Lime Street at Two
Helen Forrester
The fourth and final part of Helen Forrester’s bestselling autobiography concludes the moving story of her early poverty-stricken life Liverpool.In 1940 Helen, now twenty, is working long hours at a welfare centre in Bootle, five miles from home. Her wages are pitifully low and her mother claims the whole of them for housekeeping but she is still thrilled to be working and gaining some independence. The Second World War is affecting every part of the country and Hitler’s Luftwaffe nightly seek to wreck havoc on her home city of Liverpool.Then, tragedy is brought shockingly close to home and Helen is left reeling when she receives some terrible news. But there is no let-up in the bombing and the Germans seem determined to bring the country to its knees. When a move brings more trouble for Helen, she is determined that she will face it, as ever, with courage and determination.
HELEN FORRESTER
Lime Street at Two
Copyright (#udf85d00f-957a-5f2d-9acb-a61c3f819650)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2012
This edition published by Harper 2016
Copyright © the estate of Jamunadevi Bhatia 1985
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Cover photograph © Picture Post /Hulton Getty
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Helen Forrester asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008180942
Ebook Edition © Dec 2016 ISBN: 9780007373857
Version: 2016-11-09
Dedication (#udf85d00f-957a-5f2d-9acb-a61c3f819650)
To my husband
The generals, the institution can
select a strategy, lay it out,
but what happens on the battlefield
is quite different.
Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi
(1828–1910)
Table of Contents
Cover (#ueaa2acf3-e349-5d9e-b83c-019a4d40f05f)
Title Page (#u64ccf200-059b-538a-b74b-e8976d017c46)
Copyright (#u3cf8bc5f-884b-55d8-bd1f-9e3607d00d09)
Dedication (#ubc5aa015-6cb0-59ff-9a13-8e909285922c)
Epigraph (#uc9bde58b-99d2-5b87-af16-ef953d9d6389)
Chapter One (#uc59fefb7-9234-53ca-b971-58c2d773aa2d)
Chapter Two (#u0399eef0-155f-52ea-a4f6-ec0d66e24fe8)
Chapter Three (#u9aca629c-7f96-50c5-b069-254de2ac35f4)
Chapter Four (#ub781746d-88b8-5a87-9af3-b042e1defe5f)
Chapter Five (#ubdcb87ae-aa29-57a5-aaea-bd05e25b3def)
Chapter Six (#uf7dac57e-f59b-5daf-99cd-cf7e68d8c460)
Chapter Seven (#ue9e41182-61d3-56a3-9790-9b9261772624)
Chapter Eight (#uc0300566-0ca0-5f5a-b8d3-42c36dd4a91a)
Chapter Nine (#u82d78aaf-080d-5179-bafb-6f9e0523ea88)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Footnotes (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading … (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By Helen Forrester (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
One (#udf85d00f-957a-5f2d-9acb-a61c3f819650)
The huge clock still hangs in Lime Street station, Liverpool, and marks a convenient spot for travellers to be met. During World War II, almost every girl in Liverpool must have written to a serviceman coming home on leave, ‘I’ll meet you under the clock at Lime Street.’ There were always women there, dressed in their shabby best, hair long, curled and glossy, pacing nervously under that indifferent timepiece. Every time a train chugged in, they would glance anxiously at the ticket collectors’ wickets, while round them swirled other civilians, and hordes of men and women in uniform, khaki, Navy blue, or Air Force blue, staggering under enormous packs and kitbags. Some men wore foreign uniforms, with shoulder flashes of refugee armies, navies and air forces. No matter who they were, they all shared the same expression of deep fatigue.
This huge vortex of uprooted humanity was supervised by stolid-looking military police standing like rocks against a tide. Some of them were American Snowdrops, so nicknamed because of their white helmets. Occasionally a single English civilian policeman stood out amongst all the other uniforms, a reminder of peacetime and sanity, when a quiet, ‘Now move along there, please,’ was enough to reduce a pushing crowd to order.
The station may be rebuilt, the generations pass, but the ghosts are still there, ghosts of lovers, husbands, sons, withered like flowers on distant battlefields long forgotten, and of mothers, wives and sweethearts long since dead. Amongst those kindly shades stands Harry O’Dwyer, the fiancé of my youth, a ship’s engineer, lost at sea in 1940.
I do not know how I got through that dreadful summer of 1940, after the news of Harry’s death, or the long, hopeless year of 1941. It was a period when the Merchant Navy was decimated by German submarines and aircraft. Once a man was at sea, there was not a moment when he was not in acute danger. Over the bar, in Liverpool Bay, the U-boats waited, like cats at a mousehole, for the slow, ill-defended freighters entering and leaving the ports of Liverpool and Birkenhead. If they survived the submarines, they could strike acoustic mines, magnetic mines and other menaces plopping about in the heaving waters.
Even snugly moored in dock, ships were often the target in air raids; and the homes of their crews, packed in the dockside areas, were frequently destroyed.
I lived within a mile of the south docks, with my father and mother, four brothers and two sisters. I was the eldest child. We were a most unhappy family, our lives fraught with the bitter quarrels of our parents, and our considerable penury.
When I was a child we had lived in comfortable circumstances, but in 1930, my father had gone bankrupt, as a result of the Depression. In an effort to find employment, Father had brought us to Liverpool, his birthplace. Like most of the people living in the south of England, he had no notion of the horrifying effect of the Depression in the north. The unemployment rate was 33 per cent and there was almost no hope of work. We had sunk into an abyss of poverty, which I have described in earlier books.
(#litres_trial_promo) By 1940, however, we had begun to climb out of the pit into which we had fallen, though we were still very poor.
My parents were still filled with the Public School snobbery of their youth, so I had told them nothing of my engagement to Harry O’Dwyer. They would have immediately condemned such a union as beneath me. Harry was from a respectable Irish working-class family and a Roman Catholic, originally intended by his family to be a priest. Since I was a Protestant, we had agreed to be married quietly in a Registry Office soon after I was twenty-one, when I would not need my parents’ consent. Harry had bought a little house, which was not quite complete when he was killed. I was twenty-one years and two months old when his mother told me of his death, under the very odd circumstances that she did not know she was talking to her son’s fiancée.
In 1940, I was a neophyte social worker in Bootle, a small town sharing a common boundary with Liverpool. It was a Roman Catholic area tightly packed with overcrowded terrace houses, factories and timber yards, hedged in by the docks along the river. Though the poverty was very great, Harry was proud to say that he was a Bootle man; men had sailed from Bootle since the Anglians settled there in AD 613, and perhaps even before that.
One morning in August, our waiting room at the office was packed with the widows of men lost at sea, who wished to seek our advice regarding claiming pensions. Among them sat Harry’s mother, long since estranged from him because he had refused to enter the Church. She was now bent on benefiting from his death by claiming a pension. I thought I would faint when she explained her business, and I quickly referred her to my colleague, Miss Evans. Then, deserting the waiting crowd, I fled to the unused cellars of the old house in which the office lay, and there in the clammy grime of a disused coal cellar, I stood shivering helplessly, so filled with shock that I hardly knew where I was. When, after a few minutes, my mind cleared a little, I was nauseated at a woman who could order her son out of their home because of a religious difference, and yet could coolly try to get a pension at his death.
I heard Miss Evans calling me and automatically I ran back up the stone steps. She met me on the upper staircase and scolded me for leaving clients waiting. Like a zombie, I moved to obey her orders. I did not cry.
I did not want to know this cold, grasping woman, Harry’s mother, nor did I say anything to my own parents; there was no point in facing their probable derision at such a humble marriage. I could almost hear their cultured voices ripping apart a man I had loved dearly, and I could not bear that they should do it.
Somehow, I kept my mouth shut, but the unexpressed grief was like a corrosive at work inside me. It caused such damage that I never truly recovered from it. In a body made frail by much illness and, at times, near starvation, it worked its will. In a character already very introspective from childhood, filled with fear of grown-ups, its effect was devastating.
As a little child, I learned early that my parents were simply not interested in me, and that I had to face all the fears of childhood alone. As a young adult, I continued that early attitude of solitary suffering, and it was reinforced by the loss of the one person I trusted implicitly.
Though I did not consider it at the time, I had lots of fellow sufferers and, as a social worker employed by a charity working in the dock areas, I had to help to look after them. Our waiting room was daily filled by rows of weeping mothers and wives; every ship that went down seemed to have a Bootle man aboard. My mind is filled with memories of the overwhelmed resources of our little office, when the Athenia, the Courageous, the battleship RoyalOak, and hundreds of others, big and small, were lost in 1940 and 1941.
Sometimes the position was reversed, and a seaman’s family was lost in an air raid.
My senior, Miss Evans, and I often faced a stony-eyed or openly weeping merchant seaman or a serviceman, sent home on compassionate leave because his home had been bombed and his family killed. Commanding officers did not always tell them why they were to go home. A few would go straight to their house, see the wreckage and realise what had happened. But quite a number reported directly to our office, as instructed by their commanding officer, and we would have to break the news to them. Because extended families frequently lived in adjoining streets, a man could find himself left with only a badly injured infant in hospital, and neither sister, aunt nor mother left alive to help him to care for the baby.
These heart-rending cases intensified my own sorrow to such a degree that I could not bear it any longer, and I decided I must try to obtain other work. Not only was I grief-stricken, I was also hungry. The salary that the charity was able to pay me was so small that I could not even afford lunch; I was poorer than most of the clients who thronged our waiting room.
Two (#udf85d00f-957a-5f2d-9acb-a61c3f819650)
Even in 1940, there was much unemployment in Liverpool, and the competition for any job was still very keen. At first, when the war began, the number of unemployed was increased by firms going out of business as a result of the war. For example, my mother, so acid-tongued at home, used her superior-sounding Oxford accent to good effect as the representative of a greeting card firm. The company was suddenly faced with an acute paper shortage, and, in order to remain in business, they had to turn to printing products essential to the war effort; they did not need a sales force. Mother, by this time very experienced and quite nicely dressed, soon found a new job as an accountant in a bakery. Girls like me, however, were in direct competition with a large population bulge made up of babies born after the servicemen came home from World War I. We were now in our early twenties.
Though by this time I was a skilled shorthand typist, as well as having had experience in social work, I was turned down again and again when I applied for secretarial posts.
The supercilious head clerks and typing pool supervisors looked me over as if I were a horse up for sale, often asked the most impertinent questions and always demanded references as to my moral character. They also asked about my education, and I had to own up that I had had only four years in school.
‘Why?’ they would snap suspiciously. ‘Were you ill?’ and I would have to reply that my parents had kept me at home from the age of eleven, in order that I might keep house for my parents and my six younger brothers and sisters; it was essential to impress on them that I was extremely healthy, because no employer would consider a person who might miss days of work through ill-health.
They looked disdainfully at a sheaf of evening school certificates showing high marks, and then would often change the subject by making disparaging remarks about my poor appearance.
I could not help the way I looked. My complexion was a pimpled white from insufficient food. My homecut hair hung lankly from lack of soap. In spite of working days and evenings, I could not earn enough to dress myself properly, even in second-hand clothes. When I could manage it, I bought little tins of Snowfire makeup from Woolworth’s, at threepence a tin, to improve my looks, but often enough the expense was too great for my limited funds. I was neatly shabby to the point of beautifully stitched patches on patches, darns on darns.
Seventeen shillings and sixpence a week, which was what I earned, was only two shillings and sixpence more than I would have received on unemployment pay. Before I received my wages, deductions were made by my employer for National Health and Unemployment Insurance and for hospital care. The remainder was demanded of me by Mother. In those days, many mothers believed that they owned not only their daughters, but also everything their children earned, and my mother was no exception.
