The Four Streets (2 page)

Life was lived close to the cobbles.

Maura was, without doubt, the holiest mother in the street. She attended mass twice a day when everything was going well, and more often when the ships were slow to come in and work was scarce.

She was the person everyone went to for help and advice, and her home was where the women often gathered to discuss the latest gossip. On the day one of the O’Prey boys from number twenty-four was sent to prison, the mothers ran to gather around Maura’s door, each carrying a cup of tea and a chair out onto the street to sit and gossip, watching the children play.

‘I’m not surprised he’s gone down,’ Maura pronounced to the women sitting around, whilst standing on her doorstep, arms folded across her chest, supporting an ample bosom. Hair curlers bobbed with indignation inside a pink hairnet whilst, in order to dramatize her point, two straight and rigid fingers waved a Woodbine cigarette in the general direction of the O’Prey house. ‘Look at her nets, they’re filthy, so they are.’ In Maura’s eyes, there was a direct connection between the whiteness of the net curtains and the moral values within. No one ever challenged her assertion.

The women turned their heads and looked at the windows as though they had never noticed them before.

‘Aye, they are that too,’ came a murmur of acknowledgment, led by Peggy, Maura’s next-door neighbour. They all nodded as they flicked their cigarette ash onto the pavement and took another long self-righteous puff.

The mother of the son who had provided a poor household with stolen food was damned by dust. But Maura’s condemnation wouldn’t stop her sending over a warm batch of floury potato bread, known as Boxty, as an act of commiseration when she made her own the following morning, using flour that was itself stolen from a bag that had fallen off the back of a ship in the dock. Maura was as kind and good as she was opinionated and hypocritical.

Jerry and Bernadette Deane lived across the road from Maura and Tommy in number forty-two. Like many of the men on the four streets, Jerry had arrived in Liverpool from Mayo, hungry for prosperity and advancement that weren’t to be found in rural Ireland, where levels of relative poverty remained almost unchanged since the sixteen hundreds, and where, right into the winters of the nineteen-sixties, children still walked to school barefoot through icy fields. It was as though the land of his birth were caught in a time warp. The outside privies on the four streets were a luxury compared to the low stone-and-sod houses of Mayo, where an indoor toilet of any description was mostly unheard of in many of the villages.

Jerry and Bernadette had met on the ferry across from Dublin to Liverpool on a gloriously sunny but cold and very windy day. Jerry spotted Bernadette almost as soon as he boarded the ferry, her long, untameable red hair catching his attention. Jerry was mesmerized as, from a slight distance, he watched Bernadette do battle with her hair, which the wind had mischievously taken hold of and, lock by lock, teased out from under her black knitted beret. She struggled hard to force it back under the hat.

Jerry had been on his way to the ship’s bar when he caught sight of her, her beauty stopping him in his tracks.

‘Jaysus,’ he would often say to anyone who was listening, ‘she took the eyes right out of me head, so she did.’

Instead of moving into the bar for a pint of Guinness to settle his stomach, he sat down on a painted wooden bench, bolted to the wooden deck, to watch the young woman standing at the ship’s rail and wondered to himself why she didn’t step indoors and into the warm. Surely, it would be much easier than taking on the sea wind and trying to tame a wild mane of hair outdoors?

Her already pale complexion turned a ghostly ashen as she gave up on her hair, staggered forward a few steps and grabbed the rail with both hands, looking more than a little queasy.

Aha, Jerry thought, seeing an opportunity in the girl’s problem, thank ye Lord, a hundred thousand times, for here’s me chance. He embodied everything everyone knows to be true of an Irishman. He was as bold as brass, full of the blarney and didn’t know the meaning of the word shy. That was until he met Bernadette.

Taking the initiative, Jerry nipped into the café, bought an earthenware mug of steaming-hot sweet tea and took it over to the strange but beautiful girl. In his grinning, cheeky Irish way, he tried to introduce himself, but he was so struck by the size and the blueness of her eyes that, for the first time in his life, he could say nothing.

