The Four Streets Saga

by Nadine Dorries

  Nellie was in heaven. Kathleen brought everything into the home a mother should and, as time passed, Nellie loved the way that all the women now popped into their house for a chat and to have a fuss with Nana Kathleen. It was as if she was everyone’s mammy. Alice never made a word of complaint; she knew she couldn’t.

  Maura never dreamt it would be possible for things to alter as much as they had. For the first time, Jerry’s back door began to open and people walked in. Nellie noticed the women never spoke much to Alice. It was now definitely Nana Kathleen’s house. The cuckoo in the nest had been put firmly in her place. But it really didn’t matter; on forty milligrams of Valium a day, Alice couldn’t have cared less.

  ‘Writing to me mammy was the best thing I have ever done in me life,’ Jerry said to Tommy, one day soon after Kathleen’s arrival. ‘Even Nellie is putting on the weight now. We all are.’

  ‘What could I say to him?’ said Tommy to Maura, when he got home that night. ‘I wanted to say, aye, well, what’s the use of Alice, why didn’t you just send for Kathleen in the first place?’

  ‘Because he’s a man and he’s proud,’ said Maura, ‘and, like with all men, pride comes before a fall.’

  Kathleen’s price for staying was for Jerry to trip down to the off-licence every Friday and Saturday night and bring her back two bottles of Guinness. She would put the poker into the fire and, when it was red hot, plunge it into the Guinness.

  ‘That’s me iron, Queen,’ she would say to Nellie, who watched this ritual with fascination.

  On Fridays, Kathleen went down to the bingo with all the other women and even took Alice with her once or twice. Kathleen was teaching Alice to knit; although she wouldn’t touch baby clothes, she had been knitting Jerry a scarf for weeks.

  Life settled down into a steady pace. The kitchen was like an advice surgery every morning and Nellie loved listening to the problems that everyone brought to Nana Kathleen.

  One morning young Sheila came in, crying, with her newborn baby. She had four now and looked exhausted.

  ‘Kathleen,’ she cried, ‘this babby hasn’t slept a minute since it was born, what am I to do, I’m near at me wits’ end.’

  It took Kathleen mere seconds to diagnose the problem. ‘A baby with cold feet never sleeps,’ she said. ‘Get some socks and some booties on its feet. Here, give him to me.’

  Kathleen sat in front of the range with the baby on her lap and his bare feet facing the fire. She rubbed and warmed his feet between her hands and, slowly, the baby calmed. Within ten minutes, he was sleeping soundly. Nellie sat and grinned, feeling very important in having such a nice and clever nana.

  Her life had been totally transformed. She now loved going to school and when she arrived home she ran in and out of the house with the other kids to play, rather than go straight to her room as Alice had made her. Her Nana Kathleen would be waiting for her with a mug of tea and a rock cake she had baked that afternoon, and often she and Harry would sit and eat it together before they ran outside. It was almost as though Alice didn’t exist.

  It transpired over the weeks that Kathleen was the only woman on the street who didn’t have the time of day for Father James.

  ‘He gives me the creeps, that man. Mind, I’ll hold me tongue and say that to no one but you, Jerry, but he makes the hair on the back of me neck stand up when I see him walking up the street in his big fancy hat.’

  Father James sensed Kathleen’s reserve and kept his distance. He knew he had met his match. There was no charming Kathleen or pulling the wool over her eyes. She was polite enough at mass, but he knew not to chance a social visit.

  Kathleen tried out her reservations on Maura one morning, when they saw Father James leaving Brigie’s house down the road. Brigie had been blessed with eight daughters and not a single son.

  ‘That man should be spending more time in his own church and less in other people’s houses, if you ask me,’ Kathleen said. ‘Back home, the priest calls only for a birth, or the last rites. No other good reason for him to be dropping by all the time.’

  Maura looked shocked. ‘Kathleen,’ she said in a pained voice, ‘we are lucky to have the Father and grateful to him for sticking with us. He’s so well thought of now, he could be in a cathedral, and Rome was wanting him to go to New York, but no, he stayed with us and we won’t hear a bad word against him.’

