The Mother's Of Lovely Lane

by Nadine Dorries

  The conductor had reached them and, half swaying, he leant on the back of the seat in front of them and put out his hand for the money. Neither woman said a word and both dropped two copper coins into his hand. He slipped the coins into his leather saddlebag, wound the handle on the side of his ticket machine and handed them two grey tickets before moving on to the passengers behind. He pointedly said not a word to either of them and hadn’t since the night he’d offered to buy Biddy a drink in the Irish Centre and then walk her home. That was the day after her Mick had finally done a runner.

  ‘Well, I know one thing,’ said Elsie. ‘A smile might crack on your man’s face the day we do retire.’ She nodded in the direction of the conductor. ‘He’s never forgiven you for turning him down.’

  ‘He must have been bloody joking.’ Biddy snorted in derision. ‘I’d just got rid of one man, why would I want another?’

  Elsie was going to reply that the man she got rid of had done anything he could to avoid a day’s work and had run off with her Belleek tea set and her full purse, whereas the man on the bus had taken their fare every single day, rain or shine. He would have been quite a different kind of man. But Elsie didn’t dare. You picked your moments to point out the error in Biddy’s ways, and this was not one of them.

  Both women turned their heads once again towards the window and looked out, each thinking about the past. The brakes on the bus squealed as they rounded the corner and the masts of the ships in the docks reached out from the blackness of the Mersey like fingers on the hand of a drowning man. The bus trundled away from the dockside and on up towards the steep incline that led to the hospital and Lovely Lane. The black glass eyes of windows shut tight in sleeping houses reflected the light from inside the bus and mirrored back the two women with their powdery pink cheeks and pale white faces, headscarves tied under their chins, each deep in her own thoughts. They looked on as shop workers pulled open their shutters and a very portly lady struggled up the steps to a processing plant and did battle with the huge mortice locks on the door. The dockside traders were attaching their flat-back trailers to the horses as the dockers’ railway thundered overhead, transporting the early risers up to Clarence Dock.

  Biddy dropped her cigarette onto the floor between her and Elsie and extinguished it with her shoe, feeling the heat of the stub penetrate through to the ball of her foot. She fought for something positive and reassuring to say to Elsie, to them both, but nothing came. There was truth in what Elsie said. Change could be just around the corner and the prospect of life on a post-war pension in a damp house was bleak. Biddy had spent years avoiding thoughts of the future. She preferred not to think about what must surely lie ahead and, if what Elsie said was true, might be coming sooner than she would like.

  *

  Whilst Noleen said her Hail Marys in St Chad’s, back in Vince Street Paddy Delaney sat on his backside on the top stair, contemplating the journey down to the kitchen.

  ‘Da, you all right?’ asked Bryan, the first of the Delaneys to rise. He stood on the step behind him.

  Bryan shared a bedroom with his brothers, Finn, Jack and Cahill, and their one sister, Mary, who was the only person in the house to have a bed of her own, behind a curtain suspended on wire across the end of the room. It was an arrangement that gave the budding teenager Mary the privacy she desperately craved but did nothing to reduce the number of arguments she had with her siblings, much to Noleen’s dismay.

  ‘Aye, I am, lad. Would you get the bottle from by the side of the bed for me? I don’t want to spill a drop and have your mother fretting.’

  ‘I will, Da. Go on, you go down first.’

  Bryan stood at the top and waited as his father bounced down the stairs on his backside one step at a time. He asked the same question he always did. ‘Shall I get the crutch, Da?’

  The answer always came back the same. ‘That useless thing? No.’

  Bryan asked the same question as he could think of nothing else to say or do when he saw his father’s body stiffen with the pain of the effort. He would never accept Bryan’s help to get downstairs.

  Bryan walked into his parents’ bedroom, across the immaculate wooden floorboards that his mother scrubbed on her hands and knees once a week, without fail and regardless of how tired she was. He picked up the bottle his father used in the night.

  In the room stood a tall chest of drawers that he knew had belonged to his grandmother and a ladder-back chair against the window. The net curtains were pristine, and the window they covered gleamed. The brocade curtains were darned where the moths had made their mark, but every summer they blew on the line.

