A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin (23 page)

So nobody asked her?

Most of her life Martha had lived in a small world where the neighbours knew more about you than you did yourself. No move went unnoticed. She would often say that information went mouth
to mouth quicker than talking on one of them telephones.

She had found herself very lonely since Jamie left home, first to do his two years' national service in the army, then to study for the priesthood and, finally, to serve, in a very minor capacity, the Church in Manchester. But the idea that nobody nearby cared what could have happened to her was entirely new. She still did not realise that the upheavals of population which had occurred during the war, the bombing and rebuilding, the extension of the suburbs, had slowly changed irrevocably the Liverpool she had known. The tight little communities along the waterfront had been scattered, consigned to history.

It was true, she remembered as she thought about it in a fog of terror, that each day she spoke to a smaller and smaller number of people. It seemed as if there were always strange faces around, and, come to think of it, even her next-door neighbour was new to the district. Come in a week before she fell, he had.

She began to sweat. Did nobody know where she was? If not, how did you let anybody know if you couldn't read and write? Had Jamie not written to her? And if he had where were his letters, which, usually, the tobacconist up in Park Road kindly read to her.

The sweat which soaked her nightgown cooled, and her teeth began to chatter.

As these wild ideas penetrated, she thought she would go mad with fear for her life. Her eyes widened in terror; her heart pounded like a remorselessly swung mallet.

‘Holy Mother, help me,' she gasped instinctively, and pressed her rosary to her mouth. ‘Oh, Mother, help me. I don't want to die – I want to get better, and take care of Jamie when he come home.' She had not the slightest doubt that, in this crisis, her desperate appeal would be heard.

Her cry to the Beloved Virgin reminded her of the delicately painted, plaster Madonna in her church, before a bomb hit it. Prayers to Her had been part of her life, a frequent reminder that the Mother of the Lord Jesus was always there, able to walk in the world to listen and to hear, particularly, the prayers of women. A gentle friend, who gave you strength to bear what you had to bear. A pink-tipped hand stretched out to bless you, if you'd done something good, someone who could intercede between a sinner and God Himself.

She lay for a moment paralysed, exhausted, without hope of help from human beings. Then she forced herself to be calm, clenching her hands in
an effort to stop her panic. It's true, remember there is someone to ask, there is. Our Lady!

She took several big, shaky breaths.

Her voice worn out and very humble, though still with a dreadful agitation in it, she begged, ‘Dearest Lady, help me. I haven't got nobody but you and your Beloved Son. I've even lost dear Number Nine, who serves your Son most faithfully. I can't write to him and I don't know how you could tell him where I am. But could you? Could you put it in his heart how to find me?'

She paused. She felt so very tired, too weary even to cry any more, with a heart that still pounded unmercifully.

When she had gathered a little more strength, she continued, at first formally, ‘I beg you to intercede for me in my sinfulness that I may be forgiven for all the stupid things I done wrong in my life, especially with me kids; I never seen some of the warning signs that must have been with them.

‘But please, please, Dear Mother of Our Blessed Lord, be merciful. Let me be forgiven. Let me get well and get out of this awful place.'

She heaved a mighty sigh, said Amen and kissed her rosary.

Without any true hope that her sins would be
forgiven, particularly her many thefts from Lewis's and Blackler's Stores, she turned to lay her head on a dry piece of pillow. ‘Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner,' she whimpered.

Strangely, it seemed, for a moment, that she had laid her head against the knee of an understanding mother who would, at least try for her. She sobbed helplessly and half-dreamed that the Holy Mother spoke to her, though she did not understand the words.

A little comforted, she slowly calmed. She knew she could do no more. Fatigue overwhelmed her, and she slept.

Holy peace does not last long.

She was roused by Angie, who put a tray on top of the commode. She pulled back the bedclothes and shouted into her ear, ‘Breakfast!'

