A Cuppa Tea and An Aspirin
Helen Forrester

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2003

Copyright © Helen Forrester 2003

Helen Forrester asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007156948

Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2012 ISBN: 9780007387380

Version: 2014-12-10

For Vivien Green, with much gratitude

When the going gets tough,

the tough make tea

Anon

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

AUTHOR’S NOTE

PROLOGUE

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY-TWO

THIRTY-THREE

THIRTY-FOUR

THIRTY-FIVE

THIRTY-SIX

THIRTY-SEVEN

THIRTY-EIGHT

THIRTY-NINE

FORTY

FORTY-ONE

Keep Reading

About the Author

Praise for Helen Forrester

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The author would like to thank sincerely her editors, Nick Sayers, Jane Barringer and Jennifer Parr for their support and sound advice while she was writing this book.

The book is a novel, not a history. Though the dreadful slums of Liverpool did exist, the care Home was a figment of the author’s imagination, as were the characters who lived or worked in these places; whatever similarity there may be of name, no reference is made or intended to any person living or dead, except for the well-known historical figure of Lee Jones and his wonderful work on behalf of the poor of the city which form a small part of the background of the book.

PROLOGUE
‘I Look Proper Awful Without Me Gnashers’

1965

‘Angie! You mean you don’t know what a court is?’ In disapproval, the old woman’s lips pursed over toothless gums. She stared in genuine shock at the uniformed nursing aide who was slowly tucking in the sheets at the bottom of her bed. ‘Really, nowadays, you young folk don’t know nothing about nothing.’

‘It’s true, I really don’t know, Martha, unless you mean a magistrates’ court?’

‘Tush, I don’t mean a court up steps like that,’ retorted Martha irritably. ‘I mean a place where you live. Like a house.’

The aide smiled absently, her black face not unkind. She did not answer. Working in a crowded old folk’s Home, she was used to being scolded by the fifty-eight elderly, bedridden women and five equally incapacitated men, for whose daily care she was largely responsible; that is, being scolded by those who could speak. Some of them were the impotent victims of stroke, supposed to be turned every two hours and have their dirty nappies changed; and what a hopeless instruction that was: there simply wasn’t time. Its frequent omission accounted for the strong smell of old urine in the room and for the cries of misery from patients because of bedsores.

Opposite Martha’s bed, two women suffering from dementia were tethered to their beds. They chattered inconsequentially to themselves most of the day, their minds wandering – and God help me, thought Angie as she shook up Martha’s pillow, if they ever get loose: I’d be fired by Matron, sure as fate. Between the door and the dementia patients lay a victim of stroke, able only to grunt when she wanted anything.

In the bed next to Martha lay poor Pat, another bundle of helpless skin and bone. To Angie, the look of impending death was clear on her face, and she had already anxiously reported this to Matron. With a grim smile, Matron had assured the nervous aide that she was overreacting, as a result of her inexperience in nursing: the woman had seemed normal for her condition, when she had toured the ward two days before.

Angie had made no reply – she needed to keep her job. In her native Jamaica, rent by civil strife and surrounded by hunger and disease, she had seen so much of death. She certainly did not lack experience, she thought angrily.

For ten hours out of the twenty-four, all the patients were largely dependent upon Angie. Two other nursing aides, Dorothy and Freda, also from Jamaica, covered respectively the early morning and evening hours. A retired Irish nurse, Mrs Kelly, also working alone, cared for them from midnight to four in the morning, and there were many ignored complaints from patients at her inability to cope with their needs for bedpans or glasses of water.

The patients were either without family, or they were aged relatives of poverty-stricken local families who could not care for an invalid. Once they arrived in the nursing Home, Matron assumed that they were all uniformly permanently incapacitated. Some, like Martha Connolly, however, had suffered a broken hip or similar and might have hopes of being restored to health, if appropriately treated.

Matron was keen to retain patients like Martha, who, after the first few weeks, needed little care. Because they could do many things for themselves, they enabled her to keep her staffing costs low.

Uncouth, coarse Martha Connolly, Bed 3, Room 5, daughter of the Liverpool dockside, knew that she was not totally disabled. But she had had to agree with Matron’s sharp assessment that, if she tried to walk, she was liable to falls. She must, therefore, remain in bed unless an attendant was in the room to escort her.

Without any visitors, who might have spoken up on her behalf, unable to read or write, she knew herself to be stranded, just a numbered bed, her humanity forgotten.

