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By the Waters of Liverpool
Helen Forrester
The third best-selling volume in the powerful story of Helen Forrester’s childhood and adolescence in poverty-stricken Liverpool during the 1930s.Helen has managed to achieve a small measure of independence. At seventeen, she has fought and won two bitter battles with her parents, the first for the right to educate herself at evening classes, the second for the right to go out to work.Though her parents are still as financially irresponsible as ever, wasting money while their children lack blankets, let alone proper beds, for Helen the future is brightening. She begins to make friends her own age and to develop some social life outside the home, At twenty, still never knowing the loving kiss of a man, Helen meets Harry, a strong, tall seaman, and things finally start to fall into place…
HELEN FORRESTER
By the Waters of Liverpool
Copyright (#ud889d4e8-30c7-5d5b-9efd-8963e23c4729)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
The News Building
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
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 © Bert Hardy / Getty Images
HarperCollins has made every effort to find copyright holders and obtain permission for the use of copyright material in this book. If any material has been used without the owner’s permission please contact HarperCollins and we will give appropriate in future reprints or editions of this book.
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.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008180935
Ebook Edition © Dec 2016 ISBN: 9780007369300
Version: 2016-11-17
Dedication (#ud889d4e8-30c7-5d5b-9efd-8963e23c4729)
To dear Robert who helped so much
Table of Contents
Cover (#u10458b93-c5bd-50ac-a7ff-1e2400f6dd06)
Title Page (#u9f6f0c96-5d7f-58a4-ad83-10a95fddc41b)
Copyright (#u4b83a5c7-7c2d-5520-a80a-031f30e386fc)
Dedication (#ud7d4ccfb-dc65-55eb-9014-f61f4e3d749b)
Chapter One (#u84ce5ccb-a0e0-5d13-9924-f04d4f6b5f5d)
Chapter Two (#u8d9462e5-db65-595d-82a7-15152bec74f1)
Chapter Three (#u7bdd7723-6aef-5eca-a4cf-94618c4851c0)
Chapter Four (#u415e3e2d-5398-53d0-a6df-c159906873ec)
Chapter Five (#ua277ce1c-1cb2-59eb-9b89-04a3b0d04e94)
Chapter Six (#u860968eb-414b-5947-b5ed-459c962fbdaa)
Chapter Seven (#u5e83690f-1aec-5ee8-b943-03a7017f4719)
Chapter Eight (#u5895fc98-2967-5528-8c7f-c63c99a7c16b)
Chapter Nine (#udd12c233-db44-55f3-85ad-40afc84ae7bc)
Chapter Ten (#ue1ec4204-76d0-5519-904e-404d8d31e39c)
Chapter Eleven (#ue7a28e71-40fd-5aac-968d-7d5cb1c1132a)
Chapter Twelve (#ucad7bdd0-f4c4-5035-9f17-34709a04949f)
Chapter Thirteen (#uac65278a-07cd-5bee-8988-e2d1d286f423)
Chapter Fourteen (#u5b60eaf9-a62b-546a-b2e5-4f72f33b7c2a)
Chapter Fifteen (#ua7595440-a0d7-5869-b3e2-6b95b9cb0c9e)
Chapter Sixteen (#u1b65fcd2-0cb7-56b6-8776-30140fec9532)
Chapter Seventeen (#ub8bb94c9-6875-52d5-9c97-74ae60cdaac4)
Chapter Eighteen (#uad5dfad1-1fdb-5144-b66c-4797af6bb859)
Chapter Nineteen (#u407c7fcd-e9ca-5f51-8eba-11f682b4d2d0)
Chapter Twenty (#u0db836b0-a990-571e-8895-a81d60378214)
Chapter Twenty-One (#ue933eeac-d108-5682-8805-d2484218815b)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#u7ff814fb-8078-5556-8a70-a5d80aeb7b89)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#ue415a51a-d491-537a-a35d-1223792a8666)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#uaa3e9391-4db8-567c-8dfa-ac4694cc669d)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#udda81b89-256b-53b1-995d-0f16b184d090)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#ua383b269-8689-5b19-9a07-98093d2e5452)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#u1630e827-9bac-56f1-a255-13cc01621458)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#u548e0b79-fbea-59de-8539-d3d3b7571e58)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#uf9c583a0-491d-55a4-84a8-6f349d86fad2)
Chapter Thirty (#u59c15d6a-4c7f-5a5b-9b29-cecdd9677a23)
Chapter Thirty-One (#uc752dffa-a4ab-563a-a9d3-cd9029d1535c)
Chapter Thirty-Two (#ud7859c68-65d5-5508-a3b4-4ae89a86f06c)
March 1950 (#uf358a2f4-0ea1-5177-8a50-e2c32eb0d59e)
Footnotes (#u199bf61b-4cb0-584b-a36c-fadf1b1cce61)
Keep Reading … (#u16644b4e-185e-5ef2-b256-71ab3045c8ad)
Read the First Chapter of Lime Street at Two (#u705a5e57-227c-565e-a30a-9492095536a5)
About the Author (#ue74a1e4e-0a11-5b56-9aa7-4df4432962db)
By Helen Forrester (#u101a647c-3ffd-514e-bdf0-53d7336a58b2)
