Liverpool Daisy

by Helen Forrester

He watched her as, with black skirts swaying, she walked smartly up the street. With a bit of luck, he would set the gas meter in such a way that he would make as much out of that as out of the rent itself. That would teach her.

  TWENTY-SIX

  The wind was wailing through the streets, carrying an occasional flake of snow with it, so Daisy decided to go home. “I’ll tell George and Nell there was no work for me tonight,” she decided, as she clambered laboriously on to a tram. Mother of Christ, every bone in her body ached and her eyelids dropped with lack of sleep. She sighed heavily, as she rocked with the motion of the vehicle and watched the street lamps flick by.

  At home, she found George asleep beside his wife, and little Joey was dozing in the easy chair by a fading living-room fire.

  George looked like a stuck pig, with his mouth wide open. But Nellie admonished her, “Himself is proper tired. Let him sleep.”

  “There was no work for me tonight,” Daisy yawned. “I’ll make us all some supper and well get into bed.”

  As she trailed up and downstairs, distributing bread, cheese and tea to her guests, she worried about where she could hide her newly-acquired rent book and also her precious hoard of savings. George would be in most nights, and iddy Joey was as nosy as a hungry cur, not to mention the possibility that sharp, observant Meg might arrive.

  “And there’ll be all the old biddies from round about come a-visiting, every bloody cousin we’ve got, and Christ knows who,” she muttered. “I got to get that money out of Nellie’s room yet — it ain’t safe there.”

  She thought fleetingly of opening a banking account. Then, despite her fatigue, she could not help laughing at the idea. Even if she was allowed by the commissionaire to walk in, she would face a supercilious probing of her business; someone dressed in a shawl and boots did not fit in with gilt, marble and mahogany. She decided she couldn’t face it.

  “I can put rent book under me mattress in me new room,” she concluded. “Money’s a different matter.”

  If Mike discovered what she was doing, he would go through the roof with the force of the self-righteous explosion that would ensue. But, far worse than that, he would almost certainly demand the money she had made.

  The problem was still not resolved when, the next evening, she toiled up the narrow, dark staircase to her new room. She knew now what kind of a trade she wished to carry on and she was anxious that the room look pleasant for those who wanted to stay an hour or so. She was laden with a bedspread and bedding, a fringed cloth for the table and a flowered china candlestick and candles.

  She arranged the bed, and afterwards pulled one of the chairs out and sat down. She looked round her domain with satisfaction. The night at Ivy’s had at least paid for all that she had bought.

  The sound of her own breathing seemed unnaturally loud in the still room. Gradually the unearthly quietness of the place became overwhelming, and she jumped when a piece of furniture gave a sudden creak. She found herself listening with abnormal intensity. But through the thick walls no sound of distant traffic penetrated, no human voice or footstep came from the deserted street below.

  She looked slowly round the room as if she expected that someone or something would surely spring at her. But the sparse furniture remained in its place, the cupboard door remained shut.

  She shuddered.

  “Ee, I could be mairdered and lie here for a week before anybody found me — and they wouldn’t know who I was when they did find me,” she said out loud, and the sound of her own voice made her jump.

  Then she laughed with a hint of hysteria. “Get out and find yerself somebody to bring in, you bloody fool. Only be a bit careful, like.”

  She got up and shook out her skirts, smoothed her hair in front of a small mirror on the wall, and smiled with artificial gaiety at her reflection. “Get moving, Liverpool Daisy!”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  When next Daisy went down to the shipping office to collect Mike’s allotment, she inquired about the arrival of the Heart of Salford.

  She was assured that the ship was indeed coming home. She should watch the “Due Soon” column in the Echo for the exact date of arrival.

  She forgot all about Mike immediately she lifted the latch of her front door. She could hear Nellie coughing frantically.

  The invalid had crawled downstairs and the effort had set off a fit of coughing. She was sitting in the easy chair with her head on her knee, when Daisy entered.

