By the Waters of Liverpool (12 page)

To say that in the summer of 1939 we were scared would have been an understatement. Almost everybody in Liverpool was obsessed by a dread of the unknown. The tenseness of men’s voices and their slightly hysterical laughter, the grim shut-in look of women whose sons and husbands were being called up, the problems of beleaguered city officials suddenly faced with putting into effect elaborate programmes, which had been concocted by equally harassed civil servants sitting at desks in faraway London, all contributed to an almost unbearable tension as we waited.

Much preliminary work had already been done during the year of time bought for us by Mr Chamberlain during the infamous meeting in Munich in 1938.
Now, there was a great urgency, and everybody’s life was thrown into confusion.

Father was transferred by the City to work amongst the increasing number of refugees from Europe, who were arriving in Liverpool. He was shortly to be nearly overwhelmed by the arrival, in waves, of battered contingents of the Polish Army and Air Force. Later, he was transferred to the staff dealing with the inadequate Rest Centres provided for the bombed-out. They had originally been meagrely provisioned to discourage people from settling down to live in them rather than seeking new accommodation. The frantic needs of bewildered households, often without menfolk, could not be met. The more houses that were damaged, the more people crowded the Rest Centres and the less likelihood they had of finding alternative accommodation. Father worked like a demon.

In the meantime, we waited, fearing the future and yet unable to visualise what it would bring. Mother had been working as the representative of a greetings card firm. In August, she found herself politely dismissed, in the expectation that the paper for such a business would be severely rationed. She decided that she could, now the children were away, take a full-time post, and she was thankfully snapped up by a big bakery firm,
whose bookkeeper, a Naval Reservist, had vanished into the navy. Mother could keep books because, at one point, during the First World War, just before my birth, she had taken the place of a man in a bank, and she said that she was the first lady cashier in Liverpool. The salary offered seemed enormous in comparison with what the rest of us were earning, and she was able to buy herself some new clothes and send some extra clothing to our frightened little evacuees at the aunts’ house. We now had five less mouths to feed, and this made a great difference. I had cornflakes for breakfast as well as a piece of bread and margarine, and occasionally marmalade, which I had not tasted for many years. There was no shortage of food in the shops and we were not rationed until several months later.

This better salary which Mother was able to command made me even more ambitious to join the ranks of the green-overalled social workers. But the longer I worked in the Bootle office the more I realised that lack of education was going to hold me back. Anyone new coming on to staff had a degree. It was not that I could not do the work. I understood only too well most of the problems that bedevilled our ever-increasing flood of clients, and as the war came closer I could sympathise with the middle-class women who began to consult us.

Men in good positions were called to the army, where they earned fourteen shillings a week, seven shillings of which they had to allot to their wives, so that they were eligible to draw a dependant’s allowance. These allowances were so pitifully small that they hardly paid the rent for many people. Women threatened suicide as they were increasingly bullied by hire purchase firms, mortgage companies or rent collectors because they could no longer pay. A few employers sent their employees’ wives sufficient money to bring the allowance up to their husband’s wages, but many, faced with profound changes in their businesses due to the war, were unable to do this. My colleague and I read up the laws on contracts till our eyes glazed and learned to find technicalities upon which we could break hire purchase agreements and so release our desperate clients. Finally, organisations such as ours were able to pressure the Government into declaring a moratorium upon serving men’s debts, and so keep the wolves from the door until the end of the war.

So experience poured in upon me – but at the back of my mind there was always the nagging thought that if I was ever to make progress in the world of social work, I would need that precious piece of paper, a degree. And I had not had the opportunity to matriculate.

On 1st September, all the lights of the city were turned off. It created a darkness which townsfolk had not faced before, and we blundered about like people suddenly blinded, and were touchingly grateful for a lighted match or the spark from the trolley of the electric trams to give us a bearing. At first we endured the blackout with shivery, laughing fortitude, but after a while it became a frustrating curse, a maddening tedium. It was dangerous, too, as traffic tried to move about in such dense darkness and pedestrians stumbled over unexpected steps and hazards, like the fire hydrants, wandering dogs and cats, and parked bicycles. I once walked into a letter box and went home with a streaming, bloody nose. We learned how beautiful the stars were and, until the bombing began, rejoiced in moonlit nights.

