By the Waters of Liverpool (9 page)

‘T’ boys’ll soon learn yez,’ he assured me with a grin. ‘Eee, now, I wish I could coom meself. But me wife’ll never let me off the hook, yer know. Proper hard case she is.’

I laughed. ‘I think the girls are allowed to bring a boy friend – but, of course, I haven’t got one.’

‘Aye, give yerself time, luv. You’ll soon find one.’

I smiled, feeling suddenly a little flattered by his pleasantries, though I did not think that boy friends were likely to enter my life.

I sat quietly on a chair at the edge of the dance floor for the entire evening, watching the colourful dancers.

‘What else can you expect?’ I asked myself. The other girls had each brought a partner. Miriam did not come, having Party affairs to attend to. Except for an elderly gentleman, who, after bowing and making a polite inquiry, brought me a dish of ice cream and a glass of lemonade, I was left alone. After a few moments of laboured remarks about the inclemency of the weather, the gentleman was drawn away by a more thoughtless and equally bored Committee member. I ate my ice cream and sipped the lemonade with what I hoped was a look of jaded sophistication, and at about half-past ten I went to the ladies’ cloakroom and retrieved my old brown coat and outdoor shoes. After putting on these shabby garments, I put a carefully reserved silver threepenny piece in the attendant’s
saucer. She looked up from her knitting and said, ‘Thank you, Miss,’ a slight surprise in her thick, Liverpool voice.

It was drizzling as I dawdled back up the hill from the city restaurant in which the dance had been held. I held up the long dress from the wet pavement and the satin shoes hung from the fingertips of my other hand. Occasionally, I heaved a great sigh. The whole great expense had been for nothing.

Only Mother was up when I entered the living room. She was sitting with her feet braced high against one side of the big kitchen fireplace, her dress slipped back above her knees, to ease her veins. She laid her book down on her lap, and asked, ‘Well, how was it?’

‘A flop,’ I replied, laying the precious slippers carefully down on a chair. ‘I didn’t get a dance.’

‘You didn’t stay till the end? It’s only eleven now.’

‘I could not sit there – through the night – until one in the morning – it would be too humiliating. Not one of the girls even spoke to me.’

Mother bit her lips. ‘I’m sorry, dear,’ she said, and she sounded as if she really was. Then after a moment, as I peeled off my coat, she added some sound advice. ‘You’ll have to stop looking like a
frozen rabbit. Men don’t like plain girls – and girls who look both plain and dull never get anywhere. You must smile – look gay.’

I sighed, and tried to smile. ‘I expect you’re right,’ I agreed.

The next day the pretty dress, the petticoat and the beloved white satin shoes were bundled up in a white cloth and returned to Uncle.

Nineteen-thirty-eight was the year that Mr Neville Chamberlain, our Prime Minister, sold Czechoslovakia down the river, in order to gain time for us. The word ‘appeasement’ entered our vocabulary, appeasement of a raving lunatic called Adolf Hitler, who with his Panzer divisions was mopping up the map of Europe. It seemed that after every visit Alan made to the cinema, he would remark that the Paramount newsreels had shown the takeover of another country.

At first we all felt a sense of relief when an ailing Mr Chamberlain, supported by his black umbrella, came home from Europe and announced, ‘Peace in our time’. It was peace bought at the expense of Czechoslovakia; and it seemed that gradually in the city a great sense of shame welled up. ‘Letting
a pack of bloody gorillas loose on them,’ I heard a station porter say angrily.

The sacrifice
did
gain us time, we all knew that, time to mobilise the fleet, time to extend the barracks just off Princes Road, to fill factories at Speke with the machinery of war, expand the fire brigade, plan the evacuation of the city, time to write innumerable pamphlets which fluttered through our letter box on what to do in an air raid, gas attack, food shortage, petrol rationing, evacuation of school children – it went on and on.

A pile of gas masks in neat cardboard boxes arrived on our living-room table, to make the children giggle and shiver nervously as we tried them on, and were suddenly converted into anonymous, long-snouted aliens.

It was taken for granted that if we had to go to war our cities would within a few days be flattened by air raids. Liverpool was our paramount western port, a legitimate target. I found that I was not much afraid at the prospect of death, only of being half dead beneath a mountain of rubble. I wondered if in such a situation I could commit suicide by swallowing my tongue as it was said the poor suffering Ethiopians did. Death – to be dead – did not seem to be much worse than being alive.

Mother fervently thanked God that only Alan was old enough to be called up. Alan was wildly excited, and spent every moment he could at the airfield. Father, who had fought the war to end all wars, looked particularly pinched and sad as he read the headlines in the
Echo.
He went out and bought himself a small atlas from the local tobacconist, and with more perception of the future than our army generals, spent evenings plotting the advance of the Japanese in China, a fray which had been pushed to the back pages of the papers.

