By the Waters of Liverpool (6 page)

The great port of Liverpool lies on a series of hills rising from the waterfront, and each day I climbed the long slopes from the city centre, on my way home. I passed concert halls, hospitals, surprisingly finely built Edwardian public houses, rows of little shops and tasteful Victorian houses, some of which were falling into decay. Every so often there was a newsagent’s and tobacconist’s shop, and I depended upon the hastily chalked newspaper headlines displayed on boards outside their shops to alert me to the big news of the day. They currently dealt with the crises of the Spanish war, about which Miriam frequently held forth passionately in the office. She foretold quite accurately that it was but a dress rehearsal for a much bigger conflict. They also announced the forthcoming
coronation of George VI and his plump little Duchess, Elizabeth. Some of these shops were decorating their windows with souvenirs, coronation mugs, flags and brooches. A number of defiant people still wore pins and brooches with the insignia of Edward VIII, to show they thought that he should be the king, despite his intention of marrying an American divorcée.

I never saw a billboard that dealt with Liverpool’s fearful slums, some of the worst in the country, nor the hunger in them. Occasionally an increase in the number of unemployed was mentioned, and a great march by workless men who walked all the way to London got some attention. The slums with their suffering inhabitants had always been part of the Liverpool scene; they were not interesting.

Trudging homeward through pouring, slashing rain, I had no particular desire to arrive. Too often more problems, more worries awaited me.

This evening, to my astonishment, there was good news. Fiona had received a letter asking her to go the following afternoon for an interview with a magazine-distributing agency. She was as agitated as an aspen in the wind, and while I ate my tea, she discussed with Mother what she should wear, as if she had a wardrobe full of clothes instead of
a single blouse, a skirt and two dresses which were almost outgrown.

Mother was being most cooperative. She offered to lend her a hat which had recently been refurbished with the aid of a bright-yellow feather and a new ribbon into what was known as the Robin Hood style. Mother knew that when a shorthand student had paid me a few days earlier I had bought a pair of rayon stockings, so she lent her those as well, despite my protests that the pair I had on could not be mended any more; they were laddered beyond redemption.

After returning from night school, I spent a couple of hours fuming as I oversewed ladders and darned heels, and then lengthened one of Fiona’s dresses for her. It was after midnight before the hem was finally hand-stitched and pressed, but Fiona who had never learned to sew was touchingly grateful.

There were times when I wished that Grandma had not taught me how to use a needle. When I was a child I used to stay with her for long periods of the year in her house on the other side of the Mersey river, but she no longer had anything to do with us, because Father had quarrelled bitterly with his family.

Mother had learned from nuns who brought her
up how to do fine embroidery for copes and altar cloths, but she was not adept at other sewing. She sometimes darned socks if I was too busy to do them or if I had, in a rage at the pressure put upon me, temporarily struck work. Nine people in near rags produced a lot of sewing, by necessity to be done by hand. My eyes were always tired from short hours of sleep, constant reading for night school and from my daytime work, all done with the aid of spectacles long since outgrown and in need of replacement. Quite often the work was done by candlelight, because we did not have pennies to put into the electric and gas meters.

Apart from Fiona’s letter, there was a letter for me to give me pleasure. To improve my German I had a pen-friend. He was the son of a schoolmaster and lived, as far as I could judge from the map on the wall at night school, about forty miles from Munich. The idea was that I should write to him in German and he would write to me in English, so that we would both benefit. However, he soon fell into the habit of writing in German. This had for me one fortunate result. Because Mother did not know German, she gave up opening and reading my letters before allowing me to have them, something which I had always bitterly resented.

In early April, he had sent me some violets,
carefully pressed, from his garden. His letters had taken a slightly sentimental turn, and he wanted a photograph of me. It was very thrilling, though Hitler’s stern limitations on foreign travel and my poverty made it almost certain that we should never be able to visit each other. As a young boy, he had already visited England on an exchange plan, and that was how I originally met him.