Money for my own expenses was earned in the evenings, by teaching shorthand to pupils in their homes.
I always fell into a panic when I lost a pupil, because it often meant that I had no tram fares and must walk the five miles to work in Bootle, through quite dangerous slums. In winter, the walk had to be done in the dead dark of the wartime blackout.
Mother was not prepared to help me. She had at that time no intention of ever being a fulltime housewife herself. Before Father went bankrupt, she had always been able to afford help with the children, had never had to care for them herself. She used every pressure she could think of to make it impossible for me to work, so that I would stay at home and be a free housekeeper. Even during the time that my younger brothers and sisters, Brian, Tony, Avril and Edward, were evacuated, she nagged and made my life a misery on this subject, presumably in order to have me ready at home to care for the children when the war ended. This remorseless battle between us had gone on for years, but I had always refused to give in.
I was quite sympathetic about Mother’s preference to go to work, but I never could see why I should have to shoulder the burden of her responsibilities and become, once more, an unpaid, unrespected slavey to an uncaring bunch of siblings and two indifferent parents.
Perhaps Mother’s lifetime repression of me had become a habit and closed her mind to the possibilities of other domestic arrangements. I knew from infancy that my very existence was a trial to her – she had always made that point extremely clear to me – and I tended to apologise continually to her as if I had no right to live.
Some time back, when, because of her callous attitude towards me, I had nearly suffered a nervous breakdown, she had become suddenly afraid; mental instability was much feared as a dreadful blot on a family’s reputation. She promised she would treat me exactly as she did my pretty, compliant sister, Fiona, the third child of the family, now aged eighteen. Until I could command a better wage, she promised, she would take from me only about seven shillings a week, which would cover amply the food I ate.
She soon forgot her promise and fell into a series of tremendous rages, until I again gave up all my wages.
Fiona, three years younger than me, earned the same amount as I did, but the money was, in practice, left with her for her expenses and clothing, as was often done in middle-class families. She always looked well dressed.
Alan, the brother next to me in age, was in the Air Force. Out of the miserable fourteen shillings a week which he was paid, he allotted seven shillings to my mother. I felt that this, also, was pressing too hard on someone who had very little. I was unwise enough to say so, and Mother blew up like a time bomb.
‘It’s the only way in which I can claim a government pension, if he is killed,’ she stormed.
As far as I was concerned, this remark put her into the same cold-hearted category as Harry’s mother.
Before he was killed, Harry, my fiancé, had been on several voyages to New York, and at different times had brought me three very nice dresses from the Manhattan garment district. Anxious not to give an indication that I was engaged, I had told Mother that I had bought them in a second-hand store. Together with a pair of satin slippers, bought for my Confirmation and subsequently dyed black, the frocks enabled me to look appropriately dressed when I went to a local Dancing Club. Mother and Fiona often borrowed them. Since both of them were bigger than me, the seams were now showing signs of splitting.
Despite Mother’s ruthlessness, from the spring of 1940 I had endured my lot more philosophically. I would be twenty-one in June and would marry Harry in the summer, when he hoped to have earned enough to furnish his house with the essentials, so that we could move into it.
Now I was alone again and so distressed that I believe that sometimes I was out of my mind. I would cry as I walked home through the darkness, and often cried through the night, while Fiona slept contentedly on the other side of the bed, and poor little Avril aged twelve, squirmed uncomfortably between us.
One very hungry day, I inquired at the Employment Exchange about joining the Wrens, the naval service. I saw myself trim and smart in the navy-blue uniform and tricorn hat of an officer.
The clerk told me sharply that, with my qualifications, I might get into the ATS, the women’s service attached to the army; they needed kitchen help and drivers. I could not drive, and my present work demanded more skill than cooking for the Army, so I turned down this suggestion.
Feeling crushed and lonely, that evening I spent an extravagant shilling and went to the Dance Club, where I had first met Harry; I craved warm, friendly people round me.
Norm, the owner, had a new record of In the Mood on his wind-up gramophone, and over the cheerful noise of it, he greeted me genially.
At first those dancers who had known Harry and me were a little shy about asking me on to the floor. When they discovered that I was not going to weep for him on the padded shoulders of their best suits, I was never short of a partner. They were nearly all skilled workmen, for the moment exempt from military service; they were earning bigger wages than they had ever enjoyed before and had money to spend.
As a joke, I mimicked the pompous clerk in the Employment Exchange, who had so mortified me when I asked about joining the Wrens. A group of us were waiting for Norm to change the record, and the men gravely assured me that for a girl to join the Services was a fate worse than death.
With eyes averted, one man said, ‘It’s not suited to a nice girl like you. You’d have a rotten time.’
Another said with a grin, ‘Nice girls don’t leave home; they stay close to their mams.’ He nodded towards his friends, and added, ‘When these lads get into uniform it brings out their tomcat instincts; regular tigers, they are.’ He exchanged playful punches with the others, and the conversation became ribald, so I left them. Truly, I thought, there is no one so conservative, small c, as a skilled craftsman. I trusted them enough, however, to feel that I should keep on trying for work as a civilian.
One of Harry’s acquaintances escorted me home, and left me politely on my doorstep.
During that night, as I lay sleepless, I think I began to realise that I could not live my life alone, and that I hoped to meet someone a long time in the future, who would fill the frightful gap in my life. I was used to a large family round me. Homes were, indeed, more crowded in those days. Sometimes there was a grandparent or other relation living with a married couple with children, and a lodger or two; single men frequently rented a room and were boarded by their landlady, who sometimes became the target of malicious tongues. Elderly women, widowed or single, occasionally doubled up and also endured the disparaging remarks of their neighbours, in these cases, with regard to their sexual preferences. The concept of birth control was barely beginning to penetrate the densely populated area in which I lived; and in Bootle, a Roman Catholic district, it was almost unknown and, in consequence, families were huge.
If I could keep myself, I thought rather pitifully, one of my brothers, when they married, might allow me to live with him, if I were still single. At least then I would have some male protection. In the meantime, it was necessary for me to earn sufficient to satisfy my mother, and have enough left over to buy a decent lunch each day, pay tram fares, clothe myself and, if possible, put away something for my old age. I rarely dreamed of anything more, except to be able to go to a dance or to the theatre occasionally. The idea of holidays or of buying books, pictures or music never entered my head – they were untold luxuries.
During the following few weeks, kind, familiar faces began to vanish with alarming rapidity from the Dance Club. Though many members were exempt from military service, Ernest Bevin, the Minister of Labour and leader of the powerful Transport and General Workers’ Union, was re-directing skilled manpower to war production, often in other parts of the country. The men’s places on the dance floor were taken by soldiers from the nearby barracks, and they brought in women picked up from the streets. These new members of the Club were harder for the owners, Norm and Doris, to control; they were transients with no local reputation to maintain.
Very shortly after, a tight-lipped and disapproving Norm and Doris announced the closure of the Club. They would both go to work in a munition factory and would re-open their business after the war. Their dancing shoes were put away and they passed out of my life, two kind people who believed in a certain standard of conduct and refused to deviate from it.
It was only when I saw the hastily scrawled note pinned on the dusty black door, Closed for the duration, that I realised how much I had depended upon the Club for company. Because it was so late before I got home from work, it had been my sole source of social life, except for occasional visits to the Playhouse theatre with a friend called Sylvia Poole.
After reading the note, I stood looking up at the door with its blistered paint and soot-covered portico, and I felt again, for a moment, the same scarifying loneliness of my first days in Liverpool as a child of eleven.
A savage air raid was in progress, but, despite the whistling bombs, I had, on my way home from work, crossed the double width of the parallel boulevards of Princes Road and Princes Avenue, to look once more at the old house where I had first met Harry. It had brought me such intense, though short-lived happiness. A greenish flare, dropped by a German bomber, lit up every detail of its simple, graceful architecture and gave it an almost dreamlike air.
‘Goodbye, youth. Goodbye, happiness,’ I muttered bitterly, as amid hissing flak, I crossed back over the road and the avenue, and went home to face the inner loneliness, the sense of being lost, which is the lot of the bereaved.
I wanted to die.
Three (#udf85d00f-957a-5f2d-9acb-a61c3f819650)
Alan had been in the Air Force since July, 1939, and I missed him very much. I did not see much of Fiona, who came next after Alan in the family. She worked as a clerk in a magazine distributor’s office and had a number of men friends who took her out in the evenings to dinners, dances or the cinema. My parents rarely spoke, except to quarrel. The four younger children, Brian, now aged seventeen, Tony, aged fourteen, Avril, twelve, and Edward, aged nine, had in August, 1939, been evacuated to the country for safety, but early in 1940 Mother brought them home again, because the Government had demanded a modest financial contribution to their upkeep while they were away.
Brian finished school that year, and went to work for a shipping agent in the city. He also joined the City Police ARP Messenger Service, a group of boys with bicycles who, when the telephone lines were blown down during air raids, acted as messengers between hospitals, police, air-raid wardens and rescue squads, and rest centres for the homeless. Father used a bicycle to get to work, and Brian borrowed the machine at night.
On their return to Liverpool, the youngsters faced almost immediately four sharp, frightening air raids. No damage was done in our district.
I had suggested to Mother that, with the fall of France, it would be easier for the Germans to bomb the north of England, and perhaps we should leave at least the younger children in the country, where they were being fairly well looked after by my father’s sisters and, in the case of Avril, by a friend of my aunts. Mother would not hear of it; it was cheaper to bring them home.
Now she said to me, ‘See, the Germans are only interested in bombing the north end of the docks. We are quite safe, down here at the south end.’
I held my tongue.
Fortunately for our children, the Government had reopened the city schools. At the beginning of the war they had been closed, because their teachers had to accompany the evacuees to the country. Some children, however, were never evacuated; they ran wild in the streets, and vandalism and theft became widespread. When the trickle of children returning from evacuation became a torrent, many teachers were recalled, and the small predators went back to learning to read and write.
It says a great deal for the dedication of the teachers at that time, that despite the upheavals in their own lives and the dislocation of being evacuated, they managed to teach Tony and Edward well enough for them to win scholarships to grammar school. This made it possible, later on, for both boys to gain university degrees.
Nobody seemed to give much attention to little, blonde Avril, the second youngest member of our family. She was only a girl, equally frightened of being re-evacuated and of the air raids. In a chaotic world, she plodded on through elementary school as best she could.
The return of the children made Mother reopen, yet again, the question of my giving up my work and staying home to look after them.
As I washed the dishes and she dried them, she said without preamble, ‘Now the children are back, Helen, I expect you to stay at home. You can give your notice in on Friday.’
The idea of keeping a daughter permanently at home, often denying her marriage, died hard. But I felt I had endured enough in my early teens when I had been forced to keep house and, as the housekeeper who did not have to go to work, found myself reduced to a point bordering on starvation – the workers were fed and clothed first, the children next, and the woman at home was often left with nothing.
I did not, at first, answer Mother. This was before Harry’s death and I was buoyed up by the thought that in a very few months, I would have only a loving husband to care for.
‘I don’t think it is necessary, Mother,’ I replied carefully. ‘Couldn’t we manage the house between us? I’m getting good training as a social worker – it should lead to something better.’
Mother put the last pile of plates on to the kitchen shelf, while I emptied the washing-up bowl. She said scornfully, ‘You’ll get nowhere without a degree, so what’s the use?’ She glanced impatiently round the tiny, stone-tiled kitchen, with its greasy, deal table, and sandstone sink with a solitary cold water tap. ‘Now, where are my curling tongs?’
