When we lived in Ross, Granny came to see us, and made an agreement with Daddy – which she had already made with Uncle Percy (Uncle Frank was by then dead) – that her home and its contents should be left to Aunties Phyllis and Stella. She was anxious that they not be uprooted and made homeless by a legal challenge to her own will. Of course, Father agreed, because he had, at that time, a good job and real prospects.
Daddy had borrowed from his sister, Phyllis, regularly and signed agreements that she should be repaid after Granny’s death out of his share of their father’s reversionary interest. What he had not reckoned on was that the courts ruled that Auntie Phyllis was entitled, by the agreements he had signed, to collect INTEREST on 20-year-old loans! So our family ended up without a cent. In fact, Father still owed money to his sister.
From time to time, when they were in Liverpool, a small package would be delivered with a Hoylake postmark.
It always contained a pair of very soft, finely knitted children’s combinations; there was never any note. 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?
One of the most difficult things for anyone to understand about Helen’s story is how her grandmother could have abandoned the family. In 1997, Helen spoke to a class of children at Wyedean School in Gloucestershire. Afterwards, the pupils did a variety of exercises, including composing imaginary letters from Helen to her grandmother asking for assistance. Helen wrote to the English teacher with the following explanation of why her grandmother did not help the struggling family.
My grandmother was bitter that two of her sons made a mess of their lives – but she expected them to get on and clear up the mess. Hardship was punishment for their stupidity. The Bible says that God ‘visits the sins of the fathers upon the children’, and that was part of the attitude.
In those days, real suffering was much more common than we realize, and people were accustomed to the idea of it. For example, even basic medical care was not always available or affordable.
After the First World War, there was a lot of what was called ‘genteel poverty’. Many well-educated people who had lost their money as a result of the war lived in extreme poverty, which they hid from their neighbours as much as possible.
You were told that ‘the Lord made the burden and He knows how much you can bear’ so you got on with your miserable life and bore it. You did not give up easily. These people maintained their good manners and their pride in family but they were very poor. I think that is how my grandmother viewed my parents. I don’t think she would have been particularly sympathetic to a whining letter from me.
She would simply think that, well, lots of nice people are poor; she would not, never having seen it (remember there were no televisions with pictures of starving people to enlighten her), believe that anyone could actually starve in Britain. She would tend to say that they should get up off their butts and work.
My grandmother was, indeed, a very nice woman, for her time; yet she held ideas which are alien to us nowadays.
My great-grandmother was eighty-three years old in 1931, and had two daughters and Helen’s cousin at least partially dependent on her – and the aunts, too, had very little sympathy for Helen’s family. Help was not going to be forthcoming from that quarter. They were on their own.
It wasn’t long before the effects of the Hubands’ poor diet were evident: the weight dropped off the children, leaving them skinny-limbed and prone to catching all the bugs doing the rounds, then struggling to fight them off again; my grandmother’s teeth fell out, marring her once-beautiful looks, and my grandfather fell into a state of hopelessness and depression. When Helen became seriously ill with an ear infection and was referred to a hospital specialist, he was aghast at the sight of her protruding ribs and the buttocks that were so bony it hurt her to sit on a chair. ‘Even in this city,’ he said sternly, ‘it is some time since I saw such a shocking case of malnutrition.’
Helen said in later life that she believed that doctor saved her hearing and, quite possibly, her life when he ‘tore into my mother about the need to see that I was fed. From that moment, my life took a tiny turn for the better.’ In a lecture in 1992, she added: ‘It was only when, after the war, I saw the pictures of the inmates of Auschwitz that I fully understood how close to death we had been.’
Many years later, Alan wrote to my mother that social services had visited while she was out one day and that the children were lucky not to have been taken into care. It seems likely that Helen’s malnutrition had been reported to the authorities, and possibly Brian’s had been noted when he was in hospital with quinsy (a serious throat infection). In some ways my grandparents can be excused for their lack of financial common sense, but when I read in my mother’s memoirs that her parents still borrowed money to subsidize their smoking habits, their callousness seems incomprehensible.
My mother was lucky not to suffer any long-term ill effects from the starvation she experienced for several years from the age of eleven. It helped that she had been well fed up to that age, by Edith the nanny and other domestic staff at their previous houses, and also when staying with her grandmother. Once she was earning her own money, from the age of fifteen onwards, gradually she began to return to a healthy weight.
In adult life my mother always appreciated good plain food and was genuinely concerned for anyone who didn’t seem to eat enough. It is no wonder that Edmonton’s food bank was one of her favourite charities or that she felt quite comfortable talking with homeless men drifting in and out of the river valley near her home.
Helen felt deeply the unfairness that her siblings were allowed to go to school while she, by dint of being the eldest, was not. ‘I became housekeeper, nanny, general factotum, to six uncaring siblings and two incapable and bad-tempered parents. I discovered that the one at home must always do without, because she did not have to go to school or work.’ This fundamental injustice was one of the most important lessons I took from my mother’s story and, as a result, I have always been very sensitive about treating my own children scrupulously fairly.
