Twopence to Cross the Mersey

by Helen Forrester

  ‘For God Almighty’s sake be quiet!’ he shouted up. ‘I can’t concentrate.’

  I did not answer him. I did not care about his practising on his piano. I was triumphant at having found something for Edward to sleep in and to wheel him out in.

  Mother was lying down on the bed but, at the sound of the pram’s appalling squeak in the room, she sat up.

  ‘Good heavens!’ she exclaimed. ‘Where did you get that ghastly chariot?’

  I explained, as I took Edward out of it.

  ‘We can’t put him in a thing like that,’ Mother said.

  ‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘It gives him a place to sleep – you might be able to sleep better, if he wasn’t in the same bed as you.’

  Mother nodded acceptance, her face mirroring the hopelessness which recent events had made part of her character.

  So the Chariot became part of Edward’s and my life and squeaked its way painfully through miles and miles of black Liverpool streets. Sometimes I think there must still be two little ghosts and a squeak floating gently through Princes Park because we went there so often.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Mother still had in the stitches from the major operation which had been performed upon her soon after Edward’s birth. I had seen the scarifying gash which ran from above her waist to her pelvis; it was now healed and should really have been examined by a surgeon some time back. We considered getting the stitches out ourselves, but we had no scissors and Father was afraid to risk cutting them with his blunt razor. It was decided, therefore, that next time Father drew our allowance from the public assistance committee, Mother would have to see a doctor, no matter what we had to go without as a result of having to pay his fee.

  Two mysterious middle-aged ladies, who went out only in the evening, and two married couples lived on the floor below us. With strict instructions from Father not to speak to either of the single ladies, who were, I was assured, not ‘nice’, I was dispatched to inquire from one of the married couples the name of a doctor.

  A man in mechanic’s overalls answered my knock. He was undersized and very thin, his hair slicked back from a long, narrow face. Tired, hazel eyes regarded me kindly.

  ‘What do you want, luv?’

  ‘My father sent me down to ask if you know where we could find a doctor round here.’

  ‘Soombody took ill, luv?’ His voice was much more alert.

  ‘No, thank you. Mummy was very ill before we came here and now she must see a doctor – to have her stitches removed.’

  ‘Oh, ay. Just a minute, ducks, I’ll ask the wife.’

  He left me standing at the open door, while he retreated into the room. I caught a glimpse of a stoutish blonde girl ladling stew out of a saucepan on to plates at a table by the window. The room was crowded with a bed, a stove and living-room furniture, but the general effect was of cosy friendliness. The smell of the stew was unbelievably good and I sniffed appreciatively as I waited.

  The girl put down the saucepan and they both came to the door. She wiped her hands on a grubby apron as she looked down at me.

  ‘There’s the parish doctor,’ she said doubtfully. ‘But none of us goes to ’im unless we’re dying. Tell yer Dad that Dr Dent around the corner by the grocery shop is proper kind. He wouldn’t charge you much – but you’d better take half a crown, in case.’

  I thanked her and was just about to turn and run back upstairs, when she put her hand in her pocket and brought out a toffee. ‘’Ere yer are, luv. Have a toffee.’

  I had not tasted a sweet since I had arrived in Liverpool and I accepted the gift delightedly and rushed up the stairs with unseemly exuberance.

  ‘’is surgery hours are seven to nine,’ she called up after me.

  Father normally went to the library in the evening to read the Liverpool Echo and write replies to any advertisements which offered office jobs, so I was told to accompany Mother to the doctor’s surgery. Alan would take care of the rest of the family while we were away.

  Mother washed herself as best she could with a piece of rag dipped into cold water, and made sure she had no vermin on her. I did the same and also combed my hair; we had only one small pocket comb between us and were always afraid of breaking it, as we could not afford to replace it; consequently, I hardly ever combed my straggling locks. Since my overcoat was still in pawn, I borrowed Fiona’s.

