Twopence to Cross the Mersey

by Helen Forrester

  Another day was spent walking to the offices of the public assistance committee, where could be found Tony’s ‘Mr Parish’. Here he stood in a long queue again, soaked by rain or frozen in the winter wind, and received his precious forty-three shillings a week. He then walked home. On the other three mornings a week he went to the public library, scanned the advertisements in the newspapers in the reading-room, and wrote replies to those offering work he felt he could do. Then he walked all the way into the centre of the town to deliver his replies to the offices of the Liverpool Echo in Victoria Street, because we had no money for stamps – the postage for a letter in those days was three-halfpence.

  His shoes wore through at the soles and he stuffed them with cardboard begged from the corner grocery shop, until the holes were so big that the cardboard would not stay in place. Without tools he could not hope to mend them himself, so one week we very nearly starved completely while we paid the shoemaker. He had not had a haircut or a clean shirt for a month, though he had managed to wash himself quite thoroughly. His socks had very little left from the ankle down, and I remember his blue, frozen feet sticking out of them when he removed his soaking wet shoes on his return in the evenings. I think it was rubbing his feet with my hands which truly brought home to me our desperate position and made me accept the fact that I had to stay at home. I would rub until I had the circulation going again and he would whistle under his breath with the pain of it, and each time it happened my heart broke anew.

  For a month or more, he never spoke to anyone outside the family, except the city and government clerks who dealt with him and to whom he was just another statistic. One morning, however, the wait at the employment exchange was particularly long and chilly, and the ragged queue of weary men began to mutter rebelliously, and Father was drawn into sympathetic conversation with his fellow sufferers. They were, for the most part, respectable working men many of whose jobs were dependent upon the ships which went in and out of the port of Liverpool in normal times. They were curious about my father, because he spoke like an educated man. They could not imagine that anyone highly educated could be unemployed; they assumed, and Father did not disillusion them, that he had been a senior clerk in one of the shipping companies which had been dispensing with its office staff. They were friendly and, as Father met them again and again, they began to fill him in on how to stay alive under almost impossible circumstances.

  He discovered that many of them had wives who went out cleaning private homes or worked in stores to augment their parish relief; though these earnings should have been declared to the public assistance committee, they were not, and they made all the difference between starvation and dying more slowly of malnutrition.

  ‘If you can live long enough, there just might be a job for you one morning,’ a leather-faced old warehouseman told him jokingly.

  There were agencies in the town, he was told, which would provide the odd pair of shoes or an old blanket for a child. There were regimental funds willing to provide a little help to old soldiers. He gathered other scraps of information, which were revelations to a man who had never had to think twice about the basic necessities of life. An open fire, he was assured, could be kept going almost all day from the refuse of the streets, old shoes, scraps of paper, twigs, wooden boxes, potato peelings; if one was very ill or had a broken bone, the outpatients departments of most of the local hospitals would give some medical care. Pawnbrokers would take almost anything saleable, and one could buy second-hand clothing from them. Junk yards would sometimes yield a much needed pram wheel or a piece for an old bike. One could travel from Liverpool to London by tramcar, if one knew the route, and it was much cheaper than going by train. Some of the men had done it several times in an effort to find work in the more prosperous south-east of the country.

  Father thanked them gratefully and came home very thoughtful, marvelling at their sheer resilience and good nature in such adversity.

  All of us had colds, including the baby, and lacked even handkerchiefs, though we did our best by using newspaper culled from the greengrocer, who wrapped our small purchases of potatoes in it. Father began to realize that unless help came quickly the younger children would probably die from the first germ that infected them. The death rate in Liverpool, at that time, was one of the highest in the country and the infant mortality rate was correspondingly horrifying. He knew that we were worse off than most of the people who stood in the endless queues with him, since we did not draw the Liverpool level of relief, nor were we eligible for help with clothing which ‘Mr Parish’ sometimes gave out. No one, in all his conversations, happened to tell him that he was paying three times the rent that most people paid and that this was largely what was crippling us.

