Lime Street at Two

by Helen Forrester

"Well, it's in case of fire. No smokingallowed. Everybody has to leave their matches and pipes and cigarettes with

  me.

  "Oh, I see. Thank you."

  Though it was early, Miss Hughes was already at her typewriter in the small, brick building where I had been interviewed. When I inquired where I should go, she instructed me to follow the lane from the entrance until I came to the end of it. "It's the building on the left," she said.

  So, on that fine spring morning, I followed a narrow, deserted, macadamised road which ran through the entire Installation. At intervals, I passed other small buildings, like the one in which Miss Hughes worked. Each one had the name of a famous oil company on it; presumably, they were, in peacetime, the local offices of their companies. Between them and behind them towered great round storage tanks, with a narrow ladder running up the side of each. Each tank was moated, so that if they leaked, the petrol or oil would be confined. Between the tanks ran pipelines over rough grass. Near one tank, two old lilac bushes were puttingout buds, and other flowering bushes suggested that the area had once been a large garden. A high stone wall, patched with moss and lichens, marked the Installation's boundary. It, too, looked as if it had belonged to a garden.

  At one point, I peeped into a huge garage, where it appeared that tanker lorries were being repaired. A man in greasy overalls looked down from the top of one of these behemoths and whistled after me as I passed.

  I blushed and averted my gaze; I had never elicited a whistle from anyone before.

  The sun shone brightly on the strange, circular storage tanks, making them look like abandoned pieces of ancient, desert architecture. On the road before me, sparrows twittered and pecked, to rise and flutter away as I approached them. Seagulls sat on the edge of the tank tops and shrieked warning as I passed. Over all, hung the heavy, sickening odour of petrol, a very different smell from the close stench of Bootle slums. Above the boundary wall, I could see the chimneys of houses crowded near the adjoining Herculaneumdock. I was a little shocked that such a volatile commodity as petrol was permitted to be stored so close to people's homes; a well-placed bomb on a single storage tank could, I felt aineasily, set off such a violent series of explosions that the entire installation could be ignited in seconds. Such a holocaust would take with it the whole neighbourhood.

  It was the knowledge of this possibility which, during a particularly vicious raid, made a quiet, family man on the staff climb the deadly tanks near our office and heave off their floating roofs a series of incendiary bombs, for which incredible bravery he most deservedly received the George Cross.

  I finally reached the last building on the road. Behind it loomed the boundary wall. It had a padlocked gate in it, which presumably led into Grafton Street and gave access to the Herculaneum dock. I looked up at the little office, and paused. About thirty years later, in a novel, I would make that building into a tiny cottage, facing the river, and I would break down the boundary wall, so that the inhabitant of the cottage had access to Grafton Street. The tenant's name and the name of the book would be Liverpool Daisy *

  In front of the building was a large yard with a series of petrol pumps in it. Two big tanker lorries were being filled, and a man stood on top of one tank, dipping it, to check the level of its contents. Several men in overalls stood near the tankers, gossiping and shuffling papers in their hands. Such a strictly rationed commodity involved much paperwork, as the petrol passed down the lines of distribution. Not even the most involved checking system, however, prevented occasional theft, and there was a lively black market in petrol.

  A youth of about seventeen, also in overalls, was placidly sweeping the yard, and whistling like a blackbird; he was the first young man I had noticed on the Installation. He was to be called up shortly and would become, before he was demob-ihsed, a Wing Commander in the Royal Air Force, a feat which caused many

  * First published by Robert Hale Ltd, as Liverpool Daisy by June Bhatia. First issued in Fontana Paperbacks, 1984.earnest arguments amongst his fellow workers about the waste of talent during the Thirties, and how he might have spent his life as a labourer, had there been no war.

  Shaking with nerves, I mounted the steep front steps and knocked at the door. Then, taking a big breath, to stall my sudden sense of panic, I turned the knob and walked in.

