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

This was a new idea to me and I pondered on it, as I shyly watched his face.

‘You can read?’

‘Yes.’

‘You go to the library?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then read! Read everything you can. Read the great historians, the philosophers, especially the German ones, read autobiographies, read novels. One day, you will have the opportunity to make use of the knowledge you will accumulate, and you will be surprised to find that you know much more than those who have had a more formal education.’

He closed his book and put it in his pocket, and then said quite cheerfully, ‘Your day will come, child. Your parents are having a difficult time at present and cannot help you.’

He got up from his seat slowly and stiffly and then bowed politely to me.

‘I come here every sunny afternoon to commune with nature. Come one day and tell me what you have read.’

The faintness which had threatened me before was making his face dim to me, but I thanked him warmly and promised that I would come. I felt wonderfully comforted.

I sat down again after he had left, to allow my faintness to recede. Then I called Avril and hastened out of the rose garden before the keeper could find us without a guardian.

The way home seemed infinitely long and the momentary peace engendered by the conversation with the old man gradually left me, to be replaced with memories of Dickens’s descriptions of workhouses.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#ulink_d930c734-2ae5-5a86-a685-23e8ba605b3f)

When I arrived home, Alan and Fiona were sitting on the bottom step of the imposing flight of steps which led up to the front door of Mrs Foster’s house. The evening was drawing on and the lamplighter was going on his rounds, pulling on the gas lights with his long rod as he paused, wobbling on his bicycle, at each lamp-post.

Alan was talking cheerfully to Fiona, who looked white and woebegone, her blue eyes wide and her china-doll features crumpled with fear.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked in some alarm, as I stopped the Chariot beside them.

Alan peered up at me through his tousled mop of yellow hair.

‘Fiona’s scared, and I’m telling her that there is nothing to be scared about,’ he said stoutly.

Trying not to show that I was frightened, I lifted Avril out of the Chariot with elaborate casualness and clucked encouragingly at Edward, who smiled at me angelically.

I sat down beside Alan.

‘What is the matter?’

Fiona answered through trembling lips.

‘Mrs Foster is shouting at Mother, and Mother is shouting at Father – and – and it’s an awful noise.

‘And I want to go home to Nanny!’ And she began to cry.

‘Be quiet!’ I snapped at her, and she was immediately reduced to cowed silence.

I turned to Alan.

‘Has Mr Ferris complained?’

Alan looked puzzled.

‘Mr Ferris? You mean about the noise we make?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh no.’ Alan chuckled suddenly and began to play an imaginary piano with gusto. ‘He makes too much noise himself. He just shouts at us because it makes him feel better.’ He tossed back his hair, exactly as Mr Ferris did, and finished his piano piece with a mighty boom on the bottom notes, ‘Boom-tiddly-boom – boo-om – boom!’

I wished that I had Alan’s cool common sense. In one sentence he had calmed my fears. But not Fiona’s apparently. Tears were running down her cheeks like raindrops.

‘What has happened, then?’

Alan sobered.

‘Daddy didn’t pay the rent. He spent the money on cigarettes, and Mrs Foster is as cross as two sticks. And Mother is crossest of all, because she helped to smoke the cigarettes without thinking of where they came from. And – well, you know Mother.’

I did know Mother. Even in her most halcyon days, her temper had been something to avoid at all costs. Now, sick, bewildered, hungry and despairing, her bouts of temper bordered on insanity. She was terrifying in her rages, more terrifying in her subsequent withdrawn silences.

I licked my lips and voiced my dread in a whisper, so as not to frighten Avril, who was sitting on the pavement playing with two matchsticks and a piece of orange-peel. Alan and Fiona bent their heads close to mine.

‘Do you think she’ll turn us out into the street – Mrs Foster, I mean?’

‘No idea,’ replied Alan phlegmatically. ‘Fiona and I just opened the door when we came back from school, and understood what the trouble was inside a minute. So we just left them to it – and came down here.’

‘Where are Brian and Tony?’

Alan sighed. ‘They bounced right into the room. Now they’ll be expected to take sides – and Brian will have nightmares – and probably be sick after tea.’

I nodded silent agreement. Poor Brian, sensitive to every nuance of every word spoken to him, would be reduced to incoherence by such an episode.

‘Have we got bread for tea?’ asked Fiona.

‘A little,’ I said.

‘Shall we ever have butter again?’

‘Of course,’ said Alan.

Avril toddled up to us.

‘I like jam as well as butter,’ she announced. ‘I want jam for tea.’

I suppressed an irrational desire to slap Avril, and we sat quietly watching seamen crowding into the hall of a house opposite to ours. In this house lived an assortment of middle-aged women, who were a great mystery to me. They were much better dressed than their neighbours, though they never seemed to go out to work. And they had lots of visitors – all men.

I watched the rolling gait of the men lounging up the steps. Many of them were already drunk. They shouted raucously to each other and laughed at remarks of which I did not get the import.