‘On the mantelpiece in the living-room,’ I replied mechanically, and I followed her into it, as I shook out the wet tea towel, ready to hang it to dry on the oven door of the old-fashioned range. The range took up nearly the whole of one wall of the room, and I noticed that its iron frontage badly needed blackleading.
Mother found her tongs and thrust them into the fire, and I silently draped the tea towel over the oven door. While the tongs were heating, she combed her hair quickly, in front of a piece of mirror balanced on the mantelpiece.
‘You know very well we can’t mange, Helen,’ she began again. ‘It was difficult enough to manage when the children were evacuated.’
‘They’re not babies any more, Mother. They could all help. Brian and Tony are big enough to queue in the shops, or even help with the cleaning. Or why can’t Fiona take a turn at keeping house?’
‘Fiona is too frail – and she doesn’t know how. And boys can’t do domestic work. How stupid can you be?’
‘Well, why can’t they?’
Mother paused with hot tongs poised to make a curl at the side of her face. She said angrily, ‘Helen, you are being impudent. When I say you are to do a thing, you do it, my girl.’
‘No, Mother,’ I responded with unusual temerity. ‘I am not staying home again.’
I thought Mother was going to strike me with the hot tongs, and I stepped back hastily.
‘Don’t talk to me like that. I won’t have such nonsense. I’ll talk to your employer. I’ll have you dismissed.’ Her face flushed with anger, and she seized a piece of her hair and rolled it on the tongs, as if she were about to pull it out.
I was scared. I had no idea what the ladies at work might do, if approached by an angry mother. They might very well agree to let me go to get rid of a shouting harridan on their doorstep. Mother saw her chance in my frightened face, and she pointed the tongs at me, and said, ‘You have to learn, my lady, the facts of life. You can’t choose what you want to do. You have to do what I say.’
How I wished Harry was there. I would have turned and run to him, begged him to find me a place to shelter until we could marry; it was, after all, only a little while until we would be married. But Harry was at sea. I thought of Father, the weaker parent, and burst out, ‘I think we should talk about this with Father.’
But Mother was not listening. She was ranting about feckless daughters and how she would be worked to death, as she continued feverishly to put curls in her hair. Occasionally, she would pause in her endeavours to shake the tongs at me, as I stood like a paralysed rabbit in front of her.
I was saved by Edward’s coming in. He had fallen down and grazed his knees. They were bleeding and I took him into the kitchen to wash them, while Mother went upstairs to find a piece of old sheeting we kept for bandages.
By the time we had mopped up the blood and the tears, it was time for Mother to go to the cinema, and with a sharp, ‘I’ll talk to you later,’ she put on her hat and coat and shot out of the house. I was left to put Avril and Edward to bed and to wonder whether I should, perhaps, just capitulate, and leave when I married.
We might have been able to afford a little help in the house, between all of us, but my parents were great fritterers of money. They both smoked heavily, and my father drank. There was always money for Mother to go to the cinema, which she did twice a week at least; always money to buy, for show, a piece of furniture for the sitting-room, paid for on the hire-purchase system, a most expensive way to buy anything; money for clothes for Mother and Fiona. But there was never enough for good, plain food, for coal, blankets, soap, for underwear for the younger children. We were always short of necessities, and I knew from experience that, made to stay at home, I could be the most deprived person of all.
A beshawled neighbour of whom I had once asked the time, because our single clock had stopped, had said to me disparagingly, ‘’Asn’t your Dad got a watch? All lace curtains and nothin’ in the larder, that’s your Mam and Dad.’ And she had sighed, as she looked me up and down.
A scared waif of a girl, I had not known how to answer her, so I had hung my head and shuffled away with Baby Edward in his squeaking pram.
Whenever Mother was short of ready money, she would collect any spare clothing lying about or some of our sparse bedding, and pawn it. Because I took great care of my few clothes, it was the shelf in the girls’ bedroom which was first raided.
I was frequently reduced to the clothes I had on, and then had to save up, penny by penny, to retrieve the rest from Uncle Joe, the pawnbroker.
It was a game I could not win. Years later, however, I bought very cheaply a chest of drawers which had been badly seared by fire. A kindly man friend, aware of the problem, made a key to fit the old-fashioned locks on the drawers. Mother had one of her bigger tantrums on the subject of these locks, and she immediately demanded a key. I refused her, and carried the single key threaded on a piece of string round my neck, with Harry’s ring.
When I heard from Harry’s mother that he had been killed, I was devastated not only by grief, but, in the background of my pain, also by the knowledge that I had lost my sole defence against my mother. As my friends in the Dance Club had sharply reminded me, nice girls did not leave home – they might have added, except, of course, to be married.
Sometimes, in those early weeks after Harry’s death and after the row I had had with Mother about being the family housekeeper, I would stand behind the high shelves of files in the office of the charity for which I worked, and hold my head, while I shivered helplessly. Father had tried to act as peacemaker between Mother and me, by saying we should first try if we could manage without someone at home. Mother had reluctantly agreed, but she continued to nag at me about it. I wondered if between sorrow and Mother and hunger, I would go mad. Then I would renew my efforts to find better-paid work. At least, I thought, that might settle the problem of being always hungry.
Four (#udf85d00f-957a-5f2d-9acb-a61c3f819650)
Mother had many small ways of trying to make it impossible for me to go to work. One was to pilfer any money I had, so that I had no tram fares for the five-mile journey to Bootle where lay the office of the Charity who employed me.
I kept a close eye on my handbag, but sometimes not close enough. I also tried secreting tram fares in the bedroom which I shared with Fiona and Avril, but a room furnished only with a double bed, a single shelf and no floor covering, does not offer many hiding places. Several times, I put a week’s fares up the chimney, getting very sooty in the process, but she either found the money herself or, perhaps, Fiona mentioned it to her as an idiosyncrasy of mine.
Fiona was always asked if she would lend money and always wailed miserably that she had none. Her ability to burst into floods of tears, her gorgeous light-blue eyes welling up piteously, always defeated Mother, whereas my verbal fury merely bred acidity in return.
A few weeks after Harry’s death, of which, of course Mother knew nothing, she had done one of her lightning swoops on my belongings and had pawned them. The blouse and underwear which I had been wearing that day had to be washed and dried overnight, ready to put on the next morning. In a world where washers and dryers had not yet been heard of, this meant putting on damp clothing every morning. Frequently there was no washing powder or soap, so my white blouse had, in Liverpool’s polluted air, become grey.
It was some time before I managed to save up two shillings (ten pence in today’s money) in order to redeem a change of garments from my old friend, the pawnbroker.
The only method of saving which I could think of was to walk most of the way to and from work. My two shorthand pupils paid me one shilling and sixpence a lesson, but I had recently lost one of them when I tried to increase my charge to two shillings. To get another one, I would have to advertise in the Liverpool Echo or Evening Express, and I had yet to find the money for that.
At the same time, as the Battle of Britain progressed, air raids became frequent.
The raids usually began about six o’clock in the evening and lasted until eleven or twelve. It was everybody’s ambition to be safely at home, or wherever they were going to be in the evening, before the air-raid warning howled its miserable notes across the waiting city. This was usually an impossibility for me, because, as the raids gained in intensity and the bombed-out sought our aid, the load of work in the office increased proportionately.
We worked later and later. My colleague, on whom devolved the ultimate responsibility for the office, looked ever more careworn; her skin was pasty from lack of fresh air and her eyes black-rimmed. She was a wonderfully caring person who gave of herself unsparingly to our distraught clients.
The five miles to work seemed to take a lifetime to walk. I went down the hill and through the city, and out again, along Byrom Street, Scotland Road and the eternity of Stanley Road, through some of Liverpool’s worst, festering slums. Like many English people who commonly travelled long and inconvenient distances by public transport to their employment, I arrived already very tired. Because roads were blocked by fallen debris or railways were out of commission, many others beside myself were forced to walk. A walk which I would have cheerfully undertaken, however, if it had been necessitated by an air raid, depressed me beyond measure because it was totally unnecessary.
Only people who have had to walk without a torch or cycle without a lamp through the total darkness of a blackout can appreciate the hazards of it. Innumerable cats and dogs trotted silently through it, to be tripped over by cursing pedestrians; pillar boxes and fire hydrants, telephone poles and light standards, parked bicycles and the occasional parked car, not to speak of one’s fellow pedestrians, all presented pitfalls for the unwary. Many times I went home with a bloody nose or with torn stockings and bleeding knees from having tripped up. Another problem was the ease with which one could lose one’s way; it was simple to become disoriented while crossing a road or a square and end up on the wrong pavement, hopelessly lost.
A new hazard appeared later in the war, and was the cause of Father’s having a painful fall, when the batteries of his flashlight failed. Lack of sufficient water pressure to douse the fires raised by incendiaries had necessitated the laying of extra water pipes directly from the river. The pipes ran along the street gutters or the edge of the pavements, and even in the daytime, people occasionally fell over these unaccustomed barriers. Father, one night, tripped over a newly laid pipe and bruised himself badly. He lay on the pavement in the dark, too shaken to get up, until he heard footsteps approaching.
He cried for help, and was immediately answered by a male voice. He was located, helped up and asked about his injuries. Father said that he was all right, that the fright of the fall had given him heart pains which had now ebbed.
‘I’m lost, however,’ he said.
The stranger asked his address, and Father told him it.
‘Oh, that’s easy. I’ll have you home in a couple of shakes,’ promised the man. ‘Put your arm in mine.’
‘Have you a torch?’ inquired Father, very puzzled at his rescuer’s self-assurance in the total darkness.
The stranger laughed. ‘I don’t need a light,’ he said. ‘I’m blind. Didn’t you hear my stick on the pavement?’
‘No, I didn’t,’ Father answered. ‘Do you think we could find my spectacles? They fell off, as I went down. They must be just here somewhere.’
The stick was used to sweep the pavement round them, and the spectacles, fortunately unbroken, were returned to their owner. A very grateful Father was safely deposited on his own doorstep by a man who, in ordinary circumstances, would have been regarded as seriously handicapped.
Bearing in mind the distances I often had to walk, it was as well that I had inherited my mother’s stamina, if not her temperament; even so, the strain was very great.
In the safe knowledge that no one could see me, I would stumble along in the dark, weeping openly, and wishing I was dead. Yet, when a stick of bombs began to fall nearby, and the whistle of each succeeding missile became closer, I would instinctively duck for shelter in the nearest shop doorway and crouch down, hands clasped over head, until the last resounding bang. I discovered that to survive is a fundamental instinct of all living things, and in such situations instinct takes over.
Sometimes the planes would dive fast, one after another, and other pedestrians would dash pell-mell into my refuge, to huddle tightly round me, like sheep in a storm, until the danger had retreated. Then, with shy apologies and light jokes directed to unseen faces, we would issue forth again into the street.
While we sheltered, the blackness was occasionally lit by the unearthly green glow of flares floating slowly in the sky, while the Germans tried to locate their specific targets. For a moment we would see fellow shelterers in the greatest detail, and all of us would feel naked and helplessly exposed to our enemies in the sky. The flares and bursts of tracer bullets were in one way useful, however, because they gave us a sufficiently good view of our route that, when we all set out again, we were less likely to have a fall.
The flares also showed up ARP messenger boys racing recklessly along on their bicycles; regardless of danger, they sped from air-raid wardens’ posts, to hospitals, to fire stations and rescue squads, wherever a message needed to be delivered. Most of the boys were under seventeen years of age, too young for military service; yet nightly they took chances which even the military would have considered risky.