  Kathleen knew better than to argue, with no more than her suspicions to go on. Kathleen just knew. In her older years, she had learnt to size people up pretty quickly and Father James wasn’t coming out well.

  One day the Granada TV rental van arrived on the street and soon almost all the houses had a TV set, with a grey sixpenny meter on the back, installed in pride of place in their front room. Once a week, the man from Granada would come round to empty the box. He would count all the sixpences on the floor in front of the TV and then write the amount down in a little black book.

  He liked Nana Kathleen, who always gave him a cup of tea and a slice of freshly baked cake, while he told her the business of every house in the four streets. The Granada man was very observant; nothing got past him. It was through the TV man’s visits that Nana Kathleen heard a lot more about Father James, and she didn’t like much of what she heard. She also knew everything there was to know about every neighbour and what was occurring in every house. A cup of tea and a slice of cake paid enormous dividends.

  With television, life altered overnight. Instead of listening to the voices coming out of the radio or staring into the fire, everyone sat and watched the telly. Times were changing. Jerry began to comb his hair like Elvis and in the mornings as he shaved he sang the Beatles song, ‘Love, love me, do,’ into the mirror above the sink. The Mersey beat was taking a grip and had filtered through onto the streets, where some of the houses were replacing their copper boilers and mangles with new, twin-tub washing machines. Nana Kathleen would not succumb. ‘There’s nowhere to store the ugly contraption, other than against the wall with a tablecloth thrown over to hide it. Why would I want to do that now? We have little enough room as it is,’ she protested whenever the idea was brought up by a thoroughly modern Nellie. No one yet had a cooker, but they weren’t far off, and nearly everyone now had a fridge.

  On the day the letters arrived informing the residents that the four streets were to be added to a slum clearance list and they might be offered new houses, the jungle-drum mops went crazy. No one wanted to move and not a single letter was replied to. Everyone was happy to stay just where they were. One big happy family.

  It was hard to believe that once things had been so bad and unhappy for Nellie and Jerry. That, not long ago, Nellie had been creeping down the stairs to avoid Alice and to sneak food from the cupboard, if she got the chance. Now she was woken by Nana Kathleen, shouting up the stairs, to tell her that her breakfast was ready.

  ‘Skinny miss, get your lazy bones up and out of that bed now, before I send in ye da with a cold flannel!’ she would shout, and Nellie loved it.

  She was growing up and life had been constant and steady since Nana Kathleen had arrived. Thanks to Kathleen’s luck at the bingo, Nellie had even been to Ireland for a holiday, visited her cousins and stayed at the farmhouse where she had become firm friends with her auntie Maeve and uncle Liam.

  One Friday night, when she had been fast asleep, she had been woken by Nana Kathleen, sitting on her bed and singing. The landing light was on and Jerry was standing behind her, laughing.

  ‘Come on, Ma,’ he said, ‘let’s get ye into bed.’

  ‘No, Jerry,’ she protested, ‘I have news for my Nellie. Tomorrow, Nellie, me and you, we is going on a holiday to Ireland, so we is. I’ve just won the jackpot on the bingo tonight and we are going home to celebrate.’

  Nellie sat up in bed, hugging her knees, looking at her da. Could this really be true? Would she really see the church and the Moorhaun River?

  ‘Will I see the salmon jumping, Nana?’ she squealed, now wide awake.

  �
�Oh sure ye will, that and more,’ said Nana Kathleen as the Guinness took over and she collapsed onto Nellie’s bed and was out like a light.

  True to her word, the next morning, Nellie had all of her few clothes packed into Nana Kathleen’s carpet bag and they took the boat to Dublin, the same boat Jerry and Bernadette had met on. Nellie felt like the luckiest girl in the world. She didn’t know anyone else who had been on a holiday.

  She was so happy she thought she would burst with sheer joy. Nana Kathleen was her angel.

  A few weeks after they returned from Ireland, Nellie came down to overhear a conversation between her da and Kathleen that made her realize all was not well.

  ‘I know the signs sure enough, Jerry, and only you will know if I’m right. I’d say she was about four months’ gone.’

