The priest said babies were the will of God and should be welcomed: Dollie herself had heard the priest with white hair say it. She had noticed vaguely that there seemed to be a fearsome and threatening amount of His will about, because there were babies everywhere – dozens more than those in the court – you could see them playing in the gutters in the streets, or wrapped in their mams’ black shawls against their mothers’ chests. Heaps and heaps of them.
While Mary Margaret, her skirts hitched up, stood unsteadily over the bucket, Thomas ceased to sing; he was absorbed in slowly pulling his bulky duffle bag up the dark stairway and then carefully through Sheila and Phoebe’s room, which was not quite so dark.
At the sound of flowing water near her, Mary Margaret’s mother, Theresa, awoke.
She sat up, her eyes dazzled by the flickering candle flame. ‘You all right, Maggie?’ she asked anxiously.
‘Oh, aye. Dollie’s giving me a hand.’
Holding onto Dollie’s bony shoulder, Mary Margaret picked her way unsteadily across the littered room back to her bed.
‘Thought I heard somebody singing,’ the old lady muttered, as she lay down again.
‘It’s Tom coming in.’ Mary Margaret sank thankfully back onto her bed: at least, she was able to get up and pee, without Martha having to hold her.
When Thomas got entangled in the old tablecloth the sisters had draped on a clothesline across their room, both Theresa and Mary Margaret heard Phoebe inquire blearily who was there.
Thomas mumbled, ‘It’s only me, Miss,’ and stumbled to his own door, which was shut. He dumped his duffle bag down on the floor. In the darkness, he could not find the knob, so he hammered impatiently to be let in.
‘Dollie, let him in, love. And don’t open it too sudden; he might fall over. Quietly, now.’
‘Bugger him,’ muttered Dollie, as she stopped rearranging her blanket over herself and, this time, got to her feet. Savagely, she longed to swing the door open really fast, to see if he would, indeed, fall down.
‘You’ll get punched if you do,’ she warned herself under her breath. She opened it with exaggerated slowness, inch by inch. It was she who stumbled and hit her knee painfully on the corner of a wooden box when her father forcibly pushed the door open.
He kicked his kitbag through the doorway and then stood staring bewilderedly around the crowded room, as if he were having difficulty in recognising his own home.
Mary Margaret eased herself up on her elbow. Her angular, bony face looked thinner than ever as she peered at him through long greasy tresses.
‘Where you been?’ she asked.
‘None of your business. Where’s me dinner?’
Though already thoroughly well fed, he asked the question simply to annoy his wife.
Conflict appeared imminent, so Dollie slid silently under her blanket.
‘On the table,’ replied Mary Margaret wearily, and yawned. ‘It’ll be cold by now.’
Thomas shut the door behind him and picked his way unsteadily round Dollie and the box on which she had knocked herself. He stretched out one hand and used the end of the table, under which the girls were sleeping, to steady himself until he reached their only chair.
In front of him, on the table, was something wrapped in a newspaper. A faint odour of food still emanated from it.
Alice Flynn had wrapped up for him a bowl of soup provided by Auntie Ellen.
‘Watch you don’t spill it when you open it up,’ advised Mary Margaret. ‘And mind you don’t knock the paraffin stove off the table.’
His drunkenness was beginning to fade and he felt nauseated. Filled with self-pity, he began to cry.
Mary Margaret was familiar with this reaction. She asked, however, ‘What happened?’ She felt weak and resentful, unable to comfort.
‘I got a ship.’
She was truly surprised. ‘What?’
‘A ship. Report tomorrow. Sail on Sunday.’
‘What about your kit?’
‘Got it out of pop this afternoon – it’s here.’ He pointed to the dark lump lying in a corner by the door. ‘You know I always carry the pawn tickets in me discharge book, so you don’t lose them.’
He paused, hoping that his head would clear. It did not, so he continued weepily, ‘Signed on, and all.’
