Liverpool Daisy

by Helen Forrester

  “Got any conny-onny, luv?” she inquired of Nellie.

  “On the kitchen shelf.”

  Daisy fetched the sticky tin of condensed milk, which was half glued to the shelf by its own drips.

  Joey clattered in from school. He wore the pullover his mother had knitted for him for Christmas — it was already stained down the front — and a pair of shorts too small for him. His thin legs, grey with grime, were chapped in places. His boots were good, having come from the Public Assistance Committee; they were marked so that no pawnbroker would accept them. He had no socks.

  He went straight to the fireplace and stood with his back to it.

  “’lo, Anty Daisy. How’s yourself?”

  He grinned up at her. The thinness of his face made his teeth look too big for his mouth and his nose was running like candle grease in a draught.

  Daisy ruflled his hair. “Not bad, luv.”

  The boy turned to his mother. “I want a conny-onny sandwich, Mam,” he whined. “I’m hungry.”

  His mother nodded and made as if to rise.

  “I’ll make you one,” offered Daisy. “Your Mam’s not feeling very well.”

  Joey was much more interested in the piece of bread spread with condensed milk than he was in his mother’s indisposition. Mothers were always complaining about headaches or nerves. He snatched the sandwich out of his aunt’s hand and ran off to play in the back entry, where the boys got up a game to see who could urinate highest up the wall.

  “Doctor’s missus said he’d come later on — afore he starts his surgery,” Daisy reported to Nellie, after Joey had gone. She helped Nellie to sit up and drink a cup of the wishy-washy tea she had made. “Me side hurts,” the invalid moaned as she tried to find an easy position.

  “I got a brick heating in the oven,” Daisy comforted her. “It’ll take the pain out a bit.”

  Nellie sipped her tea.

  “Where’s George?” asked Daisy suddenly. Though she had been in the house some time she had not seen her brother, and she fully expected that he would be furious at her going to get the doctor without asking him first.

  Nellie shrugged. “He won three bob on the 2.30 yesterday.” Her mouth took on bitter lines. “He’ll be bevvied when he comes in.”

  Daisy agreed. George got as drunk as he possibly could on his infrequent betting wins. That was the way men were. The coal hole was empty and so was the tea caddy; the only food in the house was the tin of condensed milk and half a loaf of bread; yet both women knew that to remonstrate with George would be a waste of time and might mean a beating for his wife.

  She poked up the cinders to encourage them to burn. “I’ll bring you some tea, after t’ doctor’s been,” she promised, “and I’ll ask t’coalman to drop by tomorrer.”

  “I won’t have any money till afternoon,” Nellie sighed. “George goes down to the Parish in the afternoon.”

  “I’ll pay for it and you can pay me back later.”

  “Ta.” Nellie’s affection and gratitude burst out of her. “You’re a proper friend, Daise.”

  “Known you a long time — it’s a habit,” chipped Daisy with a loving grin.

  It was dark by the time the doctor finally arrived. He went to the front door, and was met by a surprised denial of need of him by the father of the family living there. Fortunately, Daisy heard the exchange rumbling through the locked door. She hammered on the door and put her mouth to the wood.

  “Tell him to come round back,” she yelled.

  She could hear this message being relayed to the doctor, and she then whipped out of the back door and along the entry. She caught the doctor standing uncertainly on the doorstep, bag in hand, just as the front door was shut on him.

  “Y’ have to come up jigger, Doctor,” she explained. “It’s me sister-in-law. She lives in t’back. She’s proper sick.”

  The doctor glanced nervously at his shabby Austin Seven parked in front of the house. Already a couple of urchins were looking it over.

  Daisy appreciated the doctor’s reluctance to leave his car out of his sight. She knew how her Jamie could strip a car within a few minutes. She shouted to Joey who was seated on the pavement playing a flicking game with cigarette cards.

  “Aye, Joey, you and your mates watch doctor’s car. Don’t you let nobody near it or I’ll clobber yez.” She shook her fist playfully at him.

  Joey grinned, and he and his two small friends moved over to the car to lean in a proprietary way against the doors.

  Daisy jerked her head towards the alley. “He’ll watch it all right.”