All schools were closed, because in principle all children were evacuated with their teachers. This meant that for the first time for years, I not only had no children to care for; I had no studying to do. All places of entertainment were also closed, with the exception of public houses which were small and had only a limited number of people gathered in them. I was accustomed to cramming my life with study, with house cleaning, with care of many of the children’s needs and with tutoring in shorthand.
My current shorthand student, a cripple, had been evacuated to Southport and I had not yet found a replacement, so although I worked long hours I sometimes found myself, late in the evening, sitting with Mother over a cup of tea, not knowing what to talk about. If I introduced a subject, I could never be sure that she would not take offence and begin one of her irrational rages, so I tended to sit in dismal silence, and leave her to talk if she wanted to. Her favourite subject was Father’s backslidings or some incident in the office when she had bested an adversary. I felt sorry for the office.

Mother was herself undoubtedly at a loss. She was not in the least interested in me and, I think, endured my presence as best she could. Her usual retreat, the cinema, with its long programmes and two new films a week, was closed to her. She had no friends – I do not recollect her ever having a bosom friend, though in our palmier days she had many close acquaintances and admirers. Father sometimes asked if she would like to go with him to his favourite pub, ‘Ye Hole in Ye Wall’ in Hackins Hey, and have a drink. She would always respond tartly that, ‘Ladies do not go into public houses.’

Looking back, I find it odd that neither of us at that point volunteered our help as wardens, telephonists, first aid personnel or anything else.
Half the town was enrolled in some service or other, while we sat stiffly over our tea. For my part, I think it was both mental and physical exhaustion. Having to walk most of the distance to and from work and spend the day coping with other people’s woes, many of them quandaries unheard of before, was a heavy strain. I rarely reached home before eight o’clock, a home where I still never had enough to eat. There was a limit to the number of the world’s woes which I could take upon my skimpy shoulders.

In Mother’s case it seemed as if there was a whole section of her which did not function at all. She never managed to bring any real order into her life, never mind into ours. The bright and intelligent mind, of which I sometimes caught a glimpse when she cared to talk about books, seemed to have been buried amid the wild, superficial gaiety of the postwar years and the disasters which had subsequently befallen us. Perhaps she was hopelessly drained, too.

So there she sat, drinking tea and popping aspirins into her mouth, while Poland was decimated and we waited for our turn.

Father bought two second-hand suitcases. The few spare clothes we had were packed into these, together with family papers, like birth certificates,
marriage lines and army discharge papers. One case was kept by my parents’ bed and one by mine, so that if the house caught fire from incendiary bombs, we could run outside with them. When the air raid siren went, we shot out of bed, grabbed our clothes and the cases and fled to the doubtful safety of the cellar steps. There were several false alarms at first, when the sirens howled, the anti-aircraft guns in the park rumbled, searchlights swung across the sky and part-time wardens ran along the streets, pushing everyone indoors. Still the bombers did not come.

We began to feel safer.

Mother bought some cheap dress material, striped in green and tan, and I stitched pretty covers, complete with shoulder straps, for our gas mask boxes. I also made each of us a matching turban and scarf. Mother, Fiona and I sailed out in these feeling very smart and up-to-date. After a while, like everyone else, we discovered what a convenient receptacle the gas mask box was. We left the gas masks at home and used the box to carry make-up, lunches and the inevitable cotton pocket handkerchief. When rationing commenced, Mother found that the ration books fitted very conveniently into hers.

With no student to tutor, I had very little money
of my own. I not only walked to town, which was the first stage of my journey to work, I walked halfway to Bootle as well, trudging a couple of miles along Scotland Road, a dreadfully poor area, and Stanley Road, to reduce the amount of the tram fare. I cut out lunch, except when there was enough bread in the house for me to take a slice of bread and margarine.