‘Holy Mother!’ his wife breathed in genuine amazement. Thomas had not had a ship for over eighteen months, and, most of the time, they had scrimped along on Public Assistance food tickets, her own hand sewing, Theresa’s old age pension and the tiny allotment Daniel made to her.
Her wonderment grew into apprehension, as she remembered her own helplessness.
‘Where you going? How long will you be away?’
‘Dunno. She’s a tramp, the Belinda, with a cargo for Lagos.’ He wiped his dripping nose with his hand and sniffed hugely. ‘With a bit of luck, we’ll pick up something else there. Could be away for months.’
‘Strewth! Lagos is far enough. What’ll I do?’
‘You’ve nothing to worry about,’ he sneered. ‘You’ll get your allotment.’
‘I’ve got to live eight weeks before they start to pay it,’ Mary Margaret retorted. ‘Even then, how will I collect it? I can hardly walk down to the shop, never mind to the shipping office. I would never have got Danny’s last one if Martha hadn’t lent me a penny for the tram.’
‘Ach! Stop being such a natterbag. Ask the clerk at the counter: he’ll fix it,’ Thomas replied irascibly. ‘Or Theresa’ll fetch it for you.’
How thankful he would be to sail out of all this, to leave on land a nagging wife and three pestiferous brats, and not have to think of anything. Even rotten food and crowded space on board was, at least, fairly worry free – you did what you were told, laid low and held your tongue, and you were OK. Then, in foreign ports, you could find a woman and get drunk and have a fine time; with a mixed cargo, the Belinda might dock in several places before she hit Lagos.
He began to feel sleepy and laid his head on his arms on the table. He barely heard his wife’s sarcastic remarks which now poured out of her.
‘It’s great for you. You’ll be fed daily, starting Sunday, but the kids won’t be. I suppose old Grossi in Paradise Street gave you part of your ticket from the shipping company in cash – and you’ve spent it?’
The ticket represented an advance on Thomas’s first month’s wages. It was supposed to enable him to get his kit together for the voyage.
Thomas grinned slightly as he replied, ‘He give me twenty-five per cent, like usual.’
He fully expected his wife to explode at the thought of the money being spent before she got a share of it. But she was silent. How had he got a ship? she wondered. She eyed him suspiciously. Was he telling the truth? Had he stolen something and sold it? Maybe there was no ship to account for his unexpected affluence?
Finally she asked him. ‘How come you got a ship so sudden, like?’
He rubbed his red face hard, massaging his eyes to keep them open. Since it showed him in an excellent light, he told her quite honestly.
‘I walked up to the registry office this morning and hung around – to see if I could find anyone who might know a ship short of crew.
‘And going up the steps, damned if I didn’t run into Sam Molloy what I went to school with, Catholic, like us. I’ve sailed with him before, but I hadn’t seen him for months.’ He paused to yawn. ‘He’s done well for himself. Done three trips on the Belinda as second mate.
‘And, you know, he had orders to find a trimmer, pronto, ’cos one of theirs has got a real bad fever – from Africa, they think – he hadn’t been well, like, though he kept on working – and it finally burst out when they was coming into port.
‘He’s in the Isolation Hospital and there’s hell to play with the medical officer – and the ship was quarantined, until the Health Authorities was sure nobody else had it. The crew had to be vaccinated, and, just in case, I had a needle this afternoon – and I feel rotten with it.
He did not tell Mary Margaret that he had had to practically go down on his knees to Sam to get the job for him, a fellow Catholic. He had produced his precious discharge book with its years of columns of ‘Very Good’, entered by a legion of ship’s masters. It was pitifully blank for the last eighteen months. Pinned in the back of it were the pawn tickets which represented his seaman’s kit.
They had gone immediately back to the boat. Sam had been persuaded to vouch for him not by any cogent argument, but by the despair of an old friend. Thomas was a decent man and a good worker, who was prepared to chance a ship which had carried a bad fever – a job which many would turn down for fear of infection. Added to that was the fact that a trimmer or fireman’s job was itself mercilessly hard: at best, only the really desperate would want it.
