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Liverpool Miss
Helen Forrester
The second volume of Helen Forrester’s powerful, painful and ultimately uplifting four-volume autobiography of her poverty-stricken childhood in Liverpool during the 1930s.The Forrester family are slowly winning their fight for survival. But life remains extremely tough for fourteen-year-old Helen. Along with caring for her younger siblings and suffering terrible hardships she is also battling with her parents to persuade them to allow her to earn her own living. Helen is desperate to lead her own life after the years of neglect and inadequate schooling.Written with an unflinching eye, Helen’s account of her continuing struggles against severe malnutrition and dirt (she has her first bath in four years) and, above all, the selfish demands of her parents, is deeply shocking. But Helen’s fortitude and her ability to find humour in the most harrowing of situations make this make this a story of amazing courage and perseverance.
HELEN FORRESTER
Liverpool Miss
Copyright (#ua616dba6-bd8c-573b-83e6-91d4afdb36d0)
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 © Picture Post/Hulton Getty
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.
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Source ISBN: 9780008180959
Ebook Edition © Dec 2016 ISBN: 9780007369317
Version 2016-11-08
Dedication (#ua616dba6-bd8c-573b-83e6-91d4afdb36d0)
To my family and friends who helped me to remember
Table of Contents
Cover (#u7b09e200-7b92-5fe5-94b2-b2b3c84f40e4)
Title Page (#u32b1f9c0-bb01-55c5-a723-921329bb878c)
Copyright (#u8805962b-25b2-531a-ba40-68ed5514265c)
Dedication (#ub9ce9269-6704-50ba-9038-c8808e2e8ed4)
Chapter One (#ubde6d09f-4803-5d79-8848-2120bc0f9ea4)
Chapter Two (#u97b31377-64cb-5519-a92b-1818a424784a)
Chapter Three (#u84ea7748-e97f-55af-bf6d-571a80d0b7b2)
Chapter Four (#uf9194655-0e81-53c2-bc71-3ab0a5875e13)
Chapter Five (#ub9a55c82-31fc-5488-900b-b1727aadab20)
Chapter Six (#uebf9e25c-ef97-558a-ada8-448949528540)
Chapter Seven (#u4c7a93ac-dbba-5fe1-b2f9-f21e4f851ab7)
Chapter Eight (#ubf1bd75c-4b00-5029-9f24-a7947d08bb45)
Chapter Nine (#ufdbdc0fc-8531-5d20-964c-1f243e1efba0)
Chapter Ten (#ud9f0cc5a-ad21-581c-b8b8-fa9c03277f8e)
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)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading … (#litres_trial_promo)
Read the First Chapter of By the Waters of Liverpool (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By Helen Forrester (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
One (#ua616dba6-bd8c-573b-83e6-91d4afdb36d0)
It had begun to rain and I was shivering, as I manoeuvered the squeaking Chariot over the road to the corner of Castle Street. Avril was red in the face with rage. She stormed at me because I would not take her out of the pram and let her walk amid the busy lunchtime crowd. At the other end of the pram, beneath the leaking hood, Baby Edward grizzled miserably for the same reason.
Since the October day was too cold for us to walk in the park, I had brought them into the city, thinking that it would be more sheltered and that we could amuse ourselves looking in the shop windows. And now we had wandered into the business district.
Pretty secretaries, rushing back from lunch, and smart businessmen, carrying umbrellas and briefcases, glanced impatiently at the intruding pram with two grubby urchins in noisy protest. It belonged away in the slums, like the tatterdemalion who pushed it.
I did not care. I was resigned to people staring at my long, wind-chapped, bare legs, at my toes sticking through a pair of old plimsolls, at an outgrown gym slip worn without a blouse, a ragged cardigan covering part of my nakedness.
Through the increasing rain, I pushed the pram dreamily amongst them. In my mind I was not walking in black, depressing Liverpool; I was in the countryside and then in the fine, old southern town from which I had been unceremoniously plucked two years before. It was market day, and Father and I were looking at the horses brought in for sale. As we moved about, the ploughmen, the shepherds and the farmers would touch their forelocks to the distinguished-looking gentleman, strolling around with a little daughter in the uniform of a good private school.
