A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin (30 page)

Sheila looked at her doubtfully. ‘So you understand about it? That goddamned Matron didn't, when I tried to explain it to her. Said it was me imagination.'

‘For sure, I understand. Heard more than one old soldier complain the same, in me time.'

They beamed at each other. As Martha looked into a pain-lined face and saw a sudden twinkle in bloodshot hazel eyes, she knew she could do something for this woman. She could be useful to her by simply being a friend.

You had to work at easing a friend's sorrow: it took time. She knew that from experience. She stretched out her hand towards the other bed, and Sheila thankfully grasped it.

In the comfortable silence which ensued, Martha remembered to quietly thank the Dear Virgin Mother for sending her a friend.

‘'Ave you got a rosary, Sheila?' she asked.

‘Oh, aye, it's about all I have got.'

Martha chuckled. ‘Same with me.' And, for no reason that they could think of, they both began to laugh at their penniless predicament.

May to June 1941

The landmine in the court was delicately disassembled by two extraordinarily young, light-footed soldiers. It was then carefully carted away, and the Connolly family and their neighbours returned home. They spent some time staring into the hole left in the paving, until the City sent an elderly man to shovel the bits of broken stone into the hole and roughly patch it over.

Though pressed by Martha, Patrick had refused to do this temporary repair. He was the only physically strong man left in the court, other than the harried Desi, who also refused.

‘I've had enough,' Pat said flatly. ‘I'm run to death and you know it.'

Martha reluctantly agreed. Often he was home
only long enough to snatch a few hours' sleep between raids. He sometimes fell onto the mattress without eating his dinner and slept immediately.

As the year progressed, air raids became more frequent, impatiently accepted as inevitable. Overworked women, without the support of their menfolk, grew grim-faced and more careworn.

While Patrick drove his fire engine through streets illuminated only by blue flares dropped by enemy planes, his family, desperately seeking sleep, went down to James Street underground station at night. There, they curled up wherever they could find a corner of platform or stairs, and slept.

In order to catch the trains which would carry them under the river to the relative safety of the Wirral Peninsula, passengers edged carefully amongst them to reach the one-foot wide space of platform along the edge of the railway line. The railway employees insisted on this area being kept clear so that they could board their trains.

The frightened refugees shared fleas, lice, influenza, coughs and colds with hundreds of others.

Only when dysentery became common and the railway company disgusted with human waste on the lines, did the local government put portable lavatories into the underground stations; as with
the rest centres, it was argued that lavatories would encourage the frightened Liverpudlians to stay longer: they might even live in the stations.

They also irritably pointed out that the refugees from the bombing were already at fault for trespassing on railway property and certainly should not be there at all. Their presence had to be discouraged: they could be prosecuted.

In London, the government finally realised that Liverpool, as the headquarters of Western Command, had to be better protected from air raids.

Barrage balloons appeared in the sky, and Martha became fascinated by their floating silently overhead; she would stand in the street and watch them dancing slowly above her like friendly, airborne elephants.

Tommy explained to her that they stopped the Jerries from dive-bombing or machine-gunning the streets by keeping the enemy planes at a higher altitude.

‘It makes it harder for them to machine-gun vehicles like Dad's fire engine,' he told her.

‘Well, that's nice to know,' she said. But she wondered if it made much difference whether you were killed by a bomb dropped from a height, or a closer bullet.

He also told her that the Spitfires, which eventually went up to challenge the German planes, were piloted by Polish airmen, who were allies.

‘They come over when Poland was taken by the Jerries.'

‘Oh, aye, I know that,' said Martha. ‘Seen lots of Poles around.'

Though she had spent little time in school and could not read, Martha knew of the existence of Poland and most other countries. Liverpool was a great port. In the pubs and in the narrow streets, she often met and talked with seamen or their wives. When anything momentous happened in the world, it always seemed to Martha that she met a sailor who had been there at the time and had witnessed the occurrence. It was a great way of getting news.

To the regular swarms of seamen were soon added serving men, like the Poles, in a variety of uniforms from all over Europe. In addition, came skilled British craftsmen transferred from the south or the Midlands to work in new factories in Speke or to serve the ships crowding into the Mersey.

They were joined by a ragtag of bewildered refugees from Europe, including Germans who had been trade unionists or Communists in their native land and were, in consequence, targets of the Nazis.

Finally, dispossessed and terrified, came Jews from a dozen countries with stories of horrors which were almost unbelievable.

They were soon joined by hordes of youngish, single British women, called up to work in factories far from their homes. These women had never earned so much in their lives and were out to enjoy what they earned. They bought clothes and food on the black market, to the irritation of local women old enough to be their mothers who could not afford to do this; and Tommy, in his early teens, learned the pleasure of having female partners, who paid well.

Finally, came the American soldiers, pouring into Burtonwood, the largest military camp in the world. They had more money, more chocolates and more of the new nylon stockings than anyone in the back streets of Liverpool had ever dreamed of.

‘They're like Cadbury's in uniform,' remarked Martha, ‘and they got more nice stockings than George Henry Lee's.'

The call-up or transfer of their menfolk and their single daughters, with the consequent disintegration of the support system of long-established neighbourhoods, played havoc with families. Absolutely carelessly, the government mixed up the population of the country in a way that it had
never been since Viking raids a thousand years before.

They failed to predict a fast increase in illegitimate births and an alarming growth in sexual diseases, particularly syphilis which, even before the war, had been considered endemic in Liverpool.

Painfully aware of the danger to her girls, Martha scolded Kathleen and Bridie when they were out late.

‘How you going to get a good husband,' she screamed at them, ‘if you don't have a good name?'