  By far the greatest proportion of the Liverpool work-force was casual labour, dependent upon the erratic comings and goings of ships in the river, and most men were accustomed to being unemployed from time to time, particularly dock labourers. Their pattern of life reflected this in that they could never make a proper domestic budget, because they never knew from one week to the next what their earnings would be. They spent their earnings and ‘made do’ in between jobs. My father, being an educated man trained to study economic trends, could never manage to be as philosophical and optimistic as they were. He feared not only for himself but for his children’s future.

  In those days there were no midday meals or drinks of milk at school to help children along. One good lady who suggested that the skimmed milk thrown down the drain by one of the city’s bigger dairies might be given free to children in the elementary schools was soundly snubbed for her socialistic ideas.

  Father swallowed what little pride he had left. He sat down at our greasy table and wrote to the headquarters of his old regiment

  Mother came home white with weariness and irritable with frustration, having tried unsuccessfully against about thirty other applicants for a job as a saleswoman.

  ‘They looked like a flock of crows,’ she remarked of the applicants. ‘They all wore black dresses, stockings and shoes – just little white collars to relieve the dreariness.’

  ‘I thought that was what shop-girls always wore,’ replied Father.

  ‘I suppose so,’ Mother said. She added, ‘And the hours one was expected to work – nine until nine on Saturdays!’

  ‘What wages were they offering?’

  ‘Fifteen shillings a week.’

  Father whistled. ‘That’s not a living wage,’ he said.

  ‘They don’t care,’ replied Mother wearily. ‘All the women there were anxious to get the job.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Each day my mother went out to try and get work and spent most of the morning and afternoon in a fruitless round of offices and shops. Before leaving, she would give me a shilling to buy the day’s food. This I laid out to the best of my ability on bread, potatoes, rice, tea, sugar, pennyworths of bacon scraps or margarine and, that dire necessity, a pint of milk for Edward, which cost twopence.

  At first, Edward used to cry with hunger, but as he grew a little older, he would lie lethargically in the Chariot, making no sound most of the time. The other children also grew apathetic and the smaller ones tried to take bits of bread when I was not looking. We never heard from the school about their progress nor did my father inquire.

  One morning my parents went out quite early, before Edward had been fed. After the children had been given a meagre bowl of porridge each and had been sent to school, there was no food left in the house. I was desperate with hunger. And the usual pint of milk would, I knew, not be enough to last Edward for twenty-four hours. However, clutching the shilling, I wrapped Edward up in his stinking blanket, put on my woollen cardigan, my coat being still in pawn, and went downstairs to buy milk from the first passing milkman.

  Standing on the doorstep were two pint bottles of milk, presumably delivered for Miss Sinford, the lady with religious mania, and Mrs Hicks, who lived with her unemployed husband in the bowels of t
he basement. The other tenants patronized a milkman who came later.

  I looked at the bottles and then up and down the apparently empty street, hoping that the milkman might still be near by. There was no sign of him, however, and I turned back into the house with the idea of getting out the Chariot and wheeling it round to the dairy to purchase Edward’s precious pint.

  Edward began to whimper. I looked down longingly at the milk bottles. Then, like a fleeing cat, I tore up the stairs, Edward bobbing up and down in my arms. I laid him down gently in the Chariot, took our two cracked cups, ran down to the bathroom and filled one with water, then ran silently down the rest of the stairs to the front door.

  I glanced quickly up and down the street. Everyone was apparently sleeping the long hopeless sleep of the unemployed.

  Quickly I took the lids off the bottles, filled the empty cup with a little milk from each bottle, topped the bottles up with water, carefully replaced the lids, shook the bottles gently, and then crept upstairs again with my precious prize.

  I managed to make a feed for Edward before the little fire I made from paper flickered out, and I fed him contentedly, knowing that I could make the pint of milk I would buy stretch further for him. I had no qualms of conscience about my theft – I thought only of Edward – and I was mercifully unaware that the policeman on the beat had quietly watched the whole operation.

