A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin (4 page)

‘If you don't stop that, I'll tell your dad,' the women would shriek. This awful threat implied a whipping with their father's belt on a bare bottom, so it was usually effective.

Ownerless cats and, occasionally, a stray dog stalked rats and mice; and the children found big, dead rats endlessly engrossing.

By the narrow entry from the main street, men stood and smoked and argued. They read a single copy of the
Evening Express
between them, in order to keep up with the racing news, and also to work on the football pools. Like a ship's crew, they tried not to quarrel, though not infrequently fist fights did break out. These scuffles, however, were more likely to occur outside the nearby pubs, when, drunk at closing time on a Saturday night, they were emptied out into the street, to be dealt with by the pair of constables on patrol.

Although it was remarkable how a rough kind of
order prevailed amid such a hopelessly deprived little community, the younger men enjoyed nothing more than a Saturday night fight, particularly if the two unarmed police constables got involved. It formed a great subject of conversation on a Sunday morning, as they nursed their aching heads and black eyes.

Within the court itself, a family row was high theatre, which brought almost every inhabitant out to watch. When a woman being beaten hit back, the female onlookers frequently cheered her on. ‘Give it 'im, Annie – or Dolly – or May – love,' they would shriek, joyously adding fuel to male rage.

As the four women sat together on their step, they did not seem to notice the general stench of the airless court or the rarity of a single beam of sunlight. Only when it rained or was too bitterly cold outside, did they seek the lesser cold of Martha's room, which at least had a window – and a range which sometimes held a fire.

Martha was extremely protective of her frail friend, Mary Margaret. If she had a fire in the range, she would sit her close by it on the Connollys' solitary wooden chair. She would then boil up old tea leaves to make a hot drink for her, which she laced with condensed milk from a tin. To add to her warmth, she would, sometimes, wrap round her
knees the piece of blanket in which her youngest child, Number Nine, slept at night; or she would pat and rub her back when she was struck with a particularly violent bout of coughing.

As they gathered on the step, after the rescue of the councillor, Martha continued her doubts about him.

‘When we never heard nothing, Pat gave up hope, he did, 'specially when he saw the pitcher in the papers of the councillor and the boatman, and nothin' about himself. And us havin' to find him a new cap and scarf, an' all. He lost his old ones when he dive in. And his boots was finished.'

Mary Margaret sighed: the loss of a cap and scarf was indeed serious, the lack of strong boots dreadful.

‘Never mind, love, he were a brave man to do what he done,' she soothed. She was one of those blessed people who travel without hope, and could not, therefore, ever be disappointed. ‘You have to make the best of it,' she advised, as she always did. ‘At least, neither of them got dragged under the landing stage by the current.'

‘Oh, aye. If they had, they would have both been drowneded – and without our Pat, it would be the workhouse for us, no doubt about it.'

For a moment, both were silenced by their permanent dread of this fate, despite the recent provision of outdoor relief by the City's Public Assistance Committee. It was a traditional fear, which ranked close behind their horror of a pauper's funeral.

Summer turned to foggy autumn and still they heard no more of the councillor.

Patrick grinned cynically, when Martha brought up the subject. ‘It's to be expected,' he told her. ‘Why should he remember? Folk like us never waste our time voting.' He laughed. ‘We don't mean nothin' to nobody.'

He continued his usual dockside waits for work; he knew no other world.

October 1937 to March 1938

Influenza swept through the courts, and suddenly it was winter, that deadly bitter winter of 1937–1938, a time when lack of coal, lack of light, lack of medical attention and lack of food tested the courage of every man, woman and child: some of them simply gave up; as uninteresting statistics, they quietly died. They left behind them, however, consternation amid their myriad of dependants.

The stalls in the market were practically deserted, and Martha and the inhabitants of Court No. 5 were so desperate that they barely noticed, floating in the background, the black storm clouds of threatening war. All they cared about was how to stay alive each day, and, somehow, keep their big families going. In particular, if their husbands had survived the
flu, the women sought desperately to find enough food to keep them fit for any work that might be available.

