A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin (19 page)

She sighed wistfully.

‘Reckon I could walk down the stairs if I still had a stick. And out of the front door and down the steps and into the garden – and away from this bloody gaol.' She opened the door wide, and sighed again. ‘But you don't have a stick – and you don't have no money neither.'

Balancing herself cautiously with her fingers against the dark, panelled walls of the house's upper hallway, she edged along the passage. When she came to an open bedroom door, she had, for a second, to walk without support. She paused and then warily took a quick couple of steps across the aperture and caught the doorframe on the other side. She whimpered. Then, though her damaged leg still hurt, she grinned. Not bad, she decided.

At the next doorway, she paused again and glanced inside the room.

It looked similar to her own room. Five beds crowded it. Each patient lay on her back, staring at the ceiling, her bedding tucked tightly under the mattress. They looked exactly like dolls in boxes in a toy shop.

‘Mother of God,' she whispered, as a cold, creepy feeling went up her back. ‘Are they all paralysed? Does anybody know who they are? Do any of them know where they are?'

She was getting cold in her backless nightie, and she shivered. Where were their families?

And, come to that, where was her own family when she needed them? Like now? Tears, never far away, welled up in her sharp, birdlike eyes and the dolls in their boxes blurred. She turned her head to rest her forehead on the wooden panelling.

A harassed, scolding Angie suddenly caught up with her and made her jump.

‘Scared me to death, you did – when I went into the bathroom and you wasn't there. Come on, now. Put your arm round me waist – and we'll get you into bed before you catch your death.'

‘Oh, Angie,' wailed Martha.

‘Come on now. Stop crying. You'll be all right once you're all warm again in bed.'

Martha sniffed, and allowed herself to be hustled into her room and into bed.

‘Wish I had a stick – and a proper dressing gown,' she said to Angie, as the aide tucked the sides of her bedding in.

‘You're not going anywhere, love. What would you be wanting a dressing gown for? Eh? And
Matron won't allow sticks, as you very well know, 'cos they can be used as a weapon. That's why yours was taken away from you, remember?'

And how I'd love to use it on Matron, the old nit, thought Martha savagely, as she wiped her tears away with the edge of her sheet.

Angie turned and ran to the door.

‘Where you going now?' Martha called. ‘I want to tell you something.'

‘Bed baths. Then, when I've finished that, I'm going home,' snapped Angie, and slammed the door after herself.

‘Humph,' grunted Martha, and glanced towards Pat's bed. The curtains were still drawn round it.

As she lay propped up by her pillow and contemplated a future like Pat's, she began to rebel against such certainty.

‘I'll ask the doctor if I can have a stick to walk up and down the bedroom,' she determined. ‘I'll make meself better if it kills me, I will.'

But Matron will be with him and you'll never get a chance to talk to him yourself, common sense warned. And you can't shout over her voice – you might be sent to a mental place. They'd say you'd gone crackers.

Her determination wilted. She began to cry
again, quietly so as not to disturb the other women in the room.

‘I thought I'd seen it all,' she wept. ‘But I never dreamed of a place like this.

‘Dear Holy Mary, Mother of God, get me out of this hellhole. Intercede for me dear Mother, I beg you!'

January to June 1939

The sleet of January and rain of February 1939 gave way to the penetrating winds of March and longer daylight hours. April followed with a mixture of heavy showers alternating with fleecy clouds chased by the sun's rays. Though an improvement on the spring of 1938, these changes in weather passed almost unnoticed over the roofs of Court No. 5.

No crocuses poked their heads up between the paving stones. In the surrounding streets, no trees existed to put out soft green buds. In Church Street in the city centre, a girl peddled small bunches of violets for ladies to pin into the fox furs draped round their necks. Martha noted these. Of all the inhabitants of Court No. 5, only Martha, searching for sources of rags and then selling them in the
market, ever saw daffodils or any other flowers, and these were usually in the gardens of homes holding auction sales.

