The Four Streets Read online

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  For my beloved and much-missed brother, John

  1960–1986

  Chapter One

  Let me take you by the hand and lead you up from the Mersey River – to the four streets, and the houses stained black from soot and a pea-soup smog, which, when winter beckons, rubs itself up against the doors and windows, slips in through the cracks and into the lungs of gurgling babies and toothless grannies.

  In May 1941, Hitler bombed Liverpool for seven consecutive nights.

  All four streets survived, which was nothing short of a miracle.

  Home to an Irish-Catholic immigrant community, they lay in close proximity to where the homes of families far less fortunate had once stood. Life on the streets around the docks was about hard work and survival.

  Children ran free, unchecked from dawn until dusk, whilst mothers, wearing long, wraparound aprons and hair curlers, nattered on front steps and cast a distracted eye on little ones charging up and around, swallowing down the Mersey mist.

  They galloped with wooden floor mops between legs, transformed into imaginary warhorses. Dustbin lids became shields and metal colanders, helmets, as they clattered and charged along back alleyways in full knowledge that, at the end of the day, they would be beaten with the smelly mop end.

  The women gossiped over backyard walls, especially on wash day, whilst they fed wet clothes through a mangle and then hung them on the line to dry.

  In winter, the clothes would be brought in, frozen and as stiff as boards, to defrost and dry overnight on a wooden clothes maiden placed in front of the dying embers of the fire.

  Such was the order of life on the four streets. All day long housewives complained about their lot but they got on with it. Through a depression, war, illness and poverty they had never missed a beat. No one ever thought it would alter. Their way of life was constant and familiar, as it had been as long as anyone could remember. When little boys grew up, they replaced their warhorses for cranes and, just like their da, became dockers. Little girls grew up and married them, replacing toy dolls with real babies. Neighbours in Liverpool had taken the place of family in Ireland and the community was emotionally self-supporting.

  But this was the fifties. The country had picked itself up from the ravages of war and had completed the process of dusting itself down. Every single day something new and never before seen arrived in the shops, from Mars bars to Hoovers. No one knew what exciting product would appear next. Liverpool was steaming towards the sixties and the Mersey beat. Times were about to change and the future hung heavy in the air.

  It smelt of concrete new towns and Giro cheques.

  The economic ebb and flow of daily life on the streets was dominated by the sound of cargo ships blowing their horns as they came into the docks angrily demanding to be unloaded. A call for the tugs meant money in the bread bin, which was where every family kept their money. An empty bread bin meant a hungry home.

  The main source of income for each household came from the labour of the men who lived on the four streets. Liverpool stevedores were hard men, but the bosses who ran the Mersey Dock Company were harder. Wages were suppressed at a level that kept families hungry and men keen for work. It was a tough life for all. Childhood was short as everyone pulled their weight to live hand to mouth, day to day.

  Each house in the four streets was identical to the next: two up, two down, with an outhouse toilet in the small square backyard. Upstairs at the top of the landing, a new enamel bath, courtesy of the Liverpool Corporation, stood exposed under the eaves. The water to the bath was supplied via rudimentary plumbing in the form of two pipes that passed through the landing roof into the loft and attached straight to the water tanks.

  Although some homes had discarded kitchen ranges for electric cookers, and back boilers for the new immersion heaters, those on the four streets enjoyed no such newfangled innovations. The open range remained, doubling as a back boiler and a cooker.

  Running past the back gate to each house was a cobbled alleyway known as ‘the entry’, which was odd as it was in fact ‘the exit’. People only very occasionally entered by the front door, and they always left by the back, although nobody remembered how the habit had begun. No one ever locked their doors; they didn’t need to.

  The entry was a playground to the street children as well as the large brown river rats that grew fat on the spewing contents of the metal bins overturned by hungry dogs and cats.