Two mothers in the next court died, leaving widowers with young children, some of whom also had the flu. This caused a flurried effort, even in Court No. 5, as a little food was collected to be taken in to the stricken families, to help until they could contact relations to come to their aid.

Local charities were besieged, their limited resources stretched. Women begged for coal to heat their freezing rooms, for a blanket in which to wrap a grandfather, for boots for their children's bare feet, even for pairs of woollen socks, anything woollen.

They especially needed more food, any kind of food. Rubbish bins behind restaurants were climbed into by men, more agile than women and accustomed to the awkwardness of ships' interiors. The contents of the bins were quickly picked through in the hopes of salvaging table scraps or unfinished cigarette ends. Street rubbish bins were, likewise, anxiously inspected.

Unemployment insurance, Public Assistance or the wages for casual labour all failed to yield more than bare existence, particularly in winters like this remorseless one, where coal was a grim necessity.

In Court No. 5, Mary Margaret's five-year-old younger son, Sean, died of the flu, and a number of others very nearly did. A Sister of Charity came to help the broken-hearted woman prepare the skinny little body for the ultimate insult, a pauper's burial: few in the court could afford to pay the Man-from-the-Pru sixpence a week for burial insurance.

Tear-stained Mary Margaret had not the strength to follow the little body to the cemetery: his grim, silent father, Thomas Flanagan, did, however, and watched it being thrown into a common grave.

Mary Margaret's tears overflowed again, when a neighbour remarked cruelly that the child's death was not all bad – it was one less to feed.

A week later, her eldest son, Daniel, a ship's boy, came home after a long voyage. She greeted him with both relief and joy. He had put on a little weight, though his face was pasty, and his voice had broken.

‘You're my real big lad now,' she told him as she hugged him to her.

Best of all, he had a bit of money in his pocket. As a result, a good wake for his little brother was unexpectedly enjoyed by the whole building.

‘At least we buried him with ham,' a weepy Mary Margaret announced with pride to her patient, oakum-picking friends, Sheila and Phoebe, in the
adjoining room. With a sigh and a gentle pat of the hand, they agreed with her. Sometimes, kids just died and there was nothing you could do about it.

When all Daniel's funds had been spent on canned ham, fish and chips, and toddy made from smuggled rum, the songs and rueful jokes exhausted, Mary Margaret relapsed into an apathy broken only by her occasional fits of coughing.

Martha Connolly wished very much that she had a lad at sea. A boy at sea earned little, but you did not have to feed him while he was away. You'd be paying for his kit every week, of course, on the never-never system. But he would still make a few shillings to give to his mother, which she could spend on canvas plimsolls for some of her other children. She could even, perhaps, buy some black wool to crochet herself a new shawl – that would be nice, she considered wistfully – her current one was threadbare and there was no warmth in it. But her own needs were at the bottom of the list.

After Patrick's unexpected swim at the Pier Head in the milder days of the previous spring, when charities had not been quite so hard-pressed, it had taken her several days to prise out of one of them another pair of boots for Patrick. She had plodded through the narrow streets from charity
to charity, begging for boots, so that he could once more stand at the docks, morning and afternoon, waiting for work.

She had endured long interviews in no less than three offices, during her quest, as she was redirected from one charitable organisation to another. Visits by voluntary social workers ensued, to make sure that she belonged to the clean, deserving poor and that her husband was not simply a lazy good-for-nothing. When the first visitor refused to recommend help for such a shiftless-looking household, Martha swallowed her rage as best she could: it was unwise to lose one's temper with Them.

It was clear to Martha that the second lady visitor, also, was completely overwhelmed by the sight of one small room filled with the impedimenta of daily life. It was cluttered with wooden boxes on which to sit, a pile of rags in a corner, presumably on which to sleep, and an old mattress leaning against a wall; even the mantelpiece was heaped with grubby rags. In the middle of the floor sat five children, shouting and arguing as they played with pebbles.

