A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin (22 page)

She nearly laughed. Ask Matron? Matron rarely came upstairs, and she never gave you a chance to open your mouth, except to make you take a pill.

She noted that the curtains round the bed next to hers had been drawn back. The bed itself had
been stripped and a new pile of neatly folded bed linen was sitting on its mattress. Must've done it in the night, she decided.

‘Where's Pat?' she inquired.

‘In the hospital morgue, I suppose.' Angie's voice was flat, disinterested. ‘There's got to be a coroner's inquest.'

Martha was shocked. ‘Poor Pat. She's dead? I thought the doctor had, maybe, sent her to hospital. I didn't realise she was dying.'

‘For some reason, yesterday, he come upstairs ahead of Matron, and, soon as he seen Pat, he ran down to the office to phone for an ambulance.' Angie grinned wryly. ‘And did he ever give Matron hell, Martha. You could hear him in her office shouting at her – he didn't even bother to shut the door.'

‘Holy Mother! Why?'

‘He reckoned Pat were dying, and, of course, she was, poor thing, and Matron didn't even seem to care about it – and she's supposed to be a registered nurse. This last few days I've been warning her the woman wasn't right.'

There was scorn in Angie's voice and a hint of fear: she dreaded that Matron might push the blame for neglect onto the nursing aides. She paused to collect the towel from under Martha.
Then she went on, ‘Doctor said she should have sent for him days ago.'

Martha suddenly burst into tears again. Poor helpless Pat. Would the same thing happen to herself? she wondered in sudden terror.

A beleaguered Angie forgot that she should have washed her patient's feet. Instead, she said a little conciliatorily, ‘Now, don't take on so, love. She's with God.'

She quickly lifted Martha's skinny legs with their map of varicose veins back into bed, and pulled the bedding roughly over them.

She draped the wet towels over one arm and picked up the basin of water, with the soap and flannel floating in it. Slopping water on the floor en route, she scurried over to the patient by the door. This woman was paralysed and could not talk beyond a few monosyllables: she could not, therefore, complain to anyone about being washed in the same water and using the same towels and flannel as Martha.

Martha herself was immersed in her own frightening predicament. No wonder the doctor had not returned to visit her.

She had been only vaguely aware that something was wrong with Pat, to whom he always went first. In the general murmur of voices, she had heard
the word hospital; she had not thought of her as actually dying.

It was the first death in the home that she had heard of during her residence there, and it scared her.

The cause of her weeping, before the arrival of Angie, had been the remembrance of Mary Margaret's death just before the war had begun. What sparked the memory she could not quite say, except that, in her general misery, she had longed to be visited by a friend, someone she could really talk to. But what few friends she had had in recent years seemed to have forgotten her.

Now, though her mind was beginning to work a little more coherently, her weeping increased. It was not only because she would never again see Mary Margaret, but now, added to her mourning for her friend, was a stark fear for herself.

She heaved the bedclothes over her head to muffle the noise of her moans, and wept on.

‘The best friend I ever had,' she passionately told the bed sheets. ‘And now I haven't got nobody, not even Number Nine, and I can't even write to him.'

1965

The following evening, Angie's relief aide, Freda, was late in arriving for her shift, and, while she waited for her, weary Angie sat down on the end of Martha's bed. She was already dressed in her macintosh and clutched her handbag on her knee.

‘And me wanting to get home to me dad,' she remarked fretfully to Martha. ‘He isn't too well.'

‘Aye, you have to watch them at his age,' Martha agreed. From scraps of information that Angie had let fall from time to time, she understood that the aide's father with whom she lived was very elderly. Old people could die unexpectedly, she ruminated, like when you didn't think they were that ill.

This led to her confiding to Angie the details of
Mary Margaret's death when quite young, and its dreadful consequences for her children.

The choice of subject did not cheer Angie up much. But she was resigned to Martha's stories, so she only half-listened as she waited for the sound of Freda's key in the front door.

