By the Waters of Liverpool (2 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like alcoholics, an improvement in my parents’ lives could be brought about only by their facing their problems squarely and themselves determining on a new and careful path, in their case a financial path. But, like many alcoholics, they could not do it. So we all continued to suffer, despite the fact that five of us were at work.

Alan worked as an office boy in the city, and most of his small wages were handed back to him for tram fares, lunches and pocket money. Similarly, my pretty fifteen-year-old sister, Fiona, worked as a cashier in a butcher’s shop. She earned the same amount as I did, but, unlike me, most of her wage was handed back to her for her expenses. Her clothes were bought for her, new, by paying for them by weekly instalments through a system of cheques. Companies issued cheques, commonly for five pounds, and with these one could buy clothing or household goods of one’s choice at any store on the company’s list. The clothing was often shoddy and expensive, but Fiona was at least as well dressed as any other girl travelling to work on the trams with her. I struggled to keep myself in clothes by buying them from the pawnbroker’s bargain table.

Paying the cheque man was as much a worry to Liverpool housewives as finding the money to pay the rent, and it drained our income. We were permanently hungry, frequently cold and not very clean. Cleanliness is expensive. Our landlord had freed us from one plague of slum living. He had had our house stoved, so that we were no longer verminous, and our relief from bug and lice bites was wonderful to us.

Brian and Tony, who came next to Fiona, had inherited their parents’ brains and they also had some of Mother’s earlier vivacity and physical strength. Brian had won a scholarship from the church school to the Liverpool Institute, and I was very envious of him. Earlier, I had won a scholarship to the Liverpool City School of Art, but I had not been allowed to take it up. I had to stay at home to keep house.

Also at school was short, determined Avril, almost unnoticed unless she had a temper tantrum like Mother, and little Edward, beloved baby of the family, whom I had nursed along since infancy. Though Edward was not very strong, probably because of the lack of adequate food in early childhood, his mind was clear and he had the ability to apply himself with great concentration to whatever he was doing. He could already read
well, and Father hoped that both he and Tony would also win scholarships. Neither Mother nor Father gave any heed to Avril’s possible abilities as a scholar. She was only a girl.

The only other members of the family to attend church were Brian and Tony, who for nearly three years had sung in the choir and had enjoyed a remuneration of a shilling and eightpence per month, which they were allowed to keep. Now they sometimes acted as acolytes. Nobody, as far as I knew, had pressed them to go to Confession. They were, however, the cleverest of passive resisters and even if pressed would probably have placidly failed to turn up for it. Brian’s hazel eyes and Tony’s calm blue-grey ones could look as blank as a factory wall, with an innocence and incomprehension of stare usually seen only in the subnormal. They were a pair of cheery scallywags, most unlikely to be faced with the inner qualms and soul-searching which always afflicted me.

I was dreadfully troubled when Mother ordered me to stop being such a fool, and to attend Confirmation classes. I made no reply, because I had long since learned not to do battle when I knew for certain that I could not win. For several days I fretted fearfully about what I should do.

‘Them as don’t obey goes straight to hell,’ Edith
had assured me, whenever I was being particularly perverse.

And there was Grandma’s soft voice whispering, ‘Good children go to Heaven, dear. Only the wicked burn in hell.’

And the Bible from which I had learned to read, under Grandma’s tuition, was full of the horrors of what happened to those who did not obey the will of God.

As I sorted files in the office, I tried to comfort myself. ‘It doesn’t really happen nowadays. It is an allegory.’ But the fear in me was almost a primeval one; it stuck in the back of my mind and refused to be shifted.

Mother was obviously used to the idea of Confession. It must have been reinforced when she was a child, because she had been brought up in a convent, the only Protestant amid a sea of Catholics. It was a waste of time to appeal to her.

Walking home through the April rain, I prayed to God to tell me what He wanted me to do, and got no immediate reply. Confused, afraid, with a mind filled with myths, I turned to the only other person I could think of who might advise me. I would ask Father.

To get a little time alone with Father would, I knew, be difficult. A big family in a tiny house has almost no privacy.

I pulled the string hanging inside the flapless letter box, in order to let myself in. I had worked late and then gone straight to evening school and had not eaten since morning, but I paused for a moment in the doorway to watch some men playing ollies in the gutter. The little white balls skittered over the rough roadway, almost invisible in the light of the street lamps. These men used to say disparagingly about our family that we talked ‘with ollies in t’ mouth’. Refined Oxford accents were extremely rare in slums.

The smell of the house hit me as I went into the little hall, a smell of warm, damp, much used air,
with strong overtones of the odour of vomit.

