He did not need to say any more to the menfolk; they all knew the saying from the trenches of the First World War, ‘Never share a match. By the time you’ve lit the third man’s cigarette, you’ll be dead.’
He did not mention flashlights or car lights or bicycle lamps. He himself had been provided with a flashlight, but nobody else in his little area owned such luxuries.
Martha reckoned her heart was broken when Brian, in late September of 1939, was suddenly imbued with a desire for adventure. At seventeen and a half, he lied to the recruiting officer that he was eighteen and applied to join the army.
The recruiting sergeant loved men from the courts, and immediately snapped him up.
‘They make the best troops in the world. They’ve already endured everything,’ he would say over a pint of ale. ‘Anything they face in the army comes easy to them after living in a court.’
Martha wept on the boy’s shoulder. ‘How could you leave me like this? I need you. And you’ve got a decent job with Mr Beamish.’
‘Somebody’s got to fight the war, Mam. I’ll get seven shillings a week – and out of it I can make a bit of an allotment. And you won’t have to feed me.’
This practical information comforted Martha a little. She wiped her nose on the end of her apron, and said, with a half sob, ‘If you get killed, I’ll mairder yez.’
The threat, often made in his childhood when he ran out into the street, made Brian laugh, and it was a cheerful young man who went off to war.
His mother wept, and not only for his lost wages; he had given her a lot of moral support. ‘Even Bridie listened to him,’ she sobbed to Alice Flynn, who, for once, fervently thanked heavens she had no sons.
Martha was almost immediately upset again when she received a postcard from Warwickshire to say that Lizzie, her eldest girl in service, had found herself a lovely job in a Naafi canteen. ‘I got a nice room in the village,’ she wrote, ‘with another girl from Liverpool.’
When Martha heard from Alice what the postcard said, she exclaimed, ‘Mother of God! What’s happening to me family? And me nearly on me knees when I first had to get her ready for a job, with new clothes and all.’
‘What did you do?’ asked Alice.
‘Ach! Spent a whole day going from one place to another, begging clothes for her. They was nice about it, but They get fed up with you, don’t they?’ Martha stared glumly at the postcard, while she chewed a piece of nail off her thumb.
‘Well, you won’t miss her wages, like you will Brian’s.’
‘She were a good girl; she sent me a bit from time to time.’
Alice tried to cheer her up by suggesting, ‘She might meet a nice lad in the Naafi.’
‘She could.’
Alice’s suggestion proved correct. Lizzie had a hasty wartime marriage in Warwickshire during a soldier’s forty-eight-hour leave.
‘There wasn’t no time, Mam,’ she wrote on a postcard, ‘to bring him home nor nothing. Maybe later on.’
The postcards dwindled in number until by the end of the war, Martha had lost track of Lizzie and, indeed, had almost forgotten her. When Lizzie saw her husband’s parents’ pleasant, clean house and ordered life, she could not bring herself to take him to Liverpool. ‘Me mam and dad died in the war,’ she said, and thus divested herself of court life.
Soon after Brian left home, Sister Elizabeth from the children’s school came to visit Martha, about the evacuation of her other children to the country.
She was met with an immediate refusal.
‘Our Kathleen’s working in a canteen,’ she told the Sister. ‘And Bridie’ll start work soon. And Tommy helps me quite a bit with what he brings in.’ Her voice rose in anger. ‘And if you think I’m going to send little Joey, Ellie and James to a foreign place, you should have another think.’
‘But you don’t want them to be killed, do you? You can go with them, you know,’ protested the teacher.
‘Of course I don’t want them killed, Sister! But who do you think is going to look after me hubby and the kids here if I go away?’ Nuns really didn’t know anything.
The Sister knew Martha of old, and she gave up: her children would soon be working, and the wages they would bring in were something all mothers in the poverty-stricken district looked forward to, to be enjoyed until the offspring married and left home.
She felt sorry for Kathleen, who, being a girl, would be expected to give up all her earnings. She knew the child was, when in school, already a boiling volcano of suppressed rage, a rage which sometimes came out in the playground when she could be quite a bully: and, like many others, she occasionally came to school with an obvious bruise on her face or arms or legs.