About the Publisher (#ue5a935ec-a36a-5084-a22d-86588c66f0db)
One (#ud889d4e8-30c7-5d5b-9efd-8963e23c4729)
I was seventeen going on eighteen, and I had never been kissed by a man. It was not surprising. Who would want to court the favours of a gaunt, smelly beanpole? I was five feet four inches tall, and that was real height in underfed Liverpool.
As I strode primly along Lime Street, on my way to evening school, the men who hung about the entrances of the cinemas hardly spared me a glance. I was most unflatteringly safe. And this, in a world where women still took it for granted that they would get married, was very depressing. Girls did not look for careers – they worked until they got married. If a woman was not loved and cherished by a man, she must be hopelessly ugly or there must be something else wrong with her.
I tried not to care that no young man had so much as winked at me. I stuck my proud Forrester nose in the air and vowed to make a career for myself as a social worker in the Charity which employed me. Dorothy Parker, the famous American writer, had once remarked that men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses; and I had a pair of too-small horn-rimmed spectacles perched on my nose. There was nobody to suggest to a shy, shortsighted girl that she might occasionally take off the ugly impediment to show the sad, green eyes behind.
‘Perhaps your yellow skin will improve, as you get older,’ my childhood Nanny, Edith, had suggested; and she scrubbed my face harder still with Pear’s Preparing To Be A Beautiful Lady soap. To no purpose. All time and our subsequent poverty had done was to add a revolting array of acne spots, spots that were made worse by the lack of soap, hot water and clean towels at home.
And here was the year 1937 rolling along. Soon I would be eighteen. And nobody, I felt, really cared what happened to me. To my mother I was a trying daughter who brought in a wage each week; to the rest of the family a pair of hands, very useful for cooking and darning socks.
It was seven years since Father had gone suddenly bankrupt, plunging us into a poverty so great that I was frequently surprised that the nine of us had survived it, seven skinny children of whom I was the eldest, and two equally thin parents.
I sighed as I trudged up the hill. Though Mother and Father now both had work, they were very poor managers, and we were still cold and hungry most of the time, surrounded by the unpleasant odour of neglect and poor nutrition.
I handed my small wages to Mother every pay day, except for three shillings and sixpence. This totally inadequate sum was supposed to clothe me, pay for lunches and tram fares, make-up and all the small things a girl at work was expected to have. Mother was bent on making me give up my employment and once again stay at home to keep house, something I dreaded; so she made it as difficult as possible for me to go to work.
I found pupils to coach in shorthand in the evenings, but I earned very little because my free time was extremely limited.
I was doing very well at evening school, I comforted myself. One day I might be promoted and earn enough to live on. My ugly, kind bookkeeping teacher had assured me recently that, if I took one more course, I would be able to become a bookkeeper. She had added that parents were always glad of a girl at home who brought in a wage; it contributed to their comfort in their old age.
She had put into words something I dreaded, something only a husband could save me from. I could be faced with spending the rest of my life maintaining and waiting on two irritable, shiftless, nagging parents, the usual fate of the daughter who did not marry. Because I was plain and shy and frightened of my mother, I knew I could be bullied into being a nobody, a nothing.
Some women with gentle parents found their care a labour of love. Not me. I knew I would be crushed as flat as a shadow. I had already had a spell as housekeeper, from the age of eleven until I was fifteen. It had been a nightmare, looking after six young children and two quarrelling parents. Mother had, before Father’s bankruptcy, never had to care entirely for her children. We had had servants. In fact, I hardly knew her until we were plunged into a slum together. She escaped from her unruly brood by working as a demonstrator in department stores.
