Minerva's Stepchild

by Helen Forrester

  Edward did follow me in, and I hastily gave him the new, unused bronze fireirons to play with. A resentfi-il Avril stayed with the cat.

  Thankfully, I curled up on the green leatherette settee. In the fetal position, the pain lessened, though during the next surge I fainted. I sobbed to myself and prayed that Mother would come home soon. Then the scarifying spasms retreated slightly, and I fell into a doze.

  Father shook me gently to awaken me and asked anxiously, "Are you all right, dear? You look very white."

  My stomach and back were tight knots of pain, increasing and decreasing like waves on a seashore. I was also shivering with cold from the unheated room. I hardly dared to move, as I whimpered out the story of the torment I was enduring.

  "My undemeaths are bleeding. Daddy. Do you think I've got appendicitis?"

  Bent over me, he listened. Then his eyes began to twinkle, his lips to twitch. A loud guffaw burst from him.

  I was horrified at such a reaction to my story. "Daddy!" I reproached him, and then broke into a moan as the pain increased.

  Father straightened up and, still smiling, let out a slow sigh of relief.

  "Didn't your mother explain this to you?"

  "What?"

  "This—this bleeding? '

  "No. Was she expecting it?" I was totally bewildered.

  "Well, of course. She must have been. You're a girl."

  "Of course, I'm a girl, " I gasped. "What difference does that make? Daddy, could you get the doctor? The pain's getting worse." I was deeply upset at his laconic attitude.

  He hesitated for a moment. Then he said, "You just stay where you are for the moment, until Mother comes home. Fiona's making the tea. I'll ask her to bring you a cup." His voice was kind.

  With eyes screwed tight to help me bear the raging pain, I put my head down again on the green leatherette. I heard him say, "Don't be afraid, old lady. This is nothing to be frightened about. You don't need a doctor."

  I did not believe him. How could anyone be in such pain and not need a doctor? "Mummy, come soon," I sobbed. Cold, indifferent Mother seemed to be the key to it all.

  The door clicked, and I opened my eyes. Fiona entered carefully balancing a coarse china cup on a saucer that did not match. Despite her care, the tea slopped as she put the cup and saucer into my hand. She looked at me anxiously.

  "Daddy said to drink the tea while it is very hot. What's the matter, Helen? You look awful."

  "I don't know, Fi, " I answered, as I tried to sip the scalding liquid. "Daddy says it's nothing—hut, oh, Fi, I've got such a terrible pain in my back and tummy—and I'm bleeding underneath. "

  Fiona's pink cheeks blenched. "Bleeding?"

  I nodded. The tea was comforting, and I drank it eagerly, though it was hot enough to bum my tongue. "Can you manage?" I asked her.

  "Yes, of course. Daddy's making the fire, and Alan is fetching the coal for him. You rest. Mummy will come soon. "

  "Where's Edward?"

  "He's in the kitchen. He's fine."

  I could feel a warm trickle between my thighs, and I took deep breaths to avoid screaming in fright.

  "Go and have your own tea, " I told her in a strained whisper, and she went, stopping at the door to look back at me with fearfiil violet-blue eyes.

  "Don't be afraid, Fi." I tried to muster a smile for her sake. "I'll be all right."

  She smiled back with sudden relief and shut the door quietly after her.

  I was sure, as I sank back on to the settee, that I was on my deathbed. And Father did not care!

  Mother sat down on the green leatherette easy chair opposite to me, and took off her hat. She looked tired and irritable.

  "Oh, Mummy," I wailed. "I've got such a terrible pain—and I'm bleeding. "

  "Oh, stop crying, Helen, " Mother snapped wearily. "There's nothing the matter with you. This is what I told you about years ago. All girls bleed every month."

  I looked at her with wide-eyed horror. "I don't remember your telling me. "

  "Of course, I did—when you were about nine. "

  If she had told me, the information must have been given so obliquely that it did not then register on my childish mind.

  My teeth were chattering, as I asked incredulously, "Every month—and pain like this? "

  "Of course not. It doesn't hurt at all. You have just worked

  yourself into a panic, and that has caused the pain. It will go away quite soon. We'll try to get some aspirins, before it is due next time."

