A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin (31 page)

‘To a dance,' she finally replied. Her sulky expression dared him to ask more.

‘Not you,' he replied tightly. ‘We saw you pick up an airman in Lime Street.'

‘So what? We went to a dance together.'

He took two steps closer to her, and she cringed. All he did was inhale deeply.

He could smell the maleness on her.

‘Give me your purse,' he demanded.

Surprised, she handed her handbag to him.

He took out her purse, opened it, and poured the contents into his calloused hand. There was almost two pounds in it – in change.

‘That's almost what you earn in a week at the
factory,' he said accusingly, as he threw the change back into the handbag. ‘Where did you get it?'

‘I can save,' she told him without much hope.

‘Not you – you're always buying clothes and suchlike. You got a whole boxful of stuff, right here. And you give your mam the same as Kathleen does, I know that.' His voice rose. ‘You're on the street, aren't you, you dirty bitch? You are, aren't you?'

Martha watched the inquisition, her mouth half open. She had always believed that the Catholic school and its nuns, backed by her own Catholic efforts at keeping her girls ‘good', would save them from the streets. She had hoped that they would marry respectably, in spite of living in an overpacked court.

As it dawned on her that she had failed, she burst into loud laments.

Without turning to look at her, Patrick said sharply, ‘Shut up or the neighbours will hear.'

The noise came down a decibel or two.

Patrick tossed the handbag at Bridie. It fell at her feet. As she bent to pick it up, he swung his belt and brought it down hard across her shoulders. As she staggered under the heavy blow, the buckle caught the side of her neck and cut her quite deeply. She gasped with pain and clutched her throat. Then she
ducked a second blow, turned, opened the door and fled down the steps.

They never saw her again. Cold, calculating, with a strange scar on her neck, she became an excellent businesswoman in her chosen profession.

She was careful to keep her job in the munitions factory, because then she was unlikely to be called up. Because of her fatigue, however, she soon gave up walking the streets herself. With an elderly lover of suitably large proportions to act as bouncer, she rented a house in Hill Street and, with four older women working for her, she became known as Madame La Belle.

She taught her women birth control, learned from a chemist who stocked the necessary materials, and she watched their health carefully. Over the years, a surprising number of her women managed to find husbands and left her for a more respectable world.

She never lacked replacements, and, after the war, was able to employ out-of-work younger women, released from their wartime occupations.

She once served a term in prison for keeping a common bawdy house. At the age of forty, however, she still managed to retire with her lover to comfortable obscurity in Birmingham.

Martha wept at her daughter's fall from grace, though she never knew the half of it. To account for the girl's sudden departure, she told the neighbours that she had got a safer job in Preston. ‘Munitions factories is dangerous,' she said.

Unlike her mother, some of the neighbours had caught glimpses of the girl with various men in the town, and they conjectured that she might be pregnant and had been sent away to secretly give birth somewhere else. They sniggered behind their hands.

After a while, Martha's usual optimism returned, and she talked again about going house-hunting. ‘To get a decent place for when the kids come home at the end of the war, and our Tommy's out of hospital,' she explained to Auntie Ellen.

Nowadays, rather than sit on the step with the other women, Ellen tended to sit indoors in a rocking chair bought for her by Desi at a sale. ‘It eases me back something wonderful,' she would sometimes tell Martha.

Seated outside on the step whenever it was warm enough, Helen and Ann hoped that the hospital would soon decide what ailed young Tommy, so that, like Auntie Ellen, he could come home.

Because, unlike his mother, they wandered in areas of the city which he also haunted, they had
seen him quite frequently in compromising circumstances, and they suspected more about Tommy's illness than his mother did. They heartily agreed with her that all her children deserved a better home.

May to September 1941

Quite unaware that she would never see Lizzie or Bridie again, Martha comforted herself with the thought that, one day, the war would come to an end. Then Brian would be discharged from the army and would come home.

She hoped, too, that, in time, Bridie would be smart enough to give up what she was doing, and come creeping home to be comforted by her mam.

As for Lizzie, letters had stopped coming from her some time back, because the girl knew her mam couldn't read them or reply to them, she told herself.

Anyway, who, in civvy street, had time to find someone with leisure enough to write a reply on her behalf, a harassed Martha wanted to know.

After the war Lizzie would surely want to come home to work near her old mam, wouldn't she? Together with Tommy, who would surely recover, Martha would have five sets of children's wages to look forward to, until they all got married. The family would be temporarily rich.

Comforted by these optimistic thoughts, she had a very private cry over Bridie's precipitate departure.

In September, Number Nine went cheerfully off to school. ‘Because I'm five,' he said proudly.

Martha found herself with a little more time to spare, so, in the hope that the war would end soon, she decided to try again to find a house.

She took Patrick's advice and walked south, down to the Dingle, where the loss of homes from bombing had been less severe.

It was a longer walk than she remembered. When she and Patrick were courting, they had walked once or twice down to the Cassie shore by the river, beyond Dingle itself, and had never found the distance a problem – because we was young and in love, she supposed.

Who'd have thought, she ruminated, that it would result in eleven pregnancies, nine of which had survived, though she had lost little Colleen to the dreaded consumption; and that, twenty years
later, she would have only two children at home who were bringing in wages, Kathleen and, normally, Tommy; and three of them still in school.

Even Tommy was not earning for the moment: he had not been well for some time now, but she had put it down to the stress of the bombing. Last time she went to visit him in the hospital, he hadn't talked much and he looked proper sick, she thought. The weary nurse in charge of the ward had been real nice to her, though, and had said that he was still under observation. She suggested that Martha should visit him again in two days' time when the doctor might have a chance to talk to her.