  The darkness made the alley look very menacing to the physician and he was not averse to having such a hefty person as Daisy precede him down it. He sighed as he glanced round the empty scullery and then entered Nellie’s bare room.

  Daisy had put a penny in the gas meter and had lit the gas lamp hanging from the centre of the ceiling. Though the mantle was damaged there was enough light to see in painful detail two wooden chairs and an older rocker with a battered copy of a racing paper on the seat, an orange crate set on end to act as shelves to hold a few dishes and cooking utensils, a candlestick with a nub of candle in it on the mantelpiece, a teapot and mugs in the hearth and over all the smelly grime of poverty.

  Making a sharp clicking sound with it, Daisy put down on the top of the orange box the half-a-crown she had been holding in her hand, so that the doctor could see that she had his fee for the visit.

  The doctor laid his bag on one of the wooden chairs. He smiled down at Nellie who was regarding him with the bright, scared eyes of a cornered animal.

  “God evening, Mrs. er—”

  “Nellie O’Brien, sir,” whispered Nellie.

  “Ah, yes. I don’t think I’ve seen you before, have I?”

  “No, sir.”

  “And this lady?” he turned gentle questioning eyes upon Daisy.

  “She’s me sister-in-law, Mrs. Gallagher.”

  “I see.” He did not sit down for fear of picking up vermin in his clothes, but leaned over the patient to take a closer look at her. “What’s the trouble?”

  “It’s me cough,” said Nellie falteringly.

  “She’s bin spitting blood,” interposed Daisy.

  Gradually the story came out and Nellie’s shrunken body was carefully examined as far as her sense of modesty permitted. The dried trail of blood in the hearth was pointed out by Daisy with a dramatic sweep of her arm.

  The doctor slowly put his stethoscope back into his bag and straightened up. His face looked pinched and tired. He glanced around the pitiful room and then back at his patient who lay staring at him with unblinking, terrified eyes.

  “Mrs. O’Brien,” he addressed her, “I would like to have your chest X-rayed. You need hospital treatment, that is certain. I can try to get you a bed in the sanatorium, where they will probably be able to help you.”

  “I’m not going to no hospital!” Nellie’s voice was surprisingly firm considering how ill she was. “It’s T.B., isn’t it, Doctor?”

  The doctor did not answer. His brow wrinkled in a worried frown. Again and again he came upon patients with an almost superstitious horror of hospitals. Death and hospital seemed to be synonymous to them.

  Nellie saw his hesitation. “You can tell me,” she said baldly. “Am I going to die?”

  Her piercing gaze allowed of no prevarication and he reluctantly replied. “It is tuberculosis, Mrs. O’Brien — but you are not necessarily going to die of it. The sanatorium has performed wonders of recent years.”

  The soft pink of Nellie’s cheeks drained to an ivory white as her worst fears were confirmed. Daisy, too, blenched at the naming of the dread killer.

  The women instinctively turned to each other and Daisy went down on her knees by the bed to put a protective arm around Nellie. Despite the doctor’s words, they both felt it was a sentence of death.

  Nellie put her hand into Daisy’s strong grasp. Her breath was laboured, as she tried to conquer the
panic which surged through her.

  “I’ll die for sure if I go to hospital,” she murmured to Daisy through trembling lips. “Don’t let them put me in hospital, Daise. You promised, remember!”

  Daisy looked up at the doctor who had hastily stepped back from the bedside when Daisy had darted forward to comfort her friend. “Couldn’t I nurse her at home?” she implored.

  The doctor gestured helplessly with his hand at the poverty-stricken room. “She needs more than you can provide — warmth, fresh air, a good diet. Has she any children?”

  “One lad.”

  “He should not sleep in the same room as her. She would have every care in the sanatorium. If she were at home I would have to visit frequently — and that would mean more expense — and drugs.”

  Daisy remembered again the big tobacco tin full of silver and stolen pound notes stowed away in the clean, airy room which had been her mother’s. She squeezed her friend’s hand. “Nellie!” she exclaimed passionately. “You could have Nan’s room.” She turned to the doctor. “I got a nice room with a fireplace. It looks straight out on to the river. She could have the windows open and a good fire.” The words tumbled out of her. “I nursed our Tommy through T.B. I got a good new blanket and I could borrow some more.” Her eyes pleaded with him.

