A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin. Helen Forrester

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СКАЧАТЬ anyone else who would listen, ‘You gotta get on with life.’ And, with constant hefty sighs, she did.

      She did her best to keep the family alive from day to day, and Patrick did his best to control his urge to hit her when she yelled at him.

      It grieved her that this very morning, despite the bitter wind bringing warning icy blasts of cold into the court, Patrick had gone out, as usual, with only bread and a cup of tea in his stomach, to stand around in the open at 7 am, waiting at a dock gate amid a crowd of others.

      Amongst the rags for sale which she collected from better homes, from dustbins, or from the local pawnbroker as unsaleable junk, she had found a badly worn man’s woollen pullover. Patrick had thankfully put it on under his shirt so that its disrepair did not show.

      A little smile had broken the deep lines of his chapped face, as she had stood watching him pull it down and tuck it into his trousers. He sadly inspected the holes in the elbows and the ragged cuffs.

      ‘It’ll keep your chest a bit warm,’ she assured him.

      ‘Ta, ever so,’ he said unexpectedly with a sly grin, as he reached for his grey collarless shirt.

      As he tucked in his shirt, she saw for a moment the young man she had married. She thought how lucky she had been to marry a man who was often kind and rarely beat her, despite her own merciless nagging of him.

      When he had picked up his docker’s hook and had gone, she had sat by the fire on the orange box, nursing Number Nine for a few minutes. He had been fussing much of the morning, despite the piece of crust she had given him to chew. The boil he had on his bottom must be troubling him, she decided: he would feel better when it burst.

      She wrapped her shawl round him, and he snuggled into her breast, but she was dry and could not feed him.

      Finally, when he seemed a little comforted she let him slip down from her knee to join the other children.

      Despite the cold, Kathleen had opted to escape to school, so Martha instructed Bridie, aged twelve, ‘Now you mind him, and don’t let him bother Auntie Mary Margaret. I’m going up to the Lee Jones.’

      Bridie was deeply involved in a game of I Spy with Mary Margaret’s girls. She looked up sourly through straggling rat tails of hair, cunning brown eyes gleaming as if she were about to say something vicious. But, after a moment, she silently shifted herself to make space for the child to sit by her; she then raucously rejoined the game.

      Delighted to be included in a big girl’s game, Number Nine joyfully tried to chant, ‘Spy! Spy!’

      Martha got up. Bridie was a real tartar. She wished, with a sigh, that her daughters were as passive as those of Mary Margaret – except for Dollie, of course. Dollie was like Bridie, a proper cross for any mother to bear.

      She took a large metal ewer from a corner and screwed its lid on tighter to make sure it still fitted. Then she said to Mary Margaret, ‘I’m going to have a whack at the Lee Jones. See if I can get some soup. Where’s your jar? I’ll try to get some for you.’

      Mary Margaret nodded and ordered, ‘Our Connie, you go and get it – it’s in the wooden box.’

      After several wails from the upstairs room of ‘I can’t find it, Mam,’ and shouts of further direction from Mary Margaret, Connie came pounding down the stairs, and handed to Martha a big, old-fashioned sweet jar with a screw-on lid. Its exterior was still grubby from its previous visits to various soup kitchens.

      ‘Soup?’ she inquired hopefully, pale-blue eyes wide.

      ‘Can’t promise, love. They may run out.’

      Connie was not yet seven years old, but she already understood the power of Them. They were people who decided how your life would be lived. They themselves lived in faraway parts of Liverpool called Princes Park or Orrell or even further away in places called Southport and Blundellsands. Sometimes they lived across the river, and you could watch them coming off the ferries each morning, to work in the big buildings by the Pier Head. One of the buildings there always seemed special to her; it had two huge dicky birds perched on the top of it, and she dreamed that, one day, she might travel on the ferry and have fancy clothes and a fancy job in that very building.

      As she quietly handed the jar to Martha, she reflected that They did sometimes give you bits and pieces to help you out – but not always.

      At Martha’s remark, her face fell, and Martha chucked her under the chin. ‘Cheer up, chick. Auntie Martha’ll do her best for you.’

      But Connie did not smile. With the back of her hand, she simply rubbed the mucus off the end of her nose and turned back to the fireplace, to rejoin the game of I Spy. Connie was learning, slowly and reluctantly, the deadly acceptance of life that her mother had.

      To facilitate transporting the ewer and the big jar, Martha stowed them in an old perambulator, kept in a recess behind the building’s front door. It was very difficult to get the pram in or out of the recess without opening the door of her own room to make enough space, so it was fairly safe from theft.

      The pram was the most useful possession she had; it not only carried Number Nine, Ellie and Joseph whenever she had to take them out, but it could hold a hundredweight of coal or a pile of old bedding bought for tearing into rags. Without it, she knew she would find it difficult to function.

      She bumped the pram down the front steps, lifted her shawl over her head and went out to face the elements and the world of Them.

      FIVE

       ‘Me Pore Feet’

       January 1938

      The water in the freezing puddles squished through the cracks in her boots, as she trudged slowly up to Limekiln Lane, the site of the office of Lee Jones’ League of Welldoers. She had not recently approached the League for help and she hoped that she would not be noticed as a regular beggar: she had learned from experience that one should not go too often to the same place; they got tired of you.

      If the League’s premises had been closer to her home, she would have sent the younger children themselves to beg a meal; they would almost certainly have been fed. But there was food for Patrick, Brian and Number Nine to think about, too; the weather was so bad that she feared that they might become ill if they did not get something hot to eat: Tommy and Joseph were already coughing badly, and all the children were snuffling with colds.

      Like Patrick and the children, she had chilblains on her heels; they seemed more than usually painful today, and she muttered, ‘Christ, me pore feet!’ as she trod on a cobblestone and the frayed lining of her boot caught the sore spot. She would give a lot, she thought, to have a thick pair of socks to cushion them.

      As she plodded along, she sighed one of her gustier sighs. If she did not count little Colleen in hospital in Leasowe, there were eight people ahead of her in the family, all of whom could do with socks. Patrick was always the first to get them, also the first to be fed – because he was the breadwinner, or was supposed to be, thought Martha with sudden asperity, as she considered her own ceaseless efforts.

      Woollen socks wore out so quickly, she would moan to Mary Margaret, and, though she could darn, she did not always СКАЧАТЬ