She's Leaving Home (44 page)

‘The place has gone mad,’ Helen commented, but her expression was troubled. She moved closer to Colette who stood pensively beside her.

‘Started with the Orbison tour in May,’ the doorman informed them as he returned to his post and tugged down his cuffs. ‘Ringo told me the screams started in Glasgow. Not much else to do up there, I suppose. Then there were riots. Crazy when you think about it – this time last year nobody’d heard of them.’

‘Except us,’ Helen swaggered. ‘We were yelling for them even then. D’you remember how the keenest girl fans would arrive in hair rollers and jeans and queue for hours to get seats in the front row? When the supporting bands came on they’d go to the ladies and do their hair and make-up and put on a dress. So when John, Paul, George and Ringo took the stage, they’d see a sea of gorgeous women, all panting for them.’

‘The queue started at midnight for a lunchtime session,’ the bouncer reminisced dreamily, his eyes alert. ‘Those were the best when the boys’d fool around on stage and cadge chip butties from the
little typists. Before Mr Epstein told ’em to behave. But it’s become a lot crazier since then, you know. Ringo’s girlfriend Maureen got chased the last time they appeared. Ended up with nasty scratches down her cheeks.’

‘Crikey. But who’d do that?’

‘Other girls who fancied Ringo, I suppose. They told her to keep away from him or they’d put her eyes out.’

Despite the late summer sunshine Helen shivered. She turned to Colette. ‘We’re not going to get in – no chance,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I dragged you down here. But let’s go into Lewis’s and wander around a bit before we have to get back to school.’

The big department store was on the corner opposite the Adelphi. Over its main doorway the Jacob Epstein statue ‘Man at the Helm’ drew their glances. Gaunt, skinny and quite naked, his large-toed foot extruded on the prow of a ship. This was the spot where Helen had met Michael on that fateful day out. It was not polite in Liverpool to stare at the statue, which had caused a furore when first installed.

The two girls looked up, daringly, deliberately. The male figure was blatant and ugly. Helen felt herself blush.

‘Funny how when you love someone, it doesn’t look so peculiar,’ she commented. ‘In fact all that equipment is fascinating.’ Colette turned away and refused to meet her eye. Helen caught her arm. ‘Sorry, Colette. I didn’t mean to – to boast. Or embarrass you. But nobody tells you these things. It’s hard work finding out for yourself.’

The two took the new escalator and found themselves in the ladies’ clothing department. They wandered around, two school pupils despite the black polo-necked sweaters which covered their blouses and ties, and stopped before an angular model sporting a narrow-waisted suit.

‘My Dad makes ladies’ suits like that but he can’t match the price. He says the ladies’ side of bespoke tailoring is dying.’

Colette did not respond. Irritated and anxious, Helen drew her into a corner near a tall mirror where two wicker chairs had been placed, presumably for menfolk to sit and admire their spouses’ choice before paying for it.

‘What’s the matter, Colette? I suggested coming out today because you looked really peaky. Aren’t you well? You act as if you’re carrying the burden of the world on your shoulders. We’re best friends. We’ve always talked. You can tell me.’

Colette shook her head slowly and allowed the black hair to hide her eyes.

‘We are still friends, aren’t we?’ Helen persisted. ‘We haven’t had a fight – I haven’t said anything to upset you?’

Again, that puzzling slow shake of the head and a refusal to meet her gaze.

Helen sat back on the cane chair and swung her legs aimlessly. For a moment she felt once more like a schoolgirl. She spoke into the air, making a more oblique attempt to engage Colette.

‘Things have changed since the holidays, haven’t they? Before that we could pretend that school would go on for ever, though of course we knew it’d come to an end. Now the end looms. It’s like the last few minutes of a voyage – as the ferry boat swings in close to the landing stage. You know that the suspension of belief is over, that real life is about to begin.’

Colette had not moved or responded. Helen continued, almost to herself. ‘We will go in different directions, unless we end up at the same university – and even then we could be in different colleges. We’ll go our separate ways. Oh, we’ll meet, and swap stories. But it’ll never be the same again. The closeness we’ve shared will be gone for ever. Boys and lovers will be more important to us in future than girlfriends. Husbands will get in the way, break the links. Grown-ups are never the bosom mates that young people can be. Never quite the same trust as between kids, is there?’