As 1939 progressed, the international political situation became increasingly threatening. In faraway London a worried Ministry of Health, which knew barely anything about the real suffering of the north of England, quietly ordered one million burial forms to be dispatched to the local authorities of the larger cities. In their turn, in May 1939 the local authorities had discussed piling up a store of cardboard coffins; and subsequently the City of Liverpool, much to the irritation of the occupants of Court No. 5, finally pulled down the wall which blocked it off from the main street.

‘It lets all the wind in from the river,' fretted frail Mary Margaret, as she sat on the step to get a breath of air before going back to her sewing. She pulled her shawl tightly round her, her hands too cold to hem a handkerchief outdoors.

One morning, at Martha's suggestion, Mary Margaret asked Joseph Duggan, the old pickpocket who lived in the second-floor back room in which he had been born, to carry her chair downstairs to Martha's room and set it by her window so that she could sew her handkerchiefs as long as the daylight lasted. Sheila and Phoebe had recently become
rather short with her, because, if she was sewing by their window on the few days they had off, their privacy while the daylight lasted was invaded.

Because Patrick was subsequently so cross about
his
privacy being intruded upon, Martha was thankful that she had not asked him to move the chair.

Previously, if Patrick was at home and Mary Margaret was visiting Martha, she thoughtfully removed herself to her own room or to that of Sheila and Phoebe.

Now, as the price of food climbed steadily, the necessity for Mary Margaret to continue to sew far into the evenings in order to help to provide for her little family meant that the presence of his wife's friend in his room infuriated Patrick. On days when he had no work, or money to spend at the races or in a pub, he liked to lie on the mattress and snooze in the afternoon.

Martha pleaded, ‘She's so desperate to do her sewing – and so ill – I couldn't refuse her, could I now?'

Reluctantly, Patrick grunted agreement. The woman would not last long.

Mary Margaret's eldest daughter, Dollie, was even more outraged when she was frequently kept away from school and made to sit cross-legged on the floor beside her mother and put her rather
imperfect knowledge of hemming to work. It was not that she liked going to school; it was rather that she would be made to work at home – and would not receive a penny for it.

Grandma Theresa had made sure she did as she was told. She had assured her that unless she worked she could not be fed, would not be fed.

A frightened Dollie knew that Grandma Theresa never issued an idle threat. Furthermore, whenever she got the chance, she loved to eat.

Muttering many rude verbal protests under her breath, she took up her needle. Because she was angry, her first handkerchief had to be painstakingly unpicked and rehemmed and, despite her mother's gentle protests to Theresa, she did not share the other children's meagre lunch.

When the school attendance officer, his own handkerchief at his nose, came to see why Dollie was not at school, Mary Margaret snatched a piece of linen out of Dollie's hand and, in the nick of time, pushed it under herself. She made her own illness the excuse for the child's absence.

‘Me hubby's at sea,' she whined. ‘And me so sick – it's TB, you see. And I've nobody else to turn to.' She was careful not to mention the existence of Grandma Theresa, busy mending sacks in a local warehouse.

During the previous winter, as the little family fought its way through the dreadful eight weeks before Mary Margaret's allotment came through, Theresa had contributed to the family the whole of her ten-shillings-a-week old age pension, and, in addition, had found a job that nobody else was desperate enough to want to do; it brought in a few extra shillings.

‘I see,' the school attendance officer had responded through the thickness of his handkerchief. He was used to this kind of excuse regarding absences of eldest daughters. As long as it was a girl who was kept at home, attendance was rarely enforced, except after very prolonged absence; lots of girls missed school every Monday: they looked after their siblings, while their mother took the washing to the public wash house. It was a different matter if it was a boy who was absent.

Full of resentment, her eyes cast down, Dollie stood silently beside her mother during this exchange, not daring to say a word.

The officer retreated, with the admonition that Mary Margaret should make some other arrangement as soon as possible.

Out in the street, he took a huge breath of air polluted merely by factories, trucks and horse manure. As he scribbled a report in his notebook,
he wondered how the court inhabitants survived at all.

