The Complete Helen Forrester 4-Book Memoir: Twopence to Cross the Mersey, Liverpool Miss, By the Waters of Liverpool, Lime Street at Two. Helen Forrester
was all so different from the chintz-clad sitting-room of our old doctor and the ready welcome of his smart little wife.
Neither of us had any idea how one communicated the fact of one’s presence to the doctor. But we soon saw that at the other end of the room was another door and that at the sound of a buzzer people went in and out of it. Presumably the doctor was in the next room. We could not guess how people established when they could go in so we sat and sat until we were the last people in the waiting-room, and the front door was closed and locked by an elderly woman. When the buzzer rang again, Mother rose and went in to see the doctor, and I was left alone.
I got up and went to stand by the gas fire. The unaccustomed warmth was delicious and wrapped itself around me in a comfortable blanket of heat. I gazed at the iron Greek soldiers on the mantelpiece and smiled at them. My grandmother had such a pair on her kitchen mantelpiece in her beautiful little house on the other side of the Mersey. The tears sprang to my eyes as I remembered it. How long would it be, I wondered, before I had twopence so that I could take the ferry across the Mersey and visit her. My parents never mentioned her and she did not write to me. Probably she did not even know where I was. I wondered if I dare write to her without my parents’ permission. Impatiently I wiped away the tears. Paper and stamps cost money, too, you stupid, I told myself.
The doctor was taking a long time over Mother’s stitches. Perhaps he would make her quite well. Then she could look after the children and I could go back to school. Perhaps in school there would be a school-teacher who would tell me what steps one had to take to get work when one had finished school.
I had always wanted to be a ballet-dancer and my father had indulged me in this by sending me to a very good teacher when I was about five years old. Just before my seventh birthday, however, a very heavy, old-fashioned wardrobe had unexpectedly fallen over while I was in my parents’ bedroom, catching my legs under it. This had resulted in one of my feet being permanently slightly twisted. It was not an unsightly crippling but was sufficient to make any dancing career impossible. During the months I had had to lie with the foot up I had discovered a natural ability for drawing, and this had led to an ambition to design clothes for the theatre.
I gazed into the doctor’s miserable gas fire and saw gorgeous imaginary figures in clothes designed by me tripping and leaping across an imaginary stage. I wished I had a pencil and paper to catch and record permanently my pretty dream. If only the doctor would make Mother well, I would study and draw and practise and fill the stage of the Liverpool Empire with such glamour as its old walls had never seen before.
There was a click as the doctor opened his surgery door for Mother and bowed her out, and she smiled her delicate, beguiling smile at him.
He was a dark, intense-looking young man; he was, I later discovered, an ardent communist who tried his best to practise his beliefs in the stinking slum in which we lived. He grinned cheerfully at me and said good night to us both.
‘What did he say?’ I asked anxiously as I held Mother’s arm to steady her, after the doctor’s housekeeper had locked the front door behind us.
We walked slowly down the empty street for a little way before Mother answered.
‘He said I should have gone to the outpatients department of a hospital.’
‘Did he take the stitches out? Did it hurt?’
‘Yes, he took them out – it didn’t hurt much – he’s a surgeon as well as a physician.’
In a trembling voice I asked another question, one with selfish intent. Behind it was my despair at the drudgery I was facing and my hopes that if I was allowed to go to school I might find a way out from being for ever the unpaid, unthanked housekeeper for our poverty-stricken family.
‘Will you be all right?’ I asked. ‘Will you get better?’
‘He thinks I will, if I go to work – in the open air.’
‘Work?’ I was truly astonished.
At my query she looked down at me, but there was no affection, no real interest in her gaze or in her voice as she answered, ‘Yes. Work.’
The idea that work could cure someone who had been ill was too difficult for me to understand. I knew nothing of mental illness, except that lunatics were shut up in lunatic asylums, and I had no comprehension of the mental stress under which my poor mother laboured and which the doctor had diagnosed.
‘You can’t,’ I said desperately. ‘There is Edward – and Avril – and me – I haven’t got my matric yet – I have to go back to school.’
‘We shall see,’ she said thoughtfully.
My stomach clenched in a deadly nervous pain. In a perceptive flash I saw myself for ever at home, the uneducated daughter retained to help in the house – and there were still some of these when I was a child – grey, uninteresting, the butt of everyone’s ill-temper, without money of my own and consequently entirely dependent upon the goodwill of the rest of the family. I saw myself for ever struggling with the care of Edward, with Avril’s tantrums and the boys’ fights, with Mr Parish’s miserable pittance, and I realized that the daughter who did not have to go to school or to work would be the one to be clothed and fed last.
I burst into tears, my hopes shattered.
‘Oh no, Mummy!’ I wailed. ‘I want to go to school! I want to be like other girls!’
‘Be quiet,’ said Mother sharply. ‘You are making an exhibition of yourself.’
I continued to weep – but quietly. Little ladies did not make exhibitions of themselves in public.
‘You have to learn that you cannot have everything you want. The family must come first.’
Immediately we arrived home, I threw a tantrum which left even Avril awed. I stamped, I cried, I shouted that I would go to school. Twelve and a half was too young an age to have to leave. I would not stay at home and look after babies.
My bewildered father, who did not know what the cause of my rage was, shouted at me above the storm to be quiet. Mother shouted back at him. Fiona and Tony, terrified by the noise, wept steadily in a corner, while Alan did his best to placate the various contestants by telling everyone to shut up. Brian took refuge halfway up the attic stairs and watched through the banister. Baby Edward cried for his forgotten bottle. A voice from below yelled up to us, ‘Shut that bloody racket, can’t yer!’
As my anger gave way to hopeless tears Father gradually picked up the story and said he thought the doctor’s idea of Mother’s going to work was an excellent one and that it would probably be for only a little while. When I continued to weep passionately, he slapped me across the buttocks and told me to go into the bedroom until I could behave in a civilized manner.
I lay face down on the bed until I could not stand the stench of it any more. The nervous strain under which the children laboured in their cold, hungry, new world was so great that Brian, Tony and Avril had become incontinent at night and Edward had no rubber undersheet to help him, so that the already disgusting beds had become even more so and were invariably wet somewhere on their surface.
Emerging finally in sulky silence and with blood-shot eyes, I found Edward still whimpering disconsolately, but the children were silently getting themselves ready for bed, by taking off their outer clothes. My parents were arguing heatedly about what kind of occupation my Mother could undertake.
Still sniffing, I made a bottle for Edward with the last of the baby food, and, since I was still filled with resentment at my parents, I took him outside and sat down on the top stair of the long flights of gloomy staircase and fed him.
The smell of the overcrowded, verminous house, its filthy, over-used bathroom and the efforts of nine different cooks combined with Edward’s rancid odour was almost overpowering, and I put my cheek against his