A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin (13 page)

Martha brightened further, and replied, ‘Sure I do. I don't remember seeing you before: it's usually an older woman what serves here.'

The tea lady replied that she had only very recently taken over the stall from her mother and that she was not yet well acquainted with all her customers. ‘I used to come in sometimes when she weren't well,' she explained.

‘Oh, aye. You must be Lilly's girl? What's your name?'

‘I'm Tara. I've taken over the stall now that Mam's rheumatism is so bad. Pleased to meet you.'

Martha smiled and nodded. ‘Likewise,' she said. ‘I'm Martha – Martha Connolly.'

As she swung her basket back onto her head, she added, with a knowing grin, ‘You must be Irish – with your name? Your mam was always so busy, I didn't talk to her much, so I didn't notice.'

The woman laughed. ‘You'd better believe it. Me folks came from County Cork. But me mam never was one for talking much.'

‘I'm sorry she's sick.'

‘Well, she's getting on. As far as she knows, she's fifty-one now.'

Martha nodded agreement that fifty-one was a ripe old age. ‘See you next week,' she said amiably.

And thus began a friendship which, through years of penny cups of tea, Martha learned to treasure.

Steadying her basket on her head, Martha rescued the bun from her pocket. She ate it as she made for the outside of the market.

At the exit, the sun seemed a little warmer, and she began to shout her wares with gusto. About noon, she decided to walk across to the big bus depot nearby, where the mechanics were usually glad to see her and her cargo of fents. If she had any left after dealing with them, she decided, she
would go down to the Pier Head where there was another large garage.

This week, because she had soft, heavy white cotton, which could be washed and re-used, she got a better price than usual and sold all of them within a few minutes.

On the way home, as she swung the empty basket with one hand, she promised herself, ‘I'll get some meat pies for the kids' tea, from the chippy.'

She turned into the next fish and chip shop she came to, and put the heavy brown paper bag into her laundry basket and carried it home on her head.

The warmth of the hot pies penetrated her tangled black hair, and the heat set the lice scuttling round her scalp. Unfortunately, laundry baskets do not have a big handle with which to carry them when filled, so she had to defer a good scratch until she got home.

She wearily climbed the steps to the front door. It was inordinately quiet, she thought, as she turned the handle. She was not sure of the time: perhaps Kathleen had already fed the children the bit of bread she had put aside for their midday meal, and they had gone back to school.

When she opened the door to her room, she was surprised to see sitting in her single chair not Mary
Margaret or Alice Flynn but Auntie Ellen from across the court. In addition to Martha's children standing silently round her, she had, sitting on her knee, Mary Margaret's youngest girl, Minnie.

Martha smelled trouble. She slowly lowered her basket down onto the floor, as she stared at the little tableau.

Auntie Ellen O'Hara, Mary Margaret's sister-in-law, was not usually asked to babysit, because it interfered with the washing which she took in to augment her husband Desi's uncertain wages as a sandwich-board man. In the corner of the boarded-up condemned cellar beneath their room, Desi had, unknown to the rent man, built a brick copper in which to boil clothes. It was lined with clay and equipped with a tap at its base so that it could be emptied. It had a wooden lid. Beneath it was a little grate for a coal fire to heat the water.

Her flat irons could be hooked onto the front of the grate to heat; and Desi had ingeniously connected appropriate flues to the house's main chimney.

Desi collected the dirty washing from her clients and returned it clean, by humping it on his back in a canvas kitbag.

She owned the outdoor clothesline which, by careful arrangement, Martha also used for her
rags. Outside Ellen's door, in the court, stood an old-fashioned wooden mangle.

On wet days, she had lines on which she dried the washing spread across the cellar and across her living room.

The last thing Auntie Ellen needed was children running in and out of her clean, flapping washing.

‘Ellen, what's up?'

Ellen turned a troubled face towards her.

‘It's Mary Margaret,' she said, as she shifted Minnie on her knee. ‘She come down here, when the kids come home, and she had a coughing fit. She spat blood on the floor, and it frightened Kathleen and she run across to find me.'