  It was late February, with days of pouring rain interspersed with weak sunshine. The trees and bushes in the locked gardens in the squares were beginning to show a faint swelling of their buds, and, as I wheeled Edward to the tiny local grocery shop and to the greengrocer’s each day, I would wonder why the children running in and out of the traffic or playing with cigarette cards on the pavement could not be allowed to play in the gardens. I would stand watching them dully as they cursed and tumbled each other about, their white or black skins equally grey with dirt and dust, their noses dribbling, their bare legs chapped and with septic sores on their knees. Little girls would play endless games of skipping and hopscotch, each with its appropriate song, learned from their elder sisters and passed down from generation to generation.

  ‘I am a girl guide dressed i’ blue,

  These are the actions I must do.

  Salute to the King, bow to the Queen

  And turn my back to the people.

  Pepper!’

  And at the word ‘pepper’ they would turn the skipping-rope with feverish speed to see how many fast skips they could do before being tripped up. Sometimes, I would wish wistfully that I might be able to join in, but I had always to watch Avril and Edward and I was mortally afraid of something happening to them in this strange world which I did not understand.

  Another pleasure was to stand in front of the greengrocer’s and contemplate the neat pyramids of oranges, apples, lemons and tomatoes. Mentally, I ate my way through the piles from top to bottom. I lacked the courage and initiative of the little street arabs, who would sometimes snatch a piece of fruit and fly like jets down the narrow back alleys, there to consume it with much ribaldry at the expense of the outraged greengrocer. A cry of ‘Bobby’ or ‘Cop’ or ‘Flattie’ would, however, send them speeding off again, old gym shoes or bare feet thudding over the flagstones like rapidly bouncing rubber balls.

  With Edward replete with Miss Sinford’s and Mrs Hick’s milk and sleeping quietly in the Chariot, Avril and I went on the usual shopping round. At the greengrocer’s I stood and dithered. If I bought rice, I argued with myself, Mother would say that I should have bought potatoes; if potatoes, then she would say rice. I knew I could not win. Mother was getting better and her increasing irritability at my sins was a sign of it

  The policeman on his beat stopped and chucked Edward under his chin. Edward opened his eyes and managed a small smile. I looked up and smiled too, my morning peccadillo completely forgotten.

  ‘Nice baby you’ve got,’ he said, putting his hands behind his back and rocking gently on his heels. He beamed at me from under his helmet. ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Edward,’ I said. He was a nice-looking young man, neat and clean, despite the acne spots all over his face.

  ‘And what’s your name?’

  ‘Helen,’ I replied promptly.

  He looked down at the baby again, while the greengrocer peered through the glass of his window, which he had been polishing.

  ‘No Mummy?’

  ‘Yes, she’s looking for work. So’s Daddy.’

  He looked surprised, apparently at my clear English, so different from that of the other children round about. It was better English than he spoke himself.

  ‘Having a hard time? Got any other brothers and sisters?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said simply, in answer to the first question. ‘We are seven. The others are all at school.’

  The wind was getting up and it was beginning to rain. My teeth started to chatter and I wrapped my cardigan closer round me.

  The policeman stared at me with calm blue eyes and said, ‘Humph.’ He adjusted the collar of his cape. I became aware of the interested gaze of the greengrocer, and decided on rice for supper.

  ‘Goodbye,’ I said to the policeman and pushed the pram a bit farther along the street and parked it outside the grocery shop, where Avril watched it while I went inside. The policeman, after a moment’s hesitation, went into the greengrocer’s shop.

  The following morning a pint of milk was delivered to the top landing of our staircase. When I ran downstairs to catch the milkman and return the bottle to him, he insisted that it was for Edward and was sent by a friend, and not even Father could make him say any more. For two long intolerable years the milkman stolidly climbed the stairs and deposited a pint of milk on our top step. It probably saved Edward’s life.