  Mother smoothed her hair, and got up briskly. "I'll put a kettle on, and when it is boiled, you can come into the kitchen to wash yourself. I'll get a piece of cloth and show you how to keep yourself dry. "

  "Will it be like this again?" I asked between dry sobs.

  "I doubt it, if you don't have hysterics. "

  Twenty minutes later, I was seated by the kitchen fire, washed and tidied, drinking another cup of hot tea. The heat fi-om the fire helped, and gradually the pain receded, as Mother had promised.

  The boys stared at me because they had been told that I had had hysterics over a perfectly normal tummy ache; and they went away, Alan to night school, Brian and Tony to play bus on the stairs.

  It had been a terrifying promotion to womanhood. I felt humiliated and stupid, and blamed myself for my pain. I had been aware of changes in my body, but I was so undernourished that the changes were slight, and they had come slowly enough not to scare me.

  Three weeks later, I collapsed with pain in night school. The English teacher made me swallow two aspirins, told me I would be all right in an hour, and sent me home. Mother said the same thing and sent me up to bed, where I groaned and moaned my way through the next eight hours or so. In the early hours of the morning I fell asleep, exhausted.

  From month to month the pain persisted, and Mother became more concerned. She bought dried mint and made a tea for me to drink at the onset of the first ache. It did not help. Cristina, my Spanish fiiend, recommended a thick paste made with ginger spice and hot water, to be licked ofiFa spoon. Trustingly I downed this horrible concoction, but the pain continued. Cristina laughed, and said all the pain would cease either on marriage or after having a baby.

  I knew I was too bad-tempered and too plain to hope for marriage, and I was certain that I was not going to have a baby outside marriage. So I smiled dimly at her and did not reply.

  All the well-meaning adults in my life assured me that menstruation was just part of growing up and that some girls had more difficulty with it than others did. Nobody suggested that I should see a doctor. It did not occur to me either.

  For a week or two, I would forget the pain in the bustle of caring for the children's endless needs, and running oflFto night school through misty streets. And then apprehension would begin to creep over me. I would ask Mother for some of her aspirins and store them behind the alarm clock on the kitchen mantelpiece. I learned that heat was comforting, and when I saw a pile of new bricks lying on a building site, I begged two cracked ones from the bricklayer and brought them home. I heated them in the oven beside the kitchen fire, and when the onslaught began, I wrapped them in newspaper and lay on the green leatherette settee, clutching them close to me. Edward began to think it was a new game and wanted a brick for himself. He thought it was a great joke to cuddle up close with the bricks between us. Since he must often have been cold, the heat was probably comforting to him, too.

  One freezing winter day, I fainted in the butcher's shop. When I came around, I was in an easy chair beside a fire, in the living quarters behind his little shop. His wife was forcing brandy down my throat. She must have succeeded in getting me to swallow quite a lot, because the pain did dull slightly, and I felt exhilarated and yet sleepy. Edward had been propped in a matching chair on the other side of the fireplace. White rivulets down either grubby cheek marked the passage of tears. He had, however, a cheering ring of red jam around his mouth and in one hand was holding the crumbling remains of a tart.

 
; The butcher's wife was a tiny woman dressed in the grayish, washed-out skirt, blouse, and cardigan which seemed to be the uniform of women in Liverpool. Wisps of hair had escaped from her bun and draggled round a careworn face.

  "Are ye feeling better?" she asked.

  "Yes, thank you," I said. I blinked at her rather hazy face through spectacles that had slipped down my nose. "In fact, I feel fine. "

  "Aye, that's good brandy, that is. You gave me husband a real fright when you keeled over. "

  "Fm sorry. I get a pain each month," I faltered shyly.

  She smiled. "Oh, that was it, was it? Oh, aye. Brandy was the best thing to give you then. Does a lot for a woman at such times."

  "It seems to," I said blithely.

  Then I remembered the children's lunch. "I must go home," I said hastily. "My brothers and sisters will be coming from school."

