Lime Street at Two

by Helen Forrester

  And here I was now, caught between male pigheadedness and dire necessity. Except possibly on the black market,which I could not afford, there was no way in which I could obtain stockings. If I lost my job for impudence, I could not help it. I mentally resigned myself to scrubbing saucepans in Army kitchens, and agreed to be the leader.

  The next morning, five frightened shrimps were washed into a very bare office, where sat a stout, elderly Yorkshireman, blinking at us over heavy horn-rimmed spectacles. His slightly grubby beige suit was creased across him, as if he had put on weight since he bought it. The expression on his face made me cringe.

  "Well?" Scorn was in that single word and in the glance he gave us, as he looked up from a pile of papers.

  "Sir, we have come to see you, because we cannot afford to buy stockings now that they are rationed," I squeaked. Miss Hughes stood quietly by her employer, her facial expression a carefully controlled blank. She had done her best for us. She would do no more.

  The small eyes seemed smaller behind the thick glasses.

  "Why not? Are you telling me that youare not paid enough? You get coupons for them. Bare legs are not respectable, you know that."

  I swallowed. My throat was so dry that I thought I would not be able to reply. Then I said rather hoarsely, "It would take all our coupons to keep us in stockings. There would be none left for anything else."

  "You'll 'ave to learn to darn, won't you?"

  I thought of my carefully mended stockings, the ladders rehooked with the aid of a fine crochet hook, an eye-destroying task. I forgot my fear in a burst of anger.

  "Sir, none of us wastes our stockings. We can't afford to."

  "And are you telling me you're not paid enough?" He leaned back in his chair and tapped its wooden arm with the end of a pencil. "When I were in 'uU, the female staff was paid the same rates, and I never 'ad one complaint." He looked us over with such an air of self-satisfied complacency that I wanted to kick his shins. Mercifully, his desk lay between us.

  "No, sir. None of us is complaining about our wages."

  One of the other girls interjected, "Sir,we could wear slacks, like the women labourers on the Installation."

  His mouth fell open. He was genuinely shocked. "Not in my office," he replied frigidly.

  "It seems to be the only alternative. Sir," I added. "Slacks would last, they would be neat, and they would be warm in winter."

  Another girl, who had not up to then said a single word, suddenly spoke up. "If you insist about stockings, we shall all have to find other jobs," she said boldly.

  I could have clapped my hands in relief that I had not had to make this threat. The man in front of us had had all his fit male staff under the age of thirty called up. He had just got his offices nicely re-organised with female staff; he would not want to start the whole operation again.

  Encouraged by the Manager's silence, the girl went on, "Our legs don't look too bad." She stepped round his desk and lifted her calf length skirt slightly and stretched out a pretty foot. Her legs were evenly stained a light brown, giving the effect of a fine silk stocking. "Oxo," she announced simply.He glanced embarrassedly at the proffered leg, took off his glasses and began to polish them furiously with a crumpled handkerchief. Angry frustration was written all over his plump, pasty face.

  "I'll talk to the Office Manager. You can go," he almost snarled, as he clapped his glasses back on again and scowled at us.

  "Thank you. Sir," I replied for the group.

  Herded by Miss Hughes, we shuffled out of the room.

  As soon as Miss Hughes had gone back to her own desk, we all began to giggle helplessly, holding on to the stair rail so that we should not fall. One of the girls who wore glasses pushed them down to the tip of her nose, and blinked at us. "I'll send you all to 'uU to work, if you're not good," she announced, and we broke into helpless laughter, and fled back to our respective offices.

  After I had regaled the Wages Department with the story of our adventures, I asked, "What does he mean by, when I was in 'uU?"

  "He means Hull, you idiot. That'swhere he came from. Everybody was perfect there, didn't you know?"

  After that, "when I was in 'uU" became a catch phrase on the Installation, guaranteed to make even the most solemn person break into a grin.

  I spent a whole week worrying myself sick that I, at least, would be dismissed because I had led the delegation.

  Nothing happened. Not a word came down from on high. Gradually, we all began to breathe more easily. None of us wanted to wear slacks—they were too daring—and common. So we continued to paint our legs. In the winter, our legs sometimes bled, because they were so chapped, and cold cream, to put on them at nights, was so scarce.

  Though we had won our little war, I had an uneasy feeling that the Purple Warning Manager had not forgotten the name of the leader of the malcontents, and in this I was right.

  Later on, the Minister of Labour decided that the young women employed by the oil companies could easily be replaced by older women. The indignant oil companies, faced with training yetanother new office staff, fought back. I became the test case, a most uncomfortable position to be in.

  22

  MORETON with its clean, sea air, combined with a much less demanding job and regular hours, improved my health. Despite the long journey to work, the help I gave in the house and the endless queueing for the basic materials of life, I also had more time.

  As with everyone else, at the back of my mind the war was a continuous, scarifying threat to me and mine. Alan was still in Kent, an area constantly threatened by German air raids. At the age of seventeen and a quarter, Brian was called up into the Navy, which was a great disappointment to him; he had hoped to follow his brother into the Air Force. Once he was at sea, we worried constantly about him.

