By the Waters of Liverpool (7 page)

Two women came on separate occasions to view our empty front room. One of them was an elderly widow and the other a shop girl in crumpled black – black was the uniform of work in those days. The lack of a bathroom and an indoor lavatory made them both turn it down with supercilious sniffs.

A few days later, a young Irish labourer, cap in hand, came to see it.

‘I’m sorry I am not prepared to let the room to a man,’ Mother said, beginning to close the front door on him.

‘It’s not for meself only,’ pleaded the youth. ‘It’s me wife and me baby.’

It is doubtful if anyone, except the poorest slum landlord, would have considered such a tenant.
Labouring in Liverpool meant casual work at rock bottom wages – and a consequent difficulty in paying the rent. A baby meant noise and a lot of washing to be hung out. And Irish people did not have much of a name for cleanliness.

I saw Mother hesitate. The careworn white face with its red-rimmed, pleading eyes must have touched some chord in her – perhaps she remembered when she had canvassed from door to door, trying to find a landlord who would accept seven children. ‘Is your wife with you now?’

‘She’s waitin’ at t’ corner.’

‘Ask her to come. She’d better see it, too.’

Joyfully, he turned and bawled up the street, ‘Mary, coom ‘ere.’

A plump, cheery woman wearing a black shawl, with a young baby wrapped in the front of it, came panting up to the doorstep. Her rosy face, and thick light brown curls bobbing round her shoulders, reminded me of Edith, our nanny. They both had the same country-fresh look. Her expression was one of sudden glowing hope.

Fiona and I were longing to see the baby, which seemed very small, and when we had all trooped into the bleak front room, from which even the curtains had been removed by the hire purchase company, Mother asked if we might see it. Its tiny
puckered face under a clean, frilled bonnet was tenderly admired by all of us, as it placidly slept.

‘’E’s only six weeks,’ his mother announced proudly as she wrapped the shawl back over him.

Mother stood in the middle of the unvarnished square of wooden floor, where the carpet had lain, and explained the disadvantages of the room. The young couple were irrepressible.

‘Och, I can keep a couple o’ buckets o’ water in t’ room. And Pat will be gone to work before most of yez is up.’

‘We’re all away during the day,’ Mother informed her, ‘except for a little while when the children come home to lunch.’

‘To be sure,’ responded Mary, with a wide, sweet smile, ‘I can do me washing and cooking while you’re all away.’

‘You can hang the washing out to dry in the back yard,’ said Mother. ‘Come and see.’

We all went out to view the tiny, sooty yard with its lavatory near the alley door.

‘We could keep our coal in the corner here,’ suggested Pat. ‘I could roof it over with a bit of a tin roof, like.’

‘Where are you living now?’ asked Mother, as we returned to the house and entered our living room.

‘We’re living with me Mam,’ replied Pat. ‘It’s too hard on Mary, though. Me Mam isn’t an easy woman, I know. When we was in Dublin we was living with her Mam, and that was all right, wasn’t it, Mary?’

Mary nodded agreement, and sighed. We all understood. In Liverpool-Irish families, daughters frequently brought their husbands to live in their family. Husbands escaped from their mothers-in-law by going to work and then in the evening going down to the local pub for a drink. The young wife, however, had recourse to no such escape route if faced with her husband’s mother – and the result was battles so bitter that they sometimes spilled out into the street and caused a street fight, a welcome entertainment to the onlookers, but unpleasant for the combatants.

As we showed the young couple round, I had become more and more resentful of Mother. I believed that she was raising the couple’s hopes, without having any intention of giving them the room. Now, to my astonishment, a bargain was struck; a rent of ten shillings a week, plus one shilling for electricity, payable in advance.

‘If you want to use the gas stove in the back kitchen, you will have to put your own pennies into the gas meter,’ Mother instructed them. It seemed
fair, but in practice we were more likely to benefit from gas left over by them than they were from us, because we always seemed to run out of gas and money before we had finished cooking. We had to try to complete the job on whatever bit of fire we might have at the time.

‘We’ll bring our gear over on Saturday afternoon,’ Pat said. They both thanked Mother gaily, and through the undraped window we watched them laughing and talking together, as they hurried up the street.

Mother was the strangest person, I thought. There were layers of her character of which one caught only a momentary glimpse. Our tiny house would now have twelve people living in it, all using the same outside lavatory and the same cold water tap. The inconvenience of people trailing through our crowded living room and kitchen at all times of the day and night would be indescribable. Our frequent bitter family rows would be heard clearly by these strangers, the details in due course to be gossiped to the neighbours. The clash of uneducated Roman Catholic Irish with upper-class Protestants was something I dreaded. Yet, watching Mother’s drawn face, I was sure she had taken the family in out of compassion. Admittedly the rent was more than half the rent of the entire house, but
nothing could compensate for the overcrowding and loss of any small privacy we had.