  For the first time since she had arrived, Mother made the long trip downstairs. The night was clear and frosty and she paused at the top of the front steps to take a big breath of fresh air; it smelled good after the foul atmosphere of the house. Slowly we proceeded down the steps and down the street, to a cross street of smaller houses and shops. We found the doctor’s front door, which led straight off the street, except for two small steps. A notice on the door invited us to enter. I turned the well-polished brass handle, it gave, and we went in.

  We found ourselves in a narrow hall in which ancient brown linoleum gleamed with much polishing under a low-watt light. To our right was a door slightly ajar, marked ‘Waiting-Room’. This proved to be packed with people, many of them Negroes, sitting on chairs ranged round the walls of the room; the centre was occupied by a large Victorian dining-table on which a number of tattered magazines lay in disarray. A gas fire, turned low, stood in front of a black, iron fireplace. On the varnished mantelpiece a marble clock ticked despondently, while on either side of it two cast-iron Greek warriors kept guard.

  A whisper of conversation ceased as we entered and all eyes regarded us. I suppose that Mother’s pale pink hat caused the interest. While we hesitated, a huge man in an old macintosh got up off his chair and offered it to Mother, who, by this time, was looking very white.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said and sat down gratefully.

  The man grinned sheepishly, his great red face breaking into a thousand wrinkles, as he stood near us fingering a greasy cap. I stood close to Mother, feeling a little frightened. This was all so different from the chintz-clad sitting-room of our old doctor and the ready welcome of his smart little wife.

  Neither of us had any idea how one communicated the fact of one’s presence to the doctor. But we soon saw that at the other end of the room was another door and that at the sound of a buzzer people went in and out of it. Presumably the doctor was in the next room. We could not guess how people established when they could go in so we sat and sat until we were the last people in the waiting-room, and the front door was closed and locked by an elderly woman. When the buzzer rang again, Mother rose and went in to see the doctor, and I was left alone.

  I got up and went to stand by the gas fire. The unaccustomed warmth was delicious and wrapped itself around me in a comfortable blanket of heat. I gazed at the iron Greek soldiers on the mantelpiece and smiled at them. My grandmother had such a pair on her kitchen mantelpiece in her beautiful little house on the other side of the Mersey. The tears sprang to my eyes as I remembered it. How long would it be, I wondered, before I had twopence so that I could take the ferry across the Mersey and visit her. My parents never mentioned her and she did not write to me. Probably she did not even know where I was. I wondered if I dare write to her without my parents’ permission. Impatiently I wiped away the tears. Paper and stamps cost money, too, you stupid, I told myself.

  The doctor was taking a long time over Mother’s stitches. Perhaps he would make her quite well. Then she could look after the children and I could go back to school. Perhaps in school there would be a school-teacher who would tell me what steps one had to take to get work when one had finished school.

  I had always wanted to be a ballet-dancer and my father had indulged me in this by sending me to a very good teacher when I was about five years old. Just before my seventh birthday, however, a very heavy, old-fashioned wardrobe had unexpectedly fallen over while I was in my parents’ bedroom, catching my legs under it. This had resulted in one of my feet being permanently slightly twisted. It was not an unsightly crippling but was sufficient to make any dancing career i
mpossible. During the months I had had to lie with the foot up I had discovered a natural ability for drawing, and this had led to an ambition to design clothes for the theatre.

  I gazed into the doctor’s miserable gas fire and saw gorgeous imaginary figures in clothes designed by me tripping and leaping across an imaginary stage. I wished I had a pencil and paper to catch and record permanently my pretty dream. If only the doctor would make Mother well, I would study and draw and practise and fill the stage of the Liverpool Empire with such glamour as its old walls had never seen before.

  There was a click as the doctor opened his surgery door for Mother and bowed her out, and she smiled her delicate, beguiling smile at him.

