Читать книгу A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin - Helen Forrester - Страница 11

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.

It did not occur to the untried volunteer that cleanliness cost money: in her world, there were always towels, soap and hot water in the bathroom. She had yet to see a court.

‘She asked me if I thought I was deserving of help,’ Martha had wailed to Mary Margaret. ‘Deserving? And me trying to make one egg stretch round six kids this morning, and little Colleen still sick in Leasowe Hospital and I can’t even get to go and see her.

‘And I didn’t have much luck selling me rags in the market, this week, neither.’

She cleared her throat and spat onto the paving stones.

‘As if it’s our fault if there’s no work and the men get drunk when they draw their unemployment or their Public Assistance or their wages. Wouldn’t they need a little bit of somethin’ to cheer them up if they was workless? Or a glass or two to ease their thirst, after all the sweat they lose when they do work?’

She glanced miserably round the darkening court. ‘Do they think we enjoy it?’

Mary Margaret laughed weakly. ‘Oh, aye. I think they do. They think that if we didn’t like it, we’d leave it. Or if we weren’t lazy, we’d clean it up.’

Martha looked at her aghast. ‘And how do they think we’d do it with no water to speak of and the lavs spilling over all the time? And me broom is worn out. And if we leave, where are we going to go? I’d like to know that. We’ve got to be close to the docks for Pat and Thomas’s sake.’

‘Martha, love, they don’t know nothin’. You have to go and tell them and hope for the best.’

‘Well, I got the boots in the end,’ Martha responded, a hint of triumph in her voice. ‘They’re second-hand, and they’re too big for him – he’s got a wad of newspaper in them, so he don’t trip up and have a fall. It’s so easy to fall in a ship.’

Amongst the hapless community strode, occasionally, an elderly Catholic priest, his biretta crushed down on his bald head, his long black robes nearly brushing the filthy ground. Women were afraid of him, as were some of their husbands, because behind him stood the wrath of God, who did not like sinners who drank at the Baltic Fleet or the Coburg, or who had suspiciously small families which might indicate a form of birth control in use.

Yet, the priest and his assistant, Father James, were sorely grieved by the suffering they saw daily in their crowded parish, already famous as a surviving remnant of the worst slums in Britain. All they could do was to preach obedience to God’s will, acceptance of the circumstances to which men were born, and the glories of the life to come.

Many of their male parishioners spoke disparagingly of them. But none of the women would hear a word against them. In their hearts, they rarely doubted the Church’s teachings and they clung to them as the only ray of hope in their lives.

They dearly loved the younger priest, Father James, who was so gentle that some of the women thought he was a saint; and they loved and respected him as they would a saint.

Like most of her female neighbours, Martha often wept as she considered all the problems of her life, particularly in winter. Her feverish prayer, addressed to the Virgin Mary, was that she should not become pregnant again. It was surely sinful to beg such help from a Holy Virgin. But if She did not understand the affairs of women and how hard life was, who else was there?

Having her latest baby, little James, named after the priest, had left her feeling very exhausted. He was a sweet-tempered child and was known affectionately throughout the courts as Martha Connolly’s Number Nine.

How Number Nine was surviving his infancy was a mystery to Martha. She had not been able to feed him herself, and he never really thrived on tinned milk; even now, with his second birthday coming up, he was nought but skin and bone and protruding stomach. But, then, life was like that. You couldn’t do much about it: God sent children. But, sometimes, He also took them away again.

The Church said that nobody was supposed to love anyone more than God himself – and Martha felt uneasily that God might be jealous of her beloved Number Nine. In quiet moments in her busy life, she prayed almost daily that He would never take him.