The Bells of Scotland Road

by Ruth Hamilton

  Then the unexpected happened. A sister in a sacking apron appeared at the door and waved to one of her colleagues. A whispered conversation took place, then Aunt Edith and Uncle Richard were summoned to the house. Aunt Edith turned to Mammy. ‘Cathy’s gone missing,’ she shouted. ‘Mrs Cornwell’s on the phone.’ The whole party dived inside, leaving Maureen gazing into her teacup as if seeking to read her fortune in the leaves.

  The missing Cathy squeezed through a gap and ran to the table. ‘Maureen!’ she shouted. ‘It’s me – it’s Cathy.’ A nun leapt across the lawn and collared the intruder. ‘Whoever let you in, child?’

  ‘Myself,’ managed Cathy.

  ‘Far too young,’ tutted the good sister, tightening her grip on the back of Cathy’s blouse.

  The child coughed. ‘I’m not too young,’ she gasped. ‘Ask Mother Ignatius. She thinks I’m old, so does Mammy. I’m old in the head and I go to the big school even though everybody else is eleven. This is a good blouse, Sister.’

  The nun was in no mood for negotiation. Because most of the Good Shepherd’s residents were mentally ill, children were strictly forbidden to visit. ‘How did you arrive here?’ she asked.

  ‘I came in Dr Spencer’s car,’ came the swift response. ‘And he paid for the blouse from Henry Barrie’s. Henry Barrie’s is on Churchgate. It’s exclusive, Aunt Edith says. Exclusive means very expensive.’

  The Augustinian nursing sister was not amused. ‘I suppose Dr Spencer told you to remain in the car?’

  ‘No,’ replied Cathy truthfully. ‘He didn’t say anything to me.’

  Dr Spencer was well-respected by the sisters. He had given a great deal of his time to the Good Shepherd, had become involved with the community when Maureen had first arrived here. Although he was not a psychiatrist, he was a well-educated man with a genuine interest in sick people. ‘You’ll have to go,’ said the nun.

  Cathy struggled, used her eyes to plead with Maureen. But Maureen simply sat and displayed no reaction to the scene.

  ‘Come along now,’ said the sister. ‘We’ll go inside and—’

  ‘Maureen!’ screamed Cathy mightily. ‘Help me!’

  Everything froze. Visitors and patients at the various tables stopped eating and chatting. Every eye was fixed on the angry young girl in the nun’s grip.

  Cathy kicked out, made contact with layers of serge and cotton, missed the sister’s legs by a mile. She was genuinely furious. She had come miles and miles in the smelly boot of a car, had missed death by inches each time the car had rattled over a bump, had held on grimly when the boot had tried to fly open. She was tired, hungry and generally fed up with people, especially with nuns. They had no imagination. She had heard Uncle Richard saying that they were good people, but that everything in their minds was as black and white as their habits. ‘I am not a little girl,’ she shouted. ‘And my Uncle Richard will be very cross if you tear my blouse.’

  The nun released her grip. Cathy, suddenly free but still pulling away, fell over. The sister picked her up. ‘Don’t move,’ she advised.

  Cathy nodded at the black-clad figure. ‘I am going to be a doctor when I grow up,’ she said, her tone as dignified and threatening as she could manage. It was hard to put weight behind words when her clothes were messy with petrol and grass stains. ‘You will need people like me one day, Sister.’

  The nun fought a ready answer, turned it into a cough.

  Cathy waved a hand towards Maureen. ‘She is my friend,’ she announced. ‘And I am here to visit her.’ She sat down next to Maureen, grabbed a cake and took a bite.

  Richard appeared in a doorway. He was closely attended by his wife and Bridie. ‘Would you ever look at that?’ asked the latter. ‘She’s there as large as life and twice as much trouble.’

  Cathy swallowed the cake in two bites before leaning sideways towards her companion. ‘Maureen?’ she began. ‘Nicky’s getting married soon to Graham if they can save enough. He has the strangest eyes. And I’m going to be a doctor. Come on, we’ll have a little walk.’ She tugged at the older girl’s hand.

  Maureen stood up and went where she was led by the child with dark honey hair. They strolled towards Richard, Edith and Bridie. ‘When are you coming home?’ Cathy asked Maureen.

  ‘Umm,’ Maureen replied, her tone guttural. There was nothing in her eyes, yet she had made a sound, and she had fixed her black gaze on Cathy.

