The Four Streets

by Nadine Dorries

  Her most difficult days of adolescence and embarrassment were being violated. Only this morning one of the twins, Declan, had burst back into the bedroom unannounced, as she was changing, which she now did when the others had gone downstairs. She closed the bedroom door, which was unusual, and dressed in private, such was her shyness around even her own sisters. Declan was curious as to why the door was closed and had satisfied his younger-brother nosiness.

  Then he ran down the stairs yelling, ‘Mammy, Mammy, Kitty’s growing titties!’

  From upstairs Kitty had heard the sharp slap and then Declan’s screams, as had probably the whole street.

  That was the first time she had ever known her mother hit Declan. She was protecting Kitty from her annoying little brother. Maybe she would protect her from the priest? That morning was the first time Kitty had considered the terrifying possibility of telling her mother. If Maura slapped Declan for peeping into her room, surely she would give out about the priest and what he did?

  Father James noted her silence, but carried on anyway. ‘I have a wonderful collection, Kitty, left to me by my own father, and I wondered if ye would like to drop by the Priory to have a look. Yer mammy tells me ye have a thirst for knowledge and different countries of the world, and when I suggested it to her, she thought it would be a grand idea.’

  Kitty still could not speak. He was talking about her to her mother? Her own mother was colluding to send her to him in his house, where she would be unsafe. For the first time in her life, Kitty hated her mother.

  She was flooded with a feeling of intense anger towards Maura, which gave her a courage she didn’t know she had.

  ‘I cannot come to the Priory, Father,’ she replied. ‘I have to help me mammy with the kids. It would be too selfish of me altogether to take time away; and Daddy would wonder why I had done it, as the arthritis is beginning to get into me mammy’s knees, now making them very sore.’

  She didn’t know how she had found the strength to say the words and defy him. She had no idea that self-preservation was kicking in. She could have been fighting for her life.

  Father James looked surprised but Kitty stared at him defiantly. ‘Be that as it may, Kitty, ’tis your choice. Maybe I’ll ask yer mammy another day,’ he replied very slowly.

  Kitty closed the office door behind her. She stood with her back to the door with her arm behind her, holding tightly onto the brass knob. It was an involuntary attempt to keep the children safe from him and to keep him locked in the office. She stood there for a few seconds whilst she gathered her breath and then, feeling stronger for having thwarted his ploy to get her to the Priory, went back to her classroom.

  Kitty had won one over on Father James. What she didn’t know was that it had happened only because Father James was slightly afraid of Tommy, in whom he had always sensed a lack of respect. If it weren’t for Tommy, if Kitty had a more compliant daddy, Father James would have called round to her house that night and told Maura to send Kitty to the Priory after evening prayers. But as it was, she was Tommy’s daughter, so he would let it rest.

  It was a warm May and Maura thought, sure, why not, when Kitty suggested throwing a party for the twins’ birthday. Kitty was always looking for ways to make people happy, even though she wasn’t too happy herself these days. She had become so miserable that Maura jumped at the chance to do something to please her.

  Kitty’s suggestion for the twins’ party had been brought on by the arrival of a hessian sack of flour, which, as far as the children were concerned, had appeared out of nowhere in the corner of the living room. The children were often amazed at the things that turned up in the house during the night.

  ‘It was a magic leprechaun,’ Maura would reply if the children pushed for an explanation. A leprechaun was as good as they were ever going to get. Maura had morals.

  The sack was eventually moved upstairs into Maura and Tommy’s bedroom, because she simply couldn’t keep the children from jumping on it and filling the room with a white powdery fog, which settled in a fine dust upon everything in its way.

  ‘As though there wasn’t enough dust to deal with from the docks, without it being created indoors as well,’ Maura grumbled, helping Tommy negotiate the narrow stairwell as they dragged the sack up the stairs.

  The sack of flour had fallen off the back of a ship in the docks, which Tommy had helped unload the previous night. Odd arrivals into the houses on the streets often happened at the end of a shift.

