By the Waters of Liverpool. Helen Forrester
‘Not all the time.’
‘How frequently?’
‘You mean going to see the – the...?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, they run over every time the undertaker has a nice-looking one.’
‘And have they been pinching you all that time, too?’
‘No, Daddy, only just recently.’
‘You must have encouraged them, Fiona.’ This from Mother.
‘Oh, no, Mummy. I suppose they notice me when they’ve nothing much to do. Anyway, how can a derrière encourage anybody?’ she asked innocently.
This made Father smile, even in the middle of his disquietude. Fiona’s flawless figure, now burgeoning, would in years to come cause many a heart to throb and provide a good deal of temptation.
Father’s voice was very gentle, as he looked at his younger daughter. ‘I am sure you don’t encourage them, my dear.’ He smiled knowingly at Mother, who did not smile back.
Alan began to whistle softly to himself and moved restlessly against the table.
‘If I had a sheet of the butcher’s notepaper,’ said Mother suddenly, her face brightening, ‘paper with his heading on it, I could write an excellent reference for Fiona.’
‘Mother!’ I exclaimed, scandalised. ‘That would be forgery.’
‘A new employer might phone the butcher to check it,’ suggested Alan.
‘I don’t think so,’ replied Mother, ignoring my outburst. ‘As a demonstrator going from shop to shop, I carry written references – I’ve heaps of them, because all my jobs are short-term ones. I don’t think anybody has ever telephoned to check them.’
Fiona looked up quickly, and then mopped her eyes agitatedly with my hanky which I had handed to her – it was the only one I owned. ‘Mummy! Could you do it? Really?’
Mother looked as pleased as a Cheshire cat. ‘I don’t see why not.’
‘If I go to work tomorrow, I can get the paper easily. I have some in the cash desk.’ She straightened up, sniffed and rubbed her nose hard with the hanky. ‘I could start looking for a new job on Monday.’
It took Mother and Fiona some time to convince Father that it was the most sensible way out. But he was genuinely worried about his favourite daughter, and he finally gave in.
Alan thought it was a huge joke, and asked Mother if she could do anything about forging pound notes. I thought she would strike him, but instead she laughed.
Though it seemed to me to be wrong, that it might be better if Father had a quiet talk with the butcher himself, I did not want to start a family row, so I held my tongue.
On Saturday, Fiona went to work as usual and returned triumphantly with the required sheet of notepaper. Mother concocted an excellent letter for her, written in a round, illiterate hand quite unlike her usual beautiful penmanship. She ended it with a phrase popular amongst tradesmen, ‘And oblige your obedient servant’, followed by a flourishing signature.
Father often bought a Liverpool Echo on his way home from work. The day’s copy was lying on his chair, so Fiona and I spread it out on the table and conned the Situations Vacant columns very carefully, though it was nearly midnight.
We found two advertisements for office girls, and Fiona begged Mother’s penny pad of notepaper from her, took the cork out of the ink bottle and sat down at the table, pen poised. She looked up at me expectantly. To my dictation, she wrote in a round schoolgirl’s scrawl letters of application to both companies.
Mother looked disparagingly at her handwriting. ‘Really, Fiona. I should have thought you could write better than that.’
But Fiona could not, and never did. The teaching of handwriting in the elementary schools was so poor that few people seemed to leave with anything better than an ugly, irregular hand. Good, flowing handwriting, like the right accent, marked one’s place in the social scale, and Fiona’s laboured, round letters indicated a girl with a poor background, in a world which was very snobbish. Only Alan, who had been taught in preparatory school, wrote the same exquisite Italian hand which my mother did.
Fiona had a natural refinement and an endearing gentleness, without a hint of snobbery. She floated amongst all kinds of people without difficulty. Her letters, however, did not produce any replies, despite the fast postal service which we enjoyed, and Fiona became very depressed. Mother thankfully set her more and more household tasks each morning, and then borrowed her fares-and-lunch money, which meant that even if she obtained an interview with a firm, she would probably have to walk to it.
I encouraged her to keep on writing applications and, as my office was close to the Liverpool Echo’s office in Victoria Street, I dropped her replies each day into the newspaper’s letter box.
I had hoped to have a talk with Father on that busy Saturday, because both he and I finished work at one o’clock on Saturdays. Every time I thought about the coming Confirmation lessons, my stomach clenched with apprehension and I longed to unburden myself to somebody. But he had spent the afternoon at the public library, and after he had eaten his tea, he went immediately up to bed. He had had a heart attack when I was a little girl, and occasionally pain in his chest sent him hastily to lie down.
‘Why can’t I sign on at the Labour Exchange?’ asked Fiona fretfully. ‘They might have a job for me.’ She was helping me to clear the breakfast dishes, and without make-up she looked tired and not very well.
Mother was putting on her lipstick in front of a piece of broken mirror wedged into the frame of the back kitchen window, and at this remark, she paused and said to Father, ‘She might be entitled to Unemployment Insurance.’
‘If she was, she has forfeited it by voluntarily leaving her position.’ Father was running backwards and forwards between kitchen and living room like a demented hen. ‘Where can my hat be? Have you seen it? I’ll be late.’ He called to Brian who was about to go out of the back door to school, ‘Brian, wheel the bike round to the front door, there’s a boy, while I find my hat.’
‘I’ll be late if I do,’ complained Brian, his dark, heart-shaped face sulky, as he clapped his school cap on to his head.
‘Oh, rubbish,’ replied Father. ‘Go and get it. And don’t wear your cap in the house – you are not a workman.’
Brian slammed down his satchel on to the floor, flung his cap on top of it, and went to do as he was bidden.
‘Why can’t I?’ reiterated Fiona, plaintively.
‘Do you want to stand in a queue with a mass of unwashed, vulgar girls?’ asked Mother. She quickly licked her forefinger and ran it over her eyebrows to remove the surplus face powder clinging to them. ‘There is no point anyway. They would try to put you into domestic service. Do you want that?’
‘No,’ muttered Fiona dejectedly. Neither she nor I had ever considered going into domestic service. Even in my most deprived days, when I began to fear I would die from hunger, I had never considered this way out of my misery. Both of us remembered the servants in our own house when we were small. With the exception of their weekly half day off and on alternate Sundays, they were never free from six o’clock in the morning until eleven at night.
No. No domestic service for Fiona. Being at home was a shade better than that; at least one could have a good cry in the privy at the bottom of the back yard.
Father found his hat under the living-room table, where the boys must have been using it as dressing-up material. He grabbed the bicycle from a fuming Brian at the