As she plodded along, she sighed one of her gustier sighs. If she did not count little Colleen in hospital in Leasowe, there were eight people ahead of her in the family, all of whom could do with socks. Patrick was always the first to get them, also the first to be fed – because he was the breadwinner, or was supposed to be, thought Martha with sudden asperity, as she considered her own ceaseless efforts.
Woollen socks wore out so quickly, she would moan to Mary Margaret, and, though she could darn, she did not always have wool to do so.
As she approached the Lee Jones’ League of Welldoers’ shabby brick building and saw the length of the queue, she quailed. Despite a cup of tea for breakfast and eating up a piece of crust that Number Nine had abandoned, she felt faint.
So great was the number of people lined up patiently alongside the building’s wall that a policeman stood there to keep order. It would be a long wait.
She went to the end of the queue and leaned against the wall for support, while she mechanically wheeled her pram backwards and forwards at her side, as if she were rocking Number Nine to sleep in it.
There were many charities in Liverpool which tried, each in its inefficient way, to ease the city’s horrifyingly intense poverty. Unlike some other cities, the deprivation of its poorer citizens was blatantly obvious to the ladies who came in from the suburbs to shop and to the menfolk who had offices in the centre of the town.
In the heart of the city, the interfusion of the two streams of inhabitants, the poverty-stricken and the fairly well-to-do, was impossible to escape; it flowed through the shopping areas and then the business districts, flooded along the dock roads and the Pier Head. And many a kind soul tried to do something about it.
Amongst some of the upper classes, there was still, also, the latent folk memory that, if something was not done about the suffering, there might be a revolution – like the French one, with its nasty guillotine and baskets of bleeding heads.
Amongst the dreadfully poor, Lee Jones was, perhaps, the most beloved benefactor. It was said that he squandered nearly all his fortune in order to help, but hardly made a dent in the need. As few others did, he understood, also, that not only was food for the body needed, but also some happy times to lighten the burden of misery.
As she leaned against the wall, eyes closed, and tried not to faint, Martha remembered a day when he had brought into the court, on a wheelbarrow, a gramophone accompanied by records of popular songs. She smiled slightly, as she recalled with what enthusiasm she and her neighbours had poured out of the houses and nearly burst their lungs as they sang old Victorian music-hall songs along with the scratchy gramophone records. It had been a really good afternoon, with rays of summer sun creeping their way in between the close-packed housetops to light up the jolly faces.
Her Brian, now pedalling his way round delivering meat for the butcher, would still whistle the same songs as he went. The boy had been thankful, also, to join the boxing club which Mr Jones had started, to give the lads something to do of a Saturday morning. Now, though Brian had to work Saturdays, he still went to practise on a Wednesday night. Patrick had said that Brian was good at it, Martha mused.
Real nice lad, our Brian, she thought. When delivering to houses which did not have distrustful cooks, who weighed in his presence everything he delivered to them, he would sometimes take a sausage or a chop from one of the white, loosely wrapped parcels, and secrete it inside his shirt.
When Martha made a half-hearted protest at its being theft, he would say stoutly that if she saw the pounds and pounds of meat which he delivered, she would know that it would never be missed. She would thankfully drop the rather black-looking offering into the soup pot.
Sometimes, on a Saturday night, when a bit of tripe or shin of beef did not look good enough even to go into sausages, Mr Beamish, his employer, would give it to him, with the strict admonition that it should be cooked immediately he got home. The two assistant butchers whom Mr Beamish employed would snigger as Brian wrapped the gift up, but the lad did not care – food was food.
The queue, mostly women, but with a few flat caps interspersed, shuffled along slowly. She moved with it, keeping her back to the wall for support, pushing the pram alongside her.
‘Atternoon, Mrs Connolly,’ said a cracked voice at her side.
Martha blinked in surprise, and made an effort to straighten up. The voice of the local illegal moneylender in a charity queue?
‘Atternoon, Mrs O’Dwyer,’ she responded cautiously.
She looked fearfully at the four-foot-high ancient crone, who was, equally, the bane and the person of last resort of all the housewives in the courts. She herself owed her a shilling from last Saturday. She had borrowed it in desperation. Patrick had had only two days’ work that week, and she had not even bread in the house. She had agreed to repay one shilling and threepence for the loan by next Saturday.
Though the repayment was not yet due, a fearsome apprehension went through her. If she failed to pay this woman, her threats of disclosure to the relieving officer of undeclared earnings, or a hint to a husband that his wife was being unfaithful, whether true or not, or a whisper to an employer of a small theft, like Brian and his chops, could play havoc with a family.
There seemed to be nothing that she did not know, nothing that she could not use to coerce money out of petrified borrowers. What was she doing here?
Thoroughly enjoying her client’s obvious fear, Mrs O’Dwyer grinned toothlessly. Martha’s shocked expression was very satisfying to her: fear was part of her stock in trade.
She was actually hunting for a debtor who had vanished mysteriously while still owing her five shillings, a very big debt. It had occurred to her that the woman might, on such a bad day, surface at the one place where she was likely to get food, the Lee Jones. She had not had any luck, but had decided, since she was there, she would beg a meal for herself.
‘Mr Connolly not doing so well, eh?’ she inquired of the paralysed Martha.
Martha’s hands under the ends of her shawl were like ice, and her feet in her sopping wet boots felt that they would never move again.
Holy Mary, help me, she prayed.
It did not occur to her that she need not answer the moneylender’s question, that her polite salutation was sufficient. Her mouth opened and shut soundlessly as she groped for words.
She was saved by a sudden ripple of shuffling down the line. The policeman on duty shouted, ‘Move along there, now.’
Like well-trained dogs on leashes, the patient queue wended its way slowly through a doorway and into a narrow passageway, where they were, at least, out of the wind and sleet. Martha quickly pulled the pram in behind her.
She glanced back and saw, with relief, that she was the last to be let into the passage. The moneylender was looking up sourly at the policeman, who was holding her back. Mrs O’Dwyer could not command any particular respect in a charitable organisation; she was merely another old woman who would be let in from the cold as soon as there was room.
Martha was greeted by a superb smell of cooking, and a smiling young woman who kept the applicants in single file as they surged down the passage. She then passed them to an older lady seated at a table. Their names and addresses, with brief reasons for their being there and the number in the family, were noted.
When Martha explained that she was trying to get something to eat for two big families, there was a pause, and she realised with a sinking heart that anybody could make that excuse in order to get a double ration.
‘Me friend has the TB, Miss. It would be the death of her to come out on a day like this,’ she pleaded.
‘Is she a widow?’
The implication that Mary Margaret’s husband could have come on her behalf silenced