Liverpool Daisy

by Helen Forrester

  She leaned, panting and shivering, against the door for a long time. Then she combed her hair and rebraided it. She put on her blouse and tied the front of it together. Since nobody else seemed to be using the cloakroom, and she feared that she had missed the last tram to Dingle, she sat down on the edge of the lavatory until, through her dozing, she heard the first morning tram rumble by.

  At home, she found an anxious Agnes, who had taken over the care of Nellie from George. It did not take much persuasion to get her to go home, and Daisy sank thankfully into her own armchair before the roaring fire which Agnes had kept up for her. Nellie was sleeping well, Agnes had assured her.

  Daisy started to shake again from head to foot. She put her head down on her knees to stop herself fainting and let the tears come in floods.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  A lorry rumbling along the street warned Daisy that morning had come. She raised her head and shook it, as if to rid herself of some of her wretchedness.

  “Smarten up, Daise,” she told herself, “Nell will be awake soon — and what’ll she think it she sees you lookin’ like a wet week?”

  She was painfully sore, and she ached from head to foot. But she forced herself to remake the fire, which had fallen low while she wept, and to put a kettle of water on to boil. When the water was hot she took it into the scullery and washed herself.

  Never in her life had she had such a desire to scrub herself all over; the scullery was so intensely cold, however, that she compromised by washing her face and those parts of herself which were most uncomfortable. Afterwards she took out her teeth and rinsed her mouth again and again. She was covered with goose pimples by the time she returned to the living-room, to stand by the fire and dress herself in her two petticoats. With needle and thread garnered from the crowded mantelpiece and some buttons taken out of a spoutless teapot she managed to make her blouse useable again. From a dresser drawer she took out one of her precious pairs of bloomers — which she never wore during her trips down town. Their softness was comforting.

  “When t’ pedlar comes, I’ll buy meself a couple of blouses,” she muttered with a watery sniff.

  A piece of broken mirror was propped up on the scullery window and she lifted it down in order to examine herself. She was marked quite badly round the neck and her eyes were redrimmed from crying.

  If Nellie or anybody sees them hickies the game’s up, she decided. She mentally sorted through the little house for something to put round her neck. “Pretend I got a sore throat,” she advised herself. “Ee, I know, now.”

  She went to the dresser and took out two old stockings and carefully wound these round her neck, pinning them in place with a safety pin.

  She put the kettle on again for tea and spread her shawl and skirt over the oven door to dry. Though she was swaying with fatigue, tea and a bit of bread and margarine seemed urgent necessities before she slept. She hoped passionately that Nellie would sleep late.

  After eating, she dragged her humiliated, weary body on to her bed in the landing room, heaved over herself the collection of old coats which formed her covering and fell into a deep sleep.

  She was awakened by Nellie, who had pottered out of her room feeling stronger than she had done for some time. A warm bed and a warm supper had given her sounder sleep than she had known for weeks.

  “You was sleeping the sleep o’ the dead,” chuckled Nellie. “What you doing with the stocking round your neck?”

  Daisy heaved herself over to face the questioner and forced herself into consciousness. Every bone in her body cried out for more rest. Nellie, however, had to be cared for, so slowly she got herself up on to her feet. She was very cold.

  “How are you, Nell, luv?” She rubbed her arms to restore their warmth. “Me throat seemed sore last night — that’s why I put the stockings round it.”

  “Oh, I’m feelin’ much better.” Nellie looked concernedly at Daisy. “You must have got chilled. Your eyes is all red and your lips is swollen.”

  “Och, I’m not so bad,” She grinned at her friend. “Now you get back into bed till I get the fire going again or you’ll be the one with a chill. I’ll bring you some breakfast. Did doctor say you should stay in bed all the time?”

  “No. Said I could do what I fancied. To keep warm but have the window open. He’s coming here today, he said, anyways.”

  “The devil he did. I’d better hurry up.”

