By the Waters of Liverpool (20 page)

‘Goodness me!’ exclaimed Mother. ‘What have you got there?’ She looked askance at me, as I staggered through the kitchen door into the marshy back garden, with a huge drawer from the dresser in my bedroom. The drawer was stacked with papers, some of them in neatly tied bundles.

‘It’s all the letters I received during the war – all my love letters, too. I can’t very well take them to India, so I thought I would burn them in the old bomb crater in the garden.’

I must have looked a little stricken, because Mother said very kindly, ‘Yes, dear. Burn the lot. India is going to be an entirely new start for you.’ Age had mellowed her a little and I was grateful for her quick sympathy, though she was still very difficult to live with.

Father looked up from his paper sadly. He did not want me to go so far away. He hoped my fiancé would find a post in England and that we would return soon. He was a much plumper and better dressed father now, and in good health. We had become friends and we would miss each other.

I thankfully dropped the drawer on the dew-spangled grass in the bomb crater, and stood panting with the effort of lifting it. Across the flat market gardens at the bottom of our land, I could see the sea wall which protected the district from becoming fenland again. It was dull mist-covered country, but I felt it was my country, because it was so close to where my grandmother had lived. Behind me stood the small, though pleasantly comfortable, bungalow which had sheltered us since 1941, when a bomb had made our Liverpool row house unsafe. The grass-covered crater at my feet had been caused by a small bomb which had fallen on our first night in our new home. Now in March, 1950, I proposed to incinerate in it the record of all my past life. Before me stretched a brand new path, totally unrelated to all that had gone before. I was going out to India to marry a gentle Hindu professor of Theoretical Physics, whom I had met in Liverpool when he was taking a doctoral degree at the university.

How strange life was. I was to give up a very promising career, take on a new country, a new religion, a new language, for this quiet person who had come into my life so unobtrusively that it was some time before I really noticed that he was there. And yet I was content, happy about it.

I crumpled up some newspaper which I had brought into the bomb crater, and set a match to it. Then one by one I opened out and dropped into the flames letters from all over the world from my three brothers, Alan, Brian and Tony, all of whom had served in the war and come home safely. They were now launched on new careers, determined to make up for the time lost. No letters from Baby Edward. He was now ensconced in Liverpool University on a scholarship. He had been kept out of the Forces by an untreated dislocated shoulder caused by a fall in childhood. Letters followed from umpteen men who had danced with me, taken me out, in some cases proposed to me, while like a lost soul I had searched frantically to find someone like Harry. But no one can take the place of somebody else. They have to be loved in their own right. I knew that now, but it had taken me a long time to learn it.

Here it was, a little clipping from the
Liverpool Echo,
with his picture: ‘O’Dwyer – Henry, aged
33, lost at sea, beloved son of Maureen and John O’Dwyer, and loving brother of Thomas and sister-in-law Dorothy. RIP.’

It was as if the flames were burning part of me.

Woodenly, I continued to throw letters on the fire. Very few letters from women. My girl friends had been fortunate, like me, in spending the war at home. None from Fiona, just married and living close by, or from Avril, who was still living at home. Avril was taking the first uncertain steps which would eventually lead her to a full and satisfying teaching career, to marriage and four bonny children.

A form letter from the Petroleum Board offering me a post at £2 14s 6d a week – three times my salary in the charitable organisation. How I had leaped at it. A living wage at last.

I started on a packet of letters tied with blue baby ribbon and, half choked with smoke and misery, threw them one by one on to the fire. Dear, highly articulate Edward, six feet tall and built to it, had taken nearly two hours to propose to me, while marching along the road to Birkenhead Park station, when he had missed the local train home and I had decided to walk part of the way with him. It had taken me only ten seconds to accept.

Halfway through I could not continue. I snatched
some of the letters back and have them still, a tiny bundle with another obituary culled from the
Liverpool Echo.
‘Parry – July – killed in action, aged 32 years, Edward, very dearly loved younger son of Mrs Parry, Orrell Park, his loving and sorrowing mother.’

That was 1944 – the invasion of France. I thought I was a Jonah, so after the war I concentrated on finding a career and discovered it in a packaging company, where women had a chance to rise in the business. I joined all kinds of social clubs and societies and made a number of good friends.

Now I live in western Canada with my dear Professor and our son. As I write, it is the beginning of 1981, and I have trunks full of letters, a much, much happier collection. Pictures of Fiona’s and Avril’s beautiful weddings, and those of the boys – what funny hats we wore; snaps of a dozen or more nephews and nieces; letters from my publishers accepting the manuscripts of
Twopence to Cross the Mersey
and
Minerva’s Stepchild,
^*
in which I described the sufferings of our family when we first came to Liverpool; lovely letters from my kind Indian in-laws. And my husband’s long letters written to me from India before I went there and others from
time to time when he has been away from me for a few days. How much I owe him for making my life anew. We came out to this wealthy, snowy country so that he could better continue his research, and here was born our son.

My cup runneth over.

Helen Forrester was born in Hoylake, Cheshire, the eldest of seven children. For many years, until she married, her home was Liverpool – a city that features prominently in her work. For the past forty years she has lived in Alberta, Canada.

Helen Forrester is the author of four best-selling volumes of autobiography and a number of equally successful novels, including most recently
Madame Barbara.
In 1988 she was awarded an honorary D.Litt. by the University of Liverpool in recognition of her achievements as an author. The University of Alberta conferred on her the same honour in 1993.

Fiction

THURSDAY’S CHILD

THE LATCHKEY KID

LIVERPOOL DAISY

THREE WOMEN OF LIVERPOOL

THE MONEYLENDERS OF SHAHPUR

YES, MAMA

THE LEMON TREE

THE LIVERPOOL BASQUE

MOURNING DOVES

MADAME BARBARA

Non-fiction

TWOPENCE TO CROSS THE MERSEY

LIVERPOOL MISS

BY THE WATERS OF LIVERPOOL

LIME STREET AT TWO