‘Echo! Liverpool Echo. Read all about it!’ shouted a man in a cloth cap, thrusting a paper towards the hurrying throng. I blinked, and hurriedly swerved to avoid him.
Would we always have to stay in Liverpool, I wondered depressedly. Would we always be cold and hungry?
‘Oh, shut up, Avril,’ I scolded crossly, and stopped the pram while I tucked an old overcoat round Baby Edward’s knees and then pushed the edges of it up over her lap. ‘Look, love. See up there – on the top of the town hall. There’s Minerva. She’s looking at you.’
Avril turned her woebegone face upwards towards the dome I had pointed out.
‘See,’ I said. ‘She’s smiling at you. Hasn’t she got a lovely golden face? But I think she’s got smuts on her nose, just like you.’ I touched Avril’s damp, little nose with a playful finger, and she sniffed and stopped crying.
Baby Edward could not see what I had pointed out; but, when I touched his nose and laughed at him, he saw hope of a game and tried to reach forward to touch my hooked nose. Tiny fingers grasped at my horn-rimmed glasses. I backed away hastily before they fell off.
Laughing at each other, we continued along the street.
Many people thought it was Britannia who sat looking down at Liverpool, but Father had told me it was Minerva, the Goddess of Wisdom, Invention and Handicrafts. He assured me that she also took care of dramatic poets and actors.
There were plenty of craftsmen in Liverpool of whom she might have been proud, even some actors and a poet or two, but most of them queued at the Labour Exchanges, their abilities unused. They stood idly round the dock gates, where ships lay in every stage of decay. They hung around outside the gaily lit public houses. Her sailors, skilled men, sat hungry in their cold kitchens, while their despairing wives nagged and their children went barefoot.
Amongst the defeated men in the queues at the Labour Exchange, Father had stood for over two years. Ruined by the Depression and, in part, by his own extravagances, he had brought us back to his native city in the hope of finding work. But, in the Liverpool wet, he had seemed like a lost butterfly, with wings beaten useless by the rain. He had watched, helpless, as Mother struggled, without medical aid, to recuperate from a major operation and a mental breakdown. Though the wartime marriage had not been a happy one, her degeneration into a haggard virago must have broken his heart.
To look at his seven children was almost too much for him. We were a hungry, ragged and increasingly unruly crew, disoriented by our parents’ disasters, seven small sparrows with our beaks open, loudly demanding to be fed.
Because Mother was at first so ill, I suddenly had thrust upon me, as the eldest child, the task of caring for her and for my brothers and sisters. The Public Assistance Committee gave Father forty-three shillings a week, out of which we paid twenty-seven shillings a week for three unheated attic rooms. The remaining sixteen shillings had to cover every need of nine people; and for a time it seemed certain that Baby Edward would die for lack of milk, and I often looked with terror at our empty food shelf.
Liverpool slum 1920’s/1930’s
Recently, a little hope had entered our lives. Father had obtained a small clerical job with the Liverpool Corporation. He earned only a few shillings more than the Public Assistance allowance and the extra money was swallowed up by his expenses. But it was a new beginning for him.
About the same time, we obtained a bug-ridden terrace house at a few shillings less rent than our rooms. I no longer had to face the irate complaints of the tenants in the rooms beneath us, about the noise the children made. The bugs bit unmercifully and they made a horrible smell, but the children did not complain.
I had high hopes, when Father started work, that I would be allowed to go to school and then to work, and that Mother would become the housekeeper. But Mother had obtained part-time employment as a demonstrator in various department stores, and she announced that she would be continuing this work.
‘Why can’t you stay at home, like other mothers do?’ I implored.
‘The doctor said I should work – remember?’
‘Yes. But that was when you were convalescent. He wanted you to walk about in the fresh air to get strong again. But you are quite well now.’
‘Oh, don’t be stupid, Helen. Stop arguing. We need the money.’
