Kitabı oku: «A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin», sayfa 2
‘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.
THREE
‘We Buried Him With Ham’
October 1937 to March 1938
Influenza swept through the courts, and suddenly it was winter, that deadly bitter winter of 1937–1938, a time when lack of coal, lack of light, lack of medical attention and lack of food tested the courage of every man, woman and child: some of them simply gave up; as uninteresting statistics, they quietly died. They left behind them, however, consternation amid their myriad of dependants.
The stalls in the market were practically deserted, and Martha and the inhabitants of Court No. 5 were so desperate that they barely noticed, floating in the background, the black storm clouds of threatening war. All they cared about was how to stay alive each day, and, somehow, keep their big families going. In particular, if their husbands had survived the flu, the women sought desperately to find enough food to keep them fit for any work that might be available.
Two mothers in the next court died, leaving widowers with young children, some of whom also had the flu. This caused a flurried effort, even in Court No. 5, as a little food was collected to be taken in to the stricken families, to help until they could contact relations to come to their aid.
Local charities were besieged, their limited resources stretched. Women begged for coal to heat their freezing rooms, for a blanket in which to wrap a grandfather, for boots for their children’s bare feet, even for pairs of woollen socks, anything woollen.
They especially needed more food, any kind of food. Rubbish bins behind restaurants were climbed into by men, more agile than women and accustomed to the awkwardness of ships’ interiors. The contents of the bins were quickly picked through in the hopes of salvaging table scraps or unfinished cigarette ends. Street rubbish bins were, likewise, anxiously inspected.
Unemployment insurance, Public Assistance or the wages for casual labour all failed to yield more than bare existence, particularly in winters like this remorseless one, where coal was a grim necessity.
In Court No. 5, Mary Margaret’s five-year-old younger son, Sean, died of the flu, and a number of others very nearly did. A Sister of Charity came to help the broken-hearted woman prepare the skinny little body for the ultimate insult, a pauper’s burial: few in the court could afford to pay the Man-from-the-Pru sixpence a week for burial insurance.
Tear-stained Mary Margaret had not the strength to follow the little body to the cemetery: his grim, silent father, Thomas Flanagan, did, however, and watched it being thrown into a common grave.
Mary Margaret’s tears overflowed again, when a neighbour remarked cruelly that the child’s death was not all bad – it was one less to feed.
A week later, her eldest son, Daniel, a ship’s boy, came home after a long voyage. She greeted him with both relief and joy. He had put on a little weight, though his face was pasty, and his voice had broken.
‘You’re my real big lad now,’ she told him as she hugged him to her.
Best of all, he had a bit of money in his pocket. As a result, a good wake for his little brother was unexpectedly enjoyed by the whole building.
‘At least we buried him with ham,’ a weepy Mary Margaret announced with pride to her patient, oakum-picking friends, Sheila and Phoebe, in the adjoining room. With a sigh and a gentle pat of the hand, they agreed with her. Sometimes, kids just died and there was nothing you could do about it.
When all Daniel’s funds had been spent on canned ham, fish and chips, and toddy made from smuggled rum, the songs and rueful jokes exhausted, Mary Margaret relapsed into an apathy broken only by her occasional fits of coughing.
Martha Connolly wished very much that she had a lad at sea. A boy at sea earned little, but you did not have to feed him while he was away. You’d be paying for his kit every week, of course, on the never-never system. But he would still make a few shillings to give to his mother, which she could spend on canvas plimsolls for some of her other children. She could even, perhaps, buy some black wool to crochet herself a new shawl – that would be nice, she considered wistfully – her current one was threadbare and there was no warmth in it. But her own needs were at the bottom of the list.
After Patrick’s unexpected swim at the Pier Head in the milder days of the previous spring, when charities had not been quite so hard-pressed, it had taken her several days to prise out of one of them another pair of boots for Patrick. She had plodded through the narrow streets from charity to charity, begging for boots, so that he could once more stand at the docks, morning and afternoon, waiting for work.
She had endured long interviews in no less than three offices, during her quest, as she was redirected from one charitable organisation to another. Visits by voluntary social workers ensued, to make sure that she belonged to the clean, deserving poor and that her husband was not simply a lazy good-for-nothing. When the first visitor refused to recommend help for such a shiftless-looking household, Martha swallowed her rage as best she could: it was unwise to lose one’s temper with Them.
It was clear to Martha that the second lady visitor, also, was completely overwhelmed by the sight of one small room filled with the impedimenta of daily life. It was cluttered with wooden boxes on which to sit, a pile of rags in a corner, presumably on which to sleep, and an old mattress leaning against a wall; even the mantelpiece was heaped with grubby rags. In the middle of the floor sat five children, shouting and arguing as they played with pebbles.
As she viewed the room, one small girl got up, hitched up her skirt to exhibit a bare bottom and peed into a bucket. Unconcerned at a visitor being present, she returned to the game. The outraged visitor turned and walked out. Her written report was damning about a mother who would so neglect a child’s manners.
As she had walked through the court itself, the third visitor had heaved at the odour of the lavatories. Before knocking at the open door of the house, she wrapped her scarf across her nose and hoped she would not be sick. She gave the name of her charity and Martha asked her to come in.
She spent about one minute at the door, surveying nervously a room in which a number of children were quarrelling violently, striking out at each other with fists and bare feet.
Martha shouted angrily to her warring offspring, ‘You kids get out – now! Or I’ll tell your dad.’