When this pen-friendship first commenced, I had had the utmost difficulty in finding money for stamps out of the shilling a week allowance I had squeezed out of my parents. Miriam in the office had willingly contributed sheets of typing paper and some envelopes, and I usually wrote to him in my lunch hours, using the office kitchen counter as a desk because it was clean. I had a tiny pocket German dictionary which my German teacher had given to me, and as my grasp of the language improved I wrote with its aid ever lengthening letters.

Too shy and ashamed to tell him of the grim poverty into which we had fallen, of the filth, hunger and vermin which were my daily companions, I wrote as if we were still living in our old home and I was attending the local high school – a private school which took girls of all ages. I described the house, the servants and our social
life. My grandmother and her home, shared with two aunts and a cousin, were also sources for description of English life. As time went on, I wrote of my hopes of becoming a qualified social worker in Liverpool, and he responded by saying that he would become a schoolmaster, like his father. We had lively discussions on books which we had both read and on religion, but he soon discovered that if we touched on politics or if I sent newspaper cuttings, the letters were not received, indicating censorship of both inward and outward mail, presumably in Germany.

I had also acquired a girl pen-friend in Stettin, through an offer, in the correspondence column of a Sunday newspaper, to put children in touch with each other. Judging from her photograph, she was exceedingly pretty, an ash blonde, and was the daughter of some small government official. She was impatient of my bad German, which was very good for me, but she gave me such long and involved explanations of German grammar and idioms that I sometimes did not understand all she said. She was one of a class of students who had been encouraged by their teacher to seek English pen-friends, and both sides seemed to get quite a lot of fun out of it. What neither side knew was that we had been drawn into a minor spy network,
and this was to cause me no little distress when the war began.

Ursel, aged fifteen, and I were blissfully ignorant of all this and discussed the scary prospect of her father arranging a marriage for her, when she was passionately in love with a boy who travelled on the same bus as she did each day. When she was not correcting my grammar, she wrote pages on every detail of the young man. They had never got beyond smiling at each other – but for nearly a year her hopes ran high. At the age of sixteen, a marriage
was
arranged for her by her father, to the minister of her church, a man of forty, and the last letter I received from her a few days before the war broke out was from a young girl brokenhearted and pregnant. It would have moved even a bored censor. Poor Ursel – and the war with its repression of the clergy and its ruinous fighting was yet to come.

Fiona went for her interview. Father provided her with threepence for the tram fares to and from the city, and she returned glowing with excitement.

‘I think I’ve got it,’ she said, as she took off the Robin Hood hat with its bright yellow feather and handed it back to Mother. ‘They said they’d let me know – they want to see one or two other girls before deciding.’

She did not return my stockings, but she was so relieved and happy that I did not want to spoil things for her. I did not tell her that the phrase ‘We’ll let you know’ was the stock dismissal of an unsuccessful candidate. She would learn the sad facts of job-hunting in Liverpool by experience. She had been fortunate in finding her first job,
because few girls would want to work in a butcher’s or a fishmonger’s shop, and she was probably by far the smartest fourteen-year-old to apply.

I went on sweeping the living room’s tiled floor and then worked my way over the small piece of coconut matting in the middle, briskly brushing the dust and debris towards the hearth.

‘What kind of work is it?’ Mother inquired. She was seated at the table, writing pad and bottle of ink before her, and she did not look up from her composing of a begging letter. She still occasionally wrote to perfect strangers asking for financial help, and quite frequently received compassionate replies enclosing a welcome pound or two.

Fiona sat down on the easy chair and clasped her hands in front of her. She replied eagerly, ‘They would teach me to use a thing called an addressograph. It makes the labels to put on the magazines they send out. They’ve got hundreds and hundreds of magazines, lovely ladies’ magazines and story ones – everything. They send them out to subscribers. They’ve got so many that they even have to have a van to take them to the post office.’

‘Are there many on the staff?’

‘No. Two gentlemen saw me – and an old lady who does the books. I don’t think there was anyone else.’

‘What’s the pay?’ asked Alan.

‘Twelve shillings and sixpence a week at first, and then in two months’ time – if I get quick at managing the machine – they’ll give me fifteen shillings. Isn’t it great?’

Alan looked amazed. ‘Holy Cain! You lucky thing! I’m only getting seven and sixpence – and Helen’s been working nearly three years – and she’s only getting twelve and sixpence.’

