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
never mind. Ask your mother to give you the fee for next time – and you can get the books from any bookshop sometime during the week. Now, be here on Thursday at 7.30, remember.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ I said heavily. ‘Good night – and thank you.’
I turned and marched out.
As soon as I was outside the school, I rushed to a corner behind a buttress of the building where the street lamps’ rays did not penetrate, and, putting my face against the damp, red bricks of the wall, I cried hopelessly and helplessly until not another tear would come. I cried from the frightful pent-up tension of yesterday and the disappointment and humiliation of today. I cried because I was drifting helplessly on a sea of life for which I had not been prepared and which I did not understand. I cried for the perfect peace and safe refuge of my grandmother’s house by the sea. I cried because I could not cross the Mersey to reach the green fields and wild seashores I loved.
Frozen and exhausted, I stuffed my blue hands into my cardigan pockets and turned towards home.
I took two steps and stopped. In my pocket was a hard little card. Mother’s library card!
Books! Perhaps the library had the books I needed. If they had, I could keep on reborrowing them, I argued. If it was not yet nine o’clock, I could run to the library and look.
I tore through the streets, taking shortcuts through every alleyway I could, regardless of danger. Dogs barked and cats and rats scampered away at the sound of my thudding feet.
I squeezed into the library’s muggy warmth five minutes before closing-time, the list of books clutched in one hand.
Feverishly, I sought through the index. Had they got them? Had they?
They had.
A few minutes later, I emerged, equipped with text-books.
At home I poured out my adventures to Alan and Fiona. It was a long time since I had had such a conversation with any of the family, and they were jubilant about the enrolment and the books. Alan offered to lend me his pen each evening.
‘If you don’t remind them, perhaps they’ll forget that you owe them half a crown,’ he said hopefully, in reference to the school fee.
‘They will have to,’ I said woodenly, ‘because I am going to school, no matter what happens.’
Brave words, but I still needed at least one notebook, and, as I put the family to bed, I worried more about obtaining twopence to buy a notebook than I worried about the half-crown.
On Wednesday, I found a piece of comb in a gutter and painfully attacked my tangled mop of hair with it Mother had a tiny pocket-comb, which of a necessity she had kept for herself, because she could not make herself neat for work if the precious object was broken. Father was fortunately almost bald. The children went uncombed and, mostly, unwashed, until more regular work enabled Mother to buy a strong comb for use by the family.
If ever I became rich, I told myself savagely, I would help to provide a basic kit for the more unfortunate of this world. It would consist of a large bar of kitchen soap, a pile of old white cloth, a pile of newspapers (newspapers can be made into beds, handkerchiefs, toilet-paper, warm padding under thin garments, draught excluders, makeshift window-pane replacements, firing, and a thousand other uses), some razor blades, for beards and nails, and a comb. One has to be without such small amenities to appreciate their worth.
My appearance was not much improved when I again presented myself at school, quailing at the thought of not being able to pay the fee.
The bookkeeping teacher was as kind as before and, after she had given the class some work to do, she brought over to me a small arithmetic textbook, told me to take it home, read the instructions in the first chapter and see if I could work my way through the problems based on them. She promised to mark the work for me.
Several children had no notebooks, so she provided some paper both for their work and mine. I soon became absorbed in the struggle to make my sluggish brain work, and forgot the silent distaste with which my fellow students were treating me.
Halfway through the evening, the class was taken over by a thin, energetic teacher who was to instruct us in English grammar. She proved equally as friendly and as helpful as the bookkeeping teacher.
Evening school has a long tradition in Lancashire and all over the city classrooms were crowded with young people desirous of improving their education. Again I was following in the footsteps of the humble weavers about whom my old gentleman in the park had told me.
It was Fiona who, accidentally, let fall one evening the information to my parents that I had gone to evening school.
They were rightly angry that I had taken such action without consulting them and both stormed at me about it
It would have brought more wrath down upon my head if I had defended myself by saying that I had long since concluded that consultation was waste of time, so I just stated firmly, ‘I have been going to evening school and I’m going to continue going.’ I had nothing to lose but my chains.
‘Where did you get the money from?’ asked Mother suddenly, her voice full of suspicion.
I had to own up that I owed the Liverpool education committee two shillings and sixpence – and, worse still, I needed two shillings more for bookkeeping books and other notebooks.
This led to further recrimination, and, with unusual impudence, I asked, ‘Would you prefer that I stole it rather than owed it?’
Such insolence was so unlike me, that it brought my parents up short.
Mother said quietly, in a tone more normal than anything she had used since we had arrived in Liverpool, ‘No, we would not Probably we shall manage to find the money somehow.’
This sudden reasonableness frightened me more than if she had had hysterics. I had become so used to her being ill and being unable to pay normal attention to us, that I had forgotten that new hope had recently entered her life and was helping her to get better quite rapidly. Once I had got over the shock and stopped staring at her, round-eyed and fearful, I was piteously grateful.
The following Tuesday evening, hair neatly combed into a bun held with a piece of string, and wearing Fiona’s cardigan, which was reasonably clean, I ran through the dank September evening to school. Hot in the palm of my hand was a half-crown, the most important coin I was ever to possess. I was to spend seven years in evening schools and I managed in each subsequent year to win a small scholarship, which covered the increasing fees and my books, as I advanced through the system; so that I did not cost my parents anything more.
The electric lights had already been turned on in the school and a great shaft of light blazed out across the pavement from the main doorway. It was early and no one else was entering. I looked up the stone steps, hollowed out by hundreds of feet, through the hall and up the staircase to the second floor.
The welcoming doorway was my hoping door; the worn stone steps my ladder to the stars. Kind hands, earnest people, were there to help me up them.
I bared my yellow teeth in a smile of pure happiness, charged across the threshold and galloped up the stairs.
HELEN FORRESTER
Liverpool Miss
