Liverpool Miss

by Helen Forrester

  What had I said that I should not have said?

  ‘Thanks, Daddy.’

  Mother stabbed a sock to death. ‘I have not been working here,’ she announced icily. ‘I have been in Lewis’s all day, demonstrating automatic toasters.’

  Alan did not look up from his book, but the eyelid furthest from Mother went down in a clear, slow wink.

  ‘That must have been interesting,’ I said firmly, as I poured a cup of well-boiled tea. ‘I’ve never seen an automatic toaster.’

  ‘I hope I never see another,’ said Mother with feeling. Then her rage burst out of her. ‘Alice – that Alice – had the temerity to walk into this house this morning, without permission, and clean this room. She actually let herself in. It’s outrageous!’ Mother rolled up a pair of socks and flung them into the fruit punnet we used as a sewing box.

  ‘Alice cleaned it?’ I exclaimed.

  ‘She did and I am furious.’

  ‘She did a marvellous job,’ I said, with honest admiration.

  Mother’s chin quivered and her thin chest heaved, as she seized another sock and thrust her hand into it.

  ‘I will decide when my house needs cleaning. I will not have a peasant walking in and out of here, as if she owned the place.’

  I was so tired, and I thought how marvellous it would be to come home every day to a clean, tidy house, so I said pacifically, ‘You know, Mummy, if she did not charge very much, it might be worth getting her to do it regularly. It would save us both.’

  ‘She didn’t charge anything,’ interjected Alan. ‘When she brought Edward home, she said it gave her something to do while her mother was having a nap and that Edward liked being in his own house.’

  ‘What nonsense!’ Mother said angrily.

  ‘Where did she get the blacking from? And the polish?’ I inquired, as I scraped my plate.

  Alan laughed. ‘She brought her own.’

  Mother caught her breath and I looked quickly across at her. She was biting her lower lip and a tear ran down her face. Suddenly I understood her humiliation, and instinctively I jumped up and went over to her. I put my arm round her shaking shoulders.

  ‘Try not to cry, Mummy,’ I urged. ‘Everybody knows you have been ill and she probably thought she was being kind and helpful. I know that people round here help each other a lot. They always seem to know where help is needed, because they gossip so much.’

  Mother nearly choked. ‘I don’t want them gossiping about me,’ she shouted. ‘When I want help I will pay for it.’

  Father had been watching the scene over his newspaper, and now he said exasperatedly, ‘You should not be upset. The girl meant well. She’s not going to do it again, I am sure.’

  ‘She certainly will not,’ snapped Mother. ‘As you observed, I settled that point once and for all.’

  I felt as if Mother had stabbed me with her darning needle. ‘Don’t let it be so, O Lord. Please!’ I almost whispered aloud.

  But it had happened. Alice had been dismissed as firmly as I had been the previous day. And I had yet to tell my parents about my dismissal and re-instatement.

  ‘What about Edward?’ I asked, trying to keep calm.

  ‘Oh, you will have to stay at home. This idea of going to work is ridiculous. See what an upset it has caused to all of us. And you are worn out.’

  I was worn out. Mother so rarely looked at me unless I had done something wrong, that I was surprised that she had noticed. But the gulf opening in front of me was so abhorrent to me that I gained a fresh surge of strength. And I fought back as if defeat would mean certain hanging in the morning.

  Every member of the family joined in the battle. Mother had hysterics, Father roared, Edward howled. Avril, stretched to her full thirty inches of height, shook her finger at us all and demanded in frantic tones that we stop. Alan took my part with reckless abandon. Fiona wept and screwed her piece of skipping rope into knots as she swore she was not going to stay at home, as I suggested. From the castle under the table, the sounds of knights preparing to go out to slay a dragon ceased and two scared faces peeped out.

  ‘Who is going to see that the boys don’t get into trouble?’ Mother asked dramatically, as they emerged.

  ‘I will,’ shouted Alan.

  ‘They’re big enough to look after themselves,’ I screamed, most unfairly.

  Brian and Tony began to bellow as they, poor innocents, suddenly became the focus of the quarrel. They must have felt that they were being abandoned by all of us.

