Читать книгу By the Waters of Liverpool - Helen Forrester - Страница 9

Fiona’s situation was grave. When fifty youngsters were competing for even the most menial of jobs, lack of a good reference could be crippling.

‘You can stay at home and keep house,’ Mother said briskly. ‘You spend all you earn – I never see much of it.’

‘Oh, Mother, Fi only gets fifteen shillings a week, and she pays all her expenses – even buys some of her clothes,’ I intervened vehemently.

Fiona’s hands clutched convulsively against my hips. She, too, feared becoming the family’s forgotten, unpaid maid-of-all-work.

Mother fumbled in her handbag for a cigarette and lit it from the fire with the aid of a newspaper spill. ‘She would be more use at home,’ she reiterated.

Father got up from his chair and moved restlessly up and down the narrow space between table and hearth which formed a passage between the front hall and back kitchen. He was very thin, and his grey tweed office suit with its shiny seat and elbows hung loosely on him. He looked haggard, as if this new problem was too much for him, and his face and prematurely bald skull shone pale yellow in the poor light. He took off his bent, gold-rimmed spectacles and rubbed eyes that were red-lidded and bloodshot.

‘If I want to leave,’ sobbed Fiona, ‘I have to give a week’s notice on pay day – that’s Friday, and it’s Friday night now. So it means I have to work almost another two weeks. And nobody is going to give a reference to a girl who leaves without notice – and how can I tell the boss the real reason I want to leave? It’s too horrid!’ She continued to dampen my skirt, as I held her.

Mother looked scornfully at her two daughters, her lips curled in disdain. ‘Really, Fiona! All this fuss, when you could make yourself useful at home for once.’ She turned to Father, and almost shouted, ‘For goodness’ sake, stop prowling.’

Father flung himself back into his chair, while Fiona cried, ‘No.’

‘She cannot mix with such dreadful people any more,’ Father sounded off determinedly. ‘What is the world coming to?’

‘They leave me alone most of the time,’ Fiona turned her puffy face towards Father. ‘I sit in the cash desk and lock myself in. It has glass all round it. They tease me but they can’t get in.’ She moved uneasily against me. ‘Only when I go to the loo sometimes...’ Her voice trailed off.

Father started up. ‘What?’ he exclaimed. ‘What happens then?’

‘They chase after me and pinch my bottom,’ she announced baldly.

‘Oh, Lord!’ Father was really shaken, as if he himself had never in his life pinched the bottoms of our maids.

Alan burst out laughing. ‘That’s better than being whacked on your rear with a ruler, like I am.’

‘Alan!’ exclaimed Mother. ‘What a lot of louts they must be.’

Father looked at his pretty daughter, speechless for a moment, and then said firmly, ‘You will stay at home tomorrow, Fiona. Helen can phone from her office to say that you are not well. Then we will say later that you are not fit to go back. You can look for other work.’

‘I’m not staying at home.’ Fiona could be as woodenly obstinate as Avril and me, but she never seemed to draw her parents’ wrath as fully as we did. ‘I just have to get through the next two weeks as best I can. Then I’ll leave. After all, I’ve put up with them for nearly a year now.’

Father looked at her aghast. ‘You mean all this has been going on for a year?’

‘Not all the time.’

‘How frequently?’

‘You mean going to see the – the...?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, they run over every time the undertaker has a nice-looking one.’

‘And have they been pinching you all that time, too?’

‘No, Daddy, only just recently.’

‘You must have encouraged them, Fiona.’ This from Mother.

‘Oh, no, Mummy. I suppose they notice me when they’ve nothing much to do. Anyway, how can a derrière encourage anybody?’ she asked innocently.

This made Father smile, even in the middle of his disquietude. Fiona’s flawless figure, now burgeoning, would in years to come cause many a heart to throb and provide a good deal of temptation.

Father’s voice was very gentle, as he looked at his younger daughter. ‘I am sure you don’t encourage them, my dear.’ He smiled knowingly at Mother, who did not smile back.

Alan began to whistle softly to himself and moved restlessly against the table.

‘If I had a sheet of the butcher’s notepaper,’ said Mother suddenly, her face brightening, ‘paper with his heading on it, I could write an excellent reference for Fiona.’

‘Mother!’ I exclaimed, scandalised. ‘That would be forgery.’

‘A new employer might phone the butcher to check it,’ suggested Alan.

‘I don’t think so,’ replied Mother, ignoring my outburst. ‘As a demonstrator going from shop to shop, I carry written references – I’ve heaps of them, because all my jobs are short-term ones. I don’t think anybody has ever telephoned to check them.’

Fiona looked up quickly, and then mopped her eyes agitatedly with my hanky which I had handed to her – it was the only one I owned. ‘Mummy! Could you do it? Really?’

Mother looked as pleased as a Cheshire cat. ‘I don’t see why not.’

‘If I go to work tomorrow, I can get the paper easily. I have some in the cash desk.’ She straightened up, sniffed and rubbed her nose hard with the hanky. ‘I could start looking for a new job on Monday.’

It took Mother and Fiona some time to convince Father that it was the most sensible way out. But he was genuinely worried about his favourite daughter, and he finally gave in.

Alan thought it was a huge joke, and asked Mother if she could do anything about forging pound notes. I thought she would strike him, but instead she laughed.

Though it seemed to me to be wrong, that it might be better if Father had a quiet talk with the butcher himself, I did not want to start a family row, so I held my tongue.

On Saturday, Fiona went to work as usual and returned triumphantly with the required sheet of notepaper. Mother concocted an excellent letter for her, written in a round, illiterate hand quite unlike her usual beautiful penmanship. She ended it with a phrase popular amongst tradesmen, ‘And oblige your obedient servant’, followed by a flourishing signature.

Father often bought a Liverpool Echo on his way home from work. The day’s copy was lying on his chair, so Fiona and I spread it out on the table and conned the Situations Vacant columns very carefully, though it was nearly midnight.

We found two advertisements for office girls, and Fiona begged Mother’s penny pad of notepaper from her, took the cork out of the ink bottle and sat down at the table, pen poised. She looked up at me expectantly. To my dictation, she wrote in a round schoolgirl’s scrawl letters of application to both companies.

Mother looked disparagingly at her handwriting. ‘Really, Fiona. I should have thought you could write better than that.’

But Fiona could not, and never did. The teaching of handwriting in the elementary schools was so poor that few people seemed to leave with anything better than an ugly, irregular hand. Good, flowing handwriting, like the right accent, marked one’s place in the social scale, and Fiona’s laboured, round letters indicated a girl with a poor background, in a world which was very snobbish. Only Alan, who had been taught in preparatory school, wrote the same exquisite Italian hand which my mother did.

Fiona had a natural refinement and an endearing gentleness, without a hint of snobbery. She floated amongst all kinds of people without difficulty. Her letters, however, did not produce any replies, despite the fast postal service which we enjoyed, and Fiona became very depressed. Mother thankfully set her more and more household tasks each morning, and then borrowed her fares-and-lunch money, which meant that even if she obtained an interview with a firm, she would probably have to walk to it.

I encouraged her to keep on writing applications and, as my office was close to the Liverpool Echo’s office in Victoria Street, I dropped her replies each day into the newspaper’s letter box.

I had hoped to have a talk with Father on that busy Saturday, because both he and I finished work at one o’clock on Saturdays. Every time I thought about the coming Confirmation lessons, my stomach clenched with apprehension and I longed to unburden myself to somebody. But he had spent the afternoon at the public library, and after he had eaten his tea, he went immediately up to bed. He had had a heart attack when I was a little girl, and occasionally pain in his chest sent him hastily to lie down.