Rumours went about that one could earn huge sums in the new factories out at Speke, which were going into war production. I thought about this and then decided that after the war I could be out of work and walking the streets with hundreds of other unskilled workers. To become a qualified social worker as quickly as possible still seemed a good idea, if I could achieve it.

No one could complain to us that our work was not essential. Daily we filled an ever-widening gap between official mandates and the protesting, unhappy victims of them.

I missed very much my fellow typist, Miriam Enns. She lived too far away from me for us to meet socially, and anyway I had no money to pay for coffees in city tea shops, which would have been one way of seeing her. Gradually, I lost touch with her.

Sylvia Poole was working for a firm supplying
medical aids, like bandages and cotton wool, and her company became very busy. We did, however, manage to go for prim little Sunday walks together, and, because of the slackened pressure in our house, Mother agreed that she should occasionally come to tea. Tea was a simple meal of bread and margarine and jam, followed by a cake bought from a shop which sold leftovers from a big bakery. Much to my delight, Sylvia and Mother got along famously, and Mother began to look forward to her coming, and would suggest that I ask her.

It was ironical that the commencement of a world war which threw the lives of millions into turmoil should at first give me a little more leisure. During the long walks home, I began to think of myself as a person in my own right and tiny independent wistful longings floated in the back of my mind. I had always had it drummed into me that I was a possession of my parents, to be moved around, fed or not fed, bullied or ignored, as they saw fit. I had fought against it instinctively for years, but I had always lost, excepting in regard to going to night school and obtaining my current job. Now, in little flashes, I began to wonder if one could not, after all, exist without somebody else’s permission. But I was an exhausted bag of bones, worn out with years of intolerable strain, and the
slave mentality which I had acquired was not going to be easily shed.

On Sunday, 3rd September, 1939, Father kept the radio on from early morning. He did not go for his usual walk. Mother and I went about our normal Sunday tasks of cleaning, cooking, washing and ironing, feeling particularly subdued. Even Fiona, who took little notice of anything which did not directly concern herself, got up earlier than usual, and wandered restlessly about the house, while we waited to see if Hitler would continue the war in Poland, despite the Allies’ ultimatum. A tremendous, ominous silence lay over our old, black city as people stayed close to home. No children played in the street and no traffic passed along it. The old men who played ollies in the gutter did not come out for their customary game.

I read again a comforting letter which I had received from Friedrich the previous day. Our dear Fuehrer was apparently still uniting the German race and I was not to be afraid, just to keep on writing to his home address. Earlier in the week, I had received a hysterical letter from Ursel. Her husband, a minister, had been arrested for a sermon he had given defending the Jews, and she was terrified. How the letter got past the German censor is beyond me, unless they had become a
little less efficient as a result of Germany’s having to supervise so many newly acquired countries.

At eleven o’clock, we gathered in the living room to listen to the
BBC.
The tired voice of our Prime Minister, Mr Chamberlain, announced that we were at war. As we all stood up while the National Anthem boomed over the radio, we looked at each other. Mother and Father, veterans of that war to end all wars, Fiona, beautiful in spite of her hair curlers, a face as blank as the page of a new exercise book, and me with Friedrich’s letter still in my pinafore pocket, all of us assured by our newspapers that we would be buried under the ruins of Liverpool within hours of the declaration of war. Would Friedrich be one of the bomber pilots, I wondered, fingering the gentle letter? Or was he at this moment too busy killing innocent Poles?

It seemed incredible, impossible. The weight on my chest was unbearable. I said in a grating voice, ‘I think I’ll make a cup of tea.’

A few evenings later, mildly surprised, like everyone else, that I was still alive, I languidly hung up my coat in the hall, the same old brown coat so often pawned, now near the end of its days.

The door into the living room opened suddenly and I blinked in the light from the room’s bare electric bulb. Fiona, with a piece of toast in one hand, stood in the doorway, and said with something like awe in her voice, ‘Helen, you’ve got to go down to see the police.’