  She got Nellie back into bed and crawled downstairs. The doctor would not be the only visitor, she was sure. The place would be like a bloody tram terminus, she told herself. “I’ll need the patience of a martyred saint.”

  Daisy’s forecast proved accurate. Visitors trickled in and out all day. Sickness held a morbid fascination for the community, and, when the doctor arrived, the bedroom was already overcrowded with three beshawled, high-smelling visitors sitting cawing round the bed like carrion crows. The invalid was looking exhausted, and the doctor instructed that there should be only one visitor at a time and only when Nellie felt like receiving them.

  He had been shocked at the miserable state of the living-room through which he had passed, and sickened by the sight of the landing bedroom. Nellie’s bedroom came as a welcome surprise; it was basically clean and comfortable, and the fire gave plenty of warmth to the tiny room.

  Seeing that Daisy seemed quite intelligent, he spent some time teaching her how to manage Nellie’s illness. It was apparent to him that she was herself, for some reason, exhausted, and he warned her to watch her own health.

  “Och, I’m fine,” Daisy assured him, “except for a bit of a sore throat.”

  Iddy Joey came to see his mother after school. He stood uneasily by her bed, shifting from one foot to another.

  “When you comin’ home, Mam?” he asked her.

  Nellie smiled adoringly at him. “Soon,” she assured him. “You missin’ your old Mam?”

  “Yep.” He went to stand by the fire to warm his backside.

  “Yer Dad make your breakfast all right?”

  Yes, the ould fella had made his breakfast O.K. and they had had chips for lunch and a boiled egg for tea. Dad would be over later. Yes, he had been to school, and the teacher had given him a pair of socks from the lost and found box. He exhibited these to his mother — they did not match but, yes, they were warm.

  When his mother ran out of questions and leaned back on her pillow, he waited for a moment and then edged to the door.

  “Ta-ra, Mam.”

  “Ta-ra, luv.” Nellie longed to call him back and kiss him but dared not. To pass T.B. to Joey would be the end, she told herself sadly.

  Relieved that his visiting duties were over, Joey bounced down the stairs. Moggie saw him coming, and retreated under the table, his back arched. Joey went down on his knees and crept towards him, growling menacingly as he advanced. The cat spat as it found itself cornered. Joey seized its swishing tail and dragged the animal out from its retreat. The maddened cat scratched him soundly, as he swung it exultantly into the air. Joey howled in sudden pain, and let go. The cat fled into the scullery.

  Nellie called out in fright at Joey’s sharp cry, and Daisy sped in from the back yard.

  “What ails you?”

  Wailing, Joey exhibited a thin wrist with a long scratch welling with blood.

  “Och, you stupid git.” Daisy bent down, picked the child up and carried him lovingly to the kitchen tap to have his wound washed. Then she gave him a penny and sent him up to Mrs. Donnelly’s to buy a lollipop.

  The postman brought another card from Mike. Daisy was so busy that she just stuck it up against the clock and forgot about it.

  Maureen Mary, anxious about her gentle aunt, arrived in the afternoon. When she let herself in, she found her mother boiling eggs. She greeted her daughter absently.

  As Maureen Mary eased off her blue felt hat, she noticed the brightly coloured post card, and picked it up and read it.

  “Our Dad’s coming home! You never told me!”


  Daisy was throwing the eggshells into the fire and raking them into the coals to drown the awful odour they made. For a moment, she stood transfixed as the blood ebbed from her face. Mike home? Saints in Heaven preserve us! She felt Mike’s belt across her back as surely as if she had actually been struck; she felt his boot hit her bottom as he kicked her into the street.

  Her hand shook as, with her back still turned to Maureen Mary, she dropped the shelled eggs into a cup and broke them up with a spoon. “Yes, isn’t it grand?” she finally managed to gasp.

  Maureen Mary stared at her mother’s broad back. “You sound proper queer. Aren’t you glad?”