  ‘Split it between Brian’s, Paddy’s and Seamus’s missus’ was Maura’s only instruction, as Tommy bent backwards and let the sack fall with a thud from across his shoulders onto the floor in the corner of the room, letting out a cloud of white smoke.

  It was a case of who wins, shares. Tommy had been working in a gang of four on the dock last night and as soon as they spotted the opportunity to lift the flour, they did so. It involved big Seamus lifting two bags at once from the hold of the ship, as though the weight were only one. Jerry took the bags at the gangway, but passed only one to Brian who, as quick as you like, ran to the entry gate where the security guard was fast asleep. When he raced back into line, Tommy then fell out and ran to the perimeter wall. The gate was closed, but not locked as it should have been. The guard had taken a mug of rum at midnight, once all the dockers were in through the gate to unload the latest arrival, and had fallen into a deep sleep, before relocking the gates.

  Tommy had noticed the guard was asleep and pointed it out to the others with a nudge and the nod of his head in the direction of the guard’s wooden hut. No words were spoken. Everyone knew the drill. At the first opportunity, a bag would be dropped. It was a high-risk strategy. There were twenty-five thousand dockers working on the Liverpool docks, mostly Irish Catholics, and although they were all part of the Irish Diaspora, the dock gateman was an Orange Lodge Protestant from Belfast who had no respect for or empathy with the Catholic dockers and navvies. He regarded them as papist left footers and could often be heard singing Lodge songs under his breath. He was a nark, but, thankfully, there weren’t many who were. The casual nature of dock work, which meant you were only guaranteed that day’s work, created a bond amongst fathers, sons and families who worked on the docks together.

  The dockers might have had no long-term security, the Mersey Dock Company may have tried to keep wages low and conditions harsh, but try as they might they could never break the resourcefulness of the Liverpool Irish dockers, who made sure that if a load could be eaten or worn, some of it would end up in the bellies, or on the backs, of their own kids.

  Tommy squatted down, took two corners of the hundredweight sack, hoisted it up onto his back and was running up towards the four streets in minutes. He deposited the sack in the living room, hared back down to the docks and slipped in through the gates, in line with his gang, with only seconds to spare before the night guard woke.

  It was always much easier to take things that could fit inside pockets or the butty bag. A hundredweight sack was an operation, and operations happened on a regular basis, but it was the smaller gains that kept life ticking over on a day-to-day basis. Tommy regularly came home with his huge pocket full of currants or sugar. Sometimes, if they knew a molasses ship was due in, some of the men would take a bottle of cold tea to the dockside and, after they had drunk it, fill it with the molasses that ‘leaked’ out of the pipe pumping it from the ship into the tanker. It only took someone to make sure that the connection to the tanker wasn’t quite tight enough when the pumping began.

  With the flour, Tommy had provided the means for Maura to make a birthday cake for the twins and the party was decided.

  ‘That’ll be grand for the boxty bread, too,’ said Maura, as Tommy went to slip out of the house, a moment of harmony growing between them.

  ‘Aye, it will that, and no one can make it as well as ye,’ said Tommy as he leant back in the door and kissed Maura briefly, before disappearing down the street into the early morning grey miasma. He hadn’t ev
en stopped for a mug of tea.

  Maura knew that Tommy thought all the time about the well-being of herself and the kids. Knowing it was the twins’ birthday coming up, he had kept his eye out for anything on the ships he could commandeer to make it a bit of a day for Harry and Declan, even if it meant a risk. Taking risks was what a lack of secure work forced you to do. Despite the Dock Workers Act of 1948 requiring the dock company to keep a register of workers, the dock company openly flouted the law and continued to keep the dockers keen, impoverished and waiting at the gates each morning.

  The dockers knew how poor they were and what a struggle life was with so many children, but they were also aware of how much the world was changing around them. They were aspirational. They wanted more for their children than they had had growing up during the war years. They knew that they deserved better living standards, and that some of their working conditions were downright dangerous. Safety measures amounted to little more than the tweed caps they all wore religiously, in an attempt to protect themselves from a swinging crane or load. In such circumstances – all too frequent – the cap was useless, but it made the dockers feel less vulnerable.

