Lime Street at Two

by Helen Forrester

  "Ah, well, I suppose it was bound to come. At least you're single. No family to worry about."

  Mother's very upset." I'm sure she must be." Father sighed, as he picked up his hat. "I shall miss you very much."

  Tom half-smiled. "Thanks. Are you ready?"

  They both said goodbye to me, and left me to my letter. I could hear Avril laughing in the back yard, as she played a game of ball against the house wall, with another little girl. She did not laugh often enough, I thought.

  Nickie put his nose on my knee and I patted him absently. Apart from the disintegration of my personal life, the further world around me was changing fast. The war kept nibbling at unexpected aspects of life. Men like Tom were being whisked away, and women like his widowed mother suddenly had to face a society which did not care much what happened to them, a society from which fathers, husbands and sons had given them a good deal of protection.

  I tried not to think about my own unhappy situation, but the fact that I did not have the money for a stamp for Alan's letter reminded me forcibly of my dire financial straits.

  What should I do? What could I do when I had so little formal education?

  I had recently been for two interviewsfor secretarial jobs. I was turned down immediately it was obvious that I had hardly been to day school at all. My experience in a charitable organisation did not, I discovered, rank very high. Charities were, in the minds of head clerks interviewing me, run by bumbling amateurs, do-gooders, cranks, a lot of old women. Humbled by the sharp tongues, I had thanked the gentlemen for their time, and had gone home.

  6

  ON 7th September, 1940, London suffered a dreadful bombing; it went on day and night, until the news was that the city was on fire from end to end. As verbal descriptions of it were passed from mouth to mouth and reached the north, we became more and more apprehensive that our turn would be next.

  In a hastily scribbled letter, Alan told me that about five hundred bombers were involved, and that the raiders were very well protected by fighter planes.

  Londoners hardly had time to recover before the Germans, on 9th September, mounted another huge operation, in which they stoked up the fires still burning from the earlier raid. On the 11th they hit Buckingham Palace, which seemed incredible to many Liverpudlians. Who would dare to hit the palace of a king? The King seemed almost thankful that he himself had beenbombed out; he said that he could now look homeless East Enders in the face!

  Liverpool was under nearly continuous nightly attack. Alan said he never went to bed for weeks during that period, but neither did we. We nodded on the basement steps, trying to get what rest we could, while the diving planes screeched overhead and the guns in Princes Park roared unceasingly. I learned a lot of German irregular verbs during those long, sleepless nights, in an effort to continue studies that I had pursued through seven years of evening school attendance. Such schools had been closed at the beginning of the war.

  Working in the dock area, I could see that it was daily becoming more difficult to keep the port of Liverpool open, and Bootle, lying immediately to the north, was to have, for its size, the doubtful honour of being the most heavily bombed area in the British Isles. The ingenuity of the population in keeping going amid the ruins was a wonder to behold.

  The civilian casualty lists began to lengthen. Amongst other places, the lists were posted outside our main office in thecity, and I remember so clearly the tired, anxious faces of the people scanning them. But the faces of a few readers had an expression of morbid fascination, eyes glazed, lips parted, as they read—the same expressions that you can, nowadays, see in the faces of onlookers at an accident or a street murder or rape; they just stare and do nothing about it, getting pleasure out of other people's agonies.

  For many of us, life was solely long days at work, work which in the Bootle area consisted largely of trying to continue normal operations amid the wreckage of a factory or office or warehouse or dock. Then a quick rush for home, into the au: raid shelter—if one was available.

  As I write, I can feel the burning tiredness of my eyes at that time, and the acute discomfort of the ridged stone basement steps. I can smell the odour from the cellar of damp coal and of cats. I can see the flaking whitewash on the stairway's walls and a century of cobwebs hanging from its ceiling. It never seemed to occur to any of us to make some cushions to sit on—we had none in the house—or brush down the dirty walls, perhaps re whitewash them, tocheer the place up. We were singularly unenterprising and simply endured the long, chilly nights.