The noise stopped. The children stared at the visitor. One of them sniggered. Martha belted her across the head and pushed her towards the door. The visitor hastily got out of the way.
Protesting and snivelling, the children shoved each other through the narrow doorway into the courtyard, where their original altercation recommenced.
The visitor swallowed. She took a notebook and pencil out of her side pocket. ‘Now,’ she said with false brightness through the thickness of her scarf, ‘how many bedrooms do you have?’
Though used to the idiosyncrasies of visitors from Them, Martha looked at the woman in amazement and wondered what relation bedrooms had to boots.
‘We haven’t got none,’ she said slowly. ‘We sleep here.’
‘Where is your kitchen?’
Martha began to lose patience. ‘This is our everything,’ she said dully through gritted teeth.
‘My God!’ muttered the lady. She had read the Connollys’ file before the visit. It had not registered with her that the room, described by an earlier visitor a few years previously, was the only room which the family rented. She was shocked by Martha’s remark. The file had also given details of the family’s financial circumstances and included some unkind remarks on the incompetence of the parents.
Martha passed wind, and the visitor looked round her a little wildly; the stench was unbearable.
She took a small breath, and then said, her voice faint, ‘Tell Mr – er – um – Connolly to come to the office on Monday and we’ll try to find a pair of boots which will fit him.’
She pushed past Martha and fled down the steps. As she passed the overflowing rubbish bins, her neat black shoes skidded on the ordure-covered paving stones. A couple of men idling at the entrance hastily made way for her, and she ran out onto the crowded pavement of the main street.
Gasping for breath, she wondered, as she turned to walk back to her office, how she could ever report such awful conditions and filthy people as suitable for aid; there was nothing to recommend them at all: they were neither clean nor respectable – nor trustworthy. She had feared that her pockets might be picked while in the court: she had not brought a handbag lest it be stolen.
But she pitied them. In a way, she understood their dilemmas. How could you get washed in a room full of people? With, at the back of it, another room opening into it, which housed another family?
If the Connolly man was to get boots on his feet, she must state, without even seeing the man himself, that he was worthy of them and was not likely to sell them.
In a wash of compassion and against her better judgement, that is what she did. And Patrick got his boots.
Martha breathed a prayer of thankfulness to St Jude, patron saint of lost causes.
At the first charity to which Martha had applied for boots, the volunteer who interviewed her and checked the Connollys’ file had scared Martha nearly to death. She had remarked sharply, ‘Your eldest son Brian is working, I see. That should be of help to you.’
Full of dread that the worker would tell the Public Assistance Committee that Brian was indeed working, Martha admitted that he was a butcher’s errand boy. This fact had not been revealed by Patrick to the relieving officer. If he had done so, the officer would have deducted most of the boy’s wages from the allowance or from the food vouchers they had sometimes to beg from him.
‘He earns five shillings a week, but I’ve got to feed him and see he looks clean, like – it takes all he earns,’ Martha explained patiently.
The interviewer looked at her with undisguised disgust; her toothless mouth, her face mahogany in colour from never having been washed, the vile stench of clothes never taken off and, under them, a body never bathed since birth.
It did not occur to the untried volunteer that cleanliness cost money: in her world, there were always towels, soap and hot water in the bathroom. She had yet to see a court.
‘She asked me if I thought I was deserving of help,’ Martha had wailed to Mary Margaret. ‘Deserving? And me trying to make one egg stretch round six kids this morning, and little Colleen still sick in Leasowe Hospital and I can’t even get to go and see her.
‘And I didn’t have much luck selling me rags in the market, this week, neither.’
She cleared her throat and spat onto the paving stones.
‘As if it’s our fault if there’s no work and the men get drunk when they draw their unemployment or their Public Assistance or their wages. Wouldn’t they need a little bit of somethin’ to cheer them up if they was workless? Or a glass or two to ease their thirst, after all the sweat they lose when they do work?’
She glanced miserably round the darkening court. ‘Do they think we enjoy it?’
Mary Margaret laughed weakly. ‘Oh, aye. I think they do. They think that if we didn’t like it, we’d leave it. Or if we weren’t lazy, we’d clean it up.’
Martha looked at her aghast. ‘And how do they think we’d do it with no water to speak of and the lavs spilling over all the time? And me broom is worn out. And if we leave, where are we going to go? I’d like to know that. We’ve got to be close to the docks for Pat and Thomas’s sake.’
‘Martha, love, they don’t know nothin’. You have to go and tell them and hope for the best.’
‘Well, I got the boots in the end,’ Martha responded, a hint of triumph in her voice. ‘They’re second-hand, and they’re too big for him – he’s got a wad of newspaper in them, so he don’t trip up and have a fall. It’s so easy to fall in a ship.’
Amongst the hapless community strode, occasionally, an elderly Catholic priest, his biretta crushed down on his bald head, his long black robes nearly brushing the filthy ground. Women were afraid of him, as were some of their husbands, because behind him stood the wrath of God, who did not like sinners who drank at the Baltic Fleet or the Coburg, or who had suspiciously small families which might indicate a form of birth control in use.
Yet, the priest and his assistant, Father James, were sorely grieved by the suffering they saw daily in their crowded parish, already famous as a surviving remnant of the worst slums in Britain. All they could do was to preach obedience to God’s will, acceptance of the circumstances to which men were born, and the glories of the life to come.
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