The Complete Helen Forrester 4-Book Memoir: Twopence to Cross the Mersey, Liverpool Miss, By the Waters of Liverpool, Lime Street at Two

‘Work?’ I was truly astonished.

At my query she looked down at me, but there was no affection, no real interest in her gaze or in her voice as she answered, ‘Yes. Work.’

The idea that work could cure someone who had been ill was too difficult for me to understand. I knew nothing of mental illness, except that lunatics were shut up in lunatic asylums, and I had no comprehension of the mental stress under which my poor mother laboured and which the doctor had diagnosed.

‘You can’t,’ I said desperately. ‘There is Edward – and Avril – and me – I haven’t got my matric yet – I have to go back to school.’

‘We shall see,’ she said thoughtfully.

My stomach clenched in a deadly nervous pain. In a perceptive flash I saw myself for ever at home, the uneducated daughter retained to help in the house – and there were still some of these when I was a child – grey, uninteresting, the butt of everyone’s ill-temper, without money of my own and consequently entirely dependent upon the goodwill of the rest of the family. I saw myself for ever struggling with the care of Edward, with Avril’s tantrums and the boys’ fights, with Mr Parish’s miserable pittance, and I realized that the daughter who did not have to go to school or to work would be the one to be clothed and fed last.

I burst into tears, my hopes shattered.

‘Oh no, Mummy!’ I wailed. ‘I want to go to school! I want to be like other girls!’

‘Be quiet,’ said Mother sharply. ‘You are making an exhibition of yourself.’

I continued to weep – but quietly. Little ladies did not make exhibitions of themselves in public.

‘You have to learn that you cannot have everything you want. The family must come first.’

CHAPTER TEN (#ulink_d1025c73-a2a4-513c-9174-c87ff1e56cba)

Immediately we arrived home, I threw a tantrum which left even Avril awed. I stamped, I cried, I shouted that I would go to school. Twelve and a half was too young an age to have to leave. I would not stay at home and look after babies.

My bewildered father, who did not know what the cause of my rage was, shouted at me above the storm to be quiet. Mother shouted back at him. Fiona and Tony, terrified by the noise, wept steadily in a corner, while Alan did his best to placate the various contestants by telling everyone to shut up. Brian took refuge halfway up the attic stairs and watched through the banister. Baby Edward cried for his forgotten bottle. A voice from below yelled up to us, ‘Shut that bloody racket, can’t yer!’

As my anger gave way to hopeless tears Father gradually picked up the story and said he thought the doctor’s idea of Mother’s going to work was an excellent one and that it would probably be for only a little while. When I continued to weep passionately, he slapped me across the buttocks and told me to go into the bedroom until I could behave in a civilized manner.

I lay face down on the bed until I could not stand the stench of it any more. The nervous strain under which the children laboured in their cold, hungry, new world was so great that Brian, Tony and Avril had become incontinent at night and Edward had no rubber undersheet to help him, so that the already disgusting beds had become even more so and were invariably wet somewhere on their surface.

Emerging finally in sulky silence and with blood-shot eyes, I found Edward still whimpering disconsolately, but the children were silently getting themselves ready for bed, by taking off their outer clothes. My parents were arguing heatedly about what kind of occupation my Mother could undertake.

Still sniffing, I made a bottle for Edward with the last of the baby food, and, since I was still filled with resentment at my parents, I took him outside and sat down on the top stair of the long flights of gloomy staircase and fed him.

The smell of the overcrowded, verminous house, its filthy, over-used bathroom and the efforts of nine different cooks combined with Edward’s rancid odour was almost overpowering, and I put my cheek against his scurvy little head and wept again.

During the next few days my mother went out each afternoon for a walk to strengthen her legs, and then one day she sponged her dress and pressed it with an iron borrowed from Miss Sinford, the benevolent, crazy old lady on the ground floor, wiped her shoes over with a wet cloth, and washed herself down with a rag and cold water. She then made up her face with the last of her make-up and the aid of her handbag mirror, and went out without saying where she was going.

As she went down the stairs, I realized for the first time how much my mother had changed. She had been considered beautiful and extremely vivacious and had always had a court of young men who called upon her – there were still some gentlemen who lived on private incomes in those days and who had time to call and take tea with a pretty woman and her friends – but now her dress hung loosely on her, her face was haggard and lined, her shining black hair, which had been exquisitely kept by her hairdresser, had grown long and straggling; she had pushed it up under her hat before going out. The polished ovals of her nails were ruined by her having to bite them to shorten them, as we all had to do, because we had no scissors. How much had Father changed, I wondered? And the children? And me?