  He was a dark, intense-looking young man; he was, I later discovered, an ardent communist who tried his best to practise his beliefs in the stinking slum in which we lived. He grinned cheerfully at me and said good night to us both.

  ‘What did he say?’ I asked anxiously as I held Mother’s arm to steady her, after the doctor’s housekeeper had locked the front door behind us.

  We walked slowly down the empty street for a little way before Mother answered.

  ‘He said I should have gone to the outpatients department of a hospital.’

  ‘Did he take the stitches out? Did it hurt?’

  ‘Yes, he took them out – it didn’t hurt much – he’s a surgeon as well as a physician.’

  In a trembling voice I asked another question, one with selfish intent. Behind it was my despair at the drudgery I was facing and my hopes that if I was allowed to go to school I might find a way out from being for ever the unpaid, unthanked housekeeper for our poverty-stricken family.

  ‘Will you be all right?’ I asked. ‘Will you get better?’

  ‘He thinks I will, if I go to work – in the open air.’

  ‘Work?’ I was truly astonished.

  At my query she looked down at me, but there was no affection, no real interest in her gaze or in her voice as she answered, ‘Yes. Work.’

  The idea that work could cure someone who had been ill was too difficult for me to understand. I knew nothing of mental illness, except that lunatics were shut up in lunatic asylums, and I had no comprehension of the mental stress under which my poor mother laboured and which the doctor had diagnosed.

  ‘You can’t,’ I said desperately. ‘There is Edward – and Avril – and me – I haven’t got my matric yet – I have to go back to school.’

  ‘We shall see,’ she said thoughtfully.

  My stomach clenched in a deadly nervous pain. In a perceptive flash I saw myself for ever at home, the uneducated daughter retained to help in the house – and there were still some of these when I was a child – grey, uninteresting, the butt of everyone’s ill-temper, without money of my own and consequently entirely dependent upon the goodwill of the rest of the family. I saw myself for ever struggling with the care of Edward, with Avril’s tantrums and the boys’ fights, with Mr Parish’s miserable pittance, and I realized that the daughter who did not have to go to school or to work would be the one to be clothed and fed last.

  I burst into tears, my hopes shattered.

  ‘Oh no, Mummy!’ I wailed. ‘I want to go to school! I want to be like other girls!’

  ‘Be quiet,’ said Mother sharply. ‘You are making an exhibition of yourself.’

  I continued to weep – but quietly. Little ladies did not make exhibitions of themselves in public.

  ‘You have to learn that you cannot have everything you want. The family must come first.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  Immediately we arrived home, I threw a tantrum which left even Avril awed. I stamped, I cried, I shouted that I would go to school. Twelve and a half was too young an age to have to leave. I would not stay at home and look after babies.

  My bewildered father, who did not know what the cause of my rage was, shouted at me above the storm to be quiet. Mother shouted back at him. Fiona and Tony, terrified by the noise, wept steadily in a corner, while Alan did his best to placate the various contestants by telling everyone to shut up. Brian took refuge halfway up the attic stairs and watched through the banister. Baby Edward cried for his forgotten bottle. A voice from below yelled up to us, ‘Shut that bloody racket, can’t yer!’

  As my anger gave way to hopeless tears Father gradually picked up the story and said he thought the doctor’s idea of Mother’s going to work was an excellent one and that it would probably be for only a little while. When I continued to weep passionately, he slapped me across the buttocks and told me to go into the bedroom until I could behave in a civilized manner.

  I lay face down on the bed until I could not stand the stench of it any more. The nervous strain under which the children laboured in their cold, hungry, new world was so great that Brian, Tony and Avril had become incontinent at night and Edward had no rubber undersheet to help him, so that the already disgusting beds had become even more so and were invariably wet somewhere on their surface.

  Emerging finally in sulky silence and with blood-shot eyes, I found Edward still whimpering disconsolately, but the children were silently getting themselves ready for bed, by taking off their outer clothes. My parents were arguing heatedly about what kind of occupation my Mother could undertake.

