By the Waters of Liverpool. Helen Forrester

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      Needle poised, I burst into the conversation with a frightened squeak, a squeak of genuine horror. ‘But we are Protestants. We say the General Confession during service. We make personal confessions only to God. I thought that was what being a Protestant was all about.’

      Mother laughed, her delicate, superior, crushing laugh. ‘Helen, we are High Anglicans. It is by accident that you have never been to Confession before. By chance, most of the places we have lived in have only Low Churches, so that when you were little you were taken to them.’ She drew on her cigarette, and then added a little sharply, ‘You seemed to have enjoyed going to a High Church recently.’

      ‘In all the many months I stayed with Grandma I never went to Confession,’ I protested. ‘If she had gone, I am sure she would have taken me with her.’

      Mother did not like being reminded of her mother-in-law, who had washed her hands of her shiftless son and would no longer have anything to do with us.

      ‘Your grandmother was too old to walk further than the village church – and that church was Low Church.’

      I pushed my fist into one of Brian’s smelly socks and attacked another hole. My voice trembled, as I said flatly, ‘Well, I’m not going.’

      Miss Ferguson looked nonplussed, and her hands with their black cotton gloves fluttered helplessly.

      Mother’s heavily made-up face began to darken. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Helen. It would do you good to go, to come face to face with your arrogance and bad temper. It might teach you to honour your parents, which would be a welcome change.’

      Me? Confess? Tell some strange priest that there were times when I felt like murdering my mother? Times like this moment. Tell him that I had dreamed that I took all my clothes off in front of a man? I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. I could tell God himself these things in the course of the General Confession, because He had made me and probably understood His faulty work. But not a priest – not a man!

      Much that I had let pass during my recent churchgoing suddenly fell into place. I had puzzled that the ministers of the church strode the streets in cassocks with black birettas on their heads, that servers assisted at the altar, that incense was used, the whole elaborate ritual. Now, the theatrical beauty of it, which had so impressed me, seemed suddenly to hide a basket of vipers.

      Shivering but determined, I put down the darning into my lap and turned to Miss Ferguson. Her shortsighted eyes darted from Mother to me.

      ‘Miss Ferguson, I couldn’t do it. If I have to go to Confession, I might as well become a Catholic and do it properly. There wouldn’t be any difference.’

      Miss Ferguson found her voice and said rather hoarsely, ‘There is a great difference, Helen. We do not accept the supremacy of the Pope. Our King is head of our church.’

      Mother nodded agreement, her mouth pinched with her disapproval of me.

      I felt as if I had been backed against a wall by a member of the Inquisition. I had never thought about the legitimacy of being allowed to worship as one pleases. I had no profound knowledge of my own faith. Most of my age group did not even attend church, though the majority, if asked, would say that they were either Protestant or Catholic – so great was the religious division in Liverpool.

      To Liverpool Protestants, Catholics were people who lived in the worst slums because they did not know any better, and their greatest entertainment was attacking Protestant religious processions. They were not ordinary, kindly people at all.

      I saw through Miss Ferguson’s suggestion only the tortured faces of my own beloved martyrs. I ignored the fact that Protestants had, in their time, done their share of roasting hapless Catholics.

      Miss Ferguson saw the need to reassure me, and she leaned forward and patted my knee. ‘The first Confirmation classes will be held in a fortnight’s time, my dear. Come along to the vestry. I am sure the good Father can explain to you much better than I can how good for the soul Confession is.’

      ‘But – but...’ I spluttered helplessly. ‘Miss Ferguson, I can’t – I just can’t.’

      The good Father! Not the Vicar. Childhood memories of gentle, vague scholars in clerical collars sipping tea in various drawing rooms made me want to rush back in time to them. I seemed to recollect that they only extolled the basic virtues. Where had they gone? I must have been asleep during the weeks I had been attending Miss Ferguson’s church.

      Mother was saying brightly that, since Miss Ferguson thought it wise, time would be found for my attendance at classes.

      With her usual outward charm, she saw Miss Ferguson out of our grubby living room, into the narrow hall and finally out to the littered street. I knew very well that she would attend to me later in a very different fashion.

      Though doubtless learned clerics were already discussing and challenging the concepts of hell and damnation and other long-held beliefs, eternal punishment for the heretic was a very real threat to a girl brought up by ignorant country servants and subsequently cut off from her contemporaries as I was. To defy one’s parents for any reason was bad enough. To defy one’s church was, in my opinion, likely to be much worse. As I contemplated Brian’s tattered sock, I was shaking with fear of the spiritual forces which might be ranked against me. I wondered if I would be struck dead if I argued with the priests, actually raised my voice in a church building. And death was only the beginning of trouble for those cast out of the church. I might burn in hell for ever afterwards.

      Nevertheless, quivering like a mouse before a cat, I determined on a last squeak.

       Two

      I could remember Mother at the age of twenty-four, an elegant beauty with fashionable short black curls and large, pale-blue eyes. Her fine legs were sheathed in the latest pure silk stockings, her skirts daringly short, so that a sudden flip of them would give a glimpse of ruffled silk garters trimmed with tiny roses or pearls, or French knickers heavy with lace. She attracted a great deal of attention from Father’s war-battered friends, and Edith said she could get anything by merely fluttering her eyelashes. It did not work, however, when I tried fluttering my scant lashes, and I decided it must be something magical, known only to grown-ups.

      The slightest argument or objection, the smallest frustration, would unleash her ungovernable temper, from which shell-shocked husband and servants would fly. I was terrified of her and would cling to Edith, seeking safety in her starched white lap. Edith always said comfortingly that she did not care a tinker’s cuss about Mother’s tempers; the job was handy for her. We lived conveniently close to the young farmer who was Edith’s fiancé, and we frequently escaped to the warmth and laughter of his mother’s farmhouse kitchen. Alan, who was the child next to me in age, was also wheeled in his pram to the farm and got bounced merrily on many a rustic knee.

      Now Mother was a middle-aged harridan, worn down by the illness she had suffered when my smallest brother, Edward, was born and by the privation we had all endured since Father’s bankruptcy. Her figure was shapeless from eating too much white bread, her lovely legs horrible with varicose veins, hands ruined like mine, from washing, scrubbing, blackleading fireplaces, and lack of gloves. We rarely had hot water or soap, either for cleaning or washing ourselves, and face or hand creams were luxuries to look at through the chemist’s window. All that remained of Mother’s earlier self was a great charm of manner and СКАЧАТЬ