Finally, as Martha began to apologise in a whisper about her weakness, he tried to comfort her. ‘Never mind, Mam. It won’t always be this bad. I’ve a feelin’ there’s a bit more work around – there’s more people coming in to buy meat, you know. Maybe Dad’ll have a bit of luck.’
Martha sniffed, untangled herself from his long arms, and wiped her nose on the end of her shawl. Brian’s observation was a shrewd one; meat was not high on the shopping list of the unemployed. If the butcher was doing better, so were his customers. His remark confirmed Patrick’s observations.
‘Don’t you worry, love. I’m all right,’ she assured the boy. ‘I’m just tired – that’s all.’ She gave a shivering sigh. ‘Now, you lie down and sleep. I’m going to settle down meself. I got to go to the market tomorrow.’
Uneasily, he did as he was told. One day, he promised himself, I’ll earn enough to rent a decent house and she can have a good fire all day and a bed to sleep in, like they had in films.
Martha took off her boots and laid them in the hearth. Then she arranged herself carefully on the edge of the mattress, watching that she did not disturb the other sleepers. She eased her feet down until they touched Bridie sleeping across the foot of the mattress. Then she tucked the ends of her skirts round her own feet and slept immediately, the sleep of the completely exhausted.
It seemed almost no time at all before she heard the tap-tap of the wand of the knocker-up on the window and his subsequent call. As the whole family stirred uneasily at the sharp noise, she rolled off the mattress, got to her feet, opened the front door and assured a crabby elderly man mumbling to himself outside that she was indeed up. Because she did not own a clock, she paid twopence a week for this service from a neighbour who did own one; he had, in consequence, been persuaded to become the court’s daily knocker-up.
Before closing the door against the clammy chill, she looked up at the narrow patch of dark sky above the rooftops. The sky looked clear, though it was cold enough to make one want to stay close to a fire. And that would be her next problem – some more coal, she thought glumly; little Dollie Flanagan could not supply it all.
She went quickly to the mantelpiece and lit the candle, and then opened the bag of groceries. Two good two-pound loaves of slightly stale bread and a whole wrap of bacon bits! She stumbled to the fireplace to rake out the ashes, put a few twigs and some paper on top of the cinders. She felt in the back of the coal box for her last pieces of coal.
She woke Patrick, while the rest of the family settled down again for another precious half-hour.
After splashing his face in the freezing water of the pump in the courtyard, Patrick went to work replete from a heap of fried bread and took with him a hefty sandwich full of bacon bits.
He paused to kiss his wife on leaving, which was unusual. Martha sensed his desire for her, but, despite her own longings, she was thankful he had to go to work: she dreaded another child.
‘Go on with you,’ she said with a grin, and pushed him playfully through the door.
Brian was scolded into washing his hands and face at the pump, and had his hair combed with the nit comb, which must, Martha reminded herself, be returned to Mary Margaret one of these days. He was packed off to walk to work in an old tweed jacket too big for him, with a piece of bread in one pocket. His delivery bicycle was kept, with his white apron, at the shop under the close eye of the butcher, who lived above the premises.
His brothers, Tommy and little Joseph, and his sisters, Kathleen and Bridie, were given a slice of fried bread and a cup of weak tea each and were hustled off to school, protesting about the cold.
‘It’s not wet out there, the sun’s out. You won’t hurt,’ Martha assured them, as she wiped each face with a damp cloth as they went down the steps. ‘Now, Bridie, button up your cardigan, and hold Joseph’s hand all the way.’
Kathleen wailed that she could not find her jacket, and it was eventually discovered in a crumpled heap in one corner, having been used as a pillow by Bridie.
Now that Kathleen was thirteen, she was beginning vaguely to wish to look pretty, so she spent the walk to school shouting at Bridie for spoiling the threadbare coat that Martha had originally found for her in Paddy’s market.
