Passage Across the Mersey

by Robert Bhatia

  Thank you very much for your letter and your most helpful criticisms of my book. It was very good of you to take so much trouble over the work of a perfect stranger at a time when you must have been proper ‘arassed’.

  I have no hope at present of having time to do any more work on the book, so I think the best I can do is to let it travel to one of the publishers you mention and see what happens to it. I am enclosing a covering letter to Hodder and Stoughton, and hoped to trespass on your kindness further by asking you to send it to them.

  One of the minor difficulties of life here is the lack of international postal coupons – the only post office which sells them is five miles away and is usually out of stock – so I am sending another dollar bill and trust that you may be able to enclose with the parcel to H and S about six shillings worth of English stamps. I hope this will not cause you a lot of trouble.

  I feel that your criticism of the first half of the book is justified and I certainly could cut it considerably and still retain that ‘flavour’ of Peggie’s English life in it, by omitting Angela’s adventures and telescoping Peggie’s earlier history.

  I am rather attached to Khan and think I would leave him safely down the well [he committed suicide], as it is a very ordinary example of how the not inconsiderable amount of straying done by Indian wives is dealt with, and is the pivot on which the second thoughts of Father Singh regarding Peggie and Ajit revolve. Life in India is so frequently melodramatic by European standards that one of my greatest problems when writing about it was to find incidents which would sound plausible to European ears!

  I learned so much while writing this book and I wish very much that I could do some more work on it, but I have a husband in permanently poor health and a boy of two to cope with – and two-year-olds just do not understand about the need for quiet for invalids! The little lad also does not understand that most little boys go to sleep at night and take naps in the day time. I do hope your baby sleeps well and is thriving happily.

  I agree with you about agents and have always marketed my own work.

  With very many thanks for all your help I hope I may have the pleasure of meeting you one day.

  Over forty years later, Helen claimed that the highlight of her entire writing career was getting the phone call from Hodder & Stoughton to say they had accepted Alien There Is None. A written offer followed and on 21 February 1958, Helen responded to Paul Hodder-Willams, Esq., with a hint of the shrewd business sense she had developed while working for the Metal Box Company in Liverpool.

  Thank you for your letter dated February 10, for your offer, and for your kind remarks regarding Alien There is None.

  I hope very much that our business association may be a long and pleasant one, and profitable to both of us.

  Before I sign the memorandum of agreement, I should be grateful if you would clarify a few points for me.

  I am sorry to question what is probably your standard memorandum of agreement and I feel sure that your firm would treat me fairly if anything untoward occurred so that publication was indefinitely delayed, but it would seem inadvisable on my part to sign a memorandum of agreement whereby a manuscript could languish on someone’s desk for years without being published and without my being able to regain possession of it.

  Despite the trepidation she must have felt at questioning anything that might get in the way of the triumph of being published, Helen was careful to protect herself. Her shrewdness in such matters would serve her well for decades.

  My mother spent most of her £100 advance at the Hudson’s Bay Company (which had been founded in 1670 as a fur-trading company but was now a chain of department stores), where she bought a lovely set of Queen Anne china with a delicate snowdrop pattern. It was probably the only truly luxurious purchase she made in the first forty years of her life. The appearance of that china always signified a very special occasion. I knew its significance and, while some pieces got broken or faded over the years, I used it in December 2015 to serve tea, sausage rolls and shortbread to friends with enough of an English connection to appreciate it.

  The first copies of the book were sent to Mum in March 1959, an event that she greeted with excitement almost as great as the day when she got the phone call to tell her she was to be a published author. Although her novel was coming out in Britain, copies would also be sold in Canada – thus the interest of the Edmonton Journal, who sent a photographer to take the picture described in the Prologue to this book.

  Shortly after this, my mother’s efforts shifted to the task of getting us all across to England, since my father was to spend the summer of 1959 at the University of Liverpool. He was flying to India first to visit his family and then to England, which was no inconsiderable journey. My mother and I, along with several large steamer trunks and suitcases, would make the three-day train journey to Montreal and then the seven-day voyage to Liverpool. She organized everything.

  There was snow on the front steps on the cold May morning when the taxi arrived to take us to the railway station. I remember being awestruck by that train journey. We had the luxury of a private ‘bedroom’ with its own bathroom and a bed that magically appeared from the ceiling while we were eating dinner in the dining car. The heartland of Canada unfolded before my eyes as my mother read to me or played games like Snap and Happy Family. For me this excitement was only surpassed when we embarked from Montreal on Cunard’s Carinthia for the crossing to Liverpool.

  It’s only now I appreciate what a tremendous relief that trip must have been for Mum. After almost six lonely years in Canada, she was going home.

