By the Waters of Liverpool (13 page)

‘You have a remarkable memory.’ The tone was heavily sarcastic.

‘Children remember all kinds of things,’ I responded woodenly.

‘What was he doing in England?’

‘He was going to stay with English friends of his father’s – friends from long ago before the war – to improve his English. It was already quite good. He could talk about almost anything – but not correctly.’

‘Where was he going?’

‘To Manchester.’

‘And where had he come from?’

I was getting fed up and snapped back, ‘I didn’t ask him.’ Father cleared his throat reprovingly.

I thought I was being grilled thoroughly but when, after what seemed hours, we finally got down to Ursel’s letters, questions about Friedrich seemed nothing.

I had been put in touch with Ursel when I had replied to a letter in the Sunday
Observer,
which Father had once bought. The letter offered to put children in touch with pen-friends in Germany. I had asked for a girl friend. The detective told me that my letter of so many years earlier had been found by the police in the file of the man who wrote the letter to the
Observer,
a known Fascist.

I stared at the detective unbelievingly. ‘Who on earth would bother to retain such a letter? And why are you interested in such a silly thing as two girls writing to each other?’

The detective did not answer. He was reading one of Ursel’s letters. Perhaps he did not like his work being considered silly.

Then he launched his attack. Question after question. Small things that Ursel had asked about, matters I had long since forgotten. How had I replied? What did this paragraph or that one refer to? Questions until I was dizzy and bewildered. Finally, Father intervened to remind the detective reproachfully that I was only a young girl.

‘Twenty is not a young girl,’ retorted the detective tartly. ‘Please be quiet. I have my work to do.’

Father was obviously getting very upset. But he did keep quiet.

Nine o’clock. Ten o’clock by the timepiece on the wall. I began to think we would never be allowed to go home. And I still did not understand what all the fuss was about. I was floundering in bewilderment.

At about eleven, it came suddenly to an end. The man who had been sitting quietly nearly behind me, said, ‘I think that will do, Tom.’ He swung his heavy body round to look at me. ‘We will have a summary typed up. You can sign it and then you can go. If you change your address you must let us know immediately.’

The curly-headed detective stood up and stretched himself. Unexpectedly, he asked quite pleasantly, ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ He picked up Friedrich’s and Ursel’s letters, shuffled them into a neat pile and put them into a folder handed him by the stenographer.

I nodded silently. Father said, ‘Thank you.’

The three men went away, and I turned to Father, ‘What…?’ I began in a quavery voice.

Father said very softly, ‘Don’t say anything.’ He made the smallest possible gesture towards the screen half-surrounding us, and mouthed, ‘Listening.’

I swallowed, and said in a normal voice. ‘I hope they bring the tea.’ If they were listening, they might
as well be reminded of their promise. Then I sat with hands crossed on my lap, like a tabby kitten tired of play, and watched people coming and going through the door.

After a little while, a bald-headed elderly constable in uniform brought two cups of tea, with Marie biscuits tucked into the saucers. ‘There you are, Miss, Sir,’ he said politely, as he put the cups down on the table.

We ate the biscuits and drank the tea in perfect silence, while we listened to the rise and fall of innumerable muffled conversations in the huge room. Men in uniform, men in civilian clothes, occasionally women of various ages and classes, were ushered through. How late did the police work? I wondered.

At five to twelve, the curly-headed detective returned, bearing several sheets of closely-typed paper. ‘Sorry you had to wait so long,’ he said quite cheerfully, and plunked himself down on his chair once more. He started to read the closely-typed sheets very carefully, running his forefinger along each line. I noticed that he had lost his little finger and I sat watching the slight movement of the stub as the non-existent finger tried to adjust to the movement of the others.

The stenographer and the second detective joined
us at the table, their faces looking nearly as rumpled as their navy-blue suits.

The summary of the conversation was handed to me, with the request to read it and sign it.

Father uncrossed his legs and leaned towards me. For the first time he looked tense.