Before the war, girls knew very well that they must guard their reputation with considerable care. It did not do to be too flirtatious or to walk the streets in the dark with a boy, until you were being seriously courted by a young man, and were walking arm in arm together: it would be presumed that, after showing his intentions publicly, he would take the girl home to be inspected by his mother, after which a very long engagement, complete with ring, would usually ensue.

Now, both Kathleen and Bridie laughed good-naturedly at Martha's warnings.

‘Ach, don't be so old-fashioned,' they said; and as soon as they had earned enough to pay for suitable attire, they went dancing and met young men that they would never have even seen before the war.

It did not take Kathleen and Bridie long to learn the finer points of sex.

Tommy knew all too well. He found himself unexpectedly worried at what his sisters might be doing, when he was himself stricken by pain from a hard sore on his penis.

Afraid to tell anyone, he endured as best he could.

He relaxed, however, when the sore appeared to heal. He decided that he had been mistaken, and went back to looking each evening for pretty, willing young women.

During the day, he worked for Brian's late employer, Mr Beamish, the butcher, which pleased Martha very much.

Mr Beamish had welcomed him. He had already lost his two assistants to the army, and had been battling the problems that meat rationing had imposed upon him, aided only by a very elderly retired butcher.

Soon after Tommy had begun to learn how to reduce an animal to a myriad of small, edible rations, he came home with a throat so sore that he could hardly speak, a rash and a bad headache. Dosed with hot tea and a lot of aspirin, he continued to drag himself to the butcher's shop: at least it took him out of the fetid atmosphere of
the Connollys' room; even a butcher's shop was better than that.

Then, one busy Friday, while dealing with a long queue of women waiting hopefully for some unrationed liver or kidneys, the lad crashed to the sawdust-besprinkled floor in what appeared to be a faint. Shocked women crowded round him, recommending a glass of water, which did not help.

A nearby doctor was called, and the lad was shipped off to hospital.

A couple of hours later, when Mr Beamish had sold all his stock, he closed his shop and fled to the court to tell Tommy's parents what had happened.

Directed to the correct door by Helen O'Brien, who was sitting on the step, he found Martha napping on the mattress, while Kathleen made herself some tea. He blurted out what had occurred, and retreated from the stinking room as fast as he could.

As she snatched up her shawl, a very distressed Martha ordered Kathleen to watch the children, and made all haste to the hospital. Hospitals meant death. But not, O Lord, for Tommy, she prayed frantically; he's too young.

At the hospital, she was coldly informed by a
supercilious clerk that Tommy would remain in hospital ‘under observation'. She could visit him any afternoon. Mystified, she was allowed to her son's bedside in a huge ward to visit him. She could not wake him from his drugged sleep.

She went slowly home and duly reported what had happened to Patrick.

‘Well, if he's that dead asleep, he won't feel any pain,' remarked Patrick, trying to be comforting. ‘They'll know in a day or two what's the matter and then they'll do something about it.'

‘Oh, aye,' Martha agreed with a sigh. ‘I can't be huntin' for rags to sell and going to the market with them, and then drag meself down here to visit him every afternoon. I'm getting real good prices nowadays – and we'd know it if I stopped earning. What am I going to do?'

‘If they've got him that sound asleep, he won't know if he's got a visitor or not.'

Martha agreed. Though she worried about him, she went to the hospital very infrequently, and the answer was always the same. ‘He's under observation.' She never questioned the studied vagueness of the replies she got from the nursing staff, and he always seemed to be deeply asleep. But Martha cheered herself up by noting that he was still breathing.

She would not have felt so concerned if it had been either Kathleen or Bridie lying there. She had always found both of them awkward to deal with, a constant worry as they grew older and more wayward. In fact, she would be thankful if both of them got called up, except that she would miss their wages.

She took it as an insult, however, when, the following year, Kathleen unexpectedly volunteered the day she was eighteen.

As for Bridie, she proved to be a shocker. ‘I was that ashamed,' Martha later confided to Ann O'Brien. ‘At first, I couldn't believe it.'

Ann thought sadly, Well, I saved Kathleen for you.

Soon after the May Blitz, hard-headed Bridie realised that, properly handled, prostitution could be lucrative. She was sixteen.

Small, plain, but prettily dressed, she discovered her own abilities. She continued to live with her parents and to work in the daytime as a cleaner in a munitions factory because this made her exempt from call-up. Late in the evening she would dress as if she were going to a dance, and make rather more money by quietly standing near the entrance to Lime Street Station watching the uniforms swarming by.

Still blithely unaware of exactly what Tommy's illness was, Martha and Patrick accidentally discovered Bridie's part-time occupation.

One raidless evening, when the Coburg had no beer and was shut, the couple had ventured out to a cinema in Lime Street. On coming out after the film was over, they saw her, in the dim light of a passing car, accost an airman.

They had imagined her dancing in one of the fairly respectable clubs in their own neighbourhood, and, at first doubted that it was her.

‘It can't be her,' whispered Martha. ‘She wouldn't dare.'

‘It's her all right,' muttered her weary husband, as anger surged in him.

An outraged Martha wanted to go straight up to her and haul her away.

Patrick restrained her. ‘Wait till she comes home,' he advised. ‘She's over sixteen now and she could very well tell a cop that you assaulted her.'

Martha spluttered. ‘But we can't let her go off with him.'

‘She's probably done it before,' Patrick replied bitterly.

They had to wait up until four in the morning.

She came almost silently up the steps and into
the hall. She carefully turned the knob of their door and entered like a ghost. She paused when she saw that a candle was still burning and that her father was standing accusingly to one side of the mattress, upon which Joseph, Ellie and Number Nine lay sleeping.

Her mother gazed at her apprehensively from their only chair.

‘Where you been?' Patrick snarled, his belt twitching in his hand like a lion's tail just before it springs.

She slowly took off her hat and kicked off her high-heeled shoes before answering.