By the Waters of Liverpool
Read By the Waters of Liverpool Online
Authors: Helen Forrester
Liverpool
Helen Forrester
To dear Robert
who helped so much
I was seventeen going on eighteen, and I had never been kissed by a man. It was not surprising. Who would want to court the favours of a gaunt, smelly beanpole? I was five feet four inches tall, and that was real height in underfed Liverpool.
As I strode primly along Lime Street, on my way to evening school, the men who hung about the entrances of the cinemas hardly spared me a glance. I was most unflatteringly safe. And this, in a world where women still took it for granted that they would get married, was very depressing. Girls did not look for careers – they worked until they got married. If a woman was not loved and cherished by a man, she must be hopelessly ugly or there must be something else wrong with her.
I tried not to care that no young man had so much
as winked at me. I stuck my proud Forrester nose in the air and vowed to make a career for myself as a social worker in the charity which employed me. Dorothy Parker, the famous American writer, had once remarked that men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses; and I had a pair of too-small horn-rimmed spectacles perched on my nose. There was nobody to suggest to a shy, shortsighted girl that she might occasionally take off the ugly impediment to show the sad, green eyes behind.
‘Perhaps your yellow skin will improve, as you get older,’ my childhood Nanny, Edith, had suggested; and she scrubbed my face harder still with Pear’s Preparing To Be A Beautiful Lady soap. To no purpose. All time and our subsequent poverty had done was to add a revolting array of acne spots, spots that were made worse by the lack of soap, hot water and clean towels at home.
And here was the year 1937 rolling along. Soon I would be eighteen. And nobody, I felt, really cared what happened to me. To my mother I was a trying daughter who brought in a wage each week; to the rest of the family a pair of hands, very useful for cooking and darning socks.
It was seven years since Father had gone suddenly bankrupt, plunging us into a poverty so great that
I was frequently surprised that the nine of us had survived it, seven skinny children of whom I was the eldest, and two equally thin parents.
I sighed as I trudged up the hill. Though Mother and Father now both had work, they were very poor managers, and we were still cold and hungry most of the time, surrounded by the unpleasant odour of neglect and poor nutrition.
I handed my small wages to Mother every pay day, except for three shillings and sixpence. This totally inadequate sum was supposed to clothe me, pay for lunches and tram fares, make-up and all the small things a girl at work was expected to have. Mother was bent on making me give up my employment and once again stay at home to keep house, something I dreaded; so she made it as difficult as possible for me to go to work.
I found pupils to coach in shorthand in the evenings, but I earned very little because my free time was extremely limited.
I was doing very well at evening school, I comforted myself. One day I might be promoted and earn enough to live on. My ugly, kind bookkeeping teacher had assured me recently that, if I took one more course, I would be able to become a bookkeeper. She had added that parents were always glad of a girl at home who brought in
a wage; it contributed to their comfort in their old age.
She had put into words something I dreaded, something only a husband could save me from. I could be faced with spending the rest of my life maintaining and waiting on two irritable, shiftless, nagging parents, the usual fate of the daughter who did not marry. Because I was plain and shy and frightened of my mother, I knew I could be bullied into being a nobody, a nothing.
Some women with gentle parents found their care a labour of love. Not me. I knew I would be crushed as flat as a shadow. I had already had a spell as housekeeper, from the age of eleven until I was fifteen. It had been a nightmare, looking after six young children and two quarrelling parents. Mother had, before Father’s bankruptcy, never had to care entirely for her children. We had had servants. In fact, I hardly knew her until we were plunged into a slum together. She escaped from her unruly brood by working as a demonstrator in department stores.
In a frantic effort to escape myself, I had at the age of fourteen raged and threatened, as only a fourteen-year-old can, until I got permission to attend evening school, to repair in some part my lack of education.
At fifteen, with the unexpected help of Miss Ferguson, a deaconess at the local church, I had fought another battle to take the job I at present held. Housekeeping was divided between a very angry mother and me.
I called Miss Ferguson my Fairy Godmother, and it was of this devout, cultivated lady that I was thinking, as I kicked a stone up Copperas Hill on the way to evening school. The street was quiet in the fading spring light, the misty air balmy – and I was shivering with pure fright.