‘Read it very carefully, Helen. If for any reason you feel it deviates from what was said, I am sure the officer will have it altered.’

The officer sighed and looked at his watch. He blew through his lips, making a soft pooh-poohing sound, and then agreed, ‘Yes, it can be altered.’

I was no lawyer but I was used to reading contracts, new laws and government directives and interpreting them to our clients. The stenographer had composed a very fair summary of what had transpired. A lawyer, no doubt, would have queried every sentence, but I did not have such an adviser. In fact, it never occurred to Father or me that we could have demanded the presence of a lawyer, though I cannot imagine how we would have managed to pay him anyway.

I borrowed Father’s fountain pen, and signed.

The signature had a galvanising effect. The stenographer, hovering in the background, was dismissed. The detective who had been the observer at the interview seized a weather-beaten trilby from an old-fashioned hat stand nearby, clapped it on his head, said ‘Good night,’ to us, and ‘See you in the morning, Tom,’ to my diligent questioner, and fled after the stenographer.

The big room seemed suddenly nearly deserted. Tom leaned back in his chair and stretched himself. He rubbed his eyes and grinned like a schoolboy at Father and me. The rocklike hardness of his expression vanished completely and we were faced with an average Liverpudlian, who might have been a small businessman of some kind.

‘How are you going to get home?’ he asked Father.

Father did not have a watch, so I looked at Grandma’s watch and said to Father, ‘It’s half past twelve. We shall have to walk.’

Father rose and nodded to the detective.

‘Like to wait a few minutes? I’ll drop you in my car.’

Father was looking completely worn out and both of us had to be up by six the next morning, so I smiled impulsively at the detective, and said, ‘That would be lovely.’

The detective gazed slyly at me through red eyelashes. ‘Forgiven?’ he asked.

My smile died. ‘You have to do your work,’ I replied. ‘But I wish you’d tell us what it is all about.’

He stood up, moved around the table and then perched himself on the edge of it, facing Father. ‘Well, I can tell you this. Your daughter is not what we are looking for. We are quite satisfied about that.’ He stopped, and again blew his soft pooh-poohing sound. ‘We’re checking everyone known to have any association with Germany. We could have a Fifth Column here, ready to betray us – you must realise that. Your daughter’s letter about a pen-friend was found in the files of a known Nazi, when we picked him up. He had
a neat little espionage system going, you know. Linked up children in one district in England with a single class in a German school.’

I gasped, and he grinned at me.

‘The English letters addressed to one school in Germany were read by German intelligence before delivery.’ He paused, and shrugged. ‘You can appreciate how it would work. Kids write about where they live and what their father does for a living – whether he has been called up or sent to work in a new factory. Undoubtedly, questions were suggested to the German children for them to ask their pen-friends; I’ve checked enough piles of correspondence like Helen’s to realise this. If they had enough letters they would get a very good picture of what was going on in a given town in England – and Liverpool, being a big port, would be of particular interest.’

‘Good Lord!’ exclaimed Father. ‘You mean that Helen had actually become part of this?’

‘Yes.’ He turned and grinned down at me. ‘But her pen-friend had left school early to be married. I gathered from her letters that she was married at sixteen?’

‘She was,’ I agreed sadly. ‘She was terribly unhappy. Her husband was a minister in her church – and he was nearly forty.’

‘So, you see, she could not be prompted in her questions – without telling her how she was being used. And from her last letter I gather that her husband was in deep trouble with the Nazis.’

I sighed, and nodded agreement.

‘But why put me through all this…?’ I gestured helplessly.

‘Had to be certain, my dear. And you work in a place where many of the staff are highly politically minded.’

Dumbfounded, I stared at him. I thought of Miriam and her high ideals – and then I remembered that, only the month before, Russia had signed a non-aggression pact with Germany. I whistled under my breath, an unladylike habit learned as a child from a shepherd.