‘You know, Angie, I should have seen the signs of it coming, and I should have been right at her bedside to comfort her. It broke me 'eart, it did, that I failed her when she needed her best friend most. I didn't even get to say goodbye to her.

‘At that time, I were so grateful that Patrick had got his fireman's job, it took me mind off her, temporary, like.'

Angie opened her bag to take out her bus fare, as Martha went on slowly, ‘I didn't notice that she hadn't done much sewing for a couple of days – only afterwards I realised it. When Dollie come running and said her mam wouldn't wake up, I whipped upstairs in me bare feet.

‘At least Theresa was with her at the last. But she was so shocked at its coming when she were just sitting in a chair, she looked like she would follow her any minute.

‘You won't know, love, 'cos you're too young, but in them days there wasn't time to cry or even think much. Once the men was called up, nobody
cried for fear of setting off everybody else into hysterics. You just held it in, and got on with what you had to do.

‘And with me sister, Maria, moved out to Norris Green, we was short of women in the courts to turn to.

‘So I sent Dollie to her Auntie Ellen; and one of her sons ran like hell to Nurse MacPherson's house. She had a phone and rang the hospital – in case Mary Margaret wasn't really dead, she told us.'

Angie nodded understandingly.

‘Alice Flynn and Kitty Callaghan took Mary Margaret's youngsters and my kids into Kitty's room, and gave them breakfast. It was the day the autumn term began, so they told Kathleen to take them all to school, except for Number Nine who was too little, of course – Kitty took care of him.

‘Because she would be late for work, Kathleen was that resentful at being landed with having to go out of her way to the school.

‘“Why can't Bridie take them?” she shrieked.

‘I told her flat, “I can't trust Bridie – you know
her.
”'

Angie nodded absently, and wondered if Freda would ever turn up for her shift.

‘But once Kathleen and Bridie really understood what had happened to Mary Margaret, they was ashen, poor lambs. And they was very good.'

She went on to describe how she boiled water on Mary Margaret's primus stove to wash the body, so that by the time the ambulance found the court she and Alice had Mary Margaret all laid out.

‘We told them we needed an undertaker, not an ambulance,' she said acidly.

‘What I always wonder, Angie, is who told Them. Maybe it was Nurse MacPherson. They descended like a cloud of flies on horse shit, they did.

‘Poor Theresa was told by Them that, because she didn't have no doctor, there would have to be an inquest, so they had her body took away.

‘These ladies decided that Theresa herself was too poor and too frail to manage her three granddaughters. You see, there was a problem with Thomas's allotment to his wife. Theresa couldn't draw it for his daughters' keep until he gave the shipping company his permission for them to pay it to her. Without the allotment, she wouldn't have enough housekeeping.

‘So, in spite of Auntie Ellen saying she could help Theresa with them, the kids were took into care. They was sent to Olive Mount the minute they come home from school for their dinner.
They cried their eyes out they did; they was so scared.

‘These know-alls did go, first, across the court to poke around in Ellen's house.'

Martha sighed gustily, as she remembered the result.

‘What with two idle young sons hanging around, not to speak of so much dirty washing, they decided that it was no place for three girls.

‘Believe me, Ellen's boys were so mad that They should think they would abuse the children. Jaysus Mary, how they swore. It was so unfair. And Peter drowneded in the war.'

Martha pinched her lips in long-held indignation. ‘To Them Theys, the court was a den of sin, proper wicked. Didn't it have two known prostitutes in it? Poor Helen and Ann, two of the kindest friends you could wish for. The ladies must have forgotten that Our Lord was good to Mary Magdalene.'

‘Must have been rotten for all of you,' muttered Angie. Would Freda never come? It was an iron rule of Matron's that an aide could not leave the building until her successor arrived. If Freda did not come soon, she herself would have to work a second shift; Matron would insist upon it.

‘It was real hard. Neither Ellen nor me ever saw
those girls again, though, God knows, we looked hard enough for them.'

This mention of the total disappearance of three children caught Angie's attention.

‘Really?' she exclaimed.