Motor traffic crawled along with heavily shaded lights; ambulances and fire engines rang their bells continuously. Lorry drivers, tram and bus drivers normally kept going until a raid was overhead, when they would park and take refuge in the nearest shelter. There were few private cars on the streets, because of petrol rationing; those out at night were, for the most part, carrying walking casualties, rescue squads, tradesmen like telephone men and electricians, air- raid wardens and medical personnel. More than one vehicle ended up in an unsuspected bomb crater in the middle of a road, the driver and passengers killed or injured.
So when my mother riffled through my handbag with her tobacco-stained fingers, to take my fare money, she created cruel hardship for me, and it was not only for my lost love that I wept.
Five (#ulink_04cbefde-d95d-52dd-8557-d99dd3eddce9)
When attacking convoys, particularly at night, the Germans began to use packs of U-boats working in unison, rather than single submarines. Although the escort ships of the convoys now had a listening device, called Asdic, with which they could detect the presence of submarines, the noise of the convoy itself often confused the listeners and made it difficult to identify a submarine with certainty. It was also ineffective if the U-boat was on the surface.
To avoid the Asdic device, the U-boat commanders would come up steeply into the middle of a convoy, and, in a few moments, create havoc. Then, still on the surface, they would race away into the darkness, outrunning the escorting corvettes.
Once my first grief over Harry’s death had become more controllable, I again began to feel very deeply for the frantic mothers and wives of merchant seamen and Royal Navy men, alike, who died during September, October and November of 1940. The women threatened to overwhelm our little office, with its limited resources.
During one dreadful Saturday morning, when weeping women stood in the waiting room because all the chairs were full, and queued along the passageway and stairs, I was so distressed that something seemed to break inside me, and I cried out in fury to a startled voluntary worker, ‘It’s madness to send men to certain death like this!’
The words rang through the crowded, untidy room, and all the voluntary workers stopped their bustle and turned to stare at me. My weary colleague, Miss Evans, seated at her desk at the hub of the turmoil, put her hand over the mouthpiece of the telephone, and said sharply, ‘Miss Forrester!’
In the ensuing dead silence, I mumbled, ‘I’m sorry.’
I snatched up a pile of files and began feverishly to put them back on their open shelves, my fury unassuageable. The tears coursed down my cheeks. ‘Why couldn’t seamen have enough sense to stay ashore?’ I raged inwardly. Most of them had skills which would have given them protected jobs in war factories. On the other hand, Harry had said that, if he had come ashore, he would have been called up, sooner or later, for the Army or the Navy; he might just as well remain a merchant seaman, and earn better wages.
Based on my utter frustration, a dull anger at Harry surged in me. He was old enough not to be amongst the first to be conscripted. We could have been married by now and had some happiness together; I could have been carrying his much desired baby. The fool! The stupid idiot, to go and get himself killed! I was terribly, unreasonably furious at him.
In those wild moments, I gave no thought to the fact that unless freighters went to sea, to carry on the country’s trade, we would soon starve. I also forgot that, though Harry often complained about the conditions under which seamen lived aboard ship, basically he enjoyed going to sea; like everyone else, he hoped the war would soon be over. Few civilians knew enough of the true situation to realise that it was bound to drag on for years. Wars are very easily started; the problem is in bringing them to a close.
Now Harry was gone, and I had not the faintest idea what to do, as I struggled to help women equally distressed. My mind refused to concentrate; my body longed for rest, preferably eternal rest. Normally I was always hungry; now I sometimes found it difficult to eat.
Even Mother noticed my unusual dullness and told me to stop looking so sulky. ‘Laugh and the world laughs with you,’ she would say, so truly, ‘Cry, and you cry alone.’
‘It’s easier for her,’ I would think sullenly. ‘She’s doing quite nicely now.’ I forgot that she had been through an earlier war, a war which had been in many ways much worse.
‘Why aren’t you going dancing?’ Fiona asked.
I looked at her blankly for a moment, and then replied, ‘I’m too tired – the office is so busy.’
I don’t think that Father noticed anything much. He tended to live a life of his own amongst his friends from the office; Mother never accompanied him either to the public houses or to the concerts and plays to which he went. Sometimes he would inquire of Tony or Brian what they were doing in their spare time. Not infrequently, he had a tremendous row with Mother, usually on the subject of money.
He may possibly have noticed that, at that time, I was not quarrelling much with Mother, and consequently the house was quieter. I was too exhausted to face her verbal barbs, and no matter what she did, I accepted it and did my best to cope with the consequences.
On the Saturday on which I had exclaimed so explosively in the office about the lunacy of the war, I worked all day, and arrived home just as Mother was putting on her retrimmed, turban-type hat before going to the cinema. She was peeking at herself in the broken piece of mirror on the mantelpiece. It was still the only mirror in the house and was consequently very precious. During the war, mirrors were hard to obtain.
She nodded to me, buckled up the belt of her leather overcoat and picked up her handbag. ‘Back at eleven,’ she threw over her shoulder, as she went through the back door.
As I took off my own coat, I listened to the click-click of her high-heeled shoes on the stone flags of the back alley. I remembered how, as a child, I would lie in bed after Edith, our nanny, had tucked me up, every limb tensed, eyes screwed tight in case those clicking heels came upstairs. Nothing made her crosser than to find that Alan and I had failed to go to sleep promptly at six o’clock. An extremely nervous child, I was afraid of the dark, afraid of the flickering shadows made by the candle which Edith always left on the dresser, but, most of all, I was afraid of my stormy mother.
While I put together a meal for myself, Father leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. It was a habit he had acquired after a heart attack which he had suffered at the age of thirty-three. Now, he was dozing while he waited for the arrival of his friend, Tom, a school teacher, still in his late twenties. Before Tom had gone to attend a Teachers’ Training College, he had worked in Father’s office, and, despite the difference in age, they had interests in common, including Father’s long-standing study of French history; they also argued about politics by the hour.
I knew that they would go to town, to drink in The Vines in Lime Street and in other public houses. Ye Hole in Ye Wall was another of their favourite haunts. Once Tom took Father to Ye Cracke in Rice Street, and subsequently, if Father was alone, he always went there. It had a tiny parlour with a transom labelled The War Office over its entrance. Men used to sit there and refight the Boer War, and no doubt Father refought the First World War in the same place. He really enjoyed exploring the many quaint taverns in Liverpool. He would come in about eleven o’clock, gravely drunk, and proceed, with care, upstairs to bed, to sleep it off in time for his Sunday morning pint at nearby Peter’s, another of his favourite public houses.
Father woke up from his nap, and sat cracking his fingers for some minutes. He looked up at me. I was seated at the table, a sheet of cheap writing paper in front of me.
‘Are you not going to a dance?’ he asked.
‘No. I thought I’d write to Alan. He must be having a terrible time at Biggin Hill; it’s been bombed like anything.’
Father nodded agreement. Though he could write well and amusingly, he rarely wrote to any of his children while they were away, and I think that in many other houses this task was left to the womenfolk.
‘He’s ground staff; he should be able to take cover,’ Father said heavily.
I wondered at Father’s indifference to the danger his sons were in while they were in the Services. Perhaps, after the horrors of trench warfare in the First World War, bombing, aerial combat and the dangers at sea seemed petty in comparison.
Mother had heatedly forbidden me to write to or visit our little evacuees while they were away. ‘You’ll do nothing but upset them,’ she had accused me.
Despite my protests, she was so vehement that I never did write.
Alan was my old and trusted friend, as well as my brother, and she knew better than to come between us. I wrote to him as often as I could. He did not always reply, for reasons which were painfully obvious from the headlines in the newspapers. The Battle of Britain was in scarifying flood. His base, Biggin Hill, was an airfield of crucial strategical importance and a frequent target of the Luftwaffe. He had continued to be trained as ground crew, had been promoted to Leading Aircraftsman, and did not normally fly. Our inadequate number of Spitfires and Hurricanes had, however, at all costs, to be kept in the air, and boys like him worked like devils to do it; at night he often slept under the aircraft on which he had been working, because time was so precious.
In the gorgeous summer of 1939, he went away a gangling youth. When we opened the door to him on his first leave in January, 1940, it was as if a young giant stood on our doorstep. He seemed to have grown a foot in height, his shoulders had broadened, and his face was that of a man. Though thin, he was healthier than I had ever seen him.
As we sat around our frugal fire, he told us that he had done six months of square-bashing, drilling very much as if he had been in the Army; then he had gone for further training in the maintenance of aircraft.
On his more recent leave, he had divulged, ‘Some of the crates we have to deal with look more like colanders than aircraft when they land. And we have to get them back up again within hours.’
‘And the crews?’ I asked.
‘We’re losing an awful lot,’ he replied, his face strained and sad.
I had guessed at the losses; we were getting Air Force families in the office, as well as those of seamen. Tears welled at the back of my eyes.
During his leaves, we gave all his clothing, which was usually soaked with oil, a thorough wash, and Mother fed him with everything she could cajole out of arrogant shopkeepers. He brought his own ration card, but it was inadequate, and, as well, we gave him our own rations of cheese, bacon and meat.
He seemed happy to be at home, and yet, by the end of the week, it was always apparent that he would be glad to return to his RAF station. Though war is horrifying, it brings excitement and drama into dull lives. As yet, he was only a Leading Aircraftsman, hardly trained, but his uniform gave him a certain prestige; and he always performed at his best when facing a high level of stress.
So, seated at the scratched, living-room table, I tried to forget my own pain and to put myself in his position. I wrote as cheerfully as I could about the neighbourhood, as yet little damaged by bombs. I told him about Nickie, our tan and white mongrel, who knew the sound of the air-raid warning and the all clear, and came and went, without any direction from us, to his own private air-raid shelter, which he had established in a little cupboard by the side of the fireplace.
My second brother, Brian, had brought the animal home, some years before. A publican had thrown it out of the door of his public house, and the tiny whimpering puppy had landed at Brian’s feet. Dreadfully upset at its obvious hunger, Brian brought it home to a house where hunger was endemic; yet we were unanimous in adopting it, and it shared our meagre meals and learned to eat anything. Faithful and intensely loving, it lay on my feet as I wrote.
I did not mention in my letters the nightly air raids we were enduring; they seemed small in comparison with the battles that the Air Force were fighting.
On the 30th and the 31st August, Biggin Hill received two dreadful poundings which nearly put it out of action. Planes were damaged on the ground, as well as in the air, and there were numerous casualties.
Alan, not yet twenty and with less than a year’s full-time experience, had, like all the other youngsters there, to cope with repairs that would in normal times have called for skilled engineers and mechanics. Above their heads, pilots who were no older, fought to break up the waves of German bombers and Messerschmitt fighters, as Goering tried to wreck the Royal Air Force, and thus open up Britain to the invasion armies then gathering in French ports.
The fall of France had been devastating for Britain. The German Air Force was now operating from French airfields just across the English Channel. Based in French ports, the U-boats could hunt the eastern Atlantic to their hearts’ content. As I wrote, I realised, with a pang, that it was probably one of those very U-boats from France which had caught Harry’s ship. I knew that Alan, too, was now in deadly peril; but letters must be optimistic.
Optimistic? Most of Britain was in a state of quiet despair. The British Army had been thrown out of Norway. Our men had been pushed out of France, though, to console us, the saga of the rescue from Dunkirk of the remnants of our army was on everyone’s lips – once or twice, I heard of men who had arrived on their mothers’ doorsteps, filthy, bloody, ragged and exhausted, rifle still in hand, having come straight home after landing; a few of them never went back – protected by their families, they simply deserted.
Now London was being bombed unmercifully, and there was a steady trickle of Londoners fleeing the capital. Some came to Liverpool, only to be caught in the lesser, though still frightening, raids on our city.