‘What?’

She was obviously intrigued at this unexpected call for her eldest sister, and with a cheek swelled with toast, she repeated, ‘You have! To see the police.’

Thoroughly alarmed, I forgot my hunger and hastened into the room. Father and Mother were seated at the table. They had just finished their evening meal, and thick white plates rimmed with bacon fat were scattered round the soiled cloth.

‘Mother! What’s wrong? I haven’t done anything.’

Father answered me. ‘Only Fiona had arrived home when they came. They left a message to say that you should go down to a place in Lime Street – and take with you any correspondence you had received from Germany.’

‘Oh, my God!’ I muttered. ‘What would they want that for?’

Mother put her knife and fork neatly together on her plate. ‘We don’t know, Helen. We hope it isn’t serious.’

‘Am I supposed to go tonight?’

‘It is nearly eight o’clock,’ Father replied. ‘They can wait. I’ll take you down tomorrow evening. Try to get home early.’

Throughout the night I tossed sleeplessly, wracked by nervous fears. Had I broken the law in writing to Germany? Would they shut me up in an internment camp? Should I burn all the carefully kept letters and say I had none to show them? Friedrich had been courting me by mail. What would they say about that?

In the morning, as I washed myself in cold water in the kitchen, using a bit of Father’s shaving soap since there was no other soap, and Father built the living-room fire, I shouted to him to ask his advice. I made a clean, blushing admission of Friedrich’s sentimental advances. As soon as I had my underclothes on, he came into the kitchen to wash his hands and get his razor. While I made Mother’s early-morning tea, he slowly lathered his face and thought about what I had said.

‘We’ll take the letters with us,’ he finally decided. ‘They will look so innocent – I am sure the police will understand. If you destroy them, they may become unduly suspicious – people do usually have some of the letters they receive, lying in drawers or desks.’

‘OK,’ I agreed reluctantly.

Because Father was a little behind in his shaving, I took Mother’s tea up to her, and she broached the same subject as she huddled in the meagre bedding.

‘Your Father and I were talking about your going to see the police. He says you must look nice. What are you doing about your clothes?’

Only twice before had Mother discussed clothes with me, at the time of my Confirmation and when she had helped me to buy the dress for the office dance. Now she sounded quite anxious.

I saw the point. A nicely dressed middle-class girl would be treated with greater respect.

‘I hadn’t thought about them. My coat is a mess, and I haven’t needed a hat since the warmer weather started. No gloves. Social workers don’t have to look smart, thank goodness. The turban and scarf I made for the spring don’t look bad, though – I could wear those.’

Mother sipped her tea. ‘Your Father is very worried. Could you buy a coat in your lunch hour? I have a pound that you can borrow.’

I was flabbergasted. I never looked for help from Mother – and now she was suddenly offering it. She
must
be worried. She earned very much more than I did, but I had not expected such a sudden change of mood.

‘I could try, Mummy. C & A Modes might have something in their sale.’

‘I don’t think there is anything in the pawnbroker’s which will fit.’ Mother sipped the scalding hot, greyish brew thoughtfully.

Suddenly, I wanted a new coat passionately. I forgot about the police. I remembered only that I had never had a
new
overcoat since I was a child. ‘I’ll try, Mummy,’ I said eagerly. ‘I can pay you back bit by bit as soon as I get a new shorthand pupil – you’ll remember that Miss Bennett was evacuated
to Southport last week – but I have advertised for someone else.’ I whistled under my breath. ‘I’ll have to go into town from Bootle, in my lunch hour. If I’m late back, the office will just have to put up with it for once.’ I felt reckless in my longing for a coat.

At lunch time I had about ten minutes to find a garment at half-price in which to impress a suspicious police force, an impossible task.