  If we were lucky, we would get an hour in bed, before we had to get up at six o'clock to go to work. I often felt worse after that hour in bed than if I had stayed up; but it did help to reduce the swelling in one's feet, which came from never putting them up.

  Picking one's way to work in a long procession of pedestrians winding through shattered or blocked streets is a memory which must have remained with many people. It always astonished me how clean and neat we managed to make ourselves, despite interruptions in the water supply and the appalling dust raised by the bombing.

  Because I had frequently to walk onwards to Bootle, in the north, I was often amongst the earliest people to set out from the south end of the city. I found myself part of a long line of much older women, their heads wrapped in turbans or kerchiefs, a pair of old shoes under their arm or sticking out of a shopping bag. They plodded along stolidly on swollenfeet, their varicose veins lumpy under their woollen stockings. Occasionally, they would shout, "Mornin'," to each other or stop for a word or two, but for the most part they walked in silence, putting first one cautious foot over scattered chunks of brickwork or electric cables and then lifting the other one over. Sometimes they paused to stare back at some unusual object, like a bath, lying in the road, or to watch the firemen and rescue workers at a particularly large scene of destruction.

  They were the cleaning ladies of Liverpool, often leaving homes that had been damaged in the previous night's raid, to go into the city to make ready the offices and shops before their staff arrived. Increasingly frequently, they found nothing left to clean, only a dangerous mountain of rubble or a burning skeleton of a building. Many businesses, however, had reason to bless them, when the building was still standing, but all the windows and doors had been blown out and stock or papers were scattered everywhere. Imperturbable, they would pick up, shake and sort, until they had the floors fairly clear. Then, if theelectricity was still working, they would plug in their vacuum cleaners and assail the all-enveloping dust. If there was no electricity, out came brooms and mops, buckets and floor cloths. To the nervous, excited clerks and shop assistants, when they arrived later, these women were quiet symbols of stability.

  As the winter crept in, loss of windows became hard to bear, both at home and at work. The sweeping rain soaked many a home and office, despite people's efforts to keep it out by nailing old rugs or linoleum over the gaping frames.

  Our office in Bootle was no exception. I arrived one morning to find snow thick on the ugly brown linoleum of our second floor office, and a great drift up against my desk.

  With icy fingers, I carefully shook the flakes off the precious files on the top of my desk and that of Miss Evans. I lifted the telephone receiver and wiped it. Immediately a sharp voice asked, "Number, please?" I thanked heaven that it was working, as I quickly put the receiver down again.

  Using a piece of cardboard, I shovelledthe freezing piles out through the glassless windows. But there was still a lot on the floor when the rest of the staff arrived. "Be careful not to sHp," I warned our voluntary helpers, as they tiptoed through the puddles.

  As the day progressed, the remainder of the snow melted under tramping feet, leaving the office dank and miserable for days afterwards.

  I learned to be very afraid of looters.

  On the ground floor of the old house which was our office, we had a room filled with clean, second-hand clothing, for the reclothing of the bombed out. Not only were people sometim
es clad only in their nightclothes, when their house came down about their ears, their day clothes could be ruined by such a catastrophe; every stitch in the house could be torn, impregnated by glass or ruined by spouting waterpipes and thick dust. Everything had to be replaced—and Bootle was poor, terribly poor.

  One frosty morning, as I hastened up the street, I saw that the office had again lost its windows during the night. My exhausted colleague had succumbed toinfluenza, and I wondered who I should talk to in the Town Hall in order to get a fast replacement of the glass.

  As I unlocked the front door I heard the sound of voices. At first I thought it was the women who ran another charity on the ground floor, but then I realised with alarm that it was men's voices I was listening to.

  The door of the clothing room was ajar, and I ran forward and flung it wide.

  A sheet had been spread over the centre of the floor and two men and a woman were tossing clothing on to it.

  "What on earth are you doing?" I asked indignantly.

  One man paused and looked up at me. He was burly, in shirt sleeves, with huge muscular arms covered with black hairs. A docker, I guessed.