  “’Course, I am. It’s me throat being sore that makes me sound funny.” She hastily put down her spoon and caressed her stocking-wrapped neck. Then she balanced a couple of slices of bread and margarine on top of the cup, picked up the salt packet and tucked it under her arm, took up a clean spoon and the cup, and thus laden, turned and said to her daughter, “ I’ll just take these up to your Anty Nell. I’ll be back in a tick. You could go up and sit with her while she eats.”

  Maureen Mary nodded agreement, as she hung her coat on the back of the front door, and then watched her mother slowly climb the stairs. She seemed to find the climb hard, and Maureen Mary thought uneasily that her mother did not seem to be her usual brisk self. A twinge of fear went through her, as she realized that the elder woman might find the care of yet another invalid too much for her health. Even mothers were not indestructible.

  Daisy herself was having the greatest difficulty in avoiding falling into hysterics.

  “I’m demolished,” she wheezed, as she stopped in the landing bedroom to catch her breath. “What in the Name of God am I going to do?”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Scarified at the news of Mike’s return, Daisy sought with flustered fingers through her collection of old newspapers for the latest copy she had of the Liverpool Echo. Did the dreaded words “home soon” mean a month hence or next week or tomorrow?

  A Shipping List in a copy of the paper which was two days’ old did not list the Heart of Salford under ‘Vessels Due Soon.’ With a sigh of relief, Daisy flung the paper on to the floor and sank down into her easy chair. Slowly the beat of her heart returned to normal. Jaysus Christ! What a predicament.

  Mike would have money in his pocket when he returned. But most of it would end up in the Ragged Bear in payment for rounds of drinks for his friends. He would never give a thought to the cost of nursing an invalid, though certainly he would make no objection to Nellie’s being cared for in his home.

  “And you can tell him forever and he won’t hear,” grumbled Daisy sourly to herself, as she leaned forward to stir the contents of a large blackened saucepan on the back of the fire. She was making stew with plenty of meat in it for Nellie and herself. And meat cost money.

  She wondered if Mike would swallow the story of the bottle factory and, after much vacillation and rubbing of her tired face with her hands, she decided that he might do so.

  But she must have a room, like Ivy. She’d be safer from chance encounters with Mike’s friends, if she had her regulars in a room.

  When she thought about the room next to Ivy’s she shuddered. Not even for Nellie could she again go through the nightmare of the previous evening. Men by ones and twos she could manage; a horde like last night’s was a terrible thing to happen to a law-abiding woman. It had been like the tales that Agnes’s husband, Joe, had told them about the Germans in Belgium during the war, awful tales of kitchen tables dragged into the streets and girls held down on them and raped until they died. Them bleeding Jerries had a lot to answer for. Her mind wandered back to the day during the war when she had helped to smash up a German’s butcher shop in Parkee Lanee. Bloody Bosche. She and the kids had eaten meat every day for a week after that.

  The sound of the chair scraping across the bedroom floor, as Maureen rose, brought her back to the present with a jolt. Where could she find a room? A place where the landlord would turn a blind eye? A place close to the Ball and Chain.

  Hands clasped between her knees, she rocked herself backwards and forwards, while she endeavoured frantically to find an answer. Finally, as Maureen Mary, came slowly back down the stairs, she decided that she had no one to turn to for advice except Ivy.

  With nothing on but a faded wrapper, a very bleary-eyed Ivy answered Daisy’s knock. Her breath smelled strongly of spirits and her room stank, even to Daisy’s tolerant nose.

  Ivy groaned and swayed on her feet, as she let her new-found friend in. “Ugh, I feel like somethin’ the cat brought in. How’s yourself?”

  “I’d hate to tell yez,” responded Daisy. She sat down gingerly on a chair by the roaring gas fire.

  “What happened to you last night? T’door was bolted when I come in atterwards, but you didn’t answer.”

  “Couldn’t stand any more,” confessed Daisy, and she went on to explain her escape along the veranda.

