She moved uneasily towards the fire. Nellie really needed a doctor, she thought fearfully. But where would she ever get money for a doctor from?
The kettle was steaming merrily again, so Daisy went immediately into the icy scullery and took from the soapstone sink a battered tin basin and a sliver of coarse laundry soap. She picked up a grey rag of a towel from off an upturned oil drum which served as a table and went back to the living room. She set the basin on the rag rug in front of the fire and emptied the kettle into it. Then she went back to the scullery, filled the kettle with cold water and emptied this into the bowl.
Slowly she took off her serge skirt and black cotton petticoat and then, after a moment’s consideration, took off her blouse. To take off her torn vest which was her only other undergarment would be the height of indecency, so she left it on. Her woollen stockings, held up below the knee by a button twisted into each top, were reluctantly discarded. She had not had her clothes off for several weeks, keeping even her serge skirt on at night because the wind off the estuary had been so cold. Now she shivered at the unaccustomed exposure.
It was against her beliefs to use soap on herself except after her monthly periods, now long past; but this time she felt there was a real need and she washed her fat thighs thoroughly and then, after looking down at them cloudily, she washed her feet. She dried herself hurriedly — the draught coming in under the door was bringing her out in goose pimples. The sudden, hard scrubbing made the louse and bug bites on her itch; normally the bites did not swell — she was almost immune to irritation from them — but now they bothered her and she scratched furiously.
She had no other clothes so she put on again those she had taken off. She remembered that, though her mother had had no clothing other than a nightgown provided by the lady from the Welfare, she had clung to her shawl and kept it round her shoulders to ease the winter cold in the frigid room upstairs. The shawl was still up there.
“Come morning I’ll take it to the wash house and wash it,” Daisy promised herself, “before that Meg wakes up to it being there.”
She rinsed out her stockings in the same water in which she had washed and hung them over a piece of string stretched across the front of the mantelpiece, to dry in the heat of the dying fire. She stood contemplating their woolly length steaming at the end nearest to the fire. There were holes in both heels and toes. She decided suddenly that since she did not have to feed her mother any more, sixpence out of her ill-gotten money might be expended on another pair of stockings.
“Nobody’ll notice them,” she comforted herself. “Black stockings is black stockings — they all look the same.”
“And what about a new petticoat then — and a pair of winter bloomers?” inquired an extravagant devil within her.
At the thought of a pair of thick cotton bloomers, brushed to a warm fluff on the inside, she felt a craving for comfort that had never struck her before. She could not remember when she had last worn knickers of any kind. Her mouth watered as if the garment was something good to eat.
“I’ll do it,” she promised herself exultantly. “Nobody’s going to see me bloomers, so they can’t ask no questions.”
“They’ll ask questions if they see you buy them in Parkee Lanee or anywhere hereabouts. You’ll have to go down town again to Hughes’s in London Road.”
This reminder brought her up short. She would have to venture again into the city; and do it alone. While she emptied the basin in which she had washed she thought about this.
Still nervously undecided, she lit a candle and trailed up to bed, but as she laid her head on the lumpy pillow she muttered, “I’ll go. Nowt worse could happen to me than happened today.”
NINE
Daisy woke with a start. A male voice was shouting “Mrs. Gallagher!” The front door was banged impatiently. “Are you there, Missus?”
“Oh,” she groaned, as she swung herself off the bed. Though her head did not ache as it had done the day before, the floor had a curious tendency to come up to meet her. “Bloody so-and-so! Always coming early. Who the hell is it?”
Aloud she shouted, “Coming!”
When she opened the door, she found, fidgeting on the doorstep, Bill Donohue, a small, elderly man with a walrus moustache made ginger by tobacco smoke. He held several rolls of wallpaper tightly to his shabby suit jacket. From his little finger dangled a pail.
“Thought you’d never come,” he said irritably as, uninvited, he walked into the living-room and looked around for a place to lay down the wallpaper. Every surface was cluttered from end to end, so he dropped it on to the floor.