Since all the aides were grossly overworked, she did not get much exercise. Her chart said that she was sixty, which was no great age. But her thin wispy hair was white, her back was humped and, at times, her mended hip hurt sharply. On the rare occasions when she was allowed out of bed, she had, until recently, used a stick. Her empty days dragged on from meal to meal, with nothing to alleviate their dreadful monotony.

‘Sometimes, I want to scream and scream,’ she once told Angie.

Angie smiled. ‘Well, don’t,’ she advised. ‘Matron might hear you. And she’d make you take a pill to quiet you.’

Fear crept up Martha’s back like pins and needles. The warning was justified. She had seen other patients drugged into silence.

One day, boiling with rage at Matron’s studied disregard of anything patients said to her, she had furiously brandished her walking stick at her. Matron hastily snatched it from her, and took it away to be safely stowed in her office. Since then, Martha had not had any exercise.

Better for her to be here, Martha had decided gloomily, rather than being left, as she had been found, hungry and with a broken hip, lying in the unheated hallway of an old house by the Herculaneum Dock.

She had been lucky that the rent collector had found her. When there was no answer to his pounding on the door, he had decided that she might be in but hiding from him, in the hope that he would go away: she was already behind with her rent.

He had knelt down to lift the flap of her letter box and peer through it. When he saw her curled up at the bottom of the narrow staircase, he had immediately run to find the policeman on the beat.

With his own key to the house, the rent collector opened the door for the constable, an ambulance was called from the corner telephone box, and an exhausted, moaning Martha was taken to hospital.

After a spell in hospital, she had been discharged to this old folk’s nursing home, she had told Angie, because she had no one to care for her.

As Martha scolded Angie for her ignorance of the infamous Liverpool court system, she became quite animated, and heaved herself painfully into a sitting position, to better lecture her.

‘You see, Angie, I were born in a court and so was me hubby; we lived in one till the war, so I know how dreadful they were.’ She paused for a moment, and then said thoughtfully, ‘It’s funny, though, I never thought of them as dreadful in them days – they was just normal life.

‘People what had never seen one usually denied they existed – ’cos they didn’t want to know. We was a family of eleven living in one room.

‘There’s people, even now, as don’t believe anybody’s starving or living with at least half a dozen other people in one room – ’cos nice people don’t want to know.’

From her own experience, Angie knew about people who ignored the misery of others, and she nodded agreement, while Martha paused to instruct her fretfully, ‘Don’t tuck me feet in so tight. I get cramp, you know that.’

‘OK,’ Angie replied easily, in her strong Jamaican accent.

Martha repeated vehemently, ‘People don’t want to know anything as makes them feel uncomfortable, ’cos then they might have to do something about it.’ She went on to explain how men like her husband, employed on the docks, had to live within walking distance of them.

‘’Cos, they was casual labour and had to sign on for work twice a day, wet or fine, you see. So houses was built in courts, to cram as many into one acre as they could – and to cram as many people into each house as you could find a piece of floor for them to sleep on. As close to the docks as they could, like, so they could walk to work in a few minutes.

‘All you could see from the main street was an archway, and, if you went through that, you come into a little paved yard. It had eight or ten houses in it.

‘There was two privies at the far end, against the back wall of the next court, and they had to do for all of us.’

She chuckled suddenly, and then added, ‘There was often a proper rush on them, specially in the mornings.

‘For years, there was near thirty people in our house alone. That were nothing like as bad compared to them that lived there fifty years ago, when I were a little girl.

‘There was a pump in the middle of the court, so as we could get water – and you often had to queue for that, too.’

She sighed at the recollection of carrying water for eleven people into her family’s room.

Then, as Angie, astonished at such a lack of lavatories, paused in her tidying of the room, Martha continued, ‘Each house had three storeys and a cellar, two rooms on each floor. And at the top there was an attic.

‘Back rooms had no windows, of course – because their back wall was the back wall for another court’s houses behind ours, you see.

‘Because the houses was in two rows facing each other, with the two lavatories across one end, it meant that we was walled in. Only the front rooms had windows – looking onto the court.

‘The main catch about living in our court was that there was a family in every room,’ Martha went on, the words dragging out of her, as she realised that Angie was beginning to lose interest.

‘You was never alone, Angie, and it was so cold in winter. The back rooms, as well as not having windows, didn’t have no fireplaces either. So even if you could buy coal it wasn’t no good.’

‘It sounds awful,’ replied Angie politely. She did not mention that her own current accommodation was not much better. Instead, she sighed wearily, as she took a quick peek behind the curtain which surrounded Pat’s bed. The curtain had been drawn round her because the doctor was expected to come later in the week to see her, thank goodness; Matron had, at last, taken notice of the aides’ reports on her.

