A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin (38 page)

An amazed Sheila was spellbound. Then she noticed Number Nine's cassock, and, as Daniel produced a pocket handkerchief to mop up Martha's tears, she ventured to ask, ‘Are you Martha's boys?'

‘He is,' replied Daniel, giving Number Nine a
friendly poke with his elbow. ‘I'm just a friend.'

‘Not just a friend,' replied Martha through her sniffs. ‘He's Mary Margaret's boy, what I told you about.' A scrawny arm came out from the confining sheets, to wrap round Daniel.

‘Aye, how you've grown. You're a real man! Haven't seen you since the war. Whatever happened to you?'

Sheila gulped. She was determined not to spoil the reunion for Martha by crying. But such an arrow of pure loneliness shot through her that she badly wanted to scream to high heaven with the pain of it.

Martha gathered her wits, while a very handsome man sat down on either side of her bed. Each of them held a tiny gnarled hand.

‘How did you find me?' she demanded. ‘I couldn't even find somebody to write to tell you where I was.'

‘Somebody here would have done it, Mam. Surely they would?'

‘Not this place,' spat Martha.

James decided to leave that issue to another time. He said, ‘All the letters I had written to you for weeks past, at home, came back in a bunch, last week. They were marked “Gone away”. It scared me to death, because they were so old.

‘Usually, you'd get Tara to read them to you,
and occasionally she'd write a line back for you. So I asked for a week's leave, and was given it.

‘I went to our house, and a perfect stranger answered the door. I was really amazed.'

Martha gave him a special squeeze. ‘Poor lad!'

Number Nine smiled at her. ‘The man said that he had returned all the letters in one go. He had kept them on the mantelpiece, because he didn't know what to do with them. Finally, he asked the rent collector for advice, and had been told how to return them, and he did so.'

Martha interjected, ‘And Tara went to Ireland, to Cork, to live with her married daughter, a couple of weeks before I fell down the stairs – I miss her. She wouldn't know where I was neither.'

James paused, and nodded, and then went on, ‘I wasn't too sure what to do next. So I tried next door.'

He grinned mischievously, and Martha saw again her beloved little boy. ‘The woman there was obviously very surprised to have what looked like a Catholic priest on her doorstep. She nearly slammed the door on me. I told her quickly that I was trying to trace my mother, and she then said that you had been taken to hospital weeks and weeks ago – didn't know which hospital. Didn't know you, only of you. Not very helpful.

‘She had seen the bailiffs take over – and had bought one of our chairs at the sale which they held.'

‘Blasted Prottie,' muttered Martha angrily. ‘Would hardly speak to me because I'm Catholic. Wall-to-wall Protties, it is, down there. All through the war, as you may remember, they made us feel small.'

Once they had moved from the court, James had been very short of playmates, other than his brother and sister. He ignored his mother's bitterness, however, and smiled at her.

He continued, ‘I tried all the hospitals. Nobody answering to your description was on their lists. I was beside myself. And I didn't have much money for tram fares, and so on.'

Daniel spoke up. ‘So he went to see old Auntie Ellen – she lives with Shaun – she's never been well since she was wounded in the war. You'll remember what a bad time she had – and Shaun himself?'

‘Oh, aye, I do.'

‘Well, Number Nine stayed the night with her. And, by chance, I docked the next morning. Signed off and came up to see her. I were proper surprised to find Jamie visiting her too,' he finished irrelevantly. Then he said with pride, ‘We done all the hospitals again, together.'

James smiled gently. ‘We got the bursars to check
ex-patients' files – you'd be surprised how many Martha Connollys there are who've been treated in hospitals over the years!

‘Once they understood more precisely what had happened, they were very good and it didn't take long. The lady who found you said I had been notified, as I was your next of kin. But they had our home address not the seminary's – an empty house – so the letter was returned.'

He sighed and glanced at silent, sad-looking Sheila. Then he said, ‘And that's how you were handed over to a social worker, Mam. Somebody had to take care of you.'