I had my usual dose of flu during February, and it left me with a cough which was a nuisance to the whole family. I determined to try to save up for a holiday. I discovered from a book at work that there was a Girls’ Holiday Home on the seafront at Hoylake in the Wirral, across the river. They charged about a pound for a week’s stay, not a very large sum, though it would take me a long time to save it, and the shilling or so train fare.

I instituted an iron discipline. No trams at all, no twopenny cinema shows of old films at the Central Hall, only a penny bun for lunch instead of a threepenny soup, and, most difficult of all, making my easily laddered rayon stockings last longer – the main difficulty was keeping them out of the clutches of Fiona and Mother. They
cost ninepence a pair and were my biggest single expense. I relooped ladders with the aid of a darning needle, an eye-straining, time-consuming job. I darned and redarned the heels, which badly fitting secondhand shoes tended to wear through very quickly. The money saved was carried in a little cloth bag on a string round my neck, and no matter how much Mother whined I never admitted its existence.

After a bitter battle, Mother managed to squeeze out of me a further two shillings and sixpence from my small wages. This left me with exactly one shilling to cover all my needs, and in a desperate position. Any money for my own existence had to be earned by teaching shorthand to pupils in their homes.

Six or seven shillings would feed a woman quite well. What I ate at home would cost about three shillings, so Mother was doing quite well out of me. My one joy during this period was going to the theatre with my friend, Sylvia, the money for which was provided to all the staff by a kindly Greek interested in the work of the Charity who employed me. I used to live for those evenings spent tucked up on the topmost bench of the Liverpool Repertory Theatre, one of the finest repertory theatres in the country.

The village in which the Girls’ Holiday Home was situated was the village in which Grandma lived. I had spent many months of childhood with her. I used to cuddle up by her side while she taught me to read from the Bible; and, from dog-eared sheets of music, how to read the notes.

Grandma was short, plump, and always dressed in black silk or satin, skirts almost touching the floor, a boned, white lace modesty vest filling the neckline in a long vee-shape from her tiny pink ear tips to her waist. She had a hearty, merry laugh and could be very witty. As she shook her head the front curls of her snowy wig bounced gently on her forehead. When she went out to shop in the village a huge hat was skewered with long hat pins on to the top of the wig. The hat was always heavily trimmed with black, grey or white satin, sometimes held by a large diamante brooch or by a bunch of dark red cherries – very dashing – or black feathers. Because going to Liverpool to buy a new hat was an exhausting operation, my two aunts who lived with her would periodically retrim her hats for her. I accepted as natural that her clothes were always black, as were those of her very dignified circle of lady friends. Widows wore black, and a few of the older ones wore tiny black bonnets like Queen Victoria’s, with a black veil which could shroud the face or be
flung back, according to the official depths of one’s mourning. Victoria had set the fashion for widows, a fashion nearly as repressive as that for widows in India. Grandma had been a widow for forty years. In its almost unbearable boredom, it must have seemed to such a lively woman like a life prison sentence.

Dare I go to see Grandma while I was in Hoylake, I wondered. I had dreamed for years of doing so, had wanted to run away to her when first I faced the appalling poverty of Liverpool. Father had not attempted to get in touch with her, as far as I knew, since their final quarrel when he went bankrupt, and of latter years I had refrained from visiting her because of his bitter remarks that I would not be welcome. But Father was her baby, who had arrived long after his nearest sister, and they must sometimes have wanted very much to see each other. He had also managed to quarrel furiously with his two sisters who lived with her. They did not approve of the gay life he had led nor did they approve of Mother, who, they felt, was not quite a lady, having worked for her living.

During our early years in Liverpool, a small parcel postmarked Hoylake would arrive from time to time. It always contained a pair of very soft, finely knitted children’s combinations; there was
never any note. Avril or Edward would rejoice for weeks in the warm comfort of the garments. Mother always wrote a polite thank-you note to Grandma – nothing more. I wondered sometimes what Grandma thought about during the long afternoons when she must have sat, as was her custom, in her sunny lace-curtained sitting room, cat on knee, and knitted. Did she grieve? Or was she sustained by righteous indignation? Had she any inkling at all about what was happening to us, that we looked like children who had suffered in an Indian famine?

After a noisy row with Mother about my duplicity in saving for a holiday and about my grim determination to go on it, regardless of the fact that Edward needed new shoes, it was with mixed feelings that I carried a shopping bag containing a change of clothes down the long slope of King’s Gap to the sea. It was said that King William’s troops set sail for Ireland from here, to fight the Battle of the Boyne, a battle celebrated annually by Liverpool Protestants with a great procession, in defiance of Roman Catholic wrath.

The wind from Liverpool Bay blew my hat off as I turned to walk along the Promenade. Along here, in a bright red brick house which was a nursing home, I had been born in a bed relinquished to my labouring mother by a wounded soldier, who
lay on the floor in the passage while I yelled my first unhappy breath. Because the nursing home staff were swamped by wounded men, this man tended my mother and washed my nappies for her, while Father fought in Russia and did not know for a long time that I was born.

