Few people were about, as the trams I caught took me out to the office. I sat and sewed as I travelled. I always carried with me either knitting or embroidery, and in this way made little gifts for the family, for Christmas and birthdays. With a few scraps of old garments or bed linen, I could make soft toys, handkerchiefs, clutch handbags, night dress cases and matching hair tidies—hair tidies were small embroidered or lace-decorated pokes, hung by a ribbon from dressing table mirror stands. All the loose hairs from brushes and combs were put into them, and they were emptied when the room was cleaned. No bedroom wascomplete without a pretty hair tidy. From second-hand wool, unravelled from worn-out sweaters, I knitted mittens, gloves, scarves and berets.
Often, when I travelled after air raids, I went into the unknown. Telephones were so few that it was rarely possible to ring to inquire from a friend or a business or an institution how they had fared during the night, to ask, for example, if a train or bus was still running. Very often, what few telephones there were were unreachable, because the lines were down. In my working-class world, nobody had a telephone, except the doctor or the chemist. There were, as yet, no public telephone boxes in our district, and the instant transfer of personal news and reassurances was far in the future.
When public transport was disrupted, it was not very easy to communicate with the shorthand pupils I taught in the evenings. The students never replied to letters, although the post office was still extraordinarily efficient. Increasingly, when I arrived on my students' doorsteps, after a difficult journey, I would be told that our Em, or our Marjie, was working overtimeand would not be home for her lesson. There was also a growing feeling, well expressed by one of my pupils, originally a shop assistant and now in a munitions factory. She tossed her briUiant golden mane, and said, with a shrug, "I'm earnin' that much on munitions, more'n any typist. What's the point in lairnin'?"
I suggested gently that, after the war, she might be glad of shorthand and typing skills.
She laughed. "I'll be married afore then. I won't have to work."
Knowing that without money from teaching shorthand I would not be able to continue working in Bootle, I renewed my efforts to find more lucrative employment.
A cold, depressed New Year came and went. Slowly Bootle picked itself up, and the office returned to near normality. There were further sporadic bombings, but nothing so terrifying as the Christmas blitz.
One blustery February morning, after a short, sharp raid, I found on our doorstep a flurry of faded, yellow pages from a large book. The script was alien to me, so, outof curiosity, I made a neat pile of them and took them inside to show Father.
Father spread the pages on the table and turned them over carefully. He was as intrigued as I had been.
"I think it's Hebrew." He rubbed a page gently between his fingers. "The paper is very good, and, see, the pages have been hand cut with a paper knife; you don't see that very often nowadays. The book must have been quite old." He pondered over my find for a moment or two, and then said, "I wonder if the book belonged to Mr. Cohen. He was killed last night, you know. Direct hit on his shop, poor old man. His daughter survived, though. She's in the Royal Infirmary—the warden told me, when I went out to have a look round after the all clear went."
"Do you think she'd like to have them?" I asked. "They could be all that she has left, in connection with her father."
So, in the hope of bringing some small comfort to a badly injured elderly Jewish lady, Father and I combed the adjoining streets and alleyways and asked our neighbours to look in their back yards for any further pages. We collected quite anumber. We wiped the dust off them, dried them where necessary, and made a neat parcel of them.
Since it was the weekend, and father did not have to go to work, he undertook to cycle over to the Royal Infirmary to see Miss Cohen.
Miss Cohen was still under the anaesthetic after surgery for her injuries and was, therefore, not able to receive a visitor. Father explained to the Ward Sister the purpose of his journey, and she undertook to give the parcel to Miss Cohen, with a hastily scribbled note from Father. "If the book is not hers, the pages can be thrown away," Father told the nurse.
Weeks went by and we forgot about the incident. Then Father received a letter written in a stiff, upright hand. Miss Cohen had been touched beyond measure by Father's kindness; the pages did, indeed, belong to the book her father had been reading during the raid. As we had suspected, the pages were the only thing left from her old home, and she would treasure them always. She was in a convalescent home in Wales and was now walking with the aid of sticks.Father and I looked at each other. Though we did not say anything, it was obvious that we were both struck by her quiet acceptance of what had happened to her. I wondered what it was Uke to have to begin again when one was about fifty-five years old.
Another person who had unexpectedly to begin again was Fiona. She received a week's notice to leave, from the magazine agency which employed her. The agency was closing down for the duration, because its subscribers were now so scattered, and it was also difficult to obtain the magazines normally ordered for them from the United States.
"What am I going to do?" she wailed. "They were so nice to me."
"You'll have to report to the Employment Exchange," Mother told her briskly. "Perhaps they'll put you in the Forces."
Fiona was aghast. Though she had stayed at school until she was fourteen, she, like me, had not much education, and she was scared at the thought of where she might be sent by the omnipotent Employment Exchange.
12
FIONA was directed by the Employment Exchange to work in a factory in Speke, a suburb on the south side of Liverpool. The factory manufactured components for aircraft. The journey to work was not difficult but, since her shift began at eight o'clock, she had for the first time in her life to get up early.
She was most excited at the prospect of earning the much higher wages offered to her, and enjoyed the period of training she was given.
