Liverpool Miss

by Helen Forrester

‘Alice Davis wants ten shillings a week to look after Edward,’ interrupted Mother. ‘And there are still the other children’s needs.’

  ‘Surely if everybody helped, we could manage between us. It wouldn’t hurt Fiona and Alan to help – they are quite big now.’

  Mother dismissed Fiona and Alan with a gesture.

  ‘On Sundays I could clean the house, and, if Fiona and Alan could make the tea, I could put Edward and Avril to bed when I came in.’

  ‘It is not very practical,’ Father said. ‘Someone has to be at home to make the children’s lunch.’

  My temper was rising, that incorrigible devil which dwelt within me. I fought it by praying each night that I would manage to keep calm until prayers the following night, and so often I failed. I made tremendous efforts to control it, not realising that insufferable people and unbearable circumstances could make a saint angry.

  I stood up and flounced towards the door.

  ‘I am going for the interview, whether you like it or not. I may never get such a chance again. I must take it.’

  ‘Helen, you forget yourself,’ exploded Father.

  ‘Oh, no I do not. For once, I am remembering myself.’

  ‘Helen!’

  Mother’s voice came in behind him. There was more than a little malice in her tone, as she said, ‘You have no suitable clothing, anyway.’

  ‘I’ll borrow some,’ I replied recklessly.

  ‘Helen! That would not do at all.’ Father sounded genuinely shocked.

  ‘It’s no worse than borrowing money,’ I retorted, and his face whitened. I had hit home most cruelly. Savagely satisfied, I fled from the room and back to the sooty saucepans.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I peeped over the railings surrounding the area. The curtains had not yet been drawn over the barred windows of my dear Spanish lady’s basement living room. In the soft light of her oil lamp, I could see her sitting in an easy chair on one side of the fireplace, with a pile of crochet work on her lap. Her handsome, black-eyed husband, Alonzo Gomez, sat opposite her on another easy chair. He was reading the newspaper, while a large black cat crouched on his shoulder, its lemon-shaped eyes glowing in the light. The remains of their evening meal still lay on a nearby table.

  I opened the iron gate and ran down the winding iron steps of the area, knocked at the plank door under the main entrance steps of the house and, after waiting a moment, walked in.

  I was engulfed by skinny brown arms and a flood of mixed Spanish and English words of welcome. Alonzo put down his paper as I entered their living room.

  ‘Come, come,’ he said, gesturing towards the blazing fire with one hand, while he smoothed his handlebar moustache with the other. He got up and bowed me to his chair.

  Suddenly, I was in a different world.

  Despite the general squalor, there were many people like Cristina Gomez who created real homes out of attic crannies or damp basements in once fashionable houses. There was never much money, though Alonzo Gomez worked as a carter for a fruit merchant in the city and the couple’s children were now grown up and had moved away; and yet the old kitchen had an air of cosiness, as if affection was exuded from the walls with the damp. The few pieces of well-worn furniture, the primitive cooking utensils hanging by the fireplace, the stone floor covered in the centre by a piece of coconut matting, all were clean and well cared for. Alonzo was known to have an explosive temper, but the explosions seemed to be rare, and at other times there was a lot of good-natured banter and teasing, when they laughed like children.

  Cristina Gomez had a good collection of clothing. She had once told me that whenever her husband earned overtime money or won on the horses, he would spend the money on clothes for one or the other of them. And now I needed to borrow a whole outfit.

  All Cristina’s clothes were black, even her petticoats, but that would not matter. Black was the uniform of work. It was usually worn by shop assistants and by many office workers.

  After I had been cuddled and installed in Alonzo’s chair, while he sat on a straight-backed one, an orange was sliced and put on a saucer and a cup of strong, black coffee set before me on a brown-painted orange box. The health of all the family was inquired after by Cristina, and Mother’s poor health sighed over with much rolling of eyes and shrugging of shoulders.

