Birmingham Friends

by Annie Murray

  Occasionally as a small child I’d gone down to the surgery with Daddy and sat in the corner of the drab waiting-room with my colouring pad and crayons, amid all the coughing and sighing and complaining about things I couldn’t understand. I was curious, hungry to see my father’s other life. It was the very fact I might now be able to make more sense of it all that attracted me. And Granny had supported me. I think she hoped it might bring Daddy and me closer.

  ‘And the patients wouldn’t like it either,’ Mummy said, sniffing. She had a heavy summer cold and would have been feeling very sorry for herself had she ever permitted indulgence in such emotions.

  ‘I think you should go,’ William said, taking an enormous mouthful of toast and speaking through it. ‘The sight of you would shock them all into feeling better. Either that or finish them off altogether.’

  ‘William!’ Mummy said.

  I scowled, and Daddy pretended the conversation wasn’t happening, a tendency of his which I found hugely aggravating.

  ‘This is not just a game,’ I said. ‘I really do want to come.’ In my enthusiasm I knocked over my egg cup and Mummy tutted.

  My father wiped his mouth with his napkin. ‘No one’ll object,’ he reassured Mummy. ‘Katie seems interested in looking after people. You do wonders with your granny after all, don’t you?’

  My mother buttered her toast in silence.

  ‘You don’t mind, do you Mummy?’

  She looked up, tight-lipped. ‘Why should I mind? I’m just thinking of your health – all those germs. But your father’s the doctor. I was only a nurse, after all, so what do I know?’

  Having to abandon her job as a children’s nurse on marrying Daddy was a sacrifice about which she had never ceased to feel bitter.

  Daddy pushed back his chair, ignoring this remark as he tended to blank out all such expressions of emotion. ‘I’ll be leaving in ten minutes.’

  I sat in the passenger seat next to Daddy, nervous at being alone with him. We turned into the Alcester Road, the Austin shuddering on cobbles and tramlines, swooping downhill from the fresher air of Moseley towards the lower-lying, smoky atmosphere of Balsall Heath, two miles from the middle of Birmingham. Daddy’s surgery was on the inner edge of this area, in St Joseph’s parish, with its hotch-potch of dilapidated back-to-back houses, and workshops and factories all squeezed in together, its life altogether louder and more public than in our suburban street. What would it be like to live here? I wondered. I was seeing everything with new eyes today, alert suddenly to these differences. Both my father and Alec Kemp moved daily between these two contrasting areas, both able to afford houses in prosperous, tree-lined Moseley. The surgery was in the Birch Street area, only streets away from Kemp’s Foundry Supplies.

  I eyed Daddy’s profile, his neatly trimmed dark hair, the little moustache and tired blue eyes, every line of him dutiful and serious.

  He cleared his throat. ‘I gather you managed to settle your grandmother down yesterday,’ he said in the objective voice he always used when speaking of her, sounding as if he was discussing one of his patients.

  ‘She took all her clothes off in the drawing room again.’ I saw him flush slightly and wondered if I’d said the wrong thing. I couldn’t always work out what I was supposed to say to my parents. One minute they were talking about patients and illnesses and bits of bodies, some of which I knew you didn’t refer to, even in Latin, in polite company. Then at other times if you mentioned something, especially if it was to do with the family, they’d go all stiff and embarrassed. It was very confusing.

  ‘Why did Granny come and live with us? She could have managed on her own, couldn’t she?’

  ‘It seemed the most practical thing, after your grandpa Robert died. North Berwick’s a long way off and it made sense for her to be near her family.’

  ‘But we’re not her only family.’

  ‘We were the ones who were able to have her. The others have commitments which made it impractical for them.’

  ‘But I don’t think she’s very happy. And she and Mummy can’t stand one another.’

  Daddy was silent for a moment. I looked out as we passed the ornate red-brick bathhouse on the Moseley Road.

  ‘It always takes families time to adjust to new arrangements – particularly people who are above a certain age. Three months is not a very long time in that situation.’

  What situation? I wondered. We were talking about Granny, not some situation. I sat in silence. Whatever the reasons she was here I thanked God she had arrived, like a bracing gust of wind from north of the border.

