Cold Comforts.

Cold Comforts.

This winter is harsh with bitterly cold winds and heavy frosts, and the inhabitants of the long rows of terraced houses huddle over their fires cursing at the draughts whistling through window frames no matter how much newspaper is stuffed into the cracks.

Doris Smith grunts and stirs in the sagging chair that is as near the fire as she has been able to drag it.
During the winter, Doris always wears a pair of her husband’s thick woolly socks over two pairs of stockings which are held up just above her knees with grubby elastic. On her feet are expensive fur lined slippers that she treated herself to at the beginning of winter, but despite the three layers covering her chubby legs, the fire is banked so high that nothing can completely protect her skin from the heat and remnants of the ugly, brown mottling that runs from her ankles to her chubby knees and darkens with every hour she sits there, will still be there during the summer.
She stirs briefly because her arms are chilly. Settling a tatty shawl more firmly around her shoulders, she glances at the clock on the mantelpiece and grunts. It’s nearly five o clock and the old man will be in for his dinner shortly, but it’s too bloody cold to stand in that freezing kitchen cooking, especially when he’ll probably leave half of it uneaten or throw it at the wall in a drunken rage. Working at the brewery he’s constantly drunk but she gives as good as she gets and doesn’t give a toss what he gets up to, as long as he hands over a few quid housekeeping on payday. And if he doesn’t give it to her willingly, she’s quite happy to pick his pockets when he’s sprawled across the bed in a drunken sleep.
Doris shuts her eyes and as she drifts back off to sleep thinks she’d tell him the pipes are frozen. That should shut him up and he’ll be too drunk to check. As for Jimmy their ten-year old son - he can fend for himself. He usually does.
********************
There has been a spate of births coinciding with the cold snap and Edie Waters, the street’s unofficial midwife, has been forced to go out in the cold almost every day.
Many of the homes where she delivers babies are desperately poor and a decent fire in the bedrooms is only a dream. After sitting for hours in icy cold rooms, Edie feels as if she’ll never be warm again.
Going home to her own cosy kitchen and thawing out in front of the fire is sheer bliss, but the icy draught which eddies around her ankles from under the doors is driving her mad.
Pulling out her rag bag from under the stairs, Edie finds one of her husband Jack’s old shirts, cuts the sleeves off and stuffs each sleeve with small bits of rag. She ties off the ends then lays the two temporary draught excluders along the bottom of the doors and surveys her handiwork. They aren’t the prettiest things she’s ever made, but they work. Her feet feel the benefit almost immediately.
**********************
Horace Rumble has settled for the evening. He is sitting on his old but comfortable sofa in front of the fire, with a faded but warm feather quilt over his knees, and with two plump cushions wedged behind his back.
A widower for many years he has slipped quietly into the life of a bachelor, able to please himself when he eats and where he sleeps. Long ago he cleared out the back bedroom and the downstairs front room and locked their doors. Now he lives mainly in the kitchen with its range which copes with his little bit of cooking and keeps him snug and warm. If he feels lonely he has a radio sitting on a shelf by the side of the chimney breast. When he wakes in the night he has all the makings for a cup of tea, and his pipe, tobacco and an ashtray are within hands reach on a small table at the end of the sofa. A battered tin with a faded picture of Queen Victoria on the lid holds his favourite biscuits, and if the cold wakes him in the night he can stoke the fire without leaving the room, having made sure he has filled up the coal bucket just before he settles for the night.
Sighing contentedly he puffs on his pipe and watches coils of blue smoke writhe towards the ceiling. Horace reckons he’s at his happiest when he can sleep here in front of the fire. He glances up as a strong gust of wind rattles a dustbin lid across his small back yard. He’s lived a long time and seen all sorts of weather, but the winter of 1934 is going to be a hard one.
***************
At number 94 Ida Pargiter or Ma as she is known, stands in the scullery heating a pan of watery stew on the gas stove while she waits for her two daughters Rose and Primrose to come home from work.
