Liverpool Miss (10 page)

The next morning, a few minutes after I arrived, breathless and hungry, the Presence sent for me. I was still very upset from the bitter recriminations of my parents, which had burst forth from both of them as they rushed between living room and kitchen getting themselves washed and dressed for work. Mother had gone out the previous evening to the pawnbroker and had pawned all the clothes which Mrs Fox had sent, except what I was wearing, and this had added to my distress. It was a very miserable and frightened young girl who crept into the Presence’s office, and stood humbly waiting for her to speak.

She looked up from her desk and in a few crisp, sharp words she dismissed me for inefficiency. She gave me a week’s notice.

My small world, my new hopes, shattered round me. It was as if they fell like tinkling glass from a broken window, leaving me naked to a winter wind.

As I stood dumbly staring at her without any idea of what I should do, she turned the pages of a file on the desk in front of her. Gradually my eyes focused on her long, shrivelled fingers and following the line of them, I saw that the file was marked ‘Forrester’, in large capital letters.

In the silence, the significance of the file slowly dawned upon me. At some point, my parents must have applied to my employers for help. And a file on our family must have been sitting on the shelves in the outer office, available for all the girls to read. I felt so mortified at the idea of a social worker’s report on our poverty-stricken home being read by the other girls, that I wondered how I would manage to face them during the week’s notice the Presence had just served on me.

She was speaking again. ‘Miss Finch will be promoted to telephonist. I am prepared to give you another chance as office girl in her place. Her salary is ten shillings a week.’

Reprieve! I snapped up the offer.

Ten shillings would pay Alice. And people got rises in pay, didn’t they? Perhaps I would, if I could last out long enough.

She lifted the telephone receiver. ‘I will speak to Mr Ellis. Report to him.’ She gave me a grim, small smile of dismissal, and I crept out of the room. Her manner was cool and distant, and yet I felt that, amid the many worries of her day, she had tried to help me.

I did not look at any of the other girls, as with eyes downcast I went over to Mr Ellis’s desk and stood by him, waiting to be noticed. He was saying, ‘Yes, yes. I understand,’ down the telephone. Finally he hung up the telephone receiver, and swivelled round towards me.

‘That’s a proper mess now, isn’t it?’ he barked.

I hung my head and said nothing.

While I waited, crestfallen, he reorganised his staff, so that Miss Finch could spend the day showing me what to do. Then I was borne off by a naturally triumphant Miss Finch to hurry into our outdoor clothes again.

All letters addressed to destinations within approximately one mile of the office were delivered by hand, as were urgent ones to more distant addresses. One of the sights of the city was the vast number of small office boys and girls trotting
about, delivering letters. Their wages were cheaper than the cost of postage.

I knew the city well and soon sorted the letters into a round, and Miss Finch and I set out together. In and out of lawyers’ offices, shipping offices and shops we tramped. There was even a letter for the Liverpool Playhouse, which we excitedly delivered at the stage door, hoping against hope that we might catch a glimpse of one of the actors. But we were disappointed. A joking, cheerful doorman took the missive from us.

Mary warned me that the lift men in some of the buildings were not to be trusted, and several times she insisted that we walked up the stairs, once as far as the sixth floor.

I did not understand the import of her warning until the next day, when I did the round on my own. Two men pawed me, while with one hand they pulled the rope that carried the lift upwards. I shrank into the far corner where I could not be reached. This did not deter one of them who, with a grin, stopped the lift at a deserted top floor and pinned me into the corner.

Instinctively I screamed at the top of my voice, and pushed away the exploring hands with all the force I could comamnd. The letters scattered over the floor of the lift. I was panic-stricken,
though I could not have said what I was frightened of.

When I shrieked the man let go of me. He turned and angrily flung open the iron gates, and told me to get out and walk. He picked up the letters and threw them after me, as I shot past him onto the landing. I snatched up the letters and scampered down the staircase to the floor I needed. I was sickened, as he slowly followed me down in the lift whispering obscenities which I had previously only come across scribbled on the walls of public lavatories and had never quite understood. His leering face, seen through the iron gates as I passed them on my way down, haunted my nightmares for several days.

This was the first time that anyone had made a sexual advance to me, and, since I did not really understand what the threat to me was, I was filled with nameless terrors for a long time, and learned to run upstairs like a rabbit. Practically all the novels I read ended with a first kiss and I imagined that a happy marriage was a life of gentle tenderness. That there was a physical side to it was unknown to me. I had washed my brothers often enough to know that there was a difference between boys and girls, and Edith had always washed us and dressed us in front of each other, so it all seemed perfectly
natural, as did the fact that elm trees and oak trees had different types of leaves.

I had once watched a bull amongst a herd of cows and understood from the cowman that they were making calves. I vaguely understood that babies were carried in their mothers’ stomachs, because some of my brothers and sisters had been born at home; and I had picked up from scurrying maids a little of what was happening, but how the baby got there was unknown to me and I presumed that its beginning was spontaneous, though I gave it surprisingly little thought. I knew I was too plain for marriage so would not be having any babies anyway.

During the past two years, while I had been developing into a woman, I had been entirely cut off from the speculative gossip of young girls. Mother had not seen fit to explain anything to me or to warn me of any danger to myself. Yet I sensed now a real physical danger and I gave a wide berth to all liftmen and commissionaires.

When Miss Finch and I returned to the office, we dashed up the stairs to the kitchen to make the morning tea. A tray was spread for the Presence, kettles were filled and cups and saucers were assembled on other trays. A box of biscuits was opened and a biscuit put on every saucer.

While Miss Finch delivered tea to the Presence and to the people working on the same floor as the Filing Department, I ran down the innumerable stone stairs to the basement, carefully balancing in one hand a cup of tea for Miss Lester, who took the names of the clients when they first entered.

