A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin (6 page)

Delighted to be included in a big girl's game, Number Nine joyfully tried to chant, ‘Spy! Spy!'

Martha got up. Bridie was a real tartar. She wished, with a sigh, that her daughters were as passive as those of Mary Margaret – except for Dollie, of course. Dollie was like Bridie, a proper cross for any mother to bear.

She took a large metal ewer from a corner and screwed its lid on tighter to make sure it still fitted. Then she said to Mary Margaret, ‘I'm going to have a whack at the Lee Jones. See if I can get some soup. Where's your jar? I'll try to get some for you.'

Mary Margaret nodded and ordered, ‘Our Connie, you go and get it – it's in the wooden box.'

After several wails from the upstairs room of ‘I can't find it, Mam,' and shouts of further direction from Mary Margaret, Connie came pounding down the stairs, and handed to Martha a big, old-fashioned sweet jar with a screw-on lid. Its exterior was still grubby from its previous visits to various soup kitchens.

‘Soup?' she inquired hopefully, pale-blue eyes wide.

‘Can't promise, love. They may run out.'

Connie was not yet seven years old, but she already understood the power of Them. They were people who decided how your life would be lived. They themselves lived in faraway parts of Liverpool called Princes Park or Orrell or even further away in places called Southport and Blundellsands. Sometimes they lived across the river, and you could watch them coming off the ferries each morning, to work in the big buildings by the Pier Head. One of the buildings there always seemed special to her;
it had two huge dicky birds perched on the top of it, and she dreamed that, one day, she might travel on the ferry and have fancy clothes and a fancy job in that very building.

As she quietly handed the jar to Martha, she reflected that They did sometimes give you bits and pieces to help you out – but not always.

At Martha's remark, her face fell, and Martha chucked her under the chin. ‘Cheer up, chick. Auntie Martha'll do her best for you.'

But Connie did not smile. With the back of her hand, she simply rubbed the mucus off the end of her nose and turned back to the fireplace, to rejoin the game of I Spy. Connie was learning, slowly and reluctantly, the deadly acceptance of life that her mother had.

To facilitate transporting the ewer and the big jar, Martha stowed them in an old perambulator, kept in a recess behind the building's front door. It was very difficult to get the pram in or out of the recess without opening the door of her own room to make enough space, so it was fairly safe from theft.

The pram was the most useful possession she had; it not only carried Number Nine, Ellie and Joseph whenever she had to take them out, but it could hold a hundredweight of coal or a pile of old
bedding bought for tearing into rags. Without it, she knew she would find it difficult to function.

She bumped the pram down the front steps, lifted her shawl over her head and went out to face the elements and the world of Them.

January 1938

The water in the freezing puddles squished through the cracks in her boots, as she trudged slowly up to Limekiln Lane, the site of the office of Lee Jones' League of Welldoers. She had not recently approached the League for help and she hoped that she would not be noticed as a regular beggar: she had learned from experience that one should not go too often to the same place; they got tired of you.

If the League's premises had been closer to her home, she would have sent the younger children themselves to beg a meal; they would almost certainly have been fed. But there was food for Patrick, Brian and Number Nine to think about, too; the weather was so bad that she feared that they might become ill if they did not get something hot to eat:
Tommy and Joseph were already coughing badly, and all the children were snuffling with colds.

Like Patrick and the children, she had chilblains on her heels; they seemed more than usually painful today, and she muttered, ‘Christ, me pore feet!' as she trod on a cobblestone and the frayed lining of her boot caught the sore spot. She would give a lot, she thought, to have a thick pair of socks to cushion them.

As she plodded along, she sighed one of her gustier sighs. If she did not count little Colleen in hospital in Leasowe, there were eight people ahead of her in the family, all of whom could do with socks. Patrick was always the first to get them, also the first to be fed – because he was the breadwinner, or was supposed to be, thought Martha with sudden asperity, as she considered her own ceaseless efforts.

