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
in the painting of Christ crucified which hung over my grandmother’s bed. He bowed his head and turned silently away.
A slightly plumper waif of a child was returned to us six weeks later. There was no ambulance this time and she found the long tram ride a sore trial. She came home to again face hunger and cold with us.
‘The spring is coming,’ we comforted her.
The studied rudeness with which every member of the family was faced whenever dealing with officialdom, as personified by the public assistance committee, by the labour exchanges, by the voluntary agencies working in the city, was a revelation to us. We began to understand, as never before, the great gulf between rich and poor, between middle class and labour. It considerably improved our manners towards our less fortunate neighbours.
When I grew up, I told myself, I would do some kind of work which would improve this situation and make it possible for people to be helped without at the same time humiliating them.
When I grew up!
But I was growing up. Even in my pinched body, changes were taking place which indicated that soon I would be a young woman. A ghastly, ugly, uneducated wreck of a young woman but still a woman.
As I sat on the doorstep in the weak April sunshine, Edward on my knee, I wondered what would become of me. Other girls went to school and then to work, but for me life had stopped in one place on my first day in Liverpool. The other children were getting at least a basic education; Alan talked hopefully of Tony and Brian being able to win scholarships to grammar school; he himself was too old to sit the examination, but he worked hard at school and read a lot afterwards. At fourteen, he could leave school and he hoped to get a job ‘with a future’. Fiona, I thought, would sooner or later marry well – she was so pretty; I did not consider how, in this wilderness of slum, she would manage to do that.
Avril, throwing her weight about both physically and verbally, amongst a number of small girls from neighbouring houses, was tough enough to take care of herself, and Edward, watching the world go by from the safe refuge of my lap, was young enough not to have to worry.
Without an education, I saw myself being kept at home until my parents died and then becoming some bad-tempered old lady’s companion-help, subject always to the whims and fancies of others. I knew I was far too plain ever to hope for marriage.
I laid my cheek on little Edward’s scurvy head and decided that such a life was not worth living.
Encouraged by the friendly old gentleman on the park bench, I continued to read. When I explained to him that I ought to be in school, he said firmly and wisely that it was my parents’ responsibility. He pointed out that, in studying by myself, I was following in the footsteps of many great Lancastrians, who, though doomed to poverty because they were weavers and caught up in the industrial revolution, found means to study and outshine their better-educated contemporaries. He cited the examples of John Butterworth, the mathematician from Haggate, who never earned more than fifteen shillings a week and learned to read and write at the age of twenty. Such was his love of learning that he became one of the finest geometricians of his day; and James Crowther and Richard Buxton, the Manchester botanists, both self-taught, both always poor, both famous.
I sighed. There was no help there. I wanted to eat and be warm every day of my life.
Avril and I had discovered one beautifully warm spot in Liverpool, although it was rather a long way from home. Sefton Park had a fine glass palm-house, which was kept at tropical temperatures to encourage the growth of the palms and similar plants inside. Avril, Edward and I used to go into it often and crawl under the great creepers to get warm, emerging later with our bottoms covered with earth, damper but warmer.
Once we were discovered by two earnest young men carrying notebooks and pencils. They were wreathed around with long scarves in the colours of the university, and when they found us they were at first puzzled and then amused.
Avril and I stared at them like a pair of scared rabbits.
‘Hide and seek?’ one young man inquired.
I nodded assent, and, like fellow conspirators, they rearranged the foliage over us and tiptoed away. A gardener on another occasion was not so kind.
‘We don’t want no dirty ragamuffins in here,’ he shouted, and sent us packing.
Crestfallen, we stalked out of the glass house with what dignity we could muster, and I pushed the Chariot homeward, passing through a working-class shopping street on the way.
Halfway up the street, I came to a large, red brick building surrounded by a matching brick wall. It was an elementary school, silent and deserted because it was Saturday. I was about to pass it without much interest, when the remains of a poster flapping in the wind caught my attention. It announced the opening of evening school the previous September. Courses in commercial arithmetic, bookkeeping, English, shorthand and several other subjects were offered.
I stopped.
I had never heard of evening school and I could hardly believe that one could go to school outside the normal hours. I could have skipped for joy.
I wondered if one could enroll at times other than September. Perhaps there would be someone on the premises who could tell me about it. I wheeled the Chariot through the gate leading to the school yard and was hesitantly moving round the building searching for a door, when a hoarse voice shouted, ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
The voice came from an upper window, where a bald man in shirt sleeves, holding a duster he had apparently been shaking, was looking down at me. His expression was hostile, and I wilted.
‘I – I was looking for someone to ask about evening school,’ I stuttered.
My questioner looked pained.
‘There’s not likely to be night school on Saturday afternoon, now is there? You’ll have to come on Monday night’ And he started to lower the window.
I did not move. I wanted to ask what time I should come.
He threw the window up again impatiently.
‘Now get outta here! We don’t want the likes of you hanging around. Get out!’
I got out, and stood in the street quivering with mortification.
Avril, looking like a pocket-sized thundercloud, stamped her foot and said, ‘Nasty old man! I don’t like him.’
I laughed a little weakly, and looked again at the poster. It said the classes were from 7.30 p.m. to 9.30 p.m.
My mind made up, I went home determined not to be put off by nasty old men.
Father was sitting by the empty fireplace, reading War and Peace. Without preamble, I mentioned the evening school to him.
He hardly seemed to hear me, and I busied myself making a bit of fire to boil a panful of water for tea.
‘Daddy?’ I queried again.
At last he said, ‘You cannot go to evening school.’
‘But, Daddy, why not?’ I protested. ‘Fiona and you could watch Avril, and I could put Edward to bed before I went. Tony and Brian will go to bed whenever you or Mother tell them.’
His face was wooden, though at the same time sad.
‘If you go to evening school, my dear, it will be necessary to state your age and other details. You are not yet fourteen and the school inspectors would order you back to day school.’
‘Well, I can’t see why I can’t go to either day school or evening school,’ I said with all the irritating belligerence of a thirteen-year-old. ‘Why can’t Mother look after Edward and Avril, while I go to school? She’s much better now.’
‘Mother