Passage Across the Mersey

by Robert Bhatia

  All my brothers and my sister are now retired and on their second careers. Alan and Brian spent their youth fighting in the war, seven years of it. Afterwards Alan became a sales rep and then bought a small hotel. He now designs gardens. Brian left the Navy loving boats but hating the Navy, and joined the Customs Service. His great interest was [coaching] boxing, but he cannot do much now, because he is very frail as a result of his war service.

  Tony was called up for the RAF and did two years’ service. He went into the Civil Service and eventually became an expert on VAT [Value Added Tax]. Retired, he now advises foreign governments on how to organize this particular tax. Edward is an MA and was the principal of a big college at his retirement. He now does a lot of social work.

  Avril went to work at fourteen and then to night school as I did. She eventually was qualified to teach and she became the Head of a Commerce Department in a high school. Retired now, she has her own business training women to return to the workforce.

  *

  On one of her Swan Hellenic cruises she met a retired but very active professor of Greek history, Professor Frank Walbank, and he became a good friend. She wrote to one of her other cruise friends about him:

  I … have an invitation to stay for a few days in Cambridge, with a darling old professor whom I met on my last cruise last fall. He is 83 years old, so I am afraid that my honour is rather safe! However, he is a delight to be with, a specialist in the history of the Aegean Sea. He knows Liverpool well, having been the Rathbone Professor of Ancient History and Classical Archaeology at the University there. He has also served as visiting professor at Pittsburgh, Berkeley and Princeton – so he is no mean scholar. He is now Professor Emeritus at Cambridge.

  I feel quite sad that we are both embedded (of necessity, almost) among our respective families over 6,000 miles distant from each other. I feel that something really good might have come out of our meeting if it had occurred earlier. He lost his wife a good many years ago. He did not do too well alone, so now he has come to live next door to his daughter, a professor of Egyptology. Anyway, I have accepted the invitation – a little is better than nothing.

  Is this a hint that there could have been some romance in the friendship had they met a few years earlier? Later she wrote to Alan about him.

  His father owned a corner shop in Bingley and wanted his only child to become a teacher, so he was sent to university. To his father’s alarm he stayed and stayed and stayed at University, and finally became a world expert in things Greek. He speaks German, Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic (Jesus’s language). I believe he can speak Arabic and some French too.

  Professor Walbank combined relatively humble beginnings with extraordinary academic achievement. Helen corresponded with him regularly and visited him a number of times. In 1996, she wrote to another Swan friend:

  I went to Cambridge and had such a good welcome there. Frank and I went some great walks in the backs by the river and had lunch in a famous room called the Combination Room, which is a sort of club room for the various college profs. It is a classically beautiful room, dating back, I believe, to the 16th century.

  One of his daughters invited us to dinner. She has such a pretty home and the conversation and the dinner were both excellent.

  There are times that, when I am with Frank, and we meet other professors, I feel like the American lady who married the poet, C. S. Lewis, and came to live with him in Oxford and found herself being patronised. I don’t know whether you saw a film called Shadowlands about them, in which this point was beautifully brought out and smartly dealt with by the American. I am not so smart. But as long as Frank does not care, I don’t care either.

  Mum had a variety of male and female friends and acquaintances in both Canada and England and maintained some connection with very old friends including John, the colleague in Liverpool who had lent her money back in 1949 when she was saving to get married to Dad. But few friendships gave her the depth of connection she longed for. A natural reserve, her unique experiences, a distance from Canadian society that she never fully bridged, the physical distance from England, her professional accomplishments without matching academic credentials, and the time and energy demanded by her work, all contributed to varying degrees of loneliness after Avadh’s death.

  No one could ever replace my father as her soul mate and companion. He was the person with whom she had made a home in three different continents, who had encouraged her to write and understood her like no one else. After losing your great love, she found, life can still be rewarding, it can still be amusing, but it is never the same again.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  I am not particularly scared of the changes which are taking place. We tend to forget the heart-turning changes which have taken place in previous times.

  Helen’s primary market was always in England and she often complained about a lack of recognition in Canada, but she was active there as well. She travelled all over Alberta to speak at schools, libraries and a Native reserve in the south, which she enjoyed immensely. She visited various places in Saskatchewan, did book tours in Ontario, and had a good following in Victoria, British Columbia, which had a significant English-born population and very strong bookstores. She acted as writer-in-residence at the Edmonton Public Library and in 1992 delivered the annual lecture in honour of the founder of the University of Alberta.

  In addition to her Beaver trophies, she received a number of local and regional awards. In 1993, the University of Alberta conferred on Helen an honorary Doctor of Letters degree ‘in recognition of an outstanding citizen for her contributions to Literature and to the cultural life of Alberta’. It was wonderful to be able to celebrate another honour with my mum, and this time Dianne, Stephen, Lauren and the rest of our family were there.

  Granny loved her grandchildren dearly, would babysit whenever asked and tried hard to relate to their busy modern lives. They appreciated her kindness and cheerfulness when they were little.

