The Four Streets (25 page)

She tried. They could see she tried, for a second, but then, just when Jerry and Noleen looked at each other and dared to hope, Alice turned her head away and stared into the fire.

‘Take him, will you,’ she said to Jerry, ‘and call him what you wish.’

This time Jerry’s tears were not of joy, but of sorrow, as he knew with total certainty his prayers were unheard.

Jerry and Alice had been sleeping with a brown rubber sheet on the mattress for weeks, in case of this very eventuality, a sudden birth, and so it took the midwife only an hour to clean up mother and baby, change the bed and throw a shovel of coal from the bucket onto the fire, before she sat on a chair by the fire to write her notes.

Jerry woke Nellie, despite the fact that Alice begged him not to, and told her the news. Her reaction to the new baby was something he couldn’t predict. He had been too scared to discuss it with her before the event. He had wanted to share his joy with her but she was only a child. He needed to know as soon as possible how Nellie was going to take to the new arrival in the house.

Nellie, dressed in her long flannelette nightdress, rubbed her bleary eyes and, clutching her teddy, padded across the landing to her da’s bedroom, her hand in his. His big palm felt hot but the lino was cold beneath her feet. It was the first time Nellie had ever seen the fireplace in her da’s room with a roaring fire in the grate. Only a single bedside lamp was alight and the room was warm, filled with a golden glow. The reflection of the flames chased each other as they danced and crackled up the walls and across the ceiling.

Although she was now too big to carry, Jerry lifted Nellie into his arms. Her red curls, now grown past her shoulders, tickled his nose and face as, half asleep, she sucked her thumb, a habit she still couldn’t break at night. Her other arm was hooked tightly around her father’s neck, as he carried her round to the far side of the bed, to look into the crib. Noleen looked on and smiled at what was an intimate and special moment, when a little girl meets, for the first time, her brand-new baby brother.

Jerry felt sick and tearful with relief when he saw Nellie’s face as her eyes alighted upon her baby brother. She took her thumb out of her mouth and lovingly grinned from ear to ear. She kissed her father’s cheek hard and took away his tears with her lips, whilst her hand clasped his other cheek hard. His eyes shut tight while he suppressed the pain that had rushed unbidden out of his heart, as he remembered the moments of her birth.

Nellie, barely containing her excitement, squealed and wriggled in his arms, to get down and closer to the baby.

‘Let’s call him Joseph!’ she exclaimed, clapping her hands together and feeling very clever. It was almost Christmas, and that day at school Father James had spoken at mass about what a great man Joseph had been to take on a pregnant single mother, Mary. With her wide eyes gleaming, she turned excitedly to Alice who was neither watching nor listening.

So, Joseph he became.

Alice was untouched by the endearing scene and continued to stare into the flames. She had given up trying to find within herself whatever other women had that enabled them to give a fig about their children. There had been years of arguing and grief from Jerry. Shame heaped upon her by the neighbours she watched from her window, acting like good mothers should. She had become the living proof that a Catholic man had committed a mortal sin when he married a Protestant woman. In the words she had heard Maura speak to Tommy on the day of their wedding: ‘Surely, as God is anyone’s judge, no good will come of it.’

She lay with both hands on her belly, as though nursing a wound. She was unreachable.

A few days later, once Jerry had returned to work, Nellie answered the front door, with Joseph in her arms. She had been kept off school for the week whilst they waited for Kathleen to return, and until Alice recovered a little from the shock of giving birth. Jerry had not explained this, but they both knew someone needed to be there to look after Alice, as much as Joseph. She knew that when she went back to school, if Nana Kathleen hadn’t yet managed to return, Maura was going to come in to help feed and change the baby, even though Jerry hadn’t managed to get Alice to agree to this yet. But even without Alice’s agreement, Maura had already been in once this morning, as had Noleen the midwife. They had all given Nellie so many instructions that her head felt as if it was going to collapse and fall off her shoulders.

Julia, her classmate and friend from down the road, was going to pop in on the way home from school with her mammy, Brigie. Yesterday morning they had both arrived with a large, navy-blue, Silver Cross carriage pram, already made up with soft white flannel sheets and a net covering the opening of the hood.