‘From Communists, Conchies, Catholics and Cranks, good Lord deliver us,’ the detective was saying to Father. He glanced again at me, sitting frightened in my chair. ‘What’s a pretty little thing like you doing, working in a place like that? You should be out enjoying yourself – dancing.’

I was deeply offended and said loyally through gritted teeth, ‘The ladies I work with do a wonderful job. I sometimes think they prevent this city from bursting into riots from sheer misery. At least people can talk to us about their troubles.’

His red eyebrows shot up and he made a face. ‘Well…’ He swung off the table, and abruptly changed the subject. ‘I’ll get the car. You know your way to the front door?’

We agreed that we did, and we stole down quiet corridors where lights still burned behind closed doors, to wait in front of the building.

At first, after the light inside the building, we faced a wall of complete darkness, but gradually our eyes became accustomed to it. Familiar Lime Street began to emerge. The outline of St George’s Hall loomed against the sky in front of us. Intermittent flashes from the shaded lights of cars lit up for a moment the squat block of the War Memorial or the finely-cast fish whose tails held up the lamp-standards. Other than the occasional sound of a car engine the busy city was absolutely quiet, and I jumped violently when above my head a sleepy pigeon cooed once.

‘I’m glad we don’t have to walk home in such darkness,’ I remarked to Father. I was deeply angry at the detective’s derisory remarks, but the safety of his car would be welcome.

‘I should buy a torch,’ replied Father, ‘and you should get one, too.’

I shrugged. When would I be able to afford a torch? I wondered suddenly if Father knew that
Mother received practically all my salary, and that to all intents and purposes I worked for nothing.

‘Could you lend me fourpence for my fares tomorrow?’ I inquired hopefully. ‘Now I’m out at Bootle, it is too far for me to walk. I’ll pay you back as soon as I get a student.’

‘I can,’ Father replied. ‘I won’t have to pay our fares back tonight, thanks to friend Tom.’

A small car swooshed around the corner and drew up at the kerb. We felt our way carefully down the steps. The door was opened from within and the front seat tipped forward, so that I could clamber into the back seat. Father sat by Tom, and as we swept through the empty streets, they talked fitfully about the invasion of Poland by the Germans and the sinking of the
Athenia
by German submarines.

When we stopped in our deserted street, I leaned forward and asked, ‘May I have my letters back sometime, if I come for them?’

Tom laughed. ‘Not till the end of the war, luv – round Christmas, probably. They have to stay in our files until it’s over.’

‘That’s not quite fair, is it? You said I wasn’t what you were looking for.’

‘Can’t be helped, luv.’ He turned round to look at me over his shoulder. ‘You should forget about
your German boy friend. Find yourself a nice English lad.’

I drew in my breath crossly. I resented Friedrich being termed a boy friend. It seemed to belittle him. But one does not argue with the police. Father had got out of the car and was holding the front seat forward for me. I slid out as gracefully as I could, and paused for a second to shake my skirts straight again.

The detective leaned across the front seat towards us. I saw the flash of his teeth as he grinned. ‘Remember what I said, young lady. Cranks, Conchies, Communists and Catholics – get out of it. Enjoy yourself while you’re young.’

I seethed with anger. Father bent and shut the door, after saying good night and thanking the man for the lift.

‘The abominable bigot!’ I exclaimed furiously to Father, as he felt around in his pocket for the house key. ‘I had no idea police could be so narrow-minded. I could cheerfully have shot him.’

Father sighed. ‘They are like the rest of us.’

Father had been so good about coming with me to the interview, that I did not want to argue with him, so I swallowed my flaring temper and did not answer him.

The letters never were returned to me. They
probably still lie in some dusty crate of wartime files of the CID, a gentle record of innocent young people touching each others’ lives across a mighty gulf.

‘Mummy, I haven’t got enough clothes,’ wailed Fiona, oblivious of small matters like a full-scale war. ‘I can’t wear this dress
again,
going out with Reg.’

