By the Waters of Liverpool (8 page)

It was my fault. I had never thought of gloves. I blamed myself, never thinking that Mother, experienced in all things appertaining to etiquette, might have reminded me.

‘I suppose you’ll have to go without,’ said the lady testily. ‘Pull your sleeves down as far as you can.’

Hanging my head, I stood alone in a corner, waiting to be marshalled into a procession according to height, and tried to turn my thoughts again to the spiritual aspect of the ceremony, but I could not recapture it. All the pleasure and hope of my
beautiful dress was lost, all the tender belief that I was approaching God like a bride ready to offer what little virtue I had to His service was gone, shot down by an impatient woman and the lack of a sixpenny pair of gloves. Ironically, I could have bought them myself, one of my shorthand students having paid me the night before. I began to shiver.

Two by two we advanced towards the old bishop sitting in front of the altar. We knelt before him and he placed his hands firmly on our heads, so that we should not rise prematurely. He said in a loud sonorous voice, ‘Defend, O Lord, this Thy child with Thy heavenly grace, that she may continue Thine forever; and daily increase in Thy Holy Spirit, more and more, until she comes to Thy everlasting kingdom. Amen.’

I was so innocent that I expected to feel different after the magical words had been spoken. But I did not. I was still shivering, disconcerted by the importance of outward and visible signs – like gloves – as against the inward and spiritual grace which I had hoped to acquire that day.

Mary had said firmly to Mother that I must have a photograph of myself, to celebrate the event and as a keepsake, so the sixpence which could have been spent on the missing gloves was expended
at the local photographer’s, who took the first picture of me since I was a little child. Until I looked into his mirror when tidying myself ready for the photograph, I had, of course, no idea what I looked like, because at home we had only a small piece of broken mirror. The photograph was better than I had hoped.

The photograph shows a slender girl with small curves in all the right places. She is dressed in a plain lace gown with the uneven hem which had been fashionable a few years earlier. She has long slender fingers, delicate ankles, and small feet encased in white satin shoes. Her face, clothed in horn-rimmed spectacles too small for her, is as plain as the back of a Liverpool tram.

I was now eighteen, going on nineteen, a plain, silent girl still struggling to stay alive, no longer quite so devoted to the church, deeply distrustful of the motives of those whose lives touched mine, a young woman without hope.

I had been promoted to the Stenographers’ Room, working side by side with Miriam, thankful to be at last delivered from the sniggering girls downstairs. My shorthand was almost perfect, thanks to good evening school teaching; my typing was still very faulty because I had taught myself. I had consequently not received a rise in salary, just an improvement in status.

Miriam had for a long time worked very hard to raise money for the volunteers among her Communist associates who went to fight against
Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Now, as her fingers flew over the typewriter keys, she raged that the war was lost to the Fascists and soon Europe would be plunged into a much bigger war. She threw herself impetuously into aiding the many Spanish children who had been sent to safety in England and into consoling the wounded, disillusioned returning volunteers.

There was a number of active Communists on our staff, earnest women toiling as social workers in the depths of Liverpool’s appalling slums. Despite their desire to recruit to their party, I kept well back from their political endeavours, partly from the fact that my personal life was so full of work that I could not cope with anything as abstract as political beliefs, and partly because of the scarifying stories Father had told me of Communist excesses he had seen during his military service in Russia.

Several stenographers had come and gone during my employment with the Charity, but the Head Typist was still the devout Roman Catholic who tried regularly to save Miriam from her misbegotten ideas and me from the clutches of a heretic church. She was a dear and almost everybody was fond of her, no matter how cross she got about hanging participles and bad spelling. Between her and Miriam I
learned to disagree with other people’s beliefs and yet have respect for them.

At one point the Charity was so short of funds that she instituted a fine of one penny for every sheet of paper that Miriam and I wasted as a result of typing errors. Miriam promptly said, ‘Not bloody likely!’ and since I had little money to spare to pay fines, we smuggled screwed-up balls of paper containing our typing sins out of the room, by quietly stuffing them into our overall pockets or down our necks. Occasionally, we had the most remarkably lumpy figures.

My life had settled into a dull, fatiguing rut. Ever fearful of unemployment, I clung to my job. Each January or February, I went down with influenza or bronchitis and, in my emaciated state, usually took a month to recover. The Presence always sent my wages to me, no matter how many weeks I was away, a rare generosity in those days.