‘It was hell!’ went on Martha forcefully. ‘And yet, you know, I was often happy then. The neighbours was wonderful – good, solid friends.’

Angie could not think of a suitable reply to this confession. She did her best, however, to provide an understanding smile. She knew she would miss her tea if the old bird didn’t stop talking soon.

Martha sighed. She felt that she was as good as in prison. She was never taken out. She had never even been into the garden surrounding the old Victorian house, a garden which she was allowed to look out on only when she was moved into a chair by the window, while Angie changed her sheets each week.

Matron seemed to imagine that clean sheets were the most important thing you could want, and that if something to eat was brought to you three times a day and you had a bath and a shampoo once a week, that was all you needed in life.

Martha grimaced. A fat lot she knew; the frantic aides often skipped both bath and shampoo.

But where had real life gone to? Where were the family, the visiting priests, the well-meant visits of amateur social workers, the busy streets, the cars, trams and lorries making pandemonium, the cries of the stallholders in the market, the children all pestering her at once, the family rows, the trips to New Brighton, the colossal fights after the football finals, when everyone got drunk down to their last penny, the interesting gossip with friends she had known all her life, the comfort of a Saturday night pint at the local, the weddings and wakes, the processions on holy days, the men tipsy and longing for you of a Saturday night?

All gone, slowly slipping away through two generations in the turmoil of the war and its aftermath – and no hope of their return, she decided mournfully. Instead, only a clamour of angry young people who did not know what suffering was, all of them wanting things – tellies and phones and expensive blue jeans and fancy kitchens and bands what made a racket like you’d never believe. I wants, she called them.

‘Bring us a cuppa tea, Angie – when you’ve had yours?’ she whined.

The aide nodded conspiratorially, and fled: the patients were supposed to wait for tea until it was served with the last meal of the day. Martha always received a clandestine mugful from Angie, however, because no other patient in the room had a clear enough understanding to demand a cup of tea for herself.

Angie, thanks be, was proper kind to her, Martha decided; she risked Matron being real mad at her if she found out about the illicit cup of tea: she was certain that Matron would consider it to be a wilful waste of tea.

Most of the time, Angie was the only person Martha had to talk to, and now, as the girl went for her meal, an anguished sense of loneliness, of desertion, crept slowly over her. She began to cry hopelessly, allowing the tears to run down her face unchecked.

‘Jaysus, how can I bear it?’ she muttered.

Absently, she took her rosary out from under her pillow. Other than her artificial teeth sitting in a glass of water beside her bed, which she always referred to as ‘me gnashers’, it was the only personal possession she still had: she did not feel that the teeth, provided through the National Health Plan, were really hers, though the dentist had assured her that they were.

Except for the rustling movements and mutterings of the other patients in the small room, and a distant tinkle of china and teaspoons, there was no sound.

‘Dear God Almighty, how do I get out of this place?’ she prayed without hope. ‘I might as well be dead.’

Then she asked herself in despair, ‘And, come to that, if I ever get out, where can I go?’

She could not answer her own questions.

While she waited for her cup of tea, she lay with the rosary in her hand. Then she ran her fingers along the familiar beads.

‘Hail, Mary, full of grace,’ she began. At least, in your loneliness, you could talk to the Holy Mother, she sobbed to herself. Even if she never replied, her silence did not mean that she hadn’t heard you.

ONE
‘He Were an ’Ero That Day, He Were.’

April 1937

Mrs Martha Connolly, wife of Patrick and purveyor of clean rags in the city market, sometimes remarked that she did have one lucky strike in her life, although she was not too sure even about that – in the end, she felt, it just seemed to mean more worry and more work for herself. The lucky strike was that her husband Patrick, though only a casual dock labourer at the time, was a good swimmer.

‘Anyways, he were an ’ero that day,’ she would boast proudly to her friends.

In explanation to less well-informed friends, she would say reflectively, ‘He were a lively lad. He swum in the canal ever since he were a kid, and won a few races in his time. It isn’t his fault that he never had a trade. He had to start earning a living the day he were twelve – or he’d have starved. So he took what there was – he went down to the docks with his dad and he’s been there ever since, poor lad.’

After she married him, she ruminated, he had kept up his skill by swimming in the nearby Wapping dock, if there were no ships tied up in it.

Both of them knew that such trespassing was illegal, but she never said a word to anyone about it, because it was such a welcome relief to him after working in claustrophobic warehouses or ships’ holds, or from the fetid confinement of their overcrowded, noisy court dwelling: from her point of view, it was much better than his getting drunk with his pals in the Baltic or the Coburg.