So Mother retrieved some bundles from pawn. Since they contained all kinds of garments, I benefited by the addition of a summer dress and a blouse to my small wardrobe. Both Mother and Fiona were considerably plumper than I was and these garments were too tight for them. This did not stop them ‘borrowing’ them – and anything else of mine left clean and folded on the shelf in our bedroom. The resultant burst under-arm seams were left for me to repair, which I did with savagely bad temper. I had also to wash and iron the garments.

When I turned on her in anger, Fiona would say mildly, ‘But your things are always ready. I don’t have time to see to my clothes.’ And it was with difficulty that I refrained from hitting her.

Mother always helped herself, with the remark that I was welcome to borrow anything of hers. But she, like Fiona, rarely washed or pressed her clothes until she had nothing fresh left to wear. Anyway, both Fiona’s and her clothes hung on my wasted frame.

The absence of the children and Alan considerably eased the financial strain. Mother’s excellent salary meant that there was a little more food in the house, though frequently it was not the most nutritious kind. I still lacked lunch quite often, but a proper, though modest, breakfast helped me through the day, and there was a little more on my plate at night. There was far less work to do at home, no studying and no student to teach, so the awful strain on me began to slacken, despite long hours of work and travel. Yet I was totally miserable.

One weekend, Mother brought home some cheap wallpaper with a garish pattern of bright red cherries and green leaves printed all over it, and we covered the dingy grey walls of the living room with it. Emboldened by the improvement, Mother
bought some cotton curtaining in similar colours, but emblazoned with roses, and we stitched curtains and, also, padded seat covers for the upended paint cans which formed some of our seating. The effect was very cheerful.

We still lacked sufficient bedding and sheets, and as the autumn crept on the increasing cold began to make my legs ache abominably. The bedding from the boys’ beds had been pawned the day they were evacuated.

A general boredom set in as the fear of being bombed to death receded. I spent some weekend evenings with Mrs Poole and Sylvia. Mrs Poole, a professional dressmaker, showed me the proper way to cut out and fit a dress. But I could not afford to buy any material.

It seemed that nobody was interested in learning shorthand in such uncertain times. A small advertisement in the
Liverpool Echo,
paid for with the last fee of my evacuated student, brought no result.

Despite my anger at the derogatory remarks of the detective, he had sparked in me the idea of looking elsewhere for a better paying job, and I began to scan the Situations Vacant columns of the
Echo.
I wanted a position in which I could use my burgeoning experience in social work. I did not particularly want to be a secretary, for which type of
position I was quite well qualified, unless it could be to a private person. There were still a few people in those days who had live-in secretaries, and in a big private house I felt that to a degree I could return to the kind of life which I had known in childhood. I wrote in reply to several such advertisements and received one response from Chester. An interview was arranged in the Adelphi Hotel. I did not get the job. My poor clothes, despite the new overcoat, and my generally neglected and unhealthy looks, together with a gauche, painfully shy manner, made it certain that I would never obtain a post in a private house. A more cultivated and presentable young woman would be essential.

With time to think, my inadequacies became even more painfully apparent to me. Yet I seemed shut into a situation of such acute penury that it was impossible to alter myself very much, and I cried myself to sleep a number of nights.

I had never discussed the situation at home with Sylvia. I shrank from trying to explain to anyone the hardships we had been enduring and the weird, bewildered lostness of my parents. Much of the time they seemed to float in a mist through which they were incapable of finding their way, though, as I pondered, I realised that Father had been trying recently to reach out to his children. Looking back,
it is clear that Sylvia and I rarely discussed our personal feelings or our emotional life. We fed each other with talks about political events, books, theatres, history – a lively intellectual stimulation, almost bereft of the giggles and gossip of ordinary youngsters. Perhaps Sylvia had other friends who fulfilled this youthful need, but I did not.