A few more jobs were becoming available in the beleagured city. Shadow factories were being built, with an eye to war; and an army of bricklayers and other building workers, though thankful for a small pay packet, cursed with pain as their blistered hands and aching backs got used to working again.

I began to have a faint glimmering of hope that, despite my lack of education, I might be able to find
a better job or, by continuing my evening school studies, become well enough informed to join the more privileged green-overalled social workers.

Students came to our office from the Social Science Department of the university, to do some practical work. Our workers gave them lectures, taught them how to interview and took them to see our clients in their homes. Some of the students were horrified at what they saw and were afraid of visiting alone.

In the Committee Room a large bookcase began to be filled with volumes on the theories of social science. Whenever the lecturer forgot to lock the bookcase, I borrowed books for a night or two and read them, slipping them back into the bookcase when the room was empty. Sometimes the theories and the interpretations of statistics made me laugh, and I thought of the shrewd exploiters of social assistance amongst whom I lived. Some of our neighbours knew every trick and used extremely agile brains to obtain what they needed from the many agencies in the city; it was almost like a business to them. They were all poor, but it was often not the most needy who received the most help. Now, three generations later, this swindling has become an art, and some people live very comfortably from it. They would probably do equally well
if they turned their astuteness towards earning a living. Crying poverty, however, can be a good excuse for shrugging off the weight of responsibility for one’s life.

The books opened up to me the world of theory, and I began to understand that there were people who spent their lives trying to find the underlying principles upon which society and nature itself were built. Pondering upon theological questions was something to which my history reading had introduced me; now I became interested in what might be going on in the university. It was further intensified by a casual conversation with one of our older students, who told me that he had been a weaver for twelve years and had, during that time, managed to study enough to matriculate. He had also saved enough to put himself through university. For a moment my ambitions soared. Then he said, ‘I couldna ha’ done it without me Mam and Dad. They just asked a bit for me food – and they gave me a room to work in – you need a room of your own to do aught. Me Dad was really good. He went without to buy me books and me Mam took in washing. Soon I’ll be able to help them.’

The ambition flopped like a balloon with a leak. My parents took from their girls; they did not give. They might occasionally encourage verbally, but
they would not help. Any money they had, any ambition they felt, was channelled to the boys. Fiona, Avril and I were always just useful wage earners.

Alan, nearly six feet tall, though very thin, joined the Auxiliary Air Force and clumped about in strong black Air Force boots. He shone them to a jetty perfection every Sunday morning. He had an Air Force uniform, with brass buttons which were also polished with the aid of endless tins of Brasso. He learned to press his uniform himself, a radical decision brought about because once when pressing his trousers I had burnt a hole in them.

Every Saturday and Sunday, he went to an airfield to be trained, first in ordinary drills and physical fitness programmes, then to work, as he said, on
real
aircraft with
real
tools. The planes were Hawker Hind biplanes, which went all of one hundred and seventy miles an hour. He was thrilled, and concentrated on the work with passionate intensity. His thin wrists strengthened as he learned to use tools, and the regular exercise broadened his shoulders. He began to walk with more self-assurance. He was paid for his service and was allowed to keep the money in addition to his pocket money.

He was generous by nature, and he would often treat the younger children to the Saturday matinée
at the Rialto Cinema. They ate ice cream sandwiches during the intermission and had a wonderful time shrieking encouragement to film heroes like Tom Mix as, on his white horse, he galloped after the ‘baddies’, who always rode black horses.

Fiona, after spending two miserable weeks in suspense, had been engaged by the magazine dealer and was very happy, working the addressograph and, when business was slack, reading all the magazines, from
True Confessions
to
Good Housekeeping,
not to speak of a number of American magazines for men, which, she told me, were utterly shocking. Her employers treated her like one of the family. She was soon earning fifteen shillings a week, the same as me. She paid half of it to Mother for her food and kept the rest for travelling expenses and pocket money. Mother still bought her clothes, which put her away ahead of me financially.

Every night she went to bed with her hair in curling rags, until she could afford a permanent wave. I wanted such a wave, too, but had not the faintest hope of being able to afford it. I had no time to put my hair in rags, so I still had long hair pulled back into a bun.

Her boy friends multiplied, so her entertainment was paid for by a series of devoted swains. Sometimes, she would beg me to tell a more ambitious
one at the front door that she was out, while she slipped through the back door to meet someone else. Her social life became one of the first family jokes at which we all laughed.