Many years ago, Ida’s husband escaped the wrath of her tongue and ran off with a factory worker from Liverpool. Now her daughters, middle aged, unattractive and totally submissive are the wage earners. Handing their unopened wage packets to their mother each Friday, they dully accept her complaints that things cost so much more these days as she grudgingly hands them a few shillings each.
In the kitchen three straight backed wooden chairs are drawn up in front of a smoking fire made entirely of coal dust.
Meanly eking out the meagre coal supply during the evenings and weekends while the girls are home, Ida has indulged herself with roaring fires during the day, but now they have run out of coal and the girls don’t get paid until tomorrow. It’s so cold that despite being bundled up in a thick woollen shawl over three layers of clothes and with a large hand knitted scarf around her neck, Ida can barely feel her hands or feet and her long thin nose, which she sniffs incessantly, is tinged with blue.
Glancing guiltily in the direction of the front door she scuttles into the larder and reaching into a grubby shopping bag hanging behind the door, pulls out a small bottle of brandy and a large bar of Cadburys. Breaking off a chunk of the rich brown chocolate she hurriedly chews and swallows, then takes a deep swallow of brandy.
Hearing the two girls at the front door, she quickly pushes the illicit hoard back into the bag, shuts the larder door and reaching for a spoon rattles it against the side of the saucepan.
Wiping her mouth, Ida pops her head around the door to the kitchen. ‘You’d better keep your coats on,’ she tells Primrose and Rose. ‘We’ve no more coal only dust, so you can give the bedrooms a good going over after tea, that’ll keep you warm. There’s nothing like a bit of hard work to keep the circulation going. And make sure you keep that curtain over the door. I’ll catch me death just see if I don’t, and then where will we be!’
*********************
A pungent fug of unwashed clothes and overcooked cabbage drifts from the scullery at Ted and Nellie Tatum’s.
In the kitchen a washing line draped with Ted’s underwear hangs from the ceiling. On a battered fireguard stretching across the fireplace, steaming nappies add to the heady atmosphere.
‘Ted, what are you doing out there? I can smell them potato’s have boiled dry and the cabbage will be the same I’ll be bound. I can’t take me eyes off you for a minute. I been slaving away all day trying to keep house and home together, the least you can do is make sure we get a proper cooked meal in the evening.’
In the scullery Ted silently mouths along to Nellie’s daily litany. He closes his eyes, hunches his scrawny neck even further into his bony shoulders and as she pauses for breath breaks in meekly. ‘Yes dear just coming; sorry about that, but they’re not burnt; just a trifle dry.’
Ignoring Derek the youngest of their children who is trying to bite her leg, Nellie throws forks down on the table and yells in the direction of the stairs for Mavis and Freddie to get themselves down for their dinner quick, otherwise it will be stone cold and not fit to eat.
Moving rapidly from sideboard to table, she bangs a bottle of brown sauce down and swooping a large red hand under the table comes up holding Derek by the scruff of his neck. Plunking him down in a chair, she wipes his nose on the edge of her apron and threatens that if he doesn’t stop snivelling he’ll get no tea.
Mavis and Freddie who have been playing in the bedroom land at the bottom of the stairs with loud thuds, burst into the kitchen and fling themselves onto the rickety chairs that stand around the table in the middle of the overcrowded room.
While Ted spoons cabbage and lumpy potatoes onto the plates, Nellie cuts a slice of corned beef for each of them.
The last to be served, Ted ends up with the thinnest piece. Hanging his head, he picks up his fork and pokes tiredly at his dinner. Around him silence falls as the Tatum family began to bolt down their rapidly cooling food.
*******************
Jacko Simms an ex boxer, and now landlord of the Golden Horn Pub, hurries in through the saloon bar doors and warms his hands in front of the blazing fire.
‘That does it,’ he declares. ‘I’ll have to put a notice up. The Gents is out of action. The pipes are good and frozen. I’m hoping that paraffin heater I put in the Ladies will keep them warm enough, but I’ve got me doubts.’
He walks across the room and peers at the thermometer hanging just inside the doors. ‘Blimey! Look at that. It’s only just above freezing in here even with the fire going. I’ll have to keep it burning all night and leave the cellar doors open. If the beer freezes in the pipes there’ll be hell to pay.’
