town hall,’ she replied. ‘Hope it’s not an eviction.’ She kept her voice calm, though she was on tenterhooks.
He shrugged, and slipped his feet into his boots. Anything was possible: you never knew what They would hit you with next. Without another word, he went slowly through to the hall and then she heard him clumping up the stairs.
She was frantic to know what the letter portended and she felt that, just to be awkward, he might keep the information from her, so she let him get to the foot of the second flight and then quietly followed him.
He knocked on Alice’s door, and on hearing her response, he opened it and walked in. The room was dimly lit by a candle.
Mike raised a hand in lazy salute, and said, ‘I just heard you got an invite from the Mayor asking you to tea!’
A vastly interested Alice smiled and hastily took the letter down from the shelf. She handed it to him. Patrick grinned slowly, and said ‘Ta’ to her. As he walked past her towards Mike and the candle, he tore open the envelope.
Martha slipped in through the open door. She winked at Alice. In perfect silence all three watched, as Patrick unfolded a single sheet of paper and began slowly to spell it out to himself.
Alice could read well and she longed to snatch it off him and run through it more quickly; nevertheless, wanting to be polite, she remained quiet.
‘Well, I’ll be buggered!’ he finally exclaimed.
‘What is it?’ hissed Martha.
‘It’s a job – for a fireman. It’s not from the town hall, it’s from the municipal offices.’
‘Temporary?’ queried Mike promptly.
Patrick agreed, and continued to stare at his letter.
Alice noticed that Martha was puzzled by the emphasis on the job’s being temporary, so she explained. ‘The City’s near stony broke, love. So they won’t want to pay for, say, a pension scheme for you.’ She paused, and then said thoughtfully, ‘They don’t have to pay nothing but the wages, if they make all new workers into temporary, even if they’re not. I read it in the paper a long time back.’
Patrick sank down on the corner of Mike’s bed. He looked at Alice and handed her the letter. ‘Could you read it to me, Missus, to make sure I got it right?’ he asked quite humbly.
Delighted to have her superior abilities acknowledged, Alice took it from him, while Mike remarked with a nod towards her, ‘She’s a real good reader, she is. Loves a love letter.’
Alice laughed, as she perused the short epistle. ‘This isn’t no love letter – my bad luck! But you’re right, Pat. The job’s yours, if you can do the training and pass the physical exam. Three pounds a week to start, and all.’
Martha looked at Pat, stupefied. ‘Three pound a week? Every week?’
‘Yes,’ confirmed Alice.
‘It’s like winning the pools!’ burst out Martha.
Alice laughed again, and went on, ‘It says that a councillor who knows him has been kind enough to recommend him.’
Mike snorted with amusement. ‘No names, no pack drill! Since when has you been hobnobbing with ’igh society, Patrick, me lad?’
‘Must be the councillor I hauled out of the river. I thought he’d forgotten me.’
‘When’ve you got to go?’ asked Martha, her mind already running over the question of a new shirt and some socks.
‘Next Thursday,’ replied a bewildered Pat. ‘I got to think a
bout it, though.’ His main thought was that Martha would, if he took the job, know exactly what he earned – and that could make life difficult.
‘Who signed it?’ asked Mike.
Alice peered at the signature. ‘It says Per pro J. Brown, Civil Defence Service. Never heard that name before, have you?’
‘Nope,’ replied Mike. ‘Except Civil Defence Service is a set-up to make ready for a war, I know that: BBC said so. Extra police an’ all that, and firemen and air-raid wardens and rescue service. It’ll be shift work, sure to be.’
Patrick continued to sit quietly on Mike’s bed, while the rest of them discussed his future. He saw himself toiling for eight hours a day, with no hope of going to the races when he felt worn out; he wasn’t sure that he wanted that. He glanced apprehensively at his wife. He knew what she was thinking: he’ll be a walking bank!
He got up slowly, and said, ‘Ta, ever so,’ to Alice, who handed his letter back to him. Then he looked down at Mike. ‘See you later, maybe.’ He sighed heavily. ‘It’s a big change. I got to think about it.’
‘Think about it, my foot!’ muttered Martha, as, after saying goodbye, she flew down the stairs after him like a flapping raven after a piece of meat.
It took about ten minutes for the news to percolate throughout the court.
TWENTY-TWO
‘’Ave a Good Cry. It’ll Cheer You Up No End’
1965
Early one chilly, overcast morning, just after breakfast, feeling hopelessly overworked and very frustrated herself, Angie addressed her favourite patient rather irritably when she found her crying.
A weeping patient was not that unusual, and Angie asked mechanically, ‘Now, what’s up, Martha?’
She set down a basin of warm water on the commode by Martha’s bed, preparatory to helping her wash herself.
‘I was thinking,’ replied Martha with a huge sobbing sigh. ‘Just thinking.’
‘Well, there’s nothing wrong with thinking, is there? Here’s the flannel. Come on now, wash your face and maybe you’ll feel better.’
A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin Page 16