  We turned into a side street and parked outside the surgery. I squinted myopically at the brass plaques. Dr. W. Munro, and underneath, Dr. J. Williamson. I hoped I shouldn’t see sour, bad-tempered Dr Williamson.

  ‘It needs a polish,’ I said.

  ‘Well, there’s a little job for you then.’

  A line of people were already waiting outside by the step. Daddy raised his hat and greeted them. One of the women, tight-faced, held a silent baby. An elderly man was coughing, bent over by it, his lungs sounding drenched.

  The waiting-room was dark, the walls painted brown. There were wooden benches against three of the walls and in one corner stood a small table and two chairs. In the fourth wall a door, through which Daddy disappeared, led out to the two consulting rooms at the back, and there was a little trapdoor for the dispenser.

  I was just settling myself down at the table when my father reappeared, hurrying across the waiting-room.

  ‘Dr Williamson is going to handle the start of surgery. I have some urgent calls to make. Won’t be too long.’

  ‘Oh, let me come. Please let me!’ It seemed very important that day that I see everything.

  He had no time to spare for discussion. ‘Come on then, quickly.’ He was already going out of the door. ‘None of them is too far. It’ll be easier to walk.’

  It was a humid day, warm and cloudy, threatening storms. We hurried along the crowded pavement of Birch Street past rows of shops, their blinds slanting out over the pavement. Everything seemed colourful, absorbing. Each shop gave off its own special smell: the warm, fleshy smell of sides of meat padded with yellowed fat, fresh bread and burnt currants, the tangy sweetness of strawberries and the bitter smells of metal and rubber from the hardware shop. Mixed with this was the ripe whiff of horse manure from the road.

  I followed Daddy into another side street, hurrying to keep up with him, he striding and I trotting.

  ‘Here we are.’ He knocked on the door of a house. ‘You’d best stay outside, I think. Old Mr Fenton has his bed downstairs now.’

  The house was run-down and filthy, the windows so thick with grime that they must have let in very little light. There were signs that the paint on the bleached window frames must once have been blue.

  A woman with a large, sagging face and a wart sprouting whiskers on her left cheekbone appeared at the door. The rest of her hair was wrapped in a washed-out brown scarf. As the door swung open a waft of stale air hit us, stinking of sweat and urine. I shrank back.

  ‘Oh, it’s you, doctor,’ the woman said lifelessly. ‘He’s bad today.’ She talked of a turn in the night, said she was sorry for having to bring the doctor out. My father gently dismissed the apology.

  The woman left the door ajar and I peered in. I could see a bed with a heavy wood headboard, covered by old grey blankets. Propped against the pillows was a yellow face, so shrunken that it seemed not to be living at all but a mask, something out of an old tomb. The head was bent back slightly so that the nose pointed at the ceiling. The old man was struggling for breath, his lungs making a terrible rattling sound.

  I had expected to feel afraid or repulsed, but I found I was looking at him with a detached kind of pity. He was dying, clearly. He appeared to be at a distance from us already, as if death had moved in and taken possession before life was extinguished.

  I watched my father bend over the bed and take the old man�
��s hand tenderly from under the bedclothes to feel his pulse. He spoke a few soft words. ‘Easy now,’ I heard him say. His daughter stood at the end of the bed with her arms folded across her large breasts.

  Daddy turned to her. ‘There’s nothing more I can do, I’m afraid. You’re doing the best that can be done.’ The woman sighed and nodded stolidly and kept thanking Daddy before we left.

  As we approached the next house, two children who had been waiting on the front step came running at the sight of the doctor, cheeping like young birds: ‘It’s the babby – he’s took real bad!’

  They were both girls, both dressed in very worn gingham frocks, too big for the elder girl and too skimpy for the younger.

  ‘Our mom’s worried it’s the diphtheria or she’d have brought him to you.’

  I stepped into the house with Daddy. The room was spotlessly clean, though with very little in the way of furniture. There was the black iron range, a table and two wooden chairs.

  The young mother was pacing the cold bricks with bare feet, the baby in her arms. His eyes were half open and he was breathing in quick, panting breaths.