There was no one to whom I could confide my shy desire to look chic, to learn to behave appropriately, become a normal middle-class girl again, groomed and cared for. Even the working-class girls who lived round me knew how to take care of their hair and their skin.

Wistfully I thought that if I had a little money to spend on pins and setting lotions, Fiona would show me how to do my hair. Mother spent a lot of time showing Fiona how to use hair tints and face creams and make-up. She bought her a fair amount of clothing and all this, added to a natural beauty, made her stunning to look at. All she had to do was smile in a lift or in the café where she had her lunch and it did not take long for well-heeled young men working in the city to find a polite way of approaching her and making a date. She was introduced by them into a circle of young people where she was accepted and was invited to parties, balls and dances. She soon learned from the more
refined girls that she met how to deport herself, and this, added to her normal gentleness, made her quite popular amongst them. She sometimes amused me in bed by telling me of small incidents that indicated that she had succeeded where I had failed; she was on an upwardly mobile path. I wondered if I would ever learn to put a teacup down on a table without upsetting it, enter a room without tripping over the rug, the small social etiquette of when to take off gloves and hat, when to shake hands and when to greet a girl with a kiss; such small things, yet so important in a world still ruled by etiquette.

At twenty I was still wearing the glasses bought for me ten years before. The frames were hopelessly small and had not been improved by several poor repairs. A few years later much of my clumsiness disappeared when I was able to buy a new pair and see properly again.

But I had no money for hairpins, never mind expensive things like spectacles, and now no money for make-up or lunches or even stockings. Few people in those days had the courage to ask an employer for an increase in pay, and I lacked the courage of a mouse. My fear of unemployment had been enhanced by the lack of response to my tentative efforts to obtain another post. And I still
owed Mother the pound she had lent me for the coat, about which she had reminded me caustically only a week before.

The visiting of clients in their homes, which I had been doing since my transfer to the Bootle office, had taught me that, though many of them were in dire straits, a great number of them lived far more comfortably than we did. They were simply better managers. Strangely, the war had not made much difference to the number of unemployed, but increasingly they seemed to be finding ways of earning small sums to augment their parish relief. They talked quite frankly to me about these little jobs, trusting me not to make a record of the information. If I had reported them, any money they earned would have immediately been deducted from their meagre allowance from the Relieving Officer. The women cleaned the homes of the more prosperous, the men did gardening, worked as handymen and sometimes as casual labour on building sites. No matter what time I called, there usually seemed to be a fire in the grate. What they most suffered from was overcrowding in dilapidated, verminous houses, lack of bathrooms, hot water and indoor lavatories, things that they could not themselves do a great deal about. Their rents were controlled at such a low level that it was in
many cases impossible for landlords to find the money for repairs, renovations or fumigation.

At home, we never learned to manage so successfully.

One Saturday, after a visit to a client, I had to spend twopence in a public telephone box to check something for the woman concerned, with my superior in the office. Afterwards I was in great distress when I realised that, though I would have the twopence returned to me eventually, I now had no money to pay my fare back to the centre of the city. I would have to walk there, and then the rest of the way from the city centre up the hill to our house. I was already sorely troubled that I had no fares left for the following week also.

I thought I would never reach home as I trudged along Stanley Road. I was dreadfully tired and still badly undernourished. At St Luke’s Church, I sat down on the steps because I felt I could go no further. People passing glanced at me curiously, so I shut my eyes until the world had stopped swimming around me.

It was a mild day, sunny enough for the rays to fight their way through the cloud of pollutants that veiled Liverpool on the few days when it was not windy. I should be able to manage four or five
miles, I told myself, now that the situation at home had eased.

Jumbled, chaotic thoughts wandered through a dulled mind, as I sat trying to get my breath. The detective had suggested that I should enjoy myself, go dancing. He must have been crazy. Things like that cost money. Even to volunteer, say, as a part-time air raid warden, which would have given me new friends, would need a few more pennies for fares, for the odd cup of coffee, possibly for uniform. Eyes still closed I put my head down on my handbag on my knee, and laughed.

