A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin by Helen Forrester Page B

a roll of rags, her shawl wrapped tightly round her.
    By the light of a candle, the girls were playing very quietly close to the entrance to Sheila and Phoebe’s empty room. Martha hissed at her daughters to come down and settle for the night.
    In chorus, they hissed back that they weren’t making any trouble and why couldn’t they play longer.
    â€˜Because your dad’s home, and he wants you downstairs and sleeping – now! Meself, I got to go down to the corner shop for a few minutes. You come on right now – or do I have to get your father to you?’
    At this awful threat to tell Mr Connolly, Dollie Flanagan picked up the grubby cards and shuffled them neatly together. If Mr Connolly was home, probably her father soon would be from the pub. He could deliver a slap a good deal harder than the one Mrs Connolly had given her – and suppose Mrs C told her father about her behaviour that afternoon?
    â€˜You’d better get going,’ she told her guests with a sigh, and got up off the floor.
    With Martha’s brood safely wrapped in bits of blanket, they were each allotted in irritable whispers a piece of floor on which to sleep.
    Finally, Martha warned, ‘Now, our Kathleen, you’re in charge, remember? Brian and Tommy will be in just now.’
    â€˜Oh, Mam!’ protested Kathleen, as she reluctantly spread herself as close to the fireplace as she could get without her mother noticing that she was hogging most of the heat.
    â€˜Shut up and go to sleep. You’re the eldest. And mind you don’t wake your father.’
    Martha picked up her shawl from the back of the chair and wrapped it tightly round her. When she opened the outer door, she flinched at the cold. Her long walk up to the Lee Jones had tired her, but desperation drove her out again.
    She quickly shut the door behind her and looked up at the tiny patch of sky visible between the enclosing court housetops. It had stopped sleeting, and, far above her between dark shadows of cloud, she glimpsed a single star.
    Despite her despair, she thought, ‘Perhaps it’s my lucky star. At least They won’t turn us out come tomorrow.’

NINE
    â€˜Old Folk’s Home? Feels More Like a Bleeding Gaol’
    1965
    â€˜You know, Angie, when I had to go down to the corner shop that night, I was more worried than I’d been in years.’
    Angie acknowledged the remark with an absent-minded nod. She was attending to Pat, the comatose patient in the next bed who had to be turned every two hours. She impatiently whipped back the curtain drawn round her and pulled the bedclothes off her.
    Martha was sitting up in her bed watching her, while she gratefully sipped the illicit mug of tea which Angie had brought up for her. Nowadays, every time the grossly overworked nursing aide came into the bedroom, which held five invalids, Martha would remorselessly continue the story ofher life: it was as if, by doing so, she gave some meaning to her current existence.
    Today was no different.
    â€˜For one thing, Angie, I was real worried about Them pulling down the wall between us and the main road. It meant that any stranger could walk in on the court. We’d always been safe in that court ’cos you knew everybody. You knew who to warn the kids about, who’d steal, even which women was giving the men the eye. And all the women watched out for the kids.
    â€˜And that was the evening I realised that me Number Nine – that’s James – 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.
    â€˜I didn’t feel safe at all, I didn’t. Not about