As she viewed the room, one small girl got up, hitched up her skirt to exhibit a bare bottom and peed into a bucket. Unconcerned at a visitor being present, she returned to the game. The outraged visitor turned and walked out. Her written report
was damning about a mother who would so neglect a child's manners.

As she had walked through the court itself, the third visitor had heaved at the odour of the lavatories. Before knocking at the open door of the house, she wrapped her scarf across her nose and hoped she would not be sick. She gave the name of her charity and Martha asked her to come in.

She spent about one minute at the door, surveying nervously a room in which a number of children were quarrelling violently, striking out at each other with fists and bare feet.

Martha shouted angrily to her warring offspring, ‘You kids get out – now! Or I'll tell your dad.'

The noise stopped. The children stared at the visitor. One of them sniggered. Martha belted her across the head and pushed her towards the door. The visitor hastily got out of the way.

Protesting and snivelling, the children shoved each other through the narrow doorway into the courtyard, where their original altercation recommenced.

The visitor swallowed. She took a notebook and pencil out of her side pocket. ‘Now,' she said with false brightness through the thickness of her scarf, ‘how many bedrooms do you have?'

Though used to the idiosyncrasies of visitors
from Them, Martha looked at the woman in amazement and wondered what relation bedrooms had to boots.

‘We haven't got none,' she said slowly. ‘We sleep here.'

‘Where is your kitchen?'

Martha began to lose patience. ‘This is our everything,' she said dully through gritted teeth.

‘My God!' muttered the lady. She had read the Connollys' file before the visit. It had not registered with her that the room, described by an earlier visitor a few years previously, was the only room which the family rented. She was shocked by Martha's remark. The file had also given details of the family's financial circumstances and included some unkind remarks on the incompetence of the parents.

Martha passed wind, and the visitor looked round her a little wildly; the stench was unbearable.

She took a small breath, and then said, her voice faint, ‘Tell Mr – er – um – Connolly to come to the office on Monday and we'll try to find a pair of boots which will fit him.'

She pushed past Martha and fled down the steps. As she passed the overflowing rubbish bins, her neat black shoes skidded on the ordure-covered paving stones. A couple of men idling at the entrance
hastily made way for her, and she ran out onto the crowded pavement of the main street.

Gasping for breath, she wondered, as she turned to walk back to her office, how she could ever report such awful conditions and filthy people as suitable for aid; there was nothing to recommend them at all: they were neither clean nor respectable – nor trustworthy. She had feared that her pockets might be picked while in the court: she had not brought a handbag lest it be stolen.

But she pitied them. In a way, she understood their dilemmas. How could you get washed in a room full of people? With, at the back of it, another room opening into it, which housed another family?

If the Connolly man was to get boots on his feet, she must state, without even seeing the man himself, that he was worthy of them and was not likely to sell them.

In a wash of compassion and against her better judgement, that is what she did. And Patrick got his boots.

Martha breathed a prayer of thankfulness to St Jude, patron saint of lost causes.

At the first charity to which Martha had applied for boots, the volunteer who interviewed her and checked the Connollys' file had scared Martha
nearly to death. She had remarked sharply, ‘Your eldest son Brian is working, I see. That should be of help to you.'

Full of dread that the worker would tell the Public Assistance Committee that Brian was indeed working, Martha admitted that he was a butcher's errand boy. This fact had not been revealed by Patrick to the relieving officer. If he had done so, the officer would have deducted most of the boy's wages from the allowance or from the food vouchers they had sometimes to beg from him.

‘He earns five shillings a week, but I've got to feed him and see he looks clean, like – it takes all he earns,' Martha explained patiently.

The interviewer looked at her with undisguised disgust; her toothless mouth, her face mahogany in colour from never having been washed, the vile stench of clothes never taken off and, under them, a body never bathed since birth.