  Bryan appreciated every little thing his ma did for their family. He only wished Mary, his sister, would too. As he turned to leave the room, he glanced back at his father’s wooden leg leaning hopelessly against the chair. It was made of oak and from the polished leather-bound top hung a blood-stained bandage. His father’s wound opened every time he strapped the prosthesis on to the stump of his leg to heave himself out of the house to look for work. He still needed the crutch when the leg was strapped on as the set-up was unwieldy and his gait unsteady. They had tried everything, including cutting up blankets and binding them in crepe bandages to use as wadding, but nothing helped. The doctors had saved Paddy’s life in the field hospital, but they hadn’t put a stop to his suffering.

  As Paddy heaved himself into his chair by the side of the fire, Bryan placed his hand under his father’s arm and helped him sit. Without a word, he pushed the cushion down behind his back. The pain in Paddy’s leg was lessened if he sat forward.

  The two of them moved smoothly through the father-and-son motions of the morning. No words were spoken. Neither so much as coughed. Silence caused no offence. Paddy pulled the crocheted patchwork blanket over his knee to hide the offending stump and Bryan handed him the rinsed-out bottle to place down by his left side, nearest to the fire and away from view. The fire poker and coal bucket sat on the grate within his reach.

  ‘Is is raining?’ asked Paddy. He rarely made it outside, other than to sit on a chair in the street at the side of the front door. As a result he had become mildly preoccupied with the state of the weather.

  ‘No. Looks like it did in the night, though. The yard is still wet. You can sit out later if you want, Da. Be a bit chilly, though, I reckon.’

  Once his da was settled, Bryan brushed the ash from the grate into a bucket, placed the kettle he had filled the night before on to the range and visited the outhouse himself. As his da had used the bottle since coming downstairs, he took that with him as he went. On his way back indoors, he stopped in the cold scullery for as little time as possible for his wash and to clean out the bottle in the stone sink. He filled up the copper boiler and lit the gas below so that it would be hot and ready for his mam when she returned from Mass.

  Paddy leant forward and began to rattle the embers with the long poker. This was one job he could manage from the chair. A pewter chest sat alongside him, on which rested the coal bucket. The kindling chest was always filled to brimming the previous night by Bryan, before he went to bed, and Paddy could easily manage both. He threw the kindling on the fire, waited for it to catch and then, using the tongues in the bucket, threw the coal on lump by lump.

  A few minutes later, when Noleen came in through the back door, the kettle was whistling and the fire leaping and that was just how Paddy wanted it to be.

  ‘Would you look at that?’ she exclaimed as she shook off her coat and hung it on the nail on the back of the door. ‘Aren’t I the lucky one. Is Bryan in the scullery?’

  ‘He is, scrubbing up. You know what Dessie is like with his drill. He makes me laugh with his inspection of the porter’s lads every morning. He thinks he’s still in the army, he does.’

  ‘Whether he does or not, we have a lot to be grateful to Dessie for. Besides, I think it keeps standards up. I mean, would our Bryan ever polish his boots like that if it wasn’t for Dessie and his inspection? How was
last night? How have you been?’

  Noleen asked her husband the same questions every morning, knowing full well he would never tell her the truth.

  Paddy leaned over to the big Roberts radio and the kitchen filled with the sound of static and voices lost on the airwaves as he tried to tune it. ‘I’ve been grand. The bed was cold and I missed you, but nothing new there.’ He grimaced. ‘One of the kids must have touched this last night. How many times have I told them.’

  ‘Was Lorraine Tanner around here last night?’

  ‘Aye, she was. Her and our Mary were doing each other’s hair. Lorraine asked me twice where Bryan was, she’s definitely sweet on him all right.’

  Noleen sighed. ‘Well, she’s wasting her time. Our Bryan has eyes for no one, just doesn’t seem to be interested in the slightest. Says he has no time for girls and would rather play pool with the lads.’

  ‘Girls, they are a different breed today, don’t have a clue about anything,’ said Paddy. ‘I asked Lorraine was she going to follow Pammy up to St Angelus and train to be a nurse and do you know what, she said she would rather be a doctor like Pammy’s boyfriend, Anthony. Imagine that!’