Having got rid of everyone, except Number Nine and four-year-old Ellie, who were crouched sleepily by the fire, both of them fretful, Martha realised that Mary Margaret’s Dollie and Connie had not joined her daughters for the walk to school. Thomas had not come down either, but then he did not get up early unless he believed that he had a chance of getting a ship.
She hesitated. Should she go upstairs to inquire if all was well? Mary Margaret usually babysat Ellie and Number Nine for her on market days, not that she had to do anything for them, only watch that they did not stray beyond the pavement outside the court entry.
Sheila and Phoebe from the room in front of Mary Margaret’s had gone off to their oakum-picking less than five minutes after Patrick’s departure.
Fear haunted Martha every time it was quiet in the upper room. Nowadays, Mary Margaret looked like a ghost, she did.
‘But you can’t do nothin’ about consumption,’ she would say to a silent Patrick, who simply shrugged. In his opinion, death amongst women was so common that it was normal.
Today, however, was Martha’s day for the market, and she must go soon or miss the best time to sell her rags. What should she do about Ellie and Number Nine?
She went uncertainly into the tiny hall and glanced upstairs.
Fat Alice Flynn was just plodding downwards, slightly sideways, so as to accommodate her girth to the narrowness of the stairwell. She was carrying the bucket of slops from the night, to empty them into a drain in the yard. Upon being asked, she agreed to watch both children until Mary Margaret woke up and could take over.
They agreed that Mary Margaret needed all the sleep she could get, poor dear. Today, her kids must be getting a good sleep: it wouldn’t hurt them. They took it for granted that her husband would sleep as long as he could – he had little else to do, unless he got a ship.
TWELVE
The Fent Woman
January 1938
With her left hand, Martha arranged her shawl over her head and across her chest for maximum warmth. She then hoisted her laundry basket full of neatly folded rags onto the top of her head and, with her right hand, picked up another bundle of them. Straight-backed, she swayed off down the court, her tiny figure almost overwhelmed by her cargo of fents. She was followed by mournful wails from Ellie and Number Nine and Alice’s reassurances to them that Mam would be back soon.
As usual, she was walking to her regular spot in Elliot Street, outside the market, where she stood amongst women selling dishes of various kinds. There she would call her wares, watching all the time for the police, because she had no pedlar’s licence.
It would be so much easier for her, she often thought, if she could wheel the bundles of fents down to the market in the pram. But there was nowhere safe to put the pram while she dealt with her customers: if she turned her back on it, it could, in a flash, be stolen. Furthermore, if an interfering flattie did show up and ask to see her licence, she could abandon the rags and run for it; an anonymous woman dressed exactly like half a hundred other women around the market could soon get lost. But, encumbered by a pram, she could not move fast – and the pram was too precious to be abandoned.
She had considered keeping Kathleen out of school on market days, to come with her and watch the pram. But not only would the school attendance officer be after her, so would formidable Sister Elizabeth, who taught the kid. Sister seemed overly keen on Kathleen staying in school.
Martha was the only woman to sell clean cotton rags in this particular market, which would suggest that there was not much demand for them in a place where the majority of the shoppers were women. A surprising number of women, however, bought them for their husbands’ use: their menfolk worked at skilled jobs involving grease, paint, blood, sewage, etc, an
d needed to wipe their hands or their engines frequently, with material cheap enough to be discarded afterwards.
She also delivered regularly to several garages employing oil-soaked mechanics who served the increasing number of private cars in the city. The butchers, poulterers and fishmongers in the market itself were also often glad to see her, to buy a rag with which to wipe off fishscales or blood from icy-cold hands.
Her biggest problem was to assemble the basket of suitable rags in the first place, and, furthermore, to accumulate them without having to pay for them.
She begged for rags from door to door in the various neighbourhoods of Toxteth, offering, in return, a coloured balloon for the children in the house.