“Didn’t expect you so soon,” replied Daisy sourly. “What colour you brought?”
Mr. Donohue looked affronted. “Same as always, of course — pink roses on a trellis with a white background.” He sniffed. “All my customers like pink roses — they’re proper pretty.”
“I wanted blue for a change,” said Daisy, not because she did, but because Bill Donohue was not going to get away with five shillings from her without suffering.
“They don’t make it,” replied Mr. Donohue loftily. “It’s out of fashion. Be back in a minute with me ladder and me paste. I’ll need some hot water to mix the paste.”
“I know that without being told,” responded Daisy tartly. “And I don’t believe you about the blue — you couldn’t have looked.
Bill Donohue was making for the door in an effort to avoid an argument, but was stopped in his attempt to escape by Daisy barking, “And don’t go so quick. Wait a minute. I want the ceiling done as well.”
He turned slowly round, very surprised. He viewed her with distrustful, watery blue eyes. “It’ll cost yer — let me see, it’ll cost yer another shilling for plain whitewash.”
It was Daisy’s turn to be affronted. “Mr. Donohue,” she said with huge dignity, “Have I ever failed to pay you?”
Bill teetered slowly back and forth on his heels while he considered this. “No,” he agreed. “But it must be all of eight years since I done a room for you.”
“You don’t need to remind me,” Daisy snapped. “I know when our Tommy died.”
“Well, have you got enough for the ceiling?” inquired Bill bluntly.
Daisy went to the fireplace where her stockings still dangled like a pair of dried snakes. She reached up and produced two half-crowns from under the clock. She held them up for her visitor to see. Then she plunged her hand into her apron pocket and pulled out another shilling. “’Ere ye are.”
Bill touched his forelock respectfully, took off his cap, scratched his head and replaced the cap. “Have to go and buy some whitewash,” he announced. “Back in half an hour.” He stopped half way out of the door. “I’ll do the ceiling first. Need hot water for the paste later on.”
Daisy nodded proudly and put the six shillings back under the clock.
He was back before she had finished eating her breakfast of tea, bread and margarine, in front of the newly made fire. The fire was not burning very well because of the huge pile of cinders under it.
“Room empty?” inquired Bill.
“There’s a bed and a chest in it.”
“Better get them out afore I start with the whitewash.”
Without asking permission, he took his pail and the packet of whitewash into the scullery. After a moment there was the sound of splashing water as he mixed the whitewash, combined with the faltering strains of “The Roses of Picardy”. Bill Donohue prided himself on knowing the words of more songs than anybody else in the neighbourhood. He had a radio and he was fond of saying that he listened to it intelligently.
“Holy Mary!” exclaimed Daisy in exasperation as she hastily swallowed the last bit of crust, put her teeth back in and hauled herself out of her chair.
Half way up the stairs, she stopped to allow a spasm of headache to recede. While it slowly passed she remembered for a second the young sailor who did not know how with a woman, and her irritability vanished. She was chuckling to h
erself as she entered her mother’s room.
The silence of the room struck her forcibly. Her chuckles ceased; the young sailor was forgotten. While she was downstairs she could have the illusion that her mother was quietly sleeping in the bedroom; now, faced with the empty bed and the need to clear it, she had to recognise again that she was alone. Slowly the tears came, accompanied by great hopeless sobs. Instead of having someone to lean on, to advise her, to bully her into staying on her feet when life seemed impossibly hard, she herself would have to be the adviser, the kind helper, the referee of family quarrels; hers would be the knee on to which grandchildren would climb to be comforted, hers would be the shoulder on which the women would weep out their bereavements and all the myriad sorrows of being mams.
“Aye, Mam,” she whispered brokenly, “I don’t know whether I can do it.”
And it seemed to her, as she stood leaning against the door jamb, that she heard again her mother giving her what-for, as she called it, for standing around and not getting on with the job in hand. She almost felt the playful pat on her behind that her mother would give her, to send her back into the street fight she had lost, or to comfort her when there was no bread to assuage her hunger.