Colette’s silence provoked her irrationally. Helen dug the girl in the ribs, quite hard. ‘So what
is it, Colette? If something’s bothering you it’d help to share it. I may not understand, not being Catholic and that, but at least you’d feel better for having spoken to someone. You don’t have a mother to talk to, but I bet you don’t confess everything to the priest, do you?’

A strange noise came from behind the curtain of hair. Regretting the sharpness of her tone Helen turned to Colette, gently peered under the fringe and ascertained that the sound had been a swallowed sob. She waited, but still no confidences were forthcoming.

‘We’ve grown apart already, haven’t we, Colette?’ Helen murmured sadly. ‘I can witter on about my hopes and plans for next year but you’ve heard all that already. I won’t describe the intimate details of what Michael and I do, because that’s too precious to giggle over. I think you grasp that. But I’m unhappy that you can’t share what’s eating you. You shouldn’t push your old friends away. I care about you a lot, Colette. Whatever it is, even if you say it’s private it can’t be so horrible that you can’t even hint at it. Can it?’

‘It can,’ said Colette shortly. ‘Nothing you can help with, anyway.’ She jumped up and began to move towards the staircase.

‘Boyfriend trouble?’ Helen spoke in an encouraging tone as they descended the stairs together. The store could afford only one escalator and had chosen one going up.

‘No. Nothing like that. God, what a joke.’

‘Why a joke? I don’t get it. Have you got a serious boyfriend you don’t want anybody to know about? I wouldn’t sneak on you. I wouldn’t tell your father or anything like that.’

Under the hair the green eyes blazed. ‘I don’t have a boyfriend of any sort. And I’d much rather not have an interrogation the whole way back to school, if you don’t mind. If you want to be a real pal you’ll let me be.’

Helen sighed. ‘Suit yourself.’ In the open air she stole one more glance at Colette. The girl seemed to have atrophied somehow. Her whole shape seemed smaller, shrunken almost, along with her personality. Had she always been like this Colette would never have made it into the inner circle of Brenda, Meg and Helen, who expected a lively contribution from each member. The foursome of
Little Women
– all bright, keen, yet distinguished from each other, complementary, contrasting – had often appeared to them a fair model. Yet Colette seemed to be withdrawing deliberately from the partnership.

‘We’ll be late if we don’t get a move on,’ was all the Irish girl would say.

On the bus back both were occupied with sombre thoughts. As they turned into the school Helen was left with a strong sense of disappointment, and of foreboding.

The train pulled out of Bletchley station with a lurch. In the corner of a ‘Ladies Only’ compartment, Dr Edith Swanson, Dean of Admissions at St Margaret’s College, Cambridge, settled herself with
The Times
crossword, a bag of peppermints and the Liverpool Corporation guidebook to the city.

Her friend Elizabeth Plumb had briefed her over the years in a series of letters filled with insight and wry observations. It was widely acknowledged that the City of Liverpool was run not by any of its women, but by three great men. They were not politicians, for those were a universally despised profession seen as incompetent, irrelevant or on the make. The Lord Mayor in his
ermine-trimmed
robes was chosen entirely on seniority not ability. Local MPs were by any yardstick a rum lot, with only the formidable Mrs Braddock, built like a small tank, of any national interest. Between her and her husband Alderman John Braddock, both good-hearted and rough souls, the complacency and diminished horizons of the masses they served were well represented.

Yet that complacency was not without foundation. Liverpool had long been a leader: its
preeminence
was widely believed unchallengeable. Blackburne House, Elizabeth’s school, had been the nation’s first girls’ day school, a generation before compulsory education. City fathers had been in the vanguard of the Victorian public health movement in 1847 and had built the first municipal housing
anywhere in Britain in 1869. They gave free school milk to their schoolchildren and refused to charge for tuberculosis treatment decades ahead of the National Health Service. The progressive spirit lived on. Thus Liverpudlians in the mid-twentieth century felt they had cause to be quite pleased with themselves.

The three wise men were universally respected. One was Glaswegian Professor Andrew Semple, Medical Officer of Health, holder of a distinguished role created by the great municipalities. A small, rotund, clean-shaven man with fiercely intelligent eyes, he it was who provided the drive behind the slum clearance schemes whose outcomes so troubled Miss Plumb. He it was, too, who urged immunisation against smallpox, explained the polio vaccine, introduced BCG against tuberculosis, waged war on head-lice. The city’s children believed that they chafed under liberty bodices in winter, a kind of cross between padded body armour and stays with ribbons, because Professor Semple said so. Their morning cod-liver oil capsules, swallowed whole (since to bite one was to have the mouth filled with a disgusting oily fishiness for the rest of the day) were certainly his edict. That their generation reached adulthood in better physical condition than any previous one in the port was largely due to his Scottish charm and competence.