  Ivy took a tin teapot off the gas stove and poured out two cups of the boiling liquid, and while they sipped tea together Daisy broached the subject of a room.

  Ivy eyed her silently. It was bad enough having two younger girls upstairs and a dear friend moving in next door very shortly.

  Daisy sensed Ivy’s reluctance to have her nearby, and she said conciliatorily, “We take different kinds — most of mine is young boys — just occasionally an older man. You must get those as likes a more Frenchy type.”

  The flattering suggestion that she was more sophisticated made Ivy unbend slightly. She tucked her wrapper more modestly over her thighs. “Trouble is, I don’t know anywhere. Not many houses round here — mostly businesses.”

  Daisy felt a qualm of anxiety that this last resort might fail her, while Ivy hummed and haaed and sipped her tea.

  She finally remembered a tailor who had, until recently, lived over his shop. He had now moved out of this apartment, while retaining the shop beneath.

  The tailor was still working in the back of his shop, sitting cross-legged on his table and sewing button holes. It was some time before he answered Daisy’s persistent rattle at his door.

  He opened the door a mere slit.

  “I’m closed,” he snapped. Then, when he saw that a shawl woman stood on his step, he snarled, “What do you want?”

  “Ivy sent me — about the rooms over your shop.”

  A thin, lascivious grin split a cadaverous face. “Come in, Missus,” he invited oilily.

  At first he demanded a shilling for every man she brought in, but Daisy’s language at this suggestion was so explicit that he paled. “What I want a room for is me own business and none o’ yours,” she roared. “What a way to talk to a plain, decent woman what keeps herself to herself.” She looked around his workroom so fiercely that he feared for a moment that she might begin to ransack it.

  Finally, a bargain was struck. Daisy could have the room at the top of the side stairs and the use of the bathroom. The other two rooms he wanted as storage and workrooms.

  A rent book was found. Old entries were torn out and Daisy’s name and the first week’s rent were entered in it.

  After she had handed over the money, she realised she had not yet seen the room and demanded to do so.

  Grumbling, the tailor led her out of his shop, locked the front door, and then unlocked the side door and took her up a narrow, dark staircase.

  “T’ room’s got furniture in it,” he said. “Stuff I didn’t want to put in me new house.” He unlocked the door, took a box of matches out of his pocket, struck a match and lit a single gas light near the fireplace. He then bent down and lit a gas fire.

  Daisy looked around primly. To her, the place was princely. There was a double bed with a mattress, a dressing-table, a table with two chairs tucked under it, and a small easy chair in a corner. There were cheap chintz curtains over the window, and clean, flowered linoleum covered the floor. A door on the opposite wall indicated that there was a storage cupboard.<
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  She sniffed. “I suppose it’ll do,” she said.

  The bathroom was next door. It was a small Victorian washroom with a single cold water tap, a wash basin and a cracked lavatory.

  “Lock up everything when you go out,” the tailor instructed, “And any damage you got to put right, understand?”

  “Och, you’re getting enough rent to cover the whole army marchin’ through,” replied Daisy. “What you worrying about?”

  “Friends of Ivy has lots o’ visitors,” responded the tailor grimly.

  Daisy had a strong desire to lift a fist and clout him down the stairs. She restrained herself, however, with the thought that the place was ideally isolated once the little shops in the street closed; and if she allowed that the constable on the beat might try the door once in the night, she was likely to be undisturbed. She decided that she must at all costs remember to lock the outside door when a man was with her; otherwise the constable might enter to check for intruders.

  “I’ll move in tomorrer,” she told her hunched, ungainly landlord, as he put his matches back into his waistcoat pocket.

  He looked the big, comely woman up and down in the gleam of light from the hallway and decided he might have a go himself one day. He contented himself for the moment by saying, “I’m gonna get a gas meter put in.”

  Daisy had taken for granted that somewhere in the room there was already a meter into which she would have to feed pennies to obtain gas, so she just nodded, and turned away.