A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin Read Online Free Page B

themselves lucky.
    Up in the attic, in a single, fairly large room under the roof, lived Alice and Mike Flynn, both of whom enjoyed a certain popularity in the court as a whole, Alice because she was easy-going and Mike because he had a radio.
    Mike Flynn was a wounded veteran of the First World War. He had been paralysed by shrapnel in his back and had not been out of their room for years. He lay by the front dormer window, which looked out directly at the window of a similar house across the court. That was all he saw of the world, except for a few visiting birds. He occasionally put crumbs out on his tiny windowsill, which encouraged pigeons and seagulls to land and perch there unsteadily, as they jostled for position.
    Mike had been given a radio by a kindly social worker, an ex-army officer. He said it kept him sane. The Flynns’ greatest expense out of their tiny army pension was getting its batteries recharged.
    The clumsy-looking box radio, however, broughthim unexpected friends. If he was feeling well enough, all the children in the house were welcome to come into the room to sit cross-legged on the bare wooden floor to listen, in fascinated silence, to the Children’s Hour. It might have been broadcast from outer space for all the connection it had with their own lives, but they loved the voice which actually said ‘Hello, children’ and ‘Happy Birthday’ to them.
    In addition, their fathers could, sometimes, get early information from Mike regarding the outcome of a football match or a horse race, on which they had bet. Mary Margaret loved nothing better than to listen to the distant music which drifted down the stairs into her room, though her husband, Thomas, grumbled incessantly about it.
    Determined to see the bright side, patient Mary Margaret said frequently that it could be worse. The house was not nearly as crowded as it used to be, and, just think, they could be without a roof at all! Or she could be like the old fellow, who lived in the dirt-floored cellar, a cellar which had been boarded up by the City Health Authority as unfit for human habitation.
    Martha’s husband Patrick had helped the desperate old Irishman who now lived there to prise the door open.
    â€˜But it’s an awful place to live,’ Martha had protested. ‘Every time it rains real hard, it gets flooded with the you-know-what from the lavatories, and then he’s got to sleep on the steps.’
    â€˜He’s better off in the court than in the street,’ Patrick had argued, and Mary Margaret agreed with him. So Martha shrugged and accepted that you had to help people who were worse off than yourself.
    On days when it did not rain, Martha Connolly, Alice Flynn, Mary Margaret Flanagan and her wizened mother, Theresa Gallagher, spent much of their time sitting on the front step, their black woollen shawls hunched round them, as they watched life proceed in the court. As the court was entirely enclosed by houses similar to the one they lived in, all equally crowded, there were plenty of comings and goings on which to speculate.
    Until recently, they could have contemplated the midden in the centre of the court and the rubbish which was thrown into it, but the City had had it removed and replaced by lidded rubbish bins outside each house, which were not nearly so interesting to the many rats which infested the dockside.
    The almost perpetual queue for the two choked lavatories at the far end of the court was a regularsource of amusement. Each person stood impatiently, with a piece of newspaper in his hand, moaning constantly and with increasing urgency at the delay. On the filthy, paved floor of the court, the usually barefoot children of the Connollys and Flanagans relieved themselves in corners, and fought and played. The women intervened only when juvenile fights threatened to become lethal.
    â€˜If you don’t stop that, I’ll tell your dad,’ the women would shriek. This awful