  Though the lives of all my future colleagues had been upset by the war, I sometimes think that opening that door allowed me to leave a world of nightmare and enter a normal world. Yet, I was truly terrified, particularly when I caught a glimpse, through an inner doorway, of two men working. It brought home to me that I had, in giving up social work, left a segment of society run almost entirely by women, a whole way of life based on caring for others. Now I was entering a man's world, in which women played only a subordinate role, a world run solely for profit.

  How was one supposed to behave? It was one thing to dance or converse with men, be pleasant for a few minutes; quiteanother to work alongside them. Fiona was having a difficult time, I knew, amongst men who regarded her as a sexual object to be preyed upon, not as a fellow worker. I wanted to turn and run. Better the devils of hunger and privation which I knew, than the devils I did not know.

  "But it's too late to turn back," I reminded myself, as I stood awkwardly before two girls a little older than myself.

  At the sight of me, one girl swung out of her seat behind a desk. She was tall, rosy-cheeked and merry-eyed, uncannily like my childhood nanny, Edith.

  As she came towards me, she said, "You must be the new shorthand typist. You're just in time for tea. What's your name?"

  I told her, and she showed me where to hang my hat and coat. One of the men, who proved to be the Departmental Manager, came from the inner office. He told me where to sit, and suggested that I try the typewriter for a few minutes. Then he would dictate some letters to me.

  Two other small offices yielded the peacetime manager of the oil company which normally occupied the building, and his quiet, unobtrusive secretary. Theirwork involved the design of a pipeline to run under the English Channel, and I did not see much of them, except when the secretary was ill. I then deputised for her. Because we laughed and talked so much, the two of them must have been acutely aware of the invasion of their peaceful building by the Wages and Personnel Department of the wartime consortium of the oil companies. They were, however, very patient with us.

  Over a cup of tea, I relaxed a Uttle, but I had been so cut off from my own age group, so aUenated by privation, that it was months before my voice lowered its nervous, defensive pitch, to its normal, deeper key. It was months before I understood the Department's racy, youthful badinage; in fact, I doubt if I ever did truly understand its more subtle inferences. I suspect that my bewilderment was a source of much good-natured amusement to all of them.

  I found, to my dismay, that amongst my duties was the calculation of a payroll. At night school I had, in bookkeeping classes, been taught only how to keep a simple set of account books; and, on the side, oneteacher had tutored me in basic arithmetic. I had had Uttle practice at either. In all my years in that office, I doubt that I ever got the weekly payroll absolutely correctly put together. The men whose wages I mixed up were extraordinarily kind and patient with me, and the Departmental Manager was never more than wittily caustic about it. I was, however, deeply ashamed of my inability to do basic arithmetic. Once again, the lack of schooling had caught up with me.

  To a generation brought up in a period of pocket calculators, the urgent need to be able to do mental arithmetic quickly and accurately must seem strange. Yet, without mechanical help one needed such an ability at every turn, and I am sure there are still elderly people who can add up a column quicker than their grandsons can do it with a calculator. Certainly the girls in my office were very accurate.

  I dreaded being dismissed as inefficient. Probably, with all the red tape which would have had to be waded through to dismiss anyone under wartime regulations, it was easier to put up with me.
It came as a great surprise at the end of the war,when employers and employees were freed from Government restrictions, to be offered employment by one of the oil companies.

  Throughout that summer, and for many summers after, I wore to work the three dresses Harry had given me—up to then I had always regarded them as being for best occasions only. From New York, they were beautifully cut and far superior to anything the other girls wore. Two of them were black, trinmied in subdued colours, and to me they were mourning dresses. Ironically, I had no decent underclothes to wear with them.

  Out of my improved wages, I gave Mother thirty shillings a week, more than I would have had to pay a landlady in our district for dinner, bed and breakfast. At last, her pressure on me to stay at home to keep house eased; I was rapidly becoming a financial asset. We managed the home between us, and I thankfully stopped teaching shorthand at night.

  The first six weeks of my new employment seemed very leisured. Despite the battle with the payroll each week, the weight of work was negligible, comparedwith the tremendous load carried in Bootle. The extreme fatigue began to seep out of my tired limbs and exhausted mind.