‘Are ye all right, luv?’

An elderly newspaper seller had shuffled across the road and was bending over me solicitously. I looked up, startled. Small kind eyes stared at me through cheap metal-framed glasses balanced on a bulbous red nose.

‘Yes, thank you. Yes. I had to rest a moment, that’s all.’

‘Thought you was goin’ to faint.’

I smiled up at him. ‘No. I’m fine now, thank you very much.’

He grinned and toddled back to his little table of newspapers.

With gritted teeth I made myself climb the hill.

At the Rialto, leaning one trench-coated shoulder
against a stucco pillar, lounged the pimp who had once offered me a cigarette. I wondered if his girls felt much worse than I did. He said good night as he always did, tipping his rakish trilby hat as he did so. He must have found me rather a joke, because I looked so prim, yet despite his despicable occupation, I always smiled and replied politely, ‘Good night.’

This night I was almost shaky enough to ask him for a cigarette, to quell my hunger and soothe the great tide of unhappiness which was threatening to engulf me. It beat in my head, choked my throat. Years and years of suppressed misery welled up; thoughts of all my lost girlhood, all the possibly happy, irresponsible years lost in grinding poverty and an incredible weight of work, marched past me and jeered at me, as if to say, ‘You think you were
entitled
to live and laugh and be happy? Don’t kid yourself. You’ve got years and years of semi-slavery before you – and nothing much else.’

The house was incredibly quiet as I entered. I shivered. Without the children, I felt bereft of a reason for living.

Father and Mother sat on either side of the fireplace reading the paper. For once, they were not quarrelling. The puppy recently brought home by Brian slumbered unheeding on the coconut
matting, his back braced against the warm fender, the current stray cat curled comfortably on top of him. It was a great friendship. Fiona must long since have gone out with a date.

Both parents looked up and said, ‘Hello.’

I responded with a small, tight ‘hello’ back, and went straight to the kitchen to fill the kettle at the sink. When I twisted a knob on the gas stove, gas hissed out of one of the rings and I thankfully lit a match and put it to the ring. I could make tea quickly.

There was a slice of commercially cooked ham on a plate in the kitchen, and I called, ‘Is the ham for me?’ My voice sounded as if I were being strangled.

‘Yes,’ Mother called back, and I heard the rustle of the newspaper as she turned the page, and it grated on my raw nerves. I took two pieces of bread from a packaged sliced loaf, dabbed some margarine on them and put the ham between them. When the kettle boiled, I asked Mother and Father if they would like tea; if so, I would make a full pot. They both decided to have some.

With agitated hands, cups were somehow rinsed under the cold water from the tap and assembled on the table with the ham sandwich. I sat down in front of them and looked at them. My throat
felt tight to choking point. Within there was a rising feeling of panic. In a minute, I thought frantically, I am going to scream – and scream – about nothing.

That was it. Scream about nothing. Scream about the void which was me. About a nonexistent person, with no meaning to anyone else but me – or perhaps Sylvia. My God, how I wished she was there.

Moving like a zombie, I poured and distributed the tea. I bit at the sandwich and rolled the cottonwool bread with its stringy piece of ham round my mouth. I chewed, but could not swallow it, trying all the time to control the irrational hysteria rising in me.

I took a big breath, then sipped some tea to help the sandwich down. I choked.

Hand to mouth, I fled to the kitchen sink and succeeded in spitting out the offending piece of sandwich. I began to cry.

It was as if a well-locked lid had suddenly burst from a gas tank, because of uncontrollable pressure from within. I could hear myself groaning and screaming, as I clung to the edge of the sandstone sink, frightful primitive cries of a creature beyond help, writhing as if in pain.

Pain it was. All the pain, all the suppressed grief
of nine dreadful years, coming to the surface, now that some of the intense load had been lifted, the revolt of a human creature nearly pressed out of existence. Screams of awful mental anguish.