She also had contacts amongst the Jewish community in the wholesale dress trade along London Road, where she sometimes got very tiny pieces of new material, which she occasionally had to pay for. She sorted the scraps into big bunches of varied colours that she thought might go together, for sale to one or two women customers who did old-fashioned quilting. They would pay as much as sixpence for an assortment of pretty new patches.
Occasionally, pawnbrokers had torn, grubby sheets hanging up outside their shops. These had been used as the outer covering for bundles of clothing which had been pawned and not redeemed, and she would bargain a penny or twopence for any that were hopelessly worn. She would then take them to the public wash house and launder them. When they had been dried on the clothesline slung across the court, she would tear them into one-foot or eighteen-inch squares and sell the smaller ones at three squares for a penny, the larger ones at two for a penny. If any were strong enough to stand being washed after use, she charged more.
Once, when canvassing in Princes Road, she stumbled on an estate auction being held on a front lawn. She watched, fascinated by the pantomime being enacted, and discovered that, towards the end of the sale, much-used cotton sheets, pillowcases, tea towels and everyday tablecloths and bath towels were almost given away.
She mentioned this to her neighbour, Alice Flynn.
‘I don’t know why they let the stuff go so cheap, Alice, but if I had had a bit more cash, I could’ve bought a great boxful from just that one sale.’
Alice considered this information at length. She had, in her youth, been in service, and finally she said a little doubtfully, ‘I’m thinking that it’s stuff from the servants’ quarters, and kitchen stuff. The family wouldn’t want to use it themselves. They was really throwing it away, no doubt – just put it out on the lawn to get a few pence for it, more to clear the house than anything.’
‘But there aren’t that many servants nowadays, are there, Alice? We had a right job to find our Lizzie a place.’
Alice laughed. ‘Well, if they’re moving out of one of them big houses, maybe they’ve got rid of the servants as well. But you was telling me that Lizzie isn’t the only girl working for her mistress?’
‘True. There’s a cook. Proper bitch she is to our Lizzie.’ Martha was silent for a minute, and then she said grimly, ‘And a proper pest to her is the sons of the house.’
‘Oh, aye. And I bet the mistress don’t want to know about that, even if you dares to tell her. Lizzie must watch it.’
Martha sighed. ‘I told her that.’
‘Some of them’ll put a little rubber cap on their you-know-what, to avoid a bun in the oven.’
‘I did tell her. ’Cos they can afford it. Wish we could.’ She laughed ruefully.
Alice Flynn laughed with her, though she would herself have loved a child. But the war had ‘fixed’ her husband as certainly as a gelded horse was fixed. So that was that.
Martha could not read. She had a habit, however, of picking up any discarded newspapers she could find. Newspapers were extremely useful. You could kindle the fire in the range with them; you could stuff one between a child’s jersey and his vest to keep his chest warm; if you could collect enough to fill a sack, it made a good mattress to sleep on, not nearly so cold as the bare floor.
Now, very thoughtfully, she first took the papers to Mary Margaret, who could read, and asked her if estate sales were advertised. Together they discovered that they were, and Mary Margaret read the advertisements to her.
Sometimes, Martha, looking very out of place in her black skirt and shawl, would put on her faded flowered pinafore, washed for the occasion, and go to such sales. She was viewed with suspicion by the auctioneers, as she edged through the crowd, to look at piles of old kitchenware, some of which a woman of her social station might manage to buy.
She did not draw attention to her real quarry, the bedding. No one else at the sale came near her because she stank. She ignored them and simply watched the auctioneer. She did not bid.
Better quality blankets, eiderdowns and bedding usually went in large lots. She waited until the sale drew to a close, only to find, sometimes, that the stuff was taken indoors again, perhaps to be given to a charity.
Where a likely pile remained on the lawn, she caught the eye of the auctioneer’s assistant or someone who seemed to be a member of the family tidying up, and asked if she could look through the stuff. She always told him flatly that she was looking for rags.