The stench in the badly-ventilated cellar room was appalling, as I handed the cup of tea to the blue-clad girl seated at a tiny table facing the clients. She thanked me, while about twenty pairs of eyes watched silently. I paused by the table, expecting Miss Lester to make some light remark or other. Gossiping, however, was a major sin in the eyes of Mr Ellis, so she said nothing.

I looked out over the clients and they stared back at me. There were fat women in black shawls, black skirts and white aprons. They were Liverpool Irish, I knew. Once or twice, while sitting in the park watching the children play, I had spoken to such women shyly about their children, and found them kind and responsive. Some of them still had the high colour of country women, but most of them looked white and drained of strength.

There were also a few women in coats and hats, shabby and grey. A number of men in stained working clothes sat quietly, with their cloth caps held neatly on their laps. One or two children
fidgeted fretfully on the wooden benches or sat on the coconut matting which covered the stone floor. Low-watt bulbs cast a poor light over the well-ordered crowd.

Perhaps it was their quietness, their resignation to the long wait for attention, which was most depressing. They seemed people who had lost all hope, and my heart went out to them. I understood why they smelled, the exhaustion which made them so very quiet. The organisation, I guessed correctly, had not enough money to enable them to offer their clients a cup of tea. Thoughtfully I stole back up the stairs to the kitchen.

‘You were a long time,’ complained Miss Finch impatiently. ‘Take this tray down to the first floor. Give each of the interviewers a cup – and don’t forget the volunteer at the centre table.’

I took the heavy tray of filled cups and carried it carefully down to the first floor. Balancing it on one hand, I pushed the landing door to open it. A youth as thin as a broomstick held it open for me as I passed through. I saw his face light up at the sight of the tea tray, and I felt dreadful because I could not give him a cup.

It was another waiting room which smelled equally badly and was equally gloomy. There was only one light hanging above a centre table round which a
screen had been set. A well-dressed lady sat at the table, a neat row of files before her. At the side of the table on a wooden chair sat an ancient bundle of bones hunched under a thick blanket shawl. Her tiny face, dark from lack of washing, peered anxiously out from the shawl, like a mouse peeping out of its hole. Little hands clutching the shawl across her breast were equally mouselike. She watched me put a cup of tea down by the voluntary worker, and I felt for a second the old woman’s clemmed stomach, the agony of the smell of the tea.

A number of small rooms ran off this waiting room. These were the interviewing rooms, where in reasonable privacy the clients could at last whisper out their difficulties. It seemed to me sometimes that the whole place ran on whispers, as if it were a sacred place where one dared not speak in a normal voice for fear the gods might be disturbed.

I took a cup of tea to each lady in a green overall in the interviewing rooms. In every room was an old-fashioned roll-top desk with a number of baskets of files at the back of them. The baskets were marked ‘Visit’ or ‘Letter’ or ‘In Hand’ or ‘Filing’. The clients were seated on wooden chairs at the side of the desk, and they hardly paused in their recitals to the interviewer as I brought in
the tea. In one room, Dorothy Evans was riffling through the file baskets, looking for a missing file. The interview was continuing despite Dorothy’s presence, and I soon learned, like her, to be quiet and unobtrusive in such a situation and never to say anything except, ‘Excuse me.’

When my tray was empty, I scurried up to the kitchen on the top floor. Miss Finch was filling another cup.

‘Take this down to Miss Dane – her office is next to the Cash Department.’

Miss Dane, I discovered, was the Assistant Presence. Since she was not quite so weighed down by responsibility as the Presence herself, she had time to stop her perusal of a mountain of correspondence, to ask me if I was the new office girl.

In case it was not obvious, I said, ‘Yes, madam, I am.’

She was a pretty, dark-haired woman, and she smiled sweetly at me, as she said, ‘I hope you will be happy here,’ as if she really meant it.

‘Thank you, madam,’ I replied warmly, and became her devoted slave.

Tea having been served, Miss Finch and I leaned thankfully against the kitchen counters and had tea ourselves. At that time, Mary Finch was sixteen years old, a year and a half older than me, and this
seemed a big gap to bridge, so our conversation was desultory.

After a few awkward minutes, we did another run up and down stairs to collect the dirty cups, and then washed them up. Our overalls still showed wet splashes from our washing up, when we again presented ourselves to Mr Ellis.

‘The index cards are ready for filing,’ he said. ‘Get on with it.’

We obediently sorted the cards into alphabetical order and filed them. Then we took another trip to the basement waiting room to relieve Miss Lester, while she fled upstairs to the cloakroom.

Two new girls to look at caused the clients to rustle in their seats and murmur to each other behind shielding hands. There were no magazines for them to read, so their boredom must have been intense.

Miss Finch sat down at the table and I stood by her and looked around me. One wall was shelved and was packed with fat, dusty envelopes set upright.

‘They’re old files,’ explained Miss Finch. ‘If you can’t find a file upstairs, it may be down here.’ And as if to justify her words, the phone rang and she was requested to check if a certain file was on the shelves.

It was. And to save Miss Barker, K to Z, coming
down for it, I was sent hurrying upwards with the grubby envelope. The staircases were rapidly beginning to feel like Mount Everest to me, they were so long and steep.

When I returned, a woman in a faded cotton frock and grey cardigan was standing in front of Mary. She was holding a baby and her stomach was already swollen with another child. Mary wrote down her name and address, and handed the slip to me.

‘You phone it up,’ she said lazily.

I took the slip as if it might bite me and reluctantly went to the little cubbyhole where the phone was. Slowly, I lifted the receiver.

Immediately came the soft hello of the volunteer temporarily manning the switchboard.

I gave the name carefully, spelling it out to make sure that it was correctly recorded.