The dock master and the other men working the dock knew his face. They never attempted to stop him unless there was a boat coming in to berth, in which case, they would warn him for his own safety. But in the depth of the Depression of the 1930s boats were few and far between.

One fine Tuesday morning in April, however, instead of trying for work or swimming in the dock, he was hanging around the Pier Head for another reason, while at the same time watching the ferries come and go across the river. On Sundays, during good weather, watching the river traffic was a popular after-church occupation for Liverpool people.

On this weekday, however, there was an unusually large crowd, because HMS Ark Royal was being launched from the other side of the river: the Pier Head was a perfect place from which to view it. Chances of getting any work, he had decided, were remote, and his Sundays off would never offer such a good spectacle as the launch of a big ship. Better, by far, to be present at this historic occasion.

He made the excuse to himself that his back hurt abominably from a particularly heavy job he had done the previous day: working today would only make the pain worse. He hoped that Martha would never find out that he had failed to go to the stand, as usual, in hope of getting work.

On Sundays, if he did not go down to the Pier Head, he preferred to lie on the old mattress on the floor of the family’s single room. There, he rested and enjoyed the rare quiet, while Martha herded six of their nine children to the nearby church. As a live-in servant, Lizzie usually attended the church closest to her employer’s home; Colleen, aged ten, lay fighting tuberculosis of the hip in Leasowe Children’s Hospital, far away on the other side of the River Mersey; and James, little Number Nine, was babysat by their neighbour, Mary Margaret, who lived in the back room upstairs.

Nowadays, Mary Margaret always said she coughed too much to be welcome at Mass – the noise disturbed the praying. But, in truth, though she loved the glittering little church with its theatrical service, she no longer had the energy to walk that far.

This particular Tuesday, amongst the many others strolling up and down or waiting for the launch, Patrick recognised a well-known city councillor. Most Merseysiders had seen his ruddy, moustached visage more than once in either the Evening Express or the Liverpool Echo. He was a man much given to noisy controversy on any subject which might give him publicity and convince Liverpudlians of his care of their city.

Outstanding in a crowd of mostly thin people, the councillor’s well-padded frame, encased in a three-piece suit, with a bowler hat rammed firmly on his head and a walking stick beneath his arm, suggested a successful man well content with himself.

His dirty macintosh flapping in the wind, Patrick watched him with the lazy indifference of the unemployed and hungry, as the floating landing stage heaved gently beneath their feet.

He was standing near the end of the stage, where a small private yacht with a broken mast had been temporarily moored: he had wandered over to look at the little craft. The councillor reached the end of his stroll at the same point, but, before turning back, paused beside him to peer down at the stricken boat.

‘Must’ve got caught in last night’s storm,’ he remarked to Patrick, as he turned to view him with friendly condescension.

‘Oh, aye,’ replied Patrick. ‘Real bad, it was.’ He was not interested enough to continue the conversation, or to warn the stupid man when he unwisely stepped over the guarding chain to look more closely at the little yacht.

While docking, a ferry bumped into the floating stage. The stage gave an unexpectedly big heave. The councillor staggered, failed to regain his balance, stumbled over a mooring rope and with a mighty plop fell into the river.

Patrick stared dumbly as the water settled again. Then the councillor, his bowler hat bobbing slowly downstream, came spluttering to the surface.

It became obvious to Patrick as the man floundered that the councillor could not swim. The current began to push the struggling man away from the stage, and, before going under again, he screamed for help.

Patrick swore to Martha, afterwards, that he did not plunge in to save him because he was a councillor and therefore important.

‘Might’ve left the silly bugger to fend for hisself, if I’d remembered,’ he told Martha scornfully. ‘What use is he to folk like us? And him a Prottie, too.’

But Protestant or not, he did instinctively plunge in to rescue the drowning man. A few powerful strokes and he caught him by the collar of his jacket. He shouted to him to stop struggling, but it took a second or two for the instruction to penetrate. Then, to Patrick’s relief, the councillor obeyed.

Swimming on his back, Patrick began to tow him towards the landing stage.

The current was against them and it took all Patrick’s strength to make headway towards the stage, where, as the accident was noticed, there was sudden activity.

With one hand Patrick finally managed to grab a hold on the gunwale of the little yacht.

As a crowd of helpers rushed to the edge of the stage, all shouting advice at once, the yacht threatened to turn over. One would-be rescuer with more sense threw a life buoy with a rope attached to it.

The current pushed the buoy away. A swift jerk brought it closer, and Patrick and the terrified councillor thankfully grasped its looped ropes.