Sufficiently often to make it worth her while she got a pile of aged linen for a few pence, or sometimes it was even given to her carelessly, as to a beggar.
She would tie her purchases into a bundle in one sheet and hoist it onto her head to carry home.
‘Aye, Mary Margaret, love,’ she said wistfully one day to her friend, ‘I wish I’d got a bit more money. I could get a lot of fents what would sell well in the market.’
Mary Margaret smiled and said placidly, ‘Wait till the kids get a bit older and can bring in something. You might start a business yet.’
‘Oh, aye. What a hope!’ Martha replied scornfully and laughed at the very idea – after all, Number Nine was not yet two. What money she had was for spending – there were always so many immediate, pressing needs – and you had to have a bit of fun, didn’t you? – a visit to the pictures or a drink with your hubby at the Baltic Fleet or the Coburg. One day’s worries were more than enough to bear.
Of course, you could dream of having a living room like Mrs O’Reilly’s, with a good coal fire constantly roaring up the chimney. But dreams were just that; you did not waste your time on them.
Nor did you normally worry too much about horrors like having to go to live in Norris Green: you only worried when it seemed suddenly that such a fate was right on top of you. And that was such an enormous worry, anyway, that she felt helpless. Sometimes all you could do was to let a thing happen to you and hope that you would live through it.
THIRTEEN
‘Me Own World’
January 1938
As Martha tramped steadily down to the market, the cold wind whipped round her skirts and made her wish that she had not sent her inadequately clad children to school quite so early. Her intention had been to make sure that they did, indeed, set off to school, instead of loafing round the court all day, which would mean yet another visit from the school attendance officer. The children would, however, have to hang around in the playground for at least an hour, she fretted, until the teacher on playground duty arrived.
As she struggled to keep her heavy basket steady on her head despite the wind, she finally consoled herself with the thought that the pavements were now drying, so their feet would not be very wet, and the sun was coming out. They would probably run all the way there, and that would warm them. And, at worst, they could stand under the rain shelter.
She refused to consider that the shelter had no walls to break the chilly wind.
She forgot, also, that, even when the teacher had arrived, they would not be allowed into the school until all the pupils had been arranged in neat lines in front of her, class by class, and the nine o’clock bell had rung. Then they would be marched into the school in numerical order, beginning with the Babies. By the time Class Eight had entered, the teacher herself, well wrappe
d up, would be complaining, as she usually did, that her hands were frozen, despite her gloves.
The colder Martha became, however, as she walked down to the market, the more she worried. But as she approached the building’s exterior and was hailed by beshawled acquaintances, also shivering, as they crouched on the pavement amid cheap crockery for sale, she shrugged. It was no good: she could not do anything about the kids. They must learn to endure cold. They would face plenty of it when they grew up.
She always felt, with relief, that the market was her own place, totally apart from family worries. Once she stepped over the threshold, she was in a world of her own.
Today, she made a joke with her friends about first going into the market itself to get warm and to see if she could sell some rags to her men friends, the butchers and fishmongers. The women were ribald about who her favourite stallholders were.
Inside, she was at least out of the wind, but she continued to shiver as she edged swiftly through the milling crowd like a skinny weasel seeking dinner down a rabbit hole.
Many of the early swarm of people were small shopkeepers, like John O’Reilly, who used the stallholders as middlemen from whom to buy modest quantities of fresh stock for their own tiny corner stores.
The baskets of produce on their arms were a menace to Martha, as they scraped by her, catching her crocheted shawl on the wickerwork and leaving her forearms scratched or bruised by its sharp points.
When her own basket was nearly knocked off her head by the jostling crew, she would snarl resentfully, ‘Aye, be careful, can’t you?’
But the offender, heaved along by the crowd behind him, would stumble blindly past her, and Martha was left to curse him unnoticed.
She coasted to a near stop amongst the fishmongers, and called, ‘Want to buy some fents – best clean cotton, George? Hugh? Joe, there?’
A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin Page 9