The ship’s master, anxious to sail, was quite thankful to have his crew completed so quickly. The ship’s agents, to whom they had hastened next, were even more so; the demurrage bill was mounting up.
With a sly grin, Thomas reflected that Sam had earned the grand evening they had had together on the twenty-five per cent in cash advanced by old Grossi.
Mary Margaret lay flat on her bed and considered resentfully how the money left over from getting the kit out of pawn and buying any extra necessities from old Grossi would have helped to feed the kids for the eight weeks before Thomas could earn another month’s wages.
At the end of eight weeks, she herself would receive part of his wages from the shipping company as an allotment. At best, when a man was at sea, you delayed the rent payment and lived on credit. You also scratted around for any job you could get yourself – because the allotment was never enough: you were dependent upon your man reaching home again with the balance of his earnings nearly intact, so that you could face the rent man and the corner store and pay your debts.
She gave no consideration to the sickness there had been aboard ship. Sickness was as common in ships as it was ashore – as Martha had reminded her after the nurse’s visit, when she had been talking about how tuberculosis could be spread by a seaman.
‘What time you got to show up tomorrow?’ Her voice was dull and listless.
‘Seven o’clock.’
Thomas laid his head on the table and suddenly succumbed to sleep. He dreamed a frightening dream of the hell of heat he would work in for the next few months. As a trimmer, he would shovel the coal to the firemen, who would feed it into the huge furnace in the bowels of the ship. In up to 140 degrees of heat, he would work to exhaustion.
It was an Australian ship working its way back to Sydney, he comforted himself as he half awoke in a panic, something he had not told Mary Margaret. It belonged to a small company which tramped between Australia and England. It was known to be fair to its crew and, according to Sam, the food was not bad either.
He dozed again and the dream continued. In it, he realised that he was too old to stand the stress of the job. He saw himself die and then fly through the sky to Australia, where, unexpectedly resurrected, he stayed and picked apples for a peaceful, cool living amid a myriad of trees in full leaf.
As loud snores erupted from her husband, Mary Margaret knew that he would never, if left to himself, wake up in time to join his ship in the morning.
It was too late in the evening to ask Martha to give him a call when the knocker-up roused her. Since her own alarm clock, though it still ticked, had long since given up on its alarm settings, she dared not sleep.
She must dispatch him in time; a seaman who missed his boat could be in real deep trouble, no matter what his excuse: it was the law.
Despite a night which stretched her endurance to the limit, she finally surrendered to slumber; it was Dollie and Connie fighting over their blanket who actually woke Thomas in time.
SIXTEEN
‘Me Allotment’
October 1938
By half past five, in response to the knocker-up, Martha was shaking Patrick and the children awake. She wanted time to go down to the garage near the Pier Head to peddle her rags and, perhaps, if she had enough stock, do a bit more at the market. Since it was Saturday, Patrick, also, must collect his week’s earnings.
Patrick met Thomas by the water pump in the court, as they went to splash their faces in its icy water. The seaman had a blinding headache as a result of his spree with Sam Molloy the previous evening.
As they roughly shaved themselves with their long-bladed, cutthroat razors, both complained that their razors needed stropping and wished that they had some soap. Pat told his neighbour that his strop was still useable and that Thomas could come in, any time, to sharpen his razor; he said he had forgotten to sharpen his own the previous night.
As he rinsed and folded his razor, Thomas mentioned that he had a ship.
‘Oh, aye? That’s good.’ Patrick took off his flat cap, and ran his hands through his unruly curly hair in the hope of arranging it to cover his bald patch. Before replacing his cap, he thoughtfully twisted the ends of his droopy moustache. ‘There’s a right collection of boats in this week. More than I seen for years.’
‘You’re right, Pat.’
‘War’s coming.’
Thomas nodded. ‘Heard from the old woman, months ago, that they was going to build an air-raid shelter on the street. They haven’t got round to it yet, though.’
Other men and women were appearing on their doorsteps to peer up at the leaden sky, before going to the latrines. Patrick and Thomas hastened to these filthy conveniences, before a queue should form.
