Passage Across the Mersey

by Robert Bhatia

  Copyright

  HarperCollinsPublishers

  The News Building,

  1 London Bridge Street,

  London SE1 9GF

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  Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

  Copyright © Robert Bhatia 2017

  Jacket layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

  Photographs courtesy of the author.

  Robert Bhatia asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  With grateful thanks to the following for permission to reproduce extracts: Liverpool Daisy, copyright © Helen Forrester, originally published by Robert Hale (now The Crowood Press) Invisible Immigrants: The English in Canada Since 1945, copyright © Marilyn Barber and Murray Watson, published by the University of Manitoba Press Quips, Quotes and Quanta: An Anecdotal History of Physics, copyright © Anton Z. Capri, published by World Scientific Publishing Co.

  Photographs reproduced courtesy of the estate of Jamunadevi Bhatia

  Photo of Helen and Robert 1959 copyright © Edmonton Journal

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Ebook Edition © ISBN: 9780008168872

  Version: 2016-12-14

  Dedication

  To my parents, whose love was a shining light

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  PART I

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  PART II

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  PART III

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Postscript

  Chronology of Helen Forrester’s Life

  Picture Section

  Keep Reading

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  A bright April sun has warmed the covered porch of our bungalow in Edmonton, Canada. My mother is dressed in a fine sari, off-white with a pattern along the edges. She looks happy, as if nothing can spoil this moment. She is beautiful, a half-smile on her lips, and her soft brown hair is neatly arranged in a roll on the top of her head.

  Aged three and a half, I am sitting looking up at her with an expression of obstinacy and triumph. The photographer from the Edmonton Journal only wanted a picture of Mum, to accompany their article about a local housewife having a novel published in Great Britain. But I insisted on being part of it. I knew it was an important moment and I didn’t want to be left out.

  ‘All right, dear,’ she agreed a bit resignedly, smoothing my hair neatly to one side before letting me join her in front of the camera.

  It was April 1959 and the novel was Alien There Is None (later republished as Thursday’s Child). Mum and I had both been very excited a few weeks earlier when a large package, as big as a suitcase and tied securely with rope, arrived. Inside were dozens of hardback copies of her first book, with an illustration of an Indian village woman and an ox cart on the cover. It had been written before I was born.

  My mother was a wonderful storyteller and often told me tales about her childhood, her life in India, her jobs, and about living in Liverpool during the Second World War. It seemed natural to me that she could write stories down and have them published in a book.

  Of course, I had no idea how difficult it was to write a book, never mind get it published, and I never had a moment’s concern that this activity would take her away from my afternoon playtime. My mother had two overriding priorities: one was to devote as much time as possible to caring for me, playing with me and feeling her way through raising a child in a society far from her homeland; the other was to care for, and support, my father, a brilliant theoretical physicist at the University of Alberta.

  There was so much I didn’t understand back then. It would certainly never have occurred to me how lonely and isolated Mum was in that foreign country. Snow lay deeply on the ground most of the time between late October and early April and, more importantly to her, the community seemed colder too. She was used to strangers passing the time of day in the streets of Liverpool, and neighbours having a chat and a laugh with each other when they met in the shops. People in Edmonton seemed more reserved, their sense of humour was different, and she found it hard to make social connections. It would only be much later when I understood that being an outsider was a key theme in my mother’s life. Back then, all I knew was that she was the most wonderful mum anyone could ever wish for.

  That cold spring began a unique privilege for me. For the next half-century, I observed and shared in the frustrations and triumphs as Mum became Helen Forrester, an accomplished and successful author. A couple of decades after hijacking her press photograph at the age of three, I became a trusted reader and confidant. She would frequently talk about her ideas and what her characters were doing, or might do in the future. Later I would receive a draft manuscript for my opinion, a role I always found a tremendous honour.

  My mother wrote four volumes of memoirs, first published in the 1970s and 80s, but those books cover only about fifteen years of her life. I am delighted to have this chance to tell a more complete story and to answer some of her readers’ questions about what happened before and after. As far as possible, I have used her own words from previously unpublished letters and speeches, adding my memories of her recollections and of events to which I was privy.

  Part I covers the years from her birth until the end of the Second World War, and shows her looking back as an adult to try to understand the damaged family she was part of and the mistakes her parents made – mistakes that could easily have had fatal consequences for her and her siblings.

  Part II tells of the love story between Mum and my dad, Avadh Bhatia, an Indian academic. My parents met in Liverpool in March 1949 but my father had to return to India in December after completing the work for his PhD in theoretical physics. From January to April 1950 they exchanged letters almost daily, letters in which they planned the life that lay before them and tried to resolve the many difficulties that threatened to spoil their chance of happiness.

