Her cry to the Beloved Virgin reminded her of the delicately painted, plaster Madonna in her church, before a bomb hit it. Prayers to Her had been part of her life, a frequent reminder that the Mother of the Lord Jesus was always there, able to walk in the world to listen and to hear, particularly, the prayers of women. A gentle friend, who gave you strength to bear what you had to bear. A pink-tipped hand stretched out to bless you, if you’d done something good, someone who could intercede between a sinner and God Himself.
She lay for a moment paralysed, exhausted, without hope of help from human beings. Then she forced herself to be calm, clenching her hands in an effort to stop her panic. It’s true, remember there is someone to ask, there is. Our Lady!
She took several big, shaky breaths.
Her voice worn out and very humble, though still with a dreadful agitation in it, she begged, ‘Dearest Lady, help me. I haven’t got nobody but you and your Beloved Son. I’ve even lost dear Number Nine, who serves your Son most faithfully. I can’t write to him and I don’t know how you could tell him where I am. But could you? Could you put it in his heart how to find me?’
She paused. She felt so very tired, too weary even to cry any more, with a heart that still pounded unmercifully.
When she had gathered a little more strength, she continued, at first formally, ‘I beg you to intercede for me in my sinfulness that I may be forgiven for all the stupid things I done wrong in my life, especially with me kids; I never seen some of the warning signs that must have been with them.
‘But please, please, Dear Mother of Our Blessed Lord, be merciful. Let me be forgiven. Let me get well and get out of this awful place.’
She heaved a mighty sigh, said Amen and kissed her rosary.
Without any true hope that her sins would be forgiven, particularly her many thefts from Lewis’s and Blackler’s Stores, she turned to lay her head on a dry piece of pillow. ‘Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner,’ she whimpered.
Strangely, it seemed, for a moment, that she had laid her head against the knee of an understanding mother who would, at least try for her. She sobbed helplessly and half-dreamed that the Holy Mother spoke to her, though she did not understand the words.
A little comforted, she slowly calmed. She knew she could do no more. Fatigue overwhelmed her, and she slept.
Holy peace does not last long.
She was roused by Angie, who put a tray on top of the commode. She pulled back the bedclothes and shouted into her ear, ‘Breakfast!’
Martha rolled over and slowly sat up. Angie had shot across the room and was tying a bib round the neck of one of the dementia patients, who had to be fed by hand.
Goodness, it really was morning. She blinked at the sight of the sun coming through the windows. How she must have slept! And did she really see the Dear Lady? Was she here?
She came sharply back to earthly necessities.
‘I got to pee first,’ she told Angie urgently.
Not wanting another wet bed, Angie abandoned the dementia patient, and came to help Martha out of bed. She whipped the tray off the commode and put it on the floor. Then she opened the lid of the commode.
‘Come on,’ she said impatiently.
Martha stared at her. She felt a little lost, as if she was a long way away from the aide. Though weariness dragged at every limb, as she threw off her bedclothes and turned until her legs dangled over the side of the bed, she felt curiously at peace. It was strange. And she had been so scared last night, she remembered.
Without thinking, she said to Angie, ‘You go back to Lena. I can manage.’
To her faint surprise, Angie obeyed.
By moving carefully, she succeeded. She even closed the commode lid and lifted the tray back onto it, without reeling.
‘Humph, there’s nothing like a good cry to set you up,’ she thought with a rueful grin as she heaved herself back into bed. ‘It cheers you up no end.’ But in her heart, she cherished an inner understanding that help would come from the Holy Mother herself.
She leaned over and took up the plate of food; it felt cold. As she viewed the white mass on a white plate, she muttered, ‘Jaysus Mary, give me patience. Macaroni cheese again – and for breakfast? Yuk! What I wouldn’t give for a good pile of bacon and fried bread!’
TWENTY-FIVE
‘Moaning Minnies’
August 1939 to March 1940
Browbeaten by a ruthless Martha, Patrick joined the fire brigade. Her final, irrefutable argument was that, if he did so, they could then find a better place to live: it would no longer be necessary for him to be close to the docks and live with nine other people in one room.
With a motley crew of new recruits to train, the regular firemen found themselves grossly overworked. Though they themselves were, like most other City employees, very underpaid, they were a tight, almost military brotherhood, held together by the sharing of particular dangers.
They looked with scorn upon the recruits thrust upon them, particularly people like Patrick, who was regarded as brainless scum from the docks. Patrick had, also, an inbuilt dumb insolence, when other people tried to order him around more than usual, and this did not endear him to his impatient teachers.
The regulars made the training as hard as they could. They were themselves big men, used to carrying heavy loads of hoses, axes and other equipment upstairs at a run. They knew just how to keep a wriggling, deadweight hose, belching out water, focused on a particular target: they became irate when their pupils, trying to emulate them, succeeded in soaking everyone in sight. Each hapless pupil had to learn how to set up a ladder safely, run up it like a squirrel and bring down a supposedly helpless victim of smoke inhalation, a feat that novices found very hazardous, as ladders swayed and teachers swore at them.