Mother and I went back to the living room and were met by a barrage of questions from the children, who had watched in silence the small procession to and from the back yard.

‘Yes, they are coming to live with us,’ Mother told them. ‘You will have to be quiet so as not to wake the baby – and be polite to them.’

Alan raised his eyebrows and made a rueful expression at me, while Fiona just shrugged her shoulders. Father was out having a drink with a young colleague with whom he had recently become friendly. Fortified by several glasses of beer, he received the news optimistically when he came home. Perhaps he felt, like me, that a week of such an arrangement would see the end of it.

To my surprise, Mother accepted my diffident announcement that I would prefer to be confirmed by another church, with only a fretful, ‘What am I going to say to Miss Ferguson? Really! Don’t you have any consideration?’

I was much too shy to go to see Miss Ferguson myself, and I do not know what explanation Mother gave her. I never saw her again, though I did hear her once when Mother sent me to borrow a shilling from her, with the plea that we had nothing for breakfast – which was true. Mother had already coerced out of me the few pennies I had, so feeling very sick at heart I had trudged to her flat, through dark streets, where the gas lamps gleamed dully through a sea mist.

The lady with whom she lived answered the door.
She did not know me, and when I inquired for Miss Ferguson I was told that she was having a bath. Fearing Mother’s scathing tongue if I returned without the shilling, I nervously whispered the reason for my visit. She left me standing in front of the open door while she went to consult the bather. There was a mumble of voices in the little apartment; then clearly I heard Miss Ferguson say, ‘Better give it to her. Get it out of my bag – it’s on the dressing table. I’m tired of that woman – she never pays back.’

I wanted to turn and run. Miss Ferguson probably lived on a pittance, unless she had private means. The stranger was, however, hastening down the hall towards me, at the same time feeling inside a small black handbag. When she reached the door, she unsmilingly handed me a silver coin and shut the door on my muttered ‘thank you very much’.

I stood looking at the offending woodwork and wanted to throw the coin at it. Mother had lost a good friend for the sake of a shilling – which she could have easily saved had she not smoked.

Mother received the money with triumphant relief, and sent Avril out to buy bread and margarine, milk and cornflakes.

So kind Miss Ferguson vanished, as far as I was concerned, into a dish of cornflakes. Fairy
godmothers do tend to depart when their work is done.

When Pat and Mary and the baby arrived, it was clear that they regarded Mother as a fairy godmother. They brought their bits of furniture on a handcart; it took two journeys. An iron bed frame was put together in the room, with much bumping and rattling of metal slats which had to be woven across the base. A wool-packed mattress tied with string was banged down on it, making the slats again vibrate in tuneful protest. A washstand with a marble top, innumerable galvanised metal buckets, a pile of enamelled wash basins with a few dishes laid inside the top one, two chairs and a small table, some iron saucepans, a tea chest of assorted garments and blankets with a chamber pot perched on top, a fine old handmade cradle on rockers, all were piled into the room. There was only one small cupboard, which had once held a gas meter, and I wondered how everything would fit in.

Mary pinned up over the small bay window a pair of dusty looking lace curtains. They did not give much privacy when the light was on, but they looked fairly tidy from the outside. It was only from occasional glimpses through the curtains when I passed in the evening that I was aware of the
muddle of their lives. Nobody to my knowledge entered the room.

The young couple evidently decided that to make the situation bearable for both sides, they should be as invisible as possible. We were barely aware of Pat, except as a shadow going out to work through the front door as Father and I came downstairs each morning. He spent half of Sunday in bed with his wife, judging by the giggles we heard and the pinging bed slats. Mary once said primly, ‘Men must have their rest on Sundays.’

To use the lavatory in the yard, they went out the front way, walked past three houses and then down a side alley which led into our back alley, and came back in through the yard door to the privy. They rarely pulled the chain, but at least they did not come through our living quarters. Nobody commented on this long tour they had to make so often, and I doubt if the family appreciated their consideration.