  “Holy Mary!” exclaimed Daisy. “What you been doing?” She ran to Nellie and eased her back till she rested against the cushion. “Nell, luv, ah thought you’d be all right in bed till I come. You should have stayed in yer bed, dear.”

  The coughing began to ease, and Nellie gasped, “I was fed up — thought I’d come down for a change.” She sounded fretful, not her usual patient self.

  “Well, never mind,” said Daisy. “I’ll get a cloth and wipe your face, and then we’ll have a nice cuppa tea to clear your throat.”

  Never argue with them as has T.B., was one of Daisy’s favourite adages. They’re just plain bad-tempered. She soon had Nellie in a better frame of mind, when, after a dose of medicine, she was tucked up in the easy chair, her feet on the brass fender. Over their tea, they reminisced about the funny things they had done when they were young together. Finally, the conversation turned to the man of the house.

  “’E won’t want me here,” said Nellie apprehensively.

  “Och, never give it a thought,” replied Daisy. “He’ll just be thankful it isn’t me Mam that’s up there.”

  Nellie chuckled at the memory of Mike’s dislike of his sharp little mother-in-law, and then as if suddenly very tired she leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes.

  Daisy viewed compassionately her friend’s worn face. The firelight cast shadows in the hollow cheeks and darkened the eye sockets, till Daisy felt with a sense of panic that she was already looking at a dead skull. Her stomach muscles clenched. She could not endure the thought of losing Nellie and she wondered agonisedly what more she could do to help her. Food, medicine, warmth, all these had been provided with a lavish hand. What more?

  Then with sudden inspiration, she asked, “Would you like to see Father Patrick, Nell? ‘Cos you can’t go to church at present, like.”

  Nellie’s eyes shot open. Their expression was one of pure terror. When your relations started to think about sending for the priest, you were a sure gonner. It was one thing to feel that you were going to die, another to be brought face to face with other people’s confirmation of it. She seemed to shrink into herself and become an even smaller lump beneath her enveloping shawl.

  “Am I that sick, Daise?”

  “Ee, na, Nellie, luv. You’re not fit to go to Mass, so I thought you might like to see him.”

  Last time she and Nellie had gone to Confession, Daisy had, after prevaricating her way through a garbled admission of the sin of avarice, fully expected to be struck dead by lightning bolts. But nothing had happened, and she wondered now, as she waited for Nellie’s reply, if perhaps God and His Holy Mother understood better than men what dire things could happen to a woman.

  Nellie clasped and unclasped her hands, which looked like mis-shaped, blue-veined claws. She looked around the crowded, homely room where she had spent so many youthful, contented hours with Daisy and her brothers and sisters.

  “Yes,” she finally sighed unhappily. “Yes, I’d better see ’im. I want to ask him to help keep an eye on iddy Joey.”

  A couple of days later Father Patrick came to visit. Daisy left him with the invalid so that Nellie could, if she wished, make her confession.

  The old priest conversed with Nellie for some time and promised to visit George and iddy Joey.

  “Mrs. Gallagher seems to have made you very comfortable here,” he remarked.

  “Oh, aye,” whispered Nellie. “She’s proper kind. She’s a wonder. She even works Saturdays and Sundays at her job, so as to get time and a half to help pay for ever
ything. And then she comes home and takes care o’ me. She’s a true friend.”

  Father Patrick went slowly and thoughtfully down the stairs. Sometimes the manifestation of pure, self-sacrificing human love in his poverty-stricken parish was so humbling that it blotted out the remembrance of the drunkenness, the family quarrels, the street fights, the endless petty theft, of which he was painfully aware.

  He blessed a flushed, embarrassed Daisy as he went out into the street.

  Daisy began to use her new room each evening. She acquired a regular client, which pleased her. He was a young labourer working on the new tunnel under the River Mersey. He came in each Friday night, after the Ball and Chain closed.

  She learned the timing of the police constable on his beat, and slipped her clients in and out circumspectly, so that his attention was never particularly drawn to the door beside the tailor’s shop. She paid her rent promptly and maintained a stiff-lipped silence, when the tailor jeered at her with obscene remarks, though she sometimes longed to strike him.