Helen had a thirst for knowledge and a love of reading that had been stimulated by her grandmother and now there were no outlets for either in the daily drudgery of her life. She was befriended by an elderly Lebanese gentleman she met in a local park, a man who spoke many languages and had worked as an interpreter. His wife and three sons were dead and now he was awaiting his own death, but still he enjoyed books and sitting outdoors in the sunshine. Helen began to sit with him regularly during the summer of 1931 and haltingly confided in him about her family’s difficulties. He counselled that her present difficulties were only temporary and advised that she should read as much as possible: ‘One day, you will have the opportunity to make use of the knowledge that you will accumulate,’ he said, adding that scholarship might not earn you much money but that it enriched your mind.
Of course, my mother loved books and in particular she loved libraries, describing them as ‘beacons of light in a dark world’. For an anniversary celebration of the Edmonton Public Library, she recalled, ‘In his destitution, my father also felt the loss of books. With two precious pennies he enrolled himself in the local Carnegie public library, full of volumes often so tattered that pages were missing. He could also read the newspapers there.
‘Dressed in garments which barely covered me, and with my filthy baby brother on my hip, I borrowed his card and faced irate librarians who wanted to send me to the children’s department. I insisted in my high-bred English accent that I had to get books for my father. They let me in. They became my friends.’
There were other uplifting moments when Helen could forget her situation for a while.
Every week
the Salvation Army Band came to our street corner, all dressed up in their uniforms, cymbals clashing, drums rattling, trumpets blowing. They would play all kinds of lively hymn tunes, while we stood and listened, and sometimes joined in the singing. Another musical effort was that of the hurdy-gurdy man. He had a monkey with him, who used to carry a hat round the audience to collect pennies from us. Then there were sad Welsh miners, standing in the gutters and singing superbly their Welsh songs for pennies.
But before long something would remind her of the family’s desperate circumstances. It must have been a bitter blow when she spotted her old friend Joan in the streets of Liverpool one wintry day, on an outing with her mother, and neither would acknowledge her. It was just over a year since they had last seen each other but in that time everything had changed. Suddenly Helen saw herself through their eyes.
Coming towards me, amid the well-dressed shoppers, was an apparition. A very thin thing draped in an indescribably dirty woollen garment which flapped hopelessly, hair which hung in rat’s tails over a wraithlike face, thin legs partially encased in black stockings torn at the knees and gaping at the thighs, flapping, broken canvas covering the feet.
I slowed down nervously, and then stared with dawning horror.
I was looking at myself in a dress shop window.
I have read it many times now but my mother’s inspired description of herself still fills me with sadness.
In the spring of 1932, after months of fruitless trudging to the labour exchange, Helen’s father obtained a poorly paid job as a clerk for the city, helped by a policeman who noticed his Denstone school tie; by coincidence, he had also attended Denstone. The school’s benevolent fund gave my grandfather the money to buy some decent clothes to wear to an interview, as well as a haircut, and the policeman provided a reference that secured him the job. Meanwhile, my grandmother took a succession of sales jobs, but the family remained hard up. Partly this was to do with Paul and Lavinia’s regular consumption of tobacco and his drinking, but it was also because of some unwise hire-purchase agreements they entered into in order to buy furniture. Under the terms of the contracts, they made monthly payments set at a level that meant they would eventually pay much more than if they had bought the goods outright. Until the last payment was made, ownership of the furniture rested with the hire-purchase company. If they defaulted, the goods were repossessed – and yet they still had to continue the monthly payments. Being my grandparents, they always fell foul of this type of agreement and ended up having their income drained by making payments for furniture they no longer had. These types of contract are more strictly regulated in the present day, but in the 1930s there were plenty of financially illiterate people who entered into them, only to rue the day.
As the person left at home during the day, Helen lived in fear of bailiffs who might come to take away the few possessions they had amassed. It seemed there was no way out of the financial black hole into which the family had tumbled.
Chapter Five
I had never considered that children might love their mother. I always feared mine.
It was traditional in British families in the first part of the twentieth century that the eldest daughter helped to look after her younger siblings and that she cared for her parents if they needed it. Never can this unwritten rule have been as harshly applied as it was to my mother in the 1930s. There was no question of any of the other children missing their schooling to help with baby Edward. Helen’s suggestions that perhaps she could go to school for a term, or maybe even attend evening classes, were met with fury and steely refusals, particularly by her mother.
Lavinia and Paul were breaking the law, since all British children were required to attend school until their fourteenth birthdays. When Helen dropped Fiona at school one day in spring 1933 when she was thirteen and three-quarters, she was questioned by a teacher, which led to a visit from a school attendance officer. How her parents avoided legal sanction is unclear, but Helen was required to go to school for the final six weeks before she turned fourteen. Her parents were outraged, but had no say in the matter, and Helen was thrilled. ‘It was bliss to hold a pencil in my unaccustomed fingers and to try my wits against the work put in front of me.’ The education she had received in her first ten years stood her in good stead and she found she was ahead of her contemporaries in every subject except maths – and that she had a particular talent for art.