  Sometimes, in those difficult days, I identified myself with an alley cat which I had once seen engulfed in a football crowd racing down a train platform from a football special. Slipping, sliding, slithering in and out amongst the hob-nailed boots, fearing all the time that small paws would be crushed, wispy tail agonisedly trodden on; expecting any moment to feel a steel toe in the ribs flinging it over the platform edge into dark, unknown depths of misery; finding, for a second, shelter by a pile of luggage in which to lick quickly at bruised sides; only to be caught up again in the ruthless rush; looking madly for a wall up which to race or a kindly hand to sweep it up and tuck it inside a shirt, away from the terrible boots.

  This time I thought that Minerva had forgotten her stepchild.

  The abuse was largely verbal but the threat of physical punishment was always there. The elder children had when young all felt the weight of a cane and sound spankings with a hand; and occasionally both Father and Mother would strike out quite hard at one or the other of us. I do not think it occurred to any of us, even Alan who was growing quite tall, to strike back.

  I would not yield. Mother said she would go to see the Presence and would demand my dismissal. The organisation had not, after all, purchased me, she said acidly.

  Suddenly I remembered the Presence’s words about a week’s notice. Presumably, on my side, a week’s notice would also have to be given before I could leave. I announced this triumphantly as fact.

  ‘What rubbish,’ shrieked Mother. She was thrashing round the small room like a tiger, and the children moved mechanically to get out of her way as she advanced on each one of them.

  Father, who was still sitting in his chair, as if it offered a modicum of safety, the newspaper crumpled in his clenched fists, said in a more normal voice, ‘She is correct. Either we pay a week’s salary to them or she must work the week.’

  Fiona wailed loudly, ‘I don’t want to stay at home.’

  ‘You’ll have to,’ I said mercilessly. ‘Fi, you’ll have to. I have done my bit. You must take a turn. It’s only till Edward is big enough to go to school.’

  ‘I won’t,’ she screamed. She flung her skipping rope to the floor. ‘No.’

  ‘No,’ Mother flashed at me. ‘Oh, no. You are not going to push your responsibilities on to poor Fiona. She is much too frail, poor darling.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The need to give notice saved me.

  Fiona was ordered to stay at home with Edward for the following two days. Mother’s contract with the toaster manufacturer expired on Thursday night; she would start a new contract at another store the following Tuesday. This, I argued, would give her time to arrange some fresh care for Edward.

  Poor little Edward. Poor Fiona, red-faced and deeply resentful. Mother actually smiled, however, when I presented her with my total earnings for the week, less fourpence for contributions to National Health and Unemployment Insurance and another penny contributed to a hospital fund. She hardly heard me when I explained that the following week, I would be earning only an office girl’s pay.

  In the office, I ran so hard and whispered so softly that my appointment was confirmed, despite my gauche manners and poor grooming.

  A few weeks later, the other girls asked me to accompany them to the cinema. Bashfully, I refused, owning up that I did not have the money. They looked at me askance and did not ask me again for a number of years; perhaps they thought I did not like them.

  Night school came to an end an
d I passed the examinations. This gave me more time to help Mother at home. The office staff, in turn, went away for two weeks’ holiday to the mountains or the seaside. They usually went with their parents and came back with breathtaking stories of the boys they had met. They giggled behind the stacks of files until Mr Ellis roared at them to return to their work. He seemed to be the only person who spoke above a thin whisper.

  I had no adventures to share with the girls. I was not entitled to a holiday that year, and my world of screaming family rows, of creditors, of pawnbrokers, of the lack of the most basic human needs, seemed to be so divorced from the experience of the staff, that there was no common ground. I was obsessed with the need to survive, with simple worries, like how to squeeze a pair of rayon stockings out of Mother, or even darning silk with which to mend the ones I wore. I was totally dependent upon the whims of Mother. She seemed to take it for granted that anything I earned was hers, and this idea stayed with her throughout my working life. Girls did not need money for expenses; boys did.

