A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin (25 page)

Ann O'Brien had heard many heated exchanges between Martha and her children. Living in a room next to them, she knew all the family and most of their woes, and, as consolation, she gave them little gifts, when she had had a good night's work and had anything to give.

Martha was being too hard, she felt; Kathleen would be on the streets in no time, if she did not watch it; and, being no beauty, she'd never get off them. She wouldn't wish her own grim life on any kid. Somebody ought to help her.

Soon after the girl had left school in July 1938, Ann was not surprised, one wet summer day, to find Kathleen snivelling in the archway leading into the court. She put down the bottle of milk she had been carrying, and put her arms around the inadequately clad girl.

‘What's up, love?' she asked, and then joked, ‘Your mam thrown you out?'

‘Not yet,' Kathleen admitted. Then she added cynically, ‘She wants me wages too much.'

As the rain pattered on the pavement outside the archway, she looked up at the concerned, raddled face bent over hers. Here was an old friend.

She poured out her desire for a nice clean job. ‘A decent factory job or something. I tried Bibby's, but I didn't get past the door. I don't know why.' She leaned against Ann's thin chest. ‘What I really want, Ann, is to be a shop girl – like the girls in Boots the Chemists. Sometimes I look at them through the shop windows and they look lovely!'

‘Well, love there's nothing like aiming high.'

Ann smiled and then glanced round her. Childless herself, she envied Martha her girls. She looked hastily around the court. She could not take Kathleen into her own room behind Martha's room: Martha had never encouraged that.

She said kindly, ‘Let's go and get a cup of tea in
the cocoa room across the road. Have a little talk, eh? Put your jacket up over your head against the rain, now.'

Kathleen nodded agreement, and they scuttled across the road and into the café. Now that the war was looming, dockers and seagoing men did not have much time to idle in cocoa rooms; they had found work, so the café was almost empty. At the back, two elderly men sat playing a game of draughts, while they sipped their cocoa; when the door slammed behind Ann, they did not even look up.

With a steaming hot mug of tea in front of her and kind Ann looking on, Kathleen gazed at her old friend with hope shining from her black-ringed eyes.

Ann truly did not want Kathleen walking the streets like herself, though a virgin was always welcome: men would pay a good price for a first go at her.

After thoughtfully sipping her own tea, she said, ‘Well, I'm going to talk to you straight, aye?'

Kathleen nodded eagerly.

‘First off, have you got a reference from the school?'

‘Oh, aye. Sister wrote me a real nice one.'

‘Good. Next thing is, you've got to look all bright
and clean yourself; you got to have nice neat hair and clean hands.

Kathleen sighed hopelessly and shrugged.

‘Don't take on, love. You go to the bathhouse and wash your hair and yourself real well; and we've got scissors, so our Helen, she could cut your hair real nice.'

‘I've got lice in it,' replied Kathleen. ‘They keep coming back.'

Mobile dandruff! Ann smiled grimly. They always will come back until you get out of the court, she thought.

She said, ‘Your mam knows to rub paraffin in your hair every week, I'd think. Then wash it.' She glanced at Kathleen's begrimed fingers clutching the end of the table. ‘And cut your nails: you got to have clean nails for a clean job.'

To Kathleen, getting herself clean seemed a hopeless task. Her only acquaintance with a bath was what she had seen in films, where women sat amid a pile of soapsuds which always covered them modestly. She remembered that they sang soulful love songs, as they lifted one leg up above the suds to admire its pearly whiteness, clearly shown in the black and white picture. Martha had condemned the latter, saying roundly, ‘It ain't decent to show off your legs!'

Despite her doubts about baths, Kathleen wanted to follow Ann's advice. Her face fell, however.

‘I haven't got sixpence for the bathhouse.'

‘We'll find it from somewhere, don't worry. What you do need is a decent frock, stockings and shoes – and a coat or mac. And, somehow, to keep the lice out of them.

‘You know, Alice Flynn's got an iron. Maybe she'd lend it to you. A hot iron down the seams of everything every few days would keep the vermin down.'

Kathleen nodded. What hope?

