A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin (24 page)

‘You see, if you're bombed flat, we got to know where to find you,' he explained with a knowing look. He tried to keep his inquiries light-hearted, though it had been explained to him that the aid
of a local man who knew where everybody lived would be a priceless help to the Heavy Rescue Units in their burrowing through rubble to find victims.

Then there was the blackout. He insisted that, before lighting so much as a candle, those who had a window had to have black curtains to cover it at night.

Kitty Callaghan, whose husband was in gaol, Sheila Latimer and Phoebe Ferguson, the oakum pickers, and Martha, all of whom had windows, were really miffed at this, and did not hesitate to tell him so.

Martha discovered, however, that she had new clients wherever she went, anxious to buy discarded cloth, preferably black or thick material like worn bedspreads, or leftover pieces of velveteen. A pair of heavy curtains, long discarded, proved unexpectedly valuable. She ceased to tear up worn sheets, and increased her prices for these bigger pieces of material.

As she shared a cup of tea with Tara, her friend of the samovar in the market, she said happily, ‘I might as well make a buck while I can.'

Tara reluctantly agreed. Her problem, as the war progressed, was that tea and sugar were becoming hard to buy. The phrase ‘under the counter'
became common currency, as retailers held back goods in short supply for favoured customers.

Cigarettes became very hard to find, even under counters.

Desi gave up his sermons on the need to carry a gas mask. Women left the mask at home and used the box as a convenient hold-all.

Older men, with jobs for the first time in years, ignored his instructions altogether, despite Desi's depressing reminders of gas casualties in the First World War.

‘Too much lumber,' they would grumble, and, if they had time, would wander off on more urgent business, like trying to buy some cigarettes, or finding a pub that was open, with a notice on the door saying that they had beer for sale.

Without Mary Margaret to read for her, Martha turned in desperation to Kathleen. She was astonished to learn that, though she stumbled on some words, the girl could read quite well, thanks to Sister Elizabeth's constant supervision at school.

Though Kathleen complained bitterly at the boring things her mother bullied her into reading, she was herself surprised at the amount of respect and praise she subsequently received from the other women in the court.

‘Only Alice can read that well,' she was told.

The praise certainly improved her self-respect.

She read showers of instructions which came through the meagre letter boxes and appeared on posters on every notice board. Home Guard, civil defence, firewatching, fire watchers, Women's Voluntary Services, the urgent need to keep silent about one's daily work; they caused a nightmare of confusion.

‘Even a pack of busybodies called the Women's Institute want to teach you how to make jam or put fruit in bottles, for Christ's sake,' muttered these women of the waterfront.

‘And them ration books. Don't even say how much you can have. We'll be cheated, we will.'

The court accidentally received pamphlets about building an Anderson air raid shelter in the garden.

‘I've had it up to here,' snapped Martha sourly, when Kathleen explained this to her. ‘What bleeding garden?'

They ended up having a good laugh at that one: they knew then that the government in London was plumb crazy.

How to use a stirrup pump to put out a fire was another instruction which caused a good deal of ribaldry.

When Desi demonstrated one, they had a great
game spraying each other, while their children, wearing their gas masks, whooped it up playing cops and robbers in and out of the deluge.

The shelter planned for the street outside the court was built, and was inspected, from start to finish, by elderly males who had worked in construction.

‘It'll fall down at the first shake,' they decided gloomily. ‘Too much lime.'

Just what the latter remark really indicated, none of the women was clear about, but it did sound ominous. Even when air raids became a reality, the shelter was rarely use as anything but a convenient latrine.

For the most part, the tenants opened up the condemned basements of their houses, and, during the raids, took refuge there. Later in the war, they trekked out of the city every night, bedding in prams, children trailing behind them, to seek greater safety in a park or in the countryside.

‘What bothers me most,' muttered usually silent Patrick, with a loud curse, ‘is the blackout.'