  At the top of the four streets lay a grassed-over square of common land known as the green, which in school holidays hosted the longest ever football matches, sometimes lasting for days on end. Rival teams were formed from each of the four streets and were in perpetual competition. Matches would begin with a nominated goal counter, who at the end of each day would collapse in his bed, exhausted and mucky, with the score scrawled on a precious scrap of paper tucked under his pillow, ready to resume playing the following day.

  St Mary’s church, which stood at the end of Nelson Street, was visited at least once a day by every woman on the four streets. No one missed mass. The priests were hugely influential amongst the community and combined the role of law keepers, teachers and saviours of souls.

  No two front doors in close proximity were painted the same colour. Black followed blue, followed brown followed green. On almost every window in every house hung a set of net curtains, each with a lace pattern different from any other window in the street. Even in homes that could boast nothing in terms of material wealth, individuality fought to be expressed and admired.

  Aside from the practical function of the nets, their existence played a significant role within the community. The degree of their whiteness and cleanliness invited verbal judgment to be passed upon the woman responsible. They had to. Women needed a yardstick by which to measure one another’s competence as wives and mothers. Men didn’t wash nets. That was women’s work. Men were judged only on the number of sons they spawned. For women, it was the nets. A barometer and a source of gossip, which was essential. Gossip was the light relief between household chores. Football for men. Gossip for women. Religion for all.

  Maura and Tommy Doherty lived in Nelson Street. Although they had a brood of children, they continued to breed, and were passionate, loving and caring neighbours to everyone in the streets. Tommy was short and muscular. If he hadn’t been a docker, putting in ten hours a day of hard manual labour, he would have been short and fat. He was bald on top and sported a Friar Tuck band of hair around the back and over his ears. As a result, he was very attached to his cap, which he wore indoors and out, rain or shine. Not one of his children had ever seen him without it, except when he slept. If Maura hadn’t insisted he remove his cap before he got into bed, often flicking it off herself, he would have worn it there too. Tommy had vivid, twinkling blue eyes, the kind that can only come from Irish roots, and his eyes reflected his personality, mischievous and kind. He was a proud and devoted husband and father, and was possibly one of the few da’s on the streets never to lay a finger on any of his children, a fact that bore testament to his temperament. All he desired in life was peace and quiet.

  Tommy had grown up in Cork and had travelled to England to work on the roads. On his first night in Liverpool, he was waylaid by a prostitute at the Pier Head. On his second, he met Maura. Penniless by the third, he got taken on at the docks and, to his great sadness, had never been home since.

  Maura was thin, taller than Tommy by a good
two inches and, as Tommy often joked, her almost-black hair and eyes were proof that her granny had lain with a tinker: a joke that often resulted in Tommy being chased around the kitchen with a wet dishcloth.

  Maura liked to travel, sometimes managing the whole mile and a half into Liverpool city centre, known to everyone as ‘town’. She had been born and raised in Killhooney Bay on the west coast of Ireland and, until the day she left home to work as a housemaid in Liverpool, had never ventured any further than Bellingar, on the back of a mule and cart.

  ‘Sure, why would ye need to go into town?’ Tommy could often be heard exclaiming in surprise when Maura told him she would be spending extra on shopping that week and would be taking the tram. ‘Everything a man could want can be got on his feet around here.’

  Without fail, an almighty row would ensue and Tommy could often be spotted running out of the backyard gate as though the devil himself were after him, when it was in fact Maura, brandishing a rolled-up copy of the Liverpool Echo to beat him around the head with, the children scattering before them like cockroaches in daylight, in case they got in the way and copped it instead. He regularly sought refuge in the outhouse, one of the few places where no one troubled him, and took his newspaper for company. Tommy may have craved peace but, with seven kids and a wife as opinionated and as popular as Maura, it was just a dream.