Kathleen stood silently behind Ellen, her head drooped and her tangled hair covering her face, as she waited for her mother to shout at her for not having enough wit, herself, to deal with such a situation.

Her mother ignored her. She was suddenly engulfed by fear for her friend. Had she leaned on her too much for babysitting?

Her voice trembled, as she asked carefully, ‘And where might she be now?'

‘She's in her room, with Alice Flynn.'

‘Mother of God!'

Martha hitched up her skirts and turned to run upstairs. As she ran, she was followed by Ellen's cry, ‘I sent one of the lads for the nurse!'

Martha paused in mid-flight. ‘Ta, ever so, Ellen,' she shouted back, and tore up the remainder of the steep staircase.

The district nurse might be able to do something to help, she thought, though she was well aware that there was nothing much that could be done for people who spat blood. Coughing up blood meant deadly consumption in your lungs; and that was that, like Martha's own little lass, Colleen, in Leasowe Hospital.

Through the open door of Mary Margaret's windlowless room, candlelight gleamed.

Before entering, Martha stopped to catch her breath.

With her mother, Theresa, standing grimly at the foot of it, Mary Margaret lay on the narrow camp bed which her husband Thomas had bought her, when her illness had become obvious.

Her daughter, Connie, home for lunch, was cuddled in her arms. Above her frightened daughter's head she wheezed laboriously.

Beside the bed, Alice Flynn knelt, one arm flung over both of them to comfort them.

Martha crept in.

‘How is she, Alice?'

Alice looked up. ‘She's breathing easier now.'

‘Praise God.' Martha knelt down beside Alice, to peer into Mary Margaret's face.

‘Can you hear me, love?'

‘Better not talk to her,' interjected Alice.

The wheezing eased for a moment, and Mary Margaret whispered, before taking another laboured breath, ‘I can hear you. And you can stop that nurse coming. She'll want me in the hospital – and I'm not going there.'

She managed a weak laugh. Then she gasped, ‘You only go there to die.'

Theresa croaked agreement. ‘I'm not having my daughter in no bloody hospital,' she said. ‘She'll be better with us.' She stared defiantly at Martha, as if Martha might, without further thought, try to whisk her daughter away.

January 1938

Despite Theresa's and Mary Margaret's protestations, her neighbours affirmed that it was too late to stop the nurse coming.

‘Ellen's lad'll be at her house by now and she'll be on her way on her bike,' Martha said with a knowing look at Alice; they weren't taking any chances. Mary Margaret seemed real ill this time.

Alice wondered if they should call the priest, too. She did not mention this thought, however, for fear of frightening the sick woman to death.

Shaun O'Hara trotted back into the court, shouted to Kathleen, watching anxiously from her doorstep, that the nurse was coming. He then vanished into Auntie Ellen's house.

The arrival of Miss MacPherson, district nurse,
was not immediately noticed by the tenants of the other houses: the shadowed court was chilly and most of the womenfolk were huddled indoors, so they missed this interesting event.

Observing the emptiness of the court, Miss MacPherson assumed correctly that the menfolk were probably hanging round the docks, gossiping in sheltering warehouse doorways after trying for a morning's work – feminine illness would not be unusual enough to bring them home. Those who had a few pennies to spend were likely to be keeping warm in the many stuffy cocoa rooms which lined the dock road.

She nodded to Kathleen, standing with her arms crossed tightly over her chest to help make up for the inadequacies of her precious jacket. The girl's greasy hair hung across her dark, sullen face; but, at the sight of the nurse, her eyes lit up with relief.

She shouted, ‘This way, Miss.'

Because she had been told by Shaun O'Hara that the need was urgent, the nurse had hurried. She had pedalled with all speed in and out of the heavy dockside traffic. Huge drays, pulled by horses as large as elephants, were, as usual, frightening to her; and really, she would never get used to the foul-mouthed lorry drivers leaning out of their
vehicles' windows to curse the slowness of the animals – and of her bicycle.

She now paused to pant for a moment, before wheeling her bicycle over the paving stones towards the expectant girl.

