By the Waters of Liverpool. Helen Forrester
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Название: By the Waters of Liverpool
Автор: Helen Forrester
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780007369300
isbn:
On Saturday, Fiona went to work as usual and returned triumphantly with the required sheet of notepaper. Mother concocted an excellent letter for her, written in a round, illiterate hand quite unlike her usual beautiful penmanship. She ended it with a phrase popular amongst tradesmen, ‘And oblige your obedient servant’, followed by a flourishing signature.
Father often bought a Liverpool Echo on his way home from work. The day’s copy was lying on his chair, so Fiona and I spread it out on the table and conned the Situations Vacant columns very carefully, though it was nearly midnight.
We found two advertisements for office girls, and Fiona begged Mother’s penny pad of notepaper from her, took the cork out of the ink bottle and sat down at the table, pen poised. She looked up at me expectantly. To my dictation, she wrote in a round schoolgirl’s scrawl letters of application to both companies.
Mother looked disparagingly at her handwriting. ‘Really, Fiona. I should have thought you could write better than that.’
But Fiona could not, and never did. The teaching of handwriting in the elementary schools was so poor that few people seemed to leave with anything better than an ugly, irregular hand. Good, flowing handwriting, like the right accent, marked one’s place in the social scale, and Fiona’s laboured, round letters indicated a girl with a poor background, in a world which was very snobbish. Only Alan, who had been taught in preparatory school, wrote the same exquisite Italian hand which my mother did.
Fiona had a natural refinement and an endearing gentleness, without a hint of snobbery. She floated amongst all kinds of people without difficulty. Her letters, however, did not produce any replies, despite the fast postal service which we enjoyed, and Fiona became very depressed. Mother thankfully set her more and more household tasks each morning, and then borrowed her fares-and-lunch money, which meant that even if she obtained an interview with a firm, she would probably have to walk to it.
I encouraged her to keep on writing applications and, as my office was close to the Liverpool Echo’s office in Victoria Street, I dropped her replies each day into the newspaper’s letter box.
I had hoped to have a talk with Father on that busy Saturday, because both he and I finished work at one o’clock on Saturdays. Every time I thought about the coming Confirmation lessons, my stomach clenched with apprehension and I longed to unburden myself to somebody. But he had spent the afternoon at the public library, and after he had eaten his tea, he went immediately up to bed. He had had a heart attack when I was a little girl, and occasionally pain in his chest sent him hastily to lie down.
‘Why can’t I sign on at the Labour Exchange?’ asked Fiona fretfully. ‘They might have a job for me.’ She was helping me to clear the breakfast dishes, and without make-up she looked tired and not very well.
Mother was putting on her lipstick in front of a piece of broken mirror wedged into the frame of the back kitchen window, and at this remark, she paused and said to Father, ‘She might be entitled to Unemployment Insurance.’
‘If she was, she has forfeited it by voluntarily leaving her position.’ Father was running backwards and forwards between kitchen and living room like a demented hen. ‘Where can my hat be? Have you seen it? I’ll be late.’ He called to Brian who was about to go out of the back door to school, ‘Brian, wheel the bike round to the front door, there’s a boy, while I find my hat.’
‘I’ll be late if I do,’ complained Brian, his dark, heart-shaped face sulky, as he clapped his school cap on to his head.
‘Oh, rubbish,’ replied Father. ‘Go and get it. And don’t wear your cap in the house – you are not a workman.’
Brian slammed down his satchel on to the floor, flung his cap on top of it, and went to do as he was bidden.
‘Why can’t I?’ reiterated Fiona, plaintively.
‘Do you want to stand in a queue with a mass of unwashed, vulgar girls?’ asked Mother. She quickly licked her forefinger and ran it over her eyebrows to remove the surplus face powder clinging to them. ‘There is no point anyway. They would try to put you into domestic service. Do you want that?’
‘No,’ muttered Fiona dejectedly. Neither she nor I had ever considered going into domestic service. Even in my most deprived days, when I began to fear I would die from hunger, I had never considered this way out of my misery. Both of us remembered the servants in our own house when we were small. With the exception of their weekly half day off and on alternate Sundays, they were never free from six o’clock in the morning until eleven at night.
No. No domestic service for Fiona. Being at home was a shade better than that; at least one could have a good cry in the privy at the bottom of the back yard.
Father found his hat under the living-room table, where the boys must have been using it as dressing-up material. He grabbed the bicycle from a fuming Brian at the front door, and pedalled creakily away to work.
‘Never mind, Fi,’ I comforted. ‘What about writing to some of the big shops in the city – they like to employ under sixteens. I’ll deliver the letters – or Alan can.’
Fiona’s face lifted a trifle. ‘Who should I write to?’
‘Um – er, try Lewis’s or Blackler’s.’
‘I’d love to work for Owen Owen’s or Boots.’
I was hastily getting into my coat and hat. Given good advice on how to improve her appearance, Fiona would have fitted well into these higher-class shops, but she was untidy and grubby, despite the fact that Mother bought her new clothes as often as possible. I said with caution, ‘You could try them.’ I picked up the letters that she had written the evening before. ‘I’ll put these into the Echo office for you.’
‘Come on, Helen,’ shouted Alan from the front doorstep.
Mother told Fiona what to give the children for lunch and fled through the back door to catch her tram. Suddenly poor Fiona was left standing alone in the dirty, cluttered living room.
Some time back, I had been very ill and for two years had not been strong enough to walk to work. Recently because I felt better and, anyway, could no longer afford the tram fares, I had begun to walk again. Alan had always been provided with tram fares, but he started to accompany me. This long march to and from the city was hard on shoes. We both had pieces of cardboard poked into our footwear to help to fill up the holes in the soles. I had painful ingrowing corns on the bottoms of my feet from the exposure of the tender flesh to hard pavement. At times it was like walking on knives.
We always went along the side of the Anglican Cathedral. It was the last of the big Gothic edifices to be built in Europe, and clearly on the morning air one could hear the tiny taps of the stonemasons’ hammers, as if a band of elves was hard at work. In pouring rain the great building looked like a huge red sandstone peak, and I loved looking at it, though I had never yet plucked up enough courage to enter it – I feared I was too shabby. Alan did not share my cat-like interest in new territory, so when I suggested that we go into it together, he shrugged and asked, ‘Whatever for?’
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