Liverpool Daisy

by Helen Forrester

  She stumbled across the room with its litter of bottles and glasses, opened the door a couple of inches and peered out.

  “It’s me, Mrs. Gallagher,” announced the neat young woman on the doorstep. “I’ve brought the blanket for Mrs. O’Brien. How is she today?”

  The lady from the Welfare! Daisy groaned inwardly, acutely aware of the bottles on the hearth rug. The sight of them would be enough to cut off, for ever, this useful source of creature comforts. The cool wind from the river hit her and she breathed in deeply to help her head to clear.

  She longed for the warmth of the blanket in the arms of the Welfare lady. If she was not smart, however, it would be given to another invalid, she was sure.

  “Och, she’s not so bad. She’s sleeping now.” She opened the door slightly further, interposing her plump figure so that the Welfare lady could not see into the room, and held out her arms for the parcel.

  The lady from the Welfare blinked behind her glasses and held her breath, as the stink from the house and its tenant flowed around her. She dumped the parcel into Daisy’s welcoming arms, and stepped back a pace.

  Daisy said with suitable subservience, “It’s proper kind of you, I’m sure. Please thank the ladies for their help.” She gave an old-fashioned half-bob which she had discovered from experience seemed to delight Welfare ladies.

  The Welfare lady smiled and gasped in response, “It will be a comfort to Mrs. O’Brien. Since she’s sleeping, I won’t come in today. Now don’t forget, will you, that you have an appointment today to get your teeth from the Dental Hospital?”

  Daisy simpered. Jesus! She had forgotten it. “No, I haven’t forgotten,” she lied glibly.

  “I’m sure your health will improve immensely once you have teeth,” the kind little woman assured her.

  Daisy sighed. The collection of her teeth was the culmination of a long battle between her and the Welfare lady. For such a frail-looking vixen she had a will of pure iron, Daisy had ofen lamented to Agnes and Nellie. She could press you into anything.

  “I’ll be there,” Daisy promised resignedly. “What time is it now? Me clock’s stopped.”

  The Welfare lady looked at her watch. “Five to eleven,” she said brightly. “Your appointment is at four.”

  Daisy nodded. “Thank you. Me mother will be glad of the blanket.” She eased back into her room a little. She would tell the Welfare next week that her mother was dead. They would never take a blanket out of a bug-ridden house like hers once it was unpacked.

  The Welfare lady was greatly relieved that she had not to sit in Mrs. O’Brien’s fetid bedroom. She promised to come again next week, when she expected Daisy to have a perfect smile.

  Daisy smiled faintly and ran her tongue round her gums. Nobody expected to have teeth at the age of forty-five, unless they were exceptionally lucky. She glumly closed the door as the Welfare lady started up her tiny car.

  There was no room on the table, so she dumped the parcel on the floor and broke the string.

  It was a good, thick double blanket. Daisy had never touched such a blanket, and it gave her almost voluptuous pleasure to run her fingers over it. She sat back on her heels looking at its spotless perfection amid the familiar filth of her room. Her head ached excruciatingly and her first thought was to carry the blanket up to her bed and go to sleep again under it.

  Moggie leaped down from the kitchen oven and came to nose around the woolly pile. He climbed on to it and began to move languidly round to make himself a nest, while Daisy stared through him, thinking how much her mother would have loved to have such a covering.

  In sudden rage she slapped the cat soundly and he went spinning across the room with a frightened yowl.

  “Yer—jigger rabbit!” she yelled at him, “Gerroff and stay off.”

  She got to her feet and picked up the blanket.

  “I know what I’ll do,” she planned. “I’ll wait till Mam’s room’s been done out and then I’ll put it on her bed. And I’ll have that room, and I can lie in bed and think about her and watch the ships coming up the river.”

  She was just frying herself a bit of bacon and a leftover potato on the living-room fire when Meg swept into the house. The glasses were still strewn around the room, but the bottles had been removed to the scullery to await a visit from the rag and bone man.