‘The pram is still warm from the baby in number four, who’s been turned out into a pushchair to make way for Joseph,’ joked Brigie. ‘The little fella won’t know where he is when he wakes up!’

There was a little hand-knitted teddy on the pillow, popped into the pram as it went down the street by one of the neighbours with a handwritten card. There were freshly baked scones in a bag with a little note from Mrs Keating and a hand-knitted white baby cardigan that Mrs O’Brien kept handy in the drawer for new arrivals on the four streets. Now that hers were all grown up and she had a bit more time on her hands, it was her job to knit the matinee coats. There was also a pile of pale-blue baby clothes and folded terry-towelling nappies, all of which had already been through a number of little boys in the street, washed and pressed ready for use, contributed to by almost every house.

Finally, there was a triangular paper packet full of tea leaves. The four streets were never short of tea. At all times, in one of the backyards, kept dry in a coal house, there was always a wooden tea chest full of leaves, courtesy of a dock gang catching it off the back of a hull.

A brown earthenware pot with the Pacific Steam Line logo embossed on the lid, wrapped up in newspaper, sat under the pram canopy. It was full of an Irish stew for the evening. There was also a loaf of bread and three sausage rolls, the pastry still hot, and three vanilla slices from the corner bakery.

The pram contained all that was needed for a new baby, plus a feast. Nellie wasn’t aware of it, but there had been a collection of halfpennies down the road for the extra meat for the stew and the pastries. She certainly felt the weight of responsibility on her shoulders with the new baby, but she knew she wasn’t on her own; there was an entire community to help and support her and her da.

Later in life, as a young woman living amongst those who became obsessed with the material value of their house, car or next holiday, Nellie often looked back in wonder at the resourcefulness, compassion and love that existed in such a poor community, which had nothing to call its own. It didn’t often know how the next meal would arrive onto the table, but it took comfort and pride in knowing it had everything of any real value: family, good neighbourliness and friendship.

As she opened the front door, thinking it would be one of the neighbours and grateful with expectation, her heart sank to see Father James standing on the step. She noticed his hands were empty.

‘Saints preserve and save us,’ he exclaimed when he saw the child straining with the effort of holding a baby. ‘Where’s ye heathen mammy?’

Nellie had been told not to answer him, and so she didn’t. The priest knew her father was at work and launched into a tirade of instructions for Nellie.

She caught bits about Alice needing to be ‘churched’.

‘The baby needs to be brought into the light and absolved of the original sin. Do ye hear me, Nellie? He needs to be brought up as a Catholic and not a Protestant, as your sinful self has been,’ he spluttered.

Nellie didn’t reply.

‘Do ye not know your own mother would spin in her grave if she knew what the ways of your father have become, since the poor woman’s passing?’ he went on.

Nellie stood and stared. The hallway of the house was long, narrow and dark. Although tiny, the baby weighed heavily in her arms. She looked over her shoulder to the door of the kitchen and waited, expecting Alice to come through it and save her from this angry priest. But nothing happened.

She had struggled to open the door and not drop the precious baby, who needed her so badly. Closing it was easier. She shuffled forward and, without looking up at him, lifted her foot slightly and kicked the door shut in the priest’s face. As the door swung to, his shouting became louder, as though he thought the increased volume would prevent its closure, and the baby began to cry.

Once the door had safely banged shut, she could see his shadow, still silhouetted through the two mottled sheets of opaque glass. His hat made his profile look more like that of a gangster than a priest. He wasn’t going to give up that easily although the closed door muffled the noise. She wished hard that he would just go away. She shuffled over to the foot of the stairs and sat herself down on the bottom step, taking care not to trip over the long shawl her father had brought home – it never failed to surprise her how much fell off the back of a seagoing liner – and had left out to be wrapped around the baby to keep him warm.

As she lifted Joseph onto her knee and adjusted his position, he turned his head towards her chest, pecking frantically like a little bird in the nest looking for food. She had no idea what he was doing. Light and warmth flooded the hallway as Alice opened the kitchen door. Her footsteps sounded, slow and heavy, on the linoleum as she walked down the hallway.