  Daddy gently opened the child’s mouth. In a voice that was low but urgent he said, ‘Kate – outside. Now.’

  I watched from the doorway with the other girls, whose eyes moved enviously over my dress.

  ‘You were right Mrs Smith,’ Daddy told her. ‘It is diphtheria. Little Tom is very ill. We’ll need to get him to the fever hospital.’

  He spoke further of the child needing a hole in his windpipe to help him breathe, and of arranging transport, a blue-windowed diphtheria van. When we left I had even more trouble keeping up with him. He strode down the street, lips pressed tightly together. I wondered once more whether I’d done something wrong.

  In the end I asked timidly, ‘That baby was very ill, wasn’t it?’

  ‘We ought to be able to do something.’ The words burst out of him. ‘We ought to be able to prevent children from getting terrible diseases like that. It’s a scourge – it’s dreadful. I can’t bear to see it.’

  I’d never seen this grief in him before. I felt like crying myself, and could only trot along silently beside him.

  He looked down at my miserable face and suddenly smiled. ‘Hey now. Don’t you go worrying, Katie. It’s not your fault.’ He laid his hand on my shoulder for a moment. ‘Come on. We’ve one more call to make.’

  I waited downstairs in a filthy room in one of the back-houses, facing out over a yard strung across with washing. The room was very dark and stuffy and on the table were the remains of what looked like several days’ worth of meals. The old oilcloth was soaked with spilled tea and the remains of some kind of stew. There were plates covered with congealed gravy, several jam jars with a crust of dried tea-leaves at the bottom and an old heel of bread. The floor was strewn with food remains and dirty clothes from which rose a rank, sweaty smell. And there was another terrible odour about the house which I couldn’t identify but which turned my stomach.

  Across the table from me a scrawny girl who I thought was about thirteen sat picking her nose and sniffing, her brown hair in two rat’s-taily plaits. Round her feet a baby crawled on the floor, its nappy hanging heavily round its bottom and stinking of faeces. The child’s face and limbs were streaked with filth. I found myself bearing in mind one of Mummy’s nursing sayings: ‘Always breathe through your mouth.’

  ‘What’s the matter with your mother?’ I asked her.

  ‘She’s took bad after the babby,’ the girl said matter-of-factly. ‘Can’t get out of bed no more.’

  ‘This baby?’ I pointed at the infant who was now sitting down, having found an old scrap of bread to chew off the floor. Shiny worms of snot trailed from his nose.

  ‘No, the littl’un – she ’ad ’im last week.’

  As we spoke I became aware that the sound I could hear of a small baby crying was coming from upstairs.

  ‘Have you got any other brothers and sisters?’ I asked. I supposed the girl must think me awfully nosy, but she didn’t seem put out by my asking.

  ‘Ar – there’m six of us. Three older ’uns, me, and then me dad buggered off, an’ then Bob moved in an’ she ’ad the two babbies.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, barely able to imagine such a household. ‘So is Bob out at work?’

  ‘Nah. ’E’s buggered off an’ all.’

  We heard Daddy’s tread on the bare boards of the stairs.

  ‘Now Lisa,’ he said carefully to the girl. She had a certain spark to her and was evidently taking everything in. ‘You know your mother is very poorly?’

  Lisa nodded.

  ‘She’s got childbed fever and I’m afraid she’s so sick that we’re going to have to take her into the infirmary. She says you’ve been helping her a great deal, but she’s fretting about you missing work and about little Sid here.’ He glanced at the youngster by his feet who was staring up at him with enormous blue eyes. ‘She said your neighbour Babs Keenan would look after you both but she’s not well at present. So what I’d like you to do now is to clean Sid here up a bit. A new napkin at least, eh? This afternoon I’ll come back and take him on a little journey in my car. You’ll have him ready, won’t you, Lisa?’ Looking at me he said, ‘He’s coming home with us for a few days. Just until Mrs Keenan’s herself again.’

  At the surgery I heard him explaining to Dr Williamson. ‘Puerperal fever, poor woman. In a shocking state – she should have been in days ago by the stench of her. The child didn’t look too hopeful either.’