Elsie his wife, slim, blonde from a bottle and ten years younger than Jacko, is exasperated. ‘Oh for goodness sake stop fussing. The beer pipes have never frozen yet and we’ve had low temperatures before. We’ve got fires going in every room and as long as we keep this one well banked up for the evening, the bricks will throw out plenty of heat overnight. We can get it going again first thing. That is if some of us don’t hang around in bed.’ She glares accusingly at him, for Jacko is a night owl and likes to lie in leaving Elsie to get things moving in the mornings. ‘If the gents want to use the toilet they’ll have to pop home and do it; most of them live near enough,’ she says.
Jacko opens his mouth to argue, but Elsie holds up an admonitory finger. ‘And if the Ladies freeze up they’ll have to do the same.’
‘But we’ll lose custom.’ Jacko protests. ‘We was only half full last night and it’s even colder today. If they have to go home to do the necessary they won’t come back.’
Elsie has heard enough. ‘Jacko we can’t do a lot about it, unless you can get out there and work a miracle to change the weather. Now you go and bring in some more coal and I’ll get some buckets of water just in case. If there are no customers this evening – and I’ll believe it when I see it – because nothing will keep that lot away from their beer. But if no one comes in, then I for one will be thankful. I shall have a hot bath, take a hot water bottle and a good book to bed, and say thank you to him upstairs for giving me the night off.
*******************

Around the corner from the Golden Horn, The Bonnie Prince Charlie pub only has three customers, but Dorrie Adams the landlady doesn’t mind.
She drapes the bar cloth over the pumps and looking in the mirror behind the bar pats her blonde hair and pinches her cheeks. She smiles in satisfaction at her reflection. She is forty five, but a well fitted corset keeps her figure trim, and careful grooming and a weekly visit to the hairdresser helps her look at least five years younger, although Dorrie likes to kid herself it’s more like ten.
Smoothing her dress over her disciplined hips, she takes a final glance in the mirror and then goes down to the cellar and selects a dusty bottle of champagne that she has tucked away for just such a night as this.
She places the champagne in a bucket of ice, goes back upstairs, and puts the bucket on a bedside table.
Checking the glowing fire in the small fireplace she slides her hands under the bed covers to feel the hot water bottles she had placed there earlier but they are rapidly cooling. She refills them from a tap in the bathroom and slips them back between crisp cotton sheets.
Casting her eyes over the cosy room, she tweaks the pillows and with a satisfied smile returns to the bar.
James O Connor, Dorrie’s dark haired handsome Irish barman is collecting glasses, cleaning ashtrays, and wiping the tables.
‘Leave that James,’ Dorrie orders. ‘We won’t get any more customers tonight. I can see to anything else that needs doing. You look cold and tired. Look, I know your digs haven’t any bathing facilities. Why don’t you go upstairs and have a hot bath. It’s just the thing for a cold night like this. And I’ve a nice fire going up there. After your bath I can bring you some supper. You can sit and eat it in comfort.’
James blushes. An idiot could see the only reason he’d got this job was because Dorrie had an itch for him, and he knows perfectly well what she has in mind for this evening. He should leave right now for isn’t she old enough to be his mother? On the other hand he needs the job and he misses his home comforts as poor as they’d been. He wants a bit of spoiling. He left Ireland to find a job but it hasn’t worked out with all the building sites shut down due to the weather.
James thinks of his spartan room back in his lodgings. His stomach growls in protest at the mere thought of his landladies meagre, badly cooked meals, and his shabby room with not even a scrap of carpet by the bed to keep the cold from his feet.
As one of the customers leaves, the icy blast whipping across the room through the open door helps him decide.
With the lights dimmed and his eyes shut he will think of Catherine his girlfriend back at home in Ireland. But, if he is going to take Dorrie up on her unspoken offer, he might as well make a good job of it and get his feet properly under the table at least until the spring.
He walks over to her and runs his eyes suggestively over her body.
‘Well now,’ he says. ‘I’m thinking a warm bath might be just the thing, but I’ll need help to wash my back.’