  At the mention of Mother’s health, my determination faltered. If I went to work, her load would inevitably be increased. Then, as Alonzo told a funny story about a carthorse which loved to steal apples from displays outside the Fruit Exchange, I realised that, on average, Mother did not earn much more than I would get, that if she stayed at home to look after the family, we would be very little poorer. And my resolve hardened.

  Cristina asked me how I was faring at night school, and this gave me a chance to talk about my own troubles and the reason for my visit, to borrow a dress, shoes and stockings, if she would be kind enough to lend them to me.

  ‘Certain, certain, you can have anything.’ She paused and looked uneasily at her husband. ‘I would not wish to anger your good Mother, though.’

  ‘She need never know where I got the clothes from,’ I assured her. ‘I only need them for one afternoon. I’ll think of another way of getting clothes for the job itself.’ I had already thought of a possible source from which to obtain at least a dress, but not quickly enough for the interview.

  Though Cristina might have qualms about offending my parents, her swaggering gallant of a husband had none. I think he had always resented my parents’ supercilious attitude towards their neighbours and his pride had been hurt.

  ‘Give them to her,’ he ordered his wife, with such a lordly gesture that the cat was disturbed from his shoulder and did a quick leap to the floor.

  Cristina’s eyebrows went up expressively and she shrugged. She got up from her chair, flicked her black shawl up round her shoulders, and said kindly to me, ‘All right, my little one. Let us see what we can find.’

  I bounced out of my chair, suddenly gay, and followed her. She had lent me old shoes on one or two earlier occasions, when she had observed that my running shoes were soaking wet; and long ago her gift of the Chariot had saved me the heavy task of carrying Edward everywhere when he was too young to walk.

  Half an hour later, I glided through our back door, through the deserted kitchen and down the steps to the coal cellar, where I stowed away a brown paper bag containing shoes and stockings. On the inside of the cellar door, I hung a coat hanger which held a black dress with matching jacket shrouded in a piece of discarded curtaining.

  ‘Who is there?’ Father’s voice came sharply from the living room.

  ‘It’s only me, Daddy.’

  I opened the door and went in. The gaslight had been lit. The mantle was broken and the flame hissed and flickered over the comfortless room. The fire was out. Upstairs, I could hear the boys fighting in their bedroom. Presumably, Fiona, Avril and little Edward were asleep, since there seemed no sound from them.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Father’s voice was freezing.

  ‘To see Mrs Gomez. Where’s Mummy?’

  ‘She has gone down to Granby Street to buy a pair of stockings.’ He flicked over a page of his book impatiently. ‘You know I don’t like you mixing with local people.’

  I hung my head, but did not reply.

  ‘If you have no homework to do, you had better go to bed.’

  ‘Yes, Daddy.’ I wondered if I should give him his usual good-night kiss, but he did not look up from his book, so I crept by him and went forlornly up to bed. I knew I had hurt him beyond forgiveness, and perhaps he really did not know how to cope with me.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  In the usual rush to get everybody off to school and themselves off to work, my parents had no time to discuss Miss Ferguson’s visit with me. Mother gave me a shilling, as usual, to buy food, and two extra pennies to put in the gas meter. Father asked me to wash his second shirt ready for the next day, and suddenly Edward and I had the house t
o ourselves.

  Greatly daring, I borrowed a large pair of scissors from a crippled Jewish lady who lived across the road. I was acquainted with her, because on cold winter Saturdays, Brian lit her fire for her and went over occasionally to make it up, since her religion demanded that she do no work on that day.

  I stood in front of our piece of mirror in the kitchen window and hacked off the greasy rat’s tails of hair until I was left with a short bob. I wished I had the family comb, but Mother had taken it to work with her. Then I attacked my nails, which were not very easy to cut with such big scissors, but finally they were snipped down to the flesh and that got rid of much of the dirt under them as well. Hair and body were then washed with a kettle of boiling water and a rag. I combed my hair with my fingers and smoothed it with the dirty towel.

  My hands still looked awful. Then I remembered an old beauty trick of Grandma’s. Feeling as if I was robbing Edward of a breakfast, I took a small pinch of oatmeal, damped the hands again and rubbed the oatmeal in hard. The hands emerged looking clean and much whiter than usual.