All the family was crowded into the small, back living room. Old-fashioned wooden shutters had been closed across the curtainless windows and secured by an iron bar. A small fire blazed bravely in the big, iron kitchen range, and by it Father was seated bolt upright in the solitary easy chair.

His usual yellowy complexion was flushed red, and he was pounding his delicate, almost feminine fist on the arm of the chair, as if to emphasise forcibly something he had already said.

As I paused by the door, he almost shouted, ‘I will not tolerate such an abomination. It is disgusting beyond words. She must leave at once.’

He was answered by an unintelligible babble from the family.

I thought for an anxious second that he was talking about me. I lived in constant, gnawing fear that my parents would withdraw me from my job and make me stay at home again to keep house; they were quite capable of taking such a decision without any prior discussion with me and of handing in my resignation directly to my employer. I was still under twenty-one.

With some trepidation I eased my way through the half-open door and into the room itself. The children’s upturned faces looked sickly in the light
of the single, unshaded electric bulb, and Edward turned his heart-shaped face, pinched with fatigue, towards me. He said simply, ‘Bed.’

Though he was nearly seven, he was no great weight and I picked him up, and said, ‘Yes, love.’ He and Brian were the only children I ever knew who asked to go to bed. It was as if their strength ran out suddenly. I smiled at him, and added, ‘I’ll put the kettle on to heat and help you wash your knees and neck as soon as it is hot.’ I looked cautiously round him at the family.

The centre of attention was Fiona. She was standing in the middle of the group, facing Father, and her wide eyes with their enormous fringe of long lashes showed signs of tears. She was almost cringing, her toes turned slightly inward, her arms across her breast as if to protect herself.

She said in a watery voice, ‘It’s not that bad, Daddy. I didn’t go. I wouldn’t dream of it.’

Nobody took any notice of me, except Alan, who grinned at me as I stumbled over his feet, on my way to the kitchen with Edward. ‘I think it’s funny,’ he said to Father.

There was some hot water in the kettle sitting on the greasy little gas stove, so I poured it into the washing-up bowl and commenced to wash Edward. I could hear Father’s choked voice. He
said furiously, ‘It is
not
funny. It is horrible. At the least, it shows a total disrespect for the dead – at the worst, it is perversion. They ought to be put out of business.’

Mother was laboriously cutting her nails with our single pair of blunt scissors, letting the ends drop into the hearth, and she murmured, ‘It makes me shudder.’

I paused in my preparations to wash Edward’s dirty knees, and left him sitting on the kitchen table drying his face, while I went to the intervening door and asked, ‘What’s happened, Daddy?’

‘Pack of sickening necrophiles!’ Father exploded again, turning to me.

Brian and Tony were sitting at the table, elbows on open exercise books. I saw Tony’s eyes light up. A beautiful new word to be learned, to be used incessantly for at least a week, while he turned it over in his mind and tried it in every possible way.

Mother greeted me with a worried, ‘Hello, Helen. We’ll explain it later. Put Avril and Edward to bed – it’s getting late.’ She turned to the students at the table who were obviously most intrigued by the conversation. ‘Hurry up, you two. Put your books away.’

‘It’s something about looking at dead people, Helen,’ Edward whispered to me, as I returned
to him, and rolled down his knee-high socks. His knees were very dirty and I scrubbed them with a piece of cotton cloth. There was no soap.

Avril had followed me out, and stood waiting for her turn to be washed. She said nothing, but her plain, round face beneath the straggling blonde hair was white, and I wondered if she were ill.

Edward struggled out of his woollen jersey and proffered a far from white neck to be washed. ‘It’s nasty,’ he muttered.

Both children looked so bewildered and scared that I answered them with forced cheerfulness. ‘It doesn’t sound very respectful, I know. But I’m sure there’s nothing to be afraid of. Dead people are just people who have shed an overcoat which has worn out. And the real people – their souls – have gone to Heaven. They are happy. It is only the people who get left behind who are unhappy – it’s natural – they don’t like being left.’

I tried to be soothing and matter-of-fact, while Avril perfunctorily washed her hands and face in the same pint of water.

Protesting crossly, Brian and Tony put their books together and heaved themselves between furniture and family towards the staircase and bed. Tony asked sulkily, ‘How do you spell necrophile?’ and was told angrily by Father not to be impudent.

I took the candle from the kitchen and eased Avril and Edward along after the boys. Mother looked overwhelmed with fatigue, but she was not too tired to fire at Fiona, as I passed her, ‘For goodness’ sake, be quiet, girl.’ Fiona sank down on an upturned paint can, which we used as a chair, and continued to whimper miserably.