  Noleen smiled. ‘Well, I bet Pammy’s doctor boyfriend didn’t come from dockside streets like Lorraine. It was a big enough deal when Pammy was accepted to be a nurse. That’s typical of Lorraine Tanner though. Never short of confidence, that one. Gets it from her mother.’

  Noleen removed the whistling kettle from the range and poured the boiling water on to the same leaves she had used yesterday. Placing the lid on the teapot, she walked over to her husband and kissed the top of his head.

  ‘And I missed you last night, even though you are a grumpy old bugger,’ she whispered into his hair.

  As she raised her head, her hand lingering for just a moment to stroke the back of her husband’s neck, the back door burst open and Bryan marched back in. He was scrubbed and clean, smelling of coal-tar soap and with his red hair damp and smoothed back and flat against his head. He had a clean urine bottle in his hand.

  ‘Here you go, Da,’ he said as he placed it down by the side of Paddy’s chair.

  ‘And here’s your cosy,’ said Noleen as she took the knitted cover off the side of the range where it had dried overnight. Paddy had insisted on having one to save their Mary the embarrassment of seeing his bottle half full should she ever come to the side of the chair.

  Five minutes later, Noleen had made the pobs, softening the bread with watered-down milk. She sprinkled them with sugar and placed them in the oven. Sugar was still on ration, but the black market around the docks ensured that no one went short of tea or sugar. A chest of tea lived in Biddy’s scullery so that everyone in Arthur, Stanley, Vince and George streets could fill up their caddies once a week. The bizzies would never suspect a woman like Biddy of fencing from the docks. It was the homes of the militant men they raided, not respectable Biddy. Once a month, at Biddy’s behest, a fresh tea chest arrived in her scullery and the old one was taken away.

  It was because of the docks, the black market and St Angelus that the families on Lovely Lane and around the Dock Road managed to survive on their meagre wages. The hospital staff helped one another when the opportunity arose. Nothing was wasted. The previous evening, Noleen had been in the process of slapping dough down on the table when Bryan walked through the door. With a grin on his face, he’d extracted a long roll of greaseproof paper from the pocket of his donkey jacket.

  ‘What the hell is that?’ asked Noleen, drying the flour from her hands with her apron and covering the space from the table to Bryan.

  ‘It’s sausage meat, Ma. Cook from the ward 3 kitchen gave it to me tonight. She said you could make some sausage rolls out of it.’

  ‘Are you kidding me?’ Noleen’s face had lit up. ‘I can that,’ she said. ‘God bless Cook. Pass it here quick. Paddy, throw some more coke on the range to get the heat up.’

  ‘I hope Cook hasn’t given you that out of pity,’ said Paddy, his voice loaded with suspicion.

  ‘Well, if she has, Da, she’s feeling sorry for a lot of people today because she gave something to nearly everyone. She said it will go off by Sunday if it isn’t cooked and eaten.’

  Bryan turned his back to his da while he hung up his coat, but Noleen caught his eye. She knew her son better than anyone. He might be able to kid his father, but not her. Bryan was the only person the cook gave sausage meat to, and as she rolled it, she silently thanked her for it. If Paddy had known, he would have said, ‘Go and tell Cook to take her pity elsewhere, we don’t need it here,’ but the fact was, they did need it. They had next to nothing and Cook knew it. Noleen had to keep their heads above water. The house had to be spotless and a meal prepared each evening. The floors had to be mopped, the nets whitened, the step donkey-stoned, the range blackened and the windows cleaned more often than those in any other house. Noleen wore her fingers to the bone and when Paddy or Bryan remonstrated with her, it was always the same reply. ‘We might not have anything, but no one will know it. I won’t have my home or my family looking like we are down and out. My house will shine brighter than any other and that’s the way it will be, Paddy. We will wear our pride in the shine on the windows, not hidden in churlish words.’

  Paddy never argued with Noleen. They had their different ways of coping with what had become their lot. She scrubbed, he complained.