  She bought an old alarm clock to help her with the timing of the constable’s beat and the length of her clients’ visits. She nearly yielded to the temptation of paying for some additional bed sheets out of her earnings. But her earnings were for Nellie’s needs, for bowls, soap, towels, nightgowns.

  One morning, she went to see her old antagonist, the Welfare lady.

  The moment the Welfare lady saw Daisy’s file she remembered how Daisy had accepted a blanket for her invalid mother’s use when that lady was already dead.

  Daisy, seated suitably humbly on a wooden chair beside the desk, saw her stiffen with disapproval. Undaunted, she launched into a long description of Nellie’s illness and the need for extra bedding in case she haemorrhaged unexpectedly.

  “Why hasn’t the doctor put her in the sanatorium?”

  Daisy sighed. How to explain how frightening it was to be put in a hospital? That’s where you went to die, if you had no one to care for you.

  She shook her head negatively. “She didn’t want to go. T’ doctor didn’t press her, ’cos she’s got me to look after her.”

  “Humph. Terminal, I suppose?”

  Daisy went white and there was a singing in her ears. You don’t say things like that about a woman’s best friend.

  “No,” she gasped out. “She’s going to get better.” She wiped a genuine tear from her eye.

  The Welfare lady saw the tear and her manner softened. “I’ll visit you tomorrow,” she promised.

  When the next morning her little car drew up outside Daisy’s front door and a beaming Daisy let her in, she noticed immediately the improvement in the little home. She remembered it clearly as one of the more neglected and poverty-stricken in her district. In a thousand subtle ways it indicated to her experienced eyes either a great change of heart or a great improvement in circumstances. She began to wonder suspiciously if her help was truly needed.

  She looked round doubtfully, at the glowing fire, the glittering fender, the new pat of margarine on the table. The comfortable smell of kippers outweighed the usual odour of vermin, and on the clothes line stretched along the mantelpiece some white, recently washed, underwear steamed in the fire’s heat.

  Mrs. Gallagher had declared her income as eighteen shillings a week allotment and Nellie’s part of the allowance George drew from the Public Assistance Committee, out of which she paid seven shillings’ rent. The woman must be a better manager than most were.

  She asked to see Nellie and, again, was agreeably surprised. By her personal standards the house was still dirty and comfortless, but in comparison with others in the district Mrs. O’Brien’s bedroom, where a good fire also blazed, was much superior.

  If the Welfare Lady had expected to get any information out of Nellie as to how the transformation had been achieved, she was disappointed. Not even simple Nellie would discuss with a welfare worker what money one had — one discussed only what money was needed.

  Downstairs, the Welfare worker asked Daisy, “Would you be prepared to pay, say, a shilling a week towards the cost?”

  Daisy looked horror-stricken. “With less’n thirty bob a week coming in, and me with a sick woman to feed?” she asked, with a dramatic flourish of a hand across her heart. The thought of having to take a shilling each week to the woman’s office or alternatively, have a voluntary worker collect it, filled her with repugnance. More bloody nosy-parkers round the place.

  A week later, Daisy received with real gratitude two pairs of sheets and a fine wool blanket. The blanket was made from small, brightly coloured hand-knitted squares stitched together, and she immediately spread it over Nellie’s bed.

  “Aye!” Nellie exclaimed, “It’s proper pretty to look at when you feel low.”

  Daisy took the sheets down to her room in the city.

  It seemed to Daisy that she was walking a narrow tightrope and that any moment she might, from sheer fatigue, lose her balance and go spinning to the floor. What little sleep she managed to get was frequently broken by a fretful cry from Nellie, who needed help now even to use the rose-wreathed chamber pot under the bed.

  And the visitors trickled into the house steadily. Even Freddie came one evening, with Maureen Mary, just before Daisy departed for work.

  Daisy had not seen her son-in-law since her mother’s funeral, and she greeted him with rough good humour. Maureen Mary kissed her mother and then went upstairs to see her aunt, leaving Daisy alone with Freddie for a few minutes.

