A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin. Helen Forrester

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СКАЧАТЬ at the woman in amazement and wondered what relation bedrooms had to boots.

      ‘We haven’t got none,’ she said slowly. ‘We sleep here.’

      ‘Where is your kitchen?’

      Martha began to lose patience. ‘This is our everything,’ she said dully through gritted teeth.

      ‘My God!’ muttered the lady. She had read the Connollys’ file before the visit. It had not registered with her that the room, described by an earlier visitor a few years previously, was the only room which the family rented. She was shocked by Martha’s remark. The file had also given details of the family’s financial circumstances and included some unkind remarks on the incompetence of the parents.

      Martha passed wind, and the visitor looked round her a little wildly; the stench was unbearable.

      She took a small breath, and then said, her voice faint, ‘Tell Mr – er – um – Connolly to come to the office on Monday and we’ll try to find a pair of boots which will fit him.’

      She pushed past Martha and fled down the steps. As she passed the overflowing rubbish bins, her neat black shoes skidded on the ordure-covered paving stones. A couple of men idling at the entrance hastily made way for her, and she ran out onto the crowded pavement of the main street.

      Gasping for breath, she wondered, as she turned to walk back to her office, how she could ever report such awful conditions and filthy people as suitable for aid; there was nothing to recommend them at all: they were neither clean nor respectable – nor trustworthy. She had feared that her pockets might be picked while in the court: she had not brought a handbag lest it be stolen.

      But she pitied them. In a way, she understood their dilemmas. How could you get washed in a room full of people? With, at the back of it, another room opening into it, which housed another family?

      If the Connolly man was to get boots on his feet, she must state, without even seeing the man himself, that he was worthy of them and was not likely to sell them.

      In a wash of compassion and against her better judgement, that is what she did. And Patrick got his boots.

      Martha breathed a prayer of thankfulness to St Jude, patron saint of lost causes.

      At the first charity to which Martha had applied for boots, the volunteer who interviewed her and checked the Connollys’ file had scared Martha nearly to death. She had remarked sharply, ‘Your eldest son Brian is working, I see. That should be of help to you.’

      Full of dread that the worker would tell the Public Assistance Committee that Brian was indeed working, Martha admitted that he was a butcher’s errand boy. This fact had not been revealed by Patrick to the relieving officer. If he had done so, the officer would have deducted most of the boy’s wages from the allowance or from the food vouchers they had sometimes to beg from him.

      ‘He earns five shillings a week, but I’ve got to feed him and see he looks clean, like – it takes all he earns,’ Martha explained patiently.

      The interviewer looked at her with undisguised disgust; her toothless mouth, her face mahogany in colour from never having been washed, the vile stench of clothes never taken off and, under them, a body never bathed since birth.

      It did not occur to the untried volunteer that cleanliness cost money: in her world, there were always towels, soap and hot water in the bathroom. She had yet to see a court.

      ‘She asked me if I thought I was deserving of help,’ Martha had wailed to Mary Margaret. ‘Deserving? And me trying to make one egg stretch round six kids this morning, and little Colleen still sick in Leasowe Hospital and I can’t even get to go and see her.

      ‘And I didn’t have much luck selling me rags in the market, this week, neither.’

      She cleared her throat and spat onto the paving stones.

      ‘As if it’s our fault if there’s no work and the men get drunk when they draw their unemployment or their Public Assistance or their wages. Wouldn’t they need a little bit of somethin’ to cheer them up if they was workless? Or a glass or two to ease their thirst, after all the sweat they lose when they do work?’

      She glanced miserably round the darkening court. ‘Do they think we enjoy it?’

      Mary Margaret laughed weakly. ‘Oh, aye. I think they do. They think that if we didn’t like it, we’d leave it. Or if we weren’t lazy, we’d clean it up.’

      Martha looked at her aghast. ‘And how do they think we’d do it with no water to speak of and the lavs spilling over all the time? And me broom is worn out. And if we leave, where are we going to go? I’d like to know that. We’ve got to be close to the docks for Pat and Thomas’s sake.’

      ‘Martha, love, they don’t know nothin’. You have to go and tell them and hope for the best.’

      ‘Well, I got the boots in the end,’ Martha responded, a hint of triumph in her voice. ‘They’re second-hand, and they’re too big for him – he’s got a wad of newspaper in them, so he don’t trip up and have a fall. It’s so easy to fall in a ship.’

      

      Amongst the hapless community strode, occasionally, an elderly Catholic priest, his biretta crushed down on his bald head, his long black robes nearly brushing the filthy ground. Women were afraid of him, as were some of their husbands, because behind him stood the wrath of God, who did not like sinners who drank at the Baltic Fleet or the Coburg, or who had suspiciously small families which might indicate a form of birth control in use.

      Yet, the priest and his assistant, Father James, were sorely grieved by the suffering they saw daily in their crowded parish, already famous as a surviving remnant of the worst slums in Britain. All they could do was to preach obedience to God’s will, acceptance of the circumstances to which men were born, and the glories of the life to come.

      Many of their male parishioners spoke disparagingly of them. But none of the women would hear a word against them. In their hearts, they rarely doubted the Church’s teachings and they clung to them as the only ray of hope in their lives.

      They dearly loved the younger priest, Father James, who was so gentle that some of the women thought he was a saint; and they loved and respected him as they would a saint.

      Like most of her female neighbours, Martha often wept as she considered all the problems of her life, particularly in winter. Her feverish prayer, addressed to the Virgin Mary, was that she should not become pregnant again. It was surely sinful to beg such help from a Holy Virgin. But if She did not understand the affairs of women and how hard life was, who else was there?

      Having her latest baby, little James, named after the priest, had left her feeling very exhausted. He was a sweet-tempered child and was known affectionately throughout the courts as Martha Connolly’s Number Nine.

      How Number Nine was surviving his infancy was a mystery to Martha. She had not been able to feed him herself, and he never really thrived on tinned milk; even now, with his second birthday coming up, he was nought but skin and bone and protruding stomach. But, then, life was like that. You couldn’t do much about it: God sent children. But, sometimes, He also took them away again.

      The Church said that nobody was supposed to love anyone more than God himself – and Martha felt uneasily that God might be jealous of her beloved СКАЧАТЬ