The Four Streets (30 page)

Julia looked at Kitty oddly. As the girls walked home after their visit, they commented that Kitty was still not well.

‘Knocked the stuffing right out of her, that accident, if you ask me,’ said Julia thoughtfully.

She had noticed a huge change in Kitty of late and, although she couldn’t put her finger on it, she knew that there was something more than a stay in hospital and a broken arm upsetting Kitty.

Kitty felt as though she lived in a parallel world to everyone else. Between her and those she knew and loved there was an invisible screen. Her family and friends spent their days rooted in reality, whereas hers were rooted in fear. They lived… she existed.

Up until now she had found clever ways to thwart Father James and stop him finding opportunities to be alone with her. She had been permanently on the run from his zealous pursuit and had outfoxed him. But now she was done for. That was it. He had won. He had turned her into a repulsive sinner and there was surely no one who lived on the four streets as disgustingly dirty and unworthy as she was.

Kitty didn’t feel glad to be home. Kitty felt nothing but shame and self-loathing. It was all she could do to put her feet onto the floor each morning, once she had woken and realized, with acute disappointment, that she was still alive. She knew she had no choices and, as if she were an actress, it was a role she had to play each and every day.

Life on the four streets was getting tougher for the families who lived there. There was less work on the docks for the dockers, and little or no money. Boys who would have followed their da onto the docks were now heading into the big factories, such as Plessey’s and Ford. The winter had taken its toll on industry everywhere. It was now March and the ice had only just begun to thaw.

For those houses on the four streets that had kept the ranges ticking over, water hadn’t been too much of a problem. In other parts of Liverpool, in homes that had replaced ranges with cookers, and lost their back boiler, they had the misery of burst pipes to contend with. Kathleen wasn’t able to keep the range lit all through the night. She filled the bath with water before she went to bed so that if her pipes did freeze, as they sometimes did, they were never short. The bath quickly formed a layer of ice that she cracked each morning to fill the kettle. The danger of frozen and burst pipes was a constant source of worry and anxiety. They tried their hardest to avoid catastrophe by putting extra coal on the fire before they went to bed.

Each night, Kathleen took a secondary precaution and left the kitchen tap dripping to keep the water moving to help prevent the pipes from freezing. There was nothing more miserable and difficult to cope with than a burst pipe in freezing weather. As if life wasn’t hard enough. The weather was just another hurdle to overcome for those who were used to dealing with adversity on a daily basis.

Today was only Thursday, the day before pay day, and everyone had already run out of money. For many families on the streets, this meant going hungry. But Kathleen had a plan. She knew Peggy had a big ship’s catering pan on her landing under the eaves and she sent Jerry round to collect it. Then she popped in to see Maura.

At the Doherty house, Tommy was fed up. The dockers had been laid off for yet another day and it was not a situation he liked, although it was no fun working in below-freezing temperatures. They had been dipping into the bread-bin ‘back-up’ money over the last few weeks and it was now running low. This always made Maura nervous and irritable.

Tommy was never miserable for long, though; it took only a neighbour or a fresh face to pop in through the door and he was a happy man again.

‘Ah, Kathleen,’ he said as she walked in. ‘Ye are a sight for sore eyes, come over here and cheer me up.’

Kathleen sat down at the table with Tommy, smiling at the sight of his paper spread out in front of him.

Was there ever an Irishman more proud that he could read, she thought to herself.

If Tommy had read the paper by the afternoon, he would go back to the beginning and start it again. Reading the trivia of Liverpool life in the hatched, matched and dispatched columns gave Tommy somewhere to put his mind, whilst the hullabaloo of a house with well-loved and noisy children carried on around him.

The back door opened again and everyone looked up at Alice, nervously standing in the doorway. For a fraction of a second, the room was silent. This was the first time Alice had stepped inside another house on the four streets.

Alice had no idea why she had followed Kathleen. She was driven by new feelings and emotions over which she had little control. She wanted to belong. When Kathleen left the kitchen after sending Jerry to collect the pan and had thrown over her shoulder, ‘I’m away to Maura’s,’ Alice had wanted to shout out, ‘Take me with you.’ But she hadn’t. She had stood there and thought to herself, I want to go too. And so, that was what she had done.