  For four and a half months, Mum’s future hung in the balance before she set sail, with great courage, to join my father in an exotic foreign land. On the first day of her voyage she wrote to him:

  Yesterday I was frightfully sad about leaving England and my family but today I have turned my face towards you and am happy because I do love you so – I remember your dear face and every flicker of expression on it and it is ever before me. I do want to make you h
appy very much.

  It was the start of a huge adventure, and a lifelong love story. She kept all the correspondence between them during the difficult months of their courtship and edited extracts now form the very heart of this book.

  My mother’s bestselling volumes of memoir ended in 1945, four years before she met my father. She wrote a couple of novels loosely based on her experiences in India but no overall autobiography. However, she kept impeccable records, and it has been a joy for me to piece together the rest of her story in Part III of this book, describing her decades away from her homeland and her journey to literary success.

  I hope readers will enjoy these extra insights into the author of Twopence to Cross the Mersey, A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin, Liverpool Daisy, and many other wonderful books. I have used the name Helen Forrester to refer to my mother throughout this book, because that is how she is best known to her readers.

  My mum led a remarkable life that included terrible hardship, breathtaking romance, perseverance and extraordinarily hard work. It was an unusual life in many respects, and one she lived to the full.

  PART I

  Chapter One

  In my more comfortable early life, my six siblings and I did not communicate much with our parents. Theirs was a truly awful First World War marriage.

  My mother was born on 6 June 1919 in Hoylake, then part of Cheshire, where her paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Huband, lived. It was to this home she so passionately wanted to return twelve years later when she yearned for ‘twopence to cross the Mersey’, a wish that would provide the title for her first volume of memoirs in 1974.

  Mum’s father, Paul Huband, came from a cultured family with a pedigree traceable back to before the Battle of Hastings in 1066. My great-grandfather had been a successful wine merchant and property owner as well as a director of a railway company that later became Great Western Railway. Sadly, he passed away in 1900, when Paul was just six years old. Helen spoke of the abrupt turn this caused to the family’s fortunes in a speech she gave in later life.

  My grandfather built a very pleasant house ‘out in the country’ in Tynwald Hill, off Green Lane [about five kilometres east of the centre of Liverpool]. I saw it at the beginning of the [Second World] war, when it had become home to a mass of poverty-stricken Chinese. When, at the age of 46, my grandfather died, my grandmother was persuaded by his executor thoroughly dishonest executor that she was now quite poor. She was a typical Victorian woman, who had never even bought a train ticket for herself, never mind done any business. She therefore sold her home and most of its contents – perhaps I should say more correctly, allowed it to be sold by the executor. She then retired to a tiny, but very pretty little house in Hoylake together with a widowed daughter [Stella] and her granddaughter, Marjorie, and another single daughter [Phyllis]. Despite the threat of poverty, they lived very well and the money left by Grandpa must have been quite considerable, since one of my cousins, who finally inherited it, still lives very comfortably on it – and when one remembers the amount of inflation which must have occurred since Grandpa died in 1900 – this is no mean feat.

  My grandmother submerged herself in black satin, with black-veiled bonnets and hats, which she wore for the next fifty years, Queen Victoria having made it the fashion. As a Victorian lady who had always been looked after, she was assured by her grown-up daughters and her lawyer that she could not possibly cope with bringing up her little son. So he was sent to a preparatory boarding school, where he also spent some of the holidays because of distance.

  My grandfather might well have been sent to boarding school anyway, as so many other boys of his era and class were. I am not sure whether his older brothers, Percy and Frank, went to boarding school, too, but it seems likely. My mother believed this enforced exile from the age of just six years contributed to my grandfather’s later difficulty in coping with his own children. She wrote to her brother, Tony, in 2000:

  It always amazed me how much Father survived in his life. He had a rotten childhood. You probably know that his father died when he was six, and he was sent to a Preparatory Boarding School in Wales, until he was old enough to be sent to Denstone – I don’t know whether you have seen Denstone, but I did when I was about eight years old – a horrible gloomy freezing cold place, stone floored, with huge dormitories for the boys. No electric light.

  Denstone College in Staffordshire is now a co-educational boarding school, and the facilities have been brought up to date since then. My grandfather was a boarder there until the age of eighteen and received an excellent education, particularly excelling in mathematics. He emerged in 1912 to get work as a clerk in a bank. It was a respectable job for an upper-middle-class boy, and one that held good prospects. He might have been promoted to branch manager and possibly in time to a role in head office, but two years later circumstances intervened when Britain suddenly found herself at war with Germany.