Almost everyone suffered nightmares at the thought of a German invasion, and superhuman efforts were made by the Home Guard and civilians to be ready for it. So that the Germans would not be able to find their way, signposts were uprooted and names of railway stations painted over. Nobody seemed to realise that a professional soldier would, in thirty seconds, make any hapless civilian he came upon say exactly where he was. All that happened was that, throughout the war, people got lost like pennies running down a sewer drain. Fortunately the Air Force did not need sign posts to know where it was; otherwise, they might have got lost, too, and the war would have had a different ending. The Army was not so fortunate, and many times, during my long walks in the Wirral, I directed lost, khaki-clad lorry drivers. Once I came upon a stranded tank, its flustered crew kneeling over a map at the roadside. They not only wanted to know where they were but where they could get a cup of tea!
There was a rap on the front door, and Father got up to let in his friend, Tom.
He came into the living-room and stood uneasily fingering his trilby hat, while Father put on his overcoat.
‘Good evening, Helen.’
I smiled up at him rather shyly. I did not like him, because I felt he was responsible for Father’s drinking so much. This was not fair, because Father had always drunk quite heavily, perhaps to soothe his shattered nerves when he returned from the First World War, a shell-shocked neurasthenic.
Tom was a big, heavily built man, a little under thirty years of age, extremely dark, his well-shaven chin still almost black from a threatening fresh growth.
He said to Father, ‘I got my call-up papers this morning.’ He ran the brim of his hat nervously through his fingers.
Father stopped buttoning up his coat. ‘Well, I’m blessed! Army?’
Tom did not look as if he regarded it as a blessing. ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Have to report next week.’
‘Ah, well, I suppose it was bound to come. At least you’re single. No family to worry about.’
‘Mother’s very upset.’
‘I’m sure she must be.’ Father sighed, as he picked up his hat. ‘I shall miss you very much.’
Tom half-smiled. ‘Thanks. Are you ready?’
They both said goodbye to me, and left me to my letter. I could hear Avril laughing in the back yard, as she played a game of ball against the house wall, with another little girl. She did not laugh often enough, I thought.
Nickie put his nose on my knee and I patted him absently. Apart from the disintegration of my personal life, the further world around me was changing fast. The war kept nibbling at unexpected aspects of life. Men like Tom were being whisked away, and women like his widowed mother suddenly had to face a society which did not care much what happened to them, a society from which fathers, husbands and sons had given them a good deal of protection.
I tried not to think about my own unhappy situation, but the fact that I did not have the money for a stamp for Alan’s letter reminded me forcibly of my dire financial straits.
What should I do? What could I do when I had so little formal education?
I had recently been for two interviews for secretarial jobs. I was turned down immediately it was obvious that I had hardly been to day school at all. My experience in a charitable organisation did not, I discovered, rank very high. Charities were, in the minds of head clerks interviewing me, run by bumbling amateurs, do-gooders, cranks, a lot of old women. Humbled by the sharp tongues, I had thanked the gentlemen for their time, and had gone home.
Six (#ulink_4cecb248-0c72-5f2c-9b37-9a40e4fa4777)
On 7th September, 1940, London suffered a dreadful bombing; it went on day and night, until the news was that the city was on fire from end to end. As verbal descriptions of it were passed from mouth to mouth and reached the north, we became more and more apprehensive that our turn would be next.
In a hastily scribbled letter, Alan told me that about five hundred bombers were involved, and that the raiders were very well protected by fighter planes.
Londoners hardly had time to recover before the Germans, on 9th September, mounted another huge operation, in which they stoked up the fires still burning from the earlier raid. On the 11th they hit Buckingham Palace, which seemed incredible to many Liverpudlians. Who would dare to hit the palace of a king? The King seemed almost thankful that he himself had been bombed out; he said that he could now look homeless East Enders in the face!
Liverpool was under nearly continuous nightly attack. Alan said he never went to bed for weeks during that period, but neither did we. We nodded on the basement steps, trying to get what rest we could, while the diving planes screeched overhead and the guns in Princes Park roared unceasingly. I learned a lot of German irregular verbs during those long, sleepless nights, in an effort to continue studies that I had pursued through seven years of evening school attendance. Such schools had been closed at the beginning of the war.
Working in the dock area, I could see that it was daily becoming more difficult to keep the port of Liverpool open, and Bootle, lying immediately to the north, was to have, for its size, the doubtful honour of being the most heavily bombed area in the British Isles. The ingenuity of the population in keeping going amid the ruins was a wonder to behold.
The civilian casualty lists began to lengthen. Amongst other places, the lists were posted outside our main office in the city, and I remember so clearly the tired, anxious faces of the people scanning them. But the faces of a few readers had an expression of morbid fascination, eyes glazed, lips parted, as they read – the same expressions that you can, nowadays, see in the faces of onlookers at an accident or a street murder or rape; they just stare and do nothing about it, getting pleasure out of other people’s agonies.
For many of us, life was solely long days at work, work which in the Bootle area consisted largely of trying to continue normal operations amid the wreckage of a factory or office or warehouse or dock. Then a quick rush for home, into the air-raid shelter – if one was available.
As I write, I can feel the burning tiredness of my eyes at that time, and the acute discomfort of the ridged stone basement steps. I can smell the odour from the cellar of damp coal and of cats. I can see the flaking whitewash on the stairway’s walls and a century of cobwebs hanging from its ceiling. It never seemed to occur to any of us to make some cushions to sit on – we had none in the house – or brush down the dirty walls, perhaps rewhitewash them, to cheer the place up. We were singularly unenterprising and simply endured the long, chilly nights.
If we were lucky, we would get an hour in bed, before we had to get up at six o’clock to go to work. I often felt worse after that hour in bed than if I had stayed up; but it did help to reduce the swelling in one’s feet, which came from never putting them up.
Picking one’s way to work in a long procession of pedestrians winding through shattered or blocked streets is a memory which must have remained with many people. It always astonished me how clean and neat we managed to make ourselves, despite interruptions in the water supply and the appalling dust raised by the bombing.
Because I had frequently to walk onwards to Bootle, in the north, I was often amongst the earliest people to set out from the south end of the city. I found myself part of a long line of much older women, their heads wrapped in turbans or kerchiefs, a pair of old shoes under their arm or sticking out of a shopping bag. They plodded along stolidly on swollen feet, their varicose veins lumpy under their woollen stockings. Occasionally, they would shout, ‘Mornin’,’ to each other or stop for a word or two, but for the most part they walked in silence, putting first one cautious foot over scattered chunks of brickwork or electric cables and then lifting the other one over. Sometimes they paused to stare back at some unusual object, like a bath, lying in the road, or to watch the firemen and rescue workers at a particularly large scene of destruction.
They were the cleaning ladies of Liverpool, often leaving homes that had been damaged in the previous night’s raid, to go into the city to make ready the offices and shops before their staff arrived. Increasingly frequently, they found nothing left to clean, only a dangerous mountain of rubble or a burning skeleton of a building. Many businesses, however, had reason to bless them, when the building was still standing, but all the windows and doors had been blown out and stock or papers were scattered everywhere. Imperturbable, they would pick up, shake and sort, until they had the floors fairly clear. Then, if the electricity was still working, they would plug in their vacuum cleaners and assail the all-enveloping dust. If there was no electricity, out came brooms and mops, buckets and floor cloths. To the nervous, excited clerks and shop assistants, when they arrived later, these women were quiet symbols of stability.
As the winter crept in, loss of windows became hard to bear, both at home and at work. The sweeping rain soaked many a home and office, despite people’s efforts to keep it out by nailing old rugs or linoleum over the gaping frames.
Our office in Bootle was no exception. I arrived one morning to find snow thick on the ugly brown linoleum of our second floor office, and a great drift up against my desk.
With icy fingers, I carefully shook the flakes off the precious files on the top of my desk and that of Miss Evans. I lifted the telephone receiver and wiped it. Immediately a sharp voice asked, ‘Number, please?’ I thanked heaven that it was working, as I quickly put the receiver down again.
Using a piece of cardboard, I shovelled the freezing piles out through the glassless windows. But there was still a lot on the floor when the rest of the staff arrived. ‘Be careful not to slip,’ I warned our voluntary helpers, as they tiptoed through the puddles.
As the day progressed, the remainder of the snow melted under tramping feet, leaving the office dank and miserable for days afterwards.
I learned to be very afraid of looters.
On the ground floor of the old house which was our office, we had a room filled with clean, second-hand clothing, for the reclothing of the bombed out. Not only were people sometimes clad only in their nightclothes, when their house came down about their ears, their day clothes could be ruined by such a catastrophe; every stitch in the house could be torn, impregnated by glass or ruined by spouting water-pipes and thick dust. Everything had to be replaced – and Bootle was poor, terribly poor.
One frosty morning, as I hastened up the street, I saw that the office had again lost its windows during the night. My exhausted colleague had succumbed to influenza, and I wondered who I should talk to in the Town Hall in order to get a fast replacement of the glass.
As I unlocked the front door I heard the sound of voices. At first I thought it was the women who ran another charity on the ground floor, but then I realised with alarm that it was men’s voices I was listening to.
The door of the clothing room was ajar, and I ran forward and flung it wide.
A sheet had been spread over the centre of the floor and two men and a woman were tossing clothing on to it.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ I asked indignantly.
One man paused and looked up at me. He was burly, in shirt sleeves, with huge muscular arms covered with black hairs. A docker, I guessed.
‘You get out of here,’ he growled. ‘And mind your own business.’
‘This is my business.’ My voice rose in anger. ‘You don’t belong here. Get out yourself before I call the police.’
The three dropped the clothing they were holding, and looked uncertainly at each other. They did not move.
‘OK. I’ll call them.’ I moved towards the door.
‘Oh, no, you don’t.’ Both men advanced on me, their feet tangling in the pile of clothing lying on the sheet.
I quickly pulled the door shut in their path. The lock was broken, but it might hold them up for a second or two.
Light and fleet, I sped up the stairs, thrust the key into the lock of our office, slipped inside and locked it from the inside. I seized the telephone and thankfully asked the operator, ‘Police, quick.’
After a solid night of bombing, the police number was engaged. The men were pounding on the door and shouting threats. ‘Call the ARP. There are probably more people there,’ I told her.
Though she had been afraid of interrupting a police telephone conversation, the operator unhesitatingly broke into the conversation on the ARP phone, and asked for help.
The men outside must have heard the relief in my voice, as I said, ‘Thanks very much.’ By the time two volunteer wardens pounded up the stairs, the looters had fled.
I was still trembling when the first volunteer member of our staff arrived. I asked her to re-sort and hang up the clothing again, and a little later on, presumably as a result of the wardens’ report, our windows were boarded up by workmen, who arrived unbidden by me.
We had some funds which could be lent to men who had lost their tools in a raid or to replace smashed spectacles, and alleviate similar woes, which were not covered by any governmental source. Ready cash was kept in an old-fashioned cash box, locked in a cupboard overnight. On a bleak November day, while my superior was still sick, I put the cash box out, ready, on the desk, and went to the waiting-room to check the number of people there.
A boy passed the waiting-room door. I presumed he had brought a message from his family; it was a common occurrence, and I went back to deal with him.
The boy had flitted silently out, taking the cash box with him.
I was appalled, and immediately sent for the police.
Two plain clothes men, they sat and warmed themselves by our dim electric fire, and sighed and rubbed their hands.
‘Normally we could pick ’im up as quick as light,’ one of them said. ‘Anybody with that much money to spend sticks out like a sore toe. But now …’ he shrugged, ‘with all the high wages … well.’
The thief was never traced. It was a sore loss to our small organisation.