Avril was howling because she could not go out too, and I decided that I might create a diversion by washing her and washing Edward.

We had a fire that day, a luxury we frequently had to forgo despite the icy February weather, so I went down to the bathroom with our kettle and only saucepan, filled them with water, brought them upstairs and set them on the fire. Carrying Edward on my hip, I took the handleless coal bucket down to the basement area, a stone-lined yard from which steps led up to the back garden. I laid Edward on a counter which must have been part of a butler’s pantry in the more palmy days of the house, and washed the coal dust out of the bucket as thoroughly as I could under a tap in the yard.

Watched by a fascinated Avril, who had by now forgotten her desire to go out and had tripped up and downstairs behind me puffing excitedly, I set the bucket in front of the fire, put the warm water in it, stripped a protesting Edward and washed him from head to heel, holding him on my knee as I had seen my nanny hold Avril when she was a baby. This was the first time he had had a complete bath since we had left home and I found that he had numerous bug bites and his little back was sore where the urine had not been properly washed off him; his head was covered with scurf.

I had no change of clothing for him, but I pinned a piece of the rag the priest had given’ us on him as a rough diaper and laid his blanket over him to keep him warm in the Chariot while I dealt with Avril.

Fortunately, Avril thought it was a wonderful game and submitted to being rubbed all over with a wet cloth. I could not wash her head because I could not think how to do it in a bucket. Dirt was ingrained in her skin and I could not get her completely clean without soap. I had an uneasy feeling that her fine golden hair was verminous and certainly she had scurf around her forehead and along the line of the parting. It seemed, too, as if the hair on the crown of her head was thinner than before. I told her cheerfully, however, that I would wash her vest and knickers after she was in bed.

I sighed as I slicked the water off her in front of the fire, so that she would dry quickly. She, like Mother, had changed. She had been a pudgy child with rosy cheeks; now she looked wan, her ribs showed and her stomach stuck out too much.

While I scrubbed the children, Father was stuck in one of his everlasting queues.

He worked very hard at being unemployed. He spent most of two days a week walking to the employment exchange, standing in a long queue, signing on as being available for work and walking back up the hill which was Leece Street, pausing outside the old Philharmonic Hall to read the concert notices with wistful attention, then on past the black-faced ear, nose and throat hospital and then through an endless maze of decaying Victorian houses to our comfortless eyrie at the top of one of them. He was not so badly off as dock labourers, he told us. They had to sign on for work twice a day.

Another day was spent walking to the offices of the public assistance committee, where could be found Tony’s ‘Mr Parish’. Here he stood in a long queue again, soaked by rain or frozen in the winter wind, and received his precious forty-three shillings a week. He then walked home. On the other three mornings a week he went to the public library, scanned the advertisements in the newspapers in the reading-room, and wrote replies to those offering work he felt he could do. Then he walked all the way into the centre of the town to deliver his replies to the offices of the Liverpool Echo in Victoria Street, because we had no money for stamps – the postage for a letter in those days was three-halfpence.

His shoes wore through at the soles and he stuffed them with cardboard begged from the corner grocery shop, until the holes were so big that the cardboard would not stay in place. Without tools he could not hope to mend them himself, so one week we very nearly starved completely while we paid the shoemaker. He had not had a haircut or a clean shirt for a month, though he had managed to wash himself quite thoroughly. His socks had very little left from the ankle down, and I remember his blue, frozen feet sticking out of them when he removed his soaking wet shoes on his return in the evenings. I think it was rubbing his feet with my hands which truly brought home to me our desperate position and made me accept the fact that I had to stay at home. I would rub until I had the circulation going again and he would whistle under his breath with the pain of it, and each time it happened my heart broke anew.