While we were out, Mary cooked huge quantities of stew in an enamelled wash bowl on the gas stove. I sometimes saw her hurry through our living room with this vast amount of steaming meat and vegetables, smelling so savoury that I was envious. I think she cooked enough at one time to last two or three days and that she heated portions of it on
the fire in their room. I once caught a glimpse of the room’s interior when I opened the door for her when she was thus laden. Three big pails of coal and three of water were ranged against a wall. A pile of washing was flung into a corner. The baby’s cradle stood close to the fire. The washstand was littered with utensils for cooking, the mantelpiece laden with anonymous bottles and jars. The table and chairs were, I knew, set in the bay window – I had seen them as I passed – and the rumpled bed was against the hall wall, behind the door. The wooden floor was bare and grimy, but it had been swept. A thick effluvia of human living rolled out, a mix of stew, onions, baby’s faeces, sweat, urine, and steam from the washing drying on a string hung from the mantelpiece. It added itself to the neglected grubbiness of our part of the house. I hastily shut the door after Mary’s, ‘Thanks, luv.’

After a few days, we discovered that Mary had found an old built-in wash boiler in a corner of the coal cellar. Rather than use a similar one in the corner of our kitchen, she had carried water downstairs and had boiled her washing in it by making a fire in the tiny grate underneath. She did all her washing down there amid the clammy smell of coal dust and cats. Then she hung the clothes to drip in the back yard, before bringing
them to finish drying in her room. She was very resourceful.

I probably saw more of her than the others did, because I was almost invariably the last person to go to bed; I often did my night school studying after everyone else had gone up to bed. She would slip apologetically through the room several times, carrying buckets of coal and water or a pile of washing from the back yard. She also emptied buckets of dirty water down the kitchen sink.

Occasionally, while I was studying by candlelight because we could not afford a penny for electricity – candles cost a halfpenny – she would hasten in with a penny because they also were plunged into darkness. I always continued with my candle, because I felt it would be unfair to switch on the light and help use up their pennyworth.

On Saturday night, Pat, with a shy grin on his face, would knock on our living-room door and hand to whoever opened it, eleven shillings. They had no rent book and never asked for a receipt. Their trust was moving.

Because of the poor quality of the building, any raised voices could be heard in the next room, and they must have suffered from the continual squabbling of the children and the bitter, screaming rows between my parents.

Sometimes they themselves quarrelled. In their case, it was not always a verbal spate. There were the sounds of screams, scuffles and thumps, while the baby howled untended. Fortunately, perhaps, our children found it funny rather than frightening. Most of the time, the baby was quiet, cosied against his mother’s ample breasts or rocked in his warm cradle by her foot on the rocker, while she knitted.

Occasionally, Mary would stop in her late-night promenade to ask me what I was doing. She smelled strongly of milk and perspiration, but she had a glowing life about her, an eager effervescence that I wished was mine. She was endlessly curious about us and boundless in her praise of Mother. I began to see Mother in a slightly better light. ‘To be sure, she’s a great lady,’ Mary would remark at times, and I wished I could feel the same about her.

One night, I had been wrestling with a difficult task which my English master had set me. I was to read a book of essays by William Hazlitt and comment on it. I was very tired and could not concentrate and was asking myself why I bothered, since it would make no difference to my marks, when Mary, carrying a pile of dirty washing, entered without knocking.

She paused, smiled and asked, as an opening gambit, ‘How are yer, luv?’

Relieved to be temporarily delivered from Hazlitt, I put down my pen and pushed the cork into the ink bottle.

‘Not bad, Mary. How are you?’

She looked at me hard. ‘You bin cryin’?’ she inquired solicitously.

I had cried, after everyone had gone to bed, letting the tears drop on to my books. Mother had paused on her way to bed, and had asked me with a hint of contemptuous curiosity what I was going to wear for my forthcoming Confirmation. Her attitude was cold, as if she were poking idly at a half-dead beetle on the floor.

I had never seen a Confirmation, and it was with a sense of shock that I received the information that I would be expected to appear in a white dress and veil – a fact which was confirmed by the head of the church’s Sunday school, the following week, when after the evening service she announced to the congregation that veils would be loaned by the church.

In a world which still judged people by what they wore – a moment’s consideration of a person’s dress would establish his position socially – I was in a difficult dilemma. To buy odd garments to cover
me was hard enough; to buy a dress for a single occasion was impossible. I would, presumably, need white stockings and shoes as well, which would never be worn again.

Mother had not offered any answer to her query, so there was not much hope of help from her. I said, tight-lipped, that I did not know what to do, but I would think about it, and opened my books and got on with my homework as best I could with a mind in a nervous flutter. Life never seemed to get any better and this additional problem made me cry with dumb despair.

‘We all have a little cry sometime or other, Mary.’ I tried to smile.

‘Oh, aye,’ she agreed. ‘I like a good cry meself sometimes. Relieves you, like.’