  Meg had not bothered to knock. She marched up to Daisy and stood over her, a thin and hungry fury suddenly jealous of Daisy’s bacon and potato.

  “I come for me ring,” she announced, her long thin nose held high, her shawl wrapped tightly round her skimpy frame.

  Daisy paused in her cooking long enough to point with a knife. “It’s behind the clock,” she said. Then she took the frying pan to the table, slapped it down on the oilcloth and looked around for a fork amid the debris. There was a strong smell of sizzling oilcloth.

  Meg stood on the fender and felt behind the clock, which was now ticking again. “You’re burning the table-cloth, Daise,” she reprimanded without looking round, as she searched with her fingers amid the junk on the mantelpiece.

  Daisy had found a fork and she said sourly through a mouth full of bacon, “It’s my table cloth.” The bacon was not very crisp and was hard to masticate without teeth.

  Her younger sister got down from the fender and turned. She put on the ring and looked at her hand thus decorated.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” she said crossly as she watched the ring flash from the light of the fire. “Mr. Fancy Pants Freddie told us yesterday and our John’s been telling me ever since.” She swayed over to Daisy seated at the table.

  “Think you’re clever, don’t you?” she mocked.

  Daisy stopped chewing. She shook her knife at her tormentor. “You get out of here, Meg, before I throw you out.” Her voice quivered with indignation.

  “I’ll go when I’m ready. This was my home, too, remember.”

  “It’s mine now.” Daisy’s eyes gleamed with resentment.

  Meg leaned towards her. “Pah! Big cheese, ain’t you?”

  Slowly Daisy collected the unchewable bits of gristle in her mouth and spat at her sister. Meg received it straight in her face.

  She jumped back, wiped her eyes clear with her hand and then with a scream she leaped at Daisy.

  “I’ll marmalise you, you dirty bugger,” she yelled.

  Daisy rose swiftly from her chair and with one hand swung the piece of furniture between her and Meg. She pointed the paring knife she had used to cut her bacon at Meg’s chest.

  Despite her rage, Meg realized that Daisy meant business. The knife was coming slowly closer to her chest, while the chair was grinding painfully against her shins.

  She backed a little.

  “Get out,” whispered Daisy, a world of menace in her voice. “Sling your hook, you bitch. Out!”

  Meg was scared now. She backed slowly towards the door, felt the latch behind her and lifted it.

  Daisy suddenly flung the chair and the knife away. With a moan of terror, Meg turned and pulled the door open. Daisy moved with the speed of an angry elephant, snatched up her sister by the back of her blouse and skirts and flung her through the doorway, heaving her forward with the toe of her boot in the small woman’s buttocks.

  Meg shot across the pavement and into the gutter, barely able to keep her feet. She wobbled like a spinning top, then turned and tore back at her sister, face contorted with hatred, hands outstretched like talons.

  Daisy hastily slammed the door and shot the bolt, then leaned her hefty weight against its ancient timbers.

  Frustrated, Meg pummelled on its heavy panel and shouted, “I’ll larn you, you fat sow.” She kicked at the door and Daisy could hear her sobbing. “John’ll marmalise you for this — you wait till I tell ’im.” Daisy grinned at the latter threat. Big John would keep well out of any fight between women.

  No amount of screaming would persuade Daisy to open the door again. After a moment or two she went contentedly back to her fryi
ng pan. Finally, Meg wiped her face on her shawl, shook her fist at the window, pushed her way through a small group of interested passers-by and marched off home, sobs of hopeless anger mixed with tears of grief for her dead mother making her a small, grey bundle of woe.

  As she ran through the back alley to her own home, she muttered, “I’ll pay her back, I will. Thinks she’s the Nan now, does she.”

  SIX

  The row with Meg and the storm of tears the previous night had done much to alleviate Daisy’s tense misery. A good fight with Meg was such a normal part of her life — she could not remember when they had not been at war with each other over some trifling detail — that she felt much better.

  Fortified by her breakfast she felt strong enough to walk over to Nellie’s house to ask her to come with her to the Dental Hospital. To travel such a distance from home without a companion was unthinkable; Daisy could imagine all kinds of terrible things which might happen to her if she went alone.