  *

  I was not yet four years old, but my mother’s enthusiasm for England and the novelty of our experiences there had a marked effect on me. The country had largely recovered from the war and for a child in 1959 it was charming. Rationing had ended five years earlier, unemployment was very low and the lush green countryside had yet to be crisscrossed by motorways. We stayed in a flat in Birkenhead, across the Mersey from Liverpool and just along from the Wirral peninsula. Digging in the sand at the seaside with both Mummy and Daddy, riding on a donkey along the shore, taking the train or double-decker bus and exploring the villages of the Wirral was magical. I remember meeting my grandparents and thinking them quite ordinary little people, long before I read about them in my mother’s memoirs. I also met Mum’s sister Fiona and her brother Brian, but I still had no real idea of the desperately hard childhood they’d all endured.

  Years later, when my wife and I read Shirley Hughes’s Dogger and her various Alfie books to our children, I’d often get a lump in my throat because it seemed as if she was describing those times. When researching for this paragraph, I was stunned to discover that she was born and brought up in West Kirby, precisely where I had been to the seaside and where we would live a few years later, from 1963 to ’64.

  I also remember the empty spaces between buildings in the centre of Liverpool, caused by wartime bombing, but they had little real meaning to me. Looking back, it was only fourteen years since the end of the war. The memories would have been very fresh and painful for my mother but it was still her home. At the time, I think she hoped that my father would return permanently to the university where he had earned his PhD, so we could live in a society she felt part of – but it was not to be.

  Once or twice while we were there, my mother disappeared to do interviews about her book, which she had brought to the attention of the BBC and, I presume, the Liverpool Echo. This did not strike me as particularly unusual, or very interesting.

  The magical summer of 1959 was a wonderful introduction to the English side of my heritage. When my mother spoke about England and Liverpool now I had real, if selective, pictures in my mind.

  *

  At the end of August, my mother and I boarded Cunard’s Sylvania for the voyage to Montreal and then the Super Continental back to Edmonton. I went to playschool for two years and then to school. Mum told me later that someone at the local school had wa
rned that she and Dad should not attempt to teach me Hindi as it might confuse me when I started to learn to read. It’s a shame I missed out on that opportunity, but otherwise I received a very good education.

  Mum used to invite other university wives to the house and the women made polite conversation in the sitting room while I played with their children outdoors. She was always welcoming to any school friends I wanted to play with and the children whose parents were out at work tended to gravitate to our house. Later, I found out that my mother had read a book about how to teach children to play. She certainly spent a lot of time with me, playing snakes and ladders, reading Enid Blyton or Treasure Island to me, even letting me pitch to her in the back garden while she held a plastic baseball bat. Gradually I became more independent, but I always remained very close to my mother.

  Somewhat like the caricature of the 1950s housewife that is so widespread today, Mum ensured that the house was a calm oasis for my father. Her efforts to make our home attractive and comfortable probably reflected a little of the ideal of her grandmother’s house as well as a reaction to the turmoil and disorder she had endured in her family’s homes. Max Born’s wife had told Helen that physicists’ wives had to be very practical and despite my father’s occasional pleadings to ‘get a man in’, Helen did as many household tasks and repairs as she possibly could herself.

  My father worked long hours while my mother did everything else. She always dealt with any practical matters, such as cooking meals, tending the house and caring for me. It was only once I was at school that she was able to snatch a few hours to start writing again. Her typewriter was perched on the dining-room table in our bungalow, and then on a small desk in the dining room of the house we moved to in 1968.

  By 1960, Mum had grown very tired and a wise doctor suggested that my father spend Saturday afternoons with me in order to give her a break. He did, and it was wonderful. He took me shopping, we went for walks to his office, and he gamely played catch with a baseball, learned to bowl with me and later to play golf. It made our relationship closer and was good for both of us.

  My father’s health remained fragile, though. During the early 1960s, he gained a lot of weight due to the treatments prescribed for his ulcer, in an era when there was little understanding of ulcers. He then developed glaucoma and did not go to an eye doctor until it was almost too late. Only a new type of experimental surgery saved his sight.

  Dad was due to spend a sabbatical year in Liverpool but it had to be delayed by a year because of the surgery. It was the late summer of 1963 when we set off. Once again, steamer trunks were packed and my mother and I embarked on the ten-day train and sea voyage, while my dad flew directly to England. Before we left, Mum bought a beautiful feathered hat. She had a firm belief that its charm would ease her way through British Customs with her collection of a dozen trunks and suitcases. I must say it seemed to work.

  This time we lived in West Kirby, the next village along from Hoylake where my mother was born. I attended the local primary school and found I was well ahead of the other children my age, except when it came to adding pounds, shillings and pence – and even that was not insurmountable. My father was out teaching and doing research at the University of Liverpool all day, so my mother had a bit more time for her writing. The Moneylenders of Shahpur was finished in May 1964, although it would not find a publisher until 1987.

  During that year in England I remember visiting my grandparents several times and meeting most of my aunts and uncles and a number of my cousins. At Christmas 1963 my grandparents came to our house, along with my auntie Fiona and her family, for a nice Christmas dinner and playtime with the latest toy cars.

