Yet, the priest and his assistant, Father James, were sorely grieved by the suffering they saw daily in their crowded parish, already famous as a surviving remnant of the worst slums in Britain. All they could do was to preach obedience to God’s will, acceptance of the circumstances to which men were born, and the glories of the life to come.
Many of their male parishioners spoke disparagingly of them. But none of the women would hear a word against them. In their hearts, they rarely doubted the Church’s teachings and they clung to them as the only ray of hope in their lives.
They dearly loved the younger priest, Father James, who was so gentle that some of the women thought he was a saint; and they loved and respected him as they would a saint.
Like most of her female neighbours, Martha often wept as she considered all the problems of her life, particularly in winter. Her feverish prayer, addressed to the Virgin Mary, was that she should not become pregnant again. It was surely sinful to beg such help from a Holy Virgin. But if She did not understand the affairs of women and how hard life was, who else was there?
Having her latest baby, little James, named after the priest, had left her feeling very exhausted. He was a sweet-tempered child and was known affectionately throughout the courts as Martha Connolly’s Number Nine.
How Number Nine was surviving his infancy was a mystery to Martha. She had not been able to feed him herself, and he never really thrived on tinned milk; even now, with his second birthday coming up, he was nought but skin and bone and protruding stomach. But, then, life was like that. You couldn’t do much about it: God sent children. But, sometimes, He also took them away again.
The Church said that nobody was supposed to love anyone more than God himself – and Martha felt uneasily that God might be jealous of her beloved Number Nine. In quiet moments in her busy life, she prayed almost daily that He would never take him.
‘I’ll Take a Whack at the Lee Jones’
January to March 1938
In January of 1938 it was so cold that small boys and girls were able to make slides on the pavements. Frozen puddles were used as a base, and each child took a short run and then slid the length of the puddle, and gradually the slide lengthened to five or six feet. Though sometimes they fell, nobody seemed to get hurt and it was a marvellous way in which to have unexpected fun without skates.
Of course, adults whose balance was not nearly so good swore at them roundly as, hurrying along the pavement, they sometimes skidded and fell. Children who did not often laugh would shriek with merriment, as huge black skirts suddenly ballooned on the pavement or men ruefully rubbed their bruised behinds.
Men and boys who were able to obtain a pair of skates, no matter how ancient, skated on frozen ponds, and, as the exercise warmed them up, they temporarily forgot their hunger.
Though Martha’s school-age children were usually kept home from school during such bitter weather, they could not play on the slide created outside the court’s entry: they had only tattered canvas plimsolls or were barefoot. All of them were suffering from itchy chilblains on their heels and toes; some of these had burst open and had become infected. To wear any kind of shoe over them caused considerable pain.
They screamed when Martha boiled up one of the cleaner rags from her stock prepared for the market, wrung it out and slapped the resultant hot poultice onto an offending chilblain, to cleanse it by drawing out the pus.
Instead of being out in the street, therefore, the children were daily crouched together on the floor, in front of the small fire in the range in the Connollys’ room.
It seemed to weary Mary Margaret that one of them, at least, would be grizzling miserably after Martha’s poulticing efforts, and be told sharply by their mother, ‘Shut up, or I’ll give you something to cry for.’
This threat would reduce the whining for a little while, unless another child, in the confined space, accidentally knocked the treated foot. Then there would be howls of pain and an immediate exchange of blows between offender and offended. Martha would slap both, and further wails of woe would ensue.
During this winter, Martha unfailingly invited Mary Margaret, her mother, Theresa, and her children to share the warmth of the Connollys’ fire, and Mary Margaret was extremely grateful for this. She dreamed, however, of having a room of her own with a fireplace or a paraffin heater; it would be so much quieter; and the more sickly she grew, the more she longed for peace.
She sat on the Connolly family’s only chair, her sewing on her lap, as she hemstitched men’s white handkerchiefs. Her daughter, Connie, was also kept out of school because she, too, had no shoes; nor had she a jacket to wear over her cotton dress.
Too young to go to school, Minnie tended to wander up to the attic to visit Mike and Alice. She was a welcome small diversion to the childless couple.
Pugnacious Dollie, her eldest, rarely joined them: she had plimsolls to wear and was hurried, protesting, off to school, just to get rid of such a quarrelsome child. But even she could not always face the cold outside without a jacket: she would dig her heels in, like a stubborn cat refusing to be put in a cage, and would sit sullenly on the house’s staircase, until finally Martha would have pity on her and let her into her room.
If Martha did not seek the steamy warmth of the public wash house, in order to launder her rags ready for market, she usually sat on an orange box near the fire, with Number Nine on her knee.
By special arrangement as to which day it was to be, her rags were hung out to dry on the clothesline outside. The line belonged to the Flanagans’ Auntie Ellen. It was stretched across the court from her house and was anchored to the wall of the Connollys’ house. The cloths dried quite well even on a really cold day, but were a problem when it rained; at such times they were piled over a piece of string stretched across the range in Martha’s room. Patrick always grumbled that their bulk took up far too much space.
As Mary Margaret chatted with Martha, she sewed with feverish speed, barely looking at her work as the needle flashed in and out.
When Dollie was present, she received, very reluctantly, a lesson in how to hemstitch: Mary Margaret hoped that, soon, she would be adept enough to earn a penny or two by helping her. Connie, her second daughter, aged six and a half, was quite proud that she, too, could already thread a needle and do clumsy running stitches.
Even if they had boots or shoes, coats or shawls, few women or older girls ever joined in the sliding games; at best, they had babies to look after, food to find, rags to sell in the market or flowers or chewing gum to hawk at the street corners.
Looking like a series of waddling black turtles in their shawls, some older girls and women, like Sheila and Phoebe who lived in the front room on Mary Margaret’s floor, trooped off to work at picking cotton or oakum. Others, like Mary Margaret, took in sewing to do as sweated labour in their homes: sewing men’s cotton handkerchiefs yielded threepence a dozen; finishing buttonholes or decorative embroidery which needed more skill yielded a fraction more per piece.
The greatest problems of a woman who sewed white material was that she had to keep her hands clean and, also, own an iron in order to press the finished work: it had to be returned in a reasonable state to the man who employed her.
All the women in the court were acutely aware that, each day, pennies for food had to be found somewhere. In too many families, men smoked and drank regularly and women not infrequently: it was the only relief they had from the misery of their lives, lives which they regarded as absolutely normal, fixed and inevitable.
According to any one of them, the best you could do was to squeeze what you could out of the far distant world of Them. Unable to explain very coherently to Them the pressure