  Noleen settled herself in the chair opposite Paddy with her tea, ready to savour the five minutes’ rest before waking the other kids for school. ‘The best five minutes of the day, this is,’ she always said to Paddy. ‘Me and you and our Bryan. Before the others are awake and crashing around and before Mary storms in giving out about something that someone else has that is better than anything we can buy.’

  Bryan sat at the scrubbed wooden-topped table and fastened the laces on his boots. Then he began brushing the toe caps. ‘Why is it the best, Ma?’ he asked. For Bryan, with his siblings still sleeping and he the only one to be a part of his parents’ morning conversation, it was special for him too.

  ‘Your mam has just left confession, Bryan. She feels fine for the next half an hour, until she finds something to feel guilty about, and then she won’t feel quite so good until she’s been to confession again. Either that, or me and you, we’re her favourites, ’cause our Mary drives her mad.’

  Bryan and his father exchanged a smile as they both heard the bedsprings above them creak. ‘Speak of the devil,’ said Paddy.

  ‘You know she’s complaining that the bed we boys have is too big and doesn’t leave her enough room?’ Bryan said.

  ‘Well, it wouldn’t be our Mary if she wasn’t complaining, would it?’ Paddy blew on his mug of scalding tea.

  They both looked over to Noleen for a response, but there was none.

  Bryan stood up and, untwining his mam’s fingers one by one, removed the teacup from her clasped hands and placed it on the range next to her. Her head had lolled to the side and her face flared orange in the reflected heat from the fire.

  Paddy’s heart almost melted with the love he felt for his wife. The glow from the fire had erased from her face the years of hard work that had robbed her of her youthful looks and at that moment she appeared just as she had when they’d first met. He’d carried that image with him during the years he was away from home, fighting in the war. His Noleen, with Irish sunlight glinting from her hair and a smile on her face.

  The love of and for his wife had kept him going through the darkest, most agonizing hours since he’d returned from the war. Stuck in his chair with his useless stump, with Noleen out working and the kids sleeping, he often thought about throwing himself into the Mersey. A peaceful, watery grave seemed at times preferable to the daily pain and humiliation he was forced to endure. He had planned it in his mind so many times. How he would stagger down to the floating landing at the Pier Head and in the dead of night, once the last ferry had sailed, slip under the chain fence and into the cold, dark, welcoming
water. Just like so many others had before him. But it was the responsibility he had towards his children, the good will of his neighbours and more than anything his love for Noleen that stopped him.

  ‘Go and get the others up, lad,’ he whispered as he gazed across at his wife. ‘Let your mam sleep. Tell Mary if she makes one squeak she’ll have the end of my slipper across her backside.’

  Bryan made for the door that led to the back stairs. ‘What, the slipper you never use, Da? The one that belonged to the other leg?’

  Paddy winked. ‘Shhh, listen while I tell ye, and don’t tell our Mary. Sister Theresa called in last night while your mam was at work and you were out playing pool. Finn has an exam today and she said he needs a good breakfast. Full of praise for him she was. Said he has promise and that he’s a clever lad.’

  ‘Finn? He is clever, Da. He will definitely pass. Clever people make a lot of money and we could use a bit of that. He can have some of my breakfast too and pay me back when he’s rich. Did Sister Theresa say if she thought he would pass the exam?’

  Paddy’s shoulders heaved as he silently laughed. Then he flinched with pain and cupped the end of his stump with both hands.

  Bryan stood motionless and waited until his father’s pain had eased and the tightly clenched lines of agony had softened on his face.

  ‘Don’t be daft, Bryan. Finn won’t pass the exam. There’s no chance of that. Our kind don’t pass anything other than the gate man down on the docks when they’re lucky enough to clock on or the bizzies checking for knockoffs in their old army rucksacks when they come back up. Our kids do well enough at St Chad’s. Mother Theresa sees to that. She never gives up, does she, not even on the likes of the Ryan boys. Jesus, God the Father gave up on them a long time since, but not Sister Theresa. St Chad’s is good enough for Finn, not Waterloo Grammar School. Who ever heard the like?’

  ‘Let’s give him his big breakfast anyway, though, eh, Da, and just do what Sister Theresa says.’