Finally, they had to learn the art of keeping themselves alive when coping with a tumbling, flaming building, a sight which truly terrified most of them.
It seemed to a gloomy Patrick that he would never learn all the finer points of firemanship and would himself end up a cinder.
He might have given up, were it not that his new life, though it had its problems, was basically less arduous. It was also more interesting.
For the first time in his life, his narrow world had been opened up. He met men from other parts of Liverpool and, willy-nilly, learned to communicate with fellow sufferers unconnected with docks or shipping.
After a few weeks of doubtful close association, he became quite defensive of them when they were criticised as conscientious objectors, trying to avoid army service or being sent down the coal mines. ‘Some of them have failed the army medical on a small point,’ he said, ‘but a lot are like me, too old for call-up.’
He was secretly envious that many of his fellow recruits could easily read the written instructions which fluttered down from distant bureaucrats, who had rarely ever seen a fire. Though many of his weedy-looking associates seemed to belong to the world of Them, he began grudgingly to respect them. They were quite kindly about explaining anything he did not understand, and did not flinch when faced with dangerous situations.
As he got used to them, they occasionally said they had joined the fire brigade because they wanted to help their country’s war effort. They seemed to have very high ideals: they did not believe in killing, even in war, some of them told him.
Ideals were something preached about by the church; as far as Patrick was concerned they had nothing to do with him. All his life, he had worked at very heavy jobs to keep himself alive, help his ever-increasing family and, maybe, have a bit of fun and warmth in the nearest pub or have a swim or a race or a game of marbles, on which to bet.
It dawned on him only slowly that these pansies, as he privately called them, had some reciprocal regard for him, for his physical strength and his silent, fairly friendly willingness to show them how to shift heavy weights quickly. Though a man of only average height and very thin, Patrick had muscles like iron.
Thanks to exercise in mu
ch fresher air than warehouses provided, and to more food, he soon acquired greater energy. He lost some of his diffidence, and he began to add his modest opinions to the general conversation.
The much-despised recruits from all levels of society, thrown together by the war, eventually founded their own brotherhood. It finally became enormous, as auxiliary firemen slowly outnumbered by ten to one the original brigades who were their teachers.
In the first year of the war the civilian population, outside London, was not heavily bombed; and, to their thankful surprise, there was no invasion by the Germans. So the auxiliary firemen were soon regarded by their neighbours as lazy good-for-nothings, like the air-raid wardens, who drew three pounds a week each as if it were a retirement pension.
Collectively the brotherhood endured this contempt, and some of them quietly worked at a second job as well. A poet working with him solemnly assured Patrick that their time would come, which did not reassure Patrick about his own safety.
He cheered up, however, when Martha reminded him that accidents in the docks and in ships were legion, and he had survived them: the fire brigade could not be much worse.
As recruitment into both the Forces and civil defence intensified, the number of young men hanging around in the streets decreased markedly. Auntie Ellen’s two sons were called up for the Navy. She was not too sorry to see them go.
‘They’ve been hanging around the house long enough,’ she said shortly. ‘It’ll be a change to get a bit of an allotment from them.’
Brave words. But when the Athenia, on its way to America with numerous evacuated children, was sunk in Liverpool Bay by a German submarine, she became sick with fear.
Very soon afterwards, there were sad signs in the district that British ships were going down in record numbers.
Helen O’Brien expressed her feelings succinctly. ‘It tries me nairves something awful,’ she said, aware of regular young clients who were dead or had vanished into the call-up.
For those who could not read, or read only poorly, and did not own a radio, word of mouth was the main source of news.
After 3rd September when war was declared, word of losses came like shards of flying glass to pierce the hearts of women. The high number of Liverpool seamen lost was further exaggerated by rumours, and the back streets were filled with numbed, whey-faced wives and mothers.
Mike, in his attic, received a lot of humbly polite visitors asking if they might listen with him to the nine o’clock news.
At first, Martha reckoned that all the beginning of the war did for her was to put neighbours into uniform so that they could boss her around.
In the middle of the continuing general distress over the loss of Mary Margaret and Grandma Theresa, not to speak of her missing daughters, a man wearing a tin hat and blue overalls was noticed in the street outside the court.
He carried a gas mask, a large, hard-cover notebook and a fancy black fountain pen. It took a few moments for his friends to recognise Desi O’Hara, Auntie Ellen’s husband, gleefully laughing at them from under his tin hat. He was, however, according to all the women, including his wife, no joke; on the contrary, he was another cross.
A sandwich-board man had suddenly become an official, the air-raid warden. Behind him, they discovered, lay real authority from Them.
He immediately lost much of his original popularity, particularly when, in a narrow side road, an air-raid wardens’ post was erected. It was complete with cups and saucers and an electric kettle – and plenty of tea and tinned milk! There was also a telephone and switchboard, with a pretty girl in uniform to run it. The local women were really shocked and annoyed at such luxury for men who hung around all day doing nothing.
Undeterred by the false accusations of laziness, Desi went from door to door down the main street and in and out of the few remaining courts. He checked exactly who lived in which house.