  He stood with his back to the fire, giving no hint that the heavy stuffiness of the room made him feel nauseated. This was his wife’s mother, and he knew that her influence on Maureen Mary was so strong that the slightest upset might culminate in Maureen Mary and little Bridie finishing up in Daisy’s house.

  He watched Daisy arrange her plaits carefully round her ears and add a couple of hairpins to the back of her head. She looked quite graceful, standing in front of the tiny wall mirror, and he realised suddenly where Maureen Mary had got her charm from.

  She turned and picked up her shawl from the back of a chair and flung it over her shoulders. She smiled at him a little mischievously, and then said hesitatingly, “I got to go to work. You know I’m workin’, Freddie?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’m trying to save a bit.” Her smile faded and she looked suddenly terribly sad, the generous mouth drooping as if she might start to cry. “It’s in case our Nell dies — she’s hasn’t got any insurance — no burial club. And I won’t have her with a pauper’s funeral.” She bit her lower lip. “I don’t know how to keep the money safe. I mean, banks aren’t for the likes o’ me — they’d laugh at me. And what with me husband coming home soon, and our George … What could I do with it, Fred?”

  The implied trust of the confidence made Freddie swell out his chest a little and rock himself confidently backwards and forwards on his heels. He put his hands in his trouser pockets while he considered the matter.

  “Well,” he replied judiciously. “The best thing would be to open a Post Office Savings account. Everybody goes to the post office.” He grinned at her. “Just watch you don’t lose the book.”

  “Aaah!” breathed Daisy. She relaxed, and some of the distress went out of her expression. “That’s the gear! What would I do without you, Fred?”

  She opened an account at the huge central post office, where it was practically certain that no one would recognise her. A deposit such as she made, if handed over in the local store which doubled as a post office, would have caused a sensation.

  On the tram returning home, she smiled a little grimly to herself, as she felt the savings book through the thickness of her skirt. “I’ll hide book in me room — with the rent book.” Then she sighed heavily. All that money would have bought a lot of glasses of beer at the Ragged Bear, a lot of seats to see the pictures in the “Flea Pit”, the local cinema. It was as well she could not spend much locally without drawing comment from her neighbours; otherwise, she mig
ht not have felt so strongly about saving for a funeral that she kept assuring herself would not take place. Nellie had to get better, not buried.

  “Holy Angels from the Throne of Light, let her live,” she muttered suddenly.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  It was fluttery Agnes’s turn to watch Nellie. She spent hour after hour of the dark winter evening sitting nervously by the sick woman’s bed, gnawing her nails and muttering, “What’ll I do if she dies while Daisy is out?” Every time Nellie, beset by fever, burst into incoherent speech, Agnes would half rise from her seat in panic and mutter, “Holy Mother, save us!” while she patted Nellie’s shoulder to comfort her.

  She was further unnerved when a strange man came to the door and asked for Daisy.

  “Daisy’s at work at the bottle factory,” she said timidly, holding the door open only a crack.

  The man sniggered unpleasantly. “Tell her Pat from the Hercy Dock came.”

  She nodded, and quickly shut the door.

  When Daisy came home about three in the morning, she told her about the Irishman. Relief at Daisy’s return overwhelmed her initial curiosity, and she failed to notice how white Daisy went at the news.

  Good God and the angels! she thought frantically, I must tell those I know not to come to the house any more. She continued to worry as she and Agnes lay down together on one of the landing-room beds, since Agnes was much too scared to go home in the dark.

  Both women awoke to the violent coughing of Nellie, from the front bedroom.

  “Jaysus!” Daisy muttered as she stumbled out of bed and ran to help her friend.

  Agnes leaned out of bed and felt frantically for the candle and matches. Not even for Nellie could she persuade herself to get out of bed without a light.

  In Nellie’s room the candle had gutted and only a faint glimmer from the fire gave any light. It bathed the suffering woman in a dim, unearthly glow as, half raised on her elbow, she struggled for breath.