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 30

Encouraged by the friendly old gentleman on the park bench, I continued to read. When I explained to him that I ought to be in school, he said firmly and wisely that it was my parents’ responsibility. He pointed out that, in studying by myself, I was following in the footsteps of many great Lancastrians, who, though doomed to poverty because they were weavers and caught up in the industrial revolution, found means to study and outshine their better-educated contemporaries. He cited the examples of John Butterworth, the mathematician from Haggate, who never earned more than fifteen shillings a week and learned to read and write at the age of twenty. Such was his love of learning that he became one of the finest geometricians of his day; and James Crowther and Richard Buxton, the Manchester botanists, both self-taught, both always poor, both famous.

I sighed. There was no help there. I wanted to eat and be warm every day of my life.

Avril and I had discovered one beautifully warm spot in Liverpool, although it was rather a long way from home. Sefton Park had a fine glass palm-house, which was kept at tropical temperatures to encourage the growth of the palms and similar plants inside. Avril, Edward and I used to go into it often and crawl under the great creepers to get warm, emerging later with our bottoms covered with earth, damper but warmer.

Once we were discovered by two earnest young men carrying notebooks and pencils. They were wreathed around with long scarves in the colours of the university, and when they found us they were at first puzzled and then amused.

Avril and I stared at them like a pair of scared rabbits.

‘Hide and seek?’ one young man inquired.

I nodded assent, and, like fellow conspirators, they rearranged the foliage over us and tiptoed away. A gardener on another occasion was not so kind.

‘We don’t want no dirty ragamuffins in here,’ he shouted, and sent us packing.

Crestfallen, we stalked out of the glass house with what dignity we could muster, and I pushed the Chariot homeward, passing through a working-class shopping street on the way.

Halfway up the street, I came to a large, red brick building surrounded by a matching brick wall. It was an elementary school, silent and deserted because it was Saturday. I was about to pass it without much interest, when the remains of a poster flapping in the wind caught my attention. It announced the opening of evening school the previous September. Courses in commercial arithmetic, bookkeeping, English, shorthand and several other subjects were offered.

I stopped.

I had never heard of evening school and I could hardly believe that one could go to school outside the normal hours. I could have skipped for joy.

I wondered if one could enroll at times other than September. Perhaps there would be someone on the premises who could tell me about it. I wheeled the Chariot through the gate leading to the school yard and was hesitantly moving round the building searching for a door, when a hoarse voice shouted, ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

The voice came from an upper window, where a bald man in shirt sleeves, holding a duster he had apparently been shaking, was looking down at me. His expression was hostile, and I wilted.

‘I – I was looking for someone to ask about evening school,’ I stuttered.

My questioner looked pained.

‘There’s not likely to be night school on Saturday afternoon, now is there? You’ll have to come on Monday night’ And he started to lower the window.

I did not move. I wanted to ask what time I should come.

He threw the window up again impatiently.

‘Now get outta here! We don’t want the likes of you hanging around. Get out!’

I got out, and stood in the street quivering with mortification.

Avril, looking like a pocket-sized thundercloud, stamped her foot and said, ‘Nasty old man! I don’t like him.’

I laughed a little weakly, and looked again at the poster. It said the classes were from 7.30 p.m. to 9.30 p.m.

My mind made up, I went home determined not to be put off by nasty old men.

Father was sitting by the empty fireplace, reading War and Peace. Without preamble, I mentioned the evening school to him.

He hardly seemed to hear me, and I busied myself making a bit of fire to boil a panful of water for tea.

‘Daddy?’ I queried again.

At last he said, ‘You cannot go to evening school.’

‘But, Daddy, why not?’ I protested. ‘Fiona and you could watch Avril, and I could put Edward to bed before I went. Tony and Brian will go to bed whenever you or Mother tell them.’

His face was wooden, though at the same time sad.

‘If you go to evening school, my dear, it will be necessary to state your age and other details. You are not yet fourteen and the school inspectors would order you back to day school.’

‘Well, I can’t see why I can’t go to either day school or evening school,’ I said with all the irritating belligerence of a thirteen-year-old. ‘Why can’t Mother look after Edward and Avril, while I go to school? She’s much better now.’

