Minerva's Stepchild

by Helen Forrester

  When I looked at Fiona's more successfi^il efforts, I realized, vdth a shock, that she had grown up. She laughed at my expres-

  sion of astonishment. Perfect teeth flashed between the gaily painted hps. She had carefiilly removed, with a wet finger, the siirphis powder from her huge eyelashes and smooth, long brows, and her dancing, violet eyes were greatly enhanced by the powdered skin.

  "Fi, you look gorgeous," I exclaimed.

  "Do you really think so?" she asked shyly.

  "Oh, yes."

  She looked down at her grubby little-girl's clothes, and sighed. "Thank goodness, Mummy's going to buy me some decent clothes to start work in. She's going to get credit so that I can have a new coat and hat and everything."

  Such a pang of jealousy went through me! I remembered the exhausting battles I had fought and was still fighting to be able to work, to have a few clothes, even to get enough to eat. Here was Fiona taking it for granted that she would have no such difficulties.

  "She hasn't asked you to look after Edward until he starts school in September?"

  "She knows I'm no good at that sort of thing," she replied placidly.

  It was true that Fiona had always appeared very helpless when asked to help in the house. I looked at her sharply. She had picked up the family comb and was contentedly combing her hair. I had an uneasy feeling that she was much smarter than I was.

  "Good for you, " I said, trying unsuccessfijlly to keep the acid out of my voice.

  Fiona put down the comb and turned to me. "They can afford to pay someone," she said calmly. "There will be five of us at work when I start. "

  "Tell that to Mother, " I snapped bitterly.

  As promised, the Presence arranged another holiday for me. This time, I had to pay my own fare and one pound toward the cost.

  "Since you will receive a month's salary before you start the holiday, there should be no difficulty about that, " she said to me very pleasantly.

  I was most grateful and thanked her effusively. I nearly danced out of her office. A holidav like the one I had had before

  would make me strong again, take away the pains in my legs. And I could, if I wished, sleep and sleep and sleep, until my head stopped aching and my eyes lost their bloodshot hue.

  Filled with excitement, I dashed into the house when I arrived home and poured out the thrilling news to my parents, who were seated at the table, bickering as usual. It took a lot of effort on the part of both Father and me to persuade Mother that she could provide the necessary one pound.

  "I'll save up my fare, " I promised, as I ate a slice of bologna and several pieces of bread and margarine, followed by gulps of sweet, weak tea.

  In the weeks that followed, by halfpennies and pennies, I saved the fare, two shillings for pocket money and enough to buy some stockings, underwear, and a petticoat, the first petticoat I had owned in Liverpool. The day before my departure I bought the ticket, put my few clothes together in a shopping bag, and talked gaily to a silent Mother about the beauty of the Lake District.

  On the Friday night I handed her my month's pay, less the raise which the Presence had quietly given to me. This latter money I had to keep for fares, stockings, and soup when I returned. Mother slipped the money into her handbag, without a word.

  An hour before the train was due, I asked her for a pound to pay to the Holiday Home.

  "I haven't got it, " she said.

  I could not believe her. But it was true.

  On the previous evening, while I had been fetching some milk from the dairy, the agent who collected for the finance company had called. She was, as usual, behind in her weekly payments, and he had threatened court action, so she had given him my wages. She added coolly that, since I would not now need the ticket for the train, she would like to have it, too so that she could get the refund.

  I spent my holiday sulkily watching Edward, while Mother commenced a full-time job as the representative of a sweet firm. Edward would go to school in September, and she felt she could undertake regular work. I began once more to fear that she would try to keep me at home.

  Within two weeks her accounts were, as she put it, in a muddle, and she was dismissed. I breathed a sigh of reHef as she returned to her demonstration work in shops, and the children cheerfully ate her samples.

  In an effort to improve my wardrobe, I bought two black dress lengths from the pawnbroker and a sixpenny pattern from Woolworth's. I found that I could not cut the dresses out with the blunt, curved nail scissors which were all we had, so I begged a razor blade from Father and cut them out with that. It took me some weeks to hand-stitch them, but when they were finished, they fitted well; and even Mother said they looked very nice.

  I had also bought from the pawnbroker a thick, brown coat. It was a nondescript garment, which had suffered fi-om being bundled up in his lofl:, but it was warm. And though it was summer time, I seemed to feel cold every time the wind blew.

  Mother called at the office one day and asked for me. Since I was in the basement taking clients' names, Sylvia Poole asked if she could help. Mother said she wanted my coat and, in front of the other girls, a bewildered Sylvia gave it to her.

  I was outraged when I returned home to find that my coat and my second, newly stitched dress were in pawn. But heated argument did not get it back, and I shivered into the autumn before I had saved enough money to redeem it.

  I was again plunged into embarrassment at the office when Father sought an interview with the Presence. He wanted help to keep our many creditors off the doorstep. I am not sure what kind of a miracle he expected her to perform on his behalf, but he lost his temper and so did she. Their raised voices came clearly through the door paneling into the outer office. She told him that, with five people working, his family was far better off than most.

  "But there are seven children, " he spluttered.

