Читать книгу The Complete Helen Forrester 4-Book Memoir: Twopence to Cross the Mersey, Liverpool Miss, By the Waters of Liverpool, Lime Street at Two - Helen Forrester - Страница 27

Summertime had always meant to me a period of waving green wheat slowly turning yellow, a time for walks along a meadow-bordered river where buttercups waited to be threaded into chains, a time to lie under a plum-tree and read to my heart’s content, a time to play at theatres and dressing-up with my friend, Joan, while the walnuts ripened overhead.

Liverpool summers are not like that. In the nineteen-thirties not much was understood about pollution; and on days when it did not rain the acrid smoke was enough to obscure the sun until a harsh, Atlantic wind temporarily lifted the veil. On hot days the alleyways and garbage cans stank, despite the ministrations of an army of dustmen who not only laboriously cleared the garbage but also washed down the alleys themselves. There were still a lot of horses in Liverpool and where there are horses there are always myriads of flies to carry dysentery. Our milkman kept his cows in a shippen at the back of his dairy, but fortunately in summer for part of the time they grazed outside the city, and took their quota of flies with them.

Hens and pigeons were common in back yards. Men kept fighting-cocks, though this was illegal, and many were the bloody battles in the long summer evenings on which men wagered a large portion of their public assistance money.

Much of this the younger children were able to accept as a way of life as they slowly forgot their earlier life, though Tony once said to me earnestly as I bathed a grazed knee he had acquired while playing rounders in the street, ‘I don’t like the kind of life we live, Helen, and when I grow big I shall change it’

‘I hope you will,’ I replied equally gravely. ‘You’ve got brains and you could get a scholarship to a better school – and that would get you out of it’

‘Why don’t you go to school, Helen?’

The tears, never far from my myopic eyes, sprang up. I bent my head so that he could not see them. ‘Mother needs me at home, dear.’

‘How will you get out of it then?’

‘I really don’t know.’ I made myself sound cheerful, as I carefully dried the small wound because wounds seemed to go septic so fast ‘When Daddy gets a job, things will change a lot.’

He stood up and stretched his thin little body. ‘Perhaps you will marry a prince,’ he suggested hopefully.

‘Perhaps,’ I agreed, though I knew that girls as ugly as I who also wore spectacles did not stand a chance of matrimony; my mother had always indicated that such was the case and I think I had already been written off as a future maiden aunt. This did not stop me, however, from dreaming for the rest of the afternoon that I married the beautiful, humane and exciting Edward, Prince of Wales.

Tony and Brian also had a dream world of their own. They rarely quarrelled and, with Fiona, they played highly imaginative games in which they sailed the world – Brian always fell overboard and was rescued by Tony – or drove trains and cars which had innumerable comic accidents.

Playing in the open, even if the air was polluted, made them more hungry and it was impossible to satisfy them. If we were to cook anything, we still had to buy coal, so that summer expenses were much the same as winter ones.

We approached our second winter in Liverpool with undisguised dread. We had commenced the first bitter January there with one set of good winter clothing apiece and two blankets. Now, not one of us had a whole garment or a pair of shoes without holes in them. Indeed, four of us were reduced to ragged running-shoes or nothing at all on our feet.

My father was a pitiful sight even in comparison with the ragged crew who lined up with him for public assistance. His elbows stuck through the sleeves of what had once been a tweed jacket and his knees were equally naked. He had no socks and there was very little left of his shirt. He used to thread the remains of his old school tie through the torn collar and knot it, in the mistaken belief that nobody would notice the bare chest underneath it. His underwear had, like that of the rest of the family, worn out, its life shortened by inadequate laundering. His chest was red from being chapped by the wind; but he suffered most from pain in his hands.

Both hands had been badly frost-bitten during his military service in Russia, and, on the hospital ship which brought him home, the surgeons had debated whether or not they should be amputated. The wonderful care he received, however, saved him from this; but intensely cold weather turned them white, and I used to sit and massage them to revive the circulation. It was then that they became most painful.

One freezing November day, urged on by two shipping clerks shivering with him in one of the endless queues in which he spent most of his life, he applied to the relieving officer of the public assistance committee for help to buy a pair of shoes and a pair of gloves.

Clothing, he was told tardy, was given in kind and stamped with the initials of the public assistance committee, so that it could not be sold or pawned.

‘I don’t mind what it is stamped with,’ replied Father humbly, ‘as long as it lessens the pain in my hands.’