  He didn’t much care for the news, although he read what he could understand. His relief from hard labour was to check out the horses running at Aintree and to study their form. Tommy had spent his entire childhood helping his father, a groom for a breeding stud. He knew something about horses, did Tommy. Or so he thought. It was his link with home, his specialist subject, which made him feel valued when others sought him out for his opinion or a tip. He was right more often than he was wrong. In his heart, he knew it was the luck of the Irish, combined with Maura’s devotion to regular prayer to the Holy Father, far more than his dubious unique knowledge, which sustained his reputation. He still lost as much money at the bookies as every other man on the streets.

  If there was anyone in the backyard as Tommy left the outhouse, whether anyone looked at his Liverpool Echo or not, or was even paying him a second’s attention, as he walked to the back kitchen door he would nod to the newspaper in his hand and loudly pronounce, ‘Shite in, shite out.’ Social skills were strangers.

  Life was lived close to the cobbles.

  Maura was, without doubt, the holiest mother in the street. She attended mass twice a day when everything was going well, and more often when the ships were slow to come in and work was scarce.

  She was the person everyone went to for help and advice, and her home was where the women often gathered to discuss the latest gossip. On the day one of the O’Prey boys from number twenty-four was sent to prison, the mothers ran to gather around Maura’s door, each carrying a cup of tea and a chair out onto the street to sit and gossip, watching the children play.

  ‘I’m not surprised he’s gone down,’ Maura pronounced to the women sitting around, whilst standing on her doorstep, arms folded across her chest, supporting an ample bosom. Hair curlers bobbed with indignation inside a pink hairnet whilst, in order to dramatize her point, two straight and rigid fingers waved a Woodbine cigarette in the general direction of the O’Prey house. ‘Look at her nets, they’re filthy, so they are.’ In Maura’s eyes, there was a direct connection between the whiteness of the net curtains and the moral values within. No one ever challenged her assertion.

  The women turned their heads and looked at the windows as though they had never noticed them before.

  ‘Aye, they are that too,’ came a murmur of acknowledgment, led by Peggy, Maura’s next-door neighbour. They all nodded as they flicked their cigarette ash onto the pavement and took another long self-righteous puff.

  The mother of the son who had provided a poor household with stolen food was damned by dust. But Maura’s condemnation wouldn’t stop her sending over a warm batch of floury potato bread, known as Boxty, as an act of commiseration when she made her own the following morning, using flour that was itself stolen from a bag that had fallen off the back of a ship in the dock. Maura was as kind and good as she was opinionated and hypocritical.

  Chapter Two

  Jerry and Bernadette Deane lived across the road from Maura and Tommy in number forty-two. Like many of the men on the four streets, Jerry had arrived in Liverpool from Mayo, hungry for prosperity and advancement that weren’t to be found in rural Ireland, where levels of relative poverty remained almost unchanged since the sixteen hundreds, and where, right into the winters of the nineteen-sixties, children still walked to school barefoot through icy fields. It was as though the land of his birth were caught in a time warp. The outside privies on the four streets were a luxury compared to the low stone-and-sod houses of Mayo, where an indoor toilet of any description was mostly unheard of in many of the villages.

  Jerry and Bernadette had met on the ferry across from Dublin to Liverpool on a gloriously sunny but cold and very windy day. Jerry spotted Bernadette almost as soon as he boarded the ferry, her long, untameable red hair catching his attention. Jerry was mesmerized as, from a slight distance, he watched Bernadette do battle with her hair, which the wind had mischievously taken hold of and, lock by lock, teased out from under her black knitted beret. She struggled hard to force it back under the hat.

  Jerry had been on his way to the ship’s bar when he caught sight of her, her beauty stopping him in his tracks.

  ‘Jaysus,’ he would often say to anyone who was listening, ‘she took the eyes right out of me head, so she did.’

  Instead of moving into the bar for a pint of Guinness to settle his stomach, he sat down on a painted wooden bench, bolted to the wooden deck, to watch the young woman standing at the ship’s rail and wondered to himself why she didn’t step indoors and into the warm. Surely, it would be much easier than taking on the sea wind and trying to tame a wild mane of hair outdoors?

