By the Waters of Liverpool (3 page)

Fiona’s situation was grave. When fifty youngsters were competing for even the most menial of jobs, lack of a good reference could be crippling.

‘You can stay at home and keep house,’ Mother said briskly. ‘You spend all you earn – I never see much of it.’

‘Oh, Mother, Fi only gets fifteen shillings a week, and she pays all her expenses – even buys some of her clothes,’ I intervened vehemently.

Fiona’s hands clutched convulsively against my hips. She, too, feared becoming the family’s forgotten, unpaid maid-of-all-work.

Mother fumbled in her handbag for a cigarette and lit it from the fire with the aid of a newspaper spill. ‘She would be more use at home,’ she reiterated.

Father got up from his chair and moved restlessly up and down the narrow space between table and hearth which formed a passage between the front hall and back kitchen. He was very thin, and his grey tweed office suit with its shiny seat and elbows hung loosely on him. He looked haggard, as if this new problem was too much for him, and his face and prematurely bald skull shone pale yellow in the poor light. He took off his bent, gold-rimmed spectacles and rubbed eyes that were red-lidded and bloodshot.

‘If I want to leave,’ sobbed Fiona, ‘I
have
to give a week’s notice on pay day – that’s Friday, and it’s Friday night now. So it means I have to work almost another two weeks. And nobody is going to give a reference to a girl who leaves without notice – and how can I tell the boss the real reason I want to leave? It’s too horrid!’ She continued to dampen my skirt, as I held her.

Mother looked scornfully at her two daughters, her lips curled in disdain. ‘Really, Fiona! All this fuss, when you could make yourself useful at home for once.’ She turned to Father, and almost shouted, ‘For goodness’ sake, stop prowling.’

Father flung himself back into his chair, while Fiona cried, ‘No.’

‘She cannot mix with such dreadful people any
more,’ Father sounded off determinedly. ‘What is the world coming to?’

‘They leave me alone most of the time,’ Fiona turned her puffy face towards Father. ‘I sit in the cash desk and lock myself in. It has glass all round it. They tease me but they can’t get in.’ She moved uneasily against me. ‘Only when I go to the loo sometimes…’ Her voice trailed off.

Father started up. ‘What?’ he exclaimed. ‘What happens then?’

‘They chase after me and pinch my bottom,’ she announced baldly.

‘Oh, Lord!’ Father was really shaken, as if he himself had never in his life pinched the bottoms of our maids.

Alan burst out laughing. ‘That’s better than being whacked on your rear with a ruler, like I am.’

‘Alan!’ exclaimed Mother. ‘What a lot of louts they must be.’

Father looked at his pretty daughter, speechless for a moment, and then said firmly, ‘You will stay at home tomorrow, Fiona. Helen can phone from her office to say that you are not well. Then we will say later that you are not fit to go back. You can look for other work.’

‘I’m not staying at home.’ Fiona could be as
woodenly obstinate as Avril and me, but she never seemed to draw her parents’ wrath as fully as we did. ‘I just have to get through the next two weeks as best I can. Then I’ll leave. After all, I’ve put up with them for nearly a year now.’

Father looked at her aghast. ‘You mean all this has been going on for a year?’

‘Not all the time.’

‘How frequently?’

‘You mean going to see the – the…?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, they run over every time the undertaker has a nice looking one.’

‘And have they been pinching you all that time, too?’

‘No, Daddy, only just recently.’

‘You must have encouraged them, Fiona.’ This from Mother.

‘Oh, no, Mummy. I suppose they notice me when they’ve nothing much to do. Anyway, how can a
derrière
encourage anybody?’ she asked innocently.

This made Father smile, even in the middle of his disquietude. Fiona’s flawless figure, now burgeoning, would in years to come cause many a heart to throb and provide a good deal of temptation.

Father’s voice was very gentle, as he looked at his younger daughter. ‘I am sure you don’t encourage them, my dear.’ He smiled knowingly at Mother, who did not smile back.

Alan began to whistle softly to himself and moved restlessly against the table.

‘If I had a sheet of the butcher’s notepaper,’ said Mother suddenly, her face brightening, ‘paper with his heading on it, I could write an excellent reference for Fiona.’