  The naval arms race between the two nations had been rumbling on for years. Few had paid much attention to the assassination of Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Bosnia on 28 June 1914, but the repercussions would snowball over the next few weeks. By 28 July, Austria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia, then Germany declared war on Russia on 1 August, marched into Luxembourg on the 2nd and declared war on France on the 3rd. Still trying to hold out, British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith asked the German Kaiser for a reassurance that Belgium would remain neutral. At 11 p.m. on 4 August, when that assurance had not been received, Britain was officially at war with Germany – something few would have predicted at the start of the summer.

  My grandfather joined the 17th Service Battalion of the Liverpool Regiment, a volunteer force raised from men in the North-West, and in November 1915 his company was sent out to the trenches of the Somme. He was like many stiff-upper-lipped men of his generation who put up with the sea of mud, the deafening explosions of shells, and the sight of friends and comrades dying of horrific wounds, and just got on with it.

  The 17th Service Battalion took part in the 1916 Battle of the Transloy Ridges, when heavy rain turned the ground into a swamp; the Battle of Arras in April and May 1917, when they pushed the Germans back but were unable to achieve a breakthrough; and some 1918 battles at the Somme as they resisted the German spring offensive. Altogether 13,795 men of the Liverpool Regiment died during the war, an average of 615 per battalion of 1,000 men, and the 17th had so few left by June 1918 they were ‘reduced to cadre’ – i.e. there was just a basic core left, which was used to train new recruits. My grandfather later told Helen that only three men remained from his old batallion, and that he would never forget all the comrades he had lost.

  In the midst of the war, in 1917, Lance-Corporal Huband was home on leave and recuperating from a sports accident when he happened to go into a library in Llandudno in North Wales and got chatting to a young woman with ‘fashionable short black curls and large, pale blue eyes’ who was working there. Her name was Lavinia Prosser-Baker, and she was a great beauty. Paul was soon smitten and asked for her hand in marriage. She agreed, and they were married on 22 February 1918 in St Hildeburgh’s Church in Hoylake.

  Very little is known about my grandmother’s origins. There is no definitive record of her parents despite extensive genealogical research undertaken by Helen’s sister, Avril. In later life, she and Helen exchanged several letters on the subject of their mother’s background. Helen remembered: ‘Mother did tell me, when I was quite young, that her father was a physician who was swept overboard on his way to the States to establish a practice and a home there. Somehow, I did not believe her.’

  They did know that Lavinia was raised in a convent, where her welfare was overseen by a guardian. She and Helen’s father had that in common: both had been raised in institutions from a young age. Avril’s research suggested that Lavinia may have been illegitimate. Helen responded to this:

  Because of the awful load of being illegitimate – people were so cruel in the nineteenth and early twentieth
century about it – she is likely to have concocted a story which would defend her against such unkindness. If such were the case, I wish she had confided in us, because it would have explained so much about her. Her awful tantrums (even when I was very little), having so many children, perhaps, to create the family she had never had – though without the foggiest notion, for years, of how to manage them! The awful frustration of being so gifted – and she was – and yet not being able, in the general chaos of her life, to train to use those gifts.

  Helen’s cousin Marjorie also maintained that Lavinia was illegitimate and believed that was why Paul’s sisters, Phyllis and Stella, did not approve of her. There was also some indication that Lavinia had a half-sister who visited the Hubands with her husband when Helen was about nine years old. Her parents entertained her but, in their snobbish way, refused to speak to him because he was just a cobbler.

  In the convent, Lavinia ‘learned all the social graces of a woman with money – all the smatterings of this and that felt necessary for a graceful woman of those days. She learned to sing well and to embroider beautifully – but not plain sewing – like patching. She learned nothing whatever about cooking, children, running a home, and was never exposed to family life at all. She had, like most convent girls, a wild interest in men.’

  Lavinia spent school holidays in the convent, looked after by the nuns, as she had no home to go to. At the age of fifteen, she left the convent school and went to live with her guardian. He owned several private libraries and trained her to be a librarian. When he married unexpectedly three years later, she couldn’t get along with the new wife. Instead, she ran away and found herself a job in a private library in North Wales, which is where she met my grandfather.

  Lavinia later told Helen she had been engaged before meeting Paul. Her first fiancé was the youngest son of a widow, who had inherited a cotton mill from her late husband. She lost her other sons in the war, but this one stayed at home to run the mill. Lavinia told Helen, ‘He was very handsome. I loved him very much.’ But tragedy struck. ‘One day, he was walking through the mill, when the floor above him collapsed under the weight of the machinery – and he was crushed to death.’