His case file was sent for and examined.

‘You are not eligible for help with clothing,’ was the verdict. ‘You do not come under the jurisdiction of Liverpool.’

The same old problem. We were not from Liverpool. Our rate of public assistance was that given in the small town from which we came, and the sum was collected from that town by Liverpool. We got none of the little extras such as money for winter coal or for Christmas which Liverpool struggled to give its less fortunate citizens, nor were we eligible for clothing.

‘What shall I do?’ my father cried, in despair.

‘Try one of the voluntary agencies.’

So Father got the run-around as it was sometimes called. He was sent from agency to agency. And they all said they could not help, because he was drawing public assistance and could get boots from that committee. In vain, he explained that the town from which we had come did not give clothing and we were ineligible for help from Liverpool.

One agency offered second-hand boots at a very reduced price, but any price was too high for us to pay. We had once spent three shillings in a secondhand clothes shop in an effort to make my mother presentable again, feeling that she had the better chance of employment, and had had to reduce our meagre food intake to a dangerous level, in consequence. If it had not been for our kind policeman’s pint of milk, Edward would have surely died that week.

Then Mother suddenly got a job ‘on commission only’. She was to sell radios from door to door.

Up and down the better-class streets she tramped, knocking at each door and trying to beguile reluctant housewives into agreeing to a demonstration of the radio in their homes. On the third day, she did find a woman willing to listen to her, and it was agreed that the radio would be brought that night for her husband to see.

The demonstration radio, meanwhile, was delivered to the door of our house by a supervisor, and was taken in by Miss Sinford, the most presentable of all the inhabitants.

‘Helen!’ she shrieked up the stairs to me. ‘Come and remove this wicked temptation from the hall!’

I ran down the stairs with Edward on my hip.

Miss Sinford pointed an accusing finger at a cardboard box and a wet battery beside it. The box was clearly marked that it contained a radio, and I guessed that it had been delivered in connection with Mother’s new job.

‘Thank you, Miss Sinford.’

I sat Edward down on the grubby hall runner, and Miss Sinford withdrew with one of her loudest sniffs of disapproval. Avril had followed me down, and I left her to mind Edward while I puffed my way upstairs again with the radio. I made a second journey for the wet battery and carried it up so fast that I splashed some of the acid on my bare legs, burning them painfully.

A third journey was made to retrieve Edward and Avril.

Still panting from the journeys up and down, I read the instructions on the outside of the box to Avril, and then very carefully unpacked the radio and put it on the table. I plugged in the wet and dry batteries and nervously turned one of the knobs. The shining newness of it awed us both.

Suddenly the room was filled with the sweet sound of violins.

Avril climbed up on to one of the chairs and put her head close to the speaker and Edward smiled and sucked his thumb. I stood in ecstasy while the music swept round me.

We spent a blissful afternoon listening to a faraway world where people spoke as we did and music was part of life.

My parents were extremely angry when they came home and found the radio unpacked and working.

‘It does not belong to us,’ said my mother furiously. ‘You know quite well that you are not to touch anything which does not belong to you.’

‘I haven’t harmed it,’ I said defiantly.

‘No, she has not,’ interrupted Avril aggressively. ‘And I heard a nice lady say “happy birthday” and “hello, twins” on Children’s Hour and I liked it.’

‘Well,’ said Father, turning it off firmly. ‘Don’t touch it again.’

Mother said, ‘I have to demonstrate it tonight, to Mr and Mrs Smithers, and I don’t know how to do it.’

‘You just put these plugs in here, like Helen did, and you turn that knob there,’ instructed Avril, stabbing the appropriate plugs and knob with a grubby finger. ‘And it goes.’

She looked up at my mother with hard blue eyes, as if daring her to say she was not right.

Father smiled.

‘She is right, you know. That is all you have to do.’ He looked worried. ‘I suppose the supervisor will move the thing to the Smithers’ house for you in his car?’

‘Heavens, no. I have to take it myself.’

‘But you can’t carry that weight,’ we said in chorus.

‘Besides,’ I added, sadly surveying the burning marks on my grey legs, ‘the acid from the wet battery can splash and burn your stockings.’

We all knew that without stockings Mother was not suitably dressed for work, and we had all observed that even if she was not much interested in us, she was more alive, more aware of things going on around her, when looking for work.