  ‘Will you come for dinner, Maureen?’ asked Cathy. ‘You don’t have to stay still all the time, you know. I used to lie very still in my bed so that the nightmares wouldn’t find me. You haven’t any baby left. It’s gone. Even if you move and talk, it won’t find you. I know all about it.’ She smiled encouragingly.

  Edith Spencer mopped her face. Cathy seemed to be opening a line of communication with Maureen, even though no words had come from the older girl.

  Bridie held her breath and prayed.

  ‘There’s no baby, you know,’ repeated Cathy. ‘You’re all right now.’

  Maureen stopped, dropped her head and studied the floor. ‘Catheee,’ she said softly. Upstairs, Cathy had been. She had stayed in bed with all the windows open, had gone for long walks with . . . with that man over there, the tall, thin man with the tall, thin wife. Nice people, the Spencers. He was a doctor and she did charity work.

  Richard Spencer dabbed at his face with a large handkerchief. During the time since her suicide attempt, Maureen had spent the occasional weekend at Cherry Hinton, but Bridie had removed Cathy each time before Maureen’s arrival. Cathy had been judged too young to cope with the older girl’s strangeness.

  For how long had Diddy Costigan sat and talked to her daughter? Richard asked himself. How many times had the girl been assured that she was not carrying a child of rape? ‘Out of the mouths of babes,’ he muttered. ‘If we’d brought Cathy along earlier . . .’ But would Maureen have been ready to listen? Was this a coincidence? Perhaps the girl’s mechanism had been due to click back into gear, perhaps she was always going to begin talking again on this particular day.

  Maureen looked at Bridie, frowned as if forcing herself to focus. ‘Cathy,’ she said, her voice rusty and dry. ‘Cathy.’

  Richard spoke to Bridie. ‘There you are. I told you that your daughter is exceptional.’

  Bridie nodded quickly. ‘You’re a good girl,’ she told her elder child. ‘But how did you get here? Everyone’s searching Astleigh Fold.’

  Cathy recounted her adventure. Richard fixed his gaze on Maureen, saw that she was retreating again into that part of her brain that felt little pain and no pleasure. ‘Maureen?’ he said.

  ‘Cathy,’ replied the girl.

  The doctor turned to his wife. ‘We get her out of here immediately,’ he said. ‘Cathy is the key.’

  Edith touched her husband’s arm before returning to the telephone. She would tell all at Cherry Hinton that Cathy was safe. Then, she would have the great pleasure of phoning a certain shop on Scotland Road in Liverpool. At last, Diddy’s daughter was on the mend.

  ‘She’s Out’, really Matt Roberts, was a mild-mannered man with a squeaky bicycle and dark, slicked-back hair. As an agent for landlords, he collected rent on a weekly basis from households in the Scotland Road area. His apparent gentleness was misleading, as he was not averse to sending in bailiffs whenever debts got out of hand. He would, however, listen to a case and assess its merits. Often, it was his accurate judgement of character that kept a family sheltered when money was scarce.

  Diddy opened the door. She had finished her stint on the market with Nicky and was preparing a pan of scouse. ‘She’s Out’ raised his hat and showed off the oily hair. ‘There’s a deputation hanging about, Mrs C,’ he told her. ‘Looking at the state of the houses. A couple from welfare and one or two from the council.’

  Diddy paid her rent and thanked him for the information. Her stew was thickening nicely now that the potatoes had fallen, so she pulled on her coat and sallied forth to view the party from the corporation. T
here were rumours about rehousing, and Diddy wanted to say her tenpenn’orth before anything happened.

  She stood on the road that had been no more than a cart track along which travellers had journeyed to and from Scotland, wondered how it had looked a couple of hundred years ago. Of course, inns had opened, then the docks had bred doss-houses and eating places. And now, it was a world apart, an area where people stood together in the face of many adversities. ‘They’ were going to break it up. ‘They’ had marked the streets for demolition ten years ago, just after the police strike and the loot. The Catholics were blamed and the Catholics would be condemned without the benefit of a trial.

  Diddy glanced round, watched the children at play. A gang of lads chased a ‘football’ of rolled up newspapers, while girls jumped about on a chalk-drawn hopscotch grid. There were jacks and bobbers on the go, cherry wobs being rattled down drainpipes, while a slightly richer child shared her spinning top with a crowd of admirers. Down a side-street, a glass-sided hearse and two plumed horses waited outside a house whose windows were draped in the traditional Irish white sheeting.