  Nellie, however, was feeling far from well and was still in bed. Looking white and exhausted, she lay curled up on a lumpy mattress in the back, ground floor room which was home to George, Joey and herself.

  “I had a bad night, luv,” she explained, “Thinking of your dear mother an’ all. Your mam was always proper kind to me — I’ll never forget her, God rest her.”

  Daisy felt a lump beginning to rise in her own throat. She fought it down. She must not cry before Nellie; Nellie was sick enough without being reminded of death. Her chest heaved as she considered that she might lose Nellie, as well as her mother. She made the suffering woman a cup of tea and said she would ask Agnes to accompany her. Agnes, however, felt that the Public Assistance visitor might call at any time and that she had better be at home, in case he got the idea from her absence that she was working.

  “He’s worse’n a dose of salts, that man,” she told Daisy. “Always wants to know where the kids are, even in school time. Always sayin’ ‘Where’s Joe’ as if labourin’ jobs were two a penny and he must be bringing home thousands a pounds. Fair demarmalises you, it does.”

  Daisy sighed and agreed. “I’ll ask Mary Foley what lives round the corner if she’ll come,” she said. “Only I always kept meself to meself, and I don’t like asking the neighbours.”

  “What about Meg? Or Nellie?”

  “I’m not speaking to Meg at the moment,” replied Daisy primly. “And our Nellie’s not well at all.” She leaned towards her sister, and added in a whisper, “I got the intuitions something awful about Nell.”

  Agnes looked startled. “Ee, don’t say that,” she implored.

  A tear welled up in Daisy’s eye. She sniffed. “Well, I just hope I’m wrong.”

  “T.B.?” inquired Agnes, her voice hardly audible as she asked the dread question.

  Daisy nodded, her expression lugubrious. The sisters looked at each other in silent horror.

  “God have mercy on us,” quavered Agnes, flinging her arms heavenward. “Poor dear.”

  They enjoyed a little weep together, and then Daisy walked homeward, calling at Mary Foley’s house on the way.

  Mary Foley was out. Great Aunt Devlin was too old to make such a long journey.

  Daisy stood tapping a nervous foot on the pavement outside her own front door. Dare she go alone? Dare she not go?

  Finally she decided that the dangers of penetrating the centre of Liverpool were less than the danger of losing the goodwill of the Welfare lady, who had so painstakingly collected sixpence a week from her for years to save up for new teeth.

  Apart from five shillings put by for the redecorating of her late mother’s room, Daisy still had three shillings left from the burial insurance money, so she decided to take a tram down to Lime Street Station and another one out again to the Dental Hospital. She reckoned she would be safer on the tram.

  Nellie had accompanied her when she went to have the impression taken for her teeth and they had walked, the appointment having been made for the day before Daisy drew her allotment from her husband’s shipping company, a day on which she was always penniless. Michael’s allotment was eighteen shillings a week and this, added to her mother’s old age pension of ten shillings, had made the two women a shilling or two better off than if they had been dependent upon the Public Assistance Committee. Still, it was not very much.

  Now as she sat demurely in the tram, hands folded neatly in her lap, as it trundled through the streets, bell pinging impatiently to make carters move their wagons off the lines, it dawned on her that her mother’s pension would have ceased with her death; yet she would be faced with the same need to pay the rent, the same need for a coal fire and oil for the lamp; but she would have only eighteen shillings with which to do it all.

  She was aghast. Under her warm shawl her body felt cold, and she trembled. All the small treats that made life bearable would be gone; no twopence for a beer at the Ragged Bear on a Saturday night or an occasional twopence for an afternoon cinema show with Nellie; even paying for a set of teeth at a painful sixpence a week for over three years would have been out of the question on a measly allotment of eighteen shillings.

  Because her husband had, by sailing on a boat which never touched Liverpool, kept her off Parish Relief, Daisy had been able to hold her head high in a district where many of the English and Welsh inhabitants looked down upon her — they wore coats and she had only a shawl. But now she knew that though her income was still above the Public Assistance rate for one person, it was not going to be enough.

