By the Waters of Liverpool (4 page)

There was no one in the cloakroom and it gave me the opportunity to attend to myself as best I could. I replaced the errant panties, pinning them firmly this time.

With eyes closed in pain, I washed my hands. The water belched forth from the tap, gloriously hot, and I thought how heavenly it would be to lie in a bath full of it, to ease the cramping pain. And the soap – how lovely it smelled.

There was a quick tap-tap of high heels on the linoleum on the landing. The door burst open and in flew the Head Cashier. She was a small woman, swathed in a green overall, a rigid disciplinarian. Today, her forbidding expression boded ill for anyone she met. I hastily busied myself drying my hands.

She ignored my good morning. ‘Where are the girls?’ she demanded. ‘Everybody is late.’

I trembled. Without exception, all the younger employees dreaded this ferocious lady. Her Assistant was never known to open her mouth, and her Junior Clerk was so frequently reduced to tears that her eyes seemed permanently lachrymose and her nose was red from much mopping.

‘Well?’

I started to say that I was going downstairs to work immediately, when such a sharp, tearing pain hit me that I clutched the white roller towel and let out a moan more like the shriek of a woman in childbirth.

‘Good gracious, girl! Whatever’s the matter?’ Her usual bitter expression vanished.

My senses were leaving me, and I whispered, ‘It’s my period.’

She was much shorter than me, and elderly, but she said firmly, ‘Pull yourself together. Now, put your arm round my shoulder. I’ll help you into the Committee Room. You can sit down there.’

Eyes clenched shut, mouth open as I continued to groan and gasp, I thankfully put my arm round her shoulder and she supported me into the adjoining room. She dumped me on to a wooden chair and then put three other chairs together, and
assisted me to lie down on them. The wood of the curved seats was not comfortable, but it was better than having to stand.

A couple of books from the bookcase were put under my head. She arranged me on my side with knees tucked up in a foetal position. Then she stood back, hands on hips, and surveyed me.

I could not control the deep, primeval groans that burst from me, as the pain surged in ever greater waves. Tears would come later, when the agony was gone and I was left exhausted.

‘Poor girl,’ she exclaimed suddenly. ‘It’s worse than childbirth.’

Childbirth was something I hardly understood at that time, but much later in life I found that indeed she was correct.

‘I’ll get the office girl to make some strong tea,’ she promised, ‘and I’ll send up some aspirins.’ The scarifying Department Head had vanished completely and a very understanding woman had emerged. She did not waste time telling me to be brave or to stop the noise I was making. ‘You lie here and try to relax yourself – it might help.’

I whimpered, ‘Thank you – but aspirins don’t help much.’

‘They should if you take enough. We’ll try what four tablets will do.’

I curled myself up tighter, as another roll of pain went through me. ‘Mr Ellis…?’ Mr Ellis was the head of my department, a man of few words, usually very tart ones.

‘I’ll deal with him,’ she promised, and whisked out of the room.

It seemed a very long time before the door opened slowly and the office girl slid in with a tray of tea things. The girl was a replacement for my friend, Sylvia Poole, who had left to take training as a chiropodist. I wished frantically that Sylvia was with me. She was so sensible. I was very cold and was lying on my back, knees up, swaying them from side to side, unable to find easement, and threatening to fall off my perilous perch. As each peak of pain was reached, I would put my clenched fist against my mouth to muffle a shriek, and then moan, a noise which came from the depth of my being and had nothing to do with will.

The tea tray was put on another chair drawn close to me, and the frightened little girl, a mouse, aged fourteen, fumbled in the pocket of her blue overall. ‘She said I was to give you these.’ She handed me four aspirins from one pocket and then, very shyly, a sanitary towel from the other pocket. ‘She said I was to help you while you put it on.’

That meant I had to get on to my feet and make
a trip to the cloakroom. I lay with eyes closed, wondering if I could do it.

‘She said to tell you to take big breaths,’ announced the girl, watching me pop-eyed, as if I were something in a cage.

