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The Complete Helen Forrester 4-Book Memoir: Twopence to Cross the Mersey, Liverpool Miss, By the Waters of Liverpool, Lime Street at Two
Helen Forrester
The complete four-volume collection of classic memoir recounting a poverty-stricken childhood in 1930s Liverpool that started with Twopence To Cross the Mersey.Twopence To Cross The Mersey – When Helen Forrester’s father went bankrupt in 1930 she and her six siblings were forced into dreadful poverty in Depression-ridden Liverpool. Managing the household and caring for the younger children all fell on twelve-year-old Helen. Written without self-pity, Forrester’s memoir of these grim days is as heart-warming as it is shocking.Liverpool Miss – Life remains extremely tough for fourteen-year-old Helen. Her continuing struggles against malnutrition, dirt and, above all, the selfish demands of her parents, are deeply shocking. But Helen’s fortitude in the most harrowing of situations makes this a story of amazing courage.By The Waters Of Liverpool – though her parents are as financially irresponsible as ever, wasting money while their children go without, for Helen the future is brightening. At seventeen, she has fought won some important battles with her parents and won, then she meets Harry…Lime Street At Two – It is 1940 and Helen, now twenty, is working at a welfare centre. Her wages are pitifully low and her mother claims the whole of them for housekeeping but she is still thrilled to be gaining some independence. As WWII rages, tragedy isn’t very far away, but Helen faces it with courage and determination.
HELEN FORRESTER
THE COMPLETE HELEN FORRESTER
4-BOOK MEMOIR
Twopence to Cross the MerseyLiverpool MissBy The Waters of LiverpoolLime Street at Two
COPYRIGHT (#ulink_59121d04-b74f-5ceb-b843-9c728d4d3a57)
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Twopence to Cross the Mersey first published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd 1974 Liverpool Miss first published in Great Britain by The Bodley Head Ltd 1979 By the Waters of Liverpool first published in Great Britain by The Bodley Head Ltd 1981 Lime Street at Two first published in Great Britain by The Bodley Head Ltd 1985
Copyright © Jamunadevi Bhatia 1974, 1979, 1981, 1985
Cover Layout Design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
The Author 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
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, 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 ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780006361688, 9780006365402, 9780006364948, 9780006370000
Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780007550401
Version: 2017-10-26
CONTENTS
Cover (#u1474a6c1-ec71-5777-8b94-6158ca7ca3dc)
Title Page (#u7150a432-ffba-528c-87fa-0e0fb7ab9e3b)
Copyright (#uf710c1e2-d74c-5649-9070-6cd4f4f94669)
Twopence to Cross the Mersey (#u02005e46-fba4-573e-9fb6-fbe08c946f9f)
Liverpool Miss (#u58bb0922-be3b-5ad2-b628-920266351ac8)
By the Waters of Liverpool (#uaba06530-4bcd-5dce-8970-a77956f8e0e6)
Lime Street at Two (#u97231e4d-4964-5de8-a6ef-545dd3442bcb)
Keep Reading (#uae72a451-1e05-5907-b98f-7c8ab59245b1)
About the Author (#u57b656c0-aae3-5fdd-b62b-e5de3122ab58)
Also by the Author (#ue6e0afd7-6488-5d40-8d4b-734c9703a875)
About the Publisher (#u4b1b96cf-2180-592f-81de-7102ffae6611)
(#ulink_b2a33243-ec2e-5014-8fc0-734cab1957ee)
HELEN FORRESTER
Twopence to Cross the Mersey
DEDICATION (#u79e5de90-63fe-5442-973e-09dd4410290a)
To the Liverpool City Police
CONTENTS
Title Page (#u76588be5-b5af-5ca2-b605-eddca1541f80)
Dedication (#uf4a8f272-aa20-551f-988b-7bfb18916c67)
Chapter One (#udfc2f8ff-b6c4-5337-8f8c-baf85c290f5e)
Chapter Two (#ufe919a17-2d7b-5482-9ae4-cea63055f796)
Chapter Three (#u705d5cfd-48fc-5d98-ad7b-a4cff0500f0b)
Chapter Four (#u826fe889-519c-5be5-87b7-c9fda9bbecc6)
Chapter Five (#ueedd1ad7-1720-5e3a-b03e-456a1d343202)
Chapter Six (#u127f69bf-afa3-59ab-be15-ac9f1c3f83ac)
Chapter Seven (#udd4eed22-94e5-5cd9-8ddd-6ae211222e7a)
Chapter Eight (#u5224b8ff-1ca6-5e7f-99f4-3585c049793f)
Chapter Nine (#uf33ba842-2a73-5e41-9b16-198426db2bff)
Chapter Ten (#ub27b24f0-6ddc-5331-95cb-7fbec5858aa9)
