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
them in newspaper and lay on the green leatherette settee, clutching them close to me. Edward began to think it was a new game and wanted a brick for himself. He thought it was a great joke to cuddle up close with the bricks between us. Since he must often have been cold, the heat was probably comforting to him, too.
One freezing winter day, I fainted in the butcher’s shop. When I came round I was in an easy chair beside a fire, in the living quarters behind his little shop. His wife was forcing brandy down my throat. She must have succeeded in getting me to swallow quite a lot, because the pain did dull slightly and I felt exhilarated and yet sleepy. Edward had been propped in a matching chair on the other side of the fireplace. White rivulets down either grubby cheek marked the passage of tears. He had, however, a cheering ring of red jam round his mouth and in one hand was holding the crumbling remains of a tart.
The tiny, stuffy room was packed with furniture, and the blaze in the hearth glanced off a gilded china shepherdess on a shining sideboard opposite to me. It danced off the glass dome covering a pair of stuffed birds and made the glasses of my hostess flash.
The butcher’s wife was a tiny woman dressed in the greyish, washed-out skirt, blouse and cardigan which seemed to be the uniform of women in Liverpool. Wisps of hair had escaped from her bun and draggled round a careworn face.
‘Are ye feeling better?’ she asked.
‘Yes, thank you,’ I said. I blinked at her rather hazy face through spectacles that had slipped down my nose. ‘In fact, I feel fine.’
‘Aye, that’s good brandy, that is. You gave me husband a real fright when you keeled over.’
‘I am sorry. I get a pain each month,’ I faltered shyly.
She smiled. ‘Oh, that was it, was it? Oh, aye. Brandy was the best thing to give you then. Does a lot for a woman at such times.’
‘It seems to,’ I said blithely.
Then I remembered the children’s lunch, yet to be made. ‘I must go home,’ I said hastily. ‘My brothers and sisters will be coming from school.’
‘Think you’ll be all right? You only live down the road, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
I got to my feet. They did not feel very certain as to where the floor was, but I managed to stagger over to Edward and to pick him up. He put his arms round my neck, and sent a shower of pastry crumbs over the threadbare carpet.
Reeling slightly, I again thanked the butcher’s wife.
She laughed.
‘It’s nothing. Aye, brandy’s gone to your head, hasn’t it?’
‘It has,’ I giggled. ‘But the pain is less.’ I wanted to kiss her, but decided I could not aim straight. So I said effusively, ‘Thank you very, very much,’ and staggered, still giggling, through the lace-draped door to the shop, which she held open for me. She smiled broadly at me, as I passed.
Though sometimes the pain would rise above the effects of the brandy, and I had to stop walking and grip the handle of the old pram until the wave passed over, I hummed most of the way home. I was merrily drunk for the first time.
I rolled round the icy living room and the kitchen as I boiled and thickened the minced meat I had bought; it was as well that it was ground, otherwise it would have been unchewable. I peeled the potatoes and boiled them to a mush, before the penny in the gas meter ran out and the gas stove refused to deliver any more heat. I spread clean newspaper on the table, and laid it. Seated on a wooden chair, I waited, at first happily, for the children to come in. But as the effects of the brandy began to seep out, the chill of the dirty, comfortless room began to invade – and the pain was once more paramount.
Edward, too, was chilled and hungry and began to whimper. I took him up on my knee and wrapped us both in the old coat I used to cover him in the pram. It smelled of urine and long use. We warmed each other a little. He sucked his thumb and dozed, while I wept silently on to his scurfy little head.
I wished I had some more brandy or anything else which would stop the grinding misery within me. As I waited, I saw suddenly the expression of pain which frequently lay on my father’s face – and in a burst of warm understanding I realised why he needed to drink sometimes. The burden of bereavement from the loss of most of his friends, in a war which, though it seemed a long time ago to me, was probably still quite close to him. The terror of the long, threatening winters he had spent in tiny block houses or in peasants’ huts during the Russian campaign, while the Revolution surged around the tiny force, so that one did not know who was friend and who was foe – what must it have done to a delicate refined man unused to any hardship? And then to lose his fortune, his occupation, his home? He sometimes told us stories of his experiences both during the war and after it, and he made us laugh. But if one analysed those stories, they were filled with horrors.
Poor Father. I laid my head against Baby Edward’s and wept not only for my own suffering, but for my father’s distress as well.
Getting drunk can leave one very low afterwards, I discovered.
There was a silent conspiracy between Father, Mother and me, to keep from the other children as many of our troubles as possible.
We had as many creditors in Liverpool as Father had had in wealthier days. Now, instead of the tailor, the dressmaker, the grocer and wine merchant, I faced the owner of the local tobacco and newspaper shop trying to collect for the cigarettes he had supplied, the club man demanding the weekly payment for cheques issued to my parents by finance companies, for purchase of clothing at specific shops; the agent of our aristocratic landlord threatening to throw us into the street; the heavy-jowled hire purchase man growling threats to repossess our well-chosen sitting-room furniture.
Ominous clouds of danger seemed to encompass me and sometimes, after getting rid of a desperate bullying man, I would lean against the inside of the front door and cry with pure fright.
In our other life in another world, I had often heard Mother say to the parlourmaid that she was not at home to anybody, and she thus evaded personal confrontation with creditors, whose bills and threatening letters lay in the wickerwork wastepaper basket.
Here in Liverpool I had to answer the door myself. No frilly-aproned, sniggering parlourmaid stood between me and outraged men whose own livelihood was precarious. Occasionally, when I felt defeated, I would prevail on Fiona to answer the heavy bangs on the front door. She looked much younger than her age and had an expression of angelic innocence. She would say with convincing firmness, ‘Everybody is out except me.’
The creditor would leave, grumbling under his breath, to mount his bicycle parked at the pavement’s edge. They never shouted at her, as they did at me.
I was never given a fixed sum from which to do the housekeeping. A shilling or two was slung on to the kitchen table with instructions to buy a list of groceries for which the money was almost invariably inadequate. Consequently, Edward and I tramped for miles to save a halfpenny on a loaf of bread, or to go to a shop which would cut a twopenny, half-pound pack of margarine into quarter pounds, so that we could buy one. Stores which did this kind of splitting up of goods could, with patience, make a lot more than those which did not. A sixpenny one-pound pot of jam, sold by the ounce at a penny an ounce, assured an excellent profit. Such shops were filled with black-shawled, unwashed women and skinny, barefoot children.
We had two lots of wages coming into the house; yet no housekeeping priorities were ever established. Mother sometimes made long lists of proposed expenditures and debt repayments, but they always ended up being tossed into the fireplace. Creditors who shouted the loudest and threatened most got paid eventually; those that did not received nothing. Cajoling credit out of shopkeepers who respected an Oxford accent was reduced to a fine art by my parents.
I can remember one pay day Mother coming triumphantly