Then, still together, they clumped back to their home, two comparatively young men already bent and greying, and, as usual, hungry.
Thomas slipped his razor into his kitbag and tightened the rope that held it closed. He ate the cold soup for breakfast.
With a stub of pencil stolen by Dollie from school and by the light of the last candle, he wrote down in large print on the margin of an old sheet of newspaper the name of his ship and that of its agents with their address.
He repeated this aloud for Theresa, who, like Martha, could not read.
‘I’ll try to fix it so you can collect the allotment instead of Mary Margaret,’ he told his mother-in-law with a yawn. ‘I don’t know for sure, with a foreign company, how to fix it – but Sam Molloy will know.’
Lying on her bed, absolutely exhausted from her broken night’s sleep, Mary Margaret missed the significance of her husband’s boat being a foreign tramp.
Though it was obvious from Thomas’s remarks that Sam Molloy, a Liverpool man, had served for some time on it, it did not mean that the boat would necessarily return to Liverpool. It could wander from port to port, picking up and delivering cargoes wherever they could be found: Thomas could be away for six months or even a year.
At her husband’s promise about the allotment, Mary Margaret relaxed slightly. Her mother was the only person in the world she would trust with her allotment money. Furthermore, she was sure that, if need be, Theresa was capable of standing up to some irate clerk in the shipping company’s office who might query her being there instead of Mary Margaret herself.
Facing up to shipping clerks was no joy to the barely literate, smelly wives of some of the crews. At best, the clerks were patronising; at worst, they were quite ill-tempered.
Mary Margaret smirked as she remembered how the wives, shuffling along in the queue, occasionally retaliated by making snide, disparaging remarks about the manhood of the men on the other side of the mahogany counter.
The innuendos did not endear them to the shipping company staff, still less did the stench which rolled across the counter.
Thomas kissed Dollie goodbye on the top of her head, because her mouth was full of bread. The bread had been donated the previous evening by the O’Brien sisters: with more ships coming into port there were more seamen, so they were doing very well, and could afford to
be generous.
Dollie stopped munching and stared balefully up at her father before she turned her back on him. He picked up Minnie, who was still clutching her morning crust, and kissed her on her cheek. He dealt similarly with Connie, who was thankful he was going away.
Sensing that something unusual was happening, Minnie broke into frightened howls.
‘Be quiet, can’t you?’ hissed Theresa. She stood in the background, hands folded under her black shawl, looking resentfully at her three grand-children, aware of the responsibilities likely to be thrust upon her.
Thomas ignored the wailing. He hesitated by the bed and said heavily to his wife, ‘You’ll be all right with Theresa here.’
‘I suppose so.’ Didn’t the fool understand that she might not be here when he came back? Didn’t he realise that she didn’t know whether she was going to be able to keep the family fed for the next eight weeks – without the strength to work herself or get help from Them? She was not like Martha, who could take things day by day. Martha had the strength to do it. She had not.
She thought wearily that he was a typical seaman, shaking off the responsibilities of home the minute he had a ship. He’d never be any different. She closed her eyes. Afraid of infection, he did not kiss her.
Guilt-ridden, not knowing what else to do, he turned, hoisted up his kitbag, and left her.
‘Goodbye, everybody,’ he shouted towards Theresa, as he opened the door to the oakum pickers’ room.
Awakened by Minnie’s howls, Phoebe and Sheila were not yet up. They muttered a malediction at Thomas’s passing through and at the noise coming from both the Connolly and Flanagan families. Then they groaned as they turned over and tried to sleep again for another half-hour.
En route out of the front door of the house, Thomas shouted goodbye to Martha and Patrick.
The Connolly door was hastily opened and the whole family surged out to shout farewell and good wishes. Getting a ship at last was stupendous luck for Thomas, they agreed.
The noise caused further havoc to the hopes of sleep for everybody in the house. This cheerful sendoff, however, raised Thomas’s spirits considerably.
A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin Page 12