  "One should not father children one cannot keep, " she retorted tartly.

  The office was convulsed with laughter. Even Mr. Ellis managed a subdued haw-haw, as he wrote in his big record book. I wished that the floor would open and close over me. I bent over the index cards and sorted them feverishly, while the private exit to the hall from the Presence's office was opened and slammed shut again.

  Father raged, off and on, for days afterward, and vented much of his frustration on me, as if I were responsible for my unbending employer.

  I feared greatly that the Presence would lose patience with such a trying family. But she did not. On the contrary, she was particularly kind whenever she met me in the hall or on the staircase, and would stop to ask if I was well or how night school was proceeding.

  A few weeks later, she was asked by the BBC if she could find someone who would give a talk on managing on a small budget. This was not an easy request to fill, because most of our clients were far from literate, and she asked me if I thought my mother could do it.

  Mother was delighted. The offer meant a day trip to Manchester, lunch provided, and a fee for the broadcast. We all encouraged her.

  She spent hours writing out likely fists of expenditure, and then screwing them up and throwing them impatiently into the fire. Though she was very good at letter writing, the talk had to be written in a manner suitable for verbal delivery, and this she found extremely difficult.

  I watched her struggle for several evenings, as I went about my household tasks. Then I asked her timidly if she would like me to try to write it for her. Much to my surprise, she thankfully agreed.

  Since every day I read several files which gave detailed lists of family expenditures, I was able to compose a likely sounding budget, based on Father's supposed salary plus my earnings. Then I wrote this into a chatty format and read it out, timing it by our solitary clock. It was a little short, so I added a recipe for fried herrings as a recommended standby for impecunious housewives—fishmongers nearly gave away herrings in those days.

  While I stood nervously by her. Mother read it and, with a sigh of relief, said it was exc
ellent. I basked in her unexpected approbation.

  She had a most enjoyable day in Manchester and delivered the talk without a hitch. It resulted in several complimentary letters from listeners and was reported in the Liverpool Echo. Because we had no radio, we could not hear her, but most of our

  neighbors did own radios, and they were most impressed that anyone in our district could speak on it. They ceased to regard Mother as "bloody stuck-up," and Mother found herself talking to respectful women wrapped in shawls or old overcoats, all of them anxious to discuss her wonderful budget. Their questions confused her, since she had not made up the talk, and they must have been puzzled by some of her answers. The unexpected status that the talk gave her in our bedraggled community, however, helped her greatly. She was forced to communicate with our many kind neighbors, and her isolation was broken.

  Some of the mothers of the girls at work had heard the talk and reported it to their daughters. The daughters spent a considerable part of their lunch hours and tea breaks arguing with me that it was a pack of lies, and I found myself in the unenviable position of having to defend it as gospel truth, despite Father's request for help from the Presence. I said loftily that the debts Father had come to see the Presence about were old ones, and finally they retired to their respective gossip comers and left me once more alone. Sylvia Poole said nothing, for which I was profoundly grateful. Perhaps her mother did not hear it.

  The unexpected success of my composition set a seed in the back of my mind, which was to lie dormant for many years before it finally sprang to life, and flowered.

  TWENTY-FIVE

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  Pressed by youngsters who wanted to share the experiences of other children, Mother began to take us, on hoHdays, to New Brighton, a small resort on the other side of the River Mersey.

  Father refused to accompany us to its crowded beach, washed with the effluent of both Liverpool and Birkenhead, so Mother and I packed paper shopping bags with banana sandwiches and beer bottles filled with lemonade made from a concentrate. Down the sides we stuffed old pairs of underpants or shorts and our always dirty towels, so that the children could bathe.

  We took the tram down to the Pier Head and caught the New Brighton ferry. The floating pier, pulsating gently beneath our feet, was always packed with people, anxious to spend a day away from Liverpool's heavily polluted air, and we held the children firmly by their hands lest they stray and fall into the heaving tidal waters.

  When the ferryboat's gangway slammed down, the crowd pressed forward while the passengers hurried off. Then, using prams and elbows to make a path, they charged onto the boat. Frantic voices floated out of the crowd screaming to our Aggie or our George to "come ere afore you fall in."

  Pushing and jostling, we poured onto the upper deck in search of a seat in the sun. Edward invariably broke into howls of fright at the uproar and had to be comforted by having the pretty seagulls pointed out to him and the lovely shiny waves.

  Then there was the excitement of watching the fimnel belch smoke. One of the boys invariably got smut in his eye, which had to be hooked out with the corner of a handkerchief.

  Sweet air from the sea blew straight up the estuary, ruffling the surface of the great river. The Royal Liver Building and the Cunard Building, trademarks of the Port of Liverpool, receded, and the New Brighton tower, the lighthouse and the sturdy battery jutting into the river loomed up. The children went mad

  with excitement and rushed up and down the companionways and along the crowded decks, Hke small, wingless gulls.

  At New Brighton pier, the mob poured off like black pepper out of a pot. It was a miracle that nobody fell off the gangplanks into the water.

  The beach always seemed to be full before we arrived, and yet, somehow, boatload after boatload of people were absorbed.