She had, at first, suggested quite strongly to a breathless Shaun that Mary Margaret should be taken straight to hospital. She pointed out that she was a nurse, not a doctor, and she was in the middle of a long list of visits to bedridden patients. It was pure luck, she told him, that he had found her at home: she had forgotten her bottle of iodine and had had to return for it.

As Shaun continued to plead for help for his aunt, however, she finally agreed to a quick visit: she knew only too well the dread these ignorant, feckless people had of all hospitals – and of most doctors who sent you there. On the other hand, a nurse, she reminded herself with a wry smile, was on the same comfortable level as a nun, someone to whom you could confide all your fears, except anything to do with sex.

On checking her notes, she found that she had, once, already visited Mary Margaret, to instruct her family on how to nurse a tubercular patient. She noted that she had ordered a plentiful diet of milk, fresh fruit and vegetables, and lots of fresh air and
sunshine. At that time, she knew she was wasting her breath. But she had done her best.

With a sigh, she now bent to lock her bicycle to the railing guarding the entry to the house's condemned cellar, took her shiny black bag from the basket on the front of the machine, and marched up the steps.

‘Where's the patient?' she snapped irritably to Kathleen, as she realised that she had not only missed her morning coffee but would probably have to forgo lunch as well, thanks to this unexpected call.

Kathleen gulped nervously, hugged her jacket tighter to her, and said, ‘Upstairs, Miss.' She turned into the house.

Miss MacPherson grunted and followed her in.

At the bottom of the stairs, which were to her right, she stopped as the full effluvium of the house hit her. A particularly nauseous wave of the odour of infant excrement rolled over her from the open door of the Connolly room. A woman with a child on her knee was sitting there surrounded by children of all ages. They were unnaturally silent.

They should be back in school was her first thought, as she glanced at her watch.

The children stared at the nurse in her navy uniform, and she stared back at them.

They looked so scared, so wide-eyed. Had the woman died? she wondered suddenly.

Kathleen was waiting for her halfway up the stairs, so she squared her shoulders and plodded silently upwards.

Near the top, Kathleen edged round a very old man, a wraith of a man, sitting on a step. He was the cadaverous, illicit inhabitant of the condemned cellar, and he had taken refuge on the staircase in the hope that it would be a little dryer and warmer than his usual shelter. He was of appalling thinness, with a face like a skull, out of which stared pale-grey eyes bereft of hope.

Used as Miss MacPherson was to the suffering of slum dwellers, she winced. He should be in a warm bed, she thought despairingly: he's near to death.

Despite weakness, he did, however, manage to shuffle himself to one side so that she could pass him. He continued to stare upwards at her face, as, without a word, she squeezed her plump body past him.

His odour was so intense that, seasoned as she was, she held her breath. She knew that there was nothing she could do for him, except advise him to go to the workhouse, where at least he would be fed. She doubted that he would have the strength to get there, so she said nothing.

They had now reached the first landing, and Kathleen preceded her through a door.

‘Mam,' the girl called. ‘She's come.'

Miss MacPherson ran a finger round her starched white collar, and entered.

By the light of an undraped window, she saw an empty, unmade double bed; an old tablecloth, hanging on a clothesline across the room, partially shielded it from the gaze of people walking past.

Much of the room was occupied by a Victorian wardrobe, its double doors closed by a big iron hasp, a huge padlock hanging from it. In it, the oakum pickers, Sheila and Phoebe, kept what little food and valuables they had: the lock was to keep children away from their food and men away from anything else they owned; it was doubtful if the female inhabitants would chance the terrible beating they would get if they stole from each other, and were caught. Furthermore, they trusted Mary Margaret, and she was there most of the time.

Miss MacPherson took all this in, and paused for a moment, puzzled. Then she realised that Kathleen had gone round the bed to another doorway, and was beckoning her. She suddenly recollected that Mary Margaret's rear room was one of the few she had seen that was windowless:
most such rooms had been condemned and closed down.

Martha came forward to greet her, relief clear on her face. She hastily informed the visitor in a loud whisper, ‘She had a proper awful bout of coughing. Then she spat blood, Nurse.' She paused for dramatic effect, and then burst out, ‘And she fainted!'