Obedient to that sharp, cheerful voice, she sniffed back her tears and surveyed the room to see what she should do first.
Bill Donohue clumped up the stairs with his bucket of whitewash and a brush. He viewed the floor and then the rest of the room with distaste.
“Need some new lino,” he remarked.
“I know that,” retorted Daisy. “You tell me how to get it out of an eighteen shilling allotment.”
Mr. Donohue put down the bucket and rubbed his hands slowly down the sides of his paint-stained trousers. He scuffed a bare piece of board showing through the offending floor covering.
“You got a good oak floor, I reckon.” He looked disparagingly at Daisy.
Daisy put her hands on her hips and leaned towards him. “And what good will that do me?”
Bill sniffed so that the dewdrop at the end of his nose wobbled. “If you tore up lino and scrubbed t’ floor well — maybe scrape it where the lino’s stuck … buy a tin of dark varnish and go over it — it wouldn’t look bad at all. Dark varnish’ll hide a lot o’ marks.”
Daisy looked again at the floor. Then she looked across at the window, over the misty river. As a child she had spent many a wet afternoon kneeling on a chair looking out of the window with Nellie, to see the ships go by. She knew the river in all its moods, she knew which company each ship belonged to because her father had taught her the funnel markings of each great company, Cunard, White Star, Ellerman’s, and a dozen others, not to speak of strange boats from far away places like China and Russia. She could remember when sailing ships still floated in the Pool of Liverpool. She suddenly envisaged this little window on the world elegantly draped with a pair of Nottingham lace curtains, the sunlight gleaming through on to a shining floor, like an advertisement she had once seen in the Liverpool Echo.
She sighed rather hopelessly.
“Varnish is a good idea, Bill,” she agreed. “I’ll think about it.” Then she ordered, “Do the inside of t’cupboard while you’re at it.”
“Cupboard not included — you know that,” replied Bill stonily, as he spread out his step ladder. “Take candlestick off t’ mantel. It’ll get splashed.”
Daisy snatched up the offending candle in its saucer and remembered also the chamber pot under the bed. She picked that up, too. “Come on, Bill,” she wheedled, looking at him with eyes slanted under long, black lashes. “You could manage the cupboard with bits of left-over paper — it doesn’t have to be perfect.”
Bill’s moustache bristled. “It’s me time as well.”
“How much now?” Daisy pouted.
“Cost you another — well, another tanner.”
Daisy made a face at his indifferent back. “All right.”
Bill dipped his brush into the bucket of whitewash and said placatorily, without looking round, “Room’ll look proper nice.” He raised a scrawny arm and carefully ran a line of whitewash back and forth across the ceiling.
Daisy hastily unhooked her mother’s shawl from the cupboard and, dodging a rain of whitewash drops, took it with the candle and the chamber downstairs.
Moggie emerged from the oven, yawning and stretching first one long, skinny grey leg and then the other. Daisy let him out of the back door. She did not feed him; he hunted for himself and was adept at getting lids off dust bins to get at the contents.
Daisy collected her breakfast dishes and the glasses from the funeral wake, and washed them up in the same basin in which she had washed herself the previous night. One basin was a necessity in a house; two would have been luxurious.
She took a shovel and handleless bucket from under the sink and proceeded with the dusty job of clearing the ashes from the fireplace. She forgot to remove the stockings she had hung up to dry and some of the ash peppered them as well as the rag rug. Suddenly, there was a peremptory knock on the front door. Cursing under her breath, she got up from her knees, wiped her dusty hands on her apron and went and opened the door.
She jumped hastily back from the sill, as the wind from the river playfully blew Mrs. Donnelly’s broad-brimmed hat off her head and into the room. It bowled across the floor and came to rest against the fender, its unsullied black collecting cinder dust all the way.
With the loose ends of her hair blown straight upwards by the wind and her red-brimmed blue eyes glaring at a non-plussed Daisy, the grocer looked like a witch who had just landed from her broomstick.