  When we drove home in the car with baby Sid Blakeley, he wasn’t looking in a much better condition than he had been that morning. Lisa had evidently tried to give his face a wipe over because the dirt was smudged and differently distributed. She had changed his nappy but this one was now nearly as full as the last, and the ammonia smell of it filled the car. I held the child beside me on the back seat.

  ‘Hello, little fellow.’ I smiled at him. The boy turned his pasty, snub-nosed face towards me with interest. He had not seemed disturbed by being taken away from home. I pushed my little finger into his palm and he gripped it tight. I giggled at him, leaned my face close, and he reached up and tried to snatch at my specs.

  ‘Oh no you don’t!’ I laughed, pulling my head back. ‘I like him, Daddy!’ There were no young relatives in our family so babies were a new experience. I liked Sid’s little fat wrists and soft, dirty feet. ‘How old is he?’

  ‘About a year.’

  ‘His sister – she’s younger than me, isn’t she?’

  ‘Oh no – couple of years older. She’s been out at work for a time now.’

  As we drove back up into Moseley I asked, ‘Daddy, why did you become a doctor?’

  ‘I suppose for the reason anyone does. Because I wanted to help people who were sick to get better.’

  ‘Do you like people?’

  I couldn’t see his face but heard the rare smile in his voice. ‘I suppose I do.’

  ‘Does Mummy like people?’

  ‘I would think she does, yes.’

  ‘She doesn’t always seem to.’

  ‘Now, now.’ He stopped the car outside our house.

  The questions I hadn’t asked him were, how long is the baby staying for and, above all, won’t Mummy be furious with you?

  I carried the smelly child into the house and went nervously upstairs to find her. This was the greatest moment of surprise of the whole day.

  She took one look at the little boy and launched herself straight back into her element. ‘Right. The first thing that child needs is a jolly good bath. Go and get it running, Kate. I don’t have the baby bath any more, but at least he can sit up by himself. Not too hot – dip your elbow in. And a new bar of Sunlight. Here, give him to me.’

  She took Sid to her with no sign of hesitation, filthy as he was. ‘Hello, young man.’ She looked intently into his eyes as I watched in astonishment, seeing a new softness in her thin face I had barely remembered her capabl
e of. ‘What you need,’ she went on, ‘is a wash and a good big bowl of something to eat. Do you like porridge, eh?’ Seeing me in front of her still, she said impatiently, ‘Go on. Stop dithering. This child needs looking after. And when you’ve run the bath, go down and ask Mrs Drysdale to put some porridge on for him.’

  Sid appeared later with a face of a quite different and more wholesome shade, and bolted down a dishful of sweet porridge. My mother settled him down to sleep in William’s and my old cot. To my surprise she had pulled out from various recesses in the house almost all the paraphernalia needed for looking after a baby: cot, sheets, blankets, bottles, terry nappies and toys.

  ‘Why on earth did you keep it all?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, as you can see,’ Mummy said stiffly, ‘you never know when it might come in handy.’ Of course she couldn’t express the fact that she simply couldn’t bear to part with these things.

  I went to Granny’s room to tell her the news. ‘I’ve had a simply marvellous day!’ I was glowing with it all. I plonked myself on a chair beside her. Her cheek was pushed out by a sweet she was eating.

  I told her about the surgery and the visits to the houses.

  ‘It was all so interesting, seeing all those people. And Daddy was so different from how he is at home.’ Granny was listening attentively. ‘D’you think I could do something like that when I grow up?’

  ‘With a family like yours,’ she said serenely, holding out a little white paper bag, ‘I should think it would be almost a foregone conclusion. Bullseye?’

  Sid Blakeley stayed in our house for only four days before Babs Keenan called at the surgery to say she was ready to take him home. But for a short time he turned our house upside down. Though he couldn’t speak, he was able to express himself, his needs and his joy with a directness of which no one else in the house was any longer capable. His small body and nose-wrinkling grin softened the lines of my mother’s face and pulled unusual smiles from my father. I even found William now and then chasing him about the room, both of them on their hands and knees. As for me, I was besotted. And I took secret pleasure in reciting to myself the new words I’d learned out on the rounds that day: diphtheria, puerperal, buggered.