  "Think you'll be all right?"

  "Yes."

  I got to my feet. They did not feel very certain as to where the floor was, but I managed to stagger over to Edward. He put his arms around my neck, and sent a shower of pastry crumbs over the threadbare carpet.

  Reeling slightly, I again thanked the butcher's wife.

  She laughed. "It's nothing. Aye, brandy's gone to your head, hasn't it?"

  "It has," I giggled. "But the pain is less." I wanted to kiss her, but decided I could not aim straight. So I said efiusively, "Thank you very, very much," and staggered, still giggling, through the lace-draped door to the shop, which she held open for me. She smiled broadly at me, as I passed.

  Though sometimes the pain would rise above the effects of the brandy, I hummed most of the way home. I was merrily drunk for the first time. I rolled around the icy living room and the kitchen as I boiled and thickened the minced meat I had bought; it was as well that it was ground, otherwise it would have been unchewable. I peeled the potatoes and boiled them to a mush, before the penny in the gas meter ran out. I spread clean newspaper on the table, and laid it. Seated on a wooden chair, I waited, at first happily, for the children to come in. But as the effects of the brandy began to seep out, the chill of the dirty, comfortless room began to invade—and the pain was once more paramount.

  Edward, too, was chilled and hungry and began to whimper. I took him up on my knee and wrapped us both in the old coat I used to cover him in the pram. It smelled of urine and long use. We warmed each other a little. He sucked his thumb and dozed, while I wept silently onto his scurfy little head.

  I wished I had some more brandy or anything else which would stop the grinding misery within me. As I waited, I saw

  suddenly the expression of pain which frequently lay on my father's face—and in a burst of warm understanding I realized why he needed to drink sometimes.

  Poor Father. I laid my head against baby Edward's and wept not only for my own suffering, but for my father's distress as well.

  Getting drunk can leave one very low afterward, I discovered.

  THIRTEEN

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  There was a silent conspiracy among Father, Mother, and me to keep from the other children as many of our troubles as possible.

  We had as many creditors in Liverpool as Father had had in wealthier days. Now, instead of the tailor, the dressmaker, the grocer and wine merchant, I faced the owner of the local tobacco and newspaper shop trying to collect for the cigarettes he had supplied, the finance man demanding the weekly payment for purchase of clothing, the agent of our aristocratic landlord threatening to throw us into the street, the heavy-jowled installment-plan man growling threats to repossess our sitting-room furniture.

  Ominous clouds of danger seemed to encompass me, and sometimes, after getting rid of a desperate, bullying man, I would lean against the inside of the front door and cry with pure fright.

  In our other life in another world, I had often heard Mother say to the parlormaid that she was not at home to anybody, and she thus evaded personal confrontation with creditors, whose bills and threatening letters lay in the wickerwork wastepaper basket.

  Here in Liverpool I had to answer the door myself to outraged men whose own livelihood was precarious. Occasionally, when I felt defeated, I would prevail on Fiona to answer the heavy bangs. She looked much younger than her age and had an expression of angelic innocence. She would say with convincing firmness, "Everybody is out except me."

  The creditors would leave, grumbling under their breath. They never shouted at her, as they did at me.

  I was never given a fixed sum from which to do the housekeeping. A shilling or two was slung onto the kitchen table with instructions to buy a list of groceries for which the money was almost invariably inadequate. Consequently, Edward and I tramped for miles to save a halfpenny on a loaf of bread, or to go to a shop which would sell margarine by the quarter pound. Such

  shops were filled with black-shawled, unwashed women and skinny, barefoot children.

  We had two lots of wages coming into the house, yet no housekeeping priorities were ever established. Mother sometimes made long lists of proposed expenditures and debt repayments, but they always ended up being tossed into the fireplace. Creditors who shouted the loudest and threatened most got paid eventually; those that did not received nothing. Cajoling credit out of shopkeepers who respected an Oxford accent was reduced to a fine art by my parents.