  The blood left Jerry’s face, as he sat down on the chair. ‘For feck’s sake, Mam, are ye sure?’

  ‘I’ve seen enough, I’m sure all right,’ said Kathleen. ‘Alice is pregnant.’

  Jerry couldn’t help being delighted at the news, but he was also anxious. He had long ago given up hope of having another child and he wasn’t at all sure how Alice would cope.

  Very soon after the wedding, Jerry had decided that sex with Alice was cold and pointless. She would deploy any number of reasons to avoid it and after the rare occasions when it did happen, she would assiduously sit in the bath and douche herself, using a soft rubber hose and a solution she had bought from the pharmacist, for at least half an hour afterwards to ensure she wasn’t pregnant. Jerry would lie in bed, smoking a cigarette and listening to the sound of his would-be babies being flushed down a tube. He would look through the window, listening to the distant tugs on the river, feeling bad and swearing that this would be the last time. He didn’t know how Alice managed it, but each time they had sex, he felt more alone than he ever had before.

  Whilst Alice slept, he often lay in bed, wide awake and looking at the stars, thinking of Bernadette. It was his way of keeping her in his sight. Bernadette was a star, one he could see each night and talk to. In the weeks following the funeral, he would take Nellie out into the yard, shuffle her up in his arms and turn her face to the night sky for Bernadette to see. Holding her in his large palms, he whispered to the twinkling inky night sky, ‘Here she is, just look at her, she’s putting on weight every day and just take a look at those big blue eyes, who do they belong to then, eh?’

  He would frequently dwell on the issue of his own sanity. He felt as if Bernadette had never actually gone. The unexpected suddenness of her death had left him unable to grasp the reality. In the early days, he thought he could hear her running up the stairs, feel her breath, sense her sadness. At night, when he left Nellie’s room, the hairs on his arms stood on end as though someone had swept in as he walked out, brushing close as they passed him. But he knew that was truly mad.

  Kathleen stayed as long as she could, but she had to go back to Ireland ready for the birth of her third son’s grandchild in her own house. She promised to return in time for the birth of Nellie’s little brother or sister. Jerry knew that once Kathleen had left, Alice tried everything possible to rid herself of the baby. She soaked her soul in gin and took various concoctions of pills bought from a dodgy nurse on Scotland Road who looked after the girls who serviced the sailors whilst they were in port.

  But the baby hung on in and slipped out, with the minimum of fuss, at four o’clock one cold and foggy morning, three weeks before he was due. An early morning star.

  They had been woken from their sleep by the sound of Alice’s waters breaking, like a champagne cork suddenly popping in the room. As soon as he realized things were happening fast, Jerry left Alice lying moaning in bed, and ran to the pub, the nearest place that had a phone he could use, to call the midwife. Alice had refused to attend a hospital.

  Neighbours were well used to the odd hours people ran up and down their street to get to the pub for the phone. Births and deaths never happened conveniently during opening hours. As he ran, not a single set of dentures, soaking in pink Steradent, rattled in their glass on a bedside table. Nor did the sound of boots on cobbles disturb a stray ship’s rat, raiding the bins. In the dead of the night, only the feral, hungry cats sitting on top of entry walls and bin lids looked curiously through the smog, with interest, at a man in his boots and pyjamas, frantically trying to knock down the pub door. Quietly.

  When Noleen, the midwife, arrived at the house, she asked how Jerry was going to manage the new baby, with Kathleen back in Mayo. Noleen, who had made a few house visits, was fully aware of how much Kathleen carried the house and that there were problems with Alice. Work on the docks was thin and big men like Jerry who could get it were working every hour God sent, to make sure they kept their place in the gang. That way they got to keep their jobs.

  ‘I have no idea, Noleen, but Mammy will be back as quick as she can,’ he said as he lit the fire in the bedroom, which had been set ready for weeks, whilst Noleen set to work with calm and authoritative efficiency.

  She knew she was chancing her luck when, once the baby was born and she had cut the cord, she lifted him without any warning and plopped him down onto his mother’s chest. It was a risk, but she considered it worth a try. As she laid the baby down, his wide open eyes looked into his mother’s and begged for acceptance.

