As my beautifully spoken parents moved around the house, if they noticed a grammatical error in my brother’s or my speech, they would automatically slap us across the head and correct us. I think this must have happened to both of them in boarding school. It is certainly one way of teaching grammar!
While I struggled through a childhood which was so unpredictable, I learned to keep out of the way of adults. I watched their faces, so that I could react quickly if I thought I was going to be hit. I also learned to keep away from school bullies.
I took refuge in hall cupboards and in wardrobes, sometimes with my brother, while our parents screamed with rage at each other.
*
The domestic staff at home provided a different kind of education, as Helen later recalled. ‘I listened to the maids talking and learned a few extraordinary facts of life, which were confirmed to me by the animals in the farm fields around us – no artificial insemination in those days.’
In 1997 she told an audience at the Daphne du Maurier Festival of Arts and Literature:
I listened to the cook, our nanny and the housemaid talking round the nursery fire in the evenings, about their boyfriends and the new films they had seen in Ludlow. I learned about who was dead or dying or needed money at home, and how much these women contributed to their families.
At one point, when two babies [Tony and Avril] arrived within eleven months, a charlady was recruited from the local workhouse to help with the cleaning. She was a tall thin woman, grey hair scraped back in an old-fashioned bun, dressed in workhouse uniform and a black shawl. We liked each other.
And she whistled as she worked. She whistled her way down the long staircases and down the back and front steps, as she scrubbed and scrubbed. And she would talk to me. She fascinated me – and looking back, I realize what an old dear she was, though at the time I mostly feared that she was bound for hell for her musical efforts. She sometimes turns up in my books.
One of the many old men who worked on the Estate on which our village home stood, taught me how to whistle, as he cleaned out ditches round the field adjacent to us.
‘A girl who whistled was bound for hell,’ I was shocked to discover. ‘A whistling girl or a crowing hen ain’t no good for gentlemen,’ said Nanny, as she proceeded to slap the habit out of me.
Religion played a part in her home life as well as at her grandmother’s, but it was the nanny and not Helen’s parents who took the children to church on Sundays.
There I heard the works of many of the great composers played on good organs. The local choirs sang mighty works, Cantatas, oratorios and anthems, on Festival days. All the churches had fine stained-glass windows for careful examination by bored little girls; some churches had good paintings donated in memory of dead parishioners. The churchyards were filled with elaborately carved gravestones so I became aware that men could carve wonderful things, like angels standing on tiptoe holding up a wreath, or women clad in a kind of Roman toga, on their knees embracing a marble cross decked with marble flowers. There was an inordinate number of plump cherubim and baby angels on children’s graves, too. Inside the churches, my grubby fingers explored other monuments with the figures of men and women in armour or stiff ruffs; and I remember being startled when I saw, on the walls, plaques to soldiers killed in action in Daddy’s war.
Every November 11th, I was taken to the cenotaph, and watched aghast, as women draped in black wept. I wore a Flanders poppy and Father wore his medals, and looked as if he might cry, too. It worried me very much.
*
Helen’s parents were not unusual in 1920s England in being very class-conscious, and although they could not afford an upper-middle-class lifestyle on Paul Huband’s earnings, they were determined to demonstrate all the outward trappings. Unbeknownst to Helen, their debts were continuing to multiply throughout the decade.
My brother and I observed another world moving round us, though we were not allowed to connect with it in any way. It was the working-class world, kept separate from us because we were upper middle-class and mixed with County people. At that time, I might not know much else, but I knew exactly how I fitted into the class structure and that I was Church of England.
Rough and noisy children tumbled past our gate on their way to and from the village, presumably going to school. On Sundays they came by dressed for church, and I remember, in the summer, envying the girls their long fair hair crowned with bright yellow straw hats decked with yards of pink ribbon. My hair was cut short. In winter, I wore a boy’s cap exactly like my brother, and in summer a round sailor hat with a white top, and a navy ribbon round it with H.M.S. Rodney on the front – with matching sailor suits and sailor dresses. It was a long-lasting fashion.
Some of the despised working class came into our house or garden quite regularly. They were mostly men, the postman, hedgers and ditchers and thatchers and pond cleaners, well diggers, delivery boys, bricklayers, the gardener, the local blacksmith with a new wrought-iron gate, tramps begging for food, gypsies wanting to sell clothes pegs and tell your fortune. A wonderful collection of characters.
The workmen who came would always talk to a watching little boy and girl, and I think they were the first people I ever talked freely to.
Another thing that separated them from local people was religion: Helen and Alan were not allowed to play with Roman Catholic children. The prohibition by her parents was so strict that it seemed to Helen as if Roman Catholic children must carry an infectious disease.
They moved to Ross-on-Wye and Helen was sent to Ross High School, where she made her first proper friend, a girl called Joan Brawn, who was the daughter of a newly widowed lady who lived nearby. Helen’s parents approved of the connection but Joan’s mother seemed curiously reluctant to let her daughter visit the Huband household. As Helen explained later, ‘Joan told me it was because my parents had a bad reputation. I knew, in Ludlow, from Edith talking to the daily cleaning lady, who came in, that it was the same story. Scandal went round these tiny towns faster than flood water.’