Bernadette didn’t notice Jerry as he approached her, so focused was she on holding onto the rail of the ship and on keeping in her stomach the fried eggs and bacon she had enjoyed that morning. She was sure she might faint, and was wondering how she would cope all alone if she did, when she saw Jerry’s tall, broad form standing next to her. It was hard to look up as it meant breaking her concentration, but she managed for a few seconds even though she felt like throwing herself overboard. A slow watery death was surely more pleasurable than feeling as she did right now.

She was distracted by his large black eyes that made her forget her sickness for all of thirty seconds. ‘I felt as though they were burning into me very soul,’ was how Bernadette described her first meeting with Jerry, wistfully and often, her eyes welling up at the mere memory of the day.

It was obvious to everyone who knew their story that Jerry and Bernadette had benefited from that all too rare but wonderful thing, love at first sight.

He realized as he walked over to her that there was no reason on God’s earth why he, a complete and total stranger, should be taking a mug of sweet tea to a woman he had never met in his life before and might never meet again. Jerry introduced himself, as best he could, but it came out as a prolonged and indistinguishable jabbering.

Holy Mary, he thought to himself, where the feck has me sensibility gone and why is me hand shaking like a virgin on her wedding night, spillin’ the bleedin’ tea everywhere?

Although Jerry was talking gibberish, Bernadette could tell he was offering her the tea. So desperate was she to feel better that she accepted it, assuming that he could see how ill she felt.

‘Thank ye,’ she whispered, as she took the mug out of his hand, managing a very thin and feeble smile that she didn’t for one second feel herself. ‘I’m so glad there is someone who knows the cure for how bad I feel.’ She tried to improve the smile and look grateful, whilst her stomach did an Irish jig in her belly.

Jerry’s stomach also began a jig, but it had nothing to do with feeling seasick. He smiled to himself at how it seemed to have gone into free fall, something he had never experienced before.

Bernadette was doubly grateful for the tea as she had only half a crown in her purse and hadn’t wanted to waste a penny. She wasn’t sure if drinking tea with milk was the right thing to do in the circumstances, but she trusted him. He looked trustworthy – and gorgeous; even through her sickness she could see that. And why shouldn’t she drink the tea in any case? In Ireland, strong, sweet tea was the cure for everything from scurvy to colic.

As she drank slowly and tentatively, Jerry studied every detail of her profile, her neck and her hair, which kept blowing across her face, covering it like a lace veil. Finding his sea legs at the same time as his courage, Jerry played the fool with his best show-off jokes and Bernadette tried her best to laugh at his audacity. After all, he was outrageously flirting with a sick woman. Suddenly, without warning, they both saw the tea again, all over the deck and Jerry’s shoes.

Jerry sprang into action. The wind had met its match. He gathered Bernadette’s flyaway hair together and spun it into a knot, before tucking it back under her cap as tightly as he could, for fear she would vomit straight onto it. Bernadette was beyond caring that a stranger was stroking the back of her neck and whispering soothing, comforting noises into her ear. Her eyes had filled with tears of shame and she looked as though her knees were about to buckle at any moment.

Jerry kept hold of Bernadette, and her hat, keeping her hair away from her face for almost the entire crossing. The seasickness claimed her as she vomited over the rail all the way to Liverpool during the notoriously choppy journey across the Irish Sea.

As deathly as the seasickness made her feel, Bernadette had noticed Jerry’s black wavy hair and, for an Irishman, his unusually broad shoulders. He wore a typically oversized cap, which, although pulled down low over his forehead against the wind, blew off to the other side of the deck so that Jerry, thrown from side to side by the rocking of the boat, had to run like a madman to rescue it. Despite how ill she felt, she laughed. It was impossible not to laugh at this cheeky Irishman.

They didn’t leave each other’s side for the entire crossing. If they had, Bernadette might have fallen over. By the time they docked at Liverpool, she felt she had known him all her life. To be fair, she had: not necessarily Jerry, but many young men from home just like him. However, it was the fact that there was something very chippy and confident about Jerry that made him different and extremely attractive, despite her self-imposed intention to meet a rich American traveller who would sweep her off her feet and carry her off, away across the Atlantic, to the country where so many of her Irish ancestors had emigrated to live.

‘Never worry, Mammy,’ she had said to her mother, who was upset at the thought that soon all her children would have left her to work abroad. ‘I’ll send ye me pay and when I’m in America, oh sure, won’t ye be the grandest woman in all of Killhooney Bay, I’ll be able to send ye so much.’