  Heavy on the air were the odors of beer and fish and chips. Fathers and young men made straight for the public houses, while mothers spread old blankets to mark their patch of sand. The children flew down to the water like startled seals.

  Ice cream men dispensed dripping cones, and Alan and I sometimes bought one each for the younger children, if we had money left over after paying our fares.

  Occasionally, Mother sent me to a booth to buy a pot of tea—one shilling deposit on the teapot—and we drank hot tea, while the children guzzled the overly sweet lemonade straight from the bottles.

  While a towel was held around the middle of each child in turn, they wriggled out of their clothes and put on the old pants we had brought with us, and then went dancing into the filthy water. It was remarkable that nobody caught any deadly disease from the sewage and chemical-filled stream.

  They came out shivering, splashing the water fi*om their skinny bodies, their feet caked with a mixture of sand and mud, and stood around us while they devoured the sand-impregnated sandwiches. Then they would play tag in and out of the seated crowd, happy to be freed from constraints of traffic and narrow streets.

  My grandmother had always forbidden me to go to the beach near her home on holidays, because it was filled with similar trippers. Nice people, I was taught, stayed at home on such days. I wondered privately what she would think of her grandchildren if she could see them now.

  To my mother, these trips must have seemed unbearably noisy and smelly, the people around her crude and boorish. Yet, in a way, the change did her good, too, and she always returned from them much more talkative and cheerfiil.

  In the late afternoon, we made the long trip home, sun-

  reddened and weary, Edward and Avril fretful and quarrelsome, Brian and Tony still bouncing. Fiona, Alan, and Avril, being very fair skinned, were usually as red as pillar boxes, and we bought a twopenny bottle of calamine lotion to sponge their backs and arms.

  One August holiday, we spent the day at New Brighton in a crowd so thick that it was impossible to find a square foot of beach on which to sit. We were lucky, however, and the children stripped off and tumbled away into the water. The next day, on the front of a national newspaper, was a large close-up of the Forrester family, half undressed, with a caption describing the record-breaking crowd. Though we were not named, we were easily recognizable.

  This made fuel for both Alan and me to be baited by our colleagues at work, and for me the gulf widened between me and the other girls. It made no difference, however, to my developing friendship with Sylvia Poole. Miriam, also, continued to be very kind, and she took me one Sunday for a hike into North Wales. I found that I did not have the strength to walk very far because my legs began to ache intolerably. We sat comfortably under a hedgerow, however, while she expounded to me the philosophy of Karl Marx and Engels. I discovered that we were both victims of The System, but her ideas seemed too radical for me to comprehend.

  Another unexpected pleasure came into my life when we discovered that the Central Hall on Renshaw Street held showings of old films. In an effort to give the poor of Liverpool an alternative to the public house, they offered a long program for the price of twopence, and people flocked in fi-om all over the city center. I used to accompany Mother on any Saturday evening on which I was not giving a shorthand lesson, and it became a treat I looked forward to throughout the week, because it did not matter how shabby one looked; nobody was in a position to sneer.

  Then Sylvia asked me to go for a walk with her one Sunday afternoon and to have tea with her family.

  "I'll ask Mother," I promised, rather desperately.

  She seemed surprised that I had to ask permission to accept the invitation, but I could not tell her that I had been taught obedience like a performing dog, and I rarely moved without permission.

  I broached the subject to Mother, as I did the ironing on the back-room table, while the rest of the family was out and Father was reading peacefully in the cold front room.

  Mother was sitting by the fire with her feet up on a footstool made out of an old tin can, and she look
ed up quickly from the newspaper she was reading.

  "What kind of a girl is she?"

  Dread question. Miriam's degree had made her acceptable, but Sylvia had no such advantage.

  "She's pretty—and she's clean—and she has nice clothes— her mother makes them, " I floundered.

  "Mm?"

  "She speaks nicely."

  "Does she?"

  "Yes."

  If she doesn't give me permission, I will go anyway, I silently swore to myself.

  I set the iron on the fire to heat up, while Mother folded up the newspaper. "Well, that sounds delightful," Mother said warmly.

  I stared at her, shirt cuff half folded back. Then I gasped, "Oh, Mummy! I'm so glad you think so. I'm sure you'll like her. "

  Mother made a slight, disparaging gesture with one hand, as if to indicate she doubted that liking would enter into it. She had accepted the acne-pocked youths with their strong Liverpool accents who were Alan's friends, and the fact that Fiona occasionally played with rowdy local girls in the street. Tony, Brian, and Avril sometimes sounded as if they had been bom in the narrow street in which we lived. Perhaps Mother realized at last that we could no longer be exclusive, that she could not prevent her children adapting to their new circumstances, however unpleasant it was to her.

  Now I had to approach the problem of getting a suitable dress out of pawn. Mother kept in her purse all the tickets for the many bundles of donated clothing and bedding that the pawnbroker had piled up in his loft for us.

  "I could afford two or three shillings to redeem something, Mummy," I said meekly.

  "Yes, ' Mother replied, a sudden razor sharpness in her voice. "You have plenty of money."