Even when Thomas's allotments came through, Mr O'Reilly at the corner shop refused Mary Margaret any further credit; he said he could not risk it: she owed too much already. She must first pay off her existing bill.

Jock, Satan Hisself, was occasionally persuaded by Theresa to let the payment of rent slide: he had many seamen amongst his tenants and understood this hiatus when seamen's families were sometimes reduced from abject poverty to almost destitution. Once the man's allotment of about half his wages began to be paid by his shipping company, he could sometimes squeeze some of the rent out of their enterprising wives. Arrears, however, continued to accumulate and would not be made up completely until the happy return of the seaman with, it was sincerely hoped, almost half his wages still in his pocket. As far as Satan Hisself was concerned, the secret was to find out the expected date of the man's return and then pounce on him before the entire population of the court retired to the local pubs or cafés to help him spend his money.

As he resignedly made a note that Thomas Flanagan was on a tramp steamer, date of return,
therefore, unknown, the London authorities took notice of the loss of civilian lives during the Spanish Civil War and increased their request for burial forms. They theorised that, if war broke out and London and other big cities were bombed as Bilbao had been, casualties would be even greater than they had first estimated.

During 1939's lovely summer and after the rubble of the broken wall had been shovelled into lorries by a gang of labourers and had been driven away, Alice Flynn went out one morning to buy some milk. She was puzzled to find another gang of men marking the edge of the pavement with white paint.

Mystified, she asked, ‘What on earth are you doing that for?'

One man slowly eased himself upright and winced at the pain in his back. He grinned. ‘What do you think?'

‘I dunno.' Alice smiled back at him; he was a nice-looking youngster.

‘It's for the war.'

Alice burst out laughing. ‘You don't fight wars with paint, you silly bugger.'

‘It's so as you can see the pavement.'

Alice continued to chuckle. ‘There isn't no war.'

‘There's going to be, Missus. It's clouding up, I
tell yez.' He bent to smooth a drip of paint off the end of his brush into the pot. He then gestured at her with the brush. ‘You can see it coming. And you know what they'll do first?'

‘No.' Alice was suddenly sobered.

‘They'll turn all the lights off – and you won't be able to see nothing. White paint'll help you find your footing.'

‘You're kidding me. Streets is dark enough already.'

‘No, I'm not kidding, Missus. Lights on – and the Jerries'll see us from above and be able to aim straight, when they come in the night to bomb us.' He pointed heavenwards. ‘Lights off, they won't be able to find us in the night.'

A pang of real fear went through Alice, not for herself but for her invalid husband, Mike, bedridden in the attic.

She stood stupefied in front of the workman who had bent once more to his task, stolidly dipping his brush into his tin of paint.

She watched him slosh further rough oblongs along the pavement edge.

Not another war? She felt an overwhelming sense of helplessness. In the background of her busy life, she had heard Mike's wireless babble about someone called Adolf Hitler, but she had dismissed
it as a lot of male political drivel. Was it all true? It couldn't be, could it?

Since nothing warlike happened during the next few days, and, after she had discussed the strange conversation with Martha, both women decided that the workman had been teasing her and she had been frightened by a pot of paint.

She forgot her fears. Martha had said with a laugh, ‘Whoever heard of turning the streetlights off or painting the pavement white to fight a war? Soldiers with their legs wound round with puttees fight wars.' Even the rumour of the building of an air-raid shelter out in the street made more sense than turning lights off or painting kerbs; and there was, as yet, no sign of the shelter.

Alice returned to her usual problem of making an army pension stretch to cover a slow, but remorseless, increase in the price of food that summer. Loath as she was to leave Mike to manage by himself, she found a part-time job cleaning the floors of a ship chandler's store: the previous cleaner, a younger woman, had volunteered for the Auxiliary Territorial Service.

Meanwhile, Theresa continued to mend sacks, despite the steady payment of the allotment.