By the Waters of Liverpool (11 page)

I was nineteen going on twenty and I had never been kissed by a man, other than an occasional peck from Father. I had never gone to an adult party and only once been to a dance. I had never since I was eleven played any games, did not know the meaning of the word
fun.
It seemed as if there was nothing but work in the world. The only real pleasure was my regular visits to the Repertory Theatre with Sylvia and an occasional walk with her.

The dogs of war who were to eat my generation were howling through the streets of Europe. The basement waiting room of the Charity for which I worked was packed with woebegone, nerve-racked Jewish and Trade Union refugees from every country in Europe. Upstairs, in the Interviewing
Department, lay a Dictionary of the Languages of Europe and this was handed to non-English-speaking clients, so that they could at least establish for us which country they came from and which language they spoke. We could then obtain an appropriate interpreter. My French and German, though far from perfect, became suddenly useful.

In the parks, trenches were dug as air raid shelters. I remembered stories my father’s friends had told, when I was little, of flooded trenches rotten with corpses and preying rats, and I felt sick.

For my twentieth birthday on 6th June, 1939, Friedrich, my ever faithful German pen-friend, now a young officer in the Luftwaffe, sent me a small ivory edelweiss on a gold chain; in his part of Germany the edelweiss was, in the olden days, given by a boy to his prospective bride. It was a lovely gift, the first piece of jewellery that I had ever owned, except for Grandma’s watch, and I sighed regretfully over it – an English woman would certainly not be approved of as a wife of a Luftwaffe officer – and I wished that he had followed his original intention of becoming a schoolmaster. With the gift came a charmingly sentimental letter. In answer to a rather depressing letter from me, he assured me that his beloved Fuehrer would never
plunge Europe into war. All Herr Hitler wished was to see all German-speaking people united under one flag. One day German travel restrictions would be lifted and we would meet each other and how wonderful that would be.

It could, of course, be that Friedrich was right and all our newspapers were wrong. As an Air Force officer, he might know more than I did of what was happening. Sometimes the
Express
gave the same view as Friedrich, and it was a big newspaper – it should know.

With the edelweiss in my hand, I dreamed wistfully. He had no inkling of the many other problems which I faced. The previous Christmas I had wanted to send him a present, a real challenge for me. I solved it by buying a torn sheet from the second-hand shop, for a few pennies. The sides of the sheet were still good, and from that material I had cut six handkerchiefs, and hem-stitched them. The drawn-thread work was trying to the eyes, but the result was attractive. Then I embroidered Father’s initials on three of them and Friedrich’s on the other three. I had ringed Friedrich’s monogram with a ring of tiny roses, all done with white cotton. Both recipients had been delighted.

‘What on earth would Friedrich think,’ I wondered, with a wry grin, ‘if he knew where his gift
had come from? What would he think if he saw my home?’

Our sitting room had once more been furnished on the hire purchase system, and we had finally managed to pay off the debts for which we were still responsible on the earlier sets of furniture which had been repossessed by the furniture stores. Father had also bought, on the same plan, a radio which was a great joy to all of us.

The radio ran on batteries and we had periodical crises when new batteries were required. The wet battery had to be recharged about once a week; and I soon learned, after carrying it down to the shop to have this done, to walk down the street with bare legs. The acid from the battery tended to slop down one’s legs and burn them. Legs heal eventually – stockings do not. I still carry faint marks on my legs from those acid burns.

Despite the fact that five wages were now coming into the house, none of us earned very much. My parents still had little idea of how to manage a small income, with the result that we were still very poorly fed, often cold, and lacked proper changes of clothing. Shoes still got lined with cardboard to fill the holes in the soles, and I still sat at work with my feet firmly on the floor so that the other girls would not notice the holes.

Mr Ellis, with his formidable tongue, had been replaced by a gentle elderly lady, who was invariably polite and kind to me. Without saying anything, she seemed to understand a little of what was happening to me and the consistent effort I was making to educate myself. She sometimes asked me what plays I had seen – she also received theatre money, as it was called by the staff – and what books I had read recently.

Perhaps it was because of her recommendation that one morning the Presence sent for me.

‘Oh, my goodness,’ I groaned to Miriam. ‘What have I done now?’

The Presence smiled, actually smiled, when after knocking timidly I entered her office.

‘Sit down, Miss Forrester,’ she ordered briskly.

Nervously I perched on the edge of her visitor’s chair. If I had to sit down to hear it, she must have something quite devastating to say.

‘Miss Forrester, we are expanding our Bootle office. The District Head at present runs it with the aid of voluntary workers. She does, however, need someone on whom she can rely to assist her. We have decided to appoint an Assistant District Head, and I would like to send you out there.’

I gaped. Presumably I would be a kind of Girl Friday – but the designation of the post put me close to
the rank of the long-envied green-overalled social workers. The post could lead to further promotion. Perhaps a living wage.

‘The salary would be seventeen shillings and sixpence a week,’ Miss Danson added, and swivelled herself round to look at me for the first time.

A rise in pay of half-a-crown would just cover the additional long tram journeys out to the north end of the city. It would not stretch to anything more. But it was a break at last.