Silence fell upon the family. The radio and its batteries were really too awkward for anyone to carry any distance.

Tony, who had been playing one of his endless games of puffer-trains with a dead cinder from the fireplace, looked up, as he shunted his imaginary train into an imaginary siding, and said quietly, ‘Put it in the Chariot and wheel it round to the lady’s house.’

We all burst out laughing, and I snatched Edward out of the pram.

‘Try it for size,’ I invited.

Very carefully, the radio was put back into its box and lowered into the stinking pram. The batteries followed. It all fitted in.

A gentle sigh of relief went through the family.

We ate a hasty meal of boiled potatoes, which tasted strongly of the smoke from an old shoe I had picked up in the street and brought home for fuel. Then, since it was dark, the whole family went in procession behind Father, who carefully wheeled the Chariot with its unusual contents. I clutched Edward to me and brought up the rear.

Down the street under the light of the gas-lamps we marched, past the brothels, past the garish lights and conversational roar of the local pub, past the boys lounging at the street corners, who watched the weird procession speculatively, out of the slum which was our world, into quieter streets of neat terrace housing.

At a corner, out of sight of the home of Mother’s customer, we unloaded the radio and set it down on the pavement. We whispered conspiratorially together, trying to decide how to get it to the house concerned, without the customer seeing any of us except Mother.

Father finally decided that he would make the first sortie and carry the batteries to the front step of the customer’s house which led straight on to the pavement; there was no front yard or garden to be negotiated.

We watched with excited anticipation as he glided ghostlike down the empty street, quickly deposited the batteries, and continued on down the street, round the block and back to us, so that he actually passed the house only once. Then Alan and Mother together carried the radio itself to the house, and put it down on the step. Mother stood by it, while Alan fled down the street, taking the same course as Father had.

Mother was out of sight of all of us, but we heard the peal of the old-fashioned front door bell when she rang it; and the sounds of the door opening and shutting and of strong Lancashire voices came to us clearly through the frosty air.

Brian and Tony started an excited conversation. Father hushed them immediately. He was standing tense, listening like a hound.

My arms were aching with Edward’s weight, so I put him into the pram. Avril complained that she was cold and I put her in with him and rubbed her legs which were mottled like an old woman’s from exposure.

Coatless, hatless and hungry, we were all shivering by the time we heard the sound of the door opening again and cheerful voices bidding Mother ‘good night’.

She was coming slowly towards us. In the gaslight, her face had a look of stupefied wonderment, as if she had just experienced a religious revelation of some kind.

The policeman on the beat was coming slowly towards us, trying the doors of each shop which faced the road on which we stood; and Father, ever fearful of being arrested for vagrancy, moved us slowly to meet Mother.

‘I sold it – that very one – they wanted the demonstration model. They signed the hire purchase agreement and gave me the deposit there and then. And they gave me tea and cake.’ Her voice quivered, as she mentioned the last item.

‘Really?’ exclaimed Father, unable to believe that in Depression-bound Liverpool anybody could afford to buy anything. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes,’ she whispered, sudden pride in her voice.

‘What will you get for it? Your commission?’

‘Thirty shillings.’

‘We shall have to tell the public assistance committee. The little bit you earned selling treacle was not worth worrying about We shall have to declare thirty shillings – and they will just cut it off our allowance.’ Father’s voice was tired and old.

‘Are you mad?’ cried Mother with an unexpected burst of spirit.

‘No, of course not. But it is not honest not to tell them.’

‘We will not tell them,’ said Mother savagely. ‘They’d let us die. They don’t care. Why should we bother about what is honest and what is not?’ The bitter question sounded all the more so because it was expressed in her beautiful contralto voice, a voice almost identical to Brian’s.

Father had his arms crossed over his chest and his hands tucked into his armpits to keep them warm. He said in a broken voice, ‘I must have some gloves. I can’t bear the pain in my hands any more.’

‘And I must have lots of fish and chips,’ shouted Avril unexpectedly. ‘Lots of lovely fish and chips.’

Fiona clutched my arm.

‘Helen, I feel awfully odd.’ Her face was ashen.

I caught her as she fainted. She was the quietest, most uncomplaining of us all and, as I held her frail little frame in my arms and looked down at her closed eyes with lashes like Michaelmas daisies, it seemed as if Death was breathing down the back of my neck.

‘Fish and chips,’ roared Avril again, quite unperturbed by her sister’s collapse.