  During that six weeks, I did three wonderfully exciting things.

  In all my life I had never been to a dentist, and during our years in Liverpool I had, like the rest of the family, endured some excruciating bouts of toothache. Because of a poor diet and lack of a toothbrush, Mother had lost most of her teeth —they simply loosened and fell out. Some of mine were loose and several had large cavities. When they had ached, the holes had been stuffed with a tiny piece of cloth dipped in bitter oil of cloves. Feeling very daring, I made an appointment with a local dentist. It was taken for granted that a visit to a dentist was always painful, so I had to screw up my courage, as I waited in the front room of his house, for my turn.

  He must have been used to neglected mouths, because he simply listed a formidable collection of fillings to be done, and two extractions, one because a tooth was beyond repair and a second because it was too loose to be filled. "They also need a good scraping," he told me, as he filled aneedle to lessen the pain of the two extractions.

  It was enough work to keep a modern dentist busy for half a dozen appointments, but this was in the days before dentistry was covered by Health Insurance, and the dentist had to keep his fees within the bounds of what the patient could pay. He therefore did the extractions inmiediately. They were painful and I bled sufficiently to cause him anxiety, probably because I was so ill-nourished. The following Saturday, he drilled and filled and scraped and polished until my mouth was sore and my head spinning.

  "Come in next week, and I'll give the fillings a final polish," he ordered, as he scrubbed his hands in a tiny corner wash basin.

  When the final grinding was done, so that the fillings matched the teeth above or below them, I was so happy at being free of pain at last that some of my exuberance was communicated to the dentist, and he grinned under his grey moustache, before he opened the door of his surgery, to let me out. "Feel better?" he asked.

  "I feel wonderful.""Good." His smile faded, as he surveyed his crowded front room. He must have been very tired. So many dentists had been called up that the weight of work on older men must have been very heavy, but not so heavy for him that he failed to remember ingrained, old-fashioned courtesies, like opening the door for me. I was touched that he should bother to do so.

  Marks and Spencer's store was to me an Aladdin's Cave. There, I bought a pair of glistening black shoes with higher heels than I had ever worn before, all of one and a half inches high, and two pairs of rayon stockings—I had never before been able to buy two pairs at one time—and I felt very rich. The purchases proved to be a good investment, because shortly afterwards all clothing was rationed.

  Except for a pair of satin dancing shoes, bought for my Confirmation in the Cathedral, these were the first new shoes I had had for ten years. I had always managed with secondhand ones.

  Lastly, I opened a Savings Account at the post office nearest the Installation. I would put money into it each week. Post Office Savings Accounts had the advantagethat one could save in them as httle as sixpence a week. The customer was provided with a book into which he stuck sixpenny stamps, as he was able to purchase them. The money was to be accumulated for new spectacles. I was still wearing, at twenty-one, the glasses prescribed for me when I was eleven. The frames were too small and had been mended and re-mended through the years, and the lenses distorted my vision. I tended to manage without them. Now, faced with the tightly packed figures on the payroll, I suffered frequent headaches.

  I carried the Savings Bank book in my handbag, and guarded the bag from Mother as if it held the Crown jewels. Though she could not draw money from the account without forging my signature, I felt that she might easily do this, or, if she knew I had any money, she was capable of making my life such a misery that I would finally give it to her.

  Many goods we take for granted were either no longer available, or were kept under the shop counters for specially favoured customers. Amongst these were makeup and hairpins and hair clips. The

  American seamen on the tankers docking at our Installation soon discovered this. Nylons, lipsticks and all the other small pleasures of life were soon circulating round the Installation and were eagerly bought by the girls. No Customs Officer at the exit gate of the Installation had time to bother about a single lipstick or pair of stockings carried out in a girl's zipper bag; their staff was so depleted by the call-up that they were already harassed enough. I bought a lipstick and some hair clips, and felt very wicked indeed.