In addition, a small rowing boat nudged at Patrick’s back, as its owner shipped his oars. Breathless after his quick row towards them, the rower gasped encouragement to both men to ‘’Old on, there, na. Seen you dive in, I did. Soon get you out.’

With the aid of an assortment of idlers, the city councillor was roughly heaved back onto the landing stage, while a panting Patrick hauled himself out.

Sitting on the edge of the stage, Patrick wiped the water from his face with his hands. Then he took his boots off and emptied the water out of them. He examined them ruefully. ‘Should have took them off,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Nobody should try swimming in boots.’

Reclining on the stage, supported by two friendly ferrymen, it seemed as if the councillor spat up half the Mersey River before both he and Patrick were escorted into the nearest warm place, the Pier Head teashop.

The sopping wet councillor was soon seated in the tiny café. A mug of hot tea was immediately proffered him by the startled woman in charge; she kept asking no one in particular, ‘Whatever happened to him, poor bugger?’

Near him stood the owner of the little rowing boat, who had helped to push the pair of them up out of the water. He was nearly as wet as the other two.

In the opinion of the boat owner, this chap in a three-piece suit was obviously a Somebody. Though he did not recollect who he was, it seemed likely that he might receive a decent tip for taking care of a Somebody. So he paid the penny for tea for him, in addition to a mugful for himself.

All attention was focused on the councillor and on the boat owner standing close behind him. It did not occur to anybody in the small crowd of interested onlookers, amongst whom stood the penniless Patrick, boots in hand, that he, also, might be glad of a hot cup of tea; or might even like the chance to mop the water out of his hair with the dish towel quickly produced for the councillor’s use.

While his ruined suit still dripped mournfully over the bare wooden floor, the councillor, aware of who had really rescued him, groggily thanked Patrick. Then, after a moment’s silence, he asked what he could do for him in recompense for his remarkably quick deliverance from drowning.

‘You could have lost your own life – that current is deadly,’ he added, with a hint of respect in his voice.

Looking like a sewer rat newly removed from a drain, Patrick stared at him, nonplussed. He had lost his cap and scarf to the river, and his ill-cut hair draggled over his eyes and down the sides of a gaunt face blackened from years of dust from a multitude of ships’ cargoes.

With an effort, he tried to clear his mind. He wondered if the councillor would consider the replacement of his cap and scarf. Then, as he trembled with exhaustion, the very basic desire of his life swelled up in his mind and expelled any other consideration.

Why not ask? he thought. Why not?

He took a long chance, and whispered almost without hope, ‘If you could get me a regular job, sir…if you could, sir?’ His exhaustion made it difficult to speak.

It was like asking for gold, in a city with thirty-three per cent unemployment. But bearing in mind that this was probably his only chance to talk to a man who might be the equivalent of Father Christmas, he added hastily, ‘And a decent place to live.’

The equally exhausted councillor blew through his lips, and his moustache dripped its last drip.

He turned to the woman behind the counter. ‘Ask this man his name and address and write it down for me,’ he ordered, in a voice still rather weaker than his usual stentorian tone. He turned to the boat owner, and added, ‘And this man’s, too.’

The boat owner smirked with satisfaction.

While the woman hunted in the pocket of her grubby apron for a nub of pencil and then in a drawer for a piece of paper, the councillor turned back to his rescuer and, with a wry smile, said to Patrick, ‘Aye, that’s an ‘ard one, lad!’ He chewed his lower lip for a moment and scratched his wet grey hair, while Patrick waited in almost unbearable suspense. Then he asked, ‘’Ave you got a trade?’

As a member of the City Council, he enjoyed, occasionally, being able to show a little munificence, and here he was, now, seated in front of a small crowd: a good moment. He’d be sure to get his picture in the paper; he had noted that a holidaymaker had leaned over the side of the tied-up ferry to take a snap of him, as he sat on the landing stage. Just now, he had seen the same man at the back of the crowd raise his camera to take another one. He would probably sell the pictures to the Post. Not exactly dignified, he considered, but to have it on the front page of a local newspaper would be useful publicity. And he might, at least, be able to get his rescuer a medal.

Because he had had no breakfast and felt faint, Pat badly wanted to sit down on a nearby stool. He feared to do so, however, because he might offend, by his disrespect, a man who was rich enough to own a gold pocket watch, which still dangled on a chain, secured to a button of his waistcoat.

‘I’m a dock porter, sir,’ he replied, shamefacedly.

‘Humph. Casual? Unskilled, eh?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Patrick muttered. ‘It’s all I could get, ever since I were a kid.’ Then, gaining courage, he added, ‘But I’m strong, sir. I’m a hard worker.’