Martha rolled over and slowly sat up. Angie had shot across the room and was tying a bib round the neck of one of the dementia patients, who had to be fed by hand.

Goodness, it really was morning. She blinked at the sight of the sun coming through the windows. How she must have slept! And did she really see the Dear Lady? Was she here?

She came sharply back to earthly necessities.

‘I got to pee first,' she told Angie urgently.

Not wanting another wet bed, Angie abandoned the dementia patient, and came to help Martha out of bed. She whipped the tray off the commode and put it on the floor. Then she opened the lid of the commode.

‘Come on,' she said impatiently.

Martha stared at her. She felt a little lost, as if she was a long way away from the aide. Though weariness dragged at every limb, as she threw off her bedclothes and turned until her legs dangled over the side of the bed, she felt curiously at peace. It was strange. And she had been so scared last night, she remembered.

Without thinking, she said to Angie, ‘You go back to Lena. I can manage.'

To her faint surprise, Angie obeyed.

By moving carefully, she succeeded. She even closed the commode lid and lifted the tray back onto it, without reeling.

‘Humph, there's nothing like a good cry to set you up,' she thought with a rueful grin as she heaved herself back into bed. ‘It cheers you up no end.' But in her heart, she cherished an inner understanding that help would come from the Holy Mother herself.

She leaned over and took up the plate of food; it felt cold. As she viewed the white mass on a white
plate, she muttered, ‘Jaysus Mary, give me patience. Macaroni cheese again – and for breakfast? Yuk! What I wouldn't give for a good pile of bacon and fried bread!'

August 1939 to March 1940

Browbeaten by a ruthless Martha, Patrick joined the fire brigade. Her final, irrefutable argument was that, if he did so, they could then find a better place to live: it would no longer be necessary for him to be close to the docks and live with nine other people in one room.

With a motley crew of new recruits to train, the regular firemen found themselves grossly overworked. Though they themselves were, like most other City employees, very underpaid, they were a tight, almost military brotherhood, held together by the sharing of particular dangers.

They looked with scorn upon the recruits thrust upon them, particularly people like Patrick, who was regarded as brainless scum from the docks.
Patrick had, also, an inbuilt dumb insolence, when other people tried to order him around more than usual, and this did not endear him to his impatient teachers.

The regulars made the training as hard as they could. They were themselves big men, used to carrying heavy loads of hoses, axes and other equipment upstairs at a run. They knew just how to keep a wriggling, deadweight hose, belching out water, focused on a particular target: they became irate when their pupils, trying to emulate them, succeeded in soaking everyone in sight. Each hapless pupil had to learn how to set up a ladder safely, run up it like a squirrel and bring down a supposedly helpless victim of smoke inhalation, a feat that novices found very hazardous, as ladders swayed and teachers swore at them.

Finally, they had to learn the art of keeping themselves alive when coping with a tumbling, flaming building, a sight which truly terrified most of them.

It seemed to a gloomy Patrick that he would never learn all the finer points of firemanship and would himself end up a cinder.

He might have given up, were it not that his new life, though it had its problems, was basically less arduous. It was also more interesting.

For the first time in his life, his narrow world had been opened up. He met men from other parts of Liverpool and, willy-nilly, learned to communicate with fellow sufferers unconnected with docks or shipping.

After a few weeks of doubtful close association, he became quite defensive of them when they were criticised as conscientious objectors, trying to avoid army service or being sent down the coal mines. ‘Some of them have failed the army medical on a small point,' he said, ‘but a lot are like me, too old for call-up.'

He was secretly envious that many of his fellow recruits could easily read the written instructions which fluttered down from distant bureaucrats, who had rarely ever seen a fire. Though many of his weedy-looking associates seemed to belong to the world of Them, he began grudgingly to respect them. They were quite kindly about explaining anything he did not understand, and did not flinch when faced with dangerous situations.

As he got used to them, they occasionally said they had joined the fire brigade because they wanted to help their country's war effort. They seemed to have very high ideals: they did not believe in killing, even in war, some of them told him.

