The Children of Lovely Lane Page 5

  The so-called cottages were cramped, small, damp and squalid. They’d been built to house Liverpool’s second influx of the Irish poor and unemployed who’d arrived to build the new roads; talk that there would soon be new council estates constructed meant that half of Dublin had rucked up looking for work. There were homes on four floors, reached via many flights of steps and a long, dark landing that ran outside every kitchen window. Each home had a fire grate in the lounge, running water in the kitchen and a coal bunker next to the front door. There was a toilet on every half landing, shared by ten families. The central concrete yard provided space for the bins, washing lines and a refuge for the children, who spent hours there, out of their mothers’ hair and beyond the reach of their fathers’ belts.

  ‘Are youse coming out to play?’ was the cry that echoed down the landings as the children knocked on doors as they ran. They would spill out into the courtyard, to congregate in the narrow lane along the front, to kick a football, if a child who owned one had surfaced, or to play Ollies with glass marbles and Jacks as they squatted in the dirt.

  Girls as young as four would push prams up and down the landings. Up and down. Up and down. Halting only to tend to the trouserless and nappyless toddlers following in their wake. They were mothers themselves, even before their first day at school. Clare Cottages spewed smoke, children and opportunities lost.

  The ceaseless, nameless whoops and yelps and the relentless thud of balls bouncing, feet running, babies crying and prams bouncing up and down the stairs rebounded straight back in through Lily’s bedroom window. And she hated it. ‘God, please, give me quiet,’ was her most frequently uttered prayer as she lay in her room in the middle of the noisy world that was Clare Cottages.

  There were times when, late at night as she tried to sleep, Lily would lie on the horsehair and straw mattress she shared with her little brother Joe and her sister Katie and attempt to count how many children lived in Clare Cottages and contributed to the noise. She reached almost a hundred and it felt like she could hear every one. The number was growing by the day, evidenced by the number of times she’d spotted the midwife’s bicycle parked at the bottom of the stairwell or on the half landing. Before she’d started to work at McConaghy’s, Lily had often been called on to help out. A half-dressed toddler would turn up at her front door with a note asking, Can I borrow your Lily for half an hour? The midwife’s here. The note was never from one of the homes where the mother hung clean nets. And it never was for just half an hour.

  It sometimes felt that because the nuns at school had draped the label ‘Clever for five’ around her neck, she had overnight become responsible for every child in Liverpool, when she had not long learnt to read herself. Sister Therese had been forever at her mother’s front door. ‘Mrs Lancashire, the child has a gift. Let us send her to board at the Convent of the Holy Martyrs out in the country in Hunt’s Cross. I’m thinking that Lily could even become a teacher herself one day. She has a real gift with numbers and the like. You are a Catholic woman, are you not?’

  But Lily’s mother was having none of it. ‘I am that, Sister, but I married an Englishman, as you well know, and he won’t hear a word of it. And besides, who will help me with the kids if she goes?’

  Sister Therese became exasperated. ‘I will help you. Let us nurture her God-given talent. The Lord may have a calling for her. She would one day earn her own money, good money, and sure she wouldn’t forget her own mother when she did.’

  Lily knew Sister Therese was whispering her silent prayers, sure that God would deliver as she waited for her mother’s response.

  But her mother’s reply was swift and unambiguous. ‘Her calling’s here,’ she said, ‘helping me with the kids. And besides, it would take years before she earned any money worth speaking of.’

  Her mother hadn’t just meant her own kids, she’d meant all of the kids who lived in homes whose mothers preferred the public house to the wash house. And from that day on, until Lily had started work at the processing plant, mothers who lived on their landing had begun to offload their offspring into the care of the young girl who had, as even her own mother said, a very old head. ‘Just mind our kids while I go to the bingo, will yer, Lily,’ was a common request. Or it might be the doctor’s, the shops, Mass, the pub or the welfare. Or even, ‘Lily, I’ve been caught short, the old man’s on nights and the bucket’s full – quick!’, and then a screaming baby would be thrust into Lily’s arms as its mother ran to the toilet on the half landing. It didn’t matter what the reason was: the clever and serious Lily spent her childhood being a glorified babysitter and she resented it deeply.