  She spotted them straight away. There was a fat woman with a loud voice, a cheery soul called Betty Something-or-other. Craddock, Diddy thought. This was an unusual female, a member of the council who would call in to see a poor family, often staying on for hours to cook, clean and wash up all the pots. That one would be on the side of the righteous, thought Diddy. With Fat Betty stood some weary-looking men in shiny boots and dark suits. The enemy. These were the ones who would dot the is and cross the ts when condemning Scotland Road.

  Feigning interest in Bell’s side window, Diddy listened to the conversation. ‘Many of them sleep in the streets during hot weather. Their homes are riddled with vermin,’ declared one of the men.

  Betty from the council chipped in, ‘And where are you planning on putting them all, Mr Swarbeck? In a bloody field? Shall we pitch a few tents while we’re here?’

  Diddy grinned. She liked the cut of Fat Betty’s gib.

  Swarbeck tut-tutted impatiently. ‘There’s a fortune spent on disinfectation, Mrs Craddock. A house went up in flames not long ago because the father used a blowlamp to burn the bugs off his children’s bed springs. And all those free dinners are costing quite a sum.’

  ‘Oh well,’ sighed Betty Craddock. ‘Like that Frenchwoman with the piled-up hair said just before they cut her head off, let ’em eat cake while there’s no bread.’ She turned her attention to another, shorter man. ‘And don’t you start, Ernie Boswell. Your mam lived round here most of her life, brought you and four others up in a court. Remember? Queueing up every morning for your water? It never did you any harm.’

  Swarbeck bridled, while the unfortunate and skeletally thin Ernie Boswell shrank further into his over-large collar. Diddy, her nose almost pressed against Bell’s window, thought she could hear Swarbeck’s bristly moustache stiffening even further before he spoke. ‘Are you suggesting that we let these conditions continue, Mrs Craddock?’

  ‘No, I’m not. But we must take measures to rehouse the residents in stages.’

  ‘Where?’ boomed Swarbeck.

  ‘Pull a few down and shove a few up,’ snapped the fat lady. ‘Do it in phases.’

  The third man chipped in. ‘Scotland Road needs gutting,’ he said. ‘There’s plenty of space further inland where we can give these people a better chance. If we pull down houses and build more on the same site, the filth will simply spread. Eventually, all this lot will have to come down. In fact, if we wait a year or so, much of the area will fall down without any help from us.’

  Diddy moved her head and saw the other side of childhood. While the young ones played, their slightly older brothers struggled along with rolls of oilcloth and baskets of bread. Yet they were happy. The Scotland Road children accepted cheerfully their responsibility towards their families. And, like Ernie Boswell, many moved on and made good when their time came, mostly because they were not afraid of work. Scotland Road should die a natural death. In a couple of generations, the young would get up, get out and build their own new world in their own good time. There was no need to put the road down like a sick cat.

  ‘That windmill’s an eyesore,’ grumbled a member of the deputation. ‘Some child will get hurt up there soon.’

  Diddy glanced in the direction of the mill, knew that her own children had been up and down the building since learning to walk. From the top, there was a wonderful view right down to the river and all the way past the Rotunda Theatre towards Bootle. They couldn’t shift everybody, surely? But in her bones, Diddy knew that it was only a matter of time before the bigwigs turned up with a yardbrush and a handful of meaningless promises. It would be Kirkby and Huyton, families split up, grandparents miles away, kids heartbroken.

  She thought about the schools, those Victorian piles where several generations had learned to read, write and calculate. What would happen to them and to the churches? What about the businesses hereabouts? The time had come to speak up, she told herself. With a smile plastered across her face, she addressed Mrs Craddock. ‘Nice to see you,’ she said brightly. ‘Last time you were here was during that scarlet fever, wasn’t it? I remember you bringing fruit for the Nolans.’

  Betty recognized Diddy. Mrs Costigan was an ally. She didn’t want to see the area broken up, didn’t trust her elected representatives to do the right thing. ‘Hello, Mrs Costigan. Dryden Street, isn’t it? Let me see – you’ve a Maureen, a Monica and a Mathilda – am I right?’ Betty prided herself on her grass roots approach.