The councillor nodded, accepted a second mug of tea from the fawning boat owner, and drained it.

‘That’s a real problem,’ he sighed. He was suddenly very tired. He wanted to go home. He glanced again at the forlorn wreck in front of him, and said with compassion, ‘I’ll do what I can, I promise you.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

The councillor knew only too well what being a dock labourer entailed. Casual work was the curse of any port, a nightmare not only to dockers, but also to lorry drivers, warehousemen, victualling firms, anybody who served shipping. Owners wanted a quick turnaround for their ships, whether they were freighters, liners or humble barges; loading and unloading must be done immediately by a readily available workforce, regardless of time of day or night: time and tides waited for no man – and demurrage was expensive. Once the job was done men were immediately dismissed.

For the dock labourers, it meant standing twice a day near a dock, hoping to be chosen for half a day’s employment. Patrick stood at 7 am and again at 1 pm in pouring rain, in broiling sun or on icy January days, waiting, just waiting to be called for about four hours of arduous work.

To draw attention to himself, he would call out his name from amid the jostling crowd. With occasional gifts of tins of tobacco or a packet of cigarettes, he greased the palm of a buttyman, who all too often ignored him and ran his own gang of favourites.

He tried also to be at least recognisable to the shipping companies’ stevedores. When a ship needed a few more hands, over and above those gangs already chosen, this employee of the shipping company would go through the struggling, desperate mob of men, and, with supreme indifference, pick out the extra labourers as if they were cattle being chosen for market. When Patrick was lucky enough to be chosen, he worked steadily and mechanically, hoping that his face might be noted by the stevedore and that he would be chosen again.

His speed of movement did not make him popular amongst his mates. Some of them had a system whereby half of them took an hour off to rest while the other half worked, then vice versa. This doubled the hours of work to be paid for by the shipowner but, to the labourers, it was much less exhausting than doing the heavy work without breaks.

Sometimes, a few men would find an obscure spot in the ship or at the back of a warehouse, and settle down to play cards for half the day, their absence unnoticed amid the general mêlée of dozens of identical-looking labourers unloading a large ship. On paydays, they turned up fast enough to collect their unearned wages.

Even if the shipowners disapproved of it, Patrick was thankful for the rest system, which he felt was fair when doing such an arduous job. He never joined the card players, however, partly because it was blatantly dishonest, and, more precisely, because he was not good at such games and would probably lose most of what he was earning.

He preferred, if he had a few pennies, to play the football pools, where he stood a faint chance of winning thousands of pounds.

In addition, Martha never made a fuss about his playing the pools; like almost everybody else in the court, regardless of the pressing need to pay the grocery bill at the corner shop, she played them herself. Rather than confess this dereliction to the priest, she added an extra Hail Mary to the small penances he usually gave her for any other sins to which she owned up.

Even if he was given work, Patrick collected at the end of the week what could only be described as starvation wages. Or even worse, on mornings when he was not chosen, he would have to go home and admit his bad luck to a hungry wife and children, only to set out again to repeat the whole performance that afternoon.

And thanks to a huge birthrate in the city, thought the councillor as he drank his tea, and a constant migration of even more desperate men from Ireland, there was a great surplus of casual, and, consequently, most satisfactorily cheap, unskilled labour on Merseyside. This fact was not conducive to persuading many of the powerful business interests of Liverpool, or even its City Council, to study methods by which the system could be made more humane. The councillor had himself brought the matter up in council, but the dreadful Depression lying over the whole country made impractical his request for a committee to plan a better system in collaboration with reluctant employers.

Even after two mugs of tea, the councillor was still shivering with cold and delayed shock, so when the waitress handed him the paper on which she had written the addresses, he asked her to get him a taxi. She called a barefoot lad lurking nearby and sent him to find one.

Anxious to earn a quick penny for going to fetch the taxi, the child shot out of the little café and scudded up the incline to the street to hail one.

As they waited uneasily for the vehicle to arrive, Patrick felt that he could no longer stand around in his drenched state. Balancing shakily, first on one leg and then on the other, he put on his sodden boots. He forgot all about the Ark Royal, but the date of its launching reminded him for the rest of his life of the day he met a city councillor.

In an effort to be polite, he now said diffidently to the councillor, ‘I think you’ll be all right now, sir. I’ll be getting home.’

TWO
‘’Aving a Good Natter with Mary Margaret’

May to September 1937

‘And he missed the Ark Royal, he did; and nobody, except the councillor, give no thought to him at all, they didn’t,’ sighed Patrick’s wife, Martha, to her friend and neighbour, Mary Margaret, while they sat on the doorstep of their court house.