Reluctant to break it to her that her child would be dead in a week or two from the shameful disease of syphilis, the nurse hoped the doctor would tell her.

Martha ignored a house to let in Mill Street, though it looked straight out at the street and was not enclosed in a court: Mill Street didn't have a very good name.

She ambled on, her feet dragging. But there was nowhere to sit to rest for a while, so she continued until she came to Dingle Lane. She hesitated, and then decided to walk down it towards the river and then double back along Cockburn Street which was
close to the riverside; there were rows and rows of respectable-looking little houses in the streets leading off it.

She suddenly found herself facing a high locked gate: she had forgotten the huge petrol installation which lay next to the Herculaneum Dock.

To her left was another narrower gate leading into the installation, and outside it stood a police constable. Despite his uniform and his tall helmet, he looked quite amiable, so, curious, she edged a little closer.

The constable saw a tidy-looking shawl woman in a clean apron hesitating in front of the big gate, and asked her if she had come in reply to the advertisement.

Puzzled, she answered, ‘No. What advertisement?'

With a nod of his head towards what looked like a small office behind him, he replied, ‘They're advertising for women labourers, Missus. It's to clean oil barrels. The men is all called up.'

Martha forgot about house-hunting and remembered only that the fent business was nearing zero. ‘Is it very heavy work?' she inquired.

‘Not really, Missus. They've got some new stuff to clean the barrels with, like a special soap. It's called detergent. I'm told it cleans up oil like you'd never believe.'

Martha smiled her sweetest smile. ‘Could I try for a job, do you think?'

‘Sure. All you have to do is come in here, and go knock on that door there. Say I let you in.'

Her smile became conspiratorial, her eyes twinkling. ‘OK,' she said, ‘let me in.'

A Petroleum Board desperately short of men willing to do a dirty job at the minimum wage ensured that the elderly clerk behind the door was pleased to see her, despite the unpleasant odour surrounding her. He did not, however, invite her to sit down when she told him her errand.

He confirmed that the job was an outdoor one, and asked what experience she had had.

‘I'm a fent woman in the market, but it's hard to find rags to sell now the war is on,' she told him. ‘I'm real strong, though.'

He surveyed her four foot ten inches, and wondered if she could even reach inside a barrel. Then he decided that their need was so urgent that he should give her a chance.

He said he would give her a week on trial. If she was satisfactory, she would work forty hours a week, cleaning up oil barrels for reuse, at a wage which seemed to her to be excellent.

After taking down details of her address, age and state of health, he told her, ‘You should wear
wellington boots to keep your feet dry. We will provide you with a leather apron to protect your skirts.'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘You'll need a warm jacket, not a shawl – and something to cover your head.'

Martha had no idea where she was going to get the garments, but she said, ‘Yes, sir. When shall I start?'

‘Monday. Come into this office at seven thirty am, and I'll give you an identity card, which you must carry at all times. Then, the foreman will tell you what to do.'

He did not tell her how chapped her hands and arms would get in the winter time, how the detergent would strip the skin of her hands of its natural oils; nor did he mention that the residual oil in the barrels would, despite the apron, probably penetrate her clothes and cause a rash on her body. In a war such miseries were secondary, and women like this were pretty tough, anyway.

Martha was staggered at her good luck. She paused by the constable at the gate and thanked him for letting her in.

He returned her grin. ‘You're welcome,' he said. And, as she walked home, Martha tried to remember if she had ever been told before that she was
welcome. She came to the conclusion that she had not.

To think it were a cop what said it to me, she reflected with honest surprise, and she giggled like a young girl.

Her mind busy with how to get to the installation at such an early hour in the morning, after making breakfast for Patrick and the children, she temporarily forgot about house-hunting.

Her room in the court was empty, and the court itself almost deserted, because everybody had work. Only Helen and Ann sleepily gazed up at her from the doorstep: their evening employment never changed. They each held a hunk of bread and a mug of tea. They guessed that, eventually, because they were unmarried, they would be sent to a factory somewhere to work at a full-time job, but it hadn't happened yet. They were thankful.

‘Where you been?' Helen asked.

An excited Martha told them, and then asked, ‘Did the kids come home for dinner?'

‘Oh, aye,' said Helen. ‘They was running round the court with their bread in their hands. What with Bridie being away and Kathleen working, you must miss your girls being here to keep an eye on them.'

‘Oh, aye, I do. But Joe's eleven now, plenty
big enough to take care of Ellie and Number Nine.'

The other women agreed. Then Ann said, ‘It's getting in the food and coal and not being able to queue, if you're at work all day, what is going to bother you most.'

Martha had not given much thought to the problems of shopping when all the shops closed at five o'clock. She shrugged and said, ‘The kids is going to have to do a lot more for themselves, and they got to help me, too. But I'll be bringing in good money, and it won't hurt Patrick to do a bit of queuing. He's like all the men; he ducks out of everything.'

At this last remark, all three women burst into laughter, because it was so true; they rarely saw any man, except the very old, in queues for food or doing battle with the rationing officials.

They commented that, though she had returned from the hospital some months before, poor Ellen still seemed in pain.

‘She's moving round a bit better since she got a rocking chair – nothing like a rocking chair for exercising your back,' said Ann. ‘But I don't think she'll ever have much use in her right arm again.'

‘Poor dear,' responded Martha with feeling.
‘How will she ever do her laundering when the war's finished? When Desi won't have a job as air-raid warden?'

Nobody knew.

September 1941 to 1942

After her interview with the Petroleum Board at Dingle, Martha had a very busy weekend. She found an old peaked cap of Patrick's to wear at work. When she cheerfully popped it on her head, Number Nine laughed, and insisted on trying it on his own head.