  One day, the Presence told me sharply to tidy up my hair. It was pay day and, in despair, I took out of my nine shillings and sevenpence a single bright shilling. A comb cost twopence, some hairclips a penny. Ninepence would buy a good, stout pair of rayon stockings.

  Mother was so infuriated that she tried to snatch Joan’s old handbag off me in order to extract the shilling, but I whisked it under me and sat on it and, tearfully, refused to move.

  Father came home and walked into the middle of the scene, and I appealed to him, because sometimes he did seem to regard me as a human being, even if I was a girl. Without any hesitation, he said I should keep the shilling, and have one each week, so I thankfully fled with my handbag to the kitchen and left my parents to fight it out.

  The weekly shilling was usually spent on second-hand articles of clothing. But I soon learned not to leave any pieces of clothing at home unless they were wet from washing, because they would be immediately pawned; stockings or gloves would be used by Mother herself or given to Fiona. On days when there was nothing to take for my lunch, I would buy a penny bread roll from Lunt’s bakery near the office.

  An overwhelming ambition in those days was to be able to afford from Lunt’s a roll packed with cheese. These cost twopence, however, and I had to content myself with buying them for other members of the staff or just looking longingly at them through the bakery’s steamy window.

  And so I struggled blindly on from day to day. The trees in Princes Park, where on Saturday afternoons I took Edward to play, turned yellow and carpeted a neat circle of grass beneath them with curled-up leaves. Wet days became more frequent, and I delivered the letters each morning in shoes that became quickly sodden; the cardboard put into them to block up the holes disintegrated, and tender bare soles were exposed to the pavement. I caught so many colds that the days when I was without one became ones of rejoicing. Liverpool air is always damp and, in those days, was filled with black particles from a myriad of chimneys, so that nasal catarrh and bronchitis were endemic and gave rise to the famous, snuffly Liverpool accent. Like many of the population I blew my nose through my fingers on to the pavement, and kept my single handkerchief for neat dabs at my nose in the office.

  Alan reached the age of fourteen in November and left school shortly afterwards. I was plunged into bitter and unfair jealousy, as I watched him set out for his first job as office boy in a new suit bought for the occasion from Marks & Spencers. In his pocket he carried a bit of lunch wrapped in an old margarine paper and a penny for the tram, so that he would not have to climb the long hill home. He was given pocket money as a matter of course, so my battle evidently helped him. He was intelligent and quick-witted and very articulate. He had snatched the job from dozens of other applicants and deserved all the help my parents could give him.

  The life of an office boy was very hard. In a tall, gloomy, Victorian building, he worked from eight-thirty in the morning until six o’clock at night and until one o’clock on Saturdays, for a wage of seven shillings and sixpence a week. Office boys were commonly hit when they made mistakes or if they dared to answer their seniors back, and the tight-lipped bookkeeper who taught him how to keep accounts was very heavy handed. He was still far from being fully developed and, like me, was painfully thin. Since he spoke ‘with an olly in his mouth’, he had been in many fights at school – it is not only sparrows who attempt to destroy those different from themselves – and sometimes, in the absence of the bookkeeper at lunch, a general fight would break out amongst the young men in the office. Though he fought back fairly skilfully, I can remember seeing bruises across his buttocks where he had been beaten with an old-fashioned rounded ruler.

  Attached to the church was a troop of Boy Scouts and Alan had joined this. Although we were certainly not the poorest family in the parish, the Scoutmaster must have found it impossible to obtain money from my parents for a uniform for him, and, therefore, provided him with one. He once went away to camp with them and returned looking strong and rosy and very freckled, but the fair skin soon became white again and the beguiling freckles faded, to be replaced by acne in its worst forms. Great boils covered his face and neck. A cheerful expression helped to compensate for this affliction. His tousled cowlick was neatly slicked back with the aid of brilliantine and the black pocket comb tucked into his jacket pocket. His pale skin gained a slight ruddiness as, like me, he ran through the streets of Liverpool, in and out of horse and motor traffic, delivering letters and messages.

  Like me, Alan suffered from the lack of a raincoat and from inadequate footwear. Liverpool shares with Ireland not only Irish inhabitants but Irish weather. When it is not actually raining, there is still a misty dampness which seems to penetrate one’s bones. Older people always seem to be complaining about ‘me rheumatism’ or ‘me arthritics’ and say that they ‘hurt something wicked’ on wet days.