I ran my hand along the iron rail of the Promenade. Here, as a six-year-old, I had squeaked delightedly when a young fisherman picked me up and ran agilely along the top of the iron railings while the incoming tide lashed at the wall below us. From here, I had once or twice sailed out in his fishing boat with his brothers. The boat was a bouncing cockle of a craft which stank of fish. No wonder I am never seasick; my introduction to the sea was so happy. Grandma must have wondered once or twice why my discarded clothes smelled so badly. I never told her because officially I was spending the day with a lonely small boy who lived on the sea front. I did not like him, so when sent trustingly down the road to his house, I just went on to the beach and messed about amongst the fishing fleet, if it was in.

As far as I could see, there was no fishing fleet any more, not a sign of a sail or a net; only small pleasure craft heeled half over in the sand, waiting for the tide to come ripping in past the Hoyle
Bank and round Hilbre Island and set them dancing.

The Holiday Home was spartan, but I rejoiced in clean sheets and shining floors. I was allotted a small windowless cubicle in which to sleep. It was stuffy with much use, and the whole building smelled of a mixture of floor polish, cabbage and cats.

I left the door of the cubicle open and sat down on the narrow bed and read innumerable notices on the wall telling me not to sit on the bed, to turn off the light, to be in at ten p.m., not to smoke, to come to meals promptly, etc. I wondered what to do. Girls cursing under their breath stumbled past to other cubicles, pushing heavy suitcases ahead of them.

The near darkness of the cubicle was becoming depressing, when suddenly the suitcases of two girls jammed in the narrow passageway. They swore ripely and richly in strongly accented German. Then they stood and laughed at each other. I jumped up eagerly to lend a hand, and between the three of us we managed to move the cases, though we left a long scratch on the varnished wall of the passage.

The girls were the daughters of Swiss hoteliers. They had been working in England for nearly a year
as servants, in order to perfect their English. Their employers had sent them to the Holiday Home while they themselves took a vacation. They, too, had very little money. We were reciprocally pleased with each other. I could understand their German and they could follow my accentless English. It was a joy to me to show them the Wirral.

At low tide, carrying our shoes and some sandwiches, we paddled out to Hilbre Island, stopping to watch the shrimps tickling our toes, and the local people bent double as they dug for cockles and mussels. We watched the sea roar in again round the tiny island, while we hunted for seashells along its shore. In the evening, when the water had silently retreated, we strolled slowly back across the wet sand, while the hills of North Wales went purple and the lights of West Kirby began to wink out ahead. As we walked, I pointed out to them the stumps of a great primeval forest sticking out of the sand, and we imagined tiny brown men in coracles drifting round the mouths of the Dee and the Mersey.

Puffing in the boisterous wind, we walked the length of the great seawall which held back the tide from the villages of Moreton and Leasowe. Behind the wall rich market gardens showed neat squares of different shades of green. Dutch dike specialists
came from time to time to inspect this great sea wall and it was much admired. Father used to say that the best cure for a cold was to walk its length and let the wild clean air from the Bay blow the germs out, which probably was not quite what the builders had in mind.

We scrambled down into an abandoned quarry, in the hope of finding some of the nests of the innumerable birds who made it their home. We did not find a nest and we had a panicky few minutes before we managed to haul ourselves out, dusty, breathless and laughing. There were no birds except sparrows in our street in Liverpool, and the riotous singing in that quarry was like a Polish choir going full belt.

Inland, we discovered small villages in winding lanes, and we would walk along them singing softly together, enjoying the great swishing trees and eating penny ice creams bought from minute village shops.

I was happy with my gay companions. Good though very plain food helped my famished body, and the cough lessened. But all the time I thought of Grandma.

One day we passed along the road in which she lived, three giggly, gawky girls, two in light sleeveless summer dresses, one in a winter skirt
and crumpled blouse, and I glanced quickly, almost frightenedly, at the house which meant so much to me.

It looked exactly the same as I remembered it. Lace curtains draped round the windows, wrought-iron gate, straight red-tiled path to the front door, carefully swept and washed, and a patch of neatly cut lawn with a few recalcitrant daisies scattered on it like stars.

I do not know why it is that some front doors look more closed than other shut doors, but to me Grandma’s door looked that day particularly blank and forbidding. I did not sleep much during the night as I wondered whether if I knocked and it were opened, there would be any welcome inside.

Towards the end of the week, the two Swiss girls became acquainted with two young men who had been caulking a rowing boat on the shore. I had walked up to the village to buy a small gift for Mother, a peace offering.

On the Friday, the girls received an invitation from the boat caulkers to go out for a row, so I had my last afternoon in Hoylake to myself. At first I sat in the gloom – on my bed – and read the notice which said that one should not use the bedroom in the daytime. I felt very lonely in the deserted Home, and chewed my thumb unhappily.