  I put on the new pair of black woollen stockings which Cristina had lent me and found they would stay up fairly well if I twisted a piece of coal very tightly into the top of each.

  How did one behave at an interview? I worried. What did one say? During the past three and a half years I had been practically cut off from all social contact. At an age when most middle-class girls would be being taught social graces by their school mistresses and their mothers, I had been walking the streets of Liverpool in rags, pushing a baby in a pram. Sometimes I was afraid I would forget how to speak properly. Only at night school did I ever get a chance to express myself. The lack of mental stimulation, the ever present lack of food, and the lack of fun and young friends had played havoc with an already shy personality – and I knew it.

  As I scuttled round the shops in Granby Street with Edward in tow, and bought bread and potatoes and margarine, I silently said the General Confession and then the Lord’s Prayer, turning towards the only help I knew. God received a rather wild collection of prayers that morning.

  This mental exercise reminded me of Father’s question as to whether I had approached the Anglican Fathers at the church about a job. The pressure Miss Ferguson had put on my parents was more than might normally have been expected. Perhaps Miss Ferguson had, after her tour of our house, consulted the priests. None of them had come to see us; but they had hooked Brian and Tony into the choir, so they knew we were High Anglicans. The idea that they might be trying to help me filled my romantic teenage heart with a kind of joy and lifted me for a while out of my wretchedness.

  I fed the children when they came in for dinner and then dragged Fiona into the kitchen and confided to her the story of the job. Would she look after Edward for me, while I went for the interview?

  ‘What if Mummy finds out?’ she quavered, her eyes wide with misgiving.

  ‘Oh, Fi, just take Avril to school and then slip back here. I’ll be back ages before the boys or Mummy and Daddy come. They’ll never know.’

  ‘I’m scared, Helen. Teacher may be cross, too.’

  ‘Look, I’ll take all the blame. You can say I bullied you into it. They’ll believe that. They’ll blame me anyway.’

  ‘Helen!’

  She was very frightened and yet I had to have a baby-sitter for a couple of hours.

  ‘Please, Fi, darling. Please.’

  She shifted around unhappily and finally agreed.

  While she took Avril to school, I put on the dress and the little jacket and then, as I squeezed a large acne spot on my chin and anxiously examined two more at the side of my nose, I agonised that she might not return. I peered anxiously at myself in the broken mirror. Behind the outgrown glasses my eyes were red with strain or pink eye. A further black rim round them from lack of food and rest did not add to my looks. I sighed, and ran to the window of the sitting room to see if Fiona was coming.

  I had nearly given up hope, when she suddenly rounded the corner and dawdled down the street towards our house.

  The walk down the hill to town was more painful than I had expected. The borrowed shoes pressed on the ragingly painful chilblains on my heels and toes. The wind blew the carefully arranged hair all over the place, and emphasised the need of a hat and a comb. Some of the euphoria which had sustained me evaporated, and was replaced by plain fear of the unknown.

  To add to that, I had defied Father and Mother and I feared that I might be punished by God for it. He had said, Honour thy Father and thy Mother, and I presumed He meant what He said.

  The closer I got to the city centre the more I quailed. And yet some stubborn instinct kept me going.

  Without a watch, I did not know whether I was late or early and I hurried into the office building, which I had passed many times with Edward in the pram. It was a tall, Victorian structure with high, narrow windows looking out on a very busy side street.

  The main floor was occupied by a tea-blending firm, and this confused me for a moment. A jolly, little woman with a steaming bowl of tea in her hand came to my rescue and directed me up the stone stairs.

  I climbed and climbed. Half way up I had to stop. Though I walked a lot in the fresh air, I was wasted from lack of food. A middle-aged lady in a green overall ran past me down the stairs without so much as a glance. A fat Irish woman in a black shawl and skirt panted her way upwards, muttering to herself. She gave me a sly grin as she passed.

  Up I went again, and finally found the door mentioned by the lady with the tea bowl. I knocked and cautiously entered.