‘Mother still isn’t fit, you know that. She is doing her very best.’ He stopped. The marriage had been far from happy; yet they had stayed together and his anxiety about Mother was based on genuine respect for her. ‘Your mother is just able to manage if she goes out into the fresh air or works among adults,’ he continued. ‘I don’t know what might happen to her if she was confined with a whining baby.’

‘He doesn’t whine,’ I exclaimed angrily. ‘And I nearly go mad trying to make this beastly fire and buy us enough to eat, and … and … ’ I burst into loud crying.

That was the beginning of a tremendous family row, in which everyone joined.

Alan tried to soothe me. ‘You could go back to school when Edward’s bigger,’ he said hopefully.

‘Once I am fourteen the school won’t take me back,’ I screamed in an abandonment of rage.

‘Stop making an exhibition of yourself,’ said Father. ‘When I get a job, you will be able to go to finishing school.’

I looked at him scornfully. French finishing schools were expensive and seemed far removed from the realities of life in Liverpool.

Fiona began to cry. ‘Don’t be cross with Helen, Daddy.’

‘Oh, shut up, Fiona,’ I snarled.

‘I want my tea,’ demanded Avril.

I slapped her.

She immediately began to bellow like a lovesick moose.

This brought Tony hotly to her defence and a smart rebuke to me from Father.

Into the uproar came Mother, weary and hungry.

‘What is the matter?’ she asked, putting down her battered handbag.

‘Helen wants to go to evening school and I have told her that it is impractical, because the school inspectors would pick her up as being young enough for day school.’

‘Well, why can’t I go to day school?’

Mother’s lips began to tremble. ‘You are needed at home, dear.’

‘No, I am not. You can very well look after the children.’

‘I have to go to work. The doctor recommended it. And I am the most likely one to get work.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ I said. Thirteen-year-olds can be very cruel.

‘The general welfare of the family demands that you stay home.’

‘I won’t!’

Mother suddenly started to cry hysterically, shrieking that it was too much and I was a hard-hearted, thankless daughter.

‘I have nothing to be thankful for,’ I retorted bitterly.

‘Helen, Helen, don’t!’ Fiona whispered, her eyes wide and terrified, as she clutched my arm. Alan, from across the room, implored me silently.

The fight went out of me. I turned to Fiona and let her lead me back to our newspaper bed. There, crouched together with my head on her shoulder, I wept myself to exhaustion. I had lost my Waterloo.

By mid-May, Fiona seemed well enough to go back to school. She was by nature placid to the point of apathy, and her gentle pliability made her popular at school. At home, she received no attention and, without playthings, she began to get bored and to ask to be allowed to return to the more lively world of school. My parents had not mentioned school to her. They went out on their various rounds of employment agencies, libraries, etc., and seemed to have forgotten her. I, therefore, prepared her for school one morning as best I could.

At the last moment she balked.

‘I feel shy,’ she said, standing uneasily in the dark hall and rubbing one foot against the other. ‘And I haven’t got twopence for the fee. Alan should have waited for me.’

Impatiently I thrust twopence into her hand from the daily shilling I received to buy food. But still she would not move and stood biting her nails and staring anxiously through the glass door at the busy street.

‘Come with me,’ she demanded.

In a home as empty as ours, there was little for me to do, so I put Edward and Avril into the Chariot and together we walked the four blocks to school.

The school was a fine, stone building, matching architecturally the adjoining church and presbytery. A high, iron railing surrounded the playground, and we paused by the gate to see if we could find one of Fiona’s playmates, so that she would not feel so lonely when going into school.

A pretty lady teacher came hurrying towards the gate. When she saw Fiona she smiled at her through the veil of her smart, little hat.

‘Good morning, Fiona. I am glad to see you back. Are you feeling quite well again now? Alan told me that you were in hospital.’

She ran her eyes over Fiona’s thin, underclothed body and returned Fiona’s angelic, worshipping smile. Then she looked at me in a puzzled fashion. A question trembled on her lips.

Fiona had been brought up properly and she immediately said politely, ‘Miss Brough, may I introduce my elder sister, Helen, and this is Avril and this is my baby brother, Edward.’

Miss Brough’s brow cleared.

She said, ‘How do you do.’

I murmured, ‘Very well, thank you.’