  Her already pale complexion turned a ghostly ashen as she gave up on her hair, staggered forward a few steps and grabbed the rail with both hands, looking more than a little queasy.

  Aha, Jerry thought, seeing an opportunity in the girl’s problem, thank ye Lord, a hundred thousand times, for here’s me chance. He embodied everything everyone knows to be true of an Irishman. He was as bold as brass, full of the blarney and didn’t know the meaning of the word shy. That was until he met Bernadette.

  Taking the initiative, Jerry nipped into the café, bought an earthenware mug of steaming-hot sweet tea and took it over to the strange but beautiful girl. In his grinning, cheeky Irish way, he tried to introduce himself, but he was so struck by the size and the blueness of her eyes that, for the first time in his life, he could say nothing.

  Bernadette didn’t notice Jerry as he approached her, so focused was she on holding onto the rail of the ship and on keeping in her stomach the fried eggs and bacon she had enjoyed that morning. She was sure she might faint, and was wondering how she would cope all alone if she did, when she saw Jerry’s tall, broad form standing next to her. It was hard to look up as it meant breaking her concentration, but she managed for a few seconds even though she felt like throwing herself overboard. A slow watery death was surely more pleasurable than feeling as she did right now.

  She was distracted by his large black eyes that made her forget her sickness for all of thirty seconds. ‘I felt as though they were burning into me very soul,’ was how Bernadette described her first meeting with Jerry, wistfully and often, her eyes welling up at the mere memory of the day.

  It was obvious to everyone who knew their story that Jerry and Bernadette had benefited from that all too rare but wonderful thing, love at first sight.

  He realized as he walked over to her that there was no reason on God’s earth why he, a complete and total stranger, should be taking a mug of sweet tea to a woman he had never met in his life before and might never meet again. Jerry introduced himself, as best h
e could, but it came out as a prolonged and indistinguishable jabbering.

  Holy Mary, he thought to himself, where the feck has me sensibility gone and why is me hand shaking like a virgin on her wedding night, spillin’ the bleedin’ tea everywhere?

  Although Jerry was talking gibberish, Bernadette could tell he was offering her the tea. So desperate was she to feel better that she accepted it, assuming that he could see how ill she felt.

  ‘Thank ye,’ she whispered, as she took the mug out of his hand, managing a very thin and feeble smile that she didn’t for one second feel herself. ‘I’m so glad there is someone who knows the cure for how bad I feel.’ She tried to improve the smile and look grateful, whilst her stomach did an Irish jig in her belly.

  Jerry’s stomach also began a jig, but it had nothing to do with feeling seasick. He smiled to himself at how it seemed to have gone into free fall, something he had never experienced before.

  Bernadette was doubly grateful for the tea as she had only half a crown in her purse and hadn’t wanted to waste a penny. She wasn’t sure if drinking tea with milk was the right thing to do in the circumstances, but she trusted him. He looked trustworthy – and gorgeous; even through her sickness she could see that. And why shouldn’t she drink the tea in any case? In Ireland, strong, sweet tea was the cure for everything from scurvy to colic.

  As she drank slowly and tentatively, Jerry studied every detail of her profile, her neck and her hair, which kept blowing across her face, covering it like a lace veil. Finding his sea legs at the same time as his courage, Jerry played the fool with his best show-off jokes and Bernadette tried her best to laugh at his audacity. After all, he was outrageously flirting with a sick woman. Suddenly, without warning, they both saw the tea again, all over the deck and Jerry’s shoes.

  Jerry sprang into action. The wind had met its match. He gathered Bernadette’s flyaway hair together and spun it into a knot, before tucking it back under her cap as tightly as he could, for fear she would vomit straight onto it. Bernadette was beyond caring that a stranger was stroking the back of her neck and whispering soothing, comforting noises into her ear. Her eyes had filled with tears of shame and she looked as though her knees were about to buckle at any moment.