I was actually receiving fifteen shillings, but I dared not say so. The precious half-a-crown difference was what had paid my fares during the time I had not been strong enough to walk to and from work, and now it sometimes bought me a bowl of soup in Woolworth’s cafeteria when there was nothing left at home for me to take for lunch. My shorthand student, when I had one, paid me enough to cover my pair of rayon stockings every other week and the bits and pieces of clothing from the pawnbroker’s bargain table.

Fiona laughed, looking suddenly like Mother when she was young and full of vivacity. ‘I’m so excited.’

‘It’s lovely,’ I agreed heartily. ‘Lift up your feet, people.’ They all automatically raised their feet off the floor, while I swept neatly in and out of the chair legs. Like an army, they put their feet
down on the floor again in perfect unison when I reached the hearth and picked up the pile of dust between my hands. I threw it into the fire and there was an immediate outcry from the others at the horrid odour of burning hair, as it hit the hot coals.

Father had been sitting silently on a wooden chair at the opposite end of the table from Mother, while he drank a cup of tea left over from our meal. He rested his head on his hand and, except for the red acne rash across his nose and cheeks, his face was pale. Now he said, ‘I’m very glad about the job, Fiona. What happened this morning about the furniture?’

All the joy was immediately wiped off Fiona’s face. She said sadly, ‘They came and took it – like they did before, Daddy. They just pushed past me and walked in when I opened the door.’

‘Pack of bullies,’ said Father angrily. ‘And to think that we’ve already paid two-thirds of it. They might have waited.’

Personally, I thought the furniture company had shown the patience of Job waiting for their money at different times. But I knew enough to keep my mouth shut. I put the broom away and went upstairs to get my account books, so that I could do my book-keeping homework.

When I returned, Mother was saying, ‘We could let that room. Nobody is going to let us have more furniture on the never-never plan for a while.’ I smiled at her use of Liverpool’s name for the hire purchase system, which never, never seemed to get paid off.

‘Well, it might help to pay the furniture instalments,’ said Father wearily. ‘Some business girl who has her own furniture, perhaps?’

I sat down by him and opened my ledgers. ‘She’d have to pass through this room and the kitchen every time she wanted to get water or go to the lavatory,’ I pointed out.

‘Oh, you always look on the black side of things,’ Mother grumbled. ‘I don’t suppose such a girl would be home very much.’ She folded up her letter and put it into the envelope. ‘I’ll advertise it in the newsagent’s window. I wonder what rent I could get?’

‘A small room rents for about seven shillings a week,’ I told her, as I carefully made entries in my collection of books.

‘How do you know?’ Mother was cross. She licked the envelope and rubbed her hand impatiently across the back of it to seal it.

‘Well, Mummy, I see details of dozens of people’s incomes and expenses at the office. The first thing
an interviewer does is to fill out a form about the client with all kinds of details.’

‘I think that’s about right,’ Father agreed. ‘I see plenty of them, too. With no bathroom in the house, we can’t charge much.’

‘I’ll try for ten shillings,’ Mother said firmly. ‘After all, this is a very respectable house.’

She wrote an advertisement on the back of an envelope and immediately went out to see the newsagent, who would, for twopence, exhibit it for a week in a glass case hung on his door.

Fiona had had an early tea before going for her interview and now announced that she was going to see a girl friend. Alan drifted off to play cricket with the other boys in the street. I should have gone to call Avril and Edward to come in because it was their bedtime, but for the moment I was alone with Father. He had picked up his library book and was looking for his place in it. I laid down my pen.

‘Daddy, could I ask you something?’

‘Yes, dear.’ He closed his book again and peered at me through his spectacles. I noticed that the gold frame was bent, so that one eye was not looking through the middle of the lens, and it gave a curiously lopsided appearance to his face.

I reminded him of Miss Ferguson’s desire to see
me confirmed, and that she expected me to go to Confession before taking my First Communion.

‘I’ve been so worried, Daddy. What is it all about? I never dreamed of having to go to Confession. I thought old King Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth did away with such things in the Church of England? I’m so frightened, Daddy – is it wrong to refuse to go?’