  Now, on this cold winter’s morning in 1953, she needed to get ready for work. She slipped out from under the pile of old army blankets covering her and her little brother, Joe, and clambered across her sleeping siblings to kneel at the head of the bed, underneath the window.

  Her younger sister Katie stirred.

  ‘Sshh, Katie, five more minutes,’ she whispered.

  Katie’s thumb headed for her mouth and her heavy lids closed again. She gave a sleepy smile as Lily tucked the blanket around her.

  At seventeen years old, it felt to Lily as though her two younger siblings had been her sole responsibility for almost all of her life. She slept on the outside of the mattress so that if either of them needed the pot during the night, or if they were ill and had to vomit, she was conveniently positioned to help. Joe was always in the middle, between Lily and Katie, who lay next to the wall. Katie complained often about this.

  ‘Lily, swap with me,’ she would say in the night. ‘The wall is freezing and it keeps waking me up.’

  ‘The wall can’t wake you,’ Lily would reply.

  ‘It does, Lily. I roll over and me leg touches it and it’s as cold as ice. Please...’ she’d whine. There were times when Katie drove Lily to the point of exasperation and she had to suppress her irritation that her little sister couldn’t do more to help.

  Lily had long, thick, chestnut-coloured hair, whereas Katie’s was short, thin and mousey. Lily’s eyes shone inquisitively and were the same colour as her hair. Katie’s were a pale blue. Lily’s face was bright and alert, but, given that she rarely smiled, often sad. Katie was kind, trusting and incapable of resentment. She could also never think anything through far enough to reach a conclusion. A weak and sickly girl, Katie mostly just did as she was told. For as long as she could stay awake. The fact that they had different fathers was apparent in their wildly differing appearances. Lily could barely remember her own father. He’d left when her mother’s drinking had begun. Lily knew her mam had sat at the bedroom window for a very long time, waiting for him to return, but he never had. The kindly if impatient man had left Lily to suffer at the hands of his replacement, a bad-tempered stepfather, who had no compunction about using his fists on his stepdaughter.

  Clambering across the mattress, Lily listened for a moment to Joe. His breathing had become much worse lately and at only three years old he was beginning to struggle with the frequency of his attacks. Careful not to disturb him, because he needed every second of his sleep, Lily reached the iced-up curtainless window. She peered at it and gasped. Overnight, snow had fallen, deep and silent, and the inside of the window was covered in the most beautiful and intricate tendrils of ice crystals she had ever seen. They were so thick, they cast an eerie grey haze over the bedroom. There was nothing in Lily’s life that could be described as beautiful, and yet, on this cold and icy morning, she had opened her eyes and there it was. Silence in her life. Beauty on her window. A smile on her face.

  ‘Are you going to bleedin’ work, or what?’

  Lily’s mother burst into the bedroom and slammed the door against the wall with such force, it felt to Lily as though her bones had rattled with the shock. She’d been so busy tracing the ice patterns with the frozen tip of her index finger that she’d failed to hear her mother’s slippered feet crossing the bare floorboards from the direction of her own room.


  ‘Get up, now!’ her mother barked.

  The other sound Lily hated was that of her mother’s voice.

  ‘Come on, ger up, we need your money this week more than ever. Your da has nothing left. Nothin’. The bastard’s drunk the bleeding lot. Doesn’t think of any of us, or that his kids need food in their mouths. Took the money out of the bread bin last night before I could catch him. Tell your boss and ’is stingy bleedin’ wife you need your pay packet on time this week or your mam will be down at your fancy office to deal with him. You got that, queen?’

  Oh, the hypocrisy of her, thought Lily as she listened to her mother, her speech still slurred from her own night out drinking with the other cottage women who frequented the pub. Last night they’d congregated at the dockers’ club, where someone who’d been quicker to the bread bin than Lily’s mother had stood the drinks.

  But this was Lily’s mother trying to be nice. This was her on a good day. At least she’s got a bad head, thought Lily. Too bad to lash out. She wanted and needed Lily’s money, and having to wait until the evening, when the brown-paper pay packet would be placed on the kitchen table, was a huge inconvenience. She had hardly any fags or food to keep her going.