‘Mother!’ I exclaimed, scandalised. ‘That would be forgery.’

‘A new employer might phone the butcher to check it,’ suggested Alan.

‘I don’t think so,’ replied Mother, ignoring my outburst. ‘As a demonstrator going from shop to shop, I carry written references – I’ve heaps of them, because all my jobs are short-term ones. I don’t think anybody has ever telephoned to check them.’

Fiona looked up quickly, and then mopped her eyes agitatedly with my hanky which I had handed to her – it was the only one I owned. ‘Mummy! Could you do it? Really?’

Mother looked as pleased as a Cheshire cat. ‘I don’t see why not.’

‘If I go to work tomorrow, I can get the paper
easily. I have some in the cash desk.’ She straightened up, sniffed and rubbed her nose hard with the hanky. ‘I could start looking for a new job on Monday.’

It took Mother and Fiona some time to convince Father that it was the most sensible way out. But he was genuinely worried about his favourite daughter, and he finally gave in.

Alan thought it was a huge joke, and asked Mother if she could do anything about forging pound notes. I thought she would strike him, but instead she laughed.

Though it seemed to me to be wrong, that it might be better if Father had a quiet talk with the butcher himself, I did not want to start a family row, so I held my tongue.

On Saturday, Fiona went to work as usual and returned triumphantly with the required sheet of notepaper. Mother concocted an excellent letter for her, written in a round, illiterate hand quite unlike her usual beautiful penmanship. She ended it with a phrase popular amongst tradesmen, ‘And oblige your obedient servant’, followed by a flourishing signature.

Father often bought a
Liverpool Echo
on his way home from work. The day’s copy was lying on his chair, so Fiona and I spread it out on the table
and conned the Situations Vacant columns very carefully, though it was nearly midnight.

We found two advertisements for office girls, and Fiona begged Mother’s penny pad of notepaper from her, took the cork out of the ink bottle and sat down at the table, pen poised. She looked up at me expectantly. To my dictation, she wrote in a round schoolgirl’s scrawl letters of application to both companies.

Mother looked disparagingly at her handwriting. ‘Really, Fiona. I should have thought you could write better than that.’

But Fiona could not, and never did. The teaching of handwriting in the elementary schools was so poor that few people seemed to leave with anything better than an ugly, irregular hand. Good, flowing handwriting, like the right accent, marked one’s place in the social scale, and Fiona’s laboured, round letters indicated a girl with a poor background, in a world which was very snobbish. Only Alan, who had been taught in preparatory school, wrote the same exquisite Italian hand which my mother did.

Fiona had a natural refinement and an endearing gentleness, without a hint of snobbery. She floated amongst all kinds of people without difficulty. Her letters, however, did not produce any replies,
despite the fast postal service which we enjoyed, and Fiona became very depressed. Mother thankfully set her more and more household tasks each morning, and then borrowed her fares and lunch money, which meant that even if she obtained an interview with a firm, she would probably have to walk to it.

I encouraged her to keep on writing applications and, as my office was close to the
Liverpool Echo’s
office in Victoria Street, I dropped her replies each day into the newspaper’s letter box.

I had hoped to have a talk with Father on that busy Saturday, because both he and I finished work at one o’clock on Saturdays. Every time I thought about the coming Confirmation lessons, my stomach clenched with apprehension and I longed to unburden myself to somebody. But he had spent the afternoon at the public library, and after he had eaten his tea, he went immediately up to bed. He had had a heart attack when I was a little girl, and occasionally pain in his chest sent him hastily to lie down.

‘Why can’t I sign on at the Labour Exchange?’ asked Fiona fretfully. ‘They might have a job for me.’ She was helping me to clear the breakfast dishes, and without make-up she looked tired and not very well.

Mother was putting on her lipstick in front of a piece of broken mirror wedged into the frame of the back kitchen window, and at this remark, she paused and said to Father, ‘She might be entitled to Unemployment Insurance.’