He peeled up a leg of his trousers to exhibit a badly grazed knee to an already fearful Martha. ‘Fell over a pile of sandbags. They've got them all round the fire hall – and you can't see a bloody thing in the dark.'

‘Aye, I tripped over a paving stone meself yesterday. Want me to wrap up the graze?' There was real sadness in her voice: her world was rapidly becoming a madhouse, as she tried vainly to keep up with the demands made on her.

‘What nearly give me a heart attack was way back in June. The first time I heard the air-raid warning go off, when They was trying it out,' Martha remarked to Alice, as they waited in a queue to buy some tins of beans at the corner shop. ‘Did it for you?'

Alice agreed that it was the most awful sound in the world. ‘And the all-clear don't sound much better,' she added.

‘It's a proper Moaning Minnie!' interjected the woman in front of them, her mouth twisted up grimly.

Everybody within hearing laughed at this likening of it to a constantly complaining woman.

The awful noise was, for the duration of the war, promptly named Moaning Minnie: under that name it didn't seem quite so scary.

Desi found it easier to explain to male smokers and, through them, to their smoking wives that the flame of a match could be seen from afar. ‘And the Jerries can see you,' he would explain, pointing skywards.

He did not need to say any more to the menfolk; they all knew the saying from the trenches of the First World War, ‘Never share a match. By the time you've lit the third man's cigarette, you'll be dead.'

He did not mention flashlights or car lights or bicycle lamps. He himself had been provided with a flashlight, but nobody else in his little area owned such luxuries.

Martha reckoned her heart was broken when Brian, in late September of 1939, was suddenly imbued with a desire for adventure. At seventeen and a half, he lied to the recruiting officer that he was eighteen and applied to join the army.

The recruiting sergeant loved men from the courts, and immediately snapped him up.

‘They make the best troops in the world. They've already endured everything,' he would say over a pint of ale. ‘Anything they face in the army comes easy to them after living in a court.'

Martha wept on the boy's shoulder. ‘How could you leave me like this? I need you. And you've got a decent job with Mr Beamish.'

‘Somebody's got to fight the war, Mam. I'll get seven shillings a week – and out of it I can make a bit of an allotment. And you won't have to feed me.'

This practical information comforted Martha a
little. She wiped her nose on the end of her apron, and said, with a half sob, ‘If you get killed, I'll mairder yez.'

The threat, often made in his childhood when he ran out into the street, made Brian laugh, and it was a cheerful young man who went off to war.

His mother wept, and not only for his lost wages; he had given her a lot of moral support. ‘Even Bridie listened to him,' she sobbed to Alice Flynn, who, for once, fervently thanked heavens she had no sons.

Martha was almost immediately upset again when she received a postcard from Warwickshire to say that Lizzie, her eldest girl in service, had found herself a lovely job in a Naafi canteen. ‘I got a nice room in the village,' she wrote, ‘with another girl from Liverpool.'

When Martha heard from Alice what the postcard said, she exclaimed, ‘Mother of God! What's happening to me family? And me nearly on me knees when I first had to get her ready for a job, with new clothes and all.'

‘What did you do?' asked Alice.

‘Ach! Spent a whole day going from one place to another, begging clothes for her. They was nice about it, but They get fed up with you, don't they?'
Martha stared glumly at the postcard, while she chewed a piece of nail off her thumb.

‘Well, you won't miss her wages, like you will Brian's.'

‘She were a good girl; she sent me a bit from time to time.'

Alice tried to cheer her up by suggesting, ‘She might meet a nice lad in the Naafi.'

‘She could.'

Alice's suggestion proved correct. Lizzie had a hasty wartime marriage in Warwickshire during a soldier's forty-eight-hour leave.

‘There wasn't no time, Mam,' she wrote on a postcard, ‘to bring him home nor nothing. Maybe later on.'

The postcards dwindled in number until by the end of the war, Martha had lost track of Lizzie and, indeed, had almost forgotten her. When Lizzie saw her husband's parents' pleasant, clean house and ordered life, she could not bring herself to take him to Liverpool. ‘Me mam and dad died in the war,' she said, and thus divested herself of court life.