Breathlessly, I looked through the racks of new stock – heavy winter coats just put on display – until a white-haired lady asked if she could help me. ‘I’ve a pound to buy a coat,’ I confessed frankly to her, and she was unexpectedly sympathetic. She suggested a lined mackintosh, and my face must have fallen, because she said, ‘Come over to the back here. There are one or two items which were missed when we were putting away the summer stock after the sale yesterday.’

And there it was, a soft woollen coat, beige, with a narrow braid trim in orange and green round the collar. The top front button was missing, a loose thread marking where it should be.

‘Try it on.’

I did. It fitted neatly on the shoulders and round a twenty-inch waist. I twirled slightly, and the flared skirt swished round legs that I was astonished to see
were slender and shapely. The turban, a hemmed length of tan cloth touched with green flecks, which I had made from a design in a magazine which Fiona had brought home, blended very well with the coat. The assistant tightened the belt slightly and stepped back.

I glowed, and inquired carefully, ‘How much is it?’

‘Nineteen shillings and eleven pence – marked down from thirty shillings.’ She rubbed her chin thoughtfully, as she surveyed me. ‘I think I can find you a similar button. The collar would nearly hide it, if it doesn’t quite match.’ She went to a table, opened a drawer and ran her fingers through an assortment of buttons and belts. She turned triumphantly with a beige button between her bright pink fingernails.

I apologised to my superior at the office for being five minutes late, and plunged into work. Later when a moment of calm arrived and I had made a cup of tea for both of us, I told her that I had to go with my father that evening on some special family business and asked if I could leave promptly.

She sighed and the weary lines under her eyes deepened. ‘Of course,’ she said. She was only about seven or eight years older than myself, and
I wondered suddenly if our clients were worth the sacrifices she made for them. Since leaving university, she had given all her young days to them, given them her life, working far into the evenings and at weekends to try to find help for them. And I wanted to do the same thing. Or did I?

Father had to pay my tram fares into the city, because I had spent my last travel money for that week on the additional trip going to and from the dress shop. In a brown paper bag lay practically all Friedrich’s letters and most of Ursel’s passionate epistles, including the last terrified cry. The pride in the new coat had gone and had been replaced by feelings akin to panic.

Father was grave and, at first, silent. On the tram, he murmured to me to answer any questions put to me, and then he qualified the remark by adding, ‘And don’t say anything more than that. I will introduce us.’

We were passed from a uniformed constable, to a sergeant and then to a plain-clothes policeman, as we worked our way into the bowels of a building in Lime Street. This was not the police station – it bore all the marks of makeshift offices hastily set up. Father had assumed like an overcoat the quiet air of authority and the cultivated language of the public school man that he was, and this outweighed his
cheap clothes, and had its effect. The higher one was in the social heirarchy the more carefully the police handled one.

Finally, we were seated at a small table sheltered by a cloth screen, which looked as if it might have started life in a hospital fifty years before. The room was a large one, containing a number of tables similarly set up, and men and women sat round them whispering and shuffling papers, like relations going through desks after a funeral. I stared up at a high ceiling, finely moulded as if for a ballroom, but covered with dust and drooping spiders’ webs. Pale green walls were discoloured from ancient water leakages and the passage of many people.

Two new plain-clothes men joined us. One sat opposite me at the table, the other one perched on a stool slightly at a distance half behind me. Nervous as a new climber faced with a precipice, I clenched my hands on my lap and braced myself for whatever might come.

It was an ordeal. The fear of internment, perhaps imprisonment, haunted me, though at no point was either mentioned by my interrogators. At times I thought I would surely faint before it was over.

Once our relationship and our names were established, Father sat quietly. I produced the letters and
laid them in two neat piles before the man at the table. He was middle-aged, with deep lines crisscrossing a craggy face. Small, hard blue eyes glittered between reddish-gold eyelashes. Thin, tightly curled hair had been plastered down each side of his head with a heavy application of strongly scented pomade, an odour combined with the heavy smell of stale cigarette smoke. He and the man behind me smoked incessantly, and the pile of cigarette butts rose in a dirty white saucer on the table. I was offered a cigarette, but whispered that I did not smoke. A battered packet of Player’s was offered to Father, and he took one and smoked it slowly, while he listened.

