Her home was a slum in Arthur's Terrace.
She drank a jug of Hull Brewery Ale each night.
She'd send me to the 'open all hours' shop
to buy a penn'th of snuff and borrow a romance
from their lending library of tatty paper backs.
We'd sit together on her horse hair sofa, holding
our books close to the light of the gas mantle
which dimmed as the evening wore on.
She'd lock the door of the outside toilet
when it wouldn't flush and the smell was bad.
I would crouch over the drain and marvel
at the hissing stream she ejected after lifting
her skirts to pee like a horse in the backyard.
She worked for a local tailor, turning collars,
fixing frayed turn-ups on trousers. buttonholing,
darning, patching; invisible mending she called it.
She stitched my school blouse, torn in a scuffle
with a bully who called her a dirty Irish peasant.
In her thirties she lost her husband and three children.
Consumption it was, rampant in those days.
She'd prayed through the nights, 'Out of the depths
I cry to thee O Lord' and he hadn't listened.
Afterwards she hid in the cupboard when the priest called.
Her grandmother died in a ditch fleeting the potato famine.
Her grandfather was spat on arriving in Liverpool,
one of the diseased Irish bringing the plague with them.
I saw an asylum seeker today.
He was wiping spittle from his face.
Norah Hanson
First published in Love Letters and Children's Drawings by Valley Press