‘Ask Miriam Enns to come and help me,’ I winced. Miriam was a stenographer, one of three who worked in a small office next to the Committee Room. She was in her late twenties and had been very kind to me. A dedicated Communist, she tended to attempt to recruit quite ruthlessly, so I had begun to avoid her, since I was not politically minded. I was too engrossed in trying to stay alive, to sidestep Mother’s terrible tempers, to educate myself, to be a good employee. To survive was all I asked of life.

Miriam came running. ‘Whatever happened?’ she asked. Her reddish hair drooped smoothly round a pixie face. She had a big mouth which could curve into a smile so sweet that one could hardly believe in the strong Party Worker lurking within. But she had the physical strength I needed very badly.

The moment she saw my contorted face, she understood. I had taken refuge before in her little office on several occasions when I had been struck like this while at work.

Miriam looked down at the tea tray and sent the office girl away. ‘OK, love. Have the tea first. Have you got any aspirin?’

I opened my clenched hand, to show the four tablets.

She raised her eyebrows. ‘That’s a lot.’

I took a large breath, as instructed. ‘The Cashier said – take four,’ I gasped.

‘Well, I suppose she’d know.’ The Cashier was never referred to by name, only as She or The Cashier. I called her Madam when I had to speak to her.

‘Oh, Miriam!’ I nearly screamed.

‘You’ll be all right, dear.’ She poured the tea and held it to my quivering lips, while I swallowed the aspirins. Then she sat by me and chafed my hands and talked about seeing a doctor.

‘I did, Miriam, and he just laughed – said I’d be all right when I married.’

‘The stupid fool,’ she exploded. ‘Consult someone privately.’

‘Miriam, I don’t have money for things like that.’

She was referring to doctors who practised outside the National Health system. I was registered with a National Health doctor and it was difficult to change one’s physician under this system. I felt I was lucky to have one doctor on whom to call, never
mind anyone else. In suggesting a private physician, Miriam was, for once, allowing her middle-class instincts to outweigh her socialistic convictions.

I choked down the aspirin, and then we staggered to the cloakroom like a pair of drunks. Miriam kept one foot against the door, so that no one could enter, while she helped me wash myself.

Back in the Committee Room, she rearranged the chairs and I lay down again, while she ran downstairs to take dictation from one of the senior staff.

The pain did not go, and I longed for home. I suppose that the Charity could not afford a taxi to send me home – they were very short of funds – and I certainly could not go on the tram. The Society did own a car, but it was in use all day taking workers to visit clients in distress.

For a while, I continued to lie on the chairs, but then removed myself to the linoleum floor, where I could move more easily. The floor was very cold, but it was flat. Nowhere in the building, which housed some twenty-five women, if one included the employees of a tea company on the ground floor, was there a couch or easy chair for staff use. There was no place where one could eat a packed lunch, except for the minute kitchen adjacent to the Committee Room. Truly, the tailor’s
child is the worst clad, and we lacked facilities which were increasingly being provided by thoughtful employers.

Halfway through the morning, the Cashier sent the office girl in with more tea and two more aspirins. Thirty grains of aspirin in little over an hour and a half did have some effect. The top edge of the waves of pain was less sharp. I lay with eyes crunched shut and wondered if the pain was a judgment on me for refusing to go to Confession.

I could not eat the slice of bread and margarine I had brought for lunch, but I drank eagerly a cup of coffee which Miriam poured for me from her own thermos flask. Miss Short, the Head Typist, kindly provided two more aspirins.

Forty grains of aspirin. I was not sure how much one could take without poisoning oneself. I knew that a hundred aspirins would cause death – it was a popular form of suicide amongst women. Mother took as many as twenty in a day. She had no physical pain to assuage, but she said they soothed her nerves; suffering from nerves was a socially acceptable ailment – Liverpool women often referred to ‘Me poor nairves’. Mother also smoked twenty to thirty cigarettes a day, as did Father.

The pain finally lessened, and when the other
clerks returned from their lunch break, I went downstairs and reported shyly to Mr Ellis.

‘Oh, aye,’ he said absently, when I said I was feeling better. ‘Take t’ index cards and sort them – there’s a lot.’

I sat down at the corner of a table which was my place in the crowded room, and spent the rest of the afternoon sorting the little white cards into alphabetical order and then standing to file them in long wooden drawers. The aspirin and exhaustion combined to make me feel sleepy, and sometimes I felt as if I was floating on a sea of distant pain.