  “The expense would be quite high, Mrs. Gallagher. You could, of course, have the Parish doctor.”

  Nellie slowly withdrew her hand. She turned her head wearily from side to side on her pillow. Her whole expression was one of blank despair.

  Daisy bent over her and wrapped her shawl close around her.

  “Now, you rest, ducks,” she ordered briskly. “I’m going to talk outside with doctor. You ain’t going to have no Parish vet.” She stroked the sick woman’s white cheek with a tender hand. “You stop worrying. I’ll fix it.”

  She turned swiftly, picked up the coin from the orange crate and put it on top of the doctor’s bag.

  “Can I talk to yez outside?”

  “Of course.” The doctor picked up his bag and the half-a-crown, which he slipped into the pocket of his shabby overcoat. He smiled down at Nellie. “Don’t lose heart, Mrs. O’Brien. Stay in bed, keep warm. I want you to consider going into the sanatorium, and I will come to see you again tomorrow morning.”

  She nodded, her eyes closed. When she was alone, she took her rosary out from under her pillow and lay with it held to her chest for comfort.

  In the scullery Daisy addressed the doctor urgently. “Me sisters will help me nurse her,” she assured him, recklessly committing Meg and Agnes to the job. “She’s proper ill, isn’t she? I seen it so often.”

  “One should never give up hope, Mrs. Gallagher. The treatment of tuberculosis has improved greatly of latter years.” In the almost empty scullery the pomposity of his voice was echoed from the walls, and he felt suddenly weak and inadequate before this forceful woman’s shrewd gaze.

  “They said that about our Tommy, but he died anyway, God rest his poor little soul.” Daisy laid her hand on the doctor’s thread-bare sleeve. “I’ll take great care of her, I will. I can afford to buy her anything she needs. Maybe I can get her better.”

  The doctor looked down at the muddy floor. “I presume she is a widow?”

  “No. Me brother is out …” she was going to say at the pub, “That is, getting his P.A.C. money,” she corrected herself hastily.

  “Well, talk it over with him. I shall be here again tomorrow. In the meantime, I will give you a prescription which will help her. Get it made up tonight.” He took his prescription pad out of his breast pocket and scribbled on it. He handed the slip of paper to Daisy, and went on, rather hopelessly, “Feed her lightly. Eggs, milk, oranges.”

  “Whatever you say, Doctor,” Daisy assured him. The fortune in the tobacco tin would provide it all.

  NINETEEN

  After the doctor had gone, Daisy went out to get the prescription made up at the chemist’s, a magical shop filled with the delicate odours of lavender, naphtha balls and cought mixture and presided over by an elderly druggist, who often provided the only medical advice his neighbours received.

  Daisy stood impatiently tapping her foot amid the mahogany and glass showcases. While inwardly she screamed, “Hurry, hurry!” she examined the clutter of soaps, perfumes, nailbrushes and patent medicines, and the chemist behind a frosted-glass screen carefully compounded the medicine. He soon presented her with a neat white parcel, sealed at either end with a drop of red sealing-wax. She paid him and, carrying it gingerly under her shawl, she ran to the dairy for milk and then to Mrs. Donnelly’s for tea and sugar. The cows at the back of the dairy had not long been milked, and the milk was still warm when it was poured into Daisy’s can.

  By the time George stumbled through the darkness of the back yard to his home, Daisy had fed Nellie and Joey with bread and milk, dosed the invalid with the bright pink medicine, and had settled down by the dead fire to wait for George’s return. Nellie was snoring gently; Daisy had tucked her up in her shawl and the old eiderdown which was the bed’s only other covering.

  Joey was rocking himself in the rocker. He had hauled Rex, the terrier, on to his lap to keep him warm.

  Though George was not drunk he was not particularly sober either. His heavily lined face was an unhealthy yellow and he stood in the doorway of the room blinking stupidly in the gaslight.

  “What’s up?” he asked, after silently taking in the scene. Womenfolk did not usually visit each other so late.

  “Shush,” warned Daisy, turning to look up at him with a scowl of disapproval. “Nellie’s proper sick.”

