Liverpool Miss. Helen Forrester

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       Six

      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 an- gelic 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 home with a box of cream cakes, when we lacked meat, milk, shoes and soap. The children, of course, thought the cakes were wonderful, and I began dimly to understand why our rough, largely Irish, neighbours spent so outrageously on weddings and funerals, cinemas and drink, whenever they got the chance. Life seemed so hopeless that they snatched at any treat, as if they had only the present and there was no future.

      There was, however, a number of families nearby with less money than we had, but whose kitchen grate always seemed to have a fire in it, though it might be of slowly collected driftwood rather than of coal. Their children, friends of Fiona, Brian and Tony, were neat and clean; they ate regularly, though I cannot remember a single fat child amongst them. Their mothers obviously mended and washed frequently and could often be seen sweeping the dust out of their front doors, across the pavement and into the gutter. I often heard the sharp snap of rugs being shaken in the back yards, and saw them kneeling on the front pavement as they scrubbed and donkey-stoned their single front step. Some of them even scrubbed the pavement itself as far as the street. The menfolk were usually craftsmen or seamen, skilled with their hands. Some of them, for a couple of shillings, rented a small allotment garden from the City. These gardens were often close to railway embankments or at the edge of the city, and good crops of fruit and vegetables were raised on them during the otherwise empty summer days.

      Neither of my parents had been trained to manage money. Grandpa died when Father was six. Father was sent to an excellent public school when he was ten, a school famous for the Shakespearean plays its boys enacted. He acquired a deep understanding of French and English history, and his mathematical abilities were of university level. But nobody taught him how to keep a budget or to manage a family.

      Mother was equally ill-prepared for life. She was an orphan, brought up in a convent. She learned how to embroider fine altar cloths and copes; she acquired a smattering of French and other social graces, and a great love of reading. She had a fine singing voice and she learned to sing very well, though not to professional level – that would have been vulgar. The nuns who taught her hammered in the need for virtue in women, but not the basic knowledge which would make a good housewife. Since all their charges were segregated from the opposite sex, except for the skirted priests, the girls appeared to have had a wild curiosity about men and to have forgotten their lessons on virtue. Some of the girls went home to a normal family life during their holidays. But Mother’s guardian was a bachelor, so she stayed at school, to spend summer holidays taking walks with the nuns and other homeless girls, and Christmases and Easters largely in church.

      Unlike most of her contemporaries, Mother had had some business experience. Her guardian was the owner of a string of libraries, and when Mother became fifteen he removed her from the convent and taught her his own business. A few years later, he married. Mother was jealous of the new wife and she ran away to North Wales, where she found a post as librarian. There, she met my father during the First World War and married him.

      Now we were all suffering dreadfully as a result of their frivolous, irresponsible life after the war. Even hunger, cold, sickness and pain failed to teach them to manage any better.

      Poor diet produces rotting teeth, and all of us at times had to endure severe toothache. To alleviate this, we painted the offending tooth with a pennyworth of oil of cloves. Though this did sometimes ease the pain, it did not stop the tooth from deteriorating further. Then abscesses formed. Brian and Avril often sat weeping, while I applied hot poultices to their faces until the abscesses swelled and burst. Father already had false teeth when we arrived in Liverpool. But Mother’s excellent teeth began to loosen from gum disease. When one became too loose, she would wiggle it with her tongue until she could pull it out with her fingers. This must have hurt her and, of course, the gaps in her mouth did not improve her looks, which must have hurt even more. Mouths full of poor teeth were, however, very common in Liverpool, and it was not unusual, particularly in respect of women, to have lost all one’s teeth by the age of twenty-five.

      During the second winter of attendance at night school, СКАЧАТЬ