A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin (26 page)

‘Are they with you?'

At the sound of the male voice, a shocked Ellen rushed to the door. ‘Danny!' she exclaimed.

In all the uproar caused by Mary Margaret's death; the inability to trace her three daughters,
whom Ellen imagined were still being sought by harassed billeting officers; the death of Theresa, followed by the upheavals caused by the preparation for war, everyone had forgotten Mary Margaret's son, a merchant seaman: he had, after all, been very rarely home since he first went to sea as a boy of fourteen.

Guilt-stricken, Ellen drew the lad through the lines of washing hung out to air in her room.

‘Come and sit down, love. I'll get you a cuppa tea and tell you all about it; I've fresh tea on the hob.' She was ashamed of her neglect and nearly in tears.

The sight of welling tears scared and puzzled Danny even more. He sat slowly down on her bed, the only area over which no bed linen flapped.

He watched her while, with shaking hands, she hastily filled a mug with tea, added tinned milk and passed it to him. ‘Help yourself to sugar,' she urged.

When he had helped himself from the tiny blue packet and she had laid it down at the end of the bed, she sat down beside him and put her arm round him.

He did not cry when she explained what had happened.

When he had been paid off by his ship, he
had been told that the small allotment he had made to his mother had not been collected. It was, therefore, being returned to him. Sick at heart, he had suspected that his gentle, sick mother had died.

Now, hearing of the loss of his grandmother, whom he had always regarded as a source of acidly honest wisdom and support, and of his as yet untraced little sisters, his mind would barely function.

‘What happened to the postcards I sent to Mam?'

Ellen was puzzled. ‘I haven't seen none since she died. Where did you post them?'

‘Um? Recife, and – er – one from Rio, and one from a wee place in Argentina where we took on water – forgotten the name.'

Like most women in seagoing communities, Ellen knew all about slow arrivals from post offices in distant places. She said comfortingly, ‘Ach, they'll probably turn up in a week or two. Postcards is always the slowest to come. You probably heard your mam complain, sometimes, that your father got home before his postcards did.'

He barely took in what she had said. He was stunned that he had apparently been entirely forgotten by his aunt and uncle; surely they cared that he existed, didn't they?

‘Why didn't you write and tell me?' he managed to ask.

Ellen cleared her throat. At first she did not know how to answer. Then she said carefully, ‘Well, we thought the right person to get hold of would be your dad, and, of course, we wrote to him – twice. We reckoned that he would tell you. But now you're saying he didn't?'

‘No. Never had no letter from him.'

‘That's queer, love. And we haven't heard a word out of him up to now, either.' She paused to consider the implications of the lack of mail. Then she said, ‘Desi and me has been thinking that the letters haven't yet caught up with him – after all, he's on a tramp.'

She sighed. ‘You know how it is, every day you hope for a letter, but it doesn't come, and the days go by.' Her voice became imploring. How can you tell a kid that, because he was rarely at home, his very existence had indeed been forgotten?

He drank the tea and put the mug down on the floor. Hands hanging between his knees, he asked dully, ‘What ship is Dad in?'

‘He's in an Australian tramp. Your Uncle Desi went to the shipping company office and told them about your mam and give them a letter to be sent out to your dad – the people here are agents for
the Australian owners. Desi said they were nice enough and they promised to send our letter to his next port of call.' She paused, mystified, and then said doubtfully, ‘And, you know, it is rather odd. Usually, he sends postcards to your mam from most ports what he touches, and we did have a couple – but we haven't had any lately – and His Nibs knows to give them to me.'

Daniel stared dumbly through the open door at the line of wet bedding stretched across the court. He had no idea what to do. Nearly eighteen years of age and signed off from his ship, he believed himself to be naked to the call-up for the Navy, which he was not looking forward to. And now this: it was as if his whole family had been swept down the drain.

Auntie Ellen was speaking again. ‘You come stay with us for a bit. Maybe we'll get news soon.'