‘You see, if you’re bombed flat, we got to know where to find you,’ he explained with a knowing look. He tried to keep his inquiries light-hearted, though it had been explained to him that the aid of a local man who knew where everybody lived would be a priceless help to the Heavy Rescue Units in their burrowing through rubble to find victims.
Then there was the blackout. He insisted that, before lighting so much as a candle, those who had a window had to have black curtains to cover it at night.
Kitty Callaghan, whose husband was in gaol, Sheila Latimer and Phoebe Ferguson, the oakum pickers, and Martha, all of whom had windows, were really miffed at this, and did not hesitate to tell him so.
Martha discovered, however, that she had new clients wherever she went, anxious to buy discarded cloth, preferably black or thick material like worn bedspreads, or leftover pieces of velveteen. A pair of heavy curtains, long discarded, proved unexpectedly valuable. She ceased to tear up worn sheets, and increased her prices for these bigger pieces of material.
As she shared a cup of tea with Tara, her friend of the samovar in the market, she said happily, ‘I might as well make a buck while I can.’
Tara reluctantly agreed. Her problem, as the war progressed, was that tea and sugar were becoming hard to buy. The phrase ‘under the counter’ became common currency, as retailers held back goods in short supply for favoured customers.
Cigarettes became very hard to find, even under counters.
Desi gave up his sermons on the need to carry a gas mask. Women left the mask at home and used the box as a convenient hold-all.
Older men, with jobs for the first time in years, ignored his instructions altogether, despite Desi’s depressing reminders of gas casualties in the First World War.
‘Too much lumber,’ they would grumble, and, if they had time, would wander off on more urgent business, like trying to buy some cigarettes, or finding a pub that was open, with a notice on the door saying that they had beer for sale.
Without Mary Margaret to read for her, Martha turned in desperation to Kathleen. She was astonished to learn that, though she stumbled on some words, the girl could read quite well, thanks to Sister Elizabeth’s constant supervision at school.
Though Kathleen complained bitterly at the boring things her mother bullied her into reading, she was herself surprised at the amount of respect and praise she subsequently received from the other women in the court.
‘Only Alice can read that well,’ she was told.
The praise certainly improved her self-respect.
She read showers of instructions which came through the meagre letter boxes and appeared on posters on every notice board. Home Guard, civil defence, firewatching, fire watchers, Women’s Voluntary Services, the urgent need to keep silent about one’s daily work; they caused a nightmare of confusion.
‘Even a pack of busybodies called the Women’s Institute want to teach you how to make jam or put fruit in bottles, for Christ’s sake,’ muttered these women of the waterfront.
‘And them ration books. Don’t even say how much you can have. We’ll be cheated, we will.’
The court accidentally received pamphlets about building an Anderson air raid shelter in the garden.
‘I’ve had it up to here,’ snapped Martha sourly, when Kathleen explained this to her. ‘What bleeding garden?’
They ended up having a good laugh at that one: they knew then that the government in London was plumb crazy.
How to use a stirrup pump to put out a fire was another instruction which caused a good deal of ribaldry.
When Desi demonstrated one, they had a great game spraying each other, while their children, wearing their gas masks, whooped it up playing cops and robbers in and out of the deluge.
The shelter planned for the street outside the court was built, and was inspected, from start to finish, by elderly males who had worked in construction.
‘It’ll fall down at the first shake,’ they decided gloomily. ‘Too much lime.’
Just what the latter remark really indicated, none of the women was clear about, but it did sound
ominous. Even when air raids became a reality, the shelter was rarely use as anything but a convenient latrine.
For the most part, the tenants opened up the condemned basements of their houses, and, during the raids, took refuge there. Later in the war, they trekked out of the city every night, bedding in prams, children trailing behind them, to seek greater safety in a park or in the countryside.
‘What bothers me most,’ muttered usually silent Patrick, with a loud curse, ‘is the blackout.’
He peeled up a leg of his trousers to exhibit a badly grazed knee to an already fearful Martha. ‘Fell over a pile of sandbags. They’ve got them all round the fire hall – and you can’t see a bloody thing in the dark.’
‘Aye, I tripped over a paving stone meself yesterday. Want me to wrap up the graze?’ There was real sadness in her voice: her world was rapidly becoming a madhouse, as she tried vainly to keep up with the demands made on her.
‘What nearly give me a heart attack was way back in June. The first time I heard the air-raid warning go off, when They was trying it out,’ Martha remarked to Alice, as they waited in a queue to buy some tins of beans at the corner shop. ‘Did it for you?’
Alice agreed that it was the most awful sound in the world. ‘And the all-clear don’t sound much better,’ she added.
‘It’s a proper Moaning Minnie!’ interjected the woman in front of them, her mouth twisted up grimly.
Everybody within hearing laughed at this likening of it to a constantly complaining woman.
The awful noise was, for the duration of the war, promptly named Moaning Minnie: under that name it didn’t seem quite so scary.
Desi found it easier to explain to male smokers and, through them, to their smoking wives that the flame of a match could be seen from afar. ‘And the Jerries can see you,’ he would explain, pointing skywards.
A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin Page 18