A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin. Helen Forrester

– was the last kid born there: no new tenant had come in for years. It would only take two empty houses in Norris Green or Dovecot or some other place to rehouse Mary Margaret’s and my families. Then all the single people living there would be told – legal, like – that they must find themselves places to live, and, bingo, They could empty the whole court and pull it down.

      ‘I didn’t feel safe at all, I didn’t. Not about nothing.’

      She paused to take another slurp of tea, while Angie braced herself, heaved and successfully turned over the hapless Pat. Despite her coma, Pat screeched with pain.

      Martha winced. She carefully put her empty mug down on the smelly Victorian commode next to her bed.

      Then she went on more vaguely, as if anxious to justify the growth of old fears, ‘They’d been closing off the courts in the north end of the town for years: them houses in the north end was only ten feet by ten feet, one room to a floor. They was much more crowded than us – and they was a long way off from us.

      ‘But when George and Maria in the very next court to us was to be moved, it suddenly seemed as if me hour had come.’

      She flung her arm across her heart, as if to indicate her shock. ‘And I knew I’d have to go and see Maria, poor dear, fight or no fight. Couldn’t leave a sister to face eviction alone. In the end, I didn’t have time, I were that harassed. Weeks later, I walked all the way to Norris Green to see her in her new house.’

      Angie did not respond. She looked down at Pat, and hesitated: her undersheet was soaked; the bed should be stripped. Then she pulled the woman’s blankets over her. Leave the bedding to the night nurse, Mrs Kelly, to change. Let her do something for once, other than sleep on the visitor’s settee in the hallway – ignoring the cries of the patients, according to the sufferers themselves.

      Martha watched Angie with the same fascination as a rabbit might exhibit if faced with a snake about to eat it; she dreaded becoming entirely helpless, as were the rest of the women in her room. How would she bear the pain?