  My grandchildren have suddenly become interested in me. I think that earlier I was just part of the furniture, a granny who could not get down on the floor to play [by this time she suffered from arthritis], for example. Now they really know what I do, I have had some wonderful sessions with them about India, when I showed them photos that I have. We also tried putting on a sari and making a turban.

  Lauren recalls going to a reading her granny was giving at a local library and, along with her older brother, being called to the front afterwards to be shown off to an appreciative audience. Mourning Doves (1996) is dedicated to Stephen and Lauren.

  Back on the other side of the Atlantic, a rock band called Alternative Radio played a song they had written based on Twopence at a reception that Helen attended. The group approached Helen with the idea of developing a musical based on Twopence and she agreed straight away. Rob Fennah, who wrote the script, worked closely with Helen to ensure that it captured the story accurately. The musical was first performed in Liverpool’s Empire Theatre on 5 April 1994. Helen attended and, moved to tears, led the standing ovation as the curtain came down. Over 27,000 people attended the first run of the production and it has been restaged four times. It has now been made into a fine play, without music, which I attended in 2015.

  In 1996, in her relentless pursuit to develop compelling characters, Helen called upon a friend who had served in the French Resistance to help her devise a Norman farmer whom she could pair up with a Merseyside widow for Madame Barbara. They exchanged letters over several years about numerous aspects of French life and custom, land tenure law, and especially wartime in Occupied France.

  Her character Barbara travels to France to visit the grave of her husband, just as Helen had travelled there to see Eddie’s resting place soon after the war. She wrote to her editor:

  The book is, indeed, grim. Most of my books are because they deal with the Depression and wars, etc… . It was strange, when I was in Normandy, in October, to find a sense of the frightful aftermath of the
invasion still there, though most of the present population are too young to remember it, although most of them must have lived amid the ruins for years; and you can buy ice cream and sodas on the cliffs above the Juno and Sword landing places. There are no houses, except the new cafe, within sight. A little way away, tucked into the coast is Arromanches which was, along the seafront, totally ruined when I saw it in 1948.

  Brittany and the Loire Valley did not have this weird aura. Britons know very little about the French civilian population caught in the invasion, and I really hope to remind them of it!

  While researching this novel, Helen visited Eddie’s grave again, her own very personal emblem of Britain’s sacrifice in France. Through the process of researching and writing and, in particular, creating the character of Michel, Helen developed a much better understanding of and empathy for the French who died during the war, or who survived to live on in the devastated landscape of northern France. Madame Barbara was published in 1999, just after Helen’s eightieth birthday.

  *

  Unlike many of her generation, my mother was quick to embrace new technology. In 1992, as soon as I thought home computers were usable for word processing, I taught her the basics. While there were the inevitable frustrations we have all endured, she soon took to computers and abandoned her typewriter. She never adopted email but as the Internet developed she saw that it was important to have a presence online. Her grandson Stephen developed a website for her just as publishers and other authors were beginning to emerge online. I counselled her not to panic about online theft of her work – something many authors feared in the early days –and just to focus on producing great stories.

  In 2000, she wrote a thoughtful letter to her agent, Vivien Green, who had taken over from Richard Scott Simon, putting the new technology in a broader historical context.

  Most of the more recent developments have been along a pretty narrow road: they are not nearly so earthshaking as Microsoft would have us believe. They are just improvements on existing technology. It will all settle down, like the telephone, the car, the TV and so on. Remember those happy days when you simply telephoned (the latest technology!) to the grocer and said what you wanted that week – and it was delivered. Ah, happy days! What’s different doing it on the Internet?

  Just imagine how horrifying the advent of trains must have seemed – the whole countryside being torn up for the ugly monsters. Why could they not have stuck to horses, carts and carriages, my grandmother always wanted to know!

  Though my grandfather [Paul Huband’s father] was a director of what became the Great Western Railway and had free tickets, not once in her life did my grandmother travel in a train, and she lived until 1939! ‘Dirty things where one had to mix with the vulgar, who all want to go to Blackpool – for a holiday! Who would ever believe it could happen?’ Yet the train changed life fundamentally for the better.

  I often compare the last 50 years to the last 50 years of the 18th century, when basic inventions brought in the Industrial Revolution and the awful uprooting of thousands of country people. They were stuffed into factories and appalling slums and learned to be machines. (They used to bury the dead child labourers from the factories at night, so as to avoid a public outcry.)

  And a great number of adults were left helpless, because they could not read or write, just like the yobs of today, who will never be computer literate and will expend their frustration at others getting richer, by rioting in exactly the same way. Remember Peterloo and the Corn Riots? But the grandchildren of our yobs will wonder what all the fuss was about.

  Yet, out of the 18th century came wondrous architecture, art, philosophy, literature, music, further inventions which raised the standard of living unbelievably. Today, there is tremendous intellectual ferment in philosophy, ethics, the true origins of life, the falsities of war, etc., running parallel with the Internet.

  Though I appreciate that the mechanical changes taking place now are going to cause a deal of pain to many people, including us, I don’t think they will be quite as soul-destroying as many fear.