“I want me four and tenpence,” announced Mrs. Donnelly frigidly.
“What four and tenpence?” The very sight of the grocer made Daisy’s ire rise. Daisy had been wangling credit out of her since she was first sent on a message by her mother when she was five years old and Mrs. Donnelly had been a handsome, newly married woman. Mrs. Donnelly knew very well, argued Daisy to herself as she surveyed the unwelcome visitor, that she never needed to collect in person. She had only to mention the debt to Daisy three of four times while she was in the shop and hint that further credit would be cut off, and the next allotment day after that Daisy would pay.
“You know. You been owing it long enough.”
“It’s not so long that I’ve owed it!” Daisy put her hands on her hips and glowered at the grocer.
Undaunted by the scowl, Mrs. Donnelly pursed her lips primly. “Oh, yes, it is. If you can drink rum mid-week, then you can pay your grocery.” She sniffed. “And I’d like me hat back, if you don’t mind.”
Daisy made no move to rescue the hat from the dusty hearth rug. Her eyes blinked and the tears began to rise as she remembered the exhausting days since her mother’s death. “I needed a bit of something with me Mam only in her grave a few hours an’ all.”
Mrs. Donnelly could not have cared less about Daisy’s bereavement — Mrs. O’Brien had been a trying customer in her time, too. “A blessed release to her, no doubt,” she said icily.
Daisy’s tears burst forth genuinely. “That’s a cruel thing to say, Mrs. Donnelly,” she sobbed, “and me nursing her all these years.”
Mrs. Donnelly relented enough to say she was sorry Daisy felt so badly about it, and she would like her four and tenpence and her hat, if Daisy ever expected to get credit again from her.
Bill Donohue had heard the raised voices, and he came slowly down the stairs to see what was happening. He viewed the weeping Daisy with compassion as she turned back into the room. Everybody knew how good Daisy had been with her mother and how she shared what she had with her sisters’ children when they came to visit her and were hungry. He watched her stumble round, feeling on the table for her little hoard of silver, then evidently remembering that it was in her apron pocket. She reluctantly came up with the two half crowns she had earned the previous night from the first two sailors.
“Here ye are,” she said as, with brimming eyes, she thrus
t the coins into the scrawny outstretched hand.
Mrs. Donnelly produced twopence change from a small leather purse with innumerable pockets.
“Me hat,” she demanded.
Still sobbing miserably before a silent Bill, Daisy went across to the fireplace to pick up the hat.
She wiped her eyes with a corner of her apron. “Now where is it,” she sniffed. “Ah, there,” and with a burst of savage rage she trod on it.
She picked up the shattered piece of headgear and carefully brushed the dust it had collected further into its black satin trimmings. The sight of the wreckage restored her aplomb a little, and Mrs. Donnelly’s horrified shriek of “What have you done?” was particularly satisfying. Still snuffling, however, she handed the hat to its infuriated owner and slammed the door in her face.
“Bad cess to yez!” she snarled through her tears at the closed door, and still sniffing unhappily she went to the fireplace to warm herself.
Her ample breasts trembled under her thin cotton blouse, as she continued to cry softly, despite the joy of the ruined hat.
“Don’t take it too hard.” Bill Donohue’s ginger moustache quivered in sympathy. “It’s proper hard when your husband’s away like Mike is.” He had a strong desire to take her in his arms to comfort her. So much good womanhood going to waste. He stuck his thumbs in his braces so that his hands would not stray as he went closer to her. “She’s a hard-nosed bitch,” he said.
“Nearly cleaned me out, she did,” confided Daisy between sniffs.
Bill looked alarmed, and the look was not lost on Daisy despite her grief.
“Don’t worry. I still got your money. Though what I do till Tuesday when I get me allotment, I don’t know.”
Bill wagged his head in sad understanding of her predicament. He stood rubbing a bit of whitewash absently into one blue-veined arm, and then said, “I’ll do the cupboard for you without extra. After all, I’ve known you and Michael a long time.”
Liverpool Daisy Page 7