Twopence to Cross the Mersey Page 10

  The old gentleman shook his depression away, realized I was distressed and comforted me.

  ‘When you are eighty-one years old, you look forward to being once more with your loved ones,’ he said.

  We sat quietly together. I tended to agree with him that death was something to look forward to.

  ‘Do you believe in God – and Heaven?’ I asked timidly.

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ he said. ‘My mother was a Mohamedan and my father was a Lutheran, and neither impressed a religion upon me. They both explained their beliefs to me, but they made me study and search for God.’

  ‘We are Church of England,’ I said. ‘That is …’ I hesitated. ‘That is, when we are clean and rich we are Church of England. I suppose at present we are nothing.’ I laughed a little guiltily. ‘I have never been inside a church in Liverpool. When we were at home, the minister called from time to time – but he does not do so here. I suppose we are too wicked.’

  He sat contemplating the placid lake for a minute, and then asked, ‘Has nobody from your Church been to see you?’

  ‘Yes. When we first came, a very kind priest in a long black robe brought us some food. He was very nice. I do not think our present house is in his parish.’

  ‘You should go to your parish church.’

  ‘We could not,’ I replied emphatically. ‘We are so dirty – we can’t afford soap.’

  He nodded understandingly.

  I added, ‘I do not know what we did to deserve it all.’

  He smiled gently.

  ‘God tries us all, child. Pray to Him for help. He will hear you.’

  I thanked him, and got up heavily from the bench. There was no hope in me.

  All the way home, however, I prayed silently in the well-known words of the Anglican prayer-book, in the belief that there is no harm in trying.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  One of the penalties frequently paid for being poor is that of being cut off from the rest of the world. The normal means of communication such as newspapers, radio and letters cost money. Some of our neighbours had radios, and they clung to them no matter what else they had to part with. It was their main source of both entertainment and news, as long as they had a penny to put into the electric meter or could afford to get the wet batteries recharged. These families could hear the first rumbling of the Nazi movement in Germany and Mussolini’s fiery speeches, and of strikes and riots in Spain, the prelude to the Spanish Civil War. Nearer home, there was the crisis of the resignation of the Labour Government.

  My father read several national newspapers and the Liverpool Echo whenever he went to the library. My mother, also, would skim through the Echo during a quick visit to the library, when she would jot down on a piece of paper details of jobs advertised. They were, however, the exception; most people around us found reading a laborious effort and there was a fair sprinkling among the older inhabitants who could neither read nor write.

  The newspaper room in the library seemed to be the preserve of adults, who did not like a dirty ragamuffin with a baby on her hip, pushing in front of them. In consequence, I knew more about Walsingham and Lord Burghley, Queen Elizabeth I’s ministers, than I did about George V’s Ramsay MacDonald.

  I knew nobody of my own age and was cut off from all forms of play. Some girls of about fourteen years of age lived in the vicinity. They were tough, brassy lasses, who regarded themselves as adults and worked all day in factories or shops. Each girl had a best friend who was known as her mate and together they went to the cinema or to dances, where they danced together; if a boy asked one of them for a dance she circled the floor with him in silence, her face exhibiting about as much expression as the back of a tram. Every Friday evening they solemnly washed and set each other’s hair, and on Sundays, dressed in their best, they would walk together in the streets, regarding hopeful males with joint disdain. This was a matriarchal society where ferocious grandmothers and nagging mothers reigned supreme and men seemed to have hardly a toehold in the home, and these young girls were already aware of this.

  They were cheap labour and at the age of sixteen they would often be unemployed, like their elder sisters, but in the meantime they were frequently the most affluent members of their household, with money to spend in Woolworth’s on cosmetics and rhinestone jewellery. I envied them their neat, black, work dresses and, even more, their best Sunday coats and hats and high-heeled shoes. They never spoke to me, except sometimes to jeer at my rags. At such times my glasses would mist over with tears, and I would whisk Avril and the Chariot round a corner, before the children could realize what was happening.

  The local boys bullied both Avril and me, just as they did a subnormal boy who lived in the next street and a little Negress, the daughter of a medical student, who lived round the corner. None of us was human by the standards of these lads – we looked different – and we ranked with dogs and cats, to be teased and mishandled if caught.

  Our family received no letters. It was as if everybody we had known before that first day in Liverpool had dropped dead. My parents always hoped for letters in reply to the endless applications for work which they wrote, but nothing arrived. Occasionally, my mother would write to an old acquaintance to beg for financial help in our predicament; there was no response.

  I longed passionately to go to school, to have some small communion with a more ordered world where I might find some spark of hope of a better life through learning. I continued to pray that, since my brothers and sisters attended a Church school, the priest would one day call upon us and would discover my existence; I was sure he could make my parents send me to his school. But the Church knew us not, and I was thrown back upon my library books and what I could remember from the past.

  Unlike many children, I had always enjoyed going to church. The major festivals of the year were to me wonderful theatrical productions, and my introduction to the works of many great composers had been through hearing their music pouring forth from a well-played organ on such occasions. Some of the churches I had attended were hundreds of years old and had priceless paintings, tapestries, vestments, carvings in stone and wood, magnificent brasswork and gold ornaments, a wealth of beauty on which the myopic eyes of a small girl could feast when the sermon became boring.

