Liverpool Miss (5 page)

I could imagine that this was not as generous as it sounded. After a week of eating too many sweets, the desire for them would be killed and few people would want them any more.

Mother inquired stiffly, ‘And how many hours a week would she work for that?’

‘Well, I open up at half past seven in the morning to catch the morning trade, you understand. And I close up at nine in the evening.’ She paused a moment and then said, ‘But I wouldn’t need her after about seven o’clock. Me husband’s home by then, and he helps me after he’s had his tea.
And I close Wednesday atternoons, so she’d have the atternoon off after she’d tidied up, like. Me husband helps me Sundays, too, so I wouldn’t want her then either.’

I wanted the job so badly that I did not care how many hours I worked, how often I scrubbed the floor. The shop seemed so lovely and warm, after our house, and I sensed that in a rough way the woman would be kind to me. I tried to will the woman to agree to take me.

A little boy burst through the shop door, leaving the bell tinging madly after him. He pushed past us and leaned against the corner of the counter.

‘Ah coom for me Dad’s ciggies,’ he announced, turning a pinched, grubby face up towards the sweetshop owner.

‘Have you got the money?’

‘Oh, aye. He wants ten Woodbines.’ A small hand was unclenched to show four large copper pennies.

The cigarettes were handed over and the pennies dropped into the wooden till.

‘Now don’t be smoking them yourself,’ admonished the woman, with a laugh.

The boy grinned at her and bounced back to the door, his bare feet thudding. As he went through the door, he turned and gestured as if he were smoking.

‘Aye, you little gint!’ she said.

The interruption had given Mother time to make a rapid calculation. As the woman turned back to her, she said sharply, ‘There is a law about how many hours a minor can work – and, incidentally a law about selling cigarettes to minors. I am sure that over sixty hours a week – at less than a penny an hour – are far more hours than are allowed.’

The woman shrugged huffily; her eyes narrowed, giving her a cunning expression.

‘I’m sure I don’t know about that,’ she replied tartly. ‘If she doesn’t want the job she doesn’t have to take it. There’s others as will be grateful for it.’ She sniffed, and looked at me disparagingly. ‘Anyway, I wouldn’t take her. The sores on her face would put the customers off. I got to have a clean looking girl.’

I looked at her appalled, hurt to the quick. In front of our broken piece of mirror, I had carefully squeezed each pimple on my face, so that the acne was temporarily reduced to raised red blotches with a fresh, golden scab on each. I had no make-up to cover the results. But I had hoped that I looked clean.

Mother’s face flooded with angry colour. For a moment she looked like Avril in a tantrum. She cast a scornful glance at the shopkeeper, who stared
back at her with her chin thrust upwards, quite unabashed.

‘Good afternoon,’ Mother snapped, as she swung round and opened the street door. The little bell tinkled crossly at being so forcibly disturbed.

‘Helen, this way.’

It was an order, and I slouched out through the doorway, closely followed by my wrathful mother.

Mother scolded sibilantly all the way home, and blamed me for wasting her time. I was too crushed and disappointed to respond.

Back I went to the kitchen and little Edward, who trotted patiently by my side, while I fumed miserably. In saner moments, I acknowledged that Mother had saved me from savage exploitation. But her motives in doing so were, to me, suspect. And as the years went by I felt that my increasing efficiency at home was daily making more certain that I stay there. Probably a few pennies of pocket money or a modicum of praise would have done much to soothe me. But everything I did was taken for granted. Failures were bitingly criticised. There was no one to turn to for consolation, except, occasionally, to Fiona.

And yet I yearned to love my parents and be loved in return, to have with them the tender relationship I had had with Grandma during the long months I had frequently spent with her during my childhood. But Grandma had vanished with the rest of my friends. In my innocence, I did not understand that my parents’ fast and extravagant life in the post World War years had alienated every relation they had. Father’s widowed mother – the last to desert them – had left her son to learn the hard way the teachings she had failed to inculcate in him when young. She probably had no conception of the depth of our sufferings.

There is no doubt that Mother never forgave her friends for deserting her after Father went bankrupt; it was as if she declared a silent, ruthless war against her own class. The depth of her bitterness was immeasurable.

I remembered well the doll-like creatures who used to frequent our drawing room and dining room. In short, beige georgette dresses, their Marcel-waved hair covered by deep cloche hats, they teetered on high heels in and out of our old home in considerable numbers. Afternoon tea or dinner were served by a parlour maid in a black and white uniform. Sometimes well-tailored young men, who also had time to waste, came to drink a cocktail or have a cup of tea.