When the office girl brought in the afternoon tea, she also carried a message from the busy Cashier, who worked in the next room. How was I? Would I like some more aspirin? She spread out her grubby little hand to show two tablets. I swallowed them gratefully with the tea.

The secretary to the Presence – the Presence was my name for my austere employer – thundered away on her typewriter at the other end of the table, but on seeing me take the aspirin, she paused to inquire what the trouble was. Through tightly clenched teeth, I told her I had a monthly pain. She nodded sympathetically and renewed her thunder. The other clerks running about with piles of files
in their arms had no time to stop to ask after my wellbeing.

It was the longest of afternoons. The noise and vibration of the typewriter in front of me, the sound of the buzzers and bells of the old-fashioned telephone switchboard behind me, the filing clerks pushing behind my chair as they ran to and fro, made the close-packed room almost unbearable. Clients crept in and out, to see the Presence in her office which led off the room I was in. Chairs were dragged across the floor for them to sit on and even that vibration went through me and made me hurt all the more.

It did come to an end, however, like everything else in life, and I had to admit to Mr Ellis that I had not completed my day’s work.

‘Humph, then we shall have to work faster tomorrow, shan’t we?’

I agreed humbly, and put the remaining cards in the table drawer.

In the cloakroom, I met Miriam struggling quickly into her overcoat. She stopped to inquire how I was.

‘Better,’ I said. With my eyelids drooping with fatigue, I turned to hang up my overall.

‘You usually walk home, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

She buttoned up her coat and picked up her handbag. ‘You’ll take the tram tonight?’

‘No.’

‘For Heaven’s sake, why not?’

I forced myself to look at her and said dully but honestly, ‘I don’t have any money.’

‘Oh, child! Why didn’t you say so before? I’ll lend you twopence – you can pay me on payday.’ She rustled round in her handbag and proffered the coins. I took them gratefully. I had been troubled all the afternoon wondering whether I would manage the long climb up the hill to home.

Liverpool trams swayed like a ship in a storm and I began to feel nauseated. I was glad when the vehicle came to a stop at the Rialto Cinema and I could descend, while its motor hummed like a hive full of angry bees as if to say it could not wait to let me off.

As I stood on the corner of Upper Parliament Street waiting for the traffic to clear so that I could cross the road, my eyes began to dim and I knew that I would probably faint. But where to take refuge on such a busy corner, with its lounging groups of unemployed men gossiping idly?

Facing me stood the Rialto Cinema and dance hall. It had a wide pillared entrance and a sweeping curve of steps. I could lean against one of the pillars,
I thought, under the supervising eye of the girl in the cash desk. If I actually passed out, she would undoubtedly call for help for me. Two or three people obviously waiting for friends to join them were already standing on the steps. People would think I was waiting for a boy friend to take me to the cinema.

The Commissionaire glanced at me. He was a shrimp of a man in a gilt-trimmed uniform too big for him. I leaned against the wall of the entrance at the furthest point from him, and closed my eyes.

‘You OK, love?’

It was a man’s voice. Wearily I opened my eyes. A man neatly dressed in a light raincoat, tightly belted, and a trilby hat rakishly tipped over one eye was standing in front of me smoking a cigarette.

I knew him by sight. He seemed to spend a lot of time hanging around that corner. Once, while I was buying groceries, he had come into the shop to purchase some cigarettes, and after he left the shopkeeper called him a damned pimp when speaking to another woman customer. ‘Got three girls, he has,’ she had said.

He had, however, the pleasant smile and easy manner of so many smart alecks making a living in the streets, and I answered, with a sob in my voice, that I was quite all right, thank you. I winced and
turned my face away. He did not leave me. Instead, his voice quite compassionate, he asked, ‘Like a cigarette?’

The steps of the cinema looked wavy when I again opened my eyes, and my legs threatened to give way. I glanced at the proffered case. It was finely worked silver.

‘No, thanks, I don’t smoke,’ I responded.

‘Try one of these,’ he urged, poking at some small brown cigarettes in one side of the case. ‘They’re great for headaches – make you feel on top of the world.’