  Diddy looked the men over. Her Billy would make ten times the three of them put together. ‘That’s right, Mrs Craddock,’ she replied sweetly. ‘I know you, Ernie Boswell,’ she continued. ‘You were in my class at school. Remember when your mam sent you down the ha’penny plunge to get clean?’ She winked at him, then addressed his companions. ‘His cozzy was an old wool jumper sewn up at the hem with two holes for his legs. He had very thin legs, did Ernie.’ She sniffed, looked at Ernie’s trousers. ‘I reckon they’re still on the puny side. Anyway, he jumped in the plunge and his cozzy got waterlogged. Came up as naked as a newborn, didn’t you, lad?’ She awarded the unhappy chap a hefty blow across his shoulders.

  Betty Craddock took a sudden interest in a chest of drawers in Bell’s window. Her broad back shook with suppressed glee, but she didn’t like to be seen making fun of folk.

  Diddy addressed the delegation. ‘Going to pull us all down, are you? This is a thriving area, you know. There’s none of us’ll go quietly. Can you imagine taking thousands of us out of here all kicking and screaming?’

  Swarbeck made much of checking his watch.

  ‘Look,’ said Diddy, ‘over there – best piano shop in Liverpool, that is. Then there’s Annie’s Antiques – she gets people from all over the world buying her stuff. Same with Bell’s.’ She jerked a thumb towards the shop. ‘We work for Bell’s, me, my husband and two of my children. There’s a big future on this road, because everybody knows where to come for a good deal. You’ll take the belly out of Liverpool if you rip down Scotland Road.’

  The men shifted from foot to foot.

  Betty turned round, her features back in order. ‘It would be better to make a positive plan to improve and revitalize,’ she said.

  Diddy nodded vigorously. ‘You can start with the Comus Street courts,’ she suggested. ‘We’ll take care of our own while you build some decent places. The families can spread round and double up, or they can go and stop with relatives for a while.’

  Betty agreed up to a point. ‘There’s sense in that, Mrs Costigan, though we’d need a better plan for temporary rehousing. But I take your point.’ She sniffed the air. ‘Do you know, I can smell Thorn’s Cocoa Rooms from here. That pudding they make with the sugar crust – I remember having two helpings with custard. Then there’s Polly’s in Currie Street—’

  ‘Stuffed heart, ribs and cabbage,’ said Diddy. ‘Tuppence a bowl, all you can eat.’
r />   ‘We are not here to discuss menus, Mrs Craddock,’ snarled Swarbeck.

  ‘What are you here for?’ asked Diddy. ‘For the good of your health?’

  A muscle twitched in the man’s cheek.

  Diddy rattled on. ‘What about the Gaiety and the Gem and the Adelphi? What’ll happen to the picture houses if there’s nobody here to buy tickets?’

  Swarbeck sighed deeply. ‘Mrs Costigan, the density of population in this area dictates that something must be done. The children are in danger. They are begging for food from the dockers, they hurt themselves leaping across from one entry wall to another, they get drowned in the canal.’

  Diddy knew that he was speaking the truth. Jim Clarke, the strongest swimmer in the city, was always being sent for to drag children out of the water. Sometimes, Jim was too late. But however often the young were told, they still spent time leaping into the ‘Scaldy’, a stretch of waterway heated by the discharge of hot fluids from Tate’s sugar refinery. ‘They’d play wherever they lived,’ she answered. ‘Children are always doing daft things. My Jimmy could have an accident in an empty room – that’s how lads are.’

  ‘There are too many children here,’ replied Swarbeck.

  Diddy’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Oh well, that’s because we’re Catholics. All we do is booze and breed – didn’t you know? Ernie’ll tell you about that, because he’s a Catholic.’ She looked at Ernie and Ernie looked at the pavement.

  Two boys shot round the corner on bicycles hired from the Penny Rip. For a penny an hour, they had the dubious privilege of travelling at great speed, usually without the benefit of brakes. Any child who insisted on luxuries like brakes was deemed to be yellow. One rider stopped his progress by colliding with Diddy, sending her reeling against the shop wall.

  ‘Now, do you see what I mean?’ asked Swarbeck, his eyes gleaming.

  Diddy pulled herself together with the help of Betty Craddock. ‘Listen, you,’ she said to Swarbeck, ‘come near my house and I’ll bloody swing for you. Get the places cleaned up, but leave us where we are.’