Soon after Brian left home, Sister Elizabeth from the children's school came to visit Martha, about the evacuation of her other children to the country.

She was met with an immediate refusal.

‘Our Kathleen's working in a canteen,' she told
the Sister. ‘And Bridie'll start work soon. And Tommy helps me quite a bit with what he brings in.' Her voice rose in anger. ‘And if you think I'm going to send little Joey, Ellie and James to a foreign place, you should have another think.'

‘But you don't want them to be killed, do you? You can go with them, you know,' protested the teacher.

‘Of course I don't want them killed, Sister! But who do you think is going to look after me hubby and the kids here if I go away?' Nuns really didn't know anything.

The Sister knew Martha of old, and she gave up: her children would soon be working, and the wages they would bring in were something all mothers in the poverty-stricken district looked forward to, to be enjoyed until the offspring married and left home.

She felt sorry for Kathleen, who, being a girl, would be expected to give up all her earnings. She knew the child was, when in school, already a boiling volcano of suppressed rage, a rage which sometimes came out in the playground when she could be quite a bully: and, like many others, she occasionally came to school with an obvious bruise on her face or arms or legs.

It was a pity, she thought. Kathleen had potential
to do better for herself, if only her mother would give her a little help – cut her hair and make her clean and neat. She did not inquire more precisely what kind of job the girl had found: her mind was filled with the problems of evacuation.

Though she had assured the child that inward and spiritual graces were more important than outward show, she had, towards the end of her last school term, talked gently to her about grooming in preparation for going to work.

She would have been delighted to know of the sound advice the child had subsequently received, though she would certainly not have approved of the woman who gave it to her.

July 1938

Not all Sister's advice to Kathleen had been lost upon her; every girl wanted to look like Jeanette MacDonald or some other queen of the films; the trouble was how to do it when you had nothing. It was even more difficult when your address was a court. She had turned down a job cleaning the floors of a greengrocery which, not without difficulty, Martha had found for her.

‘No,' was the immediate, forceful response. ‘I want to be a shop girl, a clean job, not a scrub woman. Or go into a factory if I can't go into a shop.'

Her mother was very angry. ‘Well, find a job yourself – but don't be long about it.' She turned to pick up her basket of rags, and then she snarled, ‘Look
in your dad's paper. And, meantime, be thankful you've got a mother who'll give you something to eat.'

She swung her basket onto her head, and stomped out of the house.

Kathleen was shocked. Though her mother had often appeared heartless, it seemed as if now she did not care what happened to her, as long as she brought in some money immediately.

Kathleen knew that she was verminous, so she supposed that some employers would find her unacceptable. But surely Mam would help her as much as she could to reduce that unacceptability, wouldn't she? Like she had done for Lizzie.

Yet, she had not; she had simply found her a third-rate job, for which she would need nothing but the clothes she stood up in. The hurt sank into her, to join the sense of humiliation she had endured in school. That misery, though shared by other children from the courts, had been almost intolerable. Had it not been for sharp-eyed Sister Elizabeth and her encouragement, Kathleen would have run away. At home, she had accepted the conditions in which she lived; she had no other experience; in a way, she was afraid of the world outside it: and there had always been Mam, sharp-voiced, heavy-handed, but at least there, the centre of her small universe.

A number of visits to the Wesleyan Central Hall with her mother and Mary Margaret, where, for twopence, they could watch an old film, had told her that there was, indeed, a strange world out there. But it was so different that she could not imagine becoming a part of it.

Why should Kathleen do anything different from her mother? Martha would ask anyone who would listen. They had to learn that there were some things which even a miracle-working mam could not alter; she had tried with Lizzie, and Lizzie hated her life as a domestic servant.

In Martha's estimation, it was a certainty that her world would never change for the better: her children had to be aware of that and learn to manage in it.