  Frankly, I don’t think the world is changing as fast as people imagine – the media TELL them that it is; and big business keeps bringing out new toys to rouse up sales and does all its ordering through the Internet, because it is quicker than mail; yet, the mail itself was a wonderful invention which changed the lives of both businessmen and laymen.

  I can imagine that you have problems in trying to get contracts that protect your authors and their copyrights – and it is a worry to all of us. But as the years go by, the problems and advantages will sort out; in fact, some of the problems are probably already clarifying. It is funny to remember that the idea of written contracts, in its initial day, was thought subversive and that business would fail to thrive under such restriction! And there was no such thing as copyright??

  After fifteen years of writing books that required intensive research on unfamiliar topics, Helen decided she would like to return to a setting and characters that she knew well from her life in Liverpool and her work as a social worker. She chose to focus on a segment of Liverpool society that she told me ‘were probably the only ones poorer than we were’.

  In A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin, she zeroed in on the life of Irish Catholic Liverpudlians in a court, a notorious form of slum housing of the late 1930s. As she finished the book in May 2002, she wrote to a Canadian friend:

  It is a very controversial book. I have probably offended the entire Roman Catholic Church; the entire collection of respectable, skilled craftsmen who are descendants of what was once a primitive community of semi-illiterate Irish Women on the Dock Road, who fought and stole to keep their children alive; every owner of a Private Home caring for the elderly poor (very common in Britain) holed up in ancient Victorian mansions, and all my usual readers who won’t want to believe a word of it!

  The joke about this book is that it is likely to be my last, so even if it is turned down now, my death will cause enough publicity for several publishers to enquire immediately what MSS I have left unpublished; and one of them will snap it up. So Rob will benefit.

  The book was quickly accepted for publication but Helen had a lot of discussion with one of her editors about the inner thoughts and beliefs of her impoverished Catholic characters. In January 2003 she lamented to her senior editor:

  As you probably know, Jane and I are at odds as to the reality of the Virgin Mary, who makes her presence felt in this book. In response to her queries, I have fudged matters slightly, though I think I have spoiled the touching belief of my heroine that She really does come to her to comfort the truly penitent and will intercede for them.

  I discussed this problem with educated Roman Catholics here, and they were heated in their defence of the Dear Lady’s reality. It amazed me. I am an Arya Samaji Hindu and have been for 50 years, so I do not have an opinion of my own on the subject. All I know is the ideas behind elephant-headed Gods – and, of course, a lot about Dockside shawl ladies!

  In the end, Helen accepted what she viewed as a watered-down portrayal of their absolute faith. She was just too exhausted to fight. All the same, A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin is in my opinion one of her best books. It is a simple but full-bodied urban survival story.

  After that, Helen did not want to write any more. At one point I suggested we work together on a kind of autobiography (similar to this) but the thought of the effort was too much for her.

  In 2003, my mother was feeling the loss of numerous friends and acquaintances, most recently her youngest brother, Edward. As she entered her mid-eighties, her energy diminished, her professional life began to fade away and her life narrowed noticeably. She ached from painful arthritis and found it hard to get enough exercise. She attended family events but gradually her interest in the world diminished. By 2006, signs of dementia were beginning to show and in 2010 she had to be moved into a nursing home.

  She passed away on 24 November 2011.

  In her final years Mum
had occasionally attended services at All Saints Anglican Cathedral in Edmonton and we arranged her funeral service there. Perhaps a hundred people attended, people whose lives she had touched more deeply than she was aware. Her ashes were interred at the same gravesite as Dad’s and her name inscribed next to his.

  Postscript

  As I sit and wonder how my mother not only survived but excelled against the odds, I can pick out a number of traits that I think made it possible.

  From her childhood in the idyllic English countryside, to the slums of Liverpool, the colour of India, and the rapidly changing society of western Canada, Helen was a keen observer of people and their environment. Whether it was from the perspective of a child, a young teenager in a devastated urban society or as a faculty wife, she observed people closely. Subconsciously or consciously, she asked herself: ‘Why do they act that way?’ ‘What makes them tick?’ The breadth of her experience, combined with her careful observation, gave her characters and stories veracity and variety. Moreover, her difficult and complex life spanning three countries and cultures enabled her to write with balance and perspective as well as great empathy.

  Helen was a shrewd judge of people, able to understand them and to steal tiny threads of personality to compile with countless others into the rich tapestry of her fictional characters. Her judgment also enabled her to be successful in both social work and business. Not many people were ever able to put one over on her. The downside to this shrewdness showed in the selectivity of her friendships.

  She was deeply interested, in many, many subjects. Her knowledge of nature often surprised me but she had retained and built on the lessons of her auntie Phil in Hoylake and her nanny, Edith. She knew a remarkable amount about flowers, trees, birds and animals.

  She followed social trends carefully and had a good understanding of business. She was an astute observer of world events. She had read English literature intensively, studied history deeply and explored other societies widely. She retained knowledge for her own pleasure so that, when the time came to write, she had a vast store on which to build with specific research.