There was a scholarship available at the City School of Art, and Helen’s art teacher nominated her for it. Her hopes were raised but when she heard nothing, she assumed she had not been picked. Some time later, Alan reported that his headmaster told him Helen had won the scholarship and enquired how she was getting on with it. It seemed her parents had been informed of her success but had decided not to tell her, presumably because they did not want to lose their free babysitter. Helen was devastated, as she wrote in Twopence.
I rocked myself backwards and forwards, as my touching belief that my parents, even if they had not much love for me, would do their best for me, and that they had always done so, died. I was in agony. The research into the ruthless exploitation of the eldest child was still far in the future, and there was no explanation to console my childish despair.
In 1948, psychoanalyst Melitta Schmideberg (among others) wrote that parents who had suffered emotional deprivation in their own youth could subconsciously treat their eldest child as a parent substitute, in a process called ‘parentification’. The child thus parentified not only lost out on a proper childhood but also lost his or her sense of identity in a way that could be a hindrance in social relationships in adult life.
Helen’s parents were like children themselves, floundering in the financial mess of their own making. While Helen budgeted, tried to save money to replace worn-out clothing, and sacrificed her own needs for the sake of her siblings, Lavinia made ridiculous financial decisions like coming home with a box of cream cakes when they had no meat, bread or milk. Her father couldn’t stop himself buying alcohol and cigarettes even as his children subsisted on meals of a couple of boiled potatoes. Helen explained this away, saying, ‘Life seemed so hopeless that they snatched at any treat, as if they had only the present and there was no future.’
Her mother frequently sat down to write begging letters to their old acquaintances which, for a woman who used to have a surfeit of pride, must have been hard. It seems most of her letters went unanswered, but the family received the occasional hand-out: once a five-pound note was awarded from a fund run by Paul Huband’s old regiment, and another time a packet of second-hand clothes arrived from the mother of Helen’s old friend Joan, amplifying the humiliation Helen had felt when she saw them in the street.
Another route out of poverty could be to get the children into work and the eldest son, Alan’s, future career was hotly debated in the household. My grandmother and grandfather agreed that he should try to get employment as an office boy in a firm where they would offer training and possibly a chance to sit professional exams. There were shipping firms, banks and estate agencies who might leap at the chance of a bright fourteen-year-old boy, to whom they need not pay much. In fact, he would eventually join the air force and move away from home in 1938. Helen got on well with him, subject, of course, to the usual little rivalries of adjacent children. After they grew up, they led their own lives, separated by their different experiences, but for the rest of his life Helen was closer to him than to any of her other siblings.
Fiona was not asked by her parents to help with the little ones because her health was frail. She and Helen comforted each other when they cuddled up in bed at night, but Fiona did not have Helen’s strength of character. Once, when she was left in charge of her younger siblings, she answered the door to the dreaded bailiffs and they snatched all the family’s furniture in payment of some long-held debts, leading Helen to feel horribly guilty for not being there.
Brian, whom Helen believed to be her mother’s favourite, began singing in a church
choir, later joined by Tony, and both of them kept out of the way as much as possible to avoid the arguments at home. Avril had ‘such a colossal temper that even Mother was silenced by it’, while baby Edward was too small to worry about.
Helen described the dynamic in Liverpool Miss: ‘As each child grew in strength, it fought quite ruthlessly for a place for itself, giving very little thought to the plight of others. I saw that the family unit was not as tightly locked as my parents were fond of imagining … Why could they not help too? I would ask angrily. And the retort was always the same, “You are the eldest.”’ It was a prodigious burden.
Nobody asked me what I would like to do. My role in life had been silently decided for me. It was obvious that my parents had no intention of allowing me to be anything but an unpaid, unrespected housekeeper. With all the passion of a fifteen-year-old, I decided that such a life was not worth living.
Helen walked to the docks one winter’s day in 1934, climbed over the safety fence and considered jumping into the oily, swirling waters, to escape from an existence that had become ‘unendurable’. A kindly sailor pulled her back from the edge and bought her a cup of tea, but that dark moment, when she reached rock bottom, helped to spur her on to start evening school, despite fierce parental disapproval. She would continue to educate herself in this way for seven years, earning scholarships so she did not have to pay the fees, and learning about book-keeping and other skills required for office work, as well as studying languages.
My mother wrote that she felt she had no choice but to have a career since it had long been impressed on her that she was not marriage material. Fiona was the beauty and all Helen had was her wits: “You can’t help your looks,” our nanny, Edith, used to say, as she scrubbed my face. “Maybe your yellow complexion is from being ill so much.”
Passage Across the Mersey Page 5