It was a pity, she thought. Kathleen had potential to do better for herself, if only her mother would give her a little help – cut her hair and make her clean and neat. She did not inquire more precisely what kind of job the girl had found: her mind was filled with the problems of evacuation.
Though she had assured the child that inward and spiritual graces were more important than outward show, she had, towards the end of her last school term, talked gently to her about grooming in preparation for going to work.
She would have been delighted to know of the sound advice the child had subsequently received, though she would certainly not have approved of the woman who gave it to her.
TWENTY-SIX
‘Kathleen Was So Uppity’
July 1938
Not all Sister’s advice to Kathleen had been lost upon her; every girl wanted to look like Jeanette MacDonald or some other queen of the films; the trouble was how to do it when you had nothing. It was even more difficult when your address was a court. She had turned down a job cleaning the floors of a greengrocery which, not without difficulty, Martha had found for her.
‘No,’ was the immediate, forceful response. ‘I want to be a shop girl, a clean job, not a scrub woman. Or go into a factory if I can’t go into a shop.’
Her mother was very angry. ‘Well, find a job yourself – but don’t be long about it.’ She turned to pick up her basket of rags, and then she snarled, ‘Look in your dad’s paper. And, meantime, be thankful you’ve got a mother who’ll give you something to eat.’
She swung her basket onto her head, and stomped out of the house.
Kathleen was shocked. Though her mother had often appeared heartless, it seemed as if now she did not care what happened to her, as long as she brought in some money immediately.
Kathleen knew that she was verminous, so she supposed that some employers would find her unacceptable. But surely Mam would help her as much as she could to reduce that unacceptability, wouldn’t she? Like she had done for Lizzie.
Yet, she had not; she had simply found her a third-rate job, for which she would need nothing but the clothes she stood up in. The hurt sank into her, to join the sense of humiliation she had endured in school. That misery, though shared by other children from the courts, had been almost intolerable. Had it not been for sharp-eyed Sister Elizabeth and her encouragement, Kathleen would have run away. At home, she had accepted the conditions in which she lived; she had no other experience; in a way, she was afraid of the world outside it: and there had always been Mam, sharp-voiced, heavy-handed, but at least there, the centre of her small universe.
A number of visits to the Wesleyan Central Hall with her mother and Mary Margaret, where, for twopence, they could watch an old film, had told her that there was, indeed, a strange world out there. But it was so different that she could not imagine becoming a part of it.
Why should Kathleen do anything different from her mother? Martha would ask anyone who would listen. They had to learn that there were some things which even a miracle-working mam could not alter; she had tried with Lizzie, and Lizzie hated her life as a domestic servant.
In Martha’s estimation, it was a certainty that her world would never change for the better: her children had to be aware of that and learn to manage in it.
Ann O’Brien had heard many heated exchanges between Martha and her children. Living in a room next to them, she knew all the family and most of their woes, and, as consolation, she gave them little gifts, when she had had a good night’s work and had anything to give.
Martha was being too hard, she felt; Kathleen would be on the streets in no time, if she did not watch it; and, being no beauty, she’d never get off them. She wouldn’t wish her own grim life on any kid. Somebody ought to help her.
Soon after the girl had left school in July 1938, Ann was not surprised, one wet summer day, to find Kathleen snivelling in the archway leading into the court. She put down the bottle of milk she had been carrying, and put her arms around the inadequately clad girl.
‘What’s up, love?’ she asked, and then joked, ‘Your mam thrown you out?’
‘Not yet,’ Kathleen admitted. Then she added cynically, ‘She wants me wages too much.’
As the rain pattered on the pavement outside the archway, she looked up at the concerned, raddled face bent over hers. Here was an old friend.
She poured out her desire for a nice clean job. ‘A decent factory job or something. I tried Bibby’s, but I didn’t get past the door. I don’t know why.’ She leaned against Ann’s thin chest. ‘What I really want, Ann, is to be a shop girl – like the girls in Boots the Chemists. Sometimes I look at them through the shop windows and they look lovely!’