Upstairs, I heard Avril and Edward say the small prayer which our nanny had taught me long ago, ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild…’ Then I tucked Avril into the bed she shared with Fiona and me, and put Edward into the one he shared with Brian and Tony, and left them shivering under the thin blankets to their individual nightmares.

Brian and Tony stumped grumpily round the room, pulling off their outer clothes and tossing them on to the bed rail. I put the candle down on an orange-box, which had been made into a dressing table by draping an old curtain over it, and told Brian to blow it out before he got into bed. ‘Quietly, boys,’ I pleaded. ‘Let Edward go to sleep.’ Then I ran downstairs again to the living room.

Alan had picked up a book and was flicking through it. Father and Mother were staring into the fire, Father rubbing his chin with quick, impatient motions. Fiona sat, her back against the wall, still
crying. I was dreadfully hungry and quite apprehensive about what might have happened, but I went first to her and put my arm round her shoulders. She laid her head against my threadbare skirt. We never talked together – we had little in common except our sisterhood; yet we were often a comfort to each other.

‘Daddy, what
has
happened?’

‘She has to leave her job,’ said Father, beating an impatient tattoo with his fingers on the arm of his chair. Mother nodded agreement. Alan put down his book and watched the scene with a look of morbid fascination, glancing expectantly from one to the other of us.

‘Why?’ I inquired, puzzled.

‘She must,’ Mother agreed, and then added crossly, ‘It is not fit for a young girl – it is not fit for anyone to be there.’

Alan interjected with an unexpected chuckle, ‘You could put it down to professional interest – after all, it’s all meat.’

Mother was shocked. ‘Alan! How could you say such a revolting thing?’

Alan grinned wickedly and folded his arms, as if enjoying the family’s evident distress.

Father groped for words and finally said carefully, ‘The butcher’s shop in which Fiona is working is
opposite an undertaker’s. Sometimes the undertakers invite the butchers over to look at the corpses. I cannot believe that it is the undertaker himself who does this – I think it is some of his employees.’

Fiona lifted her face. ‘It is, Daddy. They do it when he is out – and the butchers always wait until our boss has gone to market.’

‘How awful!’ I exclaimed. ‘Imagine being stared at in your coffin by a pack of strangers. How morbid!’ I looked down at Fiona’s tousled head, and said to her, ‘Perhaps you should look for another job.’

Fiona turned her face up towards me. She was so white that I thought she might faint. She said, ‘They had a young girl there this morning – and she wasn’t in her coffin – or even wrapped up. She was naked – and they were whispering and laughing afterwards about how they played with her. It sounded awful. So I was sick suddenly over the cash desk – and they laughed. After I had cleared up the mess, they sent me home early.’

Nausea began to overwhelm me. Vague tales I had heard, whispered amongst the beshawled women beside whom I had sat on front steps or in the park while watching the children play, began to surface in my mind and come together. I had always discounted their mutterings as rubbish. Now
I realised that it was not rubbish. They had been disapproving about something which had really happened. I took big breaths to control my surging stomach. How could men be so vile?

‘Heavens, I’m glad you told Daddy,’ I muttered.

‘I had to,’ responded Fiona flatly. ‘I was thinking about it again just before you came in – and I was sick over the floor.’

‘Humph,’ Mother almost grunted, ‘I thought it was something else, but I was wrong, thank goodness.’

For a moment, I looked at her blankly and then remembered her bouts of morning sickness before every birth, and I said indignantly, ‘Fi would never get herself into trouble. She’s not that kind.’ But a sudden, different fear for Fiona had been planted in my mind. Did she know anything about sex? I was still vague myself about the precise details of this mystery, but since I never expected to have a boy friend it did not matter in my case. It did matter for Fiona. I knew that she was already meeting a local youth secretly and going to the cinema with him.

Father had been brooding during this exchange. Now he fumed, ‘They should be reported.’

‘Who to?’ asked Mother.

‘The police, of course.’

‘Could the police do anything?’

‘Oh, yes. It is a serious matter.’

‘Oh, Daddy,’ wailed Fiona, ‘if you do tell the police there’ll be such a rumpus in the shop. The men will say I’m a lying troublemaker, and the boss won’t want to give me a reference.’ She rubbed her wet eyes with the backs of her hands. ‘The story will go all round the local shops, and then what will I do? With no reference, I won’t stand a chance.’

She clung to me and I suddenly leaned limply against her. I was beginning to feel faint with hunger.