The scandal to which she referred was largely to do with her parents running up debts all over the place, then fleeing from their creditors, which was particularly frowned upon in someone who worked for a bank. ‘Things began to fall apart. I heard someone say that my father was in financial difficulties, whatever that might mean,’ Helen recalled.
If Helen was right in thinking her parents were unfaithful to each other, perhaps that was also a factor in tarnishing their good name. And there was one more thing she was aware of, but likely did not grasp the significance of at the time: her father had suffered a heart attack in 1928, when he was just thirty-three years old, which must have made it even harder for him to deal with the pressure he was under.
The family moved once again, probably fleeing all the creditors on their tails, and this time they relocated to Nottingham, so Helen was separated from Joan.
My parents rented a very big town house – a very nice one. They sublet a lot of it. My brother and I were sent to a school, which seemed very much rougher to me.
In Nottingham, I went to Trent Boulevard School for a few weeks, and there I met Mary Southall, the daughter of the Methodist minister of the chapel further up Bridgford Road than us.
They obviously decided that I needed to be ‘saved’ from my surroundings, so I spent a lot of time in their house and at their chapel. What they taught me, gently, of integrity, honesty, common decency, has remained with me. I shudder to think what my life might have been in Liverpool, if they had not explained about chastity and ‘fallen women’. They are the family to whom I really owe an awful lot.
In 1930 Helen noticed that her parents had stopped entertaining visitors at the house, and one day she realized that her mother’s collection of Georgian silver had vanished from the antique sideboard. She asked where it had gone but was told by Lavinia: ‘Girls should not poke their noses into the business of grown-ups.’ And then their housemaid, Mary Ann, left and it became clear
she wasn’t planning to come back. Something odd was going on, but Helen had no idea what.
Lavinia was admitted to hospital to give birth to her seventh child, Edward, and immediately afterwards had to have a hysterectomy. While she was recuperating in hospital, her husband was declared bankrupt. Helen was told about it by a schoolfriend.
She wrote in Twopence to Cross the Mersey that it was ‘a not uncommon occurrence in the world of 1930, but strange to me. I had heard vaguely that going bankrupt was an American disease which had struck Wall Street in New York, and that Americans committed suicide when this happened to them; mentally, I saw dozens of them hurling themselves off the tops of skyscrapers, and I wondered where Father would find a skyscraper.’
When my grandfather’s employers found out about his bankruptcy, it was the final straw and they fired him. He was out of work, with seven children to feed, just as the world teetered on the brink of the Great Depression triggered by the Wall Street Crash. Stock prices tumbled, manufacturing industries failed, and unemployment began to rise. By 1933, 2.5 million would be unemployed in Britain, a staggering twenty-five per cent of the workforce.
When Helen’s mother heard the news in her hospital bed that her husband had lost his job, she must have been devastated. None of them had any idea yet of what the effects of bankruptcy would be on the whole family, or that my grandfather, in his naïvety, was about to make a string of disastrous decisions that would threaten the very existence of them all.
Chapter Four
When I came to Liverpool as a young girl, I was simply terrified by it – it was so black with soot – and a lot of its people were misshapen and ugly from the awful circumstances in which they lived and worked – people who face the utmost poverty are rarely pretty, and about the streets were many people who reminded me of the hobgoblins in my story books and, what’s more, I couldn’t understand a word of the language!
It’s difficult to put myself in my grandfather’s shoes as he tried to decide what to do in the aftermath of the bankruptcy and the loss of his job. He was well-educated, and surely a sensible man with less false pride would have sought advice before making any hasty decisions. But events moved quickly: the domestic staff walked out, one of them taking my grandmother’s clothes in lieu of unpaid wages; creditors were desperately clamouring for repayment; and, with his wife still in hospital, Grandfather relied on Helen to look after her younger siblings during those desperate days. I presume he tried to negotiate with his creditors, but none of them would give him any more leeway after hearing he had lost his job. Besides, it must have been well known that he had run away from previous debts; he was not a good credit risk.
In Twopence to Cross the Mersey, my mother explains his next actions.
Father had no knowledge of the legal rights of a bankrupt to clothing and bedding, so he sent the key of our house to his main creditor, a moneylender, with instructions to sell the house and its contents, and to reimburse himself from the proceeds. From a misguided sense of honour, he left everything we possessed, except the clothing in which he and his family were dressed, taking only a pair of blankets in which to wrap my mother and the new baby, Edward.
With the last ten pounds in his pocket, he bought tickets for the whole family to travel to Liverpool, city of his birth, imagining there must be work in such a big port, with industries that had been thriving at the turn of the century based on the wealth of the Empire. Helen’s brother Alan recalled their father telling him, at the time, that ‘by stealth’ they were going to try to get to Liverpool and that there were a number of old friends who had promised to help. These promises, however, did not materialize.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, the port of Liverpool had been second only to London as a hub through which goods were imported and exported to serve the needs of the nation. The opening of the Manchester Ship Canal in 1894 secured its status by allowing the industrial heartlands easy access to the port facilities. Liverpool’s main industries were shipbuilding, glass manufacture, iron foundries and soap making. In the early twentieth century, the city’s wealth was displayed for all to see in the grand buildings erected along the waterfront: the Port of Liverpool Building, the Liver Building and the Cunard Building, jointly known as The Three Graces. Much later, Helen would grow to love that waterfront and its magnificent buildings, which now have UNESCO World Heritage status.