  The beauty of the language of King James’s Version of the Bible and of the Church of England Prayer-Book and the rich poetry of the hymn-book were not lost upon me, and enriched my knowledge of the English tongue.

  Now, when mental stimulus was most required and religious comfort desperately needed, these things were gone from us. I believed that God was not just angry with us – he was simply furious.

  Apart from being exposed to the scholarship and intellectual wealth of the Church of England, I was fortunate in having well-educated parents. They were extremely modern in their day and surrounded themselves with friends who discussed at length ideas and concepts of the times as well as more mundane matters.

  As the eldest child, I was sometimes allowed to leave the nursery and sit with my elders in the drawing-room. Bearing in mind the hissed instructions of Nanny to ‘hold my hush’, I would sit, like a sleepy owl, on a stool by the white marble fireplace, admiring Mother’s collection of Georgian silver which winked at me in the firelight from an antique sideboard.

  The drawing-room always seemed to be full of well-tailored gentlemen, some of them economists and bankers, others wealthy merchants; and a younger group clustered round my mother talking witty nonsense to her. I did not always understand what was discussed – I was too young. I soon became aware of the world and its problems, however, as seen through the eyes of the upper middle class. There was a place called the Stock Market inhabited by bulls and bears; and there were far-away countries, like India and China, where men made fortunes. There were terrifying food shortages called famines when men died in the streets; there were wonderful farms, full of sheep, in Australia, and others equally full of wheat in Canada. There were ships to be built, railways to s
ell and venturesome investments to be made in car, radio and electric-light-bulb firms.

  The world was a wonderful, exciting place, and I longed to grow up and be part of it

  Nobody mentioned the kind of world in which I now lived. Perhaps my father’s friends did not know of its existence, or, if they did, preferred to forget it And where were my father’s friends?

  I kneeled on the floor by the window of our top-floor eyrie and looked down at the unemployed men playing one of their endless games of ollies, a form of marbles. I remembered how Joan had ignored me when I had met her. I supposed that Father’s friends had done the same.

  So much for friendship.

  One form of communication which was very rare in such streets as I looked down upon was telephoning. The public telephone was beginning to make its appearance; but even that assumed that the public had friends or businesses with telephones, to whom they wished to speak. In my new world, families still sent one of the family with either a written or verbal message.

  Father had always been interested in French history, particularly the reign of Louis XIV, and I had been with him on a number of interesting trips to museums to see new acquisitions of jewellery, clothing or furniture of this period. It occurred to me, one day, that Avril and I could go to the museum together, so I pushed the little girl and Edward in the Chariot all the way to the city and then across it to William Brown Street. I pulled the Chariot up and down three huge flights of steps until I found the right building, and was just struggling to get the pram through a recalcitrant door when a voice boomed, ‘Where are you going with that thing?’

  A very large commissionaire stood behind me.

  ‘I’m going to the museum,’ I replied nervously.

  ‘Not with that you’re not.’

  His remark was clear enough, but there was a hint of puzzlement in the tone of his voice when he made it.

  I looked sadly down at Avril. I was afraid to leave the Chariot outside, in case some urchin thought it was abandoned and took it to play with.

  I looked up at the commissionaire and was prepared to do battle.

  He must have seen the malignant gleam in my eye, because he said sharply, ‘Now you just take that thing back to where you found it, and don’t let me find you loitering round here again.’

  Loitering was something one could be arrested for, I knew, so I swallowed the bitter words that came to mind, and silently turned and bounced the Chariot back down the steps so fast that I cannonaded into an elderly, distinguished-looking gentleman coming up.

  ‘Oh, I beg your pardon, sir,’ I said, horrified at having struck such a gentle, scholarly type of person. ‘I hope I haven’t hurt you badly.’

  ‘Not at all. My briefcase took the blow,’ he replied kindly, as he stared in surprise at Avril and me. His lips parted, as if to ask me something, but I had been so humiliated by the commissionaire that I felt I was going to cry, and I hastened onward across the street to St George’s Hall. Once there, I looked back.

  The gentleman was standing at the door of the museum still staring curiously at me.

  I giggled suddenly through my tears. An Oxford accent coming from a bundle of rags and bones like me must have really puzzled him. It had not, however, impressed the commissionaire and gained me entry to the museum.

  So much for public cultural emporia.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Summertime had always meant to me a period of waving green wheat slowly turning yellow, a time for walks along a meadow-bordered river where buttercups waited to be threaded into chains, a time to lie under a plum-tree and read to my heart’s content, a time to play at theatres and dressing-up with my friend, Joan, while the walnuts ripened overhead.

  Liverpool summers are not like that. In the nineteen-thirties not much was understood about pollution; and on days when it did not rain the acrid smoke was enough to obscure the sun until a harsh, Atlantic wind temporarily lifted the veil. On hot days the alleyways and garbage cans stank, despite the ministrations of an army of dustmen who not only laboriously cleared the garbage but also washed down the alleys themselves. There were still a lot of horses in Liverpool and where there are horses there are always myriads of flies to carry dysentery. Our milkman kept his cows in a shippen at the back of his dairy, but fortunately in summer for part of the time they grazed outside the city, and took their quota of flies with them.