For a month or more, he never spoke to anyone outside the family, except the city and government clerks who dealt with him and to whom he was just another statistic. One morning, however, the wait at the employment exchange was particularly long and chilly, and the ragged queue of weary men began to mutter rebelliously, and Father was drawn into sympathetic conversation with his fellow sufferers. They were, for the most part, respectable working men many of whose jobs were dependent upon the ships which went in and out of the port of Liverpool in normal times. They were curious about my father, because he spoke like an educated man. They could not imagine that anyone highly educated could be unemployed; they assumed, and Father did not disillusion them, that he had been a senior clerk in one of the shipping companies which had been dispensing with its office staff. They were friendly and, as Father met them again and again, they began to fill him in on how to stay alive under almost impossible circumstances.

He discovered that many of them had wives who went out cleaning private homes or worked in stores to augment their parish relief; though these earnings should have been declared to the public assistance committee, they were not, and they made all the difference between starvation and dying more slowly of malnutrition.

‘If you can live long enough, there just might be a job for you one morning,’ a leather-faced old warehouseman told him jokingly.

There were agencies in the town, he was told, which would provide the odd pair of shoes or an old blanket for a child. There were regimental funds willing to provide a little help to old soldiers. He gathered other scraps of information, which were revelations to a man who had never had to think twice about the basic necessities of life. An open fire, he was assured, could be kept going almost all day from the refuse of the streets, old shoes, scraps of paper, twigs, wooden boxes, potato peelings; if one was very ill or had a broken bone, the outpatients departments of most of the local hospitals would give some medical care. Pawnbrokers would take almost anything saleable, and one could buy second-hand clothing from them. Junk yards would sometimes yield a much needed pram wheel or a piece for an old bike. One could travel from Liverpool to London by tramcar, if one knew the route, and it was much cheaper than going by train. Some of the men had done it several times in an effort to find work in the more prosperous south-east of the country.

Father thanked them gratefully and came home very thoughtful, marvelling at their sheer resilience and good nature in such adversity.

All of us had colds, including the baby, and lacked even handkerchiefs, though we did our best by using newspaper culled from the greengrocer, who wrapped our small purchases of potatoes in it. Father began to realize that unless help came quickly the younger children would probably die from the first germ that infected them. The death rate in Liverpool, at that time, was one of the highest in the country and the infant mortality rate was correspondingly horrifying. He knew that we were worse off than most of the people who stood in the endless queues with him, since we did not draw the Liverpool level of relief, nor were we eligible for help with clothing which ‘Mr Parish’ sometimes gave out. No one, in all his conversations, happened to tell him that he was paying three times the rent that most people paid and that this was largely what was crippling us.

By far the greatest proportion of the Liverpool work-force was casual labour, dependent upon the erratic comings and goings of ships in the river, and most men were accustomed to being unemployed from time to time, particularly dock labourers. Their pattern of life reflected this in that they could never make a proper domestic budget, because they never knew from one week to the next what their earnings would be. They spent their earnings and ‘made do’ in between jobs. My father, being an educated man trained to study economic trends, could never manage to be as philosophical and optimistic as they were. He feared not only for himself but for his children’s future.

In those days there were no midday meals or drinks of milk at school to help children along. One good lady who suggested that the skimmed milk thrown down the drain by one of the city’s bigger dairies might be given free to children in the elementary schools was soundly snubbed for her socialistic ideas.

Father swallowed what little pride he had left. He sat down at our greasy table and wrote to the headquarters of his old regiment

Mother came home white with weariness and irritable with frustration, having tried unsuccessfully against about thirty other applicants for a job as a saleswoman.

‘They looked like a flock of crows,’ she remarked of the applicants. ‘They all wore black dresses, stockings and shoes – just little white collars to relieve the dreariness.’

‘I thought that was what shop-girls always wore,’ replied Father.

‘I suppose so,’ Mother said. She added, ‘And the hours one was expected to work – nine until nine on Saturdays!’

‘What wages were they offering?’

‘Fifteen shillings a week.’

Father whistled. ‘That’s not a living wage,’ he said.

‘They don’t care,’ replied Mother wearily. ‘All the women there were anxious to get the job.’

CHAPTER ELEVEN (#ulink_55ee2985-5969-5c3d-b550-7da5aab90f12)

Each day my mother went out to try and get work and spent most of the morning and afternoon in a fruitless round of offices and shops. Before leaving, she would give me a shilling to buy the day’s food. This I laid out to the best of my ability on bread, potatoes, rice, tea, sugar, pennyworths of bacon scraps or margarine and, that dire necessity, a pint of milk for Edward, which cost twopence.