  "You get out of here," he growled. "And mind your own business."

  "This is my business." My voice rose in anger. "You don't belong here. Get out yourself before I call the police."

  The three dropped the clothing they were holding, and looked uncertainly at each other. They did not move."OK I'll call them." I moved towards the door.

  "Oh, no, you don't." Both men advanced on me, their feet tangling in the pile of clothing lying on the sheet.

  I quickly pulled the door shut in their path. The lock was broken, but it might hold them up for a second or two.

  Light and fleet, I sped up the stairs, thrust the key into the lock of our office, slipped inside and locked it from the inside. I seized the telephone and thankfully asked the operator, "Police, quick."

  After a solid night of bombing, the police number was engaged. The men were pounding on the door and shouting threats. "Call the ARP. There are probably more people there," I told her.

  Though she had been afraid of interrupting a police telephone conversation, the operator unhesitatingly broke into the conversation on the ARP phone, and asked for help.

  The men outside must have heard the relief in my voice, as I said, "Thanks very much." By the time two volunteer wardens pounded up the stairs, the looters had fled.I was still trembling when the first volunteer member of our staff arrived. I asked her to re-sort and hang up the clothing again, and a little later on, presumably as a result of the wardens' i report, our windows were boarded up by workmen, who arrived unbidden by me.

  We had some funds which could be lent to men who had lost their tools in a raid or to replace smashed spectacles, and alleviate similar woes, which were not covered by any governmental source. Ready cash was kept in an old-fashioned cash box, locked in a cupboard overnight. On a bleak November day, while my superior was still sick, I put the cash box out, ready, on the desk, and went to the waiting-room to check the number of people there.

  A boy passed the waiting-room door. I presumed he had brought a message from his family; it was a common occurrence, and I went back to deal with him.

  The boy had flitted silently out, taking the cash box with him.

  I was appalled, and immediately sent for the police.

  Two plain clothes men, they sat andwanned themselves by our dim electric fire, and sighed and rubbed their hands.

  "Normally we could pick 'im up as quick as light," one of them said. "Anybody with that much money to spend sticks out like a sore toe. But now . . ." he shrugged, "with all the high wages . . . well."

  The thief was never traced. It was a sore loss to our small organisation.

  During my harsh days of mourning, I learned a lot of sad truths. It was a revelation to me that the poor would steal from the poor. Working-class solidarity had been preached to me consistently by Communists working in the main office; the poor stood shoulder to shoulder against the wicked, exploiting upper classes. But, in truth, they prey on each other, with a ruthlessness which was, and still is, hard to swallow. Who has not seen decent city-built housing, built specifically to help those who could not afford much rent, stripped bare as a skeleton, of tiles, fittings, lead for the roof, by people who must have been close neighbours, to know even that the house was not yet occupied?

  There is a saying in Liverpool, "If itisn't nailed down, sit on it." I now understood what it meant, and I became very careful.

  Particularly during the war, great targets for thieves were the gas and electric meters in the cellars of damaged houses in the poorer areas. These meters had to be fed either by pennies or shillings, and their cash boxes were temptingly full of money. In peacetime, they were often rifled at night. A slender youth would lift the manhole in front of the street door, normally used for the delivery of coal directly into the cellar, and slide through the opening. He soon prised open the drawer in which the money was collected, and was then hauled quietly out by an accomplice.

  Though our house was not damaged at the time it happened, we twice had our meters broken into, and found, to our sorrow, that we had to pay the gas and electricity companies all over again.

  One exasperated old man near us had had to pay a huge gas bill because thieves had robbed his meter. Afterwards, he carefully tied a ship's bell to the underpart of the manhole cover.One early morning, as I was washing myself in the kitchen, I heard the sonorous ding-dong of the bell, and about half a minute later, shrieks and curses in the street. The old man had caught a youth and was giving him a sound beating with a broom stick, a far more effective punishment than a lecture from a magistrate.

