A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin (29 page)

There was no answer.

Patrick suddenly hit him across the face, and Joe yelped and clapped a hand to his stinging cheek, while Number Nine ducked instinctively.

‘You don't have to do that,' interrupted Martha. ‘The kid's scared.'

‘I'll make him scared. Come on, let's have it.'

No reply.

He slapped the other side of his son's face.

‘Want any more?' he asked.

Joe turned his face into his mother's ample skirts and howled. Martha hastily slammed the door into the hall, to contain the noise.

Then she put her arm round the boy. ‘Come on, love. You can tell your dad anything. He'll take care of it.' She looked warningly up at her husband.

‘He said I was trying to pinch his wallet, and I wasn't,' Joe blurted out.

Ellie had been curled up in a corner, trying to keep warm under an old coat while her dress, soaked by rain, dried in front of the fire. Now she unwisely put in a word which she imagined might exonerate her brother. She said, ‘He isn't good enough to try wallets yet.'

Her father spun round. ‘What?' he roared. ‘What're you saying?'

It all came out. Ellie thought it was a game and said so. Joe admitted the truth of it.

Pat strode to the door and, as he ran up the stairs, Martha shouted up to him, ‘Now, don't hit him – he's old.'

No, thought Patrick. But I'll tell him. And when the startled old man opened his door cautiously, Patrick kicked it wide – and told him succinctly what he thought of such a creep.

Expert at looking old and helpless, Joseph cringed. He said he had done it just to amuse the children. He never thought of them putting it into practice. For sure, he didn't – not with a neighbour, that was certain.

Defeated, Patrick shouted at him not to dare to do it again, and clumped downstairs. He wasn't past stealing from the docks himself; he had done
it many a time. But docks, ships and big stores were fair game and belonged to Them, as Martha often said. Neighbours were different – they were, well, neighbours – and you had to live with them, and simply watch that they did not steal from you.

Downstairs, he threatened both children with a real belting if they tried anything like that again.

White-faced at the thought of what a leather belt with a brass buckle could wreak on their respective behinds, they weepily agreed to instant reformation.

Martha sighed, and pulled the mattress down from the wall.

‘Get to bed,' she ordered. She turned to Number Nine. ‘And you,' she added sharply. The child knocked his pack of cards together and hastily scrambled to his feet.

As the mattress flopped to the floor, the air-raid siren began its frantic warning whoop.

1965

‘That was the worst air raid I ever knowed,' confided Martha to the long-suffering Angie. ‘It were called the May Blitz.'

She was seated on a hard-backed chair by the window of the ward, her bare feet on the chilly linoleum floor, while Angie changed the sheets on her bed and then emptied the contents of the commode into a slop bucket.

‘Really?' she replied.

‘Yes. We had seven solid nights of bombing, and that last night they nearly done us in.'

Only half listening, Angie turned to glance at the two dementia cases in the far corner of the room. One of them was becoming restive and was pulling at the rope which tethered her securely to the end
of her bed. The other one, her folded hands on her lap, was sitting on the side of the bed, her rope drooping onto the floor.

Angie clicked her tongue irritably. Better have them both back in bed and tie them down, as soon as she had finished with Martha.

Undeterred by Angie's apparent lack of interest, Martha continued.

‘We was in the cellar, as usual, and I were that worried about Kathleen and Bridie. They was going to the pictures – or that's what they told me they was going to do.' She laughed. ‘A pair of minxes, they was; chasing the lads was more likely, I reckon.

‘When they tried to get home, the street had been closed off by the police and we had been moved to a rest centre in the basement of a school and they was sent to join us there.'

She paused to clear her throat, and then went on reflectively, ‘There was over a hundred people crammed in with us; some of them had been there for days, bombed out and nowhere to go. And there was only one lavatory: you can imagine the mess; even the court was better than that.

‘Pat told me later that They refused to put in more lavatories, or some mattresses to sleep on – nothing to make it comfortable – because they wanted the bombed-out to be forced to go and
find new homes by themselves; They didn't want them to settle in and live in the shelter.'