Walking up Maura’s back path was one of the most terrifying things she had ever done in her life. Her fear was overcome by the desire to be with Kathleen. To be like Kathleen. She wondered, should she knock?

Before she lifted the latch she took a deep breath. Perspiration had formed on her top lip and her brow, yet her mouth was dry. She looked at the pale blue, cracked, painted door and stepped inside. Just like everyone else.

Maura looked straight at Alice. She had been touched by the card she had written for Kitty when she came out of hospital and, since that day, her heart had thawed towards Alice.

Tommy, himself shocked for a moment, broke the silence.

‘Jeez, how lucky a man am I, with the three best-looking women in the street all in me own kitchen. Alice, come and sit down with me at the table and save me from Kathleen and Maura naggin’ at me, will ye?’

Everyone laughed, as much with relief as at Tommy’s joke.

‘Maura, it’s going to have to be a pan night,’ said Kathleen, in a resigned voice, as she picked up the tea Maura had placed on the table for both her and Alice. With her other hand, she reached under the table and gave Alice’s hand a gentle squeeze. ‘If I don’t do it, some of the kids in this street will go to bed hungry tonight and we can’t have that, so. I will do it in our kitchen, Maura, but if I’m doing the cooking and serving, ye need to do the organizing.’

Kathleen had spoken. It was more of an instruction to Maura than a query.

‘Aye, Kathleen, I will that,’ said Maura, drying her hands on her apron and sitting down at the table to take instructions. ‘How much do we need from each house?’ she asked.

‘Threepence will do it, but if they don’t have it, Maura, don’t push it. We will have enough for everyone, so don’t make anyone feel bad. Some of these women have been away from the bogs for too long and aren’t as good at managing as they would be if they were back home with help.’

‘And that’s the God’s truth,’ Tommy chimed in.

‘It’s not just the women, Kathleen, some of the fellas are straight into the Anchor from the dock after work, spending the food money. The shorter work is, the more they want to drink the money away.’

‘Aye, thank God for the family allowance,’ said Maura. ‘I don’t know how we would manage without it, ye drinking as much as ye do, Tommy Doherty.’

She shoved Tommy on his arm, laughing as she spoke. Tommy always put his kids first and the only time he called into the Anchor was on the odd occasion when times were flush and Maura had given him a few bob extra. Every Friday night he walked into the house and put his pay packet on the kitchen table in a small brown envelope. Maura opened and checked it, then gave him his paper, betting and ciggies money. It was all Tommy needed; he didn’t ask for any more; he worked for his wife and his kids, not himself.

The family allowance, which was paid out from her book at the post office on a Tuesday, gave Maura over two pounds a week extra, which usually got them over to Friday if things were harder than usual, but this week she had been helping everyone else out, with the odd bit here and there, and now she was shorter than usual herself.

Tommy got his pencil out and they counted up the number of children on their street. Kathleen knocked on the kitchen wall with the mop end for Jerry to come in from Peggy’s, and promptly dispatched him down to Mrs Keating, Mrs McGowan and Mrs McNally, the keepers of the ship’s catering pans on the other three streets, to let them know what was happening. Jerry came back and confirmed the other women would follow suit. They had done this before and they would no doubt do it again.

Maura went out to collect the money from each house on the four streets. Kitty and Nellie went with her, together with Harry and Angela, wheeling Joseph’s empty pram to the shops. There were eighty-three children on the four streets, of varying ages. Maura needed forty pounds of potatoes, twenty pounds of carrots, fifteen of the large Spanish onions, which, to everyone’s excitement, had just started appearing in the greengrocer’s, and thirty pounds of neck end of lamb from Murphy’s.

‘Don’t ye be giving me no spuds with black eyes in now,’ said Maura sternly to Bill, the greengrocer. ‘I don’t want none of ye rubbish dumping on me, because I’m buying for everyone today.’

The greengrocer was English; if he could, he would palm the rubbish off on Maura and they both knew it. The greengrocer felt bad, knowing what Maura was doing and as she had done many times in the past. Once he had taken her money, carefully counted out in threepenny bits, he said, ‘Hang on a minute there, Maura, I’ve got something for you.’