The second person was Catholic Archbishop Dr Heenan, smooth-faced and benign. A
seaport
had to be tolerant – after all, the Chinese quarter celebrated their New Year with noisy cymbals, the Orange Lodge marched unmolested through the town centre and Congregational chapels while signs in Welsh dotted suburban street corners. Nevertheless it was quietly acknowledged that the city ‘had a lot of Catholics’, not simply because of numbers boosted by frequent Irish transfusions but because the faithful attended Mass, put their money in the plate, and did what their priests told them. Especially the women. Thus, if anything, what the RCs lacked in quantity they made up in discipline, a fact reinforced by the status of their spiritual head.

Yet Heenan was no bitter zealot. His determination to construct his own cathedral – situated with emotional symbolism at the far end of Hope Street from the Anglican version – brought widespread approval. The design, reminiscent of a spacecraft on its launch-pad, was regarded as splendid. The Metropolitan Cathedral, as it was to be known, would elevate its adherents to their rightful position in the cosmos. No longer would they be a downtrodden proletariat despised by all and sundry. The pain of emigrations from the Great Hunger of 1846 onwards which brought boatloads of desperate ragamuffins to the sea-port would be expunged. Respectability beckoned.

Heenan was grudgingly admired by the Jewish community who were intrigued by his performances at the Second Vatican Council. His attitudes were long held: in the fifties he had vigorously criticised the Holy See’s boycott of the Council of Christians and Jews. Heenan shared their view that as long as the Pope’s followers prayed every Good Friday for the veil to be lifted from the hearts of ‘the perfidious Jews… so that they too may acknowledge our Lord, Jesus Christ’, then anti-Semitism would continue and be condoned, as it was in darker regimes such as rural France and Poland. The hostile wording of the liturgy had to be erased, insisted Dr Heenan: ‘The Catholic Church, in the name of all Christians, should make some strong gesture by way of repentance for the unheard-of atrocities committed against Jews in our own time.’ Ranged against him were men like Cardinal Ottaviani who had allegedly prayed to ‘die before this Ecumenical Council ends, so that I may die a Catholic’.

Had Miss Plumb but known it, the battles in Rome were meat and drink to such as Reverend Siegel. When prayers for the Royal Family were offered in his synagogue each sabbath he would murmur a private request that Heenan’s efforts meet with divine success. It was glumly feared, however, that Liverpool’s Primate would in due course be rewarded with a Cardinal’s hat and be swept away to Westminster.

The third man was Mr Magnay, the Director of Education. H.S. Magnay, to be precise. A Tynesider. Unlike Dr Andrew Semple’s his given names were never uttered, yet his surname was
known to every Liverpool family, and by many he was deeply admired and loved.

Mr Magnay’s dumpy figure in its navy suit and waistcoat, the wavy hair streaked grey above a podgy face, was familiar to a fair proportion of his thousands of charges, for he took his duties seriously and frequently inspected schools himself. His signature in ink – not a rubber stamp – had appeared on the letter advising Helen’s parents of her place at Blackburne House. Every head teacher had had to parry his gentle but effective questions to obtain the job, and other staff as well. He set the educational standards of the city and reinforced them by the most positive means. It was taken for granted that he would attend the prizedays of as many of the city’s secondary institutions (at any rate, its grammar schools) as he could manage year by year, and that he would be photographed for the
Echo
with certificate winners. As in many other households, the framed picture of him with Helen graced her parents’ sideboard with the hope that Barry’s would some day accompany it.

Thus the populace felt themselves to be in honourable and reliable hands, at least those who read newspapers, listened to the BBC Home Service, wanted the best for their offspring and bothered to vote. And should aspects of urban life threaten to intrude – should one become too aware of litter or vandalism or crime – one could move, spread out beyond the city’s boundaries to Sefton or the Wirral, to reside with like-minded neighbours and pay much lower rates, yet continue to benefit from the proximity of the great port without any sense of obligation towards it.