  Occasionally, as cigarettes, also, vanished under counters, I bought Mother a packet of Camels. She always thanked me politely for them, and would then complain steadily, as she smoked them, that, compared to Player's Navy Cut, they were horrible.

  We were, of course, not allowed to smoke on the Installation because of the fear of fire, so we looked forward to a morning cup of tea instead. A tea break in the morning, however, was expressly forbidden by the management. It was considered an unnecessary indulgence.Nevertheless, we always made an illicit morning cup.

  Because the office staff was scattered across the Installation in the numerous small offices owned by the individual oil companies, it was difficult to supervise us, but the trying Uttle man in the bowler hat would zip around the entire complex between ten and eleven o'clock, in an effort to surprise us sipping tea.

  He roared into our little office one morning, like an autumn gale. While banging the space bar of the typewriter noisily with my right thumb, I hastily slipped my contraband cup of tea into the stationery drawer of my desk. The resultant slop ruined a pile of typing paper and dripped with a noise that seemed unnaturally loud, on to the brown linoleum beneath my feet. I typed nonsense industriously to cover the persistent tip-tap.

  I do not know where the Departmental Manager hid his cup or what the other girls did, but the picture of unnatural industry which we all presented was a miracle of instantaneous reflexes.

  He said nothing, just snorted, andstrode through the rooms, rattled down the basement steps to ensure that none of the yard staff was being so intemperate as to take tea and biscuits down there, came up again, glared at us and bolted out of the front door. We could hear him outside loosing his frustration on the unsuspecting yard men. We rescued our teacups and put the kettle on again.

  Something had to be done, we all decided. We enlisted the help of the telephonist on the central switchboard in the main office, where the bowler hat had his glassed-in desk, at which I had been originally interviewed.

  This lady was regularly informed by the wardens of the district, before the siren went, that an air raid was imminent. It was her duty to telephone each office to alert them to the impending danger. One of us would answer her ring, and she would announce, "Yellow Alert," or "Red Alert", according to the closeness of the German planes. Occasionally, she would say, "Purple, purple," which meant that the raid was likely to be up
on our area. On receiving such warnings, we were supposed to take shelter in the basement,with the yard crew. Warnings in the daytime had, however, become very infrequent, so we took over this system.

  When the bowler hat moved out of his office, all the offices on the Installation got a whispered, "Yellow!" Other offices would report sighting him to the operator, and the girl would hastily ring the phones of offices it seemed likely he would visit. She would say, "Hurry, it's red!" And tea would vanish and biscuit crumbs would be swept into the wastepaper basket. The dreaded Purple warning was reserved for the Manager of the entire Installation, When, with suitable ponderous gravity, he emerged from his office—a rare occurrence—the whole Installation was on Purple alert, as if the entire Luftwaffe was overhead.

  It is very important that management be sometimes blind, and to separate an English woman from her teacup, even when it contained the anaemic looking brew of wartime, takes more business acumen than it is worth spending. The bowler hat knew when he was defeated and gave up.

  Though they were spent in a maelstromof war, those six weeks were for me a time of recovery, and of learning to laugh and to enjoy the light-hearted company of my own age group. They were, in a sense, my first unworried, happy times, as I adopted my fellow employees as a second family. It seemed that the worst had already happened to me and was gone. I was moving forward into a new world. And then came the May blitz.

  16

  AS a result of the Lend-Lease Agree- merit with the United States, Liverpool was one of the primary ports through which flowed help in the war effort. The May blitz, which commenced on 1st May, 1941, was a week of night bombing aimed at destroying completely the city and its satellite towns. It was also the headquarters of Western Command, and the eradication of such an important Command Post would, alone, have made the attack worthwhile to the Germans.

  Since previous raids had usually begun about six o'clock in the evening, I was thankful to be working close to my home. The office normally closed promptly, a luxury I had rarely enjoyed before, and I trotted through the fresh spring greenery of Princes Park as quickly as I could in order to be home before a raid began. A secondary reason for my haste was that there were soldiers in the park. Theymanned the anti-aircraft gun emplacements and, because there were few civilians about during the week, I was a little nervous of them.