Miss Ferguson had laid on my shoulders a fear worse than that of death, the fear of hell, Dante’s hell.
How could she do such a thing? I wondered miserably, with a superstitious shudder. She was my Fairy Godmother.
She had first visited the family in order to recruit my two middle brothers, Brian and Tony, into the church choir. She knew them because all the children attended the church school. She had seen my situation as unpaid maid-of-all-work, and, perhaps to give me an hour or two of rest, she had pressured Mother into allowing me to go to church on Sunday evenings. At first I had no suitable clothes to go in, but once I could look at least neat, I thankfully attended.
We were Protestants, an important point in a city where the division between Protestants and Catholics was bitter and sometimes bloody. Children were aware from the time they could speak which side of the fence they stood on, and the implanted bigotry is to this day not entirely rooted out.
No amount of churchgoing could erase the vaguely erotic dreams which haunted me occasionally, or a terrible sense of empty loneliness. Ignorant, innocent, half-starved, practically friendless, my flowering body was trying to tell me of needs of which I had little notion. Almost all the myriad of novels I had read ended with the hero kissing the heroine for the first time. I had never considered what happened next. I felt a kiss would be the ultimate height of happiness.
But it was churchgoing which was causing my present unhappiness. As I turned into the big, gloomy evening school, which I loved so much, I was trembling with fear. Unable to concentrate on the shorthand teacher’s rapid dictation, my mind was filled with scattered pictures of what had happened the previous Sunday.
Unaware of impending trouble, I had crept out of the back pew in which I normally hid my shabbiness, and battled my way up Princes Avenue
through a brisk north-westerly carrying with it a spray of rain.
I was going home to a mother almost unhinged by her fall from considerable affluence, and to a fretful, delicate father, an underpaid, overworked city clerk. Liverpool was awash with the unemployed and the underpaid, and this governed all our lives. To a plain girl hurrying through the dusk, life seemed very hard. There was little physical strength in me. I was frail and always hungry, and I hugged my worn brown coat tightly round me for comfort.
Thankfully I pulled the string hanging from the letter box of our row house. The latch lifted, and I was glad to step inside, away from the wind.
Miss Ferguson, Fairy Godmother and deaconess of the church, was seated in our old easy chair by the fire in our living room, undisturbed, it seemed, by the fetid atmosphere and the dirty chaos surrounding her. She must have been quicker than me in leaving the service and making her way over to our house, because she was already deep in conversation with Mother as I edged my way into the cluttered room. Her square pallid face with its cherry-red nose wrinkled up into a smile as I entered.
‘Good evening, Helen.’
‘Good evening, Miss Ferguson. Hello, Mother.’
Mother was seated on a straight-backed chair opposite Miss Ferguson, and was smoking with long, deep puffs, the smoke like a fog round her head. Miss Ferguson seemed to be the only person able to penetrate beyond Mother’s polite façade and fight her way through to the real, suffering woman beneath, and Mother was listening intently as Miss Ferguson continued their conversation.
Dressed in black, with wrinkled woollen stockings and flat-heeled shoes, her hair covered by a black coif, Miss Ferguson was very different from Mother’s fashionable friends of so many years ago. But she was a cultivated woman, like my convent-bred mother, and it was a pleasure to listen to the hum of her soft voice.
I picked up an old fruit basket full of mending from beside the hearth and began my nightly task of darning the family’s socks and stockings. Everybody’s woollen socks or rayon stockings seemed to spring a hole or a ladder each day, and because we had so few pairs, they had to be darned ready for wear the next day.
At first, as my needle flew in and out, I did not take much notice of the conversation. Then Mother’s voice penetrated. She sounded pettish. ‘Helen’s at evening school three times a week. And
she is often out on Saturday evenings – either at the theatre with her friend, Sylvia, or teaching her shorthand pupil. Then church on Sunday evening – she’s hardly home, to help me.’
I looked up quickly, just in time to catch a resentful glance from my tight-lipped mother.