She snorted, as she added, ‘I think we would have starved, if it hadn't been for the WVS, coming in with soup and sandwiches regardless of the bombing. Wonderful volunteer ladies, they was. Real brave.'

Angie had given Martha's pillow a final pat and had slammed the lid on the slop bucket. She paused, however, before getting her patient back into bed, not quite believing that she had heard aright.

‘Only one loo, Martha. It couldn't be?'

Martha shook a finger at her. ‘It was deliberate, as I just told you. To drive people out; that means women with young kids – and no transport – to find a place for themselves. Imagine a city with miles and miles of ruins, if you can. Near hopeless, it had become.'

‘Good Lord!'

Martha rose slowly, but steadily, ready to get into bed again, and then she asked, out of curiosity, ‘Do you know what a landmine's like? 'Cos that's what we got in the middle of the court. It was a dud and it didn't explode, praise be.'

‘No, what is it like?' replied Angie, her interest now aroused.

‘It's like a big red pillar box – except it isn't red. The police got everyone tiptoeing out of the court, fearing it would explode before they got us all past it – it had gone halfway through the paving stones.'

The new occupier of Pat's bed said slowly, almost sleepily, ‘I know what a landmine's like, my God.'

Martha was startled. They were the first words the woman had spoken since she had been brought in a couple of days before. According to Angie, she had been transferred from the hospital because she, like Martha, had no home to go to.

Martha turned towards her, amazed that, unlike the other patients in the room, she could speak. Oh, blessed relief! Talk!

‘You do, Missus?' Martha asked gently.

‘Oh, aye. They're as big as a pillar box, like you said. One fell on our house.' The woman stopped, and then said in a faltering voice. ‘Blew out three houses. Killed me hubby and me four kids. They said I were lucky – because I were visiting me cousin down the road at the time.'

She paused again, and then added bitterly, ‘I don't think I was lucky.'

Holding Martha's arm ready to help her into bed, Angie gazed compassionately down on the new patient.

‘Don't say that, Missus,' she pleaded. ‘It must've been awful. But you're here still.'

‘I don't want to be.' Though vehement, the woman still sounded a little sleepy, as she went on, ‘And the pills you keep stuffing into me don't help, I can tell you. I can barely put two words together.'

At the latter remark, Martha gave a little laugh. Then she said in the most consoling tone she could muster, ‘None of us wants to be here, love. I'm real sorry about your hubby and the kids. I know how terrible it is to have nobody left – and I'm real glad to have you next door to me to talk to.' She smiled her most winning smile at her fellow sufferer.

The woman nodded. ‘That's proper nice of you to say so,' she replied politely, and sighed. She lifted her head slightly from her pillow, and asked, ‘Nurse, could you give me a glass of water – I'm fair parched.'

Full of pity, Angie left Martha standing, while she went to a little centre table, where there was a jug of water and a glass, to be shared by all five occupants of the room. She poured the water and handed it to the woman. The glass was drained and handed back to her.

‘Ta ever so.'

For the moment, Martha could not think of
anything more to say, so she stared longingly out of the window, where a ray of sunshine was lighting up a broken statue of Cupid in the middle of a weed-ridden lawn. She dreamed of being allowed to sit outside in the sun and breathe real fresh air, but, according to Angie, Matron disapproved of the idea.

When Angie had suggested that a few of the patients were, perhaps, well enough to be allowed into the garden, she had been promptly crushed.

‘We don't have time to go out with them, and they cannot be left alone – they might fall or wander off. Don't put any ideas in their heads about that.'

In other words, Angie had thought, she can't be bothered. They're much less trouble if they are confined to bed.

While Angie returned the glass to the table, Martha slowly climbed into bed by herself. She gave a huge smile of triumph, and Angie grinned back as she tucked her in.

As Martha watched, the sheets of the new patient were changed without taking her out of bed: Angie had to lift and roll her over to get a sheet under her, as she did for total invalids. Though the bulky woman did not appear disabled, she did not do much to help Angie in this difficult task.