He nodded. ‘Ta,' he said dully. ‘I'll go down to the agents tomorrow. See what they say.' He stirred restlessly and then stood up. He wanted to escape from the house; he did not know what else to do, beyond trying to contact his father.

Now, a slow-boiling anger at his aunt's lack of thought for him rose inside him; he did not want to let it boil over.

Through the open door, he had caught a glimpse
of Martha through the flapping washing, as she returned home, so he said, ‘I guess I'd better go and say hello to the Connollys; Martha and Mam was always great friends.'

‘You do that, love. See if they're in. Desi'll be home soon, and I'll make the tea. So don't be too long.'

Martha greeted him tenderly and told him immediately how much she missed his mother. He heard all over again details of the loss of his family and a further litany of complaints of the misery of being a woman in wartime.

‘Your whole life is that upset, what with trying to keep going with your work, and the everlasting queues to buy anything,' she said earnestly, as she put the tin teapot over the fire to warm it up. ‘You've no idea how bad it is.'

He did not bother to tell her that being a merchant seaman, with a stack of German U-boats on your tail, was not exactly paradise. He simply sat on her solitary chair by her fire, which was comfortingly warm, while she plied him with yet another mug of tea.

He was surprised out of his inertia when Patrick, in his fireman's uniform, wandered in.

Daniel did not get up, but Patrick leaned down to shake the boy's hand and clap him on the
shoulder. ‘Sorry about your mam and your granny,' he said.

‘Ta.' The boy looked up at his old neighbour. ‘You know, Pat, I'm real worried about Dollie and Connie and Minnie.' Fear of the unknown was clear upon his young face.

Patrick peeled off his jacket. Determined to be optimistic, he said, ‘Not to worry, lad. There's thousands of kids as has been evacuated: they'll be safe with somebody or other. The billeting officers is maybe behind with their lists and reports. The scrum was pretty bad, you know, because the kids went in such a hurry.'

Daniel accepted this suggestion with a nod, and then asked Patrick about his uniform.

He immediately heard a tirade about the problems of being a rookie fireman. In his shattered state, however, he could not concentrate on what was being said and he failed to understand most of it.

Remembering Ellen's warning not to be too long away, he finally rose. ‘Like to come out for a drink after tea?' he asked Patrick.

The invitation was accepted with alacrity.

In deep contrition, Ellen fed him half the potato and leek pie she had made for tea, and Desi looked askance at his consequently small portion. Ellen
cleared her throat warningly and glanced at Daniel. Desi understood and took an extra piece of bread and margarine to fill up.

When Patrick drifted in, Desi was asked to come for a drink, too.

They went down to the busy Coburg and, though he was so young, helped Daniel to drown his distress in several pints and the noisy chatter of the pub.

Despite getting quite drunk, Daniel still felt alienated from the civilian life swirling around him. Though the lack of information about his sisters and the apparent silence of his father troubled him deeply, he knew he would be thankful to get back to sea, just as his father had always been; a boat was its own world, enclosed, separate, with a boundless ever-changing ocean to look out on and soothe you. It effectively put behind you most family worries, because you could not, at a distance, do much about them.

Seamen are used to being strangers in their own home. But that night Ellen heard Daniel weeping helplessly as he curled up on her sagging settee, and she stirred uneasily. Poor kid, pity he didn't have a wife to comfort him. She hoped a good cry would help him, like it did herself when she felt down.

February 1940 to February 1941

A bereft Daniel went back to sea a couple of months later, still no wiser about his father's and sisters' whereabouts. A trip to the orphanage to which Dollie, Connie and Minnie had been transferred yielded nothing: the vacated building had been taken over by an army unit; nobody knew anything about evacuated children.

He went to the town hall, and was redirected and redirected until he did not know who he was questioning.

Having very efficiently seen the children, accompanied by their teachers and in some cases by their mothers, onto innumerable trains to the countryside, the City obviously thought that their responsibility was over. Now the children were in
the reception areas and were the billeting officers' headache.

