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
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      Father thanked them gratefully and came home very thoughtful, marvelling at their sheer resilience and good nature in such adversity.

      All of us had colds, including the baby, and lacked even handkerchiefs, though we did our best by using newspaper culled from the greengrocer, who wrapped our small purchases of potatoes in it. Father began to realize that unless help came quickly the younger children would probably die from the first germ that infected them. The death rate in Liverpool, at that time, was one of the highest in the country and the infant mortality rate was correspondingly horrifying. He knew that we were worse off than most of the people who stood in the endless queues with him, since we did not draw the Liverpool level of relief, nor were we eligible for help with clothing which ‘Mr Parish’ sometimes gave out. No one, in all his conversations, happened to tell him that he was paying three times the rent that most people paid and that this was largely what was crippling us.

      By far the greatest proportion of the Liverpool work-force was casual labour, dependent upon the erratic comings and goings of ships in the river, and most men were accustomed to being unemployed from time to time, particularly dock labourers. Their pattern of life reflected this in that they could never make a proper domestic budget, because they never knew from one week to the next what their earnings would be. They spent their earnings and ‘made do’ in between jobs. My father, being an educated man trained to study economic trends, could never manage to be as philosophical and optimistic as they were. He feared not only for himself but for his children’s future.

      In those days there were no midday meals or drinks of milk at school to help children along. One good lady who suggested that the skimmed milk thrown down the drain by one of the city’s bigger dairies might be given free to children in the elementary schools was soundly snubbed for her socialistic ideas.

      Father swallowed what little pride he had left. He sat down at our greasy table and wrote to the headquarters of his old regiment

      Mother came home white with weariness and irritable with frustration, having tried unsuccessfully against about thirty other applicants for a job as a saleswoman.

      ‘They looked like a flock of crows,’ she remarked of the applicants. ‘They all wore black dresses, stockings and shoes – just little white collars to relieve the dreariness.’

      ‘I thought that was what shop-girls always wore,’ replied Father.

      ‘I suppose so,’ Mother said. She added, ‘And the hours one was expected to work – nine until nine on Saturdays!’

      ‘What wages were they offering?’

      ‘Fifteen shillings a week.’

      Father whistled. ‘That’s not a living wage,’ he said.

      ‘They don’t care,’ replied Mother wearily. ‘All the women there were anxious to get the job.’

       CHAPTER ELEVEN

      Each day my mother went out to try and get work and spent most of the morning and afternoon in a fruitless round of offices and shops. Before leaving, she would give me a shilling to buy the day’s food. This I laid out to the best of my ability on bread, potatoes, rice, tea, sugar, pennyworths of bacon scraps or margarine and, that dire necessity, a pint of milk for Edward, which cost twopence.

      At first, Edward used to cry with hunger, but as he grew a little older, he would lie lethargically in the Chariot, making no sound most of the time. The other children also grew apathetic and the smaller ones tried to take bits of bread when I was not looking. We never heard from the school about their progress nor did my father inquire.

      One morning my parents went out quite early, before Edward had been fed. After the children had been given a meagre bowl of porridge each and had been sent to school, there was no food left in the house. I was desperate with hunger. And the usual pint of milk would, I knew, not be enough to last Edward for twenty-four hours. However, clutching the shilling, I wrapped Edward up in his stinking blanket, put on my woollen cardigan, my coat being still in pawn, and went downstairs to buy milk from the first passing milkman.

      Standing on the doorstep were two pint bottles of milk, presumably delivered for Miss Sinford, the lady with religious mania, and Mrs Hicks, who lived with her unemployed husband in the bowels of the basement. The other tenants patronized a milkman who came later.

      I looked at the bottles and then up and down the apparently empty street, hoping that the milkman might still be near by. There was no sign of him, however, and I turned back into the house with the idea of getting out the Chariot and wheeling it round to the dairy to purchase Edward’s precious pint.

      Edward began to whimper. I looked down longingly at the milk bottles. Then, like a fleeing cat, I tore up the stairs, Edward bobbing up and down in my arms. I laid him down gently in the Chariot, took our two cracked cups, ran down to the bathroom and filled one with water, then ran silently down the rest of the stairs to the front door.

      I glanced quickly up and down the street. Everyone was apparently sleeping the long hopeless sleep of the unemployed.

      Quickly I took the lids off the bottles, filled the empty cup with a little milk from each bottle, topped the bottles up with water, carefully replaced the lids, shook the bottles gently, and then crept upstairs again with my precious prize.

      I managed to make a feed for Edward before the little fire I made from paper flickered out, and I fed him contentedly, knowing that I could make the pint of milk I would buy stretch further for him. I had no qualms of conscience about my theft – I thought only of Edward – and I was mercifully unaware that the policeman on the beat had quietly watched the whole operation.

      It was late February, with days of pouring rain interspersed with weak sunshine. The trees and bushes in the locked gardens in the squares were beginning to show a faint swelling of their buds, and, as I wheeled Edward to the tiny local grocery shop and to the greengrocer’s each day, I would wonder why the children running in and out of the traffic or playing with cigarette cards on the pavement could not be allowed to play in the gardens. I would stand watching them dully as they cursed and tumbled each other about, their white or black skins equally grey with dirt and dust, their noses dribbling, their bare legs chapped and with septic sores on their knees. Little girls would play endless games of skipping and hopscotch, each with its appropriate song, learned from their elder sisters and passed down from generation to generation.

      ‘I am a girl guide dressed i’ blue,These are the actions I must do.Salute to the King, bow to the QueenAnd turn my back to the people.Pepper!’

      And at the word ‘pepper’ they would turn the skipping-rope with feverish speed to see how many fast skips they could do before being tripped up. Sometimes, I would wish wistfully that I might be able to join in, but I had always to watch Avril and Edward and I was mortally afraid of something happening to them in this strange world which I did not understand.

      Another pleasure was to stand in front of the greengrocer’s and contemplate the neat pyramids of oranges, apples, lemons and tomatoes. Mentally, I ate my way through the piles from top to bottom. I lacked the courage and initiative of the little street arabs, who would sometimes snatch a piece of fruit and fly like jets down the narrow back alleys, there to consume it with much ribaldry at the expense of the outraged greengrocer. A cry of ‘Bobby’ or ‘Cop’ or ‘Flattie’ would, however, send them speeding off again, old gym shoes or bare feet thudding over the flagstones like СКАЧАТЬ