‘Well, love there’s nothing like aiming high.’
Ann smiled and then glanced round her. Childless herself, she envied Martha her girls. She looked hastily around the court. She could not take Kathleen into her own room behind Martha’s room: Martha had never encouraged that.
She said kindly, ‘Let’s go and get a cup of tea in the cocoa room across the road. Have a little talk, eh? Put your jacket up over your head against the rain, now.’
Kathleen nodded agreement, and they scuttled across the road and into the café. Now that the war was looming, dockers and seagoing men did not have much time to idle in cocoa rooms; they had found work, so the café was almost empty. At the back, two elderly men sat playing a game of draughts, while they sipped their cocoa; when the door slammed behind Ann, they did not even look up.
With a steaming hot mug of tea in front of her and kind Ann looking on, Kathleen gazed at her old friend with hope shining from her black-ringed eyes.
Ann truly did not want Kathleen walking the streets like herself, though a virgin was always welcome: men would pay a good price for a first go at her.
After thoughtfully sipping her own tea, she said, ‘Well, I’m going to talk to you straight, aye?’
Kathleen nodded eagerly.
‘First off, have you got a reference from the school?’
‘Oh, aye. Sister wrote me a real nice one.’
‘Good. Next thing is, you’ve got to look all bright and clean yourself; you got to have nice neat hair and clean hands.
Kathleen sighed hopelessly and shrugged.
‘Don’t take on, love. You go to the bathhouse and wash your hair and yourself real well; and we’ve got scissors, so our Helen, she could cut your hair real nice.’
‘I’ve got lice in it,’ replied Kathleen. ‘They keep coming back.’
Mobile dandruff! Ann smiled grimly. They always will come back until you get out of the court, she thought.
She said, ‘Your mam knows to rub paraffin in your hair every week, I’d think. Then wash it.’ She glanced at Kathleen’s begrimed fingers clutching the end of the table. ‘And cut your nails: you got to have clean nails for a clean job.’
To Kathleen, getting herself clean seemed a hopeless task. Her only acquaintance with a bath was what she had seen in films, where women sat amid a pile of soapsuds which always covered them modestly. She remembered that they sang soulful love songs, as they lifted one leg up above the suds to admire its pearly whiteness, clearly shown in the black and white picture. Martha had condemned the latter, saying roundly, ‘It ain’t decent to show off your legs!’
Despite her doubts about baths, Kathleen wanted to follow Ann’s advice. Her face fell, however.
‘I haven’t got sixpence for the bathhouse.’
‘We’ll find it from somewhere, don’t worry. What you do need is a decent frock, stockings and shoes – and a coat or mac. And, somehow, to keep the lice out of them.
‘You know, Alice Flynn’s got an iron. Maybe she’d lend it to you. A hot iron down the seams of everything every few days would keep the vermin down.’
Kathleen nodded. What hope?
Ann looked with distaste at Kathleen’s jacket, which hung dripping from the back of her chair. ‘You gotta be respectable-looking, somehow. If you look nice, an employer might train you in something to start you. Then you can work up – and one day you might get into Boots.’
The latter remark made Kathleen smile shyly. Ann was wonderful; at least she understood.
‘If you like, I’ll have a talk with your mam. She was getting impatient with you, that’s all, because she’s got too much to do; the threat of the war’s got us all het up.’
Kathleen did not have much hope about this suggestion; she was still feeling the pain of rejection. But she had faith in Ann.
She agreed.
When Ann brought up the problem of equipping Kathleen to go out into the world of work, Martha was very defensive. ‘She could learn to be a fent woman, like me. Just ’cos she can read she’s got too stuck-up.’
But Ann was patient, and she finally pursuaded Martha that the girl could be as good as a bank if she had a decent job. Helen was recruited to help in the transformation, and thought it would be a proper lark.
