A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin. Helen Forrester

trolleys of sacks of wool from dockside to warehouse and stacking them neatly into ever higher piles, as a biting wind blew remorselessly up the river. He had then walked back through ill-lit, almost deserted streets where thin rain still whirled in the wind.

      Although he had bought himself a quick lunch at a tiny café during a brief break, he was very hungry: the thick cheese sandwich, made from white bread, had been decently large and the mug of tea welcome; nevertheless, it had cost him his last twopence. He hoped that Martha would have something better waiting for him.

      She had, of course, put aside Patrick’s share of soup, potatoes and bread. Like most other women, it was the fundamental tenet of her life that he was the wage earner and had to be fed first; the fact that she also earned rarely occurred to her.

      Nearly half the ewer of thick soup lay warming in the hearth in front of the fire; and a quarter of a loaf of bread, together with two big potatoes, had been rewrapped in one of her cleaner rags and placed in the oven, where she could watch that the children did not attempt to steal it. She longed to have some soup herself; but she refrained for fear that the food she had kept for Patrick was not enough for a labouring man.

      The only light in the room was from the embers in the range and it was comparatively quiet.

      Bridie had had her face wiped and a clean cotton frock found for her. Still complaining that the garment was too small for her, she and her sister Kathleen had gone upstairs to be reunited with a Dollie now in a much better temper and full of bread and jam given her by a wise and sympathetic Auntie Ellen.

      They were going to play cards, by the light of a candle, and had been warned by Martha that they must do it quietly because ‘Your Auntie Mary Margaret is resting.’ She was glad to be rid of them for a while; it made more space in the room for her husband.

      Joseph, Ellie and Number Nine slumbered on the mattress at her feet.

      Tommy had gone to visit one of his pals in the court house nearest the street entrance. Brian worked late on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Martha’s eyes drooped and she, also, had nodded off to sleep.

      As the door opened to admit Patrick, she awoke with a start. He paused to allow his eyes to adjust to the dim red glow of the fire. Then, with a mere nod towards his wife, a vague shadow in the gloom, he picked his way past the mattress on the floor, and sat down with a thud on the old wooden fruit box opposite her to heave off his donated boots. He rubbed his freezing toes in front of the dying embers of the fire, and then looked ruefully at a blister on his heel.

      Martha stood up and stretched herself. She gestured to the vacated chair, and said, ‘Come and sit here – it’s comfier, and give me your mac; I’ll hang it on the line over the fire – it’ll be dry by morning.’

      Still silent, he stood up in his bare feet and padded across the mattress on the floor towards the chair, being careful not to tread on his sleeping children. He took off his mac and handed it to her. His jacket underneath was also damp, so he divested himself of it and silently passed it to her. Then he sat slowly down on the chair and leaned his head back. He longed for a pint of ale.

      After hanging up his clothes and loosening the laces in his boots, so that the heat got to their interior, Martha briskly moved the hob with the kettle on it over the fire. It began to sing almost immediately.

      She opened the oven door and first took out a large empty white pudding basin put there to warm. She silently handed it to Patrick to hold. Then she lifted the tin ewer out of the hearth.

      ‘Hold the basin steady,’ she instructed, and when he had it firmly on his knee, she slowly slopped the soup into it. Finally, she turned the jug upside down and shook out a few recalcitrant bits of carrot. She straightened up, smiled, and said, ‘There you are.’

      She fetched another box from the other side of the room and placed it beside Patrick. Then she unlatched the oven door, took out the bundle of bread and potatoes and laid it on the box.

      From the mantel shelf, she took down a ladle, which she had earlier used to measure out soup for the children, and handed it to him. It had not been washed, but he took it from her without comment. He opened up the bundle, broke some of the bread into the soup, and began to slurp the food into his mouth.

      Though he knew he had had to leave her without money that morning, he did not ask where the soup had come from: Martha always found food somehow. She sold her rags in the market, didn’t she? Tommy brought in pennies and, occasionally, a silver threepenny piece, which he earned, according to him, from holding the bridles of carthorses while the drivers went into a pub for a quick pee and a drink. Brian gave her his five-shilling wage each week, and Lizzie, his girl in service, sometimes sent her mother a one-shilling postal order from her tiny wages. And, when he himself earned, he always gave her enough for the rent and a bit over for coal and candles, didn’t he?

      As food and warmth began to put life into him again, he admitted idly to himself that he drank too much and it took money – but she herself could get through several half-pints while sitting in the passageway of the Coburg with the other women, while he drank in the bar with his friends. The brightly lit pub was the only warm refuge they had, the only consolation which kept him going from day to day, week to week.

      He grinned. Most of the children had been conceived in the narrow, fairly sheltered alleyway behind the pub, while they were a little drunk and still sufficiently warm to enjoy the encounter.

      While he ate, Martha poked the fire, and then made a fresh pot of tea, courtesy of Mary Margaret, who had given her a couple of spoonfuls of tea leaves in thanks for bringing her the soup and bread. She laid two mugs on the floor beside the range, where they could be visible in the firelight. She then sat down close to Patrick on yet another sturdy fruit box, used for storing coal.

      Inside the box were a few lumps of coal, which Mary Margaret had also given her. Since Mary Margaret’s room did not have a fireplace, she cooked what little she had to cook on a primus stove. When she did not have paraffin for her stove, she would put a stew pot beside Martha’s on Martha’s fire.

      Mary Margaret’s Dollie thought it was a great game to follow a coal cart round the local streets and pick up any lumps that the coalman dropped. When he lifted the one-hundredweight sacks from his cart and carried them across the pavement to pour the contents down the coalhole in front of each terraced house, she would listen for the clang of the lid being put back onto the hole, and for the weary man to shuffle away. Then she would race over and pounce on any small bits she could find. Sometimes, when the horse moved with a jerk to the next house, a few pieces would roll off the back of the cart. Quick as a cat after a mouse, she would garner these, too, before any other child could beat her to it. She would bring it all back to her mother in an old cloth bag.

      Her mother promptly gave the coal to Martha in thanks for being allowed to share her fire. She would tell Dollie, ‘Without your Auntie Martha, I don’t know what I’d do, I don’t.’

      As Patrick finished the last ladleful, he gave a small sigh of relief, and handed the bowl back to his wife. She put it with the ladle on the mantel shelf: if it had stopped raining by tomorrow, she would take out anything to be washed to the pump in the court and rinse it there.

      She picked up a potato from the box top and, with a little smile, handed it to him. He tore it into pieces and ate all of it, including the skin.

      After he had finished eating, he belched and then sat for a while staring silently at the glowing embers.

      When Martha felt he was rested enough, she broached the subject which was worrying her most. She asked, ‘Did you know that Court No. 2 is to be emptied? That means that our Maria and George has got to move.’

      Patrick belched again, and then said, ‘Oh, aye. George told me. They’re getting a new house in Norris Green.’

      ‘What’s he going to do out there?’

      Patrick gave a grim laugh. ‘Go on Public Assistance. He’ll have to sling his hook.’

      Martha nodded. George would, indeed, have to hang up his docker’s hook for ever, if he was