‘Well, it were like this. We dealt with Mary Margaret and the coroner, and then a pauper's funeral for her. Then Ellen and Theresa went to the shipping company about getting Thomas's allotment. The shipping company promised to get in touch with the Australian owners of Thomas's ship, to get his permission.

‘Theresa was fair wore out, and a few days later she was in hospital with a heart attack, and she died within a week. Another pauper's funeral, though I doubt if Thomas would have paid for his mother-in-law's burial!

‘Inside a day or two, because the war had broken out, the girls were evacuated to the country with the other kids from Olive Mount.

‘In the awful haste the kids were sent – there was a panic that the cities would be bombed to hell straight away – maybe there wasn't time to make a record or summat to say exactly where each kid went, with them having two moves so close together.

‘Neither Ellen nor I could find anyone to tell us
exactly where they were. Each evacuated child was supposed to be given a postcard to send home with her address. But they never come.

‘You'll have no idea how difficult it was hunting for those kids when you can't read or write, and Ellen and her family was not much better than me.

‘Her hubby, Desi, could do both. But he wasn't very helpful – I don't think he wanted children thrust on him.'

She interrupted her story to remark, ‘One thing we learned in the war was that nobody cared a tinker's cuss about women like Ellen and me – we was barely listened to at all.'

Then, after a few moments' thought, she continued, ‘It was weeks before more distant relations even heard of Mary Margaret's death. And they didn't want motherless kids in their homes. Their own lives was already all upset with the war starting and their men being called up.

‘So we waited and we waited, hoping that Dollie, being eldest, knew her home address and would send the postcard. But she never did.

‘Pretty quick, They made a clean sweep of Mary Margaret's room. It was boarded up as unfit for human habitation: Thomas's few possessions were given to Auntie Ellen for safekeeping. You see,
that made Thomas another nobody: he was then a single seaman, who could find somewhere to live without Their help. All they wanted, once they could contact him, was that he pay for his kids' keep – if they could be traced.

‘Then the war really got going, and that changed everything – for ever. Who would've guessed I'd end up here all by meself and trembling at the very thought of what They might do to me?'

As her voice trailed away, Angie heard Matron speaking in the hall. She got up and tiptoed to the top of the stairs to peep down.

Matron had let Freda in, and, as the aide struggled out of her coat, was scolding her for her tardiness. ‘And where is Angie?' Matron asked. ‘She should still be here.'

Angie promptly called down, ‘I'm here, ma'am. Just checking the patients on this floor before I leave.'

She turned and called goodbye to Martha, and ran quickly down the stairs.

Martha was loath to see her go – at least she was a bit of company, which kept your mind occupied so you weren't quite so scared. Now, she glanced at the empty bed beside her and began to shake uncontrollably.

1965

Half-smothered in grubby bedclothes, Martha barely heard the front door slam after Angie's hasty exit. Yet the distant thud seemed to her to have the finality of the weighty closure of some ancient dungeon door. No escape.

No escape from being left to die unattended like poor Pat, quavered a truly terrified Martha. To be kept in bed by a matron who never spoke to you, until you got so weak that you could not move and eventually died of nothing in particular.

For something comforting to clutch against the powers of Them, she instinctively pulled her rosary from under her pillow.

Dying, and no relations called to fight for you against a ruthless Them. No one tendering precious
bits of food to give you strength. No one rubbing your hands and feet to keep the circulation going. No one holding you in their arms while they gave you sips of water. Worst of all, no one to write to dear Jamie, beloved Number Nine, to tell him where you were.

She swallowed a particularly big sob, and wondered if any of Them had thought to let him know that she was in hospital, never mind this present hellhole. When she had been found at the bottom of the stairs of her house, she had been so faint from pain and hunger that she had barely understood what was happening to her: she had simply let Them take over. There had been the cops and the rent man, she remembered vaguely. Then the ambulance men? The Casualty Department? As she slowly realised through her fright that nobody had asked whether she had any family, it occurred to her that each link might simply have told the next one that she lived alone.