A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin (11 page)

Ted sighed with relief, and wondered if the Leeds–Liverpool Canal counted as a tributary.

January 1938

Martha sat for a few minutes more in front of the O'Reillys' fire, and talked desultorily with Annie. She mentioned the likelihood of the removal of the wall which shielded her court from the main road.

‘Aye, I heard that,' replied Annie, as she straightened up after adding some pieces of coal to the fire with a pair of tongs. ‘It'll give you more fresh air.'

‘I'm afraid of strangers from the street getting in,' responded Martha, her mind temporarily diverted from her current woes. ‘I mean, you know everybody in the court. You can sit on the step in the dark, and know all who pass, even if they're drunk – a strange seaman walking through the street entry shows up like a sore thumb – and you can watch the kids – makes them more careful, because they
know you'll tell their dad if they steal or are real naughty.'

‘You're probably right,' agreed Annie amiably; she was nothing if not diplomatic. She silently thanked God that she had married a widower, who already had decent living quarters behind his busy corner shop.

Finally, with a shaky sigh, Martha rose from the high-backed wooden rocking chair. This time she felt reasonably steady. She wanted urgently to be engulfed in the darkness of the street so that she could have a good cry.

She leaned towards Annie to kiss her in thanks. Annie hastily stepped back. Then to cover her horror of picking up vermin, she took Martha's hand and squeezed it hard, as the disconcerted woman, in stumbling fashion, expressed her gratitude.

Annie turned and opened the door into the shop, and Martha walked through it. There were a number of customers, standing around chatting to each other. When Mr O'Reilly heard the door open, he glanced back over his shoulder and said, with forced cheerfulness, ‘Ah, Mrs Connolly. Feeling OK now?'

As all the customers turned in surprise to view her entrance, she hitched her shawl over her head, and said, with an embarrassed smile, that yes, she
was. Annie followed her and lifted the counter lid for her so that she could move to the customer side of it and thence to the street door.

Martha noticed Alice Flynn, her neighbour from the attic, among the interested customers and nodded politely to her. Thanks to her crippled war-veteran husband, she, at least, had a regular small pension coming in, thought Martha enviously – and he couldn't get out of bed to spend it.

She jumped, when John O'Reilly called to her, ‘Hey, don't forget your groceries. I've got them under the counter here.'

He bent down and fished out a brown paper bag, lifted it over the counter and put it into her arms. ‘See you tomorrow night,' he said with a wink.

She wrapped her shawl round the bag, as she gasped. ‘Why – why – thank you, Mr O'Reilly. I'm much obliged.' She stood looking at him, her mouth agape, not believing her luck. She could smell the bread in the bag and she salivated.

Since she had her hands full, a man waiting at the back of the little knot of customers opened the door for her.

With a huge sob, she turned and ran down the two steps to the pavement, while the customers, in surprise, turned to Mr O'Reilly for an explanation.

He said, in unexpected defence of Martha's obvious distress, ‘She's a bit upset. She fainted in the shop. So we took her into the house, and the wife's been taking care of her.'

All the customers grinned and resumed their chatter; the story confirmed their high opinion of the O'Reillys, even if they had the misfortune of being Protestants. Always got a smile for you, they had, and would let you have a bit on the slate – most of the time.

Annie O'Reilly let out an audible sigh of relief. She ignored the need of her help in the shop, and went to wash down with pine disinfectant the chair in which Martha had sat.

It was not that she disliked Martha, she told herself, as she scrubbed the cleanser thoroughly into every joint in the chair and her living room was flooded with the strong odour of disinfectant. Martha was a good woman and kept her kids in order. It was that the very thought of lice made her crawl all over.

She was not sure if it had been wise to give the woman a bag full of groceries – if other customers spotted it, it might make them too ambitious about obtaining credit. But John had carried it off very well, she realised, in simply handing it to Martha as if she had already paid for it.

Martha cried all the way home. She opened the door as quietly as she could and was greeted by Patrick's steady snoring. She glanced quickly round the room, to check that everybody had returned home.