Several times, a man vanished from the usual circle. One of the ladies would say, between puffs on a cigarette held in a long holder, ‘Gas, dahling – his lungs couldn’t stand it,’ or ‘He was loaded with shrapnel – a piece moved round to his heart. Too utterly devastating.’

I was allowed to attend the tea parties. Edith would dress me in my best frock, usually shantung silk, long white socks and brown lace-up shoes, and I would sit and nibble a piece of cake and watch the prettily dressed visitors. I soon learned that most of the men were unemployed, ex-army officers; they usually had some private means left them by more enterprising forefathers, but as prices rose their money shrank. They had no special qualifications and sought jobs as car salesmen or vacuum cleaner salesmen. One of them regularly allowed me to reach up and touch the silver plate the doctors had implanted to replace the top of his skull; another had an artificial leg which creaked when he walked. Father himself had trouble with his hands, which had been frost-bitten during his service in Russia. He also got chest pains, forerunners of the heart attacks to come.

So, perhaps my parents’ friends, bereaved, disillusioned, wounded in a war of frightful, unnecessary suffering, had so many troubles of their own that
they were unable to help one of their number who had failed largely through his own inadequacies.

I was born after the war, so it was only history to me. Had I realised, when I got so cross with my parents’ ineptitude, how close it still was to them, how they had already gone through the shock of seeing the kind of life they understood crumble, I would have been much more compassionate.

One windy March evening, when the children’s need of clothing seemed particularly dire, Mother decided to write to some of her old acquaintances to ask for second-hand clothing. After all, she said bitterly to Father, the most she could lose was a three-halfpenny stamp, since she appeared to have lost any friendship there was.

When the children had gone to bed, she sat at one end of the living-room table and wrote three letters, while I sat at the other end and did my homework.

Three days later, a scented letter dropped through our letter box. As far as I could remember, it was the first letter, other than a bill, which we had received since coming to Liverpool.

Opening it was a ceremony, carried out under the eager eyes of the entire family.

‘It’s from Katie,’ said Mother, naming a gay,
childless married friend, as she slit the envelope with the kitchen knife.

It contained a single sheet of notepaper wrapped round a five-pound note. Katie was sorry about us and sent the enclosed with love. Mother had found a technique for adding to our income.

Until she had exhausted every possible person she could think of, Mother wrote at least one begging letter a week. She rarely got money out of the same person twice. But she had had an enormous circle of acquaintances, and when she ran out of these she wrote to the parents of the children’s friends and also moving letters to their teachers. After that, she wrote to people whose names she had picked out of library reference books.

She learned to write eloquently of the children’s woes and her own efforts to find work. She did not mention Father in letters to strangers, perhaps to give the impression, without actually saying so, that she was widowed. She frequently passed her efforts over to me to read – one of the few times when she took me into her confidence. I had never heard of confidence tricksters and I read them admiringly, believing them to be a perfectly honourable way of earning money. After all, Grandma had always said that charity was a great virtue, and we were certainly in need.

There were many professional begging letter writers in Liverpool at that time. Earnest gentlemen sat in their tiny bed-sitting rooms and wrote passionate appeals for help to any monied person who came to their attention. They invented whole families of starving children, aged parents in need of shoes, wives dying of tuberculosis, and so on. And they made a steady living at it. In contrast, Mother could say honestly that her children were in dreadful need, even if bad management was part of the cause of it.

Some well-to-do people, including Royalty, who were bedevilled by begging letter writers, would send the letters to a charitable organisation in the city, with the request that they investigate the need; it was remarkable how generous people were when the need was found to be genuine. I do not recollect, however, anyone coming to investigate us as a result of one of Mother’s letters.

Thanks to the kindness of many people unknown to me, a few comforts began to trickle into the house, amongst them a second-hand iron bed for me. The spring was hollowed out like a hammock and it was a number of years before I acquired a mattress. I shared it for a while with Edward, but it represented my first personal gain at home since we had arrived in Liverpool. It was at least another five
years before I got proper blankets and sheets for it; and lying chilled to the marrow through endless winter nights was one of the greater hardships for all the children.

Sometimes parcels of clothing or bedding arrived in response to the letters. Clothing for the younger children was almost invariably given to them and it helped to keep them tidy for school. Sometimes there was clothing which fitted Mother; men’s clothing was rarely sent, perhaps because of the difficulty of fitting. The bedding was usually bundled up with some of the clothing, ready for pawning.