During my harsh days of mourning, I learned a lot of sad truths. It was a revelation to me that the poor would steal from the poor. Working-class solidarity had been preached to me consistently by Communists working in the main office; the poor stood shoulder to shoulder against the wicked, exploiting upper classes. But, in truth, they prey on each other, with a ruthlessness which was, and still is, hard to swallow. Who has not seen decent city-built housing, built specifically to help those who could not afford much rent, stripped bare as a skeleton, of tiles, fittings, lead for the roof, by people who must have been close neighbours, to know even that the house was not yet occupied?
There is a saying in Liverpool, ‘If it isn’t nailed down, sit on it.’ I now understood what it meant, and I became very careful.
Particularly during the war, great targets for thieves were the gas and electric meters in the cellars of damaged houses in the poorer areas. These meters had to be fed either by pennies or shillings, and their cash boxes were temptingly full of money. In peacetime, they were often rifled at night. A slender youth would lift the manhole in front of the street door, normally used for the delivery of coal directly into the cellar, and slide through the opening. He soon prised open the drawer in which the money was collected, and was then hauled quietly out by an accomplice.
Though our house was not damaged at the time it happened, we twice had our meters broken into, and found, to our sorrow, that we had to pay the gas and electricity companies all over again.
One exasperated old man near us had had to pay a huge gas bill because thieves had robbed his meter. Afterwards, he carefully tied a ship’s bell to the underpart of the manhole cover.
One early morning, as I was washing myself in the kitchen, I heard the sonorous ding-dong of the bell, and about half a minute later, shrieks and curses in the street. The old man had caught a youth and was giving him a sound beating with a broomstick, a far more effective punishment than a lecture from a magistrate.
Seven (#ulink_20f2bc02-b06d-5061-b7fe-e632986b6240)
It was October, and nearly five months since I had bid Harry a hasty goodbye, when he embarked on his last voyage. I still felt very forlorn and terribly alone, despite a large family. I had spent this Saturday afternoon walking over to see the pawnbroker, to retrieve a cotton-wrapped bundle containing two of my dresses, a skirt and cardigan, which Mother had pawned. My return journey took me past the house in which we had rented two freezing attic rooms, when we first came to Liverpool.
Seated on the stone steps which led down from the pavement to her basement home was Mrs Hicks. Bundled up in a series of woollen cardigans, she was enjoying the late October sunshine.
She was an old friend, and when she saw me, she got up from the steps and dusted her black skirt with her hands.
‘’Allo, luv,’ she greeted me in surprise. ‘’Ow are yer? Come in. Haven’t seen you in ages.’ She pulled open the cast-iron gate which protected the steps.
I smiled at her and carefully eased myself past the gate and on to the narrow steps, to follow her down and through the heavy door under the sweep of steps that led up to the main entrance of the house.
The basement rooms in which she lived had originally been the kitchens of the house. Thick, vertical iron bars still guarded the windows, and the interior still smelled of damp and much scrubbing with pine disinfectant.
The sun did not penetrate her home, and in the gloom, she beamed at me, every wrinkle and crease of her face suggesting battles won or lost, patience learned. She had been very kind to all of us in the bitter days when, up in the attic, we had nearly starved.
Brian had been her particular friend, and she asked after him, as she shut the outer door. I told her he was well and had work.
‘Sit down, now. We’ll have a cuppa tea. See, the kettle’s on the boil,’ and she pointed to an iron kettle on the hob, belching steam like a railway train. ‘And how’ve you bin, me duck?’
While I sat down by the fire and put my bundle on the floor, she moved swiftly round the room on tiny booted feet, while she collected the tea things and put them on a table beside me.
‘I’m all right,’ I lied. ‘And how are you? It’s lovely to see you again.’
‘Och, me? Never nuthin’ the matter with me. And me hubbie’s a lot better, now he’s workin’.’
Mr Hicks, I learned, had become a timekeeper at a new factory in Speke, and Mrs Hicks said that, after so many years of unemployment, it felt strangely nice to have regular wages coming in, although it meant a long bicycle ride for him each day.
I congratulated her. Provided they were not bombed out, people like Mr and Mrs Hicks benefited greatly by the war.
Mrs Hicks finally came to rest in the easy chair opposite me, and, as we sat knee to knee, she stirred her mug of tea vigorously, and remarked, ‘You don’t look at all well, luv. Has your throat bin botherin’ you again?’
‘No, Mrs Hicks.’ My throat was husky, but not with the tonsillitis which plagued me from time to time. I put my mug down on the little table, put my head down on my knee and burst into tears.
In a second I was pressed to Mrs Hicks’ pillowy chest. ‘Now, now, dear.’ She stroked my hair, which I was again growing because I had no money for hairdressers. Then she turned my face up to her. ‘What’s to do? Has your Mam been at you agen?’
No love had been lost between Mother and Mrs Hicks; she must have heard Mother raging at me many a time.
‘No, Mrs Hicks. It’s not that.’
Gradually she wormed out of me my loss of Harry, and I said tearfully, ‘I don’t know what to do, Mrs Hicks. I just don’t.’
‘You’re not expecting, are you, luv?’
Mrs Hicks was a most practical woman, and I had to smile at her through my tears.
‘No, I’m not. We – we agreed we would wait. But I wish I was. I’d have something to live for, then.’
‘Nay. It’s better as it is – you’ll see that later on. And him bein’ an older fella, he sowed his wild oats years ago, I’ll be bound. He knew what he was about – he must’ve really loved you.’
‘He was awfully good. He didn’t want me to be left single, with a child, like so many.’ Fresh tears burst from me.
She let me cry, and it did me good. The tea went cold, but when I gently loosed myself from her arms and leaned back in my chair, full of apologies for being such a badly behaved guest, she wiped my face with a corner of her apron, and then made me sit quietly while she made a fresh, black brew.
‘I don’t blame you for not telling your Mam; hard case, she is, if you’ll forgive me for sayin’ so. Will you tell her now?’
‘I don’t think so, Mrs Hicks. It’s past now.’ I sipped my new cup of tea gratefully. ‘You know, she’d dissect the whole thing and be so disparaging – mostly about his being a seaman. You know her.’
‘Humph. What’s wrong with goin’ to sea?’
The question was rhetorical; I did not have to explain my mother’s snobbery to Mrs Hicks; she had suffered from it herself often enough.
‘Have you bin to see his mother?’
I had already told her how I had met Mrs O’Dwyer when the lady came to my office to consult the Society for which I worked about claiming a pension. Now I added, ‘She seemed so hard and bitter, Mrs Hicks. Harry said she never forgave him for leaving the priesthood; and yet, there she was, trying to benefit from his death. Frankly, it made me feel sick.’
The tears welled again.
‘Aye, dear, dear. What you need is a body and a good wake. Gives you a chance to cry yer head off.’ She sighed. ‘There’s lots like you, luv, and all they can do is light a candle.’
I agreed wanly, and often, in later years, when I saw forests of candles twinkling before bejewelled Madonnas, I thought of all of us who did not have the privilege of burying our dead.
I said, depressedly, that I must go home, and she rose and put her arm round me as I walked across the room. ‘Now, you come and see me again – anytime you like. And I won’t say a word, if I see your Mam. I won’t say nuthin’ to nobody, if it comes to that.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Hicks.’ I put my arms round her and kissed her.
I went to see her two or three times. Then I lost touch with her when, on the sudden death of her landlady, the house was sold, and she had to move. Nobody seemed to know or care where she had gone. The new owner of the house simply shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Half the world’s on the move.’ When I stopped the postman on his round, to inquire if he had a forwarding address, he remembered the old lady, but he nodded his head negatively. ‘They didn’t have no letters to speak of. She couldn’t read, you know. Nice old girl, she was; let me shelter in her hall, once, when it were raining.’
Eight (#ulink_6150d3d6-412c-56f9-9385-eab0a8faa6cd)
Being able to talk frankly to Mrs Hicks during several visits helped me immeasurably. She encouraged me to cry and talk as much as I wanted, and she never used the platitudes that come so readily to the lips of those trying to comfort the bereaved. Illiterate she might be, but she understood people very well, and I began to accept that I really had to pick up my life again and go on living.
Everyone in Liverpool needed as much strength as they could muster. That autumn, we endured over fifty consecutive nights of air raids. Brian, Tony, Avril and little Edward looked washed out and old, because of fear and lack of sleep. They never complained, however, and the three younger ones went to school daily, no matter how late they had had to sit up. Fiona was rarely at home during these raids; she continued her social life as if the bombings never occurred. She would return home after the raid was over, with stories of playing cards in hotel shelters or eating in a restaurant while the lights dipped from time to time, as the building rocked.
We worried when Brian was on duty during a raid. The more intense the attack, the more likely that telephone wires would be brought down, and the more messages he would have to carry through the pandemonium of the streets. A cyclist has not even the protection of a vehicle roof over his head; and, for once, Mother and I were united in our worries. He would turn up, however, soon after the all clear had sounded, covered with dust, eyes bloodshot, triumphant and cheerful, after having helped the police and wardens dig out victims.
After one particularly heavy raid, he breezed in rather later than usual, saying casually to our horrified mother, ‘Sorry I’m late. We had to find the heads.’
Without the production of the head of a victim, a person could not immediately be pronounced dead – arms, legs, even torsos, did not count, and this caused boundless difficulties to many families. So, quite phlegmatically, seventeen-year-old Brian had been hunting heads at the site of a bad incident.
I wondered if the highly strung, imaginative little boy had really grown into an iron-nerved man, or whether he had just learned, of a necessity, to live with his fears. In any case, his experience as a police messenger must have helped to prepare him for the greater horrors he saw later in the Royal Navy. He never lost his compassion, though; the small boy who took pity on a whining puppy and brought it home grew into an immensely understanding man.
Sometimes I was myself caught in a raid, while still at the office or when walking home; once or twice, when the siren sounded, I was at a dance with my friend, Sylvia Poole.
I had known Sylvia for a number of years. She had a lively mind and we enjoyed discussing topics of the day. I was interested in the forces that shaped history, and in individuals, like Churchill and Hitler, who seemed to be born at a pivotal moment in time. Did they shape our history or had our history shaped them? Ideas about the economic forces surging beneath the surface of the news turned my attention to appropriate books and newspapers, as did the plight of European Jews.
I knew more than most people about the dreadful situation of European Jews, because since 1933 I had seen a steady stream of refugees go through our office, and each of them had his own shocking story. When I put the individual stories together and saw the general trend of them, I was both horrified and terrified.
After the war, when I talked to demobilised friends who had served in the army of occupation in Germany, men and women who had seen Belsen and other death camps, I knew that even my worst imaginings had under-estimated what had happened. I had been taught that the Germans were the best educated, most advanced people in Europe; yet they had condoned genocide.
Sylvia and I never discussed our personal affairs. Looking back, I do not really know why not. Girls are supposed to giggle and confide in each other. I never did. Sylvia was precious to me because of the way we hammered out ideas.
Sometimes, during that hard winter of 1940–41, I accepted a date with the acquaintance of Harry’s who had escorted me home on the day that the Dance Club closed. I was glad of company, and had no thought of anything more than that; indeed, I found it hard to think beyond the day I was living. He was a pleasant, shy young man in a reserved occupation, but when he wished to deepen the friendship and began to speak of a possible engagement, I sent him on his way. Though I liked him, I could not love him.
There was an inner core of me which was extremely fastidious. Though I was a passionate young woman, I lived in a time when many girls would not settle for less than marriage; and for me marriage had to have real love as one of the ingredients.