  ‘Yes, Mam,’ whispered Lily. Her breath hung in the air in a white cloud and her teeth began to chatter as she trembled with the cold. Lifting her hands, she started to untie the knots in the rags at the bottom of each of her long plaits. She tried hard to look as presentable as she could for work.

  The bedroom door banged shut as her mother shuffled into the kitchen to take her morning pee in the enamel bucket that sat under the kitchen sink.

  Leaning forward, Lily placed her hands on the wall either side of the small window and exhaled loudly, breathing on the glass and watching in wonder as the thinnest part in the middle of the ice almost melted. She breathed hard, again and again, willing it to clear as the sound of her mother’s urine hitting the sides of the metal pail and her mutterings faded into the distance. Using the nail of her thumb, she scraped away a hole big enough to see through and gasped. Clare Cottages and everything she could see of the smog-blackened neighbourhood looked beautiful. Soot-stained grime had transformed overnight into pristine white. The roof of the wash house at the end of the road appeared almost magical.

  St Chad’s school playground to the side of the cottages was the whitest, an as yet untouched blanket. Glistening pillows sat on top of the chimneystacks and bin lids, but what was most exciting was that it was peaceful. All was quiet. The filth and the dirt and even the roofs of the redundant corrugated-metal air-raid shelters down in the concrete square were covered in soft white folds of virgin snow and Lily wanted to cry with joy at the beauty of it.

  As she turned her gaze up towards the grey and heavy sky, she wondered if it was the cold and the threat of yet more snow to come that had given her the sweetest of all gifts. She had awoken to the sound of nothing. The streets were empty. There were no children thundering along the landings, racing up and down the connecting stairs or congregating on the corner of the lane. It was soundless and it was bliss. Sitting back on her heels, Lily listened to the silence and smiled a rare and sweet smile.

  ‘Fecking hell, Lily, get up!’ Her mother’s voice boomed out yet again from the doorway, where she stood tucking her vest into her knickers and rearranging her skirt before she shuffled away in her freshly dampened slippers.

  Katie and Joe stirred.

  Lily heard the front door open and the sound of a metal shovel scraping along the concrete floor of the coal house. The cold had driven her mother out to fetch the coal herself. A rare occurrence. Lily held her breath as a thought seized and froze her. Oh no. Will she find it? Will she break it? Will she go mad that I hid it? She bit her lip and waited.

  ‘Do I have to get up now as well, Lily?’ whispered Katie, her thumb hanging in mid air, ready to slip back into her mouth should the answer be no.

  The coal-shed door banged shut. Her mother shuffled back indoors. The front door slammed. Lily breathed again. She was safe. Her secret stash had not been found. She heard her mother throw the coal on to the small fire, the only source of heat in the house. It pounded against the chimney wall as it clattered and fell into the grate.

  Normally at this time the docks’ klaxon would ring out and, before it had finished, the landings would spring into life. Doors would bang open and shut and the air would be filled with the jokes, curses and complaints of men making their way to the docks and work; men who were far more industrious and sober than Lily’s stepfather.

  He was always late, swearing loudly as her mother roused him. He was never allowed to sleep off his hangover, unless of course he did it in the bin sheds, which, on occasion and much to Lily’s shame, he had been known to. ‘Get out of that fecking bed and down those stairs into work,’ was her mother’s own daily klaxon. The only woman Lily’s stepfather never raised his fists to was his wife. Instead, it was Lily who bore the brunt of his anger and frustration with his drunken wife and Lily who had the bruises to show for it.

  She would hold her breath and wait for the thud she knew was her stepfather being dragged out of his bed and on to the floor. Her mother’s temper at his taking the money from the bread bin, failing to turn up to work the previous day, or any one of the many things that made her angry with him when she wasn’t drunk herself, gave the woman enormous strength.

  This morning she could hear her parents arguing. The familiar words floated into her room and woke her siblings.

  ‘You fecking cow bitch.’