Seared by disappointment, I would take the cloth-wrapped parcel to the crowded pawnbroker’s shop with its three golden balls hanging in front of it, and, after much good-natured haggling with the pawnbroker, I would receive four or five shillings, and a ticket so that I could later redeem the parcel.

The parcel was whisked away from the high, black counter and thrown up a chute to the pawnbroker’s assistant in the store room above. After a year, if the goods had not been redeemed or interest paid on the loan, the parcel would be torn open and the contents sold. So many goods were for sale that the pawnbroker’s was an excellent place to buy almost anything, from clothing
and boots to an engagement ring or a bedspread or a concertina; and there were always women wrapped in shawls or in long, draggling men’s overcoats, picking through the merchandise on the bargain tables set out in front of the store on fine days.

The money raised from the pawnbroker might be used for a little extra food or, more frequently, to pacify a creditor who had threatened court procedure. Cigarettes were almost always one of the first things bought with it, and sometimes Mother would go to the cinema. She often remarked angrily that if Father could afford a drink, she could afford a cinema seat.

The local newspaper-shop proprietor, after a fierce row with me because Father owed him a whole pound for cigarettes, obtained a Court Order against us. This meant that the bill had to be paid by regular instalments set by the Court, on threat of the bailiffs selling us up if we failed to pay. This added enormously to my fears, because I had stood and watched while whole houses of furniture were sold by the bailiffs for a few shillings to settle a ridiculously small debt. Mother once bought for sixpence a superb hand-made rocking chair when there were no other bids for it.

I never knew where my parents might run up
another bill or who might pounce on me, as the hapless housekeeper who had to answer the door. I had always been afraid of people who shouted, and I would stand shivering with my shoulder against the inside of the door, while someone hammered and shouted on the outside.

Once or twice I considered running away, but in those days there was no support from welfare organisations for such a runaway. And who would employ someone like me?

I once threatened to go to Grandma, but my Father said grimly that she would probably turn me away, that I should be thankful for what I had. Things would get better one of these days.

Grandma had become a loving, distant dream to me, and I was shocked beyond measure at the idea that she no longer cared. Yet I believed what Father said.

Spring had come at last. The trees lining Princes Avenue were stickily in bud; the privet hedges behind the low, confining front walls of the houses were already bursting into leaf, and the sparrows and pigeons were a-bustle with the need to mate.

I wheeled Edward down Parliament Street to the small Carnegie library in Windsor Street. A playful wind flipped dust and pieces of paper round its railings, against which women leaned, shopping bags on arm, to gossip in the pale sunshine. The soot-covered library was a handsome little building with high, arched windows which made it pleasantly light inside. Its battered books passed through my hands at the rate of about half a dozen a week and helped me to forget hunger, cold and humiliation.
The librarians knew me and sometimes recommended a new book which had come in. In those days, librarians seemed to be great readers and both Father and I enjoyed discussions with them about books we had read.

I parked the Chariot close to the iron railings at the front. Edward was a patient child who would sit and watch the passers-by while I hastened to find something new to read.

As usual, I went directly to the section devoted to travel books. A new travel book was a great treat to me, I learned all I know of geography from them. I would carefully follow on the maps in the books journeys through countries as diverse as Tibet and Bermuda, examining myopically photographs which ranged from very fuzzy to very clear. I was always annoyed when there was no map in the book because I did not have an atlas, and poor photography was also a great disappointment. Later, more affluent generations would travel by hitchhiking the routes my fingers traced so longingly on maps.

I pushed my straggling hair back behind my ears and took off my faulty glasses to peer closer at the shelves; sometimes I could see better without the glasses than I could with them.

‘Helen Forrester, isn’t it?’ inquired a voice from behind me.

I turned slowly, surprised that anyone should know me by name.

It was the deaconess from the church, to whom in a rage I had shown our house. It was no wonder that I had not recognised her voice. During our previous encounter, she had said so little while I had said so much. I blushed at the memory of my unpardonable outburst.

I murmured shyly that I was Helen. She looked very sweet in her coif and frumpy clothes.

‘I was about to come to see you,’ she announced unexpectedly. Then she glanced round the booklined room. ‘Perhaps we could talk here, though. Let’s go over there.’ She took my elbow and guided me into a corner of the Fiction section.

‘I wanted to ask you, my dear, if you would like a job as a telephonist. A charity I know of needs a girl, and I immediately thought of you, because you have such a pleasant voice.’

I gaped at her, struck dumb by the unexpectedness of the offer. Then I gasped, ‘Oh, yes.’