Woollen socks wore out so quickly, she would moan to Mary Margaret, and, though she could darn, she did not always have wool to do so.

As she approached the Lee Jones' League of Welldoers' shabby brick building and saw the length of the queue, she quailed. Despite a cup of tea for breakfast and eating up a piece of crust that Number Nine had abandoned, she felt faint.

So great was the number of people lined up
patiently alongside the building's wall that a policeman stood there to keep order. It would be a long wait.

She went to the end of the queue and leaned against the wall for support, while she mechanically wheeled her pram backwards and forwards at her side, as if she were rocking Number Nine to sleep in it.

There were many charities in Liverpool which tried, each in its inefficient way, to ease the city's horrifyingly intense poverty. Unlike some other cities, the deprivation of its poorer citizens was blatantly obvious to the ladies who came in from the suburbs to shop and to the menfolk who had offices in the centre of the town.

In the heart of the city, the interfusion of the two streams of inhabitants, the poverty-stricken and the fairly well-to-do, was impossible to escape; it flowed through the shopping areas and then the business districts, flooded along the dock roads and the Pier Head. And many a kind soul tried to do something about it.

Amongst some of the upper classes, there was still, also, the latent folk memory that, if something was not done about the suffering, there might be a revolution – like the French one, with its nasty guillotine and baskets of bleeding heads.

Amongst the dreadfully poor, Lee Jones was, perhaps, the most beloved benefactor. It was said that he squandered nearly all his fortune in order to help, but hardly made a dent in the need. As few others did, he understood, also, that not only was food for the body needed, but also some happy times to lighten the burden of misery.

As she leaned against the wall, eyes closed, and tried not to faint, Martha remembered a day when he had brought into the court, on a wheelbarrow, a gramophone accompanied by records of popular songs. She smiled slightly, as she recalled with what enthusiasm she and her neighbours had poured out of the houses and nearly burst their lungs as they sang old Victorian music-hall songs along with the scratchy gramophone records. It had been a really good afternoon, with rays of summer sun creeping their way in between the close-packed housetops to light up the jolly faces.

Her Brian, now pedalling his way round delivering meat for the butcher, would still whistle the same songs as he went. The boy had been thankful, also, to join the boxing club which Mr Jones had started, to give the lads something to do of a Saturday morning. Now, though Brian had to work Saturdays, he still went to practise on a
Wednesday night. Patrick had said that Brian was good at it, Martha mused.

Real nice lad, our Brian, she thought. When delivering to houses which did not have distrustful cooks, who weighed in his presence everything he delivered to them, he would sometimes take a sausage or a chop from one of the white, loosely wrapped parcels, and secrete it inside his shirt.

When Martha made a half-hearted protest at its being theft, he would say stoutly that if she saw the pounds and pounds of meat which he delivered, she would know that it would never be missed. She would thankfully drop the rather black-looking offering into the soup pot.

Sometimes, on a Saturday night, when a bit of tripe or shin of beef did not look good enough even to go into sausages, Mr Beamish, his employer, would give it to him, with the strict admonition that it should be cooked immediately he got home. The two assistant butchers whom Mr Beamish employed would snigger as Brian wrapped the gift up, but the lad did not care – food was food.

The queue, mostly women, but with a few flat caps interspersed, shuffled along slowly. She moved with it, keeping her back to the wall for support, pushing the pram alongside her.

‘Atternoon, Mrs Connolly,' said a cracked voice at her side.

Martha blinked in surprise, and made an effort to straighten up. The voice of the local illegal moneylender in a charity queue?

‘Atternoon, Mrs O'Dwyer,' she responded cautiously.

She looked fearfully at the four-foot-high ancient crone, who was, equally, the bane and the person of last resort of all the housewives in the courts. She herself owed her a shilling from last Saturday. She had borrowed it in desperation. Patrick had had only two days' work that week, and she had not even bread in the house. She had agreed to repay one shilling and threepence for the loan by next Saturday.