Ideals were something preached about by the
church; as far as Patrick was concerned they had nothing to do with him. All his life, he had worked at very heavy jobs to keep himself alive, help his ever-increasing family and, maybe, have a bit of fun and warmth in the nearest pub or have a swim or a race or a game of marbles, on which to bet.

It dawned on him only slowly that these pansies, as he privately called them, had some reciprocal regard for him, for his physical strength and his silent, fairly friendly willingness to show them how to shift heavy weights quickly. Though a man of only average height and very thin, Patrick had muscles like iron.

Thanks to exercise in much fresher air than warehouses provided, and to more food, he soon acquired greater energy. He lost some of his diffidence, and he began to add his modest opinions to the general conversation.

The much-despised recruits from all levels of society, thrown together by the war, eventually founded their own brotherhood. It finally became enormous, as auxiliary firemen slowly outnumbered by ten to one the original brigades who were their teachers.

In the first year of the war the civilian population, outside London, was not heavily bombed; and, to their thankful surprise, there was no invasion
by the Germans. So the auxiliary firemen were soon regarded by their neighbours as lazy good-for-nothings, like the air-raid wardens, who drew three pounds a week each as if it were a retirement pension.

Collectively the brotherhood endured this contempt, and some of them quietly worked at a second job as well. A poet working with him solemnly assured Patrick that their time would come, which did not reassure Patrick about his own safety.

He cheered up, however, when Martha reminded him that accidents in the docks and in ships were legion, and he had survived them: the fire brigade could not be much worse.

As recruitment into both the Forces and civil defence intensified, the number of young men hanging around in the streets decreased markedly. Auntie Ellen's two sons were called up for the Navy. She was not too sorry to see them go.

‘They've been hanging around the house long enough,' she said shortly. ‘It'll be a change to get a bit of an allotment from them.'

Brave words. But when the
Athenia
, on its way to America with numerous evacuated children, was sunk in Liverpool Bay by a German submarine, she became sick with fear.

Very soon afterwards, there were sad signs in the
district that British ships were going down in record numbers.

Helen O'Brien expressed her feelings succinctly. ‘It tries me nairves something awful,' she said, aware of regular young clients who were dead or had vanished into the call-up.

For those who could not read, or read only poorly, and did not own a radio, word of mouth was the main source of news.

After 3rd September when war was declared, word of losses came like shards of flying glass to pierce the hearts of women. The high number of Liverpool seamen lost was further exaggerated by rumours, and the back streets were filled with numbed, whey-faced wives and mothers.

Mike, in his attic, received a lot of humbly polite visitors asking if they might listen with him to the nine o'clock news.

At first, Martha reckoned that all the beginning of the war did for her was to put neighbours into uniform so that they could boss her around.

In the middle of the continuing general distress over the loss of Mary Margaret and Grandma Theresa, not to speak of her missing daughters, a man wearing a tin hat and blue overalls was noticed in the street outside the court.

He carried a gas mask, a large, hard-cover notebook and a fancy black fountain pen. It took a few moments for his friends to recognise Desi O'Hara, Auntie Ellen's husband, gleefully laughing at them from under his tin hat. He was, however, according to all the women, including his wife, no joke; on the contrary, he was another cross.

A sandwich-board man had suddenly become an official, the air-raid warden. Behind him, they discovered, lay real authority from Them.

He immediately lost much of his original popularity, particularly when, in a narrow side road, an air-raid wardens' post was erected. It was complete with cups and saucers and an electric kettle – and plenty of tea and tinned milk! There was also a telephone and switchboard, with a pretty girl in uniform to run it. The local women were really shocked and annoyed at such luxury for men who hung around all day doing nothing.

Undeterred by the false accusations of laziness, Desi went from door to door down the main street and in and out of the few remaining courts. He checked exactly who lived in which house.