The girls are very rough," she told me. Their language is unbelievable." "Did the Employment Exchange give you any other choices?" I inquired.
"No. Except that I could have gone into the ATS, if I could have passed the army medical. And I didn't want that, really. At least I can come home at night, if I'm in a factory."
She really was not very strong; we had always protected her from heavy work,
and I hoped the job she was given would not require great muscular strength.
Another change was pending in the family. The severity of the Christmas raids had, at last, been enough to convince Mother that the younger children should have remained in the country. Tony was now over fourteen though, and she felt he should remain in Liverpool. During his earlier evacuation he had, like Brian, won a scholarship to the Liverpool Institute. The Institute had originally been evacuated to Wales, so he had gone there to join it. Because so many boys returned home, the Institute had been re-opened in Liverpool, so when Mother arranged for his return home, he was able to continue school.
Now, once more. Mother wrote to the Aunts, my father's sisters, who lived across the river, to ask if they would again accept little Edward and Avril into their home.
Because the Aunts originally faced having Liverpool slum children billeted on them, they had asked that some of their nephews and nieces be sent to them, to be their evacuees. We had thankfullyaccepted their offer. Tony and Edward had been well cared for by them, and Avril had been most kindly looked after by a friend of theirs.
We all waited impatiently for a reply to Mother's request. Despite the disruptions of the war, we could reasonably expect an answer within forty-eight hours.
No reply came. Then Father discovered from files in his office that the authorities had decided that the Aunts' village, Hoylake, was now considered too close to badly bombed Birkenhead and Wallasey to be safe for evacuees; the Aunts were, therefore, exempt from billeting.
A subsequent letter to their friend who had looked after Avri
l elicited a polite reply saying that they had another child staying with them.
A scattered raid which damaged property near to us, finally prompted Mother to consult the children's school teachers. Within a couple of days, Edward and Avril were whisked away to Wem, a small village in Shropshire.
There they really suffered. Billeted on poor families with few facilities, people who also did not want them, they wereeven colder and more hungry than they had been at home. The local school had to accommodate the village children as well as the evacuees, so pupils were taught in two shifts, which meant a very early start to the day for our young ones. They had a long walk to the school and back, and then a dreary afternoon when they were not wanted in their hosts' houses and yet had nowhere to go. Far more than the heavy raids they had endured in Liverpool, the bitter experiences of their second evacuation were engrained in their minds for the rest of their lives. I could cheerfully have shot Mother for removing them from the comfort and safety of their original billets.
Tony had never talked much about his earlier experiences in Wales, except to say that he was first billeted with a very old lady, who lived alone in a huge, neglected house. Though she was kind, she had no idea how to manage a strange little boy. He must at first have been very frightened, but he never complained of being unhappy. Perhaps his life there was marginally better than it was at home, and his unquenchable sense of humour carriedhim through. When the subject of re-evacuation was brought up, he said simply, "I won't go."
Once the two younger children were re-evacuated, our household was reduced to Father and Mother, Brian, Tony, Fiona and me. Except for Tony, all of us had work. Mother's irritation at my refusal to become a full-time housekeeper was reduced to a steady grumble. I still did my share of housework and standing in queues. My days were very long, however, particularly those on which I had to walk to work. In an effort to cope with the needs of our war-weary clients, the staff continued to work long into the evening and through the lunch hour.
During this period, as I tried to overcome my sense of hopeless loss, to stop myself glancing along the rows of anxious faces in the waiting room, in the hope of seeing one cheerful, broken-nosed, beloved countenance, I began to understand better the turmoil within an apparently coherent, calm client; I looked for the real person behind the mask. Later on, it gave me strength not to flinch, when faced with a pilot whose face had beenburned off or with frightfully misshapen, civilian cripples. I sought the valiant, hurt personality within the shattered frame, the truest bravery sitting silently, uncommuni-catively, in a wheelchair.
In my mind, also, the difference between black, white, yellow and brown people lessened. I lived in a district with a fairly large black. West African population and the Chinese community was not far away. Bootle itself had a number of seamen from the Far East, some Indians and Negroes; most of them had white wives and gorgeous-looking children. As the bitterness of the blitz drew us all closer together, I learned that we all shared the same needs, the same fears, the same bigotry; we were simply the human race.
At the time, having met hundreds of fleeing Jews, I found it difficult to include Germans and, later on, the Japanese in the human race! In the face of the licensed cruelty and murder of a war, it is hard to stand back and view the faults of one's own beleaguered nation, and then judge.
Though ignorant and very innocent, caught in the trap of a lonely, narrow life, in a few months I seemed to grow fromadolescence to maturity, just as the boys who went into the Forces suddenly became men.
I often wondered what a normal life was like. Was there such a thing? What was it like to live all one's life in one house, go to one school for twelve years, be trained for a profession or go to university? I could not recall what it was like to eat three meals a day as a matter of course. What was it like to have friends you had known all your life, people you never had to explain anything to, because they knew of, and had shared many of your experiences? Go out to dinner? To parties? I had been to only one adult party in my life—Sylvia's twenty-first birthday celebration. What was it like to stay in the house of a friend? How should one behave in such circumstances?