Though the repayment was not yet due, a fearsome apprehension went through her. If she failed to pay this woman, her threats of disclosure to the relieving officer of undeclared earnings, or a hint to a husband that his wife was being unfaithful, whether true or not, or a whisper to an employer of a small theft, like Brian and his chops, could play havoc with a family.

There seemed to be nothing that she did not know, nothing that she could not use to coerce money out of petrified borrowers. What was she doing here?

Thoroughly enjoying her client's obvious fear, Mrs O'Dwyer grinned toothlessly. Martha's shocked expression was very satisfying to her: fear was part of her stock in trade.

She was actually hunting for a debtor who had vanished mysteriously while still owing her five shillings, a very big debt. It had occurred to her that the woman might, on such a bad day, surface at the one place where she was likely to get food, the Lee Jones. She had not had any luck, but had decided, since she was there, she would beg a meal for herself.

‘Mr Connolly not doing so well, eh?' she inquired of the paralysed Martha.

Martha's hands under the ends of her shawl were like ice, and her feet in her sopping wet boots felt that they would never move again.

Holy Mary, help me, she prayed.

It did not occur to her that she need not answer the moneylender's question, that her polite salutation was sufficient. Her mouth opened and shut soundlessly as she groped for words.

She was saved by a sudden ripple of shuffling down the line. The policeman on duty shouted, ‘Move along there, now.'

Like well-trained dogs on leashes, the patient queue wended its way slowly through a doorway
and into a narrow passageway, where they were, at least, out of the wind and sleet. Martha quickly pulled the pram in behind her.

She glanced back and saw, with relief, that she was the last to be let into the passage. The moneylender was looking up sourly at the policeman, who was holding her back. Mrs O'Dwyer could not command any particular respect in a charitable organisation; she was merely another old woman who would be let in from the cold as soon as there was room.

Martha was greeted by a superb smell of cooking, and a smiling young woman who kept the applicants in single file as they surged down the passage. She then passed them to an older lady seated at a table. Their names and addresses, with brief reasons for their being there and the number in the family, were noted.

When Martha explained that she was trying to get something to eat for two big families, there was a pause, and she realised with a sinking heart that anybody could make that excuse in order to get a double ration.

‘Me friend has the TB, Miss. It would be the death of her to come out on a day like this,' she pleaded.

‘Is she a widow?'

The implication that Mary Margaret's husband could have come on her behalf silenced Martha.

She reluctantly muttered, ‘No.'

She watched the lips of her interlocutor tighten, and wondered frantically if there was anybody among these charming-looking ladies who would understand that married men rarely came to such charities, unless they wanted something for themselves; it was the wife who scrounged, begged, borrowed or stole to cope with the needs of their huge families.

Yet another lady was called and a whispered conversation ensued. The new lady, elderly, dressed in black, ran her fingers through a card index as she checked on Mary Margaret's name. The card evidently told her something more than the name. She looked hesitantly at Martha. Then, with genuine pity at the sparrowlike creature before her, she said, ‘We'll make an exception today – the weather is terrible.'

Martha's eyes filled with tears. She said with genuine feeling, ‘God's blessing on yez, Miss.'

The lady smiled at the weeping woman, and said, ‘I hope times get better for you soon.'

In relief, Martha cried quietly to herself most of the long way home. In the pram, she had the huge bath-water ewer and Mary Margaret's jar, both full
of soup right up to their lids, and almost too heavy to lift. In addition, in big brown paper bags lay three two-pound loaves of bread, two for her own family and one for Mary Margaret's, and a pile of potatoes baked in their jackets.

The fact that the potatoes had been cooked told her that They understood the predicament of those who often had nothing with which to cook: no coal, no gas, no wood, no fireplace, no nothing.

Some of Them was real nice, she snivelled to herself. In her gratitude, she even forgot the excruciating pain of her chilblains.

January 1938

As she carefully pulled the old pram up the front steps so as not to spill the soup, she could hear the ruckus in the house.