Since the Home lacked a lift, on her arrival in the
ward she had been brought in on a stretcher carried up the stairs by the gardener and his grown son. She was wrapped in a blanket and they simply lifted her, blanket and all, onto the bed. As the blanket was removed, the bedding had been quickly whipped over her.

In an absent-minded way, Martha was puzzled.

‘Oh, my God!' she gasped under her breath.

In a quick glimpse, Martha understood and was filled with pity.

The woman had no legs! No wonder she did not use the commode, but had a bedpan instead. No wonder that, in an effort to give her a scrap of privacy, kind Angie kept most of her covered with a bath towel when washing her. Poor thing!

After Angie had scuttled across the room to tend the restive dementia patient, leaving Martha's new companion propped up on either side by extra pillows, Martha said to the grey-haired woman, ‘Me name is Martha Connolly. What's yours?'

‘Sheila McNally,' she replied dully. She did not turn to look at Martha, but lay back with her eyes closed.

Martha gazed at her with some anxiety. Where did one begin with a woman so incapacitated that she would never get out of bed alone, even though her mind seemed all right?

With no one to visit her, no one with whom to communicate, except the hard-pressed aides, Martha longed to talk with her new neighbour. She was not sure, however, how to begin. She stared disconsolately out of the window at the top of a tree, all she could see of the garden from her bed. A raven flew into the branches cawing its arrival. Lucky bird – to be free.

She was relieved of her dilemma by Sheila's asking, ‘How long you been here?'

‘About eight or ten weeks.' Martha was not really sure: no calendar brightened the blank walls; every day was the same; they came, they went, and you endured as best you could from meal to meal. At least in the court, you'd usually known what day it was. Saturday: Patrick was usually around, because one of his shifts was on Sunday. Sunday: what was left of the family was home. Monday: wash day, and work all week.

‘Blessed Virgin!' exclaimed Sheila. ‘I hope I don't last that long.'

So she was Catholic? That was something.

‘Aye, don't say that, love. Maybe you'll get better and be let out,' Martha lied comfortably.

‘Not me. They cut me legs off in the hospital. I'm in here 'cos they can't do nothing more for me.'

‘'Tis a terrible thing to happen to yez,' Martha
agreed as gently as she could. ‘But you could do a lot if you had a wheelchair.'

Sheila snorted. ‘Me? Who's going to pay hundreds of pounds for that?'

‘National Health might.' Martha thought for a minute, and then she chuckled, ‘You could zip around this floor in one, and frighten the living daylights out of the Matron. She always shouts at you if you get out of bed and dare to look down the stairs. She'd have palpitations, right off.'

Sheila carefully turned her head, and actually grinned at Martha. ‘You don't like her, do you?'

‘I don't think she's human. Doctor give her bloody hell the other day, when Pat, what had your bed, died. Said it were her fault.'

‘Humph. I don't like her neither – first minute I seen her, I says to meself, you won't get no help here, you won't.'

‘Have you got anybody who'd ask the doctor for you?'

‘Does he come here?'

‘Yes.' There was unease in Martha's voice, as she added, ‘It's hard to get to talk to him, though, 'cos Matron does the talking, if you know what I mean.'

‘Oh, aye, I do. They was a bit like that in the hospital. They was always talking over your head, like.'

‘What was you in for?'

‘I got clots in me veins. Doctor said they would cause gangrene, so they took me legs off.' She stopped, and then said unhappily, ‘I agreed to it: everybody knows how terrible gangrene is: I couldn't face it.'

They had a very satisfactory afternoon together, first tearing Them apart, and then sharing their wartime experiences. They particularly discussed the night that the deadly landmines were dropped and Sheila lost her family and her neighbours on either side of her.

When you've had a bad time, it's good to talk it out with your friends, thought Martha wistfully. It's been a long time. I don't know what I would have done without Angie.

She wished she could have offered Sheila a cup of tea and an aspirin to ease the pain she said she had in the legs that were no longer there, a pain which Martha told her she had heard soldiers from the First World War complain about.