  7

  IT was October, and nearly five months since I had bid Harry a hasty goodbye, when he embarked on his last voyage. I still felt very forlorn and terribly alone, despite a large family. I had spent this Saturday afternoon walking over to see the pawnbroker, to retrieve a cotton-wrapped bundle containing two of my dresses, a skirt and cardigan, which Mother had pawned. My return journey took me past the house in which we had rented two freezing attic rooms, when we first came to Liverpool.

  Seated on the stone steps which led down from the pavement to her basement home was Mrs. Hicks. Bundled up in a series of woollen cardigans, she was enjoying the late October sunshine.

  She was an old friend, and when she saw me, she got up from the steps and dusted her black skirt with her hands.

  "'Allo, luv," she greeted me in surprise.

  "Ow are yer? Come in. Haven't seen you in ages." She pulled open the cast-iron gate which protected the steps.

  I smiled at her and carefully eased myself past the gate and on to the narrow steps, to follow her down and through the heavy door under the sweep of steps that led up to the main entrance of the house.

  The basement rooms in which she lived had originally been the kitchens of the house. Thick, vertical iron bars still guarded the windows, and the interior still smelled of damp and much scrubbing with pine disinfectant.

  The sun did not penetrate her home, and in the gloom, she beamed at me, every wrinkle and crease of her face suggesting battles won or lost, patience learned. She had been very kind to all of us in the bitter days when, up in the attic, we had nearly starved.

  Brian had been her particular friend, and she asked after him, as she shut the outer door. I told her he was well and had work.

  "Sit down, now. We'll have a cuppa tea. See, the kettle's on the boil," and she pointed to an iron kettle on the hob,belching steam like a railway train. "And how've you bin, me duck?"

  While I sat down by the fire and put my bundle on the floor, she moved swiftly round the room on tiny booted feet, while she collected the tea things and put them on a table beside me.

  "I'm all right," I lied. "And how are you? It's lovely to see you again."

  "Och, me? Never nuthin' the matter with me. And me hubbie's a lot better, now he's workin'." />
  Mr. Hicks, I learned, had become a timekeeper at a new factory in Speke, and Mrs. Hicks said that, after so many years of unemployment, it felt strangely nice to have regular wages coming in, although it meant a long bicycle ride for him each day.

  I congratulated her. Provided they were not bombed out, people like Mr. and Mrs. Hicks benefited greatly by the war.

  Mrs. Hicks finally came to rest in the easy chair opposite me, and, as we sat knee to knee, she stirred her mug of tea vigorously, and remarked, "You don't look at all well, luv. Has your throat bin botherin' you again?"

  "No, Mrs. Hicks." My throat washusky, but not with the tonsilUtis which plagued me from time to time. I put my mug down on the Uttle table, put my head down on my knee and burst into tears.

  In a second I was pressed to Mrs. Hicks' pillowy chest. "Now, now, dear." She stroked my hair, which I was again growing because I had no money for hairdressers. Then she turned my face up to her. "What's to do? Has your Mam been at you agen?"

  No love had been lost between Mother and Mrs. Hicks; she must have heard Mother raging at me many a time.

  "No, Mrs. Hicks. It's not that."

  Gradually she wormed out of me my loss of Harry, and I said tearfully, "I don't know what to do, Mrs. Hicks. I just don't."

  "You're not expecting, are you, luv?"

  Mrs. Hicks was a most practical woman, and I had to smile at her through my tears.

  "No, I'm not. We—we agreed we would wait. But I wish I was. I'd have something to live for, then."

  "Nay. It's better as it is—you'll see that later on. And him bein' an older fella, he sowed his wild oats years ago, I'll bebound. He knew what he was about—he must've really loved you."

  "He was awfully good. He didn't want me to be left single, with a child, like so many." Fresh tears burst from me.

  She let me cry, and it did me good. The tea went cold, but when I gently loosed myself from her arms and leaned back in my chair, full of apologies for being such a badly behaved guest, she wiped my face with a corner of her apron, and then made me sit quietly while she made a fresh, black brew.