By the Waters of Liverpool. Helen Forrester

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СКАЧАТЬ temper had been further fed by her total unhappiness at her present state.

      Like alcoholics, an improvement in my parents’ lives could be brought about only by their facing their problems squarely and themselves determining on a new and careful path, in their case a financial path. But, like many alcoholics, they could not do it. So we all continued to suffer, despite the fact that five of us were at work.

      Alan worked as an office boy in the city, and most of his small wages were handed back to him for tram fares, lunches and pocket money. Similarly, my pretty fifteen-year-old sister, Fiona, worked as a cashier in a butcher’s shop. She earned the same amount as I did, but, unlike me, most of her wage was handed back to her for her expenses. Her clothes were bought for her, new, by paying for them by weekly instalments through a system of cheques. Companies issued cheques, commonly for five pounds, and with these one could buy clothing or household goods of one’s choice at any store on the company’s list. The clothing was often shoddy and expensive, but Fiona was at least as well dressed as any other girl travelling to work on the trams with her. I struggled to keep myself in clothes by buying them from the pawnbroker’s bargain table.

      Paying the cheque man was as much a worry to Liverpool housewives as finding the money to pay the rent, and it drained our income. We were permanently hungry, frequently cold and not very clean. Cleanliness is expensive. Our landlord had freed us from one plague of slum living. He had had our house stoved, so that we were no longer verminous, and our relief from bug and lice bites was wonderful to us.

      Brian and Tony, who came next to Fiona, had inherited their parents’ brains and they also had some of Mother’s earlier vivacity and physical strength. Brian had won a scholarship from the church school to the Liverpool Institute, and I was very envious of him. Earlier, I had won a scholarship to the Liverpool City School of Art, but I had not been allowed to take it up. I had to stay at home to keep house.

      Also at school was short, determined Avril, almost unnoticed unless she had a temper tantrum like Mother, and little Edward, beloved baby of the family, whom I had nursed along since infancy. Though Edward was not very strong, probably because of the lack of adequate food in early childhood, his mind was clear and he had the ability to apply himself with great concentration to whatever he was doing. He could already read well, and Father hoped that both he and Tony would also win scholarships. Neither Mother nor Father gave any heed to Avril’s possible abilities as a scholar. She was only a girl.

      The only other members of the family to attend church were Brian and Tony, who for nearly three years had sung in the choir and had enjoyed a remuneration of a shilling and eightpence per month, which they were allowed to keep. Now they sometimes acted as acolytes. Nobody, as far as I knew, had pressed them to go to Confession. They were, however, the cleverest of passive resisters and even if pressed would probably have placidly failed to turn up for it. Brian’s hazel eyes and Tony’s calm blue-grey ones could look as blank as a factory wall, with an innocence and incomprehension of stare usually seen only in the subnormal. They were a pair of cheery scallywags, most unlikely to be faced with the inner qualms and soul-searching which always afflicted me.

      I was dreadfully troubled when Mother ordered me to stop being such a fool, and to attend Confirmation classes. I made no reply, because I had long since learned not to do battle when I knew for certain that I could not win. For several days I fretted fearfully about what I should do.

      ‘Them as don’t obey goes straight to hell,’ Edith had assured me, whenever I was being particularly perverse.

      And there was Grandma’s soft voice whispering, ‘Good children go to Heaven, dear. Only the wicked burn in hell.’

      And the Bible from which I had learned to read, under Grandma’s tuition, was full of the horrors of what happened to those who did not obey the will of God.

      As I sorted files in the office, I tried to comfort myself. ‘It doesn’t really happen nowadays. It is an allegory.’ But the fear in me was almost a primeval one; it stuck in the back of my mind and refused to be shifted.

      Mother was obviously used to the idea of Confession. It must have been reinforced when she was a child, because she had been brought up in a convent, the only Protestant amid a sea of Catholics. It was a waste of time to appeal to her.

      Walking home through the April rain, I prayed to God to tell me what He wanted me to do, and got no immediate reply. Confused, afraid, with a mind filled with myths, I turned to the only other person I could think of who might advise me. I would ask Father.

       Three

      To get a little time alone with Father would, I knew, be difficult. A big family in a tiny house has almost no privacy.

      I pulled the string hanging inside the flapless letter box, in order to let myself in. I had worked late and then gone straight to evening school and had not eaten since morning, but I paused for a moment in the doorway to watch some men playing ollies in the gutter. The little white balls skittered over the rough roadway, almost invisible in the light of the street lamps. These men used to say disparagingly about our family that we talked ‘with ollies in t’ mouth’. Refined Oxford accents were extremely rare in slums.

      The smell of the house hit me as I went into the little hall, a smell of warm, damp, much-used air, with strong overtones of the odour of vomit.

      All the family was crowded into the small, back living room. Old-fashioned wooden shutters had been closed across the curtainless windows and secured by an iron bar. A small fire blazed bravely in the big, iron kitchen range, and by it Father was seated bolt upright in the solitary easy chair.

      His usual yellowy complexion was flushed red, and he was pounding his delicate, almost feminine fist on the arm of the chair, as if to emphasise forcibly something he had already said.

      As I paused by the door, he almost shouted, ‘I will not tolerate such an abomination. It is disgusting beyond words. She must leave at once.’

      He was answered by an unintelligible babble from the family.

      I thought for an anxious second that he was talking about me. I lived in constant, gnawing fear that my parents would withdraw me from my job and make me stay at home again to keep house; they were quite capable of taking such a decision without any prior discussion with me and of handing in my resignation directly to my employer. I was still under twenty-one.

      With some trepidation I eased my way through the half-open door and into the room itself. The children’s upturned faces looked sickly in the light of the single, unshaded electric bulb, and Edward turned his heart-shaped face, pinched with fatigue, towards me. He said simply, ‘Bed.’

      Though he was nearly seven, he was no great weight and I picked him up, and said, ‘Yes, love.’ He and Brian were the only children I ever knew who asked to go to bed. It was as if their strength ran out suddenly. I smiled at him, and added, ‘I’ll put the kettle on to heat and help you wash your knees and neck as soon as it is hot.’ I looked cautiously round him at the family.

      The centre of attention was Fiona. She was standing in the middle of the group, facing Father, and her wide eyes with their enormous fringe of long lashes showed signs of tears. She was almost cringing, her toes turned slightly inward, her arms across her breast as if to protect herself.

      She said in a watery voice, ‘It’s not that bad, Daddy. I didn’t go. I wouldn’t dream of it.’

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