A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin. Helen Forrester

the interviewer’s assessment.

      Behind the social workers’ backs, Martha and Mary Margaret would laugh at their suggestions that, if they did not drink or smoke, they might save a little money to improve their lot. If their requests for specific help were refused, they simply begged somewhere else. In truth, the problems the women faced were so huge that it was beyond the scope of any individual to do much to right them.

      Men put their small hopes on choosing a winning horse in the day’s races or winning a game of pitch-and-toss – or the football pools. Unfortunately for their families, in the majority of cases they lost.

      Martha thanked the Virgin Mary and the saints regularly that Patrick did not drink his way through all the Public Assistance he received when out of work; he gave her at least half and shared his cigarettes with her. She screamed at him regularly for more. But in her heart she loved him and understood his need to get something for himself out of his thankless existence, even if he was at home on Public Assistance.

      As a result of being kept out of school as a girl, to look after her siblings, Martha herself could neither read nor write. This put a severe limitation on how she could earn a living or understand what was going on in the world outside the confines of the waterfront. She trusted to the constant gossip in her little community to keep her informed on the latest news.

      She would say determinedly to Mary Margaret or Alice Flynn or anyone else who would listen, ‘You gotta get on with life.’ And, with constant hefty sighs, she did.

      She did her best to keep the family alive from day to day, and Patrick did his best to control his urge to hit her when she yelled at him.

      It grieved her that this very morning, despite the bitter wind bringing warning icy blasts of cold into the court, Patrick had gone out, as usual, with only bread and a cup of tea in his stomach, to stand around in the open at 7 am, waiting at a dock gate amid a crowd of others.

      Amongst the rags for sale which she collected from better homes, from dustbins, or from the local pawnbroker as unsaleable junk, she had found a badly worn man’s woollen pullover. Patrick had thankfully put it on under his shirt so that its disrepair did not show.

      A little smile had broken the deep lines of his chapped face, as she had stood watching him pull it down and tuck it into his trousers. He sadly inspected the holes in the elbows and the ragged cuffs.

      ‘It’ll keep your chest a bit warm,’ she assured him.

      ‘Ta, ever so,’ he said unexpectedly with a sly grin, as he reached for his grey collarless shirt.

      As he tucked in his shirt, she saw for a moment the young man she had married. She thought how lucky she had been to marry a man who was often kind and rarely beat her, despite her own merciless nagging of him.

      When he had picked up his docker’s hook and had gone, she had sat by the fire on the orange box, nursing Number Nine for a few minutes. He had been fussing much of the morning, despite the piece of crust she had given him to chew. The boil he had on his bottom must be troubling him, she decided: he would feel better when it burst.

      She wrapped her shawl round him, and he snuggled into her breast, but she was dry and could not feed him.

      Finally, when he seemed a little comforted she let him slip down from her knee to join the other children.

      Despite the cold, Kathleen had opted to escape to school, so Martha instructed Bridie, aged twelve, ‘Now you mind him, and don’t let him bother Auntie Mary Margaret. I’m going up to the Lee Jones.’

      Bridie was deeply involved in a game of I Spy with Mary Margaret’s girls. She looked up sourly through straggling rat tails of hair, cunning brown eyes gleaming as if she were about to say something vicious. But, after a moment, she silently shifted herself to make space for the child to sit by her; she then raucously rejoined the game.

      Delighted to be included in a big girl’s game, Number Nine joyfully tried to chant, ‘Spy! Spy!’

      Martha got up. Bridie was a real tartar. She wished, with a sigh, that her daughters were as passive as those of Mary Margaret – except for Dollie, of course. Dollie was like Bridie, a proper cross for any mother to bear.

      She took a large metal ewer from a corner and screwed its lid on tighter to make sure it still fitted. Then she said to Mary Margaret, ‘I’m going to have a whack at the Lee Jones. See if I can get some soup. Where’s your jar? I’ll try to get some for you.’

      Mary Margaret nodded and ordered, ‘Our Connie, you go and get it – it’s in the wooden box.’

      After several wails from the upstairs room of ‘I can’t find it, Mam,’ and shouts of further direction from Mary Margaret, Connie came pounding down the stairs, and handed to Martha a big, old-fashioned sweet jar with a screw-on lid. Its exterior was still grubby from its previous visits to various soup kitchens.

      ‘Soup?’ she inquired hopefully, pale-blue eyes wide.

      ‘Can’t promise, love. They may run out.’

      Connie was not yet seven years old, but she already understood the power of Them. They were people who decided how your life would be lived. They themselves lived in faraway parts of Liverpool called Princes Park or Orrell or even further away in places called Southport and Blundellsands. Sometimes they lived across the river, and you could watch them coming off the ferries each morning, to work in the big buildings by the Pier Head. One of the buildings there always seemed special to her; it had two huge dicky birds perched on the top of it, and she dreamed that, one day, she might travel on the ferry and have fancy clothes and a fancy job in that very building.

      As she quietly handed the jar to Martha, she reflected that They did sometimes give you bits and pieces to help you out – but not always.

      At Martha’s remark, her face fell, and Martha chucked her under the chin. ‘Cheer up, chick. Auntie Martha’ll do her best for you.’

      But Connie did not smile. With the back of her hand, she simply rubbed the mucus off the end of her nose and turned back to the fireplace, to rejoin the game of I Spy. Connie was learning, slowly and reluctantly, the deadly acceptance of life that her mother had.

      To facilitate transporting the ewer and the big jar, Martha stowed them in an old perambulator, kept in a recess behind the building’s front door. It was very difficult to get the pram in or out of the recess without opening the door of her own room to make enough space, so it was fairly safe from theft.

      The pram was the most useful possession she had; it not only carried Number Nine, Ellie and Joseph whenever she had to take them out, but it could hold a hundredweight of coal or a pile of old bedding bought for tearing into rags. Without it, she knew she would find it difficult to function.

      She bumped the pram down the front steps, lifted her shawl over her head and went out to face the elements and the world of Them.

      FIVE

       ‘Me Pore Feet’

       January 1938

      The water in the freezing puddles squished through the cracks in her boots, as she trudged slowly up to Limekiln Lane, the site of the office of Lee Jones’ League of Welldoers. She had not recently approached the League for help and she hoped that she would not be noticed as a regular beggar: she had learned from experience that one should not go too often to the same place; they got tired of you.

      If the League’s premises had been closer to her home, she would have sent the younger children themselves to beg a meal; they would almost certainly have been fed. But there was food for Patrick, Brian and Number Nine to think about, too; the weather was so bad that she feared that they might become ill if they did not get something hot to eat: Tommy and Joseph were already coughing badly, and all the children were snuffling with colds.

      Like Patrick and the children, she had