I nodded and piled up my books. I would have another try at Hazlitt tomorrow during my lunch hour.

Mary shifted the washing round in her arms. It reeked.

‘What’s to do?’ she persisted.

I sighed. ‘Well, Mary.’ She was always Mary, never Mrs O’Neill, to all of us. It marked the difference in class. ‘Well, Mary, I’m going to be confirmed.’ And I went on to explain the problem of the dress.

Mary was thrilled. Confirmation was a great event,
she burbled, though in her opinion it should have taken place when I was seven. ‘Och, you’d look like an angel, in white,’ she assured me, looking my bean-pole figure up and down. ‘Surely your Mam will get you a frock?’

‘She can’t afford it,’ I defended Mother. ‘And I don’t have a penny.’ I added frankly.

Mary clicked her tongue.
‘My
Mam got me one – and for sure we didn’t have much money. It’s a very special occasion.’ She glanced down at the washing in her arms. ‘Look, luv, just let me take me washing down. We got to think how to do this.’

She tripped down the stone steps to dump the washing in the copper. When she came up she had a coal smudge on her apron and was dusting it off impatiently. She stopped in front of me, and announced almost defiantly, ‘If you can’t get a dress any other way, I’ll lend you me wedding dress.’

‘Oh, Mary!’ The offer was so kind, but Mary’s figure was rotund and anything of hers would have hung on me. Yet her dress must have been almost a sacred relic to her amid her present hard circumstances. I hesitated.

She must have read my mind. ‘It’s proper nice – and it’ll fit near enough,’ she said. ‘I was real thin when I was married.’ She looked down at her
enormous bosom and giggled. ‘Marriage agrees with me. I’ll have a word with your Mam.’

When I came home the next evening, Mother greeted me with such enthusiasm that I was frightened. But, according to Avril, Mary – dear Mary – had indeed been talking to her, pointing out that other than my marriage or my funeral, Confirmation was the greatest day of my life, even if it was to be performed by a Protestant bishop.

Before I even got my coat off, Mother was saying, ‘Just come and look.’

Laid on a chair, with a sheet of newspaper under it so that it was kept clean, was an open dressmaker’s box with a large pile of white tissue paper in it. Mother carefully parted the tissue, took out a dried sprig of orange blossom and laid it on the table, while she gushed, ‘Isn’t that sweet? It’s from her wedding bouquet.’ Then she carefully lifted out a pile of lace and shook it. It was a charming, long-sleeved white dress.

I gaped as I looked at its shimmering whiteness, its absolute purity of line. ‘Mother! It’s lovely. It’s perfect. They must have spent a fortune on it.’

Mother laughed. ‘Well, you should know by now that a working-class wedding is a great event. And they spend money on them.’

Mother carefully folded the dress back into its
tissue. As she lifted the package and handed it to me, a few grains of lavender fell from it. I bent over the box’s contents and sniffed. It smelled like Grandma’s sheets and dresses, with a lovely perfume of fresh lavender.

‘Mummy’s going to buy you some white shoes and stockings – and a petticoat,’ interjected Fiona. ‘Aren’t you, Mummy.’ She said it firmly, as if to reinforce the decision.

‘Of course,’ said Mother, without blinking an eyelid. Fiona winked at me. Mary, she told me afterwards, had swept Mother along on such a flood of excitement that Mother had said she would apply to the finance company for a cheque for a pound, to cover the purchase of these accessories.

To persuade Mother to buy me anything was little short of a miracle and, with the box still in my arms, I knocked on Mary’s door, and went in to thank her. She blushed as I kissed her, then heaved her baby round on her lap to offer it her breast, and muttered, ‘It’s nothing, luv. Nothin’ at all.’

So, for the first time I entered the echoing hollowness of Liverpool Cathedral. It was overwhelming. Soaring pillars of tawny pink sandstone, huge stained-glass windows, their myriad colours reflected on the smooth grey stone floor, a welter of beauty for a sensitive seventeen-year-old, a fitting
place for God to dwell. Surely, I thought, God Himself is present here.

Mother and Fiona had entered by another door, and I stood alone for a moment almost afraid to advance into such a place. Then a lady from the church fussed forward, led me into a corner, pinned a veil over my newly washed hair and straightened my dress. ‘You haven’t got any gloves!’ she exclaimed, throwing up her hands. I looked down at my work-reddened hands and then at the hands of the other boys and girls, standing soberly near me. Everyone had on white gloves, except me. I blushed to the roots of my hair. All the sense of oneness with the beauty around me vanished. Would God ever forgive the lack of white gloves?