He disappeared into the back of the shop and came out with a wooden box full of uncooked beetroots.

‘I will have to throw these out at the end of today, so if you can get them cooked quickly, you are welcome to them.’

‘Aye, so we can and thank ye, Bill, ye aren’t all bad.’ He and Maura exchanged a grin.

The cheeky mare, he thought. He had a soft spot for Maura, though. She had been Bernadette’s best friend and, like every other man who had been blinded after laying eyes upon her, he had been in love with Bernadette.

Maura placed the box of beetroots across the top of the pram and walked on to the homes in the other three streets that would become communal kitchens for the day. When she reached the door, she called out through the back gate from the entry, ‘I’ve an extra treat,’ and handed over to each one their share of the vegetables and meat, plus eight big beets. ‘Chop them into slices after you’ve boiled them, that way everyone can have a share.’

‘Ye got beets for free from that thieving git?’ said Mrs Keating. ‘Well, ye never know, maybe pigs do fly.’

Now, everyone was happier. They might have had nothing. They might all have been poor, and this morning they had been facing misery and hungry bellies. Some were smoking what was left of old fag ends in dirty ashtrays and, as a result, they were bad-tempered. Now, everyone was pulling together and an atmosphere of something close to joy had settled on the four streets, as the kids played together, wrapped up against the March wind, aware something close to a party was about to take place.

Kathleen’s kitchen became a hive of activity, as did the three others. As a result of Kathleen’s thinking, each child would go to bed on a full belly of Irish stew. The women tripped in and out of each other’s houses, sharing out the vegetables to be prepared and chopped. Once the beetroots were cooked, they were peeled and put into a large bowl, another gift from a ship’s kitchen, and then the ingredients for the stew were put into the pan to cook. The neck end of lamb needed to simmer all day to soften and then break down into stringy lumps. The carrots were put in at midday and then the potatoes in the last hour before the stew was thickened up with flour and gravy browning. The women had also made soft floury bread, which was still warm and ready to be dipped into the gravy.

At suppertime each child brought a bowl and a spoon into Kathleen’s kitchen, where she and Alice were dishing up. On the top of each bowl of Irish stew they laid slices of beetroot and on top of that a warm floury cob. You could hardly hear yourself speak for the excited chatter of children sitting on the stairs, as well as all over the kitchen and living-room floors.

‘Thank ye, Auntie Kathleen, thank ye, Auntie Alice,’ they all shouted, after they had taken the first mouthful, before getting down to the serious business of eating. As each child slurped and ate, silence descended on the house.

This was thrilling for the children. They had none of the worry of making ends meet. To them, this was an adventure, a break from the usual routine, underpinning the fact that they were all one big family and would always look after each other. Mothers wove their way among the children, helping the little ones to eat, making sure they were safe and could manage to spoon the food without spilling any. The women exchanged happy smiles with one another. This was a job well done. This was what their community was about. Together, they could beat anything.

Kitty did her bit to help, but she was feeling ill and the smell of the stew turned her stomach. She had helped to look after Joseph and, earlier in the day, once the pram was empty of vegetables, she and Nellie had taken him for a walk. They both kept looking over their shoulders for runaway cars as they ambled along the cold streets, wheeling Joseph to sleep after his lunchtime feed.

Nellie had noticed Alice was helping out in the kitchen, peeling carrots, which she thought was nice. Alice didn’t see that Nellie and Kitty had taken Joseph and they didn’t bother to tell her. Nana Kathleen knew where they were, that was all that mattered.

Nellie knew Kitty wasn’t very happy. She didn’t talk much and she didn’t laugh at Nellie’s jokes. This was unusual and confusing, but then Nellie had a grand idea.

‘Kitty, did you know that Nana Kathleen makes everything better?’ she piped.

Kitty laughed for the first time. ‘Aye, she does that,’ she replied.

‘So, why don’t you talk to her and tell her what’s wrong?’

‘Who says there’s anything wrong with me?’ said Kitty sharply. Nellie noted that her eyes had filled with tears.

‘No one, Kitty, just me. But I knows ye better than anyone and I know summat’s up.’ Adversity had gifted Nellie with wisdom way beyond her years.