Bernadette was confident that she would be massively successful in the land of milk and honey, and her generosity was such that she was determined everyone she knew would benefit too.

She already had a job waiting for her as a chambermaid in Liverpool’s Grand hotel, with staff accommodation provided in the maids’ dorm under the roof, boiling in summer and freezing in winter. Bernadette did not care. This lowly position did not deter her from her grand ambitions. She would have work. That was something many in rural Ireland did not. It hadn’t stopped raining in Mayo for weeks before she left, and although she loved her home, she was looking for adventure and a way to earn a living, not to grow a set of gills.

But she hadn’t reckoned on meeting Jerry and she also hadn’t expected to fall in love within minutes of her feet leaving the Irish shore. It wasn’t the most romantic or conventional beginning to what became the deepest and truest love affair, but it forged an immediate deep bond.

Jerry told Bernadette he was off to stay with a widowed aunt who lived on the four streets. Although he didn’t have a job already lined up, he knew there was plenty of work in Liverpool for strong Irish navvies. Work on the docks, the roads or building the new houses was not too difficult to come by and a slice of a pay packet earned in England could transform the life of a family back home.

As soon as they docked and Bernadette set foot on dry land, she started to feel better. On board the ship, she had felt as close to death as it was possible to be, having vomited what felt like the entire lining of her stomach. Never had she experienced anything as unbearable. She knew if it hadn’t been for Jerry’s company and the fact that he had looked after her, it would have been a million times worse.

Jerry turned to look at her and laughed. In the five minutes since they had docked, the colour had risen in her cheeks. Her eyes had begun to take on a sparkle and her smile was less forced. Jerry didn’t want to part from her. He needed to know the Bernadette who wasn’t distracted whilst vomiting over the deck.

‘Let’s go in here,’ said Jerry, pointing to a rough-and-ready portside café. ‘Ye need to get a lining on your stomach before ye set off to your hotel, and I sure need to eat before I set off to look for work. Let’s grab a bite together, eh? It’ll set us both up for what lies ahead for the rest of the day.’

Bernadette willingly agreed. She had no idea when she would get the chance to eat again, and she also wanted to spend some time with this handsome young man when she wasn’t embarrassing herself and could act in a more dignified and ladylike manner.

The café smelt of damp wool, stale bodies, fried steam and blue cigarette smoke. They walked across its floorboards to a newly vacated table with a red gingham tablecloth, next to the open fire. The waitress came and removed the overflowing ashtray, replacing it with a clean one as she took their order. Jerry offered Bernadette a cigarette, a Capstan Full Strength, which made her choke, and both of them laughed a great deal as they began to talk.

Very shortly a large brown earthenware pot of tea was placed on the table with a plate of thickly sliced white bread and butter, followed by two plates piled up with chips and two fried eggs on top. Bernadette hadn’t realized how hungry she was until they both devoured the food.

Finally, Jerry plucked up the courage and, cheekily, reached out and took one of Bernadette’s hands in his own. She didn’t pull away.

‘Does ye not know any modesty at all?’ she chided playfully, hitting the top of his hand with her free one as though to knock it away, something she had no intention of doing.

Bernadette might have been play-objecting to Jerry’s romantic advances but really she was giggly and delighted. They talked about their homes and family, the places they both knew and the people they had in common.

‘Do ye know the O’Shaughnessys from Mayo?’ asked Jerry.

‘Ah, sure I do, from Bellingar, I know the mammy and daddy and their daughter Theresa,’ replied Bernadette. This was Ireland. In the rest of the world they say you are only ever six people away from someone you know, but in Ireland it has to be two.

Jerry was nervous, turning his teaspoon over and over between his fingers, making a constant tinkling sound as it tapped the cup. On a normal day, he found it hard to remain serious for more than a few minutes and here he was, for the last hour, pouring out his life plan to a woman who had thrown up over his feet. He had never before had a conversation in which he talked out loud about the things that made him hungry for the future. Jerry was stupidly happy. They both were. Emotions were gripping them both so fast they had no idea what was happening but neither resisted.