Ann looked with distaste at Kathleen's jacket, which hung dripping from the back of her chair. ‘You gotta be respectable-looking, somehow. If you look nice, an employer might train you in something to start you. Then you can work up – and one day you might get into Boots.'

The latter remark made Kathleen smile shyly. Ann was wonderful; at least she understood.

‘If you like, I'll have a talk with your mam. She was getting impatient with you, that's all, because she's got too much to do; the threat of the war's got us all het up.'

Kathleen did not have much hope about this suggestion; she was still feeling the pain of rejection. But she had faith in Ann.

She agreed.

When Ann brought up the problem of equipping Kathleen to go out into the world of work, Martha was very defensive. ‘She could learn to be a fent woman, like me. Just 'cos she can read she's got too stuck-up.'

But Ann was patient, and she finally pursuaded Martha that the girl could be as good as a bank if she had a decent job. Helen was recruited to help in the transformation, and thought it would be a proper lark.

After combing her hair for lice with the comb which had belonged originally to Mary Margaret, Kathleen submitted to her impatient mother's rubbing paraffin into her hair. The next morning, a sleepy Helen combed out the dead lice and cut it for her. She then bustled her off to the bathhouse, where she paid the sixpenny entrance fee.

Kathleen was so scared of the bossy attendant and of the huge white bath full of water, steaming like a witch's cauldron, that she threatened to bolt. But Helen held her hand firmly, made her strip and almost forced her into the bath. She then washed her hair and instructed her on how to wash her body and face.

‘Got to do it thorough,' she ordered. ‘Every week! Clean job – clean girl.'

For years, Helen had not taken a bath herself or bothered to wash her head. Older than Ann, she had as a child been bathed in the Mersey River, before the docks and warehouses closed it off altogether, and she had remarked laughingly to Ann when approached about Kathleen, ‘It was a lot easier to be clean in them days; not like it is now.'

She, too, knew the Connolly children well and she agreed that, with a little cooperation, Kathleen could be given a better chance than either of them had had.

What emerged from the bath was a little maid with a peerless white skin and shiny black hair which floated softly round her face, and a skinny little body with tiny breasts, not yet fully formed.

‘Aye, you look like a real little love,' Helen told the child, as she dried her off on the clean towel provided by the bathhouse.

The problem of clothes had been partly solved by Martha's talking to Tara, her market friend. She had told her about Ann's interference regarding Kathleen.

She said, ‘Of course, I don't want her on the street. I only want her to have an ordinary job until she's a couple of years older. Then, maybe, she'll be big enough and strong enough to get a factory job,
if she's lucky. And she said herself that a factory job would be OK.'

‘Did you get any clothes for her?'

‘Nah. Where would I get clothes for her? No charity's going to help me much.

‘God's truth! You know, I'm afraid to ask anybody for help. Last time I did, it were for Mary Margaret's kids – and They took them away. When I think of that, I worry about Them taking me own little ones.'

Tara nodded agreement. ‘What about trying for a cheque?'

Cheques were issued by loan companies, usually to be spent in certain stores which charged inflated prices. The sum was paid back by weekly instalments. Tara herself was able to obtain such cheques because her husband was known to have regular work as a tram driver and was likely, therefore, to pay off the loans which they represented. Tara used them all the time because the clothes she bought had often worn out before the loan was paid off. So immediately she had finished paying off one cheque, she applied for another.

Now she said, ‘I think you might just manage to get one. You work regular in the market, don't you? That's a job. Why not have a try? You could be lucky.'

Two companies snubbed Martha and turned her down. A third company said that they would consider her application if she could provide written confirmation that she had a regular business in the market.

Defeated because she had no pedlar's licence to show them, she consulted Tara again.

Tara suggested shrewdly that this third company might be more lenient, because they wanted clients who were not likely to be called up and be reduced to a soldier's pay with their debts frozen, if war began.

‘That may be,' responded a glum Martha. ‘But how do I convince them about me?'

Tara's reply was unexpected. ‘Who's your favourite butcher in the market?' she inquired.