Chapter Eleven (#uf7e6db40-c2f8-5556-9f62-45cdf83fd88f)
Chapter Twelve (#u32ae85cf-31d3-5d4e-aee1-4d21b80a2d2d)
Chapter Thirteen (#ua39354b8-c397-5904-a4ef-72ef280a2230)
Chapter Fourteen (#u33c353b5-bde2-5861-9a17-3bfe7abf3926)
Chapter Fifteen (#u7df9149e-2cbc-54e4-a809-6da16a088306)
Chapter Sixteen (#u964be1a8-e6e9-5233-806d-56dd5c737f25)
Chapter Seventeen (#u05c2bb6c-58b5-5251-bb23-f073e60bda75)
Chapter Eighteen (#u318c9405-14cc-58a5-8d99-a1c577febe77)
Chapter Nineteen (#u8f35ff3a-9508-524e-bd86-5f720591e251)
Chapter Twenty (#u909ad256-3d73-5017-bc36-712fe14d8d79)
Chapter Twenty-One (#uc557a8a9-23d2-5a97-9982-cfe037cd804c)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#u638be827-28da-5c26-84b7-6a0d0fea8405)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#u506e73b3-3f54-50d1-a154-97c476394293)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#u3a3c7c9f-a547-58f3-a4e5-91d563de5226)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#u4617806b-81c8-5f39-9783-1166dc10d4df)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#ue11f48bf-04d4-5ab3-969f-13da253ba2ba)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#u8b781ea9-b429-5035-9be5-76abb80486e6)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_6d3c5043-7943-5876-9077-32d4f7dc1fdc)
Liverpool is a city through which visitors pass on their way to other places. It is to them a dull world of shipping and commerce which sprawls untidily along the north bank of the River Mersey. Many of them will not know that it has a sister port, Birkenhead, on the opposite bank, which is linked to it by ferry-boats, a railway tunnel and a road tunnel. Beyond Birkenhead lie the small seaside towns of the Wirral peninsula and behind them is pleasant countryside. My widowed grandmother lived in the Wirral, and here, while visiting her, I spent the happiest days of my childhood, on sandy beaches or in wind-swept gardens. I remember with love the rain-soaked hills looking out on to stormy seas and the turbulent estuary of the Mersey.
It used to cost twopence to cross the river on the ferry-boat from Liverpool to Birkenhead. Twopence is not a very large sum, but if one has no money, the river is a real barrier, and, during the Depression years, was an impassable one to many of the poverty-stricken people of Liverpool.
Not so many years ago, I took my little Canadian-born son to see Liverpool and the places of my childhood.
‘Did you live here when you were small, Ma?’ he asked incredulously, his strong North American accent sounding strange amid the thick, nasal speech around him.
‘Yes, I was in Liverpool for part of my life.’
‘My, it’s dirty! Do you mind it being dirty?’
I smiled, seeing it all through his stranger’s eyes, eyes accustomed to new buildings, miles of neon signs, miles of prairie golden with wheat or diamond-white with snow.
I laughed down at him a little ruefully.
‘Yes, at first I did mind. Not now, though. I soon learned that people and cities which do the hard, unpleasant work of the world can’t help getting dirty. Liverpool’s a wonderful place when you get to know it.’
He looked at me derisively and said, with all the cold logic of a five-year-old, ‘They should use more soap and – wash the streets.’
My smile faded, as cold shadows of winters past crept over me. That was how I had felt, when first I had really looked at the city and not passed through it as a traveller. God, how I had minded the dirt! How terrified I had been! How menacingly grotesque the people had looked; children of the industrial revolution, nurtured for generations on poor food in smoke-laden air, grim and twisted, foul-mouthed and coarse, shaped in this strange gloomy world to serve the trade to the Americas. And I, a middle-class girl of the gender south-west of England who had been shielded from the rougher side of life by a private school system and obedient servants, had nearly gone mad with panic when, with little warning, I had been thrown amongst them. Gone was the protection of money and privilege; I had to make what I could of this grimy city and its bitterly humorous inhabitants and share with them their suffering during the Depression years.