  Still sniffing, I made a bottle for Edward with the last of the baby food, and, since I was still filled with resentment at my parents, I took him outside and sat down on the top stair of the long flights of gloomy staircase and fed him.

  The smell of the overcrowded, verminous house, its filthy, over-used bathroom and the efforts of nine different cooks combined with Edward’s rancid odour was almost overpowering, and I put my cheek against his scurvy little head and wept again.

  During the next few days my mother went out each afternoon for a walk to strengthen her legs, and then one day she sponged her dress and pressed it with an iron borrowed from Miss Sinford, the benevolent, crazy old lady on the ground floor, wiped her shoes over with a wet cloth, and washed herself down with a rag and cold water. She then made up her face with the last of her make-up and the aid of her handbag mirror, and went out without saying where she was going.

  As she went down the stairs, I realized for the first time how much my mother had changed. She had been considered beautiful and extremely vivacious and had always had a court of young men who called upon her – there were still some gentlemen who lived on private incomes in those days and who had time to call and take tea with a pretty woman and her friends – but now her dress hung loosely on her, her face was haggard and lined, her shining black hair, which had been exquisitely kept by her hairdresser, had grown long and straggling; she had pushed it up under her hat before going out. The polished ovals of her nails were ruined by her having to bite them to shorten them, as we all had to do, because we had no scissors. How much had Father changed, I wondered? And the children? And me?

  Avril was howling because she could not go out too, and I decided that I might create a diversion by washing her and washing Edward.

  We had a fire that day, a luxury we frequently had to forgo despite the icy February weather, so I went down to the bathroom with our kettle and only saucepan, filled them with water, brought them upstairs and set them on the fire. Carrying Edward on my hip, I took the handleless coal bucket down to the basement area, a stone-lined yard from which steps led up to the back garden. I laid Edward on a counter which must have been part of a butler’s pantry in the more palmy days of the house, and washed the coal dust out of the bucket as thoroughly as I could under a tap in the yard.

  Watched by a fascinated Avril, who had by now forgotten her desire to go out and had tripped up and downstairs behind me puffing excitedly, I set the bucket in front of the fire, put the warm water in it, stripped a protesting Edward and washed him from head to heel, holding him on my knee as I had seen my nanny hold Avril when she was a baby. This was the first time he had had a complete bath since we had left home and I found that he had numerous bug bites and
his little back was sore where the urine had not been properly washed off him; his head was covered with scurf.

  I had no change of clothing for him, but I pinned a piece of the rag the priest had given’ us on him as a rough diaper and laid his blanket over him to keep him warm in the Chariot while I dealt with Avril.

  Fortunately, Avril thought it was a wonderful game and submitted to being rubbed all over with a wet cloth. I could not wash her head because I could not think how to do it in a bucket. Dirt was ingrained in her skin and I could not get her completely clean without soap. I had an uneasy feeling that her fine golden hair was verminous and certainly she had scurf around her forehead and along the line of the parting. It seemed, too, as if the hair on the crown of her head was thinner than before. I told her cheerfully, however, that I would wash her vest and knickers after she was in bed.

  I sighed as I slicked the water off her in front of the fire, so that she would dry quickly. She, like Mother, had changed. She had been a pudgy child with rosy cheeks; now she looked wan, her ribs showed and her stomach stuck out too much.

  While I scrubbed the children, Father was stuck in one of his everlasting queues.

  He worked very hard at being unemployed. He spent most of two days a week walking to the employment exchange, standing in a long queue, signing on as being available for work and walking back up the hill which was Leece Street, pausing outside the old Philharmonic Hall to read the concert notices with wistful attention, then on past the black-faced ear, nose and throat hospital and then through an endless maze of decaying Victorian houses to our comfortless eyrie at the top of one of them. He was not so badly off as dock labourers, he told us. They had to sign on for work twice a day.