They were warmed by a few rays of welcome spring sunshine, sneaking into the tiny court from between the chimney pots. It lit up Martha’s dark visage and birdlike black eyes, and Mary Margaret’s skeletal thinness, which was apparent even when she was wrapped in her shawl.

As they gossiped, Mary Margaret steadily hemmed a pocket handkerchief: on a protective piece of white cloth on her lap, she held a little pile of them, already finished. Beside her, Martha methodically tore up old sheets and folded them into small, neat squares; she would sell the squares to garage hands or to stallholders in the market, so that, from time to time, they could wipe their oily or bloody or fish-scale-encrusted hands.

A month after the rescue, they were once again mulling over Patrick’s unexpected adventure with the city councillor – and, in more detail, his promise to help Patrick get a better job. Help had not as yet materialised.

‘I suppose he must’ve forgot,’ offered Mary Margaret.

Martha smiled wryly. ‘Right,’ she agreed, and then shrugged as if to shake off any wishful thoughts she might have about it.

Mary Margaret Flanagan and her family lived in the back room on the first floor of the crowded court house, in which the Connollys had the front room on the ground floor. She suffered from tuberculosis of the lungs.

Crammed in with Mary Margaret were her widowed mother, Theresa, her four children still at home, and her husband, an unemployed ship’s trimmer.

Because of the lack of a window, her family lived, without much complaint, much of their lives in semi-darkness, relieved in part by a penny candle, when available, and the daily kindness of the two elderly women in the front room of her floor: Sheila Latimer and Phoebe Ferguson left their intervening door open, day and night, so that light from their front window could percolate through to Mary Margaret’s room.

Sheila and Phoebe had been mates ever since they were tiny children. They had shared their sorrows through childhood beatings and sexual misuse, through marriages that were not much better, and, finally, when their husbands had been drowned at sea and their children were either dead or gone, the old chums had decided to live together.

From other inhabitants of the court, they endured a lot of jokes as to their sexual preferences, but they had been through so much together that they did not care. They were thankful for the luxury of a room to themselves, after their earlier experiences of being packed in with children, elderly relations and bullying husbands.

As paupers, they lived on Public Assistance, outdoor relief provided by the City. This, they both thankfully agreed, was a great improvement over the old days, when they could have been consigned to the bitter hardships and tight confinement of the workhouse. Now, as long as no one told the Public Assistance officer about their working, they were able to earn illicitly a little more on the side, by picking oakum, which was used for caulking ships. The oakum picking meant they could buy a trifle more food, and it took them out of the packed house for most of the day. They considered themselves lucky.

Up in the attic, in a single, fairly large room under the roof, lived Alice and Mike Flynn, both of whom enjoyed a certain popularity in the court as a whole, Alice because she was easy-going and Mike because he had a radio.

Mike Flynn was a wounded veteran of the First World War. He had been paralysed by shrapnel in his back and had not been out of their room for years. He lay by the front dormer window, which looked out directly at the window of a similar house across the court. That was all he saw of the world, except for a few visiting birds. He occasionally put crumbs out on his tiny windowsill, which encouraged pigeons and seagulls to land and perch there unsteadily, as they jostled for position.

Mike had been given a radio by a kindly social worker, an ex-army officer. He said it kept him sane. The Flynns’ greatest expense out of their tiny army pension was getting its batteries recharged.

The clumsy-looking box radio, however, brought him unexpected friends. If he was feeling well enough, all the children in the house were welcome to come into the room to sit cross-legged on the bare wooden floor to listen, in fascinated silence, to the Children’s Hour. It might have been broadcast from outer space for all the connection it had with their own lives, but they loved the voice which actually said ‘Hello, children’ and ‘Happy Birthday’ to them.

In addition, their fathers could, sometimes, get early information from Mike regarding the outcome of a football match or a horse race, on which they had bet. Mary Margaret loved nothing better than to listen to the distant music which drifted down the stairs into her room, though her husband, Thomas, grumbled incessantly about it.

Determined to see the bright side, patient Mary Margaret said frequently that it could be worse. The house was not nearly as crowded as it used to be, and, just think, they could be without a roof at all! Or she could be like the old fellow, who lived in the dirt-floored cellar, a cellar which had been boarded up by the City Health Authority as unfit for human habitation.

Martha’s husband Patrick had helped the desperate old Irishman who now lived there to prise the door open.

‘But it’s an awful place to live,’ Martha had protested. ‘Every time it rains real hard, it gets flooded with the you-know-what from the lavatories, and then he’s got to sleep on the steps.’