Despite the darkness, she managed to account for all the children, who seemed sound asleep.

A hoarse, newly broken voice from one corner greeted her, however. ‘'Ello, la, Mam.' In the dimness, a shape unfolded itself.

‘Hello, Brian, love.' Martha was thankful that the darkness hid her tears.

It did not deceive Brian. He sensed from her voice that something was wrong, and he asked, ‘You OK?'

‘Oh, aye. I just went down to O'Reilly's to get something for breakfast. Did Kathleen tell you about the bowl of soup in the oven for you?'

‘Oh, aye. Thanks, Mam. I'll light the candle for you.'

He reached over to the mantelpiece and accidentally kicked Bridie. She muttered crossly and slept on. He cussed her, as he found the matches. Then he struck one and revealed a room which, with its crowded bodies, resembled one of Hogarth's engravings.

‘That's enough, lad. No swearing.' Martha stepped
cautiously into the room, carefully avoiding the pee bucket and the water bucket. She dumped her parcel on the floor.

She turned towards her son and, for a second, the dying match showed the boy a shiny wet face and weary puffed-up eyes.

‘Mam,' he whispered. ‘What's up?'

In the darkness, he dropped the dead match and moved towards her. He put his arms around her.

Broken, she sobbed out her humiliation at the great kindness of the O'Reillys, who had been so diplomatic when giving her the groceries.

A skinny, clumsy youth, Brian did not say anything much. He simply held her tightly, and stroked her tangled hair. He knew all about humiliation, the sniggers of the other butchers because his employer sometimes gave him leftovers; even the very mention of where he lived was enough to tell anyone that he was scum.

Thanks to the efforts of the League of Welldoers to provide diversions for boys in the slums, he was learning to box. It gave him unexpected hope that, one day, he would not be simply a trained butcher's assistant living in a court; he would be a champion boxer, like Joe Louis, and be able to beat the daylights out of anybody in the whole world;
the magical stories he had seen at the cinema had confirmed this hope.

Finally, as Martha began to apologise in a whisper about her weakness, he tried to comfort her. ‘Never mind, Mam. It won't always be this bad. I've a feelin' there's a bit more work around – there's more people coming in to buy meat, you know. Maybe Dad'll have a bit of luck.'

Martha sniffed, untangled herself from his long arms, and wiped her nose on the end of her shawl. Brian's observation was a shrewd one; meat was not high on the shopping list of the unemployed. If the butcher was doing better, so were his customers. His remark confirmed Patrick's observations.

‘Don't you worry, love. I'm all right,' she assured the boy. ‘I'm just tired – that's all.' She gave a shivering sigh. ‘Now, you lie down and sleep. I'm going to settle down meself. I got to go to the market tomorrow.'

Uneasily, he did as he was told. One day, he promised himself, I'll earn enough to rent a decent house and she can have a good fire all day and a bed to sleep in, like they had in films.

Martha took off her boots and laid them in the hearth. Then she arranged herself carefully on the edge of the mattress, watching that she did not disturb the other sleepers. She eased her feet down
until they touched Bridie sleeping across the foot of the mattress. Then she tucked the ends of her skirts round her own feet and slept immediately, the sleep of the completely exhausted.

It seemed almost no time at all before she heard the tap-tap of the wand of the knocker-up on the window and his subsequent call. As the whole family stirred uneasily at the sharp noise, she rolled off the mattress, got to her feet, opened the front door and assured a crabby elderly man mumbling to himself outside that she was indeed up. Because she did not own a clock, she paid twopence a week for this service from a neighbour who did own one; he had, in consequence, been persuaded to become the court's daily knocker-up.

Before closing the door against the clammy chill, she looked up at the narrow patch of dark sky above the rooftops. The sky looked clear, though it was cold enough to make one want to stay close to a fire. And that would be her next problem – some more coal, she thought glumly; little Dollie Flanagan could not supply it all.