She made no mention of the priest as she handed Nellie a bottle and said, ‘Here, give him that. It will shut him up.’ She turned on her heel and walked back into the kitchen and the warmth of its fire, closing the door behind her as she went.

The previous evening, Nellie had sat and helped her father feed the baby when he got home from work. She had watched him change the disgusting nappy, full of his black and dark green meconium. She had held the baby’s head whilst her da splashed water on his bottom and she had shaken the Johnson’s talcum powder over him, creating a cloud that made them both splutter and laugh. She helped to fasten the nappy pin, terrified she might put it through his wiggly bits. Her father showed her how to put the back of her hand on the inside of the nappy, flat against Joseph’s abdomen, as a shield, to stop that happening. And Nellie had giggled as little Joseph decided, once again, to empty his bladder, which went straight into her father’s face as he bent to fold the new nappy over his son.

How she wished her da was here now and not at work. How she wished Nana Kathleen would hurry back. She was still shaken from the priest’s visit. He had finally moved away from the door. She nervously put the teat of the bottle into Joseph’s tiny mouth. He helped her out by latching on immediately and suckled frantically while his wide-open eyes stared gratefully into hers.

She was overcome with love for him. She knew Alice’s coldness better than anyone and that her job would be to protect him, whilst her da or Nana Kathleen couldn’t be there. She shifted her arm under Joseph’s back and brought her hand up to support his neck. As she cradled him in her arms, she whispered into the side of his face, ‘Don’t worry, Joseph, I will look after you.’ Her tears fell from her cheeks onto the floor. Lonely and lost, she never felt the ghostly arms slip gently around her shoulders, or the tender kiss on her own cheek, but she did suddenly feel much better.

It was a normal morning on the street. As Nellie crossed the road to ‘run a message’ to the shop on the corner, she heard Peggy shouting at the school welfare officer.

‘I have five feckin’ pair of shoes and nine kids, would ye like to choose which feckin’ kids stay at home, come on then, come on in, will ye, King Solomon, and choose.’

Peggy stood back and held the front door open, to usher the welfare officer into the house, at which point he banged his book shut and fled down the street. He was no stranger to being shouted at but Peggy scared him more than most.

‘Do ye think I want four feckin’ kids hangin’ round me neck all day, eh? You don’t come here, mister, and complain about my kids not being in school until you bring some feckin’ shoes with you. Can you ’ear me?’

He was already gone, speeding away in his Morris Minor up the Vauxhall Road.

‘There, he won’t be back in a hurry,’ said Peggy to no one in particular, before she went back inside and carried on shouting, this time at the kids.

He would be back, without the shoes. Peggy would shout at him, again. He would flee to his car, as always, and on it went, a well-rehearsed, recurring drama.

‘Jeez, can you hear Peggy giving out,’ said Maura to Kitty, who was on her way out of the door to school. ‘She will be giving this street a bad name, the way she’s carrying on, so she will. I’m going to ask Kathleen to talk to her.’ Kathleen was back and settled into number forty-two. Her son Liam and his wife Maeve were running the farm back home so Kathleen had decided to stay put in Liverpool, until her job of bringing up Nellie was done.

Maura had made the same comment to Tommy the previous evening, although he didn’t appear to be convinced it was a good idea.

‘Why don’t you have a chat with her yourself?’ Tommy had said, thinking that it would surely be a useless exercise anyway. A letter from the Pope wouldn’t stop Peggy shouting.

‘Because I don’t want to fall out with me next-door neighbour and she has respect for Kathleen, her being older and all that,’ said Maura.

‘Maura, me love, our street is on the list for slum clearance, how much worse a name can we get than that, I ask ye?’ Tommy said reasonably.

Maura had muttered on under her breath, that the only way she would be taken out of her house would be in a box, but Tommy had stopped listening. He was studying the form of the horses for the three-thirty at Kempton, his newspaper laid out on the kitchen table. The children were growing and the sanctuary of the outhouse was no longer his; there would always be one or the other knocking on the door for him to get out.