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
might have been French, the old gentleman asked me, ‘And where did you learn to speak English like that, child?’
I blushed guiltily. He must have been listening to Avril and me.
What was wrong with my English? And how does one learn one’s own language? I asked myself. I was nonplussed.
Sharp brown eyes, with yellowed whites, appraised my bare feet, greasy gym slip, worn without a blouse, which I had had to lend to Fiona, and knitted cardigan with holes through which my elbows stuck.
Ashamed, I bowed my head so that my face was shielded by a mass of untended hair.
‘I … er … I learned it at home,’ I muttered.
‘You speak it beautifully,’ he said with a gentle smile. ‘I have not heard better speech during my many years in Liverpool.’ The intonation was definitely foreign.
The bent head shot up. This was the first compliment anyone had ever paid me.
‘Do you really think so?’ I asked incredulously.
‘I do.’
I said impulsively, ‘Mummy and Nanny thought it was important to speak well. Neither of them seemed to think that I spoke very well.’
‘Nanny?’
I nodded confusedly.
‘We don’t have a nurse now.’
A watery sniff muffled the much admired accent.
He said dryly, ‘I imagine not.’
Avril clambered down off my knee and went on one of her small perambulations. Edward slept. My acquaintance opened his book, as if to continue his reading. Instead, he sat tapping the page with a swollen, chilblained finger.
My eyes were carried to the page by the pointing finger, and I was astonished to see that the print in the book consisted of curly dashes with occasional dots.
He noticed my interest, and smiled at me.
‘It is Arabic,’ he said.
I was impressed.
‘Can you speak it, sir?’
‘Of course. My mother was an Arab.’
That accounted for the darker skin, I thought, and I wondered if I dare ask him what brought him to England. How romantic to have a real Arab for a mother! I wondered if she wore a yashmak and transparent trousers, like the princesses in my fairy-tale books.
His eyes were twinkling. Perhaps he was lonely, too, for he said suddenly, ‘I speak seven languages and can read four more.’
‘How wonderful!’ I exclaimed in genuine admiration, remembering my own struggles with the French language.
‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘How is it that – that—’ and he waved his hand in a comprehensive gesture, which took in the Chariot with its half-starved baby and Avril’s and my deplorable condition.
Hesitating and seeking for words at first, I explained as best I could about bankruptcy and unemployment. Gradually I gained courage and confided in him my despair at not being able to continue at school and my fear of what would become of us.
He listened patiently, occasionally interjecting a question or nodding understandingly.
Finally I trailed to a hopeless stop.
He sat silent for a while, contemplating the lake, his book still open on his knee, his face full of the sad resignation of the very old.
At last, he sighed and said, ‘You know, child, it is not what happens to you that matters – it is how you deal with it.’
This was a new idea to me and I pondered on it, as I shyly watched his face.
‘You can read?’
‘Yes.’
‘You go to the library?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then read! Read everything you can. Read the great historians, the philosophers, especially the German ones, read autobiographies, read novels. One day, you will have the opportunity to make use of the knowledge you will accumulate, and you will be surprised to find that you know much more than those who have had a more formal education.’
He closed his book and put it in his pocket, and then said quite cheerfully, ‘Your day will come, child. Your parents are having a difficult time at present and cannot help you.’
He got up from his seat slowly and stiffly and then bowed politely to me.
‘I come here every sunny afternoon to commune with nature. Come one day and tell me what you have read.’
The faintness which had threatened me before was making his face dim to me, but I thanked him warmly and promised that I would come. I felt wonderfully comforted.
I sat down again after he had left, to allow my faintness to recede. Then I called Avril and hastened out of the rose garden before the keeper could find us without a guardian.
The way home seemed infinitely long and the momentary peace engendered by the conversation with the old man gradually left me, to be replaced with memories of Dickens’s descriptions of workhouses.
When I arrived home, Alan and Fiona were sitting on the bottom step of the imposing flight of steps which led up to the front door of Mrs Foster’s house. The evening was drawing on and the lamplighter was going on his rounds, pulling on the gas lights with his long rod as he paused, wobbling on his bicycle, at each lamp-post.
Alan was talking cheerfully to Fiona, who looked white and woebegone, her blue eyes wide and her china-doll features crumpled with fear.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked in some alarm, as I stopped the Chariot beside them.
Alan peered up at me through his tousled mop of yellow hair.
‘Fiona’s scared, and I’m telling her that there is nothing to be scared about,’ he said stoutly.
Trying not to show that I was frightened, I lifted Avril out of the Chariot with elaborate casualness and clucked encouragingly at Edward, who smiled at me angelically.
I sat down beside Alan.
‘What is the matter?’
Fiona answered through trembling lips.
‘Mrs Foster is shouting at Mother, and Mother is shouting at Father – and – and it’s an awful noise.
‘And I want to go home to Nanny!’ And she began to cry.
‘Be quiet!’ I snapped at her, and she was immediately reduced to cowed silence.
I turned to Alan.
‘Has Mr Ferris complained?’
Alan looked puzzled.
‘Mr Ferris? You mean about the noise we make?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh no.’ Alan chuckled suddenly and began to play an imaginary piano with gusto. ‘He makes too much noise himself. He just shouts at us because it makes him feel better.’ He tossed back his hair, exactly as Mr Ferris did, and finished his piano piece with a mighty boom on the bottom notes, ‘Boom-tiddly-boom – boo-om – boom!’
I wished that I had Alan’s cool common sense. In one sentence he had calmed my fears. But not Fiona’s apparently. Tears were running down her cheeks like raindrops.
‘What has happened, then?’
Alan sobered.
‘Daddy didn’t pay the rent. He spent the