  I can remember one payday Mother coming triumphantly home with a box of cream cakes, when we lacked meat, milk, shoes, and soap. The children, of course, thought the cakes were wonderfiil, and I began dimly to understand why our rough, largely Irish, neighbors spent so outrageously on weddings and fijnerals, cinemas and drink, whenever they got the chance. Life seemed so hopeless that they snatched at any treat.

  There was, however, a number of families nearby with less money than we had, but whose kitchen grate always seemed to have a fire in it, though it might be of slowly collected driftwood rather than of coal. Their children, fiiends of Fiona, Brian, and Tony, were neat and clean; they ate regularly, and their mothers obviously mended and washed frequently. The menfolk were usually craftsmen or seamen, skilled with their hands. Some of them, for a couple of shillings, rented a small allotment garden from the City. Good crops of finit and vegetables were raised on them during the otherwise empty summer days.

  Neither of my parents had been trained to manage money. Grandpa died when Father was six. Father was sent to an excellent school when he was ten, a school famous for the Shakespearean plays its boys enacted. He acquired a deep understanding of French and English history, and his mathematical abilities were of university level. But nobody taught him how to keep a budget or to manage a family.

  Mother was equally ill-prepared for life. She was an orphan, brought up in a convent. She learned how to embroider fine altar cloths and copes; she acquired a smattering of French and other social graces, and a great love of reading. She had a fine singing voice and she learned to sing very well. The nuns hammered in

  the need for virtue in women, but not the basic knowledge which would make a good housewife. Some of the convent girls went home to a normal family life during their holidays. But Mother's guardian was a bachelor, so she stayed at school the year around.

  Unlike most of her contemporaries. Mother had had some business experience. Her guardian was the owner of a string of libraries, and when Mother became fifteen, he removed her fi*om the convent and taught her his own business. She was working as a librarian when she met and married my father.

  Now we were all suffering dreadfully as a result of their financial irresponsibility. Even hunger, cold, sickness, and pain failed to teach them to manage any better.

  Poor diet produces rotting teeth, and all of us at times had to endure severe toothache. To alleviate this, we painted the offending tooth with a pennyworth of oil of cloves. Though this did sometimes ease the pain, it did not stop the tooth fi-om deteriorating fiirther. Then abscesses formed. Brian and Avril of
ten sat weeping, while I applied hot poultices to their faces until the abscesses swelled and burst. Father already had false teeth when we arrived in Liverpool. But Mother's excellent teeth began to loosen fi-om gum disease. When one became too loose, she would wiggle it with her tongue until she could pull it out with her fingers. This must have hurt her and, of course, the gaps in her mouth did not improve her looks. Mouths fijll of poor teeth were, however, very common in Liverpool.

  During the second winter of attendance at night school, I found I could not see very well. I had lost some sight, and my glasses needed to be replaced. I had also grown, so that the fi-ames were too small for me, and my already plain face was made to look even more out of proportion.

  A further affliction was an annoying disease called pinkeye. At different times all the family caught it. It is an acute inflammation of the eye, which causes a heavy discharge, so that the eyes are sealed tight during sleep and in the daytime are flushed a sickly pink. The chemist sold me tiny packets of boracic acid which we made into a solution with hot water, and it helped.

  But my eyes were always sore, fi'om too much reading through wrong glasses in a bad light. Frequently we lacked pennies to push into the gas meter for the light in the living room, so

  I read by candlelight or, if we had no candles, I would do my homework leaning against a lamp post. The streets were lighted by gas in those days, and the lamplighter would dash on his bicycle from one cast-iron lamp post to the next to pull the chain that lighted the lamp. In the early part of the night-school term, it was frequently warm enough for me to do my homework in the park, or there was sometimes sufficient daylight to enable me to do it at home. But the deep winter was a time to be dreaded.

  I came to my studies hopelessly tired and always hungry. The quiet order of the school, however, helped my mind to focus. At the end of the second year, if I passed the examinations, I was to move on to a Senior Evening Institute. There the cost of books would be greater, and I had moments of panic while I waited for the results of the examinations, wondering what I would do if I did not win a scholarship this time. And even worse, what would be my fate if I failed the examination itself? My only hope would be gone.