He was told that each unaccompanied child had a card to post to their parents to say where they were.

‘I don't think me sisters can write properly yet,' protested Daniel.

‘Then their teacher would surely write for them,' snapped a harried bureaucrat.

‘Only Dollie and Connie was in school,' the boy persisted. ‘Our auntie says they was took into care with little Minnie and they wouldn't likely be in school for the next few days. In that time they was evacuated with an orphanage.'

The bureaucrat smiled in relief at this information. ‘In that case, I am sure that you don't need to worry. The orphanage will take good care of them wherever they are. All you need to find out is which area the orphanage was evacuated to.'

Easier said than done, particularly during air raids. On inquiry, he found that he was still, mercifully, a little too young for the Navy and thankfully, after a daily search for nearly two months, found himself another merchant vessel, a tramp, where he would be better paid: he reasoned that he might need real money to help his sisters, if he couldn't communicate with his father quite soon.

‘I got to earn,' he told Ellen. ‘Maybe something bad has happened to me dad. Then there's only me left; and I'll need money for the kids. Next time I'm in port, I'll do another round of trying to find out. Meantime, see what you can do, please, Auntie. I don't know when I'm going to be back – you know what it's like on a tramp – I could be gone six months or more.'

In feeding and housing him while he was home, a careworn Ellen decided that she had made enough effort. It was up to Thomas Flanagan to get his children together. There was no doubt in her mind that, somewhere, her three little nieces were being well cared for, either by the orphanage or by billeting officers: they would be better fed and better looked after than they had ever been in the court with a sick mam. She decided that she need not be too worried about them, and she tried to reassure Daniel on this point.

She would, she decided, give a piece of her mind to their father, Thomas, next time he surfaced. He could write well enough to reply to her letters, blast him.

She turned her attention to the pressing need of buying soap powder, which seemed to have vanished from the local shops, and to her urgent need of coal to heat the hot water in her wash boiler.

She found that if she wanted coal, she would have to fetch it herself from the coal yard: delivering coalmen suddenly had better jobs or had been called up.

Desi, too, had a better job, which he was enjoying very much; he did not want to borrow Martha's old pram to go to fetch coal for his wife, nor did he want to collect or deliver the laundry any longer.

The resultant row between Ellen and Desi was an epic listened to with fascination by the entire court: it was as well that their boys were at sea, the court agreed; they would certainly have become embroiled on one side or the other.

In addition, two of Ellen's best clients, wives of skilled craftsmen with their own businesses, had cancelled their laundering because their husbands had been called up: their incomes were suddenly reduced to miniscule army allowances. One of them told her tearfully that she was also besieged by her husband's creditors, because she could no longer keep up the monthly payments for the wireless set and the front-room furniture which they had bought.

Prompted by Daniel's arrival and by her forgetfulness of him, Martha became slowly conscience-smitten about Colleen, who was still in Leasowe
Hospital being treated for consumption. She could not remember when she had last been out to see the child, though Kathleen had reminded her to send a birthday card, and had bought one, written a greeting and posted it on her behalf.

‘I never seem to 'ave a calendar, and I'm that befuddled with all of it,' Martha wailed to Kitty Callaghan from the second floor; Kitty had a sister and a sister-in-law from nearby visiting with her on the front step. Martha joined them.

The three other women agreed with her remarks. Forced to find new jobs as older employment vanished for the duration of the war, they were all hampered by near illiteracy.

Martha continued to complain. ‘Now I got to find stuff for blackout curtains, 'cos everybody's hanging onto their old linen: consequence, I got no decent fents.' She stared glumly at a rat peeping out from under the steps opposite her. And now I got to take time off to go out to Leasowe.' She explained about Colleen.

‘Aye, you better go,' responded Kitty. ‘She mayn't have much time.'

At this mention of human mortality, the three ladies round Martha immediately assumed expressions of deep, polite sympathy: everybody knew that consumption was a death sentence.