  Many years later, the greengrocer told my mother about the young policeman who had inquired about us from him, and had then gone round to the dairy and ordered a daily pint of milk to be delivered for Edward, and had paid for it out of his own meagre wages.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  One of the advantages of being very poor is that one has time. Since we had no clothes except those on our backs, there was no pile of washing to be dealt with each Monday. When there is little food, there is little cooking, and since we possessed no bed linen, towels, cleaning materials or tools, most other domestic jobs either were non-existent or could not be carried out. As the weather improved, therefore, I began to take a walk each day, pushing Edward and Avril in the Chariot.

  These were, for me, voyages of discovery into a world I had never dreamed of before. I meandered along narrow streets, where the soot-blackened early Victorian houses opened directly upon the pavement. Some of the houses had the flagstone across their front door scrubbed and neatly whitened, with a strip of well-shone brass covering the sill; their painted window-sills were carefully polished and their garish chintz curtains were starched as stiff as the sentries outside Buckingham Palace. Others were like our house: dull windows veiled in grey webs of lace, window-panes missing and filled in with cardboard, old orange-peel and cigarette-ends littering their frontage.

  The local pawnbroker’s shop, with its dusty sign of three golden balls hanging outside over a wooden table piled high with second-hand clothing, made for me a fascinating treat. I loved to gaze in the windows at the rows of Victorian and Edwardian rings for sale, the war medals, violins, blankets, china ornaments and sailors’ lucky gold charms.

  The pawnbroker himself was part of the scene, as he stood in his doorway puffing at a cigarette, shirt-sleeves rolled up to show olive-coloured arms, tight black curls receding from his forehead, a magnificent watch-chain with dangling seals swathed across a wrinkled, blue serge waistcoat over a comfortable paunch.

  ‘Come on, me little blue-eyed duck!’ he would call to Avril when he saw her, and occasionally he would feel around in his waistcoat pocket with his tobacco-stained fingers to dig out a grubby sweet for her. She loved him and would howl dismally on the days when we did not wal
k that way. For me, he would have a polite nod and a brief Afternoon. Nice day’, regardless of whether it rained or shone.

  One mild March afternoon, I circled the cathedral and listened to the ring of the stonemasons’ tools on its great sandstone walls. It rose like a graceful queen above slums which put Christianity to shame. I stared up the beautiful sweep of steps leading to its entrance, wondering if I dare go in, but I was too afraid. I had not seen myself in a mirror since coming to Liverpool, but I knew I was both dirty and shabby. My hat and shoes had been passed to Fiona, who was obliged to go out to school, whereas I could stay indoors. The shoes had been replaced by a pair of second-hand running shoes with holes in the toes; my head was bare and my hair straggled in an unruly mass down my neck; it was rarely combed and never washed.

  Still pushing aimlessly, I wandered along Rodney Street, a lovely street of well-kept Georgian houses, the homes and surgeries of Liverpool’s more eminent doctors. A brass plaque on No. 62 informed me that Gladstone was born there. Mr Gladstone was not one of my heroes, so I continued onward enjoying the peace and orderliness of the quiet road.

  I turned down Leece Street, past the employment exchange where Father spent so many unhappy hours, past tall, black St Luke’s Church and into Bold Street, the most elegant shopping centre in Liverpool. Although there were at least a dozen empty shops up for rent, the atmosphere was one of opulence. I pushed past women in fur coats and pretty hats, who stared at me in disgust, to look in windows which held a single dress or fur or a few discreet bottles of perfume. A delicious odour of roasting coffee permeated the place.

  Onward I went, through the packed shopping area of Church Street, where trams, nose to tail, clanged their way amid horsedrawn drays, delivery vans and private cars, and newspaper men shouted to me to ‘read all abaat it’. The cry of ‘Echo, Echo, Liverpool Echo, sir’ comes wafting down the years, like the overwhelming scent of vanilla pods, the sound and smell of a great port.