In a frantic effort to escape myself, I had at the age of fourteen raged and threatened, as only a fourteen-year-old can, until I got permission to attend evening school, to repair in some part my lack of education.
At fifteen, with the unexpected help of Miss Ferguson, a deaconess at the local church, I had fought another battle to take the job I at present held. Housekeeping was divided between a very angry mother and me.
I called Miss Ferguson my Fairy Godmother, and it was of this devout, cultivated lady that I was thinking, as I kicked a stone up Copperas Hill on the way to evening school. The street was quiet in the fading spring light, the misty air balmy – and I was shivering with pure fright.
Miss Ferguson had laid on my shoulders a fear worse than that of death, the fear of hell, Dante’s hell.
How could she do such a thing? I wondered miserably, with a superstitious shudder. She was my Fairy God-mother.
She had first visited the family in order to recruit my two middle brothers, Brian and Tony, into the church choir. She knew them because all the children attended the church school. She had seen my situation as unpaid maid-of-all-work, and, perhaps to give me an hour or two of rest, she had pressured Mother into allowing me to go to church on Sunday evenings. At first I had no suitable clothes to go in, but once I could look at least neat, I thankfully attended.
We were Protestants, an important point in a city where the division between Protestants and Catholics was bitter and sometimes bloody. Children were aware from the time they could speak which side of the fence they stood on, and the implanted bigotry is to this day not entirely rooted out.
No amount of churchgoing could erase the vaguely erotic dreams which haunted me occasionally, or a terrible sense of empty loneliness. Ignorant, innocent, half-starved, practically friendless, my flowering body was trying to tell me of needs of which I had little notion. Almost all the myriad of novels I had read ended with the hero kissing the heroine for the first time. I had never considered what happened next. I felt a kiss would be the ultimate height of happiness.
But it was churchgoing which was causing my present unhappiness. As I turned into the big, gloomy evening school, which I loved so much, I was trembling with fear. Unable to concentrate on the shorthand teacher’s rapid dictation, my mind was filled with scattered pictures of what had happened the previous Sunday.
Unaware of impending trouble, I had crept out of the back pew in which I normally hid my shabbiness, and battled my way up Princes Avenue through a brisk north-westerly carrying with it a spray of rain.
I was going home to a mother almost unhinged by her fall from considerable affluence, and to a fretful, delicate father, an underpaid, overworked city clerk. Liverpool was awash with the unemployed and the underpaid, and this governed all our lives. To a plain girl hurrying through the dusk, life seemed very hard. There was little physical strength in me. I was frail and always hungry, and I hugged my worn brown coat tightly round me for comfort.
Thankfully I pulled the string hanging from the letter box of our row house. The latch lifted, and I was glad to step inside, away from the wind.
Miss Ferguson, Fairy Godmother and deaconess of the church, was seated in our old easy chair by the fire in our living room, undisturbed, it seemed, by the fetid atmosphere and the dirty chaos surrounding her. She must have been quicker than me in leaving the service and making her way over to our house, because she was already deep in conversation with Mother as I edged my way into the cluttered room. Her square pallid face with its cherry-red nose wrinkled up into a smile as I entered.
‘Good evening, Helen.’
‘Good evening, Miss Ferguson. Hello, Mother.’
Mother was seated on a straight-backed chair opposite Miss Ferguson, and was smoking with long, deep puffs, the smoke like a fog round her head. Miss Ferguson seemed to be the only person able to penetrate beyond Mother’s polite façade and fight her way through to the real, suffering woman beneath, and Mother was listening intently as Miss Ferguson continued their conversation.
Dressed in black, with wrinkled woollen stockings and flat-heeled shoes, her hair covered by a black coif, Miss Ferguson was very different from Mother’s fashionable friends of so many years ago. But she was a cultivated woman, like my convent-bred mother, and it was a pleasure to listen to the hum of her soft voice.
I picked up an old fruit basket full of mending from beside the hearth and began my nightly task of darning the family’s socks and stockings. Everybody’s woollen socks or rayon stockings seemed to spring a hole or a ladder each day, and because we had so few pairs, they had to be darned ready for wear the next day.