After combing her hair for lice with the comb which had belonged originally to Mary Margaret, Kathleen submitted to her impatient mother’s rubbing paraffin into her hair. The next morning, a sleepy Helen combed out the dead lice and cut it for her. She then bustled her off to the bathhouse, where she paid the sixpenny entrance fee.
Kathleen was so scared of the bossy attendant and of the huge white bath full of water, steaming like a witch’s cauldron, that she threatened to bolt. But Helen held her hand firmly, made her strip and almost forced her into the bath. She then washed her hair and instructed her on how to wash her body and face.
‘Got to do it thorough,’ she ordered. ‘Every week! Clean job – clean girl.’
For years, Helen had not taken a bath herself or bothered to wash her head. Older than Ann, she had as a child been bathed in the Mersey River, before the docks and warehouses closed it off altogether, and she had remarked laughingly to Ann when approached about Kathleen, ‘It was a lot easier to be clean in them days; not like it is now.’
She, too, knew the Connolly children well and she agreed that, with a little cooperation, Kathleen could be given a better chance than either of them had had.
What emerged from the bath was a little maid with a peerless white skin and shiny black hair which floated softly round her face, and a skinny little body with tiny breasts, not yet fully formed.
‘Aye, you look like a real little love,’ Helen told the child, as she dried her off on the clean towel provided by the bathhouse.
The problem of clothes had been partly solved by Martha’s talking to Tara, her market friend. She had told her about Ann’s interference regarding Kathleen.
She said, ‘Of course, I don’t want her on the street. I only want her to have an ordinary job until she’s a couple of years older. Then, maybe, she’ll be big enough and strong enough to get a factory job, if she’s lucky. And she said herself that a factory job would be OK.’
‘Did you get any clothes for her?’
‘Nah. Where would I get clothes for her? No charity’s going to help me much.
‘God’s truth! You know, I’m afraid to ask anybody for help. Last time I did, it were for Mary Margaret’s kids – and They took them away. When I think of that, I worry about Them taking me own little ones.’
Tara nodded agreement. ‘What
about trying for a cheque?’
Cheques were issued by loan companies, usually to be spent in certain stores which charged inflated prices. The sum was paid back by weekly instalments. Tara herself was able to obtain such cheques because her husband was known to have regular work as a tram driver and was likely, therefore, to pay off the loans which they represented. Tara used them all the time because the clothes she bought had often worn out before the loan was paid off. So immediately she had finished paying off one cheque, she applied for another.
Now she said, ‘I think you might just manage to get one. You work regular in the market, don’t you? That’s a job. Why not have a try? You could be lucky.’
Two companies snubbed Martha and turned her down. A third company said that they would consider her application if she could provide written confirmation that she had a regular business in the market.
Defeated because she had no pedlar’s licence to show them, she consulted Tara again.
Tara suggested shrewdly that this third company might be more lenient, because they wanted clients who were not likely to be called up and be reduced to a soldier’s pay with their debts frozen, if war began.
‘That may be,’ responded a glum Martha. ‘But how do I convince them about me?’
Tara’s reply was unexpected. ‘Who’s your favourite butcher in the market?’ she inquired.
Martha cheered up immediately and looked positively roguish. ‘They all are!’ she declared. ‘They’re forever teasing me.’
‘Ask any two of them to write a little note on their billheads to say they buy regular from you and know that you have a steady business in rags,’ she ordered.
Quite shyly, Martha did this. Once it was clear to the butchers that they were not being asked to guarantee her loan, two of them did as she asked. They both wished her luck.
Martha got a cheque to the value of one pound, the company’s smallest issue. Like Tara, she became hooked on the system and was launched on a merry-go-round of debt which seemed eternal.
So, when Kathleen walked out of the baths, she had on, for the first time, a petticoat and panties, lisle stockings, held up by a pair of elastic garters contributed by Ann, a navy-blue skirt, a pink-striped blouse and a navy-blue waterproof jacket with a zip fastener. She also had on a pair of second-hand lace-up shoes too big for her, bought by Martha herself, with much grumbling, from a second-hand shop; the one-pound cheque she had obtained had proved insufficient to cover new shoes.
A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin Page 19