But while there were rich pickings for the wealthy, there was a dark side to the story. In 1928, the year before the Wall Street Crash, fourteen per cent of the population of Liverpool were in a state of poverty, barely able to feed themselves and living huddled together in overcrowded slums that were breeding grounds for infectious diseases. Immediately after the Wall Street Crash in October 1929, the American Government clamped down on the import of foreign goods and demanded repayment of outstanding loans. Both of these actions had instant effects on Liverpool’s docks, leading to a massive drop in revenues and to hundreds of workers being laid off. Worldwide, prices fell and foreign imports were taxed, causing the value of British exports to halve in just a year. My grandfather obviously had not been reading the newspapers closely, because by the time he arrived in Liverpool with his family in the winter of 1930–31, the unemployment rate there was double the national average. It would continue to rise until, at its worst, almost a third of working-age men were unable to find jobs.
Britain’s northern industrial cities, such as Glasgow, Manchester, Sheffield and Liverpool, were badly hit in the Depression, while the South, where light industries – chemicals and electrical goods – dominated, remained relatively unscathed. My grandfather would have done better to have stayed in Nottingham but perhaps he was too ashamed. He was under immense pressure. I understand his uncertainty and despair.
The family arrived in Liverpool on a dismal, wet, grey day. Helen’s mother was still very weak from her operation and could not walk unaided, so she lay in the station waiting room surrounded by her children while my grandfather went out to look for accommodation for them. All he could find was a single room, with ‘a suffocating odour of unwashed bodies, old cooking and cats’. After buying some bread, milk and sausages, his cash ran out and they could not afford a bag of coal to heat the place. A Roman Catholic priest helped that first time, but he warned my grandparents that unemployment was rising and that finding a job would not be easy.
Gradually their disastrous situation began to sink in. After hearing her parents tell the priest a well-edited version of their story, Helen, aged ten and a half, understood more of what was happening and felt a sense of foreboding.
Now, at last, I knew why we were in Liverpool and what the word ‘bankruptcy’ really meant to our family. I knew with terrible clarity that I would never see my bosom friend, Joan, again, never play with my doll’s house, never be the captain of the hockey team or be in the Easter pageant. My little world was swept away.
I looked at Alan, who was standing equally silently by the window. His eyes met mine and we shared the same sense of desolation. Then his golden eyelashes covered his eyes and shone with tears, half-hidden.
My grandfather went to the authorities to claim unemployment benefit but he didn’t realize that it was paid at the level given by the last town in which they had registered as residents. In Nottingham in early 1931, this was forty-three shillings a week – less than he would have got had he been a Liverpool resident, and a ridiculously tiny amount on which to feed and house a family of nine.
Permanent accommodation was eventually found at a private house in the south of the city: two top-floor rooms and an attic in very run-down condition. Neither of my grandparents realized that the twenty-seven shillings a week charged by the landlady was way above the going rate – yet another example of their poor financial skills. Alan, Fiona, Brian, Tony and Avril were registered at a local school, which at least had the benefit of being heated during the day, but Helen was kept at home to look after baby Edward, while both of her parents tried to find work. At t
he age of eleven, she was put in charge of cooking, cleaning, laundry, and trying to make a shilling a day (equivalent to five pence in modern British currency) stretch so she could produce an evening meal for the whole family. A pint of milk for the baby cost twopence, leaving ten old pennies for a loaf of bread, a bag of potatoes, and possibly a penny worth of bacon or margarine. Their staple diet was boiled potatoes, and gnawing hunger pains were a sensation they soon got used to.
Other people were poor in Liverpool in 1930, but Helen stood out as ‘not like them’:
In a middle-class school uniform, with a very cultivated speech, with a small baby in my arms, I ventured into a world where other children jeered and laughed at me. I had been taught by my grandmother that property was sacred, so I could not steal as other children did. She also taught me that food that had been dropped on the ground or into garbage cans must never be touched – it would probably poison me and I would die. So, as if I was a high-caste Hindu, I left such things untouched.
Perhaps my grandfather thought, when he moved to Liverpool, that his mother would be forced to help them but he had burnt his boats in that respect many years earlier. She still had her home in Hoylake, a ferry ride across the Mersey, and a decent income, but there had been a falling-out between her and Helen’s parents a few years earlier. Now Helen’s grandmother was unwilling to help them in their time of need. Paul’s brother Frank had died in 1923 and his other brother Percy had himself been declared bankrupt. Of the five siblings, only the girls were to be provided for. Helen wrote to Avril about it in later life.
Grandfather’s monies were held in trust, so that Grandma could live on the interest and the capital distributed amongst his children after she died. All the monies which our father would have inherited went to Auntie Phyllis, most of it as interest on small loans she made him when we were little.
Passage Across the Mersey Page 4