He chuckled. ‘Good Lord, no. There’s nothing to be frightened about. The Church of England allows considerable latitude within its ranks – you must know that.’ He sighed heavily. ‘Both your Mother and I were brought up as High Anglicans – in fact, you probably know that your mother was actually brought up by Roman Catholic nuns, despite her being a Protestant.’

‘Hm,’ I agreed.

‘But then there was the war. And, you know, it was difficult after that to believe in anything. We rarely went to church after that, except to get you children christened.’

‘You go to the cenotaph every November 11th, no matter what,’ I reminded him with a little smile.

‘Yes, I do. But that’s just so that my old friends – my dead friends, wherever they are – know that I remember them, that I have never forgotten them.’ His voice was suddenly shaky. ‘There were only
three survivors, you know, from my old regiment – the three of us who volunteered for the Russian campaign.’

I could not bear the stricken look on his face, and I selfishly recalled him to my own predicament by asking, ‘Must I go to a High Anglican church, Daddy? Couldn’t I be confirmed somewhere else? Edith always took us to the village church – and they had very plain services, I remember – and neither you nor Mother said anything.’

Again he sighed, and then he looked up at me with a little smile. ‘As far as I’m concerned, dear, you can go to any Protestant church you like, if it gives you comfort. I know you are trying to live a good life – and church will help to keep you out of mischief.’

Mischief was the last thing I was ever likely to get into, and I laughed, a laugh tinged with great relief.

‘Really? Would it be all right? Could you talk to Mother about it?’

‘Of course. Your Mother won’t mind, and I expect Miss Ferguson will get over it; she will probably be offended at first, though, because you always seem to have been a protégée of hers.’

‘She’s been a fairy godmother – and I’m truly sorry if she becomes angry about it, but even for
her I can’t face Confession.’ I picked up my pen and chewed the end of it, and then said passionately, ‘I’d burn first.’

Father laughed. ‘You’re a real Protestant – but I’m glad for you that you seem to have a clear belief, God bless you.’

Such a weight rolled off my shoulders. The smell of sulphur and brimstone, the smell of hell, which had haunted me uneasily for days, rolled away.

I jumped up from my chair and leaned over to kiss his bald pate. ‘Thank you, Daddy.’

He caught my hand and squeezed it, while he looked up at me earnestly. ‘Religion is a private thing – remember that. If you can find a path to God which suits you, take it. I wish I could, but I am not able to feel anything any more – as I said, it was the war.’

I put my arm round his shoulders and sought in my mind for comforting words. ‘Perhaps you will change as time goes on, and the memory of the war becomes less.’

He nodded. ‘Perhaps.’ But he never did.

I was the one who changed. Starting from Father’s unexpectedly wise counsel, I began to look at others’ religions with a wider and more inquiring mind, as I moved about Liverpool and met people of all beliefs and all nationalities. Edith was fond
of remarking that the gentry had too much book learning and not enough real learning, and it took a while for me to remedy this imbalance.

The ice between Father and me had been broken. Older now, I was more able to forgive and understand his weakness and in reaching out for his aid when I was so afraid, I think I had restored to him in some small part a sense of being wanted, being needed for more than the wages he brought in.

Whether his talk with me had alerted him to the possible code of behaviour of his sons, I do not know. He began, however, to check on where they went in their spare time and what they did. He made them all promise to tell Mother or me their destination whenever they went out. Nobody thought of Fiona and Avril. The boys all had lively, inventive minds and were fairly well mannered. They tended to draw friends to them, whose parents were glad to have them play in their houses, where they were under supervision. The boys also frequently played together, and this helped to keep them out of bad company.

Father’s new interest in his children was wonderful to me. One of the most scaring things in childhood is the lack of an older person to turn to, to depend on for guidance and advice. Now, in a diffident, irregular way he was beginning to make
his presence felt in the family, as if the trauma of the war and his financial ruin was beginning to be sloughed off. Though, in fearsome battles, Mother still shouted him down, he persisted quietly, using a strong sense of humour which I had not realised he possessed.