  On the day of the party, prams – each of which contained at least one sleeping baby and often two, laid head to toe – lined the entry wall on either side of the tall wooden gate leading into the yard. The prams were safe. The community didn’t take from its own. Thieving was reserved for the contents of the ships, vans and trucks parked at the docks and, besides, who would steal a pram with a baby in it? Everyone had enough mouths to feed.

  It was a warm and sunny day, and children ran in and out of the yard, squealing with anticipation and spilling over into the entry. They were all dressed in the best they had, which might have been worn, third-hand, home-made or worse, but, on party day, clean. They were excited. A birthday party was a major event. It had been talked about for weeks and now it was here. Harry and Declan would even get a present wrapped up in paper to open in front of everyone.

  Mothers sat in the wider part of the Dohertys’ yard, just inside the gate, on wooden chairs they had wheeled down the street, balanced across the tops of prams. As it was a special day, they smoked Embassy cigarettes instead of roll-ups, and chatted about the new Hoover that could be bought in town from Blackler’s if you had the money. No one on the four streets could afford to buy a machine to lift dirt off a floor. There were enough children to do that.

  They had removed their aprons, which signified a special event. Aprons came off for mass, parties and Christmas Day. But none had taken the wire rollers and pins out of their hair, covered by headscarves. Even at mass, Jesus had to put up with those. The hair rollers indicated that something better might be round the corner. The enduring permanence of wire and pins pricking their scalps was the physical and material manifestation of hope, yelling loudly that every woman on the four streets was waiting for better days to come. One day there would be a reason to take them out and, when that day came, they would have had their hair done and would be at the ready.

  In the narrow section of yard outside the back door, Maura now had Bernadette’s bright yellow Formica kitchen table which had been set up and was laden with sandwiches, fairy cakes and jelly. The bread for the sandwiches had been lifted from the back of a bread van making a delivery in Bootle, just a mile or so away, at seven that morning, stolen to order by the O’Prey boys, heroes for the day. One wooden tray of soft rolls and one of barm cakes. The non-edible evidence of the theft had already been chopped up and placed in the wood store to be burnt under the copper wash boiler on Monday.

  Early that morning, Maura had left her house, accompanied by her brood, to fetch Nellie to the party. As Kitty and the children ran up to the green, Maura had knocked on Jerry’s door and told Alice, firmly, that she was taking Nellie with her. This was in accordance with instructions from Jerry, as given to Maura, when he had called for Tommy to leave for work at six that morning. He didn’t want Nellie to miss the big event in the street. Alice was difficult and bloody-minded. It was better to collect Nellie in the morning than risk Alice saying no later in the day.

  ‘I’ve come for the child,’ said Maura when Alice opened the door after what seemed like an age. Maura felt very conspicuous, stood in her own street waiting for an answer. She felt as welcome as the rent man after a lean week.

  Alice stared at her for a few long seconds, as though she was having trouble understanding what Maura said. ‘Wait here a minute,’ she replied in a monotone, and closed the front door in Maura’s face.

  ‘Jeez, have ye ever known the like,’ hissed Maura to Peggy, who was stood at her door puffing on a ciggie and watching. The kids were already impatient and hopping around on the street, eager for Nellie to run about and play. ‘A stranger in me own street, in a house I knew and cleaned, long afore she did.’

  Maura’s blood boiled. If Nellie hadn’t been Bernadette’s child she would have shouted through the letterbox, in a manner far from ladylike, ‘Feck off with yer, ye haughty stuck-up Protestant bitch,’ and stormed off into Peggy’s to confer. If Nellie hadn’t been Bernadette and Jerry’s child, and therefore worth the effort, a street war would surely have broken out.

  It took every ounce of Maura’s willpower to hold her tongue and to keep her hands to herself, as, after what seemed an eternity, Alice opened the door and pushed Nellie out onto the street. Nellie looked dishevelled and as though she had been crying, but as soon as she saw Maura, her face lit up.

