By the Waters of Liverpool. Helen Forrester
packed with people all talking at the tops of their voices. The family had long since finished its tea and, normally, I would have quickly eaten whatever had been kept hot for me in the oven which lay alongside the fire. Then I would have cleared the dishes and washed them up and put Avril and Edward to bed before going to night school. Tonight I had no strength left.
Mother, in a soiled house dress, was sitting in Father’s easy chair, reading the Echo, her bare feet on a wooden chair – to rest her veins, as she always said.
‘Hello, dear,’ she greeted me amiably, glancing over the newspaper. Then she put the paper quickly down on her lap. ‘Are you ill?’
Sometimes I was more afraid of Mother when she was being considerate than when she was quarrelsome. I answered carefully, using the polite expression for what had happened to me. ‘I was unwell.’
‘How are you now?’
‘A bit better, thanks. I won’t go to night school tonight – I’ll hand my German essay in on Wednesday.’
I took out of my handbag the crumpled confectioner’s paper bag which held the uneaten lunch of bread and margarine. ‘I’ll take this for tomorrow’s lunch,’ I added as I laid it on the table.
‘Gosh,’ exclaimed Fiona, ‘you must be hungry.’ She went quickly to the oven and lifted out a plate, using the hem of her skirt to protect her fingers from the heat.
I smiled at her gratefully, as she put the meal down in front of me, a tablespoonful of stewed minced beef, a potato and the inevitable pile of frizzled-up cabbage.
‘Mother bought some jam tarts and we kept one for you. Here it is.’ She pushed towards me a second plate with a little tartlet in a paper case sitting on it.
Mother was watching me, as I sat down, and I asked if she could spare two aspirins.
‘Of course,’ she said, and got up to find them in her handbag. ‘Would you like some hot ginger?’
Even in pain, this horrible thick concoction of ground ginger mixed with hot water was something to be avoided, so I refused it with suitable expressions of gratitude for her kind thought.
‘Eat your tea and go to bed,’ she advised, and returned to her perusal of the paper.
Edward put his tousled brown head out from under the table where he and Tony and Brian were playing cards. ‘You can use my hottie if you’ve got a tummyache,’ he offered. He loved lending his hot water bottle to other members of the family. Some kind soul, responding to the begging letters Mother wrote quite regularly, had sent it with a parcel of clothes. Since it was unpawnable, Edward had always had his bed warmed by it.
I laughed for the first time that day and thanked him, as he ducked back underneath the table. The healthy noise of play in the room was a godsend to me. So often my parents fought or the children squabbled and howled. Amity was something to be cherished.
Avril was playing by herself at her favourite game of dressing our latest alley cat in an old baby shawl and putting it to bed in a box. She was talking softly to the patient animal.
Mother had dropped the aspirins by my plate, and Fiona brought some weak tea, made by pouring fresh water over the old leaves in the pot. Mother leaned forward and poured a cup out for herself and for me. Absently, she popped two aspirins into her own mouth and swallowed them.
Father and Alan were seated on old paint cans, trying to rewind the thread neatly round the handle of a time-worn cricket bat that one of Alan’s colleagues had given him. Both had nodded to me when I came in; now they started to argue as to the best way to secure the thread.
‘Snap!’ came a delighted shout from Tony under the table. ‘I’ve won. I’ve won!’
‘No, you haven’t,’ responded Brian indignantly. ‘Something’s wrong. All the kings have been played before. There must be an extra one in the pack.’ He had a most retentive memory, but neither Edward nor Tony would accept his contention. An altercation broke out, as they scrambled round in the tiny space, while they checked the incredibly battered pack of cards with which they always played.
I ate my tartlet, while Mother leaned down from her chair and shouted at them. The raised voices vibrated through my wracked body. The tartlet did nothing to assuage my hunger, and I considered eating the lunch which I had brought back home. But I was not sure that there was enough bread in the house to provide me with lunch the following day, so I left it wrapped up in its old margarine papers.
I went upstairs and took a piece of cloth from a pile at the back of a dusty, built-in shelf in the bedroom. These rags had been accumulated from bits of sheeting and garments bought from the secondhand shop and torn into squares. Mother, Fiona and I used the same collection for our periods, washing them again and again. We were always nervous of running out of them.
The pain was rapidly easing now, and I went downstairs again, through the living room where a fight between the boys seemed about to break out, through the little back kitchen with its clutter of unwashed dishes, into the tiny backyard, lined with brick, to the lavatory by the far wall.
We were lucky to have a flush lavatory to ourselves. There was still a number of courts in Liverpool, surrounded on all sides by houses containing a family in each room, where all the inhabitants shared two lavatories set in the middle of the court.
Ours was a dank, cold outhouse, and its pipes or its tank froze every winter, causing bursts which sometimes took our aristocratic landlord weeks to repair. Copies of the Liverpool Echo lay on the long wooden seat, for use instead of toilet paper.
When I returned, Fiona had filled the hot water bottle for me and I thankfully took it and went up to bed, leaving the family to cope as best they could with the work I usually did.
The bed I shared with Fiona and Avril now boasted a bottom sheet and three pillows with pillow cases. The linen was grey with poor washing with insufficient soap, and sometimes with no soap or hot water; but it indicated an improvement over earlier days when I had slept on a wad of newspaper covering a door set on bricks, with an old overcoat to keep me warm.
I crawled on to the lumpy, smelly mattress and drew the two thin blankets up to my chin. I placed the hot water bottle carefully on my aching stomach; it was so hot that it seemed as if it might skin me. The rest of me was very cold despite the comparative mildness of the weather, and my knee joints and ankles hurt quite sharply whenever I moved.
Then the tears pent up during the day exploded and I cried bitterly until I could cry no more. I cried from weakness, from cold, from hunger, from despair that life would never get any better, a holocaust of loneliness, of frustration, which seemed to pick up brief pictures of the pain-filled day and whirl them maddeningly in my head. Despite my fear of burning in hell if I did not go to Confession, I began to pray passionately to be allowed to die.
But God evidently had other things in mind for me, because I continued to survive.
I slept so deeply that I did not hear Avril or Fiona get into bed, but when Father’s alarm clock clamoured its warning of six o’clock, I was automatically out of bed and on my feet in a flash, anxious to get into the kitchen before the others, in order to wash myself in private.
Father trailed down the stairs ahead of me dressed in the tattered remains of a camel-hair dressing gown his sister had given him for his sixteenth birthday – the only garment apart from what he had been wearing that he had brought from our old home. He went straight to the kitchen range to rake out the cinders and build a new fire, while I put a kettle of water on the gas stove for his shaving and for Mother’s early morning cup of tea.
I filled the washing-up basin with cold water from the tap, stripped off and quickly washed myself from head to foot. Mostly I had to make do with water and a cotton rag – occasionally there was soap for my face. When the kettle boiled,