‘He’s better off in the court than in the street,’ Patrick had argued, and Mary Margaret agreed with him. So Martha shrugged and accepted that you had to help people who were worse off than yourself.

On days when it did not rain, Martha Connolly, Alice Flynn, Mary Margaret Flanagan and her wizened mother, Theresa Gallagher, spent much of their time sitting on the front step, their black woollen shawls hunched round them, as they watched life proceed in the court. As the court was entirely enclosed by houses similar to the one they lived in, all equally crowded, there were plenty of comings and goings on which to speculate.

Until recently, they could have contemplated the midden in the centre of the court and the rubbish which was thrown into it, but the City had had it removed and replaced by lidded rubbish bins outside each house, which were not nearly so interesting to the many rats which infested the dockside.

The almost perpetual queue for the two choked lavatories at the far end of the court was a regular source of amusement. Each person stood impatiently, with a piece of newspaper in his hand, moaning constantly and with increasing urgency at the delay. On the filthy, paved floor of the court, the usually barefoot children of the Connollys and Flanagans relieved themselves in corners, and fought and played. The women intervened only when juvenile fights threatened to become lethal.

‘If you don’t stop that, I’ll tell your dad,’ the women would shriek. This awful threat implied a whipping with their father’s belt on a bare bottom, so it was usually effective.

Ownerless cats and, occasionally, a stray dog stalked rats and mice; and the children found big, dead rats endlessly engrossing.

By the narrow entry from the main street, men stood and smoked and argued. They read a single copy of the Evening Express between them, in order to keep up with the racing news, and also to work on the football pools. Like a ship’s crew, they tried not to quarrel, though not infrequently fist fights did break out. These scuffles, however, were more likely to occur outside the nearby pubs, when, drunk at closing time on a Saturday night, they were emptied out into the street, to be dealt with by the pair of constables on patrol.

Although it was remarkable how a rough kind of order prevailed amid such a hopelessly deprived little community, the younger men enjoyed nothing more than a Saturday night fight, particularly if the two unarmed police constables got involved. It formed a great subject of conversation on a Sunday morning, as they nursed their aching heads and black eyes.

Within the court itself, a family row was high theatre, which brought almost every inhabitant out to watch. When a woman being beaten hit back, the female onlookers frequently cheered her on. ‘Give it ’im, Annie – or Dolly – or May – love,’ they would shriek, joyously adding fuel to male rage.

As the four women sat together on their step, they did not seem to notice the general stench of the airless court or the rarity of a single beam of sunlight. Only when it rained or was too bitterly cold outside, did they seek the lesser cold of Martha’s room, which at least had a window – and a range which sometimes held a fire.

Martha was extremely protective of her frail friend, Mary Margaret. If she had a fire in the range, she would sit her close by it on the Connollys’ solitary wooden chair. She would then boil up old tea leaves to make a hot drink for her, which she laced with condensed milk from a tin. To add to her warmth, she would, sometimes, wrap round her knees the piece of blanket in which her youngest child, Number Nine, slept at night; or she would pat and rub her back when she was struck with a particularly violent bout of coughing.

As they gathered on the step, after the rescue of the councillor, Martha continued her doubts about him.

‘When we never heard nothing, Pat gave up hope, he did, ’specially when he saw the pitcher in the papers of the councillor and the boatman, and nothin’ about himself. And us havin’ to find him a new cap and scarf, an’ all. He lost his old ones when he dive in. And his boots was finished.’

Mary Margaret sighed: the loss of a cap and scarf was indeed serious, the lack of strong boots dreadful.

‘Never mind, love, he were a brave man to do what he done,’ she soothed. She was one of those blessed people who travel without hope, and could not, therefore, ever be disappointed. ‘You have to make the best of it,’ she advised, as she always did. ‘At least, neither of them got dragged under the landing stage by the current.’

‘Oh, aye. If they had, they would have both been drowneded – and without our Pat, it would be the workhouse for us, no doubt about it.’

For a moment, both were silenced by their permanent dread of this fate, despite the recent provision of outdoor relief by the City’s Public Assistance Committee. It was a traditional fear, which ranked close behind their horror of a pauper’s funeral.

Summer turned to foggy autumn and still they heard no more of the councillor.

Patrick grinned cynically, when Martha brought up the subject. ‘It’s to be expected,’ he told her. ‘Why should he remember? Folk like us never waste our time voting.’ He laughed. ‘We don’t mean nothin’ to nobody.’

He continued his usual dockside waits for work; he knew no other world.

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