  It was a big, ill-lit room with dusty yellow walls. There were several large tables, piled with files and papers, at which people sat engrossed in their work. In one corner stood a small table with a telephone on it. Behind the telephone stood a large wooden box with rows of knobs along its front. For a second, I imagined myself seated before the telephone transacting all kinds of important business.

  At the back of the room stood rows of deep bookcases filled with files, and several girls in blue overalls were running about with stacks of brown folders in their arms. The only man in the room was a dark, saturnine person in a formal business suit, who sat at a large table writing in a big book. Two well-coiffured, smartly dressed ladies sat at the same table writing busily.

  The gentleman looked up at my entrance.

  ‘Yes?’ he snapped.

  Quivering with fright, I explained humbly over the bent heads of his lady helpers that I had come for an interview with the Secretary.

  He sniffed, and gestured towards a young lady sitting before a typewriter. She smiled at me, took my name and made me sit down on a wooden chair with my back to the room.

  While the typist knocked and went into an inner room, I thankfully regained my breath and tried surreptitiously to ease the agony of my feet inside the borrowed shoes.

  When the typist returned to usher me into the inner room, I was sure I would faint with fright. However, she smiled very kindly at me, so I shuffled unhappily into the furnace.

  At first I could not see anybody in the big, gloomy room. Then I realised that a woman, a tiny person, was seated at the desk by the window. I stood quaking just inside the door, after closing it silently behind me, until she looked up and took notice of me. She was plain to the point of ugliness, with greying hair combed neatly to her head. She had, however, a tremendous aura of authority, like all the ferocious head mistresses who had had me in their care rolled up into one powerful, scarifying personality.

  While she examined me in the poor light from the overcast day, I stood with hands clenched together in front of me, awaiting the verdict.

  Her voice when she spoke was cool and sibilant.

  ‘You may sit down.’

  Too scared to look at her again, I sat down on the edge of the chair by her desk. In answer to her questions, I said, ‘Yes, madam,’ or ‘No, madam,’ exactly as servants had done when addressed by Mother. I volunteered no information for
which she did not explicitly ask. She had a file in front of her and occasionally she would flick over the papers in it with a long thin finger. It was apparent that she knew something of our family, and I presumed that Miss Ferguson had told her about us.

  Finally, she said, without looking up, ‘You may commence work next Monday. The hours are from nine to five-thirty on week days and nine until twelve-thirty on Saturdays. Two overalls will be provided for you to wear in the office and you will be expected to keep them clean. The salary is twelve shillings and sixpence a week.’ She paused, and then said, after some consideration, ‘The salary is payable monthly. However, in view of your family’s circumstances I will arrange for you to be paid weekly.’

  ‘Thank you, madam,’ I said weakly. I’d got it! A real job!

  ‘Report to Mr Ellis on Monday – in the outer office.’

  ‘Yes, madam.’

  I hesitated, uncertain whether I was dismissed or not. Part of me was mentally singing a Te Deum, part of me was so scared that for a moment or two I could not have moved.

  ‘You may go now.’ The voice was cold and disinterested, as if the mind behind it was already giving attention to other matters.

  ‘Thank you very much, madam,’ I said to a head already turned away from me.

  But she had opened a Minute Book and was immersed in reading it, so I crept shakily to the door and went quietly out into the hustle of the general office.

  I said, ‘Thank you,’ to the pretty typist, as I passed her and she nodded back cheerfully, her fingers keeping up a constant tattoo on the typewriter before her.

  Nobody else took any notice of me, so I slipped away, down the long staircases, like a warehouse cat. For a moment I shivered in the great pseudo-Gothic doorway, and then plunged into the crowd which thronged the pavement.

  A blister had formed on top of a chilblain on my heel and it hurt sharply as I climbed the long hill towards home. The wind was so strong that it pushed and tousled me as if it had human hands. Fear of what lay ahead at home stole through me and sapped the strength from me; fear also that I would not be able to please my new employer. She had such a fearsome presence that I quailed at the memory of her.