As a good dancer, I had the opportunity of meeting throughout the war a great number of young men. Far from the roots of home, men who normally would not have been seen dead in a ballroom, sought company on the dance floor. Friendships and romances flourished, but for me the chemistry was never right. And I further longed to meet the kind of cultivated man who visited our home in the long-ago days before Father went bankrupt. Though Harry had fought his way up from nothing, he had had the company of scholarly men during his youth; he knew how to study and he read widely. His mother might be a most unreasonable woman, but I think it must have been she who taught him good manners, and this, added to a naturally kindly character, made him a very pleasant person to be with.
On 28th October, the Empress of Britain was sunk, and on 5th November, the armed merchant cruiser HMSJervis went down while escorting an Atlantic convoy. Despite brave efforts by the Jervis to defend the convoy, five other boats joined her at the bottom. In December, U-boats off the coast of Portugal played havoc with several convoys. The sorrow caused was reflected in our office, the names of ships whispered by weeping women becoming a monotonous litany.
We became expert at guiding womenfolk, many of whom could hardly read or write, through the voluminous red tape in which they became enmeshed when they applied for pensions. Some women took a double blow; they lost a husband or son to the German navy and, during the air raids, they lost their home, and, sometimes children, as well. It became a relief to deal with more ordinary problems, like a cripple’s special needs or a bastardy case.
Increasingly, I sought diversion during the long hours spent seated on the cellar steps, when there was nothing to do except consider how sleepy and how miserable one was. So I continued to study my German grammar book, until the humour of it struck me; then I laughed and put it away – I never wanted to speak to a German again. Crouched on the steps with a lap full of cotton reels and darning wool, I sewed and mended. Whenever I had a few pence, I went with Sylvia to a new dance club or to the theatre, regardless of the heaviness of the raid.
I danced mechanically with anyone who asked me, glad when the man was a good dancer, so that I could give myself over to the rhythm of the music and find some relaxation. While exchanging the usual pleasantries, I would, over my partner’s shoulder watch the door, look at the other men on the floor, always hoping, half believing that Harry would be there. Outside, I searched the faces in the bus queues and in any group of seamen walking in the town; wherever there were men, my eyes hunted automatically. I began to understand Mrs Hicks’ remarks about the need for wakes and funerals, to be convinced of death.
The owner of the new dance club which Sylvia and I attended converted his lessons into a permanent wake. He had lost his wife in the blitz and had had her body cremated; her ashes were put into a fine vase, and the vase was set on a special shelf in the ballroom. The idea was so macabre that we ceased to go there and, in fact, neither of us ever went to a dancing class again.
Father asked me to write periodically to his friend, Tom, now training with the infantry. To please him, I did write for some considerable time, giving news of Liverpool and, since he was a teacher, sending press cuttings about the plight of teachers, which I thought might interest him. Perhaps Father hoped for a match between us, but I found him as dull as a January day. His replies were pedantic and grammatically perfect; I used to scribble Ten out of Ten on the bottom of them.
Father was very disconsolate at losing his drinking companion. He used to go alone to the concert halls and public houses they had previously frequented, but, since he was a sociable man, he probably found people to talk to.
He was on friendly terms with his colleagues at the office, but they had other interests. In their spare time, many of them were air-raid wardens, and some joined the Home Guard when it was set up. Most took the Government’s instruction to Dig for Victory very seriously and, according to Father, raised mammoth crops of vegetables on what had once been their lawns. We had only a brick-lined yard, so gardening was not possible, but, in any case, Father’s bad heart precluded his doing much heavy work.
There is no doubt that during those years he was often very lonely. Mother and he were never the good companions that older people can become. At best, they carped at each other continually.
Father was a clerk in the Liverpool Corporation. He was transferred by them to work in the administration of Rest Centres for the bombed out and of warehouses used to store the possessions of the dead or of the temporarily homeless.
When members of the Polish Army straggled into Liverpool, he was sent for a few days to help to take the history of the ragged, disillusioned men. Some who could not speak English could speak Russian, and the language he had learned under such painful circumstances in the Russian campaign in the First World War was suddenly put to use. He enjoyed the work, but he would come home to sit in his ancient easy chair, eyes closed, hands trembling with fatigue. Like all of us, he lacked sleep; and I think, also, that the company of soldiers in such adversity reminded him of his own anguish in the Great War.
The constant barrage of the guns during the raids also wore him down. I could see his face grow steadily more grim, as the nights progressed. He would sit very quietly on the cellar steps, while overhead the racket was continuous. Occasionally, however, he would bury his face in his hands, and once he muttered that it was exactly like being on a battlefield with a jammed machine gun, unable to return the fire.
There was little that I could do for him, except let him talk to me whenever he felt like it. He enjoyed telling his war stories over and over again. They were excellent vignettes of the lives of primitive Russian peasants, who had rescued him from certain death when he lay half frozen amid his dead comrades in the bloodied snow. He told me of sharp encounters with the enemy, in pathless forests, where his greatest fear always was that he would get lost. Many of his wounded friends died, when a shed made into an improvised hospital was set alight by the enemy during a raid. He still shuddered at the memory. ‘It was a hopeless inferno in seconds,’ he said. He spoke with praise of a Japanese unit which, at one point, served with him, of the utter savagery of the Russian revolution, of the people of Archangel dying of starvation and the smallpox. He was himself immune to smallpox, because his mother had caught it while she was pregnant with him; so he helped to nurse and to bury the victims of the disease. He had innumerable scarifying tales of the personal agony of war and revolution, so often forgotten amid cold statistics. He taught me that revolution rarely solves anything.
When the noise of the bombs was very bad, he would give a shaky laugh and say, ‘And we thought we had finished with war!’
‘It will be over in a few months,’ I would say to him. He would smile faintly – he knew better – from experience.
Once he said with great bitterness, ‘It will never be over – it will go on and on.’
How right he was. The war died down amid exhausted European populations, only to blaze up in Korea, Vietnam, India, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Egypt and Israel, while embers smoulder and threaten Africa and strange outposts, like the Falklands.
In October, Sylvia celebrated her twenty-first birthday with a party, one of the first grown-up parties I attended.
Her plump, patient, little mother must have collected bits of rationed food over many months. Someone had contributed a bottle of blackcurrant wine of surprising strength; unaccustomed to alcohol, we all became quite merry.
On my twenty-first birthday, the previous June, Mother’s employer, a baker, hearing that I was approaching my majority, baked for me an exquisite little birthday cake. It was a rich fruit cake, which he had decorated himself with delicate flower wreaths of white royal icing. It was illegal to make such an extravagant cake, and he must have taken the ingredients from some illicit hoard stored away at the beginning of the war. He presented the cake to Mother as a gift.
The family had joined together to buy me a leather shopping bag, popularly known as a zipper bag. In these bags, carried by almost all business girls, were transported makeup, lunch, a change of shoes and stockings for wet days, a novel to read on the bus or train, and innumerable oddments like safety pins and aspirins. I was delighted by the gift; they must have hunted through most of Liverpool’s many shops to find such an article.
I arrived home from work, that evening, about eight o’clock. The family had given up hope of my arrival, assuming that I was working late and was having a snack in the office. They ate the sandwiches and scones which Mother had kindly provided to celebrate the day. The cake, however, was kept untouched.
I remember being moved almost to tears at the effort that had been made to find me a gift and a cake. I immediately cut the cake and passed it round the family. It was strange to eat cake for my birthday – but no dinner!
Nine (#ulink_6874bf99-4432-5820-bc93-19fa833c0d09)
Small financial problems which, looking back, seem laughable, presented me with dreadful headaches.
In the early part of the autumn I forgot to switch off the cloakroom light before leaving the office.
The room had no blackout curtaining, and the light blazed forth across the old, walled garden at the back of the building. Our outraged warden reported it, and the Society was fined seven shillings by the local magistrate. This amount was deducted from my wages at the rate of one shilling a week, and for nearly two months my already penurious state was reduced to near disaster; I remember being torn between a decision to walk to work and thus wear out my precious stockings, which would have to be replaced, or nurse my current pair of stockings along, by hooking up the ladders with a fine crochet hook and darning and redarning, so that I could ride on the tram to work. It was a very long seven weeks.
It always astonished me that Mother never got fined for similar offences. The warden frequently remonstrated with her about the lack of curtaining over our back bedroom windows and the consequent glow of candlelight through them, a glow which in his opinion would guide the Luftwaffe straight to us. Perhaps because he was a neighbour he was loath to report her. Towards the end of the war, she did buy some second-hand curtains and put them up, but I suspect that she rather enjoyed baiting the unfortunate warden.
It was on a foggy day in late November that, after a heavy raid, I was very tired and decided to travel the whole distance to work by tram. On the first tram I took, to the city centre, the clippie told me that the whole system had been disorganised by the air raid, and that I might get a tram to Bootle more easily from the Pier Head.
At the Pier Head, the Transport Supervisor was about to dispatch a tram to my destination. It was evidently the first tram which would travel along Derby Road that morning, and I heard him tell the driver, ‘The police say the timber yards is burnin’ fierce. I tried to telephone, but the wires must be down ’cos I couldn’t get through, and nobody seems to know what’s really happening. So you mayn’t get to the end of the line.’ He paused uncertainly, and then ordered, ‘Go as far as you can. There’s no end of people as will be going on and off shift at the other end.’
The driver, his face almost purple from constant exposure to the elements, wound a huge scarf round his neck and climbed wearily on to his unprotected platform. He tinged his bell irritably with the toe of his boot, and his clippie threw away her cigarette end and skipped quickly on to the back platform. I followed her more sedately. The rush hour had not yet begun, so I was the only passenger.
The clippie was a gaunt woman in a navy-blue uniform, too short at the sleeves. She collected my fare and handed me a ticket. Then she closed the door of the passenger compartment and sat down opposite to me, to have a cosy gossip on the hardships and dangers of being a tram conductor.
‘I’m that scared sometimes at night, with no proper lights, like, and the pubs let out. It’s all right if they’re merry drunk, if you know what I mean; the worst that’ll happen is that they’ll be sick all over the floor. But if they’re bevvied and ready for a fight, or if they start to slobber all over you, well! And me man away in the Army, an’ all.’
I sympathised with her. I wondered if I could do her job. Cope with drunks, and the impertinence she would endure as a woman doing a man’s job? I doubted it.
While, out of the corner of her eye, she watched the scenes of destruction that we passed, she smoked incessantly. ‘Lot of fires,’ she remarked, and then added with a sigh, ‘I’d rather be in an air raid, at times, than face some of the men as gets on this tram.’ With the heel of her flat, laced-up shoe, she ground a cigarette end into the floor.
‘Couldn’t you get a better job?’
‘Well, it’s handy, ’cos I do split shifts, and in between I can get home to see to the kids. And the pay’s good – for a woman.’
When the tram slowed, at a point where men were still hastily clearing pieces of debris from the tram lines, she got up abruptly.
‘I’ll ask Hisself how he’s doin’,’ she said, and strode forward between the bench seats, which faced each other the length of the vehicle. She shoved back the door which connected with the driver’s platform, and smoke rolled into the passenger compartment; the poor driver must have been nearly blinded by it. I hastily pulled out a cotton handkerchief and dabbed my smarting eyes. In seconds, I could barely see anything myself.
The tram stopped.
Shadowy firemen and wardens bobbed round the vehicle and shouted up to the driver. As the result of their encouragement, the driver edged the tram forward, tinging his strident bell persistently.
As we sailed slowly past, a warden called up to him, ‘The overhead wires is still up all the way. It’s a bloody miracle.’
The tram stopped again. From behind the hanky pressed to my nose, I peeped at the stout back of the driver. A warden had swung himself up on to the platform beside him. The warden’s face was black with soot, his eyes and mouth a startling red.