  Maura knew there was no point in kicking up against Alice. She knew that if she did, she would force Jerry to take sides and he would have to side with Alice. Or ‘his bitch of a Protestant wife’ as Maura frequently called her.

  ‘I know I’m a Catholic and I shouldn’t say this,’ Maura had confided to Peggy only the previous morning, ‘but if Jerry told me he wanted to get a divorce, I would jump for joy, so I would.’

  ‘Right ye are there,’ replied Peggy, ‘just don’t go saying that in front of Father James now, or any of the nuns, or they’ll have ye doing a penance.’

  They both roared with laughter, because they knew Maura was joking.

  ‘If my Tommy’s words get any sharper, or his arse any fatter and lazier, I’ll be divorcing meself,’ spluttered Maura.

  ‘Aye, away with ye,’ said Peggy, ‘yer Tommy’s words are only sharp because he’s always having to slip them in sideways, ye talk so much. Hush giving out about divorce, for Jerry or anyone, no one gets divorced around here.’

  Both women laughed as they worked out how to make the Camp coffee that had appeared in the grocery shop that week. Peggy had been told that everyone was drinking it and it was all the rage, so she had bought a bottle for them to try for a change. They poured the brown glutinous liquid into two cups, added the hot sterilized milk and then drank it, pretending they both thought it was lovely.

  They never touched it again.

  Peggy and Maura went on their way, with Maura’s anger towards Alice having dispersed. But it was a continuous battle to hold her tongue and one Maura knew she had to keep fighting, to make sure she kept true to the promise of her prayers and was able to keep a watchful eye over Nellie.

  It was only because Maura had got the child into the church with Jerry’s mammy Kathleen, for a quick baptism the day before the funeral, that Nellie was safe in the light. As Maura was her godmother, it was her job to ensure she stayed there and if that meant keeping on even terms with Alice, so be it.

  Nellie was excited to see the Doherty children and Maura, whom she loved so much, and left the house without a backward glance, skipping along, towards the green at the top of the street. She chatted away to the children and Maura all the way without stopping. Her long, strawberry-blonde curls had turned to a distinctive red and bounced up and down, freshly rubbed through with a hair lotion called Goldilocks that her da had bought from an American sailor on the Canada dock. He had applied it last thing the previous night, in preparation for today. Her blue eyes sparkled;
she found it impossible to contain her anticipation. She had no idea what a birthday party was.

  At the jumble sale at a church hall in Maghull, Maura had snapped up a dress and a hand-knitted pale-pink cardigan for Nellie, which she put on her as soon as they got back to her own house. The pink cardigan had faded from overwashing, but it didn’t matter; Nellie still felt like a princess. Jerry had that morning given Maura the threepence the dress and cardigan had cost. He had no idea about clothes and he knew better than to ask Alice to take Nellie shopping.

  He depended on Maura for almost everything to do with Nellie, who had found her way around Alice. She had even begun to do little things that she had watched Jerry do in their own home, and Kitty and Maura do in theirs. He laughed so much that he almost cried when he caught her in the kitchen one day, battling with the big broom and trying to sweep the kitchen floor.

  When he told Maura, she added her own pearls of wisdom. ‘Aye, well, it’s because, even at her young age, she can feel the need for a mother in the house. She senses the absence of a caring woman, Jerry.’

  Jerry didn’t reply. He wished Maura wouldn’t let on so about Alice all the time. He knew the mistake he had made, but it was his mistake and he would have to live with it. That would be much easier if people stopped reminding him of what he had done.

  Sometimes Maura felt angry with Jerry, as if he had forgotten about Bernadette. She knew he never mentioned her name in the house, or to Nellie, and yet when Maura did so, she saw the lump in his throat and the tears in his eyes. Maura, too, welled up every time she thought of Bernadette. She often spoke of her to Nellie.

  ‘She was a lovely woman, a saintly woman. God knows, why would he take a new mother and so young?’ she would gasp, over-dramatically, as she clasped Nellie to her bosom.