She smiled at me, and continued, ‘The salary is not much – about twelve and sixpence a week. Would you like me to arrange an interview for you?’

Twelve shillings and sixpence a week seemed a huge sum to me. All the wonderful things it would buy danced before me, mixed with a terrible
apprehension that I would not get the job because I was so dirty and had no clothes except the grubby, ragged collection I was wearing.

The deaconess was talking. ‘I thought I would ask you first, before speaking to your mother.’

At the mention of Mother, I remembered the sweet shop episode.

‘My parents will never agree to it,’ I said hopelessly. ‘I have to look after Edward.’

‘I’ve already thought of that,’ she responded eagerly. ‘Alice Davis lives a few doors away from you. She has an invalid mother who cannot be left alone and she badly needs to earn a few shillings. I am sure she would take care of Edward during the day – and she wouldn’t charge much.’

A fairy godmother in a blue coif! A true fairy godmother. A wave of gratitude surged through me, but I did not know how to express it. ‘Would she, really – would she do it?’ I whispered.

‘I’m sure she would, if I ask her.’

I was acquainted with Alice. She belonged to the Salvation Army. I said ‘good morning’ to her most Sundays, as she strode along the street pushing her mother’s wheelchair down to the Citadel. Her mother would be bundled up in rough grey blankets, regardless of whether it was winter or summer; and Alice wore a navy-blue uniform, with
a matching Victorian bonnet trimmed with a red ribbon proclaiming ‘Salvation Army’ across the front. Her sturdy legs were clad in sensible black stockings and the shine on her black shoes equalled that on the shoes of our local police constable. Her cheerful face shone like her shoes. Occasionally, the Salvation Army band played at the end of our street, and Alice would rush down to them, clutching her cymbals, ready to join in while they were so close to her home. Alice was rough, but Edward would be safe with her.

Please, Lord, please let it happen, I prayed silently. Aloud, I said, ‘Thank you very, very much. I would love the job if you think I can do it.’

She smiled. ‘Of course you can do it. Shall I call on Mrs Forrester tonight? You might like to talk to both your father and your mother first.’

‘I will,’ I said, though I had no real hope. Perhaps, however, with an advocate like this respectable lady, just perhaps, they could be persuaded.

‘I’ll come this evening, then?’

‘Yes, please,’ I mumbled.

In a daze, I wheeled Edward home, pushing the pram unseeingly through the usual crowds of black, white and yellow men idling at the corners. Some of them murmured resentfully as the pram brushed carelessly past them.

How on earth was I to approach Mother and Father about this offer? I worried. A chance of freedom at last, a tiny flame of hope in a very bleak world.

The whole routine of the family would have to be altered. Alan and Fiona would have to shoulder some of my work. And Alice would have to be paid. Some clothes would have to be redeemed from the pawnbroker – or obtained from somewhere else. Where would Mother find the money?

At home, I poked up the fire and began to make toast for the children’s tea, while I thought once again of running away. Could I live on twelve shillings and sixpence? Boys sometimes ran away to the south, where there was more work than in financially ruined Liverpool. Occasionally, girls did, too. I had, however, read in the newspaper about the flourishing white slave traffic into which girls were sold. I was not clear what happened to white slaves, except that they were kept in bondage and abused by ruthless men until they died. I imagined them being misused like American black slaves, and I had no wish to die a dramatic death like Uncle Tom in
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
. I had wept over this tragedy as a small girl and did not wish for a similar fate.

I did some careful arithmetic. A small, unheated
housekeeping room could be found for about seven shillings and sixpence a week; food, say, four shillings, firing in winter would take the other shilling, leaving nothing for clothing. I did not consider that I might need tram fares – I had been walking, now, for the past three years all over south Liverpool; make-up was beyond my experience, and pocket money an idle dream, anyway.

The children drifted in for tea and I dealt with their squabbles and their hunger as best I could.

Father and Mother returned from work soon after the children. Inside five minutes, they were quarrelling violently. I cannot remember what triggered the trouble. It did not matter, because the underlying animosity smouldered all the time and needed very little to make it flare up. As usual, they drew each child into the argument in an effort to make them take sides, and this frequently reduced Avril and Brian to hysterics as they agonised between the parents. Fiona and Alan were old enough to retreat to friends’ homes if they got desperate enough, but poor Avril, Tony and Brian had no such refuges. Tony usually managed to stay a little calmer, though he was always upset, and Edward just stuck firmly in whichever lap he happened to be cradled when hostilities broke out.