Dear heaven! Now what had I done? My needle slowed. Miss Ferguson knew how much washing, mending, ironing and cleaning, not to speak of child care, I managed to tuck into the time before and after work and during the weekends. She visited regularly and had seen me always busy. She now favoured me with a quick wry grin, and let Mother’s complaints pass.
I looked at my flashing fingers as I darned. Broken nails and soot-ingrained cuticles, half-healed cuts and burns, all told of fires made, sooty saucepans scoured and food prepared. At work I hid my hands as much as possible.
‘It is really time dear Helen was confirmed – I should have mentioned it before,’ Miss Ferguson said persuasively. ‘The confirmation lessons don’t take very long – in fact, she may already know all that is required.’
So that was it. Well, I was quite happy to be confirmed if it pleased my Fairy Godmother, and thereby become a full member of the church.
‘I suppose it is,’ replied Mother. She flicked the ash of her cigarette into the tiny fire, which was almost lost in the huge, old-fashioned kitchen range. ‘It is the time for the lessons – she really has to spend more time at home. I need her help.’
I let them continue to discuss the merits of Confirmation and the First Communion which would follow it, and went on darning and dreaming. Suddenly my heart jolted, when unexpectedly Miss Ferguson said, ‘Of course, the dear child has never been to Confession. If she is to take the sacrament, she will need first to go to Confession. It would be a good idea, don’t you think, if she got into the habit beforehand and went this week. Perhaps young Alan should think about it, too.’
I could feel myself going clammy all over. At that moment all the history books I had read, written almost entirely by Protestants, seemed to contribute to the sense of horror at anything which savoured of Catholicism – and Confession was surely a Catholic institution. In my nostrils there was suddenly the smoke and smell of the burning flesh of Protestant martyrs, made beloved by many a story; ordinary men and women, lords, priests, yokels, who had bravely faced being burned alive rather than acknowledge the Pope or the Mass – or confession to anyone but God.
I was weak on the theology of it, but I knew that Catholic Bloody Mary was the most hated Queen in British history, because she had tried to burn out of existence all signs of Protestantism. This unthinkable suggestion of Miss Ferguson’s went against everything I had ever learned of my church. In a city riven down the middle by religion, it seemed incredible that a Protestant deaconess should ever mention Confession.
Needle poised, I burst into the conversation with a frightened squeak, a squeak of genuine horror. ‘But we are Protestants. We say the General Confession during service. We make personal confessions only to God. I thought that was what being a Protestant was all about.’
Mother laughed, her delicate, superior, crushing laugh. ‘Helen, we are High Anglicans. It is by accident that you have never been to Confession before. By chance, most of the places we have lived in have only Low Churches, so that when you were little you were taken to them.’ She drew on her cigarette, and then added a little sharply, ‘You seemed to have enjoyed going to a High Church recently.’
‘In all the many months I stayed with Grandma I never went to Confession,’ I protested. ‘If she had gone, I am sure she would have taken me with her.’
Mother did not like being reminded of her mother-in-law, who had washed her hands of her shiftless son and would no longer have anything to do with us.
‘Your grandmother was too old to walk further than the village church – and that church was Low Church.’
I pushed my fist into one of Brian’s smelly socks and attacked another hole. My voice trembled, as I said flatly, ‘Well, I’m not going.’
Miss Ferguson looked nonplussed, and her hands with their black cotton gloves fluttered helplessly.
Mother’s heavily made-up face began to darken. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Helen. It would do you good to go, to come face to face with your arrogance and bad temper. It might teach you to honour your parents, which would be a welcome change.’
Me? Confess? Tell some strange priest that there were times when I felt like murdering my mother? Times like this moment. Tell him that I had dreamed that I took all my clothes off in front of a man? I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. I could tell God himself these things in the course of the General Confession, because He had made me and probably understood His faulty work. But not a priest – not a man!
Much that I had let pass during my recent churchgoing suddenly fell into place. I had puzzled that the ministers of the church strode the streets in cassocks with black birettas on their heads, that servers assisted at the altar, that incense was used, the whole elaborate ritual. Now, the theatrical beauty of it, which had so impressed me, seemed suddenly to hide a basket of vipers.