I smiled. ‘I would like that very much,’ I assured the Presence enthusiastically, putting to the back of my mind how much the tram journeys would add to my already incredibly long working day.

Full of excitement I broke the news to Mother. She refused to believe that the rise in pay had been so little. ‘It amounts to nothing, really,’ she fretted. ‘They must have given you at least five shillings?’

‘They didn’t, Mummy, I assure you. But I will get training in actual casework – and that is worth something.’

So, for half-a-crown more than I would have received had I been unemployed, I took on considerable responsibility and continued to live largely on hope.

Bootle had more unemployment, more overcrowding, more pollution, more ignorance, more
huge Roman Catholic families floundering in poverty than I had ever seen before. It was even worse than the badly hit south side of the city. No wonder the patient, delicate-looking District Head needed help. With only the Society’s small funds available to us, it was like being asked to shovel out a rubbish dump with a teaspoon.

I plunged in to help, but found the greatest difficulty was within myself. I had been so crushed by the staff of the Head Office that I tended never to do anything which I had not been asked to do. I had little natural initiative; only a kind of slave-like mentality. And this had, with much trial and error, to be slowly overcome. If I was to join the green overalls, all of whom had degrees, I realised sadly that I had a long way to go.

One night, as I sat huddled on the tram from Bootle, I pondered over my inabilities, not at that time very clear about what ailed me, knowing only that change I must from the frail, drained woman for whom nobody cared very much, into a more dynamic person. Otherwise, I feared, I did not have much to look forward to in the future.

Left alone with Father one Saturday afternoon, I asked him tentatively if he could think of any other kind of work to which I might aspire. Without a second’s thought, he came up with a very good
suggestion. ‘You might be able to pass the entry exams for the Civil Service by now – they give you quite a wide choice of subjects, you know.’

Half believing, I made inquiries and found he was correct. Father became interested, and I found a schoolmaster willing to coach me in Geography, the weakest subject amongst the rag bag of subjects which I could offer. For five shillings a lesson, half of it contributed by Father, he came to the house in the evenings, and began to teach me about winds, tides and currents and how they affected the layout of the world. And I was hooked. Nobody in my childhood had taught me anything beyond the names of rivers, cities, countries, seas and where they were. Night school was finished for the season, and, fascinated, I studied earnestly from the books he lent me. He came four times. Then I received a brief note from his wife that he had been called up. Reluctantly I returned the books.

A few weeks later, the Civil Service cancelled its examinations for the duration of the war. Nobody seemed to know at that time how they would recruit any staff they would require.

Frustrated, I threw myself once more into an effort to improve my social work.

As war began to breathe down the back of our necks, our socially isolated family received unexpected visitors.

A fussy, elderly man who lived in the next street arrived to show us how to put on our gas masks. He was apologetic to the ladies because their hair styles were likely to be disturbed by the straps, since it was essential that the masks fit tightly. He recommended our keeping our hair short. He also warned us that mascara was liable to melt and run down our faces while we had our masks on.

Fiona was the only member of the family who used mascara, and she continued placidly to brush it on in front of the piece of mirror wedged into the kitchen window frame. It made her already huge
eyelashes even more seductive. She brushed her hair up into the newly fashionable high sweeps round her face, and at the back bouncing curls fell to her shoulders.

My bun got so tangled up with the straps of the mask that it was as well that there never was a gas attack.

The Air Raid Warden knocked peremptorily on our door. He lived a few doors away from us and had been unemployed for years. He had a reputation for being utterly lazy, but he took his present duties very seriously, and demanded to see our blackout curtains.

We had none. We had no curtains at all upstairs, except for a short net curtain across the front bedroom window. We did have, however, the original big wooden shutters of the house in the downstairs rooms, and had always used these instead of curtains in the living room. The Warden agreed that these would make excellent blackout and a good defence against flying glass. He tutted like a maiden aunt over the bare bedroom windows, and ordered us to buy black cloth and make curtains.

‘Or yer can paste double layers of brown paper over t’ panes. Another thing you can do, is make wooden frames covered with thick paper and fit ‘em into t’ windows each night, like.’

Mother said frostily that we would just have to manage without candlelight in the bedrooms. She was not going to blot out the daylight with brown paper, and she could not afford curtains or frames.

The Warden stuck his blue chin in the air and replied that the windows must be covered – by law – in case the flare of a match or other casual light flashed out of them and brought German bombs down upon us.

Mother was not going to take orders from any local oaf, and retorted, ‘What rubbish!’

The Warden stood firm. ‘I tell yez, you’ll be fined if you don’t cover ‘em,’ he warned, his dark Irish face grim as he held his temper in.

Muttering maledictions, Mother went out to buy blackout material for the front bedroom. Then, in the copper in the basement, we dyed two of our few sheets and pinned one over the back kitchen window, which lacked shutters, and one over the window of the boys’ bedroom. The girls’ bedroom window remained bare and, since we could not show a light, we had to fumble round in the dark when going to bed.

The Warden was not satisfied. The windows should have sticky tape crisscrossed over them, to stop shattering glass from flying into the rooms. Mother said she would see to it, but she never did, and
the patient Warden finally acknowledged defeat. Resignedly, he recommended that we sit on the basement steps during raids, that being the safest place in the house.