I clutched my son’s confiding little hand in mine, as, for a second, I felt again the fear which had enveloped me that January day in 1931, when, at the age of twelve and a half, I arrived in Liverpool, not to pass through it as I had done before, but to live in it.
It seemed to me that it was not my son’s hand which I held so tightly but the hand of my youngest sister, Avril, and that I could hear her snivelling, as we looked out from the entrance of Lime Street Station and saw, through icy, driving rain, a city which seemed to be slowly dying, unloved and unsung, in the Depression of the nineteen-thirties.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_bf9c9090-2f2b-572b-84dd-b53a7e52ff07)
‘Shut up, Avril,’ I said sternly, between chattering teeth. ‘Everything is going to be all right.’
‘I’m cold and I’m hungry.’ The wail threatened to become one of three-year-old Avril’s howling tantrums, as she started to kick off her patent-leather shoes and tear at her blue satin bonnet-strings.
I loosened the wet elastic of my black school hat from under my chin. The hat, as usual, had been crammed down on top of a large ribbon bow, which held my front hair ruthlessly scraped back from a too high forehead. My spectacles were sprayed with rain and I could not see very well as I peered short-sightedly down Lime Street.
I lifted Avril up and hugged her to my damp school uniform.
‘Behave yourself,’ I ordered sharply. ‘We are all hungry. You must be brave until Daddy comes back to collect us.’
Fortunately, I did not know that my father, at that moment walking the streets of Liverpool in search of shelter for his sick wife and seven children, had no real idea of what to do to mitigate the catastrophe which had struck him. I presumed that adults always knew what they were doing and the likely outcome of their actions. I did not know that my mother, lying on a stretcher in the ladies’ waiting-room, her six-week-old son beside her, was sweating with pain after a major abdominal operation and was bordering on a nervous breakdown. I could not understand why we could not go to stay with my grandmother, who lived only a few miles away in the Wirral peninsula. No one had told me she had quarrelled violently with her son and his wife, whom she condemned jointly as worthless spendthrifts, and would have no more to do with us.
Busy with childish affairs of school and girlfriends, I had noticed only that during the last few weeks my parents’ friends were not dropping in for a drink as frequently as usual; in fact the house had been almost free of visitors for a couple of months.
Alan, who was a year younger than I, had pointed out to me a few months earlier that Mother’s wonderful collection of Georgian silver had vanished from the antique sideboard on which it was normally displayed, and I had asked my mother where it had gone.
‘Girls should not poke their noses into the business of grown-ups,’ I had been told tartly, and I had retreated to Alan for consolation.
‘Perhaps it has been sold,’ he had whispered uneasily, as he ran his fingers through his corn-coloured hair.
‘Why?’ I asked, my eyes goggled in surprise.
He stared at me reflectively, his wide, blue eyes troubled. ‘I don’t know. There is something wrong. Mary Ann packed her suitcase and left on Saturday.’
Mary Ann was our housemaid, a jolly, outspoken girl.
‘I thought she had gone home to visit her mother for a few days – that’s what she told me.’
‘I don’t think so. She seems to have taken everything with her. She even asked Cook for her curling-tongs back – Cook was always borrowing them.’
Our uneasiness grew while Mother was in hospital, until an idle word from a school-friend gave us a clue.
Father had done a mysterious thing called ‘going bankrupt’, a not uncommon occurrence in the world of 1930, but strange to me. I had heard vaguely that going bankrupt was an American disease which had struck Wall Street in New York, and that Americans committed suicide when this happened to them; mentally, I saw dozens of them hurling themselves off the tops of skyscrapers, and I wondered where Father would find a sky-scraper.
Father was a public school man who had been sent to boarding school by his widowed mother when he was only six years old; he had left it at nineteen to join the army in 1914. My mother, an orphan, had been brought up by nuns. Neither had had any training in the management of a family or a domestic budget, and they had enjoyed a high standard of living by being permanently in debt. Further, they had had seven children. Bankruptcy was inevitable, once the Depression set in and dividends dried up.
The remainder of our servants left in a body, while Mother was still in hospital, and I was left to manage the home as best I could, until we moved to Liverpool. One of our unpaid domestics took the opportunity, while my parents were absent, to take away my mother’s entire wardrobe, leaving her only the outfit she had been wearing when she was whisked into hospital.