‘I don’t remember you going through our school, my dear,’ she remarked to me. ‘You must have left before I came – I have only been here three years.’ She chucked Edward under the chin with a finger clothed in good brown leather. Then she looked at me again, more sharply. ‘But that is not possible – you are quite young.’ She laughed. ‘You must have gone to school somewhere else.’

My tongue clove to the roof of my mouth and I could not answer.

Fiona said brightly, ‘She used to go to our old school. She has never been to school in Liverpool.’

‘Haven’t you, my dear?’

‘No, Miss Brough.’

I was nearly tongue-tied with fear of what my parents would say if they found out about this conversation.

She was looking at me keenly now, and must have seen the stark fright in my eyes. She pursed her delicately painted lips, and said, ‘Well, never mind. Fiona, hurry up or you will be late.’

The school bell began to ring and she smiled reassuringly at me and said, ‘Goodbye. Goodbye, Avril and Edward.’

‘Goodbye,’ I muttered through clenched teeth.

My legs were shaking so much that I could not start the pram. I watched her disappear through the school’s ornately carved doorway before, at last, I could make my feet move.

I said nothing to my parents.

A week later a school attendance officer called upon my parents while I was out. How they evaded being prosecuted and sent to prison for my long truancy I will never know. Perhaps their calm authoritative manners made even school attendance officers quail. My immediate attendance was, however, ordered.

I faced two outraged parents every day for the next six weeks until my fourteenth birthday. The day after that, I was back home again looking after Edward.

I had never been to an elementary school, and I found myself far ahead of the other children in the class in everything except mathematics. It was, however, bliss to hold a pencil in my unaccustomed fingers and to try my wits against the work put before me.

This school had a new and enthusiastic drawing-master. He had to teach children who, for the most part, hardly knew that artists created pictures, and he had only pencils, paper and pastel crayons with which to work, but at my first lesson he did his utmost to explain perspective to the disinterested class.

‘Any questions?’ he asked.

While the rest of the class stared at him glumly, I put up my hand.

‘Could you explain why medieval pictures often look so alive and real though they have no perspective?’ I asked hopefully.

The class turned round in a body and stared at me open mouthed. The teacher’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he sought to reply to me.

Finally, he answered me briefly and then set the class the task of drawing a picture of mountains and roads.

He came and sat on the bench beside me and examined my work. He looked carefully at the little picture and suggested a technical method of improving the texture of the shading in it, while I sat in frozen silence beside him afraid that I would smell abominable to him.

‘I should like you to draw me one or two more, as homework,’ he said at last ‘You can sketch anything which takes your fancy. I want to see what you can do.’

Breathless with excitement, I said I would like to do the drawings but I had neither paper nor pencils.

He smiled and said calmly, ‘I can provide you with them.’

I sat on the steps for several evenings, Edward crawling at my feet, while I sketched the life of the street and a picture of Avril, who was hugely flattered at having a drawing made of her.

A week or two later, the drawing-master expressed his approval of my work and produced a small examination paper for me to work my way through. The paper, with my drawings, vanished into officialdom.

‘There is a scholarship available at the City School of Art,’ he explained kindly to me, ‘and I have put you in for it’

I was happy. For the first time in two years I played with other girls, and I was being taught, though in a rough-and-ready manner. Nobody wanted to sit by me because I was so disgustingly dirty, even by the low standards prevalent in the neighbourhood, but in the open school yard I played tag and skipped until my limited strength gave out.

My fourteenth birthday passed, and my parents put an end to my little holiday. I wept and raged, but to no purpose. I was wanted at home, and Father thankfully turned over Avril and Edward to me again.

Although I had played with other girls at school, I had found nothing in common with them. They had a hearty vulgarity of speech and manner which made me recoil from them and, to them, a girl who spoke as if she had ollies in her mouth was very suspect A small group of girls who were better behaved and came from better homes regarded me with undisguised horror.

I was back where I had started from, pushing Edward’s Chariot to and from the shops or the park, and without any hope of bettering myself.

During the summer holidays, I took all the children to the parks to play, and sat wistfully amongst stout mothers in black shawls, watching my little charges play just as they did. The children accepted me as just another ‘Mum’ and I was too shy to ask if I could play too.

September saw the children back at school again. I watched them go with envy. Now I was over fourteen I could not hope for further education.