It was apparent to me that Father was now earning more than he used to. He, too, began to have a modest social life, when he met his colleagues at various public houses in the city. Several times he went to concerts at the Philharmonic Hall, newly rebuilt after a disastrous fire, which Brian and Tony had enjoyed watching. He managed to buy a suit and an overcoat and occasionally shoes and shirts. Cinemas bored him, so he did not go to them. He did not give any more money to the home, which caused constant flareups between Mother and him. His main argument was that to retain his job he had to have a minimum of clothing, which he would certainly never get if he did not buy it himself. To that end he had to save some money. Mother would come flying back at him, that he smoked and drank too much, to which he would promptly retort that she spent most of her evenings at the cinema – she went at least twice a week – and that she also smoked like a proverbial chimney. Then they would rake up every possible transgression since the day of their marriage, and accuse and counteraccuse until the family fled or
was reduced to tears and impassioned pleas to them to stop.

Though Mother was now very strong physically, she was feeling the effect of the change of life, something I had never heard of until Miriam mentioned it in connection with her mother. Mother’s temper was so unpredictable that if she was more unbalanced than usual we did not notice it. She complained, however, of being overly hot and she sometimes looked as if she had fever. Miriam called these attacks hot flushes and advised me to be patient with her and encourage her to rest. I made a great effort to hold my tongue when she was being particularly vicious in her remarks, and tried to help more in the house when she obviously did not feel well.

At nearly nineteen I was an adult and better able than I had been to assess soberly what was happening to any of us. Once Mother realised that I understood what was happening to her, she seemed glad to be able to speak frankly to me about it. I encouraged her to see the doctor from time to time, and though there was no real aid then for this intense physical upheaval, he was able to comfort her by assuring her that it would pass.

Rest was possible, because she did not work full time, and when all the children were at school she
could go to bed in the afternoon and get up late in the morning. Whatever cleaning and washing there was to be done was usually achieved at the weekend when I was at home. She began again to read regularly, and drew real enjoyment from the great storytellers of the time – Edgar Wallace, Jeffrey Farnol, P. G. Wodehouse, Rafael Sabatini and many others. She had been a librarian before her marriage and she liked to discuss what she had read. In me she found a willing listener.

Through her guardian, who owned a string of private libraries, she had met many of the early twentieth-century writers and in those days had read much more deeply than she did in her later years. It dawned on me that her knowledge of literature had in part guided me, because every time I was ill – which was at least twice a year – she would bring me her own choice of books from the public library to read in bed. It was she, I recollected, who had brought me the first books I read on Japanese and Chinese history and travel books on South America, a continent I had never thought about before then and a fascinating area for further study.

This shared love of books formed a slender bridge between us, and I began to find it easier to talk to her, though on a shallow level, about other concerns in which I was interested, like the
war we were all afraid would break out and about the refugees pouring in from Europe.

Mother feared for her sons. She dreaded them being butchered as her own generation had been, though I once heard her remark that she had ‘done her duty to the nation by producing four sons’. The idea that to produce soldiers was the duty of a mother shocked me beyond measure, but to women of her age, of the officer class, it must have seemed natural.

As a result of the battle-axes being laid down between us, though never buried, at the time of the office Christmas dance I felt brave enough to say that for once I would like to attend.

‘Do you think you could help me buy a secondhand dress?’ I begged humbly. ‘I have never been to the office parties before, and Miriam thinks I should – I might meet some of the Committee members – and that might help me with promotion later on.’ Miriam was nothing if not practical, despite her ideals.

Mother pondered over this, and said, ‘I’ll see.’

A few days later, she came home with a long white rayon taffeta dress, which she had bought from a girl she knew in one of the stores. My share of the cost – five shillings – was paid in two instalments, as my shorthand student paid me.
The material of the dress was delicately patterned in fine red and green stripes and at the back it had long ruffles running from waist to hem. The sleeves were short and puffed and the low V-neck had a diamante clasp tucked into it. Though it was not particularly fashionable, it fitted me and Fiona said it looked quite pretty.

The white stockings bought for my Confirmation had, because of their colour, survived Fiona’s marauding, so they were ready to hand, and Mother gave me the pawn ticket so that I could retrieve the white satin slippers and the petticoat from Uncle’s.

The pawnbroker was Jewish, portly. What hair he had was curled tightly round a bald patch. The light of the bare electric bulb above his high counter shone on his olive face and made his heavy watch chain glitter. He was an old friend.

While the apprentice went up into the loft to retrieve the cloth-wrapped bundle, I told him shyly about the dance, and then confided that I had not been to a dancing class since I was eleven and feared I might not be able to dance.