His mother nodded reluctant agreement. ‘I remember the woman. She said to sign this, sign that. So I make me cross; and all I knew was that I would be sent here to be looked after till I was better.'

She looked at her son and then kissed him again. ‘Jaysus, I'm so thankful you come.'

A startled, but delighted, Angie performed a minor miracle by squeezing four cups of tea out of the kitchen.

As she thankfully sipped her tea, Martha asked in curiosity, ‘What happened to Dollie and Connie and little Minnie? Were they found and do you still see them?'

Daniel grinned. ‘Oh, aye, I see them from time to time.'

Martha's face lit up. ‘Tell us,' she urged.

Sprawled on the end of her bed, he paused to gather his memories, and began.

‘Well, you know, in the war, some of the civilian population, folk like us, was much less looked after than They would like you to believe. It was simply because of the pure muddle of fighting a war and feeding people and everything: nothing worked quite perfectly, specially for bunches of nobodies like us what often didn't know what we was supposed to be doing.

‘Remember our Dollie? Now, she was tough, you know that, and she were eleven years old by then, quite capable of looking after other kids. And she was scared stiff, after Mam died. And, of course, Dad and me, we were at sea.

‘The three girls were bundled off into care, and within two days they was evacuated with the other children to Shropshire. It seems that in the general rush to get the children out of the city, no paperwork was done on them – I guess They thought They would catch up on it once they was safe from being bombed.

‘Dollie told me the three of them was absolutely terrified, because they didn't understand what was
happening to them, except that their mam was dead and their dad was at sea, and none of Them seemed to like Auntie Ellen or Grandma Theresa. They didn't seem to have a single familiar person to cling to. She said they were bundled about in all kinds of strange places by women who didn't even know their names and fed food they didn't like by these strangers.

‘They ended up with a crowd of other kids they'd never seen before outside a railway station, and more strangers came to look at them. They were even more scared when the strangers picked out a child or children and took them away. It was clear, she said, that nobody wanted three dirty little girls, even if they were evacuees fleeing from the expected raids on Liverpool.

‘So they slid behind a parked car and then run like hell down a back lane of what must've been a village in Shropshire.

‘That night, a farmer found them curled up together, sleeping in his stable. They were cold and hungry, and Dollie had told Connie and Minnie not to say a word to anyone. When the farmer tried to get them to say who they were, none of them answered, so he persuaded them to come in to see his wife. She bathed them, to warm them up, she said, and then gave them some breakfast
and soon they were out collecting eggs with her. She got their first names out of them. But they all lied that they did not know their surnames or their address – and, of course, they really didn't know the address of the Home they'd been taken to. But the farmer knew from their voices that they come from Liverpool.

‘Dollie said she thought he wanted them to stay and work for him, because his daughter and his labourer were both called up. Because, you know, they wasn't helpless. Dollie was over eleven, Connie was about eight and even Minnie was over six. Many a farmer's kids are helping by that age.

‘When he went to market, he inquired if They had any children that they still wanted to billet. He was told that they had all gone.

‘So he must have simply chanced keeping them without saying any more. Who would notice, anyway? Within a few weeks, they would be regarded as the farmer's three evacuees from Liverpool.

‘And Dollie kept them there until the war ended. It wasn't all beer and pickles, and Connie said that at first Minnie cried a lot. But the farmer's wife grew very fond of them and fed them reasonable.

‘Dollie never thought of trying to write to me, care of Auntie Ellen. She reckoned, anyways, that, once they connected with Liverpool again, they
would be put back in an orphanage, and their life on the farm was much better than any orphanage would be.

‘Each morning they went to school, and Dollie gave their full names. But she said they were orphans and had no family left in Liverpool. She said she was deliberately vague about how they had come to be evacuated. The school was quite disorganised, because another evacuated school was foisted on it in the afternoons. Our Dollie was always a good liar, and her story was accepted without query.