  Within minutes, their own front door would bang violently as he was ejected, barely dressed and without tea or ceremony, out into the snow to take his place in the pen, ready to join a gang down at the docks. Only today there were no ships. The klaxon hadn’t rung. The smog on the river was too thick even for the tugs and the ships waited out at the bar. But they had both been too stupefied to notice.

  Lily frowned. Her blissful moment of privacy had finished almost before she had realized it was hers.

  ‘Lily.’ Joe’s little voice was nothing more than a whisper. At such a young age, he had learnt the most important survival trick: to be invisible in the Lancashire house.

  Lily smiled. ‘Yes, love,’ she said as she shuffled across the top of the blankets towards him. Scooping him up, she lifted him out of the bed and stood him at the window. ‘Look at that, Joe,’ she said. ‘It’s been snowing.’

  The patch of ice Lily had cleared was already beginning to ice over again.

  ‘Can we play a game in the snow, Lily?’ Joe’s eyes were bright and hopeful and Lily’s heart sank.

  ‘I can’t, Joe, I have to go to work, but I’ll tell Katie she has to play with you when she gets up, or one of the girls on the landing.’

  Joe’s smile vanished. They both knew that Katie would give Joe ten minutes, but he couldn’t run as fast as the others, or keep up with their games, and they would quickly forget. Katie forgot most things.

  Lily bent down and kissed Joe’s brow. She didn’t like the telltale rattle in his breathing. His exhalations were noticeably much longer than his inhalations and the wheeze on the tail end whistled ominously. His overly bright pink cheeks felt warm to the touch in the frozen room. Lily said a silent prayer that today the wheezing wouldn’t last for too long as she sat Joe on the pot and hurried Katie along.

  ‘Katie, come on, love, I’m a bit late. Give us a hand and get yourself ready. I’ve got milk and pobs for you this morning.’ She helped Katie drag her legs out of the bed and began to dress.

  When they had finished on the pots, they would be emptied into the metal bucket. Lily’s next job would be to carry the bucket down to the toilet on the half landing and tip it away. She prayed that there would be no queue today and that she could be quick. As soon as she returned home from work, she would do the same thing over again.

  No one ever got fed until she arrived back home. Often there would be no sign of her mother, who had long since taken to
joining her stepfather down at the pub. Sometimes her mother forgot that there was no food in the cupboard and Lily had to take from the rent money in the bread bin and run down to the corner shop and wait until it was closing and beg.

  ‘Could I have the cut-offs from the meat blade?’ she would ask as her face burnt red with shame. ‘Would there be any veggies you are throwing out tonight I can have?’

  Lily truly disliked the corner shop. Its smell was so pungent, of potatoes on the verge of rotting, that it caught in the back of her throat. It was a place of shame to Lily, and she knew the less than friendly owner gossiped with the women. She avoided it as much as she could.

  When there was no rent money, in desperation she would knock on the convent door for Sister Therese, who was the only person, along with Father Brennan, that her parents feared and who Lily could turn to for help.

  ‘There’s no money for the tea and little Joe won’t stop crying, Sister.’ Lily said it as it was to Sister Therese. There was almost nothing to hide from the woman who had done more for little Joe and her sister than their own mother had.

  ‘Holy Mother of God.’ The reply was always the same. ‘Come into the kitchen with me.’ Sister Therese would load Lily’s covered basket with whatever was on the convent kitchen table and send Lily back home with enough to feed them all. The following day her parents would be full of recriminations and shame when Sister Therese arrived at the door.

  ‘You try my patience to the end, Mrs Lancashire. You need to take better care of your children, and the burden you put on poor Lily here, it is too much,’ Sister Therese would remonstrate. ‘I don’t want to do it, but you will be forcing me down to the welfare office with your behaviour soon, so you will.’

  For a day or two, sometimes longer, Lily and the kids would feel the benefit. Lily would return home from work to a hot pan of scouse, ready for them all, and a happy Joe. ‘Here you are, luv, here’s your tea,’ her mam would say as soon as she got through the door. As though they were words she uttered on a regular basis. A reformed mother, trying her hardest to be nice.