The novels I read dealt with the crises of life, not the humdrum everyday. Being moved about as a child, like a tiddly-wink counter being neatly pinged into ever-new cups, was not a great deal of help to me in answering these questions. A child visitor was not treated in the same way as an adult. One was often put to sleep inthe corner of someone else's bedroom, someone who, often enough, found a child a nuisance. Frequently, in my grandmother's house, I was very lonely and fell back upon a morose charwoman for company. Above all, I was expected to be quiet, which immediately stifled many of the questions a child might have asked in normal circumstances.
Moving to and fro, from Grandma's house to my parents' house, parents who often moved themselves, meant that I was, during my few years at school, usually "the new girl", and I grew ever shyer and more diffident as I moved from school to school.
My parents and their friends, caught up in the mad gaiety of the early Twenties, after the First World War, had lived a life separate from that of their children. We were penned up in a nursery with a nanny. Except for glimpses of other children's parents when we went, occasionally, to play with families like our own, grownups and their behaviour were something of a mystery to us. Grandma, two aunts and an older cousin, who lived together, were probably more familiar to me than anyother grownups, but I was always acutely aware of being an outsider amongst them, and, looking back, I am surprised how Uttle I really knew them.
In the long, noisy nights of the blitzes, when it seemed that we might all be dead before morning, I pondered for hours on these gaps in my knowledge.
I knew my crisis-ridden clients quite well. I had seen their dreadful poverty, though it was not as acute as mine had been. I admired their bravery and resourcefulness. But their world was totally different from the world from which I had sprung. They had deep-rooted family ties. Most of them had always lived in the same street and had a strong sense of neighbourliness. They worked in the same places that their fathers and grandfathers had done. They belonged to trade unions and benevolent societies and to churches and chapels. They had networks.
Normally, was it like that in the middle classes?
Was Grandma's household, where I had spent so many healing months as a little child, a normal household? No man lived in that house, and a male visitor was rareindeed. Did not the four staid women who Hved there have wild desires like me? How did they subdue them? What had lain behind their gently smiling faces?
Being a surrogate parent from the age of eleven had cut me off from ready discussion with my siblings, of their experiences and ideas. To me they were our children, whose needs must be met; I never thought of them as people in whom I could confide or ask difficult questions of. The three younger children, Tony, Avril and Edward, had no memory of our earlier life, and Brian had very little; theirs was a totally different upbringing. Only an occasional word dropped by Fiona and Alan indicated their remembrances, and their lack of shared early experience with the rough, though quite friendly, youngsters living round us.
I never dared to ask Mother what she would regard as normal. She could demolish me with a word. When Father felt like communicating, he talked like a Canadian on the telephone, a flood of words which could last for an hour without stopping to take breath. He was interestingand witty but a difficult person of whom to ask straight questions.
Legally and in truth, I had become an adult, an adult without the experiences of my class or status. I was anxious to blend into my odd world as I found it, not to be thought of as unusual by my acquaintances at the office or by the neighbours, most particularly not to be thought of as uneducated. Though quite loquacious, I tended to avoid any expression of my own deeply held beliefs and ideas, and would often agree politely with anything people said to me, no matter what I felt; it was as if I papered over the cracks and voids of personality and experience with wh
at I regarded as suitably patterned wallpaper. To many observers the result must have been quite eccentric.
Though my parents seemed unaware of the fact, Fiona, too, was grown up. She was becoming increasingly resentful because, like many parents. Father and Mother tried to dictate to her who should be her friends. They had one idea in mind, that she should make a good marriage. At nineteen, she was bent on pleasing herself, and it seemed to me that she chose quitewell. She was not nearly so stupid as she pretended to be, and she had inherited Mother's ability to play a part if she wanted to—to avoid the persecution I endured from Mother, and to avoid taking a turn as family housekeeper, she had most successfully played for years the part of Mother's darling, empty-headed, little girl. I did not blame her in the least; I wished that I had been that smart. Now, however, she wanted to be her own woman.
Many years later, it was interesting to see her on stage in amateur dramatic performances. She was unusually adept at interpreting a character, and I felt sad that she had not had the opportunity to exploit this gift in the professional theatre. With this ability and her great beauty, she might have become a popular actress.
Now, feeling more independent as a result of her good wages, this usually placid, inoffensive young woman rebelled.
One raidless evening, while the rain beat down outside, she announced to my parents, seated finishing a last cup of tea after the evening meal, that she was considering becoming engaged to a youngwatchmaker, whose poHtics were known to be far left.
Father slapped down his newspaper, knocking over his cup, and blew up like a ruptured gas main. Mother, for once in total agreement with her mate, was equally noisy. "Fiona, how ridiculous! He's not a nice young man at all, and you must know it!"
I could not remember ever seeing Fiona so angry as she became that night. Dry-eyed, but flushed, she said furiously that she would live her own life and make her own mistakes. Irritation, suppressed for years, came bursting out, and I realised how alike we were, except that she had had the self-control which I lacked. She suddenly ceased to be, to me, a rather distant saint, who, according to Mother, was always perfect, and became infinitely more loveable in her distress.
Lime Street at Two Page 8