‘When I was trying to find them, the people I talked to wasn't much help, and even the police accepted the billeting officer's word that they could be easily traced and that their brother would be informed of where they were.

‘Connie told me that they heard on the farm's radio about the bombing of Liverpool, and that scared the three of them even more.'

Martha smiled lovingly into Number Nine's neatly shaven face, and then turned to ask Danny, ‘So where are they now, poor little lambs?'

Danny laughed. ‘Our Dollie was never a poor little lamb. They're all married and with kids of their own now. Before the end of the war, when Dollie was fourteen, she had had enough and demanded
that the three of them go back to Liverpool – 'cos most evacuees had returned. By that time, the police had finally traced them anyway They ended up in foster homes for a bit, in Liverpool. Later on, we all lived together for a while in a little flat, with a social worker keeping an eye on us. The girls, as they left school got jobs.

‘And who did they marry?' Sheila ventured to ask.

‘Dollie's married to a bus conductor, Connie's hubby is a motor mechanic, and Minnie did quite well for herself. In 1953, she was an usher in a cinema, and there she met our George, a crane driver. He was a great picture-goer; even now, you can't unglue him from the telly when there's a good film on.' He laughed at his recollection of his kindly brother-in-law.

‘And what about you?' Sheila's eyes twinkled as she surveyed the fine-looking, middle-aged man.

‘Me?' He reddened, and then said shyly, ‘Well, I'm courting. I'm a bosun now, earning well; but I wanted to be free of any domestic responsibility for a while…'

Sheila nodded. ‘But having nobody of your own is lonely, isn't it?'

‘Aye, it is. I've finally realised it!' He grinned.

This exchange between Danny and Sheila alerted
Martha to her friend's inner desolation, in comparison with her own joy. She broke in, ‘Aye, Sheila, love, you must be feeling lonely, like nothing on earth. But you don't have to worry. You've got me. And Number Nine will keep an eye on both of us, won't you, Jamie?'

‘Of course,' he replied without hesitation and with a gentle smile towards Sheila. ‘I've already asked if I can be moved to a Liverpool parish.'

He had not yet realised that in addition to finding his mother, for which he was truly thankful, he had acquired an adopted Auntie Sheila.

Still less did he realise that a certain Great Lady, to whom he frequently addressed his prayers, was enlisting mortals to arrange that mother and aunt would, for years, look after him, and, often, his fellow priests, as they ministered to a Liverpool flock.

To be free to do his job properly, the Great Lady had argued to herself, even the holiest, most humble of priests needs a housekeeper. In a presbytery, with their pensions restored to them, so that they were not wholly dependent upon Number Nine, these two elderly ladies, between them, would do very well; over the years they would probably look after a number of priests.

And she would make sure that she motivated a
handyman in their parish who could and would adapt a kitchen to a wheelchair.

Satisfied, that she had done her best as an interceder, she quietly blessed the little group around the bed in the care home, and equally quietly withdrew.

Martha and Sheila never forgot her. Regularly in their prayers, they thanked the Dear Lady and her Beloved Son for their extraordinary good luck, as they felt it must be, to have such a nice presbytery in which to live and such good men to care for.

Helen Forrester was born in Hoylake, Cheshire, the eldest of seven children. For many years, until she married, her home was Liverpool – a city that features prominently in her work. For the past fifty years she has lived in Alberta, Canada.

Helen Forrester is the author of four bestselling volumes of autobiography –
Twopence to Cross the Mersey
,
Liverpool Miss
,
By the Waters of Liverpool
and
Lime Street at Two
– and a number of equally successful novels, most recently
Madame Barbara
. In 1988 she was awarded an honorary D.Litt by the University of Liverpool in recognition of her achievements as an author. The University of Alberta conferred on her the same honour in 1993.

A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin
is published exactly 40 years after Helen Forrester's much loved book,
Twopence to Cross the Mersey
.