  Alan, Brian and Tony all played cricket in the street, often with a beer bottle as a wicket and a piece of board as a bat. Alan had had the advantage, when quite a small boy, of playing the game in better circumstances. A couple of professionals had taken an amused interest in the little eager beaver who haunted their practice ground and had coached him. This acquired ability had led him into the school team. One of his older colleagues at work gave him his old cricket bat and pads, and this enhanced his chances of playing with other teams after he left school. He got a lot of pleasure from these games.

  He also went to night school. He always says he learned a lot there. But he did not stay in the system very long, and he probably learned much more in the Auxiliary Air Force, which he joined a few years later.

  I rejoiced in his good beginning in the business world. Because my parents kept pressing me to stay at home again and be the unpaid housekeeper, I was most unchristianly envious of the interest and encouragement lavished on him by both Mother and Father. I cried for hours through freezing winter nights, and prayed frequently and earnestly for strength to keep my temper. I was convinced that most of my misery was caused by lack of self-control over envy and bad temper. It was a long time before I realised that there is a limit to anybody’s self-control; and that the only sin I had committed was to be born to my Mother at a time when she would otherwise have divorced my Father. She could never forgive me for it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  As autumn merged into winter the children began to look forward to Christmas, having been reminded of its coming by Brian and Tony’s extra choir practices. For years, Fiona and I secreted all kinds of bits of wool, old socks and cotton scraps, and out of them we manufactured gifts for the family. Golliwogs and rabbits emerged from the socks, hand-hemmed handkerchiefs, handkerchief cases, pin cushions and hair tidies, prettily covered boxes and pyjama cases were made from the cotton scraps. I once made Fiona a doll’s bed out of a shoebox; it was complete with little blankets and a bedspread, and she joyfully put her tattered doll into it. The doll was her only treasure from our old home. It was dreadfu
lly dirty, and its papier mâché feet and hands were nearly worn out; but its glass eyes still opened and closed and it still had some hair.

  Another time, I made a horse and cart for Edward. The horse was made out of corks found in the street. It had wobbly legs made out of slivers of firewood. The cart, which was a carton from a box of matches, had high wheels made from the tiny lids of ointment tins, also found in the street gutters. Though it was not a very robust toy he played with it for several days before it fell to bits.

  From their choir money, Brian and Tony bought little gifts for everybody. One of my most treasured possessions is a pottery black cat given me by Tony and, until recently, I had a tiny pottery donkey with a red pincushion on its back, bought for me by Brian. When, after forty-five years, I recently smashed the donkey I stood over the scattered bits and cried. Both these treasures travelled half way round the world with me. Another treasure is a crocheted red and yellow egg cosy made for me by Avril in one of her earliest sewing classes. Sometimes I take it out and think of the small, determined little girl stabbing away with a crochet hook too big for her fingers.

  Alan’s shilling a week was strictly for pocket money, so he bought us all kinds of delightful gifts, like bottles of perfume and talcum powder from Woolworth’s.

  My parents always tried to make Christmas pleasant for the younger children. Only the first two Christmases in Liverpool were without any real effort at celebration, and for both of those we enjoyed one of the Christmas boxes of food distributed to the poor of Liverpool during the festive season.

  For two Christmases after I began work, a mysterious stranger telegraphed us five pounds. We never discovered who sent it but it provided a dinner and a stocking full of small gifts for the little ones.

  Alan and I, like all working people, had two days’ holiday. Such was his exhaustion that on any holiday Alan slept until midday. For Fiona and me, however, there was never such a luxury. Boys needed rest; girls could manage without. Brian and Tony had to be got up and given their breakfast in time for them to sing at the Christmas services. Edward, like most little boys, was awake at sun-up, as was Father. On Sundays and holidays, Mother stayed late in bed and Avril slept late, too. Holidays for me were not a time for relaxation, and I was always thankful to escape back to work. At work, people occasionally said, ‘Thank you.’