  ‘Would you look at him, all knowing,’ said Noleen, with forced gaiety, grinning from ear to ear. Like all Irish Catholic midwives, she regarded each birth as a miracle and a gift. It never crossed her mind to wonder why such a good God gave poor women so many babies whose mouths they couldn’t feed, and why he chose every now and then to make one of them bleed so much from forcing yet another child out of a tired and shot womb that they died in her arms before the ambulance arrived. Noleen was a kind woman and genuinely took a delight in every delivery she attended.

  ‘Sure, he’s been here before, that little fella, so he has,’ she trilled.

  For just a moment, a tiny moment, suspended in the warmth of a room imbued with the love and magical hope a new baby brings, there was a chance. Noleen’s words had penetrated Alice’s fog, and caught her up in the expectation heaped upon her. Alice thought she would dig deep inside and try to give motherly love a go. She met her newborn son’s eyes, as Noleen and Jerry watched, holding their breath.

  She tried. They could see she tried, for a second, but then, just when Jerry and Noleen looked at each other and dared to hope, Alice turned her head away and stared into the fire.

  ‘Take him, will you,’ she said to Jerry, ‘and call him what you wish.’

  This time Jerry’s tears were not of joy, but of sorrow, as he knew with total certainty his prayers were unheard.

  Jerry and Alice had been sleeping with a brown rubber sheet on the mattress for weeks, in case of this very eventuality, a sudden birth, and so it took the midwife only an hour to clean up mother and baby, change the bed and throw a shovel of coal from the bucket onto the fire, before she sat on a chair by the fire to write her notes.

  Jerry woke Nellie, despite the fact that Alice begged him not to, and told her the news. Her reaction to the new baby was something he couldn’t predict. He had been too scared to discuss it with her before the event. He had wanted to share his joy with her but she was only a child. He needed to know as soon as possible how Nellie was going to take to the new arrival in the house.

  Nellie, dressed in her long flannelette nightdress, rubbed her bleary eyes and, clutching her teddy, padded across the landing to her da’s bedroom, her hand in his. His big palm felt hot but the lino was cold beneath her feet. It was the first time Nellie had ever seen the fireplace in her da’s room with a roaring fire in the grate. Only a single bedside lamp was alight and the room was warm, filled with a golden glow. The reflection of the flames chased each other as they danced and crackled up the walls and across the ceiling.

  Although she was now too big to carry, Jerry lifted Nellie into his arms. Her red curls, now grown past
her shoulders, tickled his nose and face as, half asleep, she sucked her thumb, a habit she still couldn’t break at night. Her other arm was hooked tightly around her father’s neck, as he carried her round to the far side of the bed, to look into the crib. Noleen looked on and smiled at what was an intimate and special moment, when a little girl meets, for the first time, her brand-new baby brother.

  Jerry felt sick and tearful with relief when he saw Nellie’s face as her eyes alighted upon her baby brother. She took her thumb out of her mouth and lovingly grinned from ear to ear. She kissed her father’s cheek hard and took away his tears with her lips, whilst her hand clasped his other cheek hard. His eyes shut tight while he suppressed the pain that had rushed unbidden out of his heart, as he remembered the moments of her birth.

  Nellie, barely containing her excitement, squealed and wriggled in his arms, to get down and closer to the baby.

  ‘Let’s call him Joseph!’ she exclaimed, clapping her hands together and feeling very clever. It was almost Christmas, and that day at school Father James had spoken at mass about what a great man Joseph had been to take on a pregnant single mother, Mary. With her wide eyes gleaming, she turned excitedly to Alice who was neither watching nor listening.

  So, Joseph he became.

  Alice was untouched by the endearing scene and continued to stare into the flames. She had given up trying to find within herself whatever other women had that enabled them to give a fig about their children. There had been years of arguing and grief from Jerry. Shame heaped upon her by the neighbours she watched from her window, acting like good mothers should. She had become the living proof that a Catholic man had committed a mortal sin when he married a Protestant woman. In the words she had heard Maura speak to Tommy on the day of their wedding: ‘Surely, as God is anyone’s judge, no good will come of it.’