A young man in a shabby blue suit had pulled another chair forward and sat down. He had brought with him a small pile of writing paper, some folders and a couple of well-sharpened yellow pencils. He had arranged a shorthand notebook on his knee and was taking notes of everything that was said. This threw me into further alarm. I shifted myself fractionally, so that I could see what the young man wrote. My own shorthand was first class and I had often transcribed from the other typists’ work. I had no difficulty in reading what he wrote, even at an odd angle. If he doesn’t get it down correctly, I will correct him, I promised myself, like a terrier
prepared to defend its territory from a Great Dane, all bombast and no clout.

Age? Place of birth? All the addresses I had ever lived at – Father had to aid my memory about this one. Jobs? Schools? My short time at school was explained by Father as being because of Mother’s bad health – but these were not school officials, they were detectives. Religious affiliation? Friends?

Friends? Had I really only two? Miriam and Sylvia? Boy friends? Only Friedrich? Was I sure? No casual men friends that I met only occasionally?

‘No,’ I snapped indignantly. ‘I’m too busy.’ Why could they not see that that was a stupid question to a girl who looked like me?

‘Why did you study German?’

I looked at him dumbly. Why did one study anything? Because one wanted to know.

‘I wanted to make up my lack of ordinary education,’ I told my grim interrogator cautiously.

‘Most people learn French.’

‘I am learning French as well.’

‘Humph.’

We sat silent for a moment, looking at each other. The blue eyes were cold and hard, mine a little moist because I felt physically weak and helpless. Why were they bothering me like this? I wanted
to ask. But Father had warned me only to answer questions, not to ask them.

I half closed my eyes, so that the detective should not see the tears threatening. Under my lids I took a quick look at the shorthand writer’s notebook. On his current page, the record was correct, right down to the exact wording of Father’s interjection about my schooling.

The detective was reading Friedrich’s letters. Apparently he read German easily and was flicking from one page to another quickly.

‘How did you come into contact with Friedrich Reinhardt?’

I half smiled. I was immediately whisked into a train lumbering northwards towards Crewe. I was travelling alone, as usual, on my annual visit to Grandma’s. On the window seat next to me sat a boy about two years older than me. He was dressed in a grown-up suit of unusual cut, rather shabby. He was slim, hair dark and slightly wavy, with a heart-shaped face and a flawless white skin.

The train was a local one which stopped at almost every station, and at each stop the boy would peer anxiously out of the window. Two adults in the compartment, a middle-aged husband and wife, had, after staring at both of us, opened newspapers and retired behind them.

Very shyly, the boy had turned to me and asked, ‘Pardon me. Where are you travelling?’ His accent was foreign.

Equally shyly, I had peeped up from under the brim of my panama school hat, and whispered, ‘Liverpool,’ as if it were important that the other travellers did not hear me.

‘I must the train at Crewe leave. A man comes for me there.’

‘I change at Crewe. I will tell you when we arrive.’

‘Much thanks.’ He relaxed his vigil of station watching, and I sat the doll I had been nursing down on the seat beside me and arranged its skirts modestly. He smiled at it, rather patronisingly, and I smiled at him. Boys never understood what a friend a doll could be.

It was the beginning of a long friendship, all of two hours. I left with a note of his address and the promise to write. It was a simple address, the name of a village near Munich. Neither of us did write, of course, and the slip of paper was lost before I returned from Grandma’s. But the address was not lost. It stayed in my mind with the picture of a beautiful youth and a lovely train journey through the green Midlands of England. When I began to learn German and the class was encouraged by the
teacher to find a German pen-friend, I had remembered it like a nursery rhyme and all the other odds and ends which children keep in a mental rag bag.

‘How did you get the name and address of Reinhardt in order to write to him?’

I jumped at the sharp repetition of the question. The granite face before me was formidable. I told him.