Coming Home to the Four Streets by Nadine Dorries (books that read to you .txt) 📗

found the transition from docker’s wife and queen of the four streets in Liverpool, to that of the landlady at the Talk of the Town Inn on the windy west coast of Ireland, a difficult one.

‘Why would anyone call it the Talk of the Town?’ she had demanded of her husband, on the wet, cold, windswept day they had arrived. She could barely hear his reply as the ocean roared behind them, only a moment’s walk from where they stood. Their children, bedraggled, too miserable even to complain, huddled into their sides. ‘There’s almost nothing and no one here and we haven’t passed a shop in miles. In the name of God, what flamin’ town is it supposed to be the talk of? Where is the town, Tommy?’

She had stood with her hands on her hips and taken in the sparsity of stone cottages with weak spirals of grey smoke struggling to rise in the rain and blending without trace into the equally grey sky. The church, with its teetering gravestones facing the ocean, sloped down towards them and, huddling against the crumbling perimeter wall for protection, stood a sad and sorry-looking donkey that struggled to raise his head, or show any interest whatsoever in their arrival. Maura’s dark eyes, offended by the sight of the dilapidated inn, locked onto Tommy’s face and she realised, with a sickening dip of her heart, that her husband had been entirely duped.

‘Tommy, speak to me, are we in the wrong place? Tell me we are, please,’ she begged.

‘I don’t think so, queen,’ he replied, his voice hesitant, a letter that they both knew he couldn’t fully read, gripped in his hands. He was inches shorter than his wife and twice as wide and she fought the conflicting desires to knock his cap off his head, or comfort him.

Angela, their eldest since Kitty’s death, sensing danger, inserted herself between them and slipped her hand into Tommy’s. There were certain responsibilities Angela had assumed from Kitty, and one of those was to look out for Tommy, who could be far too trusting for his own good. A quiet man of simple needs, loving his family, football and friends, Tommy had bumbled through life until he had, late one evening, without any warning whatsoever, found himself standing at the doors of hell and nothing had been quite the same since.

‘Da, where are we going now?’ she’d asked, hoping the answer was not into the low, stone-built, partly-thatched building before them.

‘I’m not sure, queen,’ Tommy replied, his heart beating so fast it made him dizzy. Maura had ripped the letter from his fingers and scanned it with her flashing eyes.

‘Oh, for the love of God, Tommy, tell me, is this it? Did you did ask the man how many people actually lived in this place before you signed the contract and handed over the money?’ Her dark hair, free from the curlers she wore for most of the day in Liverpool, was pinned to the nape of her neck in a tight bun, her headscarf, tied into a knot under her chin, making her look much older than her forty years. ‘Oh Tommy, by all the saints in heaven, what have you done now?’

For a brief moment, Maura thought she saw tears well in her husband’s eyes, but with a blink, they were gone. Angela looked up into her da’s face; she had seen the tears too and threw her mother a threatening glance. She squeezed Tommy’s hand tighter, willing him to look down at her and say the only thing she wanted to hear, ‘We’ve come to the wrong place, queen.’

Niamh slipped her thumb into her mouth and her free hand into her mother’s, her eyes wide, while Harry rocked from side to side with the baby on his hip and the younger boys, tired from their long journey, flopped onto the suitcases that Tommy – carrying one under each arm and one in each hand – had dropped on the ground into puddles which splashed the shoes Maura had polished, ready to make a good impression on arrival at their new home. Each one of them was staring at Tommy, the man of the family who everyone looked up to. Tommy, who dragged men out of the Anchor and back into their own kitchens, tipping their money into the bread bin of a grateful wife and mother. Tommy, the man who organised the hauls from the tramp ship, got them up the dockers’ steps and into his wash house, then distributed around the four streets before it was time to light the copper for the next week’s washday.

Tommy was the close friend of Captain Conor who sailed the tramp ship Morry to the four corners of the world, and if it hadn’t been for his meeting Maura on the day he arrived in Liverpool, Tommy might have been a merchant sailor himself. It was Tommy who studied the form of the horses and had the best tips in Liverpool, making him the man amongst men. Tommy, who lived with the darkest secret, shared with his best friend Jerry Deane. And if the residents of the four streets had an inkling what it was that Tommy had done, they would have chased him all the way to the gates of hell.

But Tommy was no longer in the four streets, this was a new world. He was out of his depth, in total despair and confusion, as he turned to face his family and replied, ‘I don’t know what I’ve done, Maura; all I know is, if we don’t make a go of this, we’ve lost the bleeding lot.’

Maura remained as appalled today as she had been on that fateful morning and nothing and no one had managed to convince her that there were any more benefits for her children to living in a public house which faced out across the Atlantic, than there were perched in an equally damp two-up, two-down facing down across the Mersey