Martha cheered up immediately and looked positively roguish. ‘They all are!' she declared. ‘They're forever teasing me.'

‘Ask any two of them to write a little note on their billheads to say they buy regular from you and know that you have a steady business in rags,' she ordered.

Quite shyly, Martha did this. Once it was clear to the butchers that they were not being asked to guarantee her loan, two of them did as she asked. They both wished her luck.

Martha got a cheque to the value of one pound, the company's smallest issue. Like Tara, she became hooked on the system and was launched on a merry-go-round of debt which seemed eternal.

So, when Kathleen walked out of the baths, she had on, for the first time, a petticoat and panties, lisle stockings, held up by a pair of elastic garters contributed by Ann, a navy-blue skirt, a pink-striped blouse and a navy-blue waterproof jacket with a zip fastener. She also had on a pair of second-hand lace-up shoes too big for her, bought by Martha herself, with much grumbling, from a second-hand shop; the one-pound cheque she had obtained had proved insufficient to cover new shoes.

On their way back from the bathhouse, Helen and she stopped in front of a tobacconist's shop. The door had a mirror as its middle panel. Despite a tobacco advertisement on it which announced ‘
THREE NUNS
, None Nicer', Kathleen could see a perfect stranger looking back at her.

‘Now, don't you look nice?' said Helen, turning her round a little so that she could see the whole effect.

Kathleen giggled. ‘None nicer!'

Three days later, she got a job washing dishes in the canteen of a nearby factory.

Ann advised her anxiously, ‘It's a start, and it's
a clean job. Stick with it, love. I asked Alice and she'll lend you the iron. And never be late for work, remember. Smile, smile, smile, be nice to whoever's telling you what to do, and learn their job: it'll work wonders for yez.'

Advice given to her by her own mother, thought Ann bitterly, and she had not taken it.

Kathleen washed dishes and smiled. Without a clock, she was dependent on the knocker-up, who was a bit early for her. As a result, she was never late getting to work. She enjoyed the midday meal which came with the job, and dreamed of the lovely perfume smell that wafted out of the door of Boots Cash Chemists.

As part of her weekly battle with her mother over handing over her wages, she insisted on keeping a sixpenny piece so that she could have a bath each week.

When, miraculously, she was put in charge of the canteen's china cupboard and received a shilling a week increase in pay, she did not tell Martha. The shilling meant that she could afford to go to the cinema sometimes with the other girls at work, or buy replacement pairs of lisle stockings. Shortly after the war broke out, when stockings were rationed and any spare ones vanished under the counter, she saved assiduously for a
few weeks and covered her bare legs with a pair of trousers.

Martha disapproved so much of the trousers that she forgot to ask where Kathleen had got the money to pay for them.

‘It's shocking!' she shouted. ‘Go, take them off afore your father sees you.'

‘All the girls at work is wearing them,' replied Kathleen woodenly, which was true.

Patrick did not care what she wore; he was too engrossed in the map of Liverpool he was studying preparatory to being taught to drive fire brigade vehicles. He simply shrugged, and said, ‘I seen lots of women in them in town.'

Meanwhile, his determined little daughter dreamed of earning enough to leave home.

In the middle of the war, like Brian, the day she was eighteen she lied to the military that she was aged nineteen and joined the army, the ATS. In the course of the war, she travelled all over Europe as a cook, and never went back home; she never made it to Boots either.

She never forgot, however, that it was two despised prostitutes who helped her to escape from the court – and from her mother – and throughout her life she was more respectful than most to members of the oldest profession.

The original transformation of Kathleen had not gone unnoticed by Bridie, who hoped for much the same help: she became suddenly more attentive towards Helen and Ann.

1939

‘Where's Mam? The door's boarded up. And me sisters? And I can't find Martha.'

Already worried, because he had not received a letter from his mother during a very long voyage down the coasts of Brazil and Argentina, then up the Pacific coasts of Chile and Peru – and back again, Daniel Flanagan stood on Ellen's doorstep, a fine-looking young man, aged almost eighteen, in blue jeans and a shabby pullover. He was tense and scared.