‘If she was, she has forfeited it by voluntarily leaving her position.’ Father was running backwards and forwards between kitchen and living room like a demented hen. ‘Where can my hat be? Have you seen it? I’ll be late.’ He called to Brian who was about to go out of the back door to school, ‘Brian,
wheel the bike round to the front door, there’s a boy, while I find my hat.’

‘I’ll be late if I do,’ complained Brian, his dark, heart-shaped face sulky, as he clapped his school cap on to his head.

‘Oh, rubbish,’ replied Father. ‘Go and get it. And don’t wear your cap in the house – you are not a workman.’

Brian slammed down his satchel on to the floor, flung his cap on top of it, and went to do as he was bidden.

‘Why can’t I?’ reiterated Fiona, plaintively.

‘Do you want to stand in a queue with a mass of unwashed, vulgar girls?’ asked Mother. She quickly licked her forefinger and ran it over her eyebrows to remove the surplus face powder clinging to them. ‘There is no point anyway. They would try to put you into domestic service. Do you want that?’

‘No,’ muttered Fiona dejectedly. Neither she nor I had ever considered going into domestic service. Even in my most deprived days, when I began to fear I would die from hunger, I had never considered this way out of my misery. Both of us remembered the servants in our own house when we were small. With the exception of their weekly half day off and on alternate Sundays, they were
never free from six o’clock in the morning until eleven at night.

No. No domestic service for Fiona. Being at home was a shade better than that; at least one could have a good cry in the privy at the bottom of the back yard.

Father found his hat under the living room table, where the boys must have been using it as dressing-up material. He grabbed the bicycle from a fuming Brian at the front door, and pedalled creakily away to work.

‘Never mind, Fi,’ I comforted. ‘What about writing to some of the big shops in the city – they like to employ under sixteens. I’ll deliver the letters – or Alan can.’

Fiona’s face lifted a trifle. ‘Who should I write to?’

‘Um – er, try Lewis’s or Blackler’s.’

‘I’d love to work for Owen Owen’s or Boots.’

I was hastily getting into my coat and hat. Given good advice on how to improve her appearance, Fiona would have fitted well into these higher-class shops, but she was untidy and grubby, despite the fact that Mother bought her new clothes as often as possible. I said with caution, ‘You could try them.’ I picked up the letters that she had written the evening before. ‘I’ll put these into the
Echo
office for you.’

‘Come on, Helen,’ shouted Alan from the front doorstep.

Mother told Fiona what to give the children for lunch and fled through the back door to catch her tram. Suddenly poor Fiona was left standing alone in the dirty, cluttered living room.

Some time back, I had been very ill and for two years had not been strong enough to walk to work. Recently because I felt better and, anyway, could no longer afford the tram fares, I had begun to walk again. Alan had always been provided with tram fares, but he started to accompany me. This long march to and from the city was hard on shoes. We both had pieces of cardboard poked into our footwear to help to fill up the holes in the soles. I had painful ingrowing corns on the bottoms of my feet from the exposure of the tender flesh to hard pavement. At times it was like walking on knives.

We always went along the side of the Anglican Cathedral. It was the last of the big Gothic edifices to be built in Europe, and clearly on the morning air one could hear the tiny taps of the stonemasons’ hammers, as if a band of elves was hard at work. In pouring rain the great building looked like a huge red sandstone peak, and I loved looking at it, though I had never yet plucked up enough courage
to enter it – I feared I was too shabby. Alan did not share my cat-like interest in new territory, so when I suggested that we go into it together, he shrugged and asked, ‘Whatever for?’

Along Rodney Street, with its charming Georgian frontages, its trim white front doors and gleaming brass plates, he made me stop several times. It was a street of medical specialists, whose cars parked in the street reflected their owners’ status. Alan would pause to touch reverently a polished door handle or a new shiny mascot sitting proudly on a bonnet, and would point out to me the merits of the various makes.

Sometimes he would talk enthusiastically about the cricket matches which he played in the park. He was always the hero batting steadily against the opposing team’s wicked bowlers.