‘I can’t see a thing in front of me,’ the driver protested.
‘I’ll get down and walk in front of you,’ the warden offered. ‘I’ll watch for anything on the line.’ He hopped down on to the road again, and shouted up to the driver, ‘Now, mind you listen hard for me – and don’t, for God’s sake, run me down. You can see better than you think – it’s more steam than smoke now.’ Then his voice came more faintly from the cloud of vapour. ‘Couple o’ hundred yards and you’ll see all right. And they’ll have this bit o’ trouble damped down by the time you come back.’
Once again the tram eased forward. It seemed a very long two hundred yards.
When visibility improved, the warden left us with a brisk wave of his gloved hand, and the driver accelerated. Timber flamed and crackled, as we passed the yards, and sometimes waves of heat swept through the open door at the front.
I should have been frightened, and yet I was not.
I was let down at the stop nearest to the office, and, as I walked up the side road to the dilapidated building, I was thankful to find that the immediate area appeared undamaged. It was extremely quiet, and I met no voluntary workers hurrying up the road at the same time. These middle-aged ladies were normally extremely conscientious about being prompt, and I put down their absence to the transport system being disorganised by the raid. No clients were leaning against the front door, waiting for me to let them in. Sometimes, however, if the raid had been severe, they would come streaming in from the rest centres later in the morning.
I unlocked.
The postman did his morning round very early, so I emptied the letter box, and slowly climbed the stairs, sifting through the letters as I went.
I unlocked the rooms the organisation occupied and put on the lights. The silence oppressed me. The raid must have been so bad the previous night, that people were not yet able to move around, I decided, or were still having breakfast in the rest centres.
The mail consisted largely of Government circulars, which would have to be studied, so that we could advise our clients of the latest foibles of civil servants, on the subject of servicemen’s debts, rationing, pensions of every kind, and so on. Many civil servants were tucked away in huge mansions or commandeered hotels in different parts of the country, and were in a fair state of confusion themselves; this was reflected in the muddled bureaucratic gobbledygook of their epistles.
After the letters had been scanned and sorted, I wandered round the office and went into the waiting room, to open the only window which had any glass in it. Though the air that rushed in was smoky, it smelled better than the fetid atmosphere of the room, and I leaned out to see if the buildings at the back had been damaged.
Below me, amid the weeds of the brick-walled garden, squatted a solitary soldier. He was bent over, as if taking cover.
I smiled. From the back, he looked like a Home Guard practising guerrilla tactics, and I expected that in a moment I would see one or two more of them sneak over a broken part of the wall, rifles at the ready; retired men or men on night shifts would sometimes get together in the daytime to do this. Like mothers-in-law they were a favourite cartoonists’ joke, but they tried very hard to prepare themselves to face the Germans’ professional invasion troops.
The soldier stood up slowly and signalled with a wave of his arm to someone outside my line of vision. In response, two other soldiers appeared, carrying spades instead of rifles.
The first soldier moved aside. And then I saw the object of their interest.
A dull metal pillar box was resting half on its side, much of it buried in the earth. After circling slowly round it, the men with spades began very gingerly to dig it out.
A bomb disposal squad! And a very large unexploded landmine which, presumably, the first soldier had now defused.
But if it were damaged, it could still explode.
The instinct of self-preservation sent me across the room and down the stairs quicker than the bomb could have blown me. Coatless, hatless, out of the front door I flew into the cold, smoky road.
An unattended army lorry was drawn up by the side gate, presumably waiting to transport the bomb to an open area to be exploded.
In the middle of the road, I paused uncertainly.
An angry shriek came from further up the road. A warden beckoned me wildly. I ran towards him, where he stood behind a rope tied across the street.
He lifted the rope for me to duck underneath it, as if he believed that the rope itself would protect us from the possible blast.
Furiously, he thrust his thin, bespectacled face close to mine. ‘And how did you get down there? When we cordon off a place, it’s cordoned, and you’re not supposed to go there. You might be killed.’ He was genuinely concerned.
Gasping for breath, I muttered, ‘I came into work from the Derby Road side. I didn’t see any barrier. Perhaps the soldiers undid the rope to get their lorry in, and forgot to tie it across the road again. No wonder I didn’t have any clients or staff in the office. I think it’s defused now.’
‘Well, you stay right here, young woman, till they’ve taken it away. It can go off, defused or not defused, if some of its innards is ruptured.’
It is strange how strong the instinct to live is. I stood shivering by the warden for nearly an hour, until we saw the lorry roll slowly down the other end of the road, with its horrid burden in the back.
While I waited, I thought about Coventry, which, on 14th November, had been decimated in one enormous raid. I wondered if we would be the next victims.
Raids did continue, though none as heavy as that which destroyed Coventry. Amid the turmoil that they engendered, the problem of Christmas asserted itself.
We were determined to give the younger children the best possible Christmas. To Mother, it meant squeezing out of a reluctant butcher one of his few turkeys; to me, it meant contriving from nothing a gift for each child; and to all of us, it meant we could get a good sleep sometime during the daytime hours. The Germans, however, had other ideas. On the night of Friday, 20th December, we endured a very heavy air raid, with an even more severe one on the 21st. On the Sunday night, we shared a third intense raid with Manchester.
After the first raid, I went out and stood in the middle of our empty street, while the all clear howled eerily round me. Though there was no sign of damage in the street itself, the sky was suffused by the reflection of fires, and I wondered what would be awaiting me in the office that Saturday morning. Shivering with cold and apprehension, I went back into the house, to snatch a couple of hours of sleep before setting out on my long journey to work; I was thankful that my kind superior at the office had, at last, returned after her long battle with influenza. The raid had lasted ten hours, ten solid hours of bombardment. What a mess there would be for us to clear up. What a tremendous number of ruined lives to try to put together again.
Despite having to take several detours, the city bus and tram service was working very well. We passed scurries of activity where fires still burned, victims were being dug out, and dangerous, teetering walls pulled down. The Adelphi Hotel, the pride of Liverpool, had suffered badly from blast, and my fellow passengers on the tram viewed it with surprised exclamations, as if it should have been exempt from damage.
‘It was a land mine,’ the clippie told us. ‘Fell at the side of the building – in Copperas Hill.’
Copperas Hill was a narrow street of early 19th century houses, some boarded up as uninhabitable, a few used as offices, the rest still lived in by very poor people, who would that morning be a lot poorer – if they were still alive.
Feeling physically and mentally drained, I left the office very late that Saturday evening. The Luftwaffe had already been extremely busy for some hours.
I dithered on the office steps. The roar of flames, the whistle of bombs, seemed concentrated in Bootle and in the north end of Liverpool itself. I would have to pass through the area in order to get home.
Miss Evans had decided to work later, to catch up with her records, and then to sleep in the office. She insisted, however, that I should go home. ‘There isn’t much you can do to help me now – you’ll be safer at home,’ she said.
She was very brave. Looking up at the sky, all too full of shrieking, diving planes, it seemed likely that the office would not survive. Very reluctantly, I left her in the cold, empty building.
I walked up to Stanley Road, to see if, by chance, there was still a tram running to town.
The whole normally busy road was almost deserted, though in the distance I could hear the bells of a fire engine and, as I crossed the street, a van nearly ran me down. I listened for the answering guns in their emplacements in Bootle, but could not hear them. The searchlights were busy, though, flicking like metronomes across the sky.
In the light of flares, fires, tracer bullets and searchlights, it was easy to see. I felt cross; I was not going to be kept from home by any German planes. I began to walk.
When the even explosions of a stick of bombs seemed to be coming very close, I dodged into doorways, pressing myself tightly against whatever door presented itself. Twice I found a public shelter, crowded with people, some singing, some praying, rosaries in hand, and was urged by wardens to remain there. But I was obsessed with the need to get home, and immediately there was a slight pause in the racket, I slipped out and pressed onwards. At several points, the raid passed right overhead at a time when there seemed no place to hide. I went down on my knees in the road and then flattened myself against the kerb, face tucked into the tiny corner of protection that it offered; and listened to hasty footsteps running on the pavement, as others tried to find a refuge, while I eased myself slowly along the gutter. Further down the road, I heard someone cry out in pain and the sound of anxious voices, as a person was struck, presumably by flak. A series of bombs appeared to hit the next street, and I was suddenly glad that I had been faced with a blank wall on my side of the street, and was consequently, sprawled in the gutter; if there had been a house or shop-doorway in which to shelter, I could well have been speared by glass slivers bursting from the win-dows.
On the theory that a moving object was harder to hit than a stationary one, I ran like a frightened alley cat, in the hope of avoiding an incendiary bomb or heavy piece of debris falling on me. Incendiary bombs, though quite small, were deadly if they fell on someone, and flak from our anti-aircraft guns or flying pieces of rubble and glass from bombed buildings, were more of a menace than the chance of being caught directly by an exploding bomb. Another great danger was from falling power lines, still live and spitting like angry dragons.
At the junction of Cazneau Street with Scotland Road, which is the continuation of Stanley Road towards the city, I hesitated. The violence of the raid had momentarily decreased, and the blackout appeared to have taken over again. If I went up Cazneau Street, I could bypass the city centre which was probably under attack. Cazneau Street was, however, a fearsome slum with which I was not familiar, and I feared that once I crossed London Road, a main artery which bisected that particular line of streets, I would get lost. Mind made up, I trotted along Scotland Road. I was shivering with nervous determination to outwit the Luftwaffe and get home safely.
As I neared the city centre, there was more traffic about and more pedestrians; raucous male voices called after me as they glimpsed the outline of a young female. I increased my speed and panted onwards towards the Old Haymarket, a vast open space into which the Mersey tunnel debouched from under the river.
‘I’ll cross William Brown Street, where the Picton Library is, and skirt around the wall of St John’s Garden. It’ll give me a bit of protection,’ I told myself. By doing this I avoided the wide-open spaces of this handsome part of Liverpool and would be less likely to be hit. I would also bypass most of Lime Street, still the main walk for prostitutes in the city, where I had no doubt it would be business as usual, blitz or no blitz; it was not the ladies I feared, but their pimps and hangers-on.
The city was in turmoil, with service vehicles zipping recklessly through the battered streets. There seemed to be a very big fire at the beginning of Dale Street, and behind the buildings past which I ran up to the far end of Lime Street, there was obviously another heavy conflagration, which I afterwards was told was St John’s market burning. Roasted in it were most of the turkeys which Liverpudlians had dreamed of eating on Christmas Day, and to hear the talk in the shopping queues after the holiday, one would imagine that the loss of the turkeys was more deeply mourned than the loss of three hundred and fifty-six men, women and children who died during the three days of the blitz.
As I ran, incendiaries fell like rain, and magnificent St George’s Hall was alight; I was told later that there were hundreds of people sheltering in the cells underneath it, unaware that the building above them was in flames. Though I was aware only of a blizzard of bombs, flak and hazardous litter on the pavements, a short distance away a bomb fell in front of the Court Theatre, and a fire engine, racing to a call, fell into the crater, killing the entire crew of seven; so much for speed in such a situation. I was lucky that I did not fall over something or into something myself.
I felt naked as I left Renshaw Street behind me, and climbed the hill towards Catherine Street. To my right, the Anglican Cathedral was outlined against a rosy sky. It seemed less noisy here, and was totally deserted. The quiet rage, which had sustained me through the city, began to drain, and I was aware of intolerable fatigue.
There were several hospitals at the top of the hill, where cars and ambulances were coming and going steadily. I wondered if I should give up, and take refuge in one of them. But I was very close to home, and hospitals could be hit, too. In fact, during that night the Royal Infirmary and the Mill Road Infirmary were severely damaged.
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