She went quickly to the mantelpiece and lit the candle, and then opened the bag of groceries. Two good two-pound loaves of slightly stale bread and a whole wrap of bacon bits! She stumbled to the fireplace to rake out the ashes, put a few twigs and
some paper on top of the cinders. She felt in the back of the coal box for her last pieces of coal.

She woke Patrick, while the rest of the family settled down again for another precious half-hour.

After splashing his face in the freezing water of the pump in the courtyard, Patrick went to work replete from a heap of fried bread and took with him a hefty sandwich full of bacon bits.

He paused to kiss his wife on leaving, which was unusual. Martha sensed his desire for her, but, despite her own longings, she was thankful he had to go to work: she dreaded another child.

‘Go on with you,' she said with a grin, and pushed him playfully through the door.

Brian was scolded into washing his hands and face at the pump, and had his hair combed with the nit comb, which must, Martha reminded herself, be returned to Mary Margaret one of these days. He was packed off to walk to work in an old tweed jacket too big for him, with a piece of bread in one pocket. His delivery bicycle was kept, with his white apron, at the shop under the close eye of the butcher, who lived above the premises.

His brothers, Tommy and little Joseph, and his sisters, Kathleen and Bridie, were given a slice of fried bread and a cup of weak tea each and
were hustled off to school, protesting about the cold.

‘It's not wet out there, the sun's out. You won't hurt,' Martha assured them, as she wiped each face with a damp cloth as they went down the steps. ‘Now, Bridie, button up your cardigan, and hold Joseph's hand all the way.'

Kathleen wailed that she could not find her jacket, and it was eventually discovered in a crumpled heap in one corner, having been used as a pillow by Bridie.

Now that Kathleen was thirteen, she was beginning vaguely to wish to look pretty, so she spent the walk to school shouting at Bridie for spoiling the threadbare coat that Martha had originally found for her in Paddy's market.

Having got rid of everyone, except Number Nine and four-year-old Ellie, who were crouched sleepily by the fire, both of them fretful, Martha realised that Mary Margaret's Dollie and Connie had not joined her daughters for the walk to school. Thomas had not come down either, but then he did not get up early unless he believed that he had a chance of getting a ship.

She hesitated. Should she go upstairs to inquire if all was well? Mary Margaret usually babysat Ellie and Number Nine for her on market days, not that
she had to do anything for them, only watch that they did not stray beyond the pavement outside the court entry.

Sheila and Phoebe from the room in front of Mary Margaret's had gone off to their oakum-picking less than five minutes after Patrick's departure.

Fear haunted Martha every time it was quiet in the upper room. Nowadays, Mary Margaret looked like a ghost, she did.

‘But you can't do nothin' about consumption,' she would say to a silent Patrick, who simply shrugged. In his opinion, death amongst women was so common that it was normal.

Today, however, was Martha's day for the market, and she must go soon or miss the best time to sell her rags. What should she do about Ellie and Number Nine?

She went uncertainly into the tiny hall and glanced upstairs.

Fat Alice Flynn was just plodding downwards, slightly sideways, so as to accommodate her girth to the narrowness of the stairwell. She was carrying the bucket of slops from the night, to empty them into a drain in the yard. Upon being asked, she agreed to watch both children until Mary Margaret woke up and could take over.

They agreed that Mary Margaret needed all the sleep she could get, poor dear. Today, her kids must be getting a good sleep: it wouldn't hurt them. They took it for granted that her husband would sleep as long as he could – he had little else to do, unless he got a ship.

January 1938

With her left hand, Martha arranged her shawl over her head and across her chest for maximum warmth. She then hoisted her laundry basket full of neatly folded rags onto the top of her head and, with her right hand, picked up another bundle of them. Straight-backed, she swayed off down the court, her tiny figure almost overwhelmed by her cargo of fents. She was followed by mournful wails from Ellie and Number Nine and Alice's reassurances to them that Mam would be back soon.

As usual, she was walking to her regular spot in Elliot Street, outside the market, where she stood amongst women selling dishes of various kinds. There she would call her wares, watching all the
time for the police, because she had no pedlar's licence.