  The news was dreadful. In North Africa, the siege of Tobruk was an ongoing litany of losses. In East Africa, there was bitter fighting—a facet of the war that not many remember now.In Greece, an infantryman, together with his unit, slowly retreated through its harsh mountains, to Crete, only to be bombed and attacked there, and to arrive eventually, with bare and damaged feet, in threatened Egypt. His unit was regrouped and he fought his way across North Africa. He still goes each year to the El Alamein reunion, where the survivors of this bloody battle meet to touch hands and relive for a moment their shared trauma. During those dreadful days, he might have felt a Uttle better if he had known that the most beautiful girl in his native Moreton would one day be his wife. But Fiona's future husband, a gentle, peaceful person, was a very long march away from home.

  The Battle of the Atlantic was a continuous running sore, and an even more destructive battle for the Mediterranean, including the besieged and battered little island of Malta, GC, took a frightful toll of both the Royal Navy and the Merchant Navy. I was no longer dealing with the relations of the men lost, but through the gossip of the port I heard the names of innumerable sunken ships. I cried in sympathy with more than oneacquaintance who lost husband, son or lover.

  As I tried to build a new life for myself, like a willowherb precariously rooted in the ruins of a bombsite, I clung to a rigid routine of daily catching the same train, concentrating on the boring payrolls, cooking, standing in queues on Saturdays, cleaning and mending for the family, and, of course, doing my voluntary work for the Air Training Corps, a welcome change. Occasionally, late in the evening, I went to a village dance. My partners were the men from the Royal Air Force transit camp or from the nearby gun sites. I sometimes accepted a date, but there was not much time to get to know any of them before they were sent overseas. One or two of them wrote to me for several years, and I always replied. I hoped that my letters were comforting, and fun to read.

  To the astonishment of many who had not had time to read in the newspapers the reports of the preliminary buildup, on the 22nd June, 1941, the Germans attacked Russia. Three million German soldiers rolled like floodwater into an ill-prepared country.Though the famous
German Panzer Divisions must have seemed terrifying in their immensity, the Germans themselves had certain weaknesses in other areas, to which they had not given sufficient attention. They lacked general transport. Also, they had not fully appreciated the problems raised by the fact that Soviet railways are of a different gauge from the rest of Europe, and this complicated the use of German rolling stock in occupied Russian territory. To help to shift the vast number of men and the amount of materials they needed, they employed 625,000 horses in the invasion. Horses do not need petrol, but they do have to be fed.

  As they followed the retreating Russians deeper and deeper into their huge country, the Russians' scorched earth policy, that is, burning everything in the path of the enemy, must have made the feeding of the animals progressively more difficult.

  Suddenly, we all became knowledgeable about Russian cities and rivers. The names of Russian generals, at first tongue-twisters to the British, became fashionable as the names of household cats. The voyage from Britain to Murmansk in Northern Russiacreated another graveyard for our seamen, as the AlUes sent aid to a nation which had suddenly become one of us, instead of one of them. Hot water bottles and fur coats, already hard to get, vanished from the market-place; and we were told that they had been sent to Russia.

  Father did not need a map of Russia to follow this latest invasion. He leaned back in his greasy easy chair and said with quiet satisfaction, "The Germans have lost the

  war."

  Considering that the Germans were rolling up the Russian army as if it were a carpet about to be discarded, this seemed a very optimistic remark. But Father knew at first hand something of Russia, of its tough peasantry, its horrendous winter, and when I demurred at his remark, he merely said, with a grin, "Remember Napoleon."

  Particularly amongst the working class, there was considerable sympathy for the Russian people. As goods from factories began to arrive in Liverpool for shipping to Russia, it was common to see boxes, tanks and planes scrawled with messages,like, "Another for Stalin" or "Long live Russia".

  I simply hoped that Father was right.

  At this period of the war, although I had such endearing colleagues at the office, once out at Moreton I was quite lonely. Edward and Avril soon made friends at school. Brian and Tony began to put down roots in their new village. Before being called up, Brian joined the Home Guard, and spent Saturday and Sunday, and occasional nights, guarding the coast, or practising repelling imaginary invaders amid the grass-tufted sandhills of our seashore. Fiona forgot her watchmaker and enjoyed herself at local Church dances. I always went to different dances, because I felt overshadowed by her. Besides, I was shy and abrupt and, until I established myself as a very good dancer, I frequently sat depressedly watching the other couples jitterbugging to the big band music.

  The shoulder flashes of the airmen on the floor were those of a myriad of countries, from Australia to Czechoslovakia. A sailor of any kind was a rarity—seamen weremore common in Liverpool and Birkenhead, where lay the docks.

  Many of these young men wanted to meet a girl who would take them home. There, by a civilian fireplace, at no cost to themselves, they could be warmer than in the freezing camp sites and could share what there was of home-cooked food. They also often got their socks darned and buttons stitched on.

  The rank and file of the Forces were paid only twenty-one shillings per week. If they wished their wife or mother to receive a family allowance from the Government, they were obUged to make an allotment for her of seven shillings a week from their pay. The remaining fourteen shillings bought them very little, though I came across one or two men in Bootle who, out of this miserable pittance, sent their wives additional money, because the wife's allowance was only twenty-five shillings a week, including their allotment. As they often said, "She's got to pay the rent and the hire purchase man.