  No more bacon ends from Mrs. Donnelly’s! She would soon be as thin as Meg whose family was on relief. A fat lot of good teeth were going to be. For once, a tear of self-pity quivered in the corner of Daisy’s deep-set blue eyes and rolled slowly down her plump face, which had been specially wiped with a wet cloth for the benefit of the dentist.

  The earnest young dentist who had made her teeth for her awaited her arrival with something approaching agony. He had been unable to forget the interview with her two weeks earlier when he had examined her mouth and taken the impression for her teeth. The fearsome smell of her and of her clothing had been bad enough, the louse which he was sure he had collected from her had been worse. When she opened her mouth, however, he had recoiled like a young soldier going over the top and facing fire for the first time. He had hastily reached for a glass of mouthwash and made her gargle and spit her way through two complete glasses full before trying again.

  This time he was prepared. The tall window nearest to him was wide open. In the cupboard rested another clean white coat, together with a large paper bag into which to thrust the one he was wearing immediately Daisy should have left. Neatly lined up by the tiny sink were two glasses of double strength mouthwash. He was ready.

  Yet, when she entered not ungracefully with an old-fashioned, respectful half-bob, her plump face beaming in spite of her worries, he felt ashamed. To square his conscience he fussed around her a little, showed her the immaculately white teeth grinning on his side table, explained to her how to keep them clean, warned her that she might feel she was going to vomit when he put them in. He made her rinse her mouth till it stung with the disinfectant.

  “Keep taking big breaths and you’ll be all right,” he advised. “In a few months you’ll forget you’ve got them in your mouth and will be able to eat meat and anything else.”

  “Humph, meat!” grunted Daisy, her stomach already begining to turn with fear of the apparatus surrounding her. The dentist, however, was treating her as a proper lady and she was enjoying that part of it, so she obediently opened her mouth.

  In went the upper and lower teeth and Daisy’s stomach began to heave.

  “Guggle-guggle,” she exclaimed, desperately looking round for the sink.

  “Hold it, hold it!” urged the dentist frantically. “Remember, big breaths.”

  Daisy gasped in the cool autumn air from the open window, and gradually the nausea eased.

  “Shlike havin’ a golf ball in your mouth,”
she upbraided the dentist mournfully.

  “Smile,” he ordered her cheerfully, to take her mind off the nausea.

  Blinking miserably she forced her mouth into a cheerful half moon.

  The improvement in her looks was so great that the dentist was able to praise her appearance without stint. “Takes years off you,” he assured her. “Now don’t take them out except at night and to rinse them as necessary.”

  She nodded sad agreement. Four bloody pounds on teeth when what she was going to need was food to eat.

  She heaved herself out of the dentist’s chair, bobbed and simpered at him, said ‘thank you’ and clumped depressedly down the hollowed stone stairs and into the street.

  She teetered nervously on the pavement outside the hospital and wished heartily that Nellie was with her to share the perils of the city. Every so often her new teeth would shift slightly and she would hastily breathe deeply to assuage the desire to vomit.

  She watched the trams go by. They were packed with people going home and were not stopping except to let passengers down. She would have to walk down to Lime Street, she decided.

  She trailed down Pembroke Place until she reached London Road. No one among the scurrying passers-by bothered her, and by the time she had reached the junction of the two thoroughfares she had gained a little confidence. She paused in Monument Place. The brightly lit stores in London Road beckoned her; and when a small group of women shoppers started across the road she went with them, mesmerised by the lights and the cheery bustle of the crowd.

  She wandered through two big stores, fingering sheets, caressing shiny furniture and looking open-mouthed at ladies’ lingerie of such delicacy as to be shocking. She was pleased to see that they also stocked more sturdy garments, good fleecy cotton bloomers and woollen vests with high necks. She was so highly entertained that she forgot to be afraid; and even the discomfort of her mouth receded.

  At closing time she left reluctantly with the other wanderers in the store, and continued her walk towards Lime Street.