  Hens and pigeons were common in back yards. Men kept fighting-cocks, though this was illegal, and many were the bloody battles in the long summer evenings on which men wagered a large portion of their public assistance money.

  Much of this the younger children were able to accept as a way of life as they slowly forgot their earlier life, though Tony once said to me earnestly as I bathed a grazed knee he had acquired while playing rounders in the street, ‘I don’t like the kind of life we live, Helen, and when I grow big I shall change it’

  ‘I hope you will,’ I replied equally gravely. ‘You’ve got brains and you could get a scholarship to a better school – and that would get you out of it’

  ‘Why don’t you go to school, Helen?’

  The tears, never far from my myopic eyes, sprang up. I bent my head so that he could not see them. ‘Mother needs me at home, dear.’

  ‘How will you get out of it then?’

  ‘I really don’t know.’ I made myself sound cheerful, as I carefully dried the small wound because wounds seemed to go septic so fast ‘When Daddy gets a job, things will change a lot.’

  He stood up and stretched his thin little body. ‘Perhaps you will marry a prince,’ he suggested hopefully.

  ‘Perhaps,’ I agreed, though I knew that girls as ugly as I who also wore spectacles did not stand a chance of matrimony; my mother had always indicated that such was the case and I think I had already been written off as a future maiden aunt. This did not stop me, however, from dreaming for the rest of the afternoon that I married the beautiful, humane and exciting Edward, Prince of Wales.

  Tony and Brian also had a dream world of their own. They rarely quarrelled and, with Fiona, they played highly imaginative games in which they sailed the world – Brian always fell overboard and was rescued by Tony – or drove trains and cars which had innumerable comic accidents.

  Playing in the open, even if the air was polluted, made them more hungry and it was impossible to satisfy them. If we were to cook anything, we still had to buy coal, so that summer expenses were much the same as winter ones.

  We approached our second winter in Liverpool with undisguised dread. We had commenced the first bitter January there with one set of good winter clothing apiece and two blankets. Now, not one of us had a whole garment or a pair of shoes without holes in them. Indeed, four of us were reduced to ragged running-shoes or nothing at all on our feet.

  My father was a pitiful sight even in comparison with the ragged crew who lined up with him for public assistance. His elbows stuck through the sleeves of what had once been a tweed jacket and his knees were equally naked. He had no socks and there was very little left of his shirt. He used to thread the remains of his old school tie through the torn collar and knot it, in the mistaken belief that nobody would notice the bare chest underneath it. His underwear had, like that of the rest of the family, worn out, its life shortened by inadequate laundering. His chest was red from being chapped by the wind; but he suffered most from pain in his hands.

  Both hands had been badly frost-bitten during his military service in Russia, and, on the hospital ship which brought him home, the surgeons had debated whether or not they should be amputated. The wonderful care he received, however, saved him from this; but intensely cold weather turned them white, and I used to sit and massage them to revive the circulation. It was then that they became most painful.

  One freezing November day, urged on by two shipping clerks shivering with him in one of the endless queues in which he spent most of his life, he applied to the relieving officer of the public assistance committee for help to b
uy a pair of shoes and a pair of gloves.

  Clothing, he was told tardy, was given in kind and stamped with the initials of the public assistance committee, so that it could not be sold or pawned.

  ‘I don’t mind what it is stamped with,’ replied Father humbly, ‘as long as it lessens the pain in my hands.’

  His case file was sent for and examined.

  ‘You are not eligible for help with clothing,’ was the verdict. ‘You do not come under the jurisdiction of Liverpool.’

  The same old problem. We were not from Liverpool. Our rate of public assistance was that given in the small town from which we came, and the sum was collected from that town by Liverpool. We got none of the little extras such as money for winter coal or for Christmas which Liverpool struggled to give its less fortunate citizens, nor were we eligible for clothing.

  ‘What shall I do?’ my father cried, in despair.

  ‘Try one of the voluntary agencies.’

  So Father got the run-around as it was sometimes called. He was sent from agency to agency. And they all said they could not help, because he was drawing public assistance and could get boots from that committee. In vain, he explained that the town from which we had come did not give clothing and we were ineligible for help from Liverpool.

  One agency offered second-hand boots at a very reduced price, but any price was too high for us to pay. We had once spent three shillings in a secondhand clothes shop in an effort to make my mother presentable again, feeling that she had the better chance of employment, and had had to reduce our meagre food intake to a dangerous level, in consequence. If it had not been for our kind policeman’s pint of milk, Edward would have surely died that week.

  Then Mother suddenly got a job ‘on commission only’. She was to sell radios from door to door.

  Up and down the better-class streets she tramped, knocking at each door and trying to beguile reluctant housewives into agreeing to a demonstration of the radio in their homes. On the third day, she did find a woman willing to listen to her, and it was agreed that the radio would be brought that night for her husband to see.