A school teacher came to explain the need to evacuate Brian, Tony, Avril and Edward to the country, in the charge of their teachers. She was a faded, middle-aged woman in a worn tweed suit, and the children stood around the room and stared at her, as she spoke.

She inquired if we had any relations to whom they could be sent. ‘You might prefer that to their going with the school.’ Her artificial teeth clicked as she pushed them into place with her tongue.

‘No,’ replied Mother. Father cleared his throat.

‘There are the aunts at Hoylake,’ I suggested tentatively. ‘Could Avril go to them?’

‘I doubt if they would take her,’ Father interjected, and it was finally agreed that the children would leave with the school.

Dismayed at the thought of filthy, lousy evacuees from Liverpool or Birkenhead being billetted on them, the aunts had the same idea as I did, and the next day a letter arrived suggesting that they should take in two of the children. Father roared with laughter at the thought of how suddenly important their long-neglected nephews and nieces had
become. He turned the letter over and over in his hand, and remarked, ‘I can’t remember when one of them wrote to me last.’

Mother looked as if she had been caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, and I tried to reassure her.

‘They were always very kind to me when I was a child,’ I said quickly. ‘None of the children will come to harm with them.’

So, as German tanks ploughed across the Polish border, Tony and Edward, with a pitifully small amount of luggage, went off with a school teacher, to meet the aunts they had never seen. I will never forget their tight, white little faces. A stony-faced Avril, determined to be brave, went with them, to live nearby with a friend of the aunts; and for the first time in her memory knew what it was to have good, new clothes bought for her, sleep in a properly equipped bed and be decently fed. Brian, like a young soldier, went with the school to Wales and lived with a postman who was also exceedingly good to him. Despite much kindness, none of the children came through that traumatic time without scars.

The Government provided an allowance for the evacuees’ board. But later on, they demanded that parents contribute to this cost. On the day they
announced this, Mother decided that she could not bear to be parted from her darlings any longer, and they were broughthome. If she had to maintain her children, they might as well be at home, air raids notwithstanding. When the raids became very heavy, under pressure from the school, they were re-evacuated, this time to strangers, and they were very unhappy. However, when the Government again demanded money, Mother brought them home. They were thankful to return, despite the danger.

In June, 1939, Alan went gaily off, for the second year, for his annual training camp with the Auxiliary Air Force. It was to be two weeks long and was to be his holiday. We knew that, like the first one he had attended, he would be out in the countryside at a Royal Air Force base being well fed and would be enjoying himself working with tools. He would also be paid, and would return home looking well and with pocket money to spend. Before he went, he bought himself a new sports jacket and trousers, so that off duty he would look smart, and we teased him before he went, about all the feminine hearts he would break during his free evenings. He was happy.

He did not return. There was no letter to say what had happened, and Mother was in a panic. Father
said that a number of young men from his office had also not returned from various military training camps where they had gone as Territorials for their summer training. It was part of the national call-up.

About a month later, the postman delivered a small sack containing Alan’s unworn sports jacket and trousers. Mother wept. ‘He must be dead,’ she mourned, and pawned them next time she was short of money.

Father reminded her that the Forces were very good at telegraphing the news of deaths. No news was good news.

Three or four months later, he arrived home on forty-eight hours’ leave. He looked even thinner than when he had left us, but it seemed as if he had grown a foot. He had finished an arduous square-bashing, through which all regular recruits had to go, and was now again thankfully working on planes. He was tired and slept most of his leave, but he was still enthusiastic and went back to his base quite cheerfully.

He had obviously had a tough training period, so we refrained from reminding him that we would have been glad of a letter to say where he was. Now we had an address, both Mother and I wrote to him regularly.

Mother forbade me to write to the evacuated children or to go to see them. I was very angry about this, but gave in sulkily when she said, ‘Seeing someone from home will upset them.’ Despite her argument, she went out to Hoylake to see them and she would never say how she got on with her in-laws. I could not really understand her objection to my going, but she may have been jealous for a long time of my particular position as surrogate mother, and wished to reassert herself with them.

Anyway, I obeyed. I was finding it increasingly hard to face up to Mother. My new job amid appalling squalor, in addition to the long journey out to Bootle, was draining a character already crushed and exhausted.

It seemed as if the whole population of the country was on the move, as men were called up and women shut down their homes and went back to live with mother, as the children vanished into the countryside, and drafted workers got sent to distant war factories. Lonely youths far from home spent much time cultivating girls who would invite them to their homes, to compensate a little for spartan Victorian barracks or bare, comfortless workers’ dormitories. Fiona’s dates multiplied exceedingly, and into our emptied house began to drift a curious assortment of men of all nations
and all social classes, to eat our rations and warm their wet feet at our single fire, to have their socks darned and their buttons stitched on. Mother was in her element as a hostess, and we all hoped, as the war progressed and the other boys were called up, that somewhere in the world Alan, Brian and Tony were being taken care of, too. I think this was the best contribution that Mother ever made to society, as she tried to feed and comfort the strangers at our door.