  Bearing in mind that a man in a reserved occupation in a factory could earn a basic wage of one pound per day, plus boundlessovertime at one and a half times or double that rate, British servicemen were ridiculously badly paid. It was no wonder that, when American servicemen arrived with their much better pay, uniforms and food, there was considerable jealousy. However, many a mother with sons in the Forces did welcome into her home someone else's boy, particularly for short leaves of twenty-four or forty-eight hours. Occasionally, the language barriers were formidable and yet friendships were cemented that lasted a Hfetime, and many a girl married and went to Europe, after the war, to share the hardships of a continent which had been wrecked by the conflict. There were even a few brave souls who married German and Italian prisoners of war.

  Many of the Polish, French, Dutch and Czech dancers whom I watched had already lost home and family to the Germans. Some of them were bags of rattling nerves, who should have been allowed to leave the Forces to become civiUans in Britain. Instead, they had yet to face the great and bloody battles ofNorth Africa, Sicily, Italy, and the Normandy invasion.

  Mother discovered the cinema in Hoylake, and she went there frequently. Later in the war, she complained sourly, "It's simply packed with American soldiers, and they are with the most utterly vulgar blondes. I don't know where they pick them up—I really don't."

  Though many of the girls were perfectly respectable local residents, army camps, especially American ones, drew to them professional prostitutes from all quarters; and, despite work orders and the general regimentation of civilian life, these ladies flourished mightily.

  As long as the beer allocation lasted. Father found the village pubs, also full of servicemen, lively and interesting. He spent most of his evenings in them.

  At times, I could find myself sitting in the evening with a cat on my lap to keep me warm, because the coal ration had run out, and wondering once more what I was living for. Sometimes, I would try to make plans about what I should do after the war, or I would toy afresh with the idea of going into the Forces and would shrink

  yet again from it, because I dreaded more physical hardship—I felt I had had enough.

  Even worse than being alone, I could find myself sitting opposite an extremely irritable mother who had run out of money for the cinema or cigarettes and had finished her library book. If she happened to be in a good mood, however, and if I were careful to tread my way gingerly through all the verbal minefields, we were able to talk about books that we had read or about our old home of so very long ago, a whole lifestyle which I suspect Mother never really appreciated until she lost it. I was the only child who really remembered much detail of that more affluent life and could share in her recollection of it.

  In the early days of her marriage, she had collected Georgian silver, and she was still interested in antiques. We would tell each other of pretty examples of silver still occasionally displayed, at usurious prices, in antique shops.

  She had been brought up in a Roman Catholic convent school, and she would occasionally recount experiences she had had in this rarefied environment. Shehad retained her AngUcan denomination, though she carried with her, from the First World War and its senseless carnage, the same doubts and bitterness that Father did. While the Second World War whirled around us, we would sit in our cold, still very comfortless sitting-room under a dim, single electric light bulb which flickered occasionally, and stir our colourless tea, while we discussed whether the Body and Blood of Christ was, indeed, made real in the bread and wine of the Communion Service. Mother tended to believe, and also discussed, the idea that it was probably all right to address prayers to the Virgin Mary. I once responded that, to me, she always seemed to be only a plaster statue. This irreverent remark brought a storm down about my ears, and she was only placated by a promise to take her to the cinema the following evening.

  Of course, any leisure which any of us had was quite late in the evening. Even if I had the necessary fares, I had to allow an hour and a half to get to work and an hour and a half to return, because the transport timings were uncertain, and, to begin with, I had a twenty-minute walk toMore
ton station each day. Some buses ran from the end of the road to an intermediary station, but to take one would have added to my already expensive fares. Nobody in the family travelled as far as I did to work. Apparently, many of the neighbours never knew I existed, until nearly the end of the war, because I left home so early and returned so late—and yet it was an improvement upon the struggle I had had to get to and from Bootle. As buses and trains grew older and were not replaced or properly serviced, the whole nation suffered from difficulty in getting about, and the Government's slogan, "Is your journey really necessary?" became a joke. Few would want to travel for pleasure in dark, close-packed vehicles whose timing was uncertain; except those with a little leave, who battled to get home to their families for a brief reunion.

  Sometimes it is the small irritations of a war which irk the most; the blackout, the inability to fight one's way down a packed corridor of a long distance train, simply to get off or go to the lavatory; the problem of obtaining even a cup of tea on a long journey; trying to find a cobbler to mendshoes; or an electrician, or a plumber; or a washer or a switch in order to do a repair oneself. But gradually we got so used to people looking grey, shabby and un-mended, to buildings left unpainted, to taps that dripped and appliances which did not work, to furniture with seats worn thin, to shopkeepers like buUyboys, that we did not even notice them.

  23

  THE coming of clothes rationing on 1st June, 1941, laid the foundation of a huge black market. Everybody knew somebody who knew somebody who could obtain articles of clothing, particularly dress lengths. In order to serve this market, theft must have been wholesale.