  My grandfather was ailing and he passed away that spring of 1964 at the age of seventy. I remember Mum going to see him in hospital the evening he died. Later that week my uncles and aunts gathered for the funeral. Mum attended while I stayed at home with my father during the service and then joined her at the little reception afterwards. In her private way, she grieved the loss of her father but I imagine she was also grieving for the family life that might have been had he and his wife not been such damaged individuals. At the time of his death Mum had had very little contact with him for many years, but she always kept a photograph of him on her bedroom wall.

  *

  When we returned to Canada in summer 1964, my mother wrote The Latchkey Kid, by far her most controversial novel. Inspired by a string of youth suicides that had been reported in the press, it was a satirical commentary on women who were too busy trying to achieve social prominence to attend to their families. Mum intended the book to be funny but it attracted a lot of criticism. She was a relative newcomer to Canada, a ‘refined’ English immigrant, and she was talking about an uncomfortable truth that Canadians were touchy about. Her strident defence of the book’s satirical perspective and subsequent discussions about the interplay between fact and fiction left a strong impression on me. The Latchkey Kid did modestly well in Canada and was republished later in the United Kingdom but it discouraged her from writing novels with contemporary Canadian settings.

  My father’s career was flourishing and the Theoretical Physics Institute was established at the University of Alberta to develop research contacts at other universities, both in Canada and overseas. A flow of visiting professors came from all over the world. The custom at the time was that they were entertained in the home. As a result, my mother and I became quite expert at evening ‘coffee parties’. We served sherry or whisky and soda as well as coffee, and finger foods such as the classic cocktail stick with a chunk of Cheddar cheese, a piece of pineapple and a maraschino cherry. I often helped to hand round the food and once earned a new sort of admiration from my mother when I helped her to arrange a coffee party at just three hours’ notice.

  As well as physics, my father was knowledgeable about English and Indian history and culture and was very well-informed on world events and politics. My mother read widely, both fiction and non-fiction, and did endless research for her novels. As a result, my parents spent a lot of time ‘putting the world to rights’ in the privacy of their own home. They discussed history, politics and the issues of the day in depth. My father was always supportive of my mother’s writing career and, even more importantly, he was a constant source of intellectual stimulation and clearly appreciated her intelligence.

  While Edmonton was still a small city and Helen did not develop many close friendships, she was not entirely isolated. There was a small writing community and a local chapter of the Canadian Authors Association, whose meetings she attended regularly. There was no dedicated independent bookstore in the city until 1956 – and then it was the first one between Toronto and Vancouver – but its ambitious owner eventually evolved into a publisher. Naturally, the store had a close relationship with local authors.

  The Hudson’s Bay Company department store had a good book department too. Moreover, it sponsored the annual Beaver award for the best submitted unpublished manuscript. In 1970, my mother returned home late one evening teary-eyed with excitement and clutching the golden trophy – ‘My Beaver’ – and $500 for The Moneylenders of Shahpur. She was very proud of that award and kept it permanently on display.

  In the later 1960s, my mother was working on her novel Liverpool Daisy when a reporter proved to be an unexpected source of inspiration. As she explained later:

  I had written three novels, the latest one being The Latchkey Kid, and had had some success. The local Canadian newspaper, therefore, sent a young reporter to interview me – this city did not have many authors in those days.

  I brought out my best [snowdrops] tea set and made tea and cookies for him, and we had quite an amiable hour together. Imagine my horror when, a few days later, there was a page in the paper about ‘this sheltered little professor’s wife sitting amid her priceless English teacups. What did she know about life, still less about Canada?’

  I was terribly, terribly angry. His interviewing had been totally superf
icial and he never asked details of my life. I was in the middle of writing Liverpool Daisy, but I put her on hold and, in total rage, wrote Twopence to Cross the Mersey.

  Helen consulted her family members back home before embarking on her first memoir. ‘I told [my mother] it won’t be very nice, but she said “go ahead and be as kind as you can”.’

  My grandmother visited Canada in 1968 and stayed with us for several weeks. I found her difficult to get along with and I don’t think my mother enjoyed the visit much either. None of us was used to the kind of intrusion that houseguests bring. Lavinia died in 1972 before Twopence was published. My auntie Avril cared for her in her final weeks and Helen provided support by letter and telephone. After she passed away, Mum tried to book a flight to England to attend the funeral but found it impossible to get there in time and at an affordable cost so she grieved for her mother quietly, in her own way. Her childhood had been difficult and her relationship with Lavinia had often been fraught, but the loss of her second parent severed a link to the past.

  Before sending Twopence out to publishers Mum changed all the names and used the pseudonym Helen Forrester for the first time to give herself an easy-to-pronounce English name and so that her siblings need not be identifiable. In fact they were proud of the book and told all their friends about it. Ten publishers rejected Twopence, with one editor saying he couldn’t believe the suffering depicted and another complaining that it wasn’t humorous. The editor at Jonathan Cape who accepted the manuscript, Tom Maschler, understood because he had seen and experienced similar hardship in Germany during the Depression.