Occasionally, he would ruefully rub his bruised bottom and mutter maledictions against the ruthless bookkeeper under whom he worked as an office boy. Older men were heavy-handed with their apprentices. They believed in knocking a young man into shape. They had never heard of bruised egos, and a bruised bottom was just one of the hazards of being young. Boys of fourteen found themselves a small minority amid older men and they learned their trade and how to behave,
whether they liked it or not. Perhaps that is why in those days there was less vandalism and less theft. In big, soulless places like the docks, however, theft was a fine art.

I rarely talked to Alan about my own affairs. I was, after all, a stand-in mother to him. I listened. It was unusual for me to talk very much to anyone except my friend, Sylvia Poole. I never seemed to be able to stop talking to her. Ever charitable, Sylvia always said she learned a great deal from me. She certainly received a great number of lectures on British and French history.

Neither Alan nor I mentioned the necrophiles amongst whom poor Fiona had found herself working. To me it was another sickening facet of human behaviour to be shunned, condemned and put out of my mind. Alan had made a joke of it, and I wondered if he really thought it was funny. It must have been in his mind, because he said suddenly, as we hurried down fashionable Bold Street, ‘You know, Fi is very dumb. She was lucky she didn’t get raped in that place.’

‘She’s not so stupid, really,’ I replied. ‘She had enough sense to lock herself into the cash desk – like a doll in a glass case. She’s so pretty. Too nice to be pushed around.’

I caught my breath as a stab of pain went down
the side of my stomach. A familiar dull ache spread down my back.

My step faltered, and Alan paused to ask, ‘Something the matter?’

‘No. Nothing much. Just a little spasm. It will go.’ I clutched one arm across my waist, to try to contain a second wave of pain.

‘You look awfully white.’

‘No. It will go,’ I reassured him, and moved forward again, pressed by the crowd behind me hastening to work.

Alan must have been aware that each month I was seized by terrible, clawing pain lasting some eight to twelve hours. It was impossible to hide it, because I would faint from time to time. Yet I could not bring myself to tell him what the trouble was. Our National Health Insurance doctor assured me that it would disappear when I married, which was not much comfort to a born spinster. He never examined me. I took aspirin in large quantities. Mother bought me ground ginger to take in hot water and, if the pain struck while I was at home, I had the use of Edward’s hot water bottle to hug. Nothing helped much. I wondered how I would ever crawl through the day’s work. I had no sanitary towel with me to use, and no money to buy one. We used bits of old cotton cloth which we washed over and over again.

I did not consider returning home. People who missed too many days of work tended to be dismissed at the first excuse, and I had lost a lot of days through illness already. If I fainted in the office it would be all right. Women frequently fainted from overwork, lack of food and all kinds of untreated illnesses.

I felt a stab of another kind as we moved slowly onward. The pin holding up my panties had opened and scratched me, and in seconds they slid down my legs and lay round my ankles. Alan giggled, as did one or two passers-by.

Proud as hell, I felt so humiliated that I started to cry quietly, as I stepped out of them. It was not the loss of the panties that bothered me; it was their grey raggedness. They were tattered beyond repair, elasticless, patched on patches, in a world where a good pair could be bought for sixpence – and they were already stained. I did not know how to endure the look of disgust on the face of one nicely dressed woman who stepped round me. I wanted to scream at her that it was not my fault that I was not clean.

‘Pick them up quick and put them in your bag,’ said Alan, a grin on his face.

I did so, hastily cramming them down into the old-fashioned handbag, and we moved on quickly.
Alan produced a hanky and I surreptitiously wiped my eyes. The pain was coming in low-level, steady waves.

‘Thanks,’ I murmured, as I handed it back to him. The handkerchief was grey from poor washing. Sometimes it seemed as if we lived in a world which was made up entirely of shades of grey and black.

We came to the corner of Whitechapel and Church Street. Here our ways parted.

‘All right?’ Alan asked.

I hesitated for a second, wondering if he could lend me three-halfpence for a tram ride home. Fear of piling up more absences than my employer would tolerate made me say, ‘Yes, thanks. ‘Bye.’

I shuffled up to the office. What was I going to do? I would have to ask one of the girls for help. Would they again think me to be a disgusting object, lacking even basic commonsense to provide myself with ordinary sanitary requirements?

Filled with consternation, beside myself with pain, I climbed the six flights of stone steps to the cloakroom on the top floor.