  George ambled over to take a closer look at the invalid. He swayed uncertainly over her.

  Daisy caught his arm. “Come in t’ scullery,” she commanded, with a knowing look towards Joey. The boy had ignored his father’s arrival and was busy investigating the inside of the patient dog’s left ear.

  “Come on, now, I got something to tell yer.”

  George allowed himself to be guided into the icy scullery.

  Daisy shut the door. This left them in darkness except for a shaft of moonlight across the floor.

  “Listen, George,” Daisy whispered urgently. “I had the doctor to her this afternoon. He wanted to put her in a sanatorium, but she won’t go!”

  “Sanatorium?”

  “Yes. And you know what that means.”

  George considered the matter laboriously. Then his voice came lugubriously out of the darkness. “Yes. I know. She’s got T.B. Always coughing, she is. Christ! What’ll I do?”

  Daisy explained her idea of nursing Nellie in her own home by the river.

  “Oh, Daise!” George began to weep drunkenly.

  “Now, you shut up. You and Joey could come, too, except I don’t have time to look after everybody ’cos I’m working, see. You could take care of Joey here — then he won’t know too much about the trouble with his Mam — and you could come and help me in the daytime a bit — or maybe in the evening when I’m working.”

  “I didn’t know you was working. Where you working?”

  Daisy was silent for a moment and then she flashed out, “That’s none of your business.”

  George cleared his nose with a large sniff. “I only asked.”

  “Well — I’m working evening shift in t’ bottle factory downtown. Mike’s allotment isn’t enough. And you listen to me, George.” She shook a finger at him. “We’re going to have to pay doctor and chemist and coalman and everything — so no more getting bevvied every time you get a few shillings. Hear me? You got to buckle to and help me.”

  All this was more than George’s fogged brain could take in. Never bright at best, it seemed to him that his world had been in chaos ever since he had come home from the third Battle of Ypres in 1917 to spend a year in hospital while the quacks dug pieces of shell splinter out of him. Now Nellie was sick to the point of death — that much he understood. Beyond that he could only think about lying down before he fell down.


  Finally, Daisy snapped at him, “Och, go and sleep it off — but don’t you dare wake Nellie. I’ll come over in the morning.”

  She opened the door and called softly to Joey. “I’m going home, Joey. Watch you don’t wake your Ma when you get into bed. And mind you get off to school in the morning.”

  Joey grinned at her over Rex’s rough back and nodded.

  George pushed past Daisy and shambled into the room. “I’ll take a strap to yez if you don’t behave,” he mouthed thickly.

  Back in her own home, though the hour was late, Daisy built up her fire with extravagant hands, till it roared up the chimney and the room was bright with dancing flames and glowing coals. The room was more cheerful looking that it had been. Articles that had lain for months at the pawnbroker’s were now returned to their proper place. A black enamel coal hod stood resplendently full of coal by the fireplace; a shabby red cloth with a fringe of pompons round its edge covered the table again. A pair of brass candlesticks, a wedding present from an aunt of Mike’s, kept the china dogs company on the littered mantelpiece. From the oven came a fragrant odour of meat, potatoes and onions simmering in a casserole in the oven. Under a chair rested Daisy’s best high-heeled, black patent shoes, which had been in pawn almost constantly ever since little Tommy’s funeral.

  The heat of the fire soothed Daisy as she sat down and baked in front of it. Her shins and her cheeks gathered new burn mottles. When some of her weariness and worry had seeped out of her, she took the casserole out of the oven and ate the contents with a battered tin spoon, while the heat of the basin in her lap added to her contentment. But when the casserole was empty and she had settled back in her chair, while the fire reduced to a rosy glow, a huge wave of fresh grief about Nellie rose in her. She remembered how they had skipped in the street together, wandered on the Cassy shore and gone to stare at the Chinese inhabitants of Parkee Lanee. They had shared every treat, taking turns, at times, to suck a single sweet.

  Slowly she began to weep, at first quietly and then noisily. They had lain in bed together and talked about that mysterious thing called ‘blood’ and had giggled about boys, while an irate Meg and Agnes, who had also slept in the same bed and found a visitor added to their number too much of a crowd, had kicked them and told them to shut their gobs.