Even when I was very small, I wondered why my parents stayed together. I knew a girl whose mother was divorced, and I quite envied her. But I had been fortunate in having Edith to take care of me and there were the long absences from home when I stayed with Grandma. In their conversations about the people they knew, they taught me that not all families were riven by warfare. Now, as the fight raged over the tea table, I wished passionately I could run to Grandma for help.

Alan had piled into the fight with some furious, rude remark and was sharply slapped by his father. He shot out of the kitchen door into the back yard, raging nearly as incoherently as Father was.

Fiona wept helplessly, her head on the table. Brian and Tony stonily munched their toast, their movements nervous and uncoordinated; they did not answer the passionate appeals of Mother and Father to take their side. Avril stood behind Mother’s chair, holding on to it and shaking it, as she shouted hopelessly, ‘Stop, everybody. Why can’t you stop?’

Neither protagonist would give way.

I was silent with despair. I hardly heard the words hurled around me or addressed to me. What was I going to do when the church lady arrived? Mother
seized a cup and saucer from the table and hurled them into a corner. Through her screams of rage, I heard a knock on the front door.

The other children had also heard the sharp rat-tat. When they instinctively turned their heads towards the front of the house, Mother stopped in mid-scream.

‘What was that?’ asked Father, his lips turned back in a snarl.

‘Someone is at the door,’ I said, too much in anguish to move.

‘Well, get a move on, girl. Answer it. Say we are not at home.’

Reluctantly I obeyed, feet dragging. I shut the living-room door behind me.

As I turned the lock on the front door, I wished, for the first time, that it was only a creditor. The moment I swung back the door, she was in the muddy hall and pulling off her gloves, as the wind gusted behind her.

‘It’s quite cold this evening,’ the deaconess said cheerfully. ‘Well, have you asked them, my dear?’

‘I haven’t had an opportunity yet,’ I apologised.

Her smile faded, and she sighed. ‘Never mind. I’ll ask for you.’

‘They said they are not at home tonight.’

From behind the closed door came the sound of
renewed strife, though the level seemed more subdued. The interruption had broken the continuity of the argument. The lady laughed and looked at me conspiratorially. The living room was suddenly quiet. The feminine chuckle must have penetrated to the family.

The deaconess tucked her gloves into her handbag and said briskly, ‘I imagine your mother would be at home to me. We know each other well enough to call occasionally without warning, don’t we?’

I tried to smile at her as I heard the living-room door open behind me. ‘Will you come into the front room?’ I asked hastily. ‘I’ll inquire if they are at home.’ These were phrases I had often heard May, our parlourmaid, use, and they came automatically to mind in such a difficult situation.

I opened the door to the front room and ushered the blue-clad lady into it, just as Avril stumped out of the other room, her eyes tearful, her mouth surrounded by black toast crumbs. She marched into the sitting room after the visitor, and stood staring at her.

I heard the deaconess speaking softly to the frightened little girl, as nervously I announced our visitor to Mother and Father. Both parents were standing motionless, like alerted hares, as they tried to judge who the visitor was.

Mother, her face and neck still red from combat, pushed past me and went into the front room. Father gave a great sigh and flopped into a chair. His hands were trembling as they always did when he was upset.

Fiona had ceased to weep and gazed up at me with great pansy eyes still dewdropped. Brian and Tony asked Father’s permission to leave the table.

‘Yes,’ he said peevishly.

They scrambled down from their chairs and I heard the back door slam, as they went out to play in the last of the evening light.

Father turned back to me. He gestured with his head towards the front room. ‘What does she want?’ he asked. I think he was always nervous that his wife had done something outrageous which he did not know about.

I knelt down on one knee and began to pick up the bits of cup and saucer that Mother had shattered. Through my draggling hair, I hesitantly answered him.

‘She has come about me.’

He sat up straight and looked at me. ‘About you? What have you done?’

I stood up and faced him. ‘I haven’t done anything. She’s got a job for me. And she’s keen that I should take it.’

‘What nonsense!’ He sniffed, and then added angrily, ‘I wish she would mind her own business.’

‘She means well, Daddy.’

‘She should hie her back to her nunnery and stay there. She has no right to interfere with my family.’ He thumped the arm of his chair. ‘She has no right to put ideas into your head.’

I stood irresolutely before him, the broken dishes in my hand. I wanted to put my arms round him and beg him to intercede for me. When I was small and he was not too busy, we had been able to talk to each other. But this ease between us had got lost in the maelstrom of trouble which had engulfed us. So I hesitated, and the opportunity was lost.