Liverpool Miss (16 page)

Mother had barely shut the front door, when the string on the latch was pulled and the door again swung open. Brian and Tony came bursting in from playing football in the street. They were excited because it had begun to snow heavily, and they thought that later on they might be able to make a snowman. They were followed almost immediately by Avril and Baby Edward, who had toddled down to Granby Street together, to buy a pint of milk; the milkman had refused to deliver any more until his bill was paid. Giggling together triumphantly, they handed me the bottle.

Since the children were there, Mother said nothing to me, but, as she picked up the bread knife again, her contemptuous look spoke volumes. Feeling wretched, I returned to the sink full of washing.

As I was hanging the garments over a piece of string strung across the kitchen, Father and Alan came through the back door, laughing and shaking the snow off themselves.

I must tell Daddy, I thought. I simply have to. But not now, because of the children. Mother will turn on me, the minute I open my mouth. But three pounds is a huge sum to raise. How does Mother imagine she is going to do it?

Mother was very quiet during tea. By silent consent nothing was said about Miriam before the children.

I had to give a shorthand lesson that evening, so immediately after tea I prepared a protesting Edward for bed. I borrowed Fiona’s macintosh from her to put over my cotton dress, because my skirt was not dry and my own very light macintosh was neither windproof nor waterproof. I would have to talk to Daddy in the morning. With a quick glance at the clock, I snatched up my shorthand books and ran to catch a tram outside the Rialto Cinema. To reach my pupil’s home, it was necessary to take a tram to the Pier Head and another one out again to his district. There was no question of being able to walk the distance in a reasonable time.

The snow was coming down in great fleecy flakes and my feet were soaked before I reached the
end of our street. The bright lights of the cinema seemed to be floating amid the flakes, and a drift was forming across its curved front steps. The clumsy trams looked like glittering ghosts as they churned their way slowly along Catherine Street. Few people were about, and for a second I considered turning back. But I needed money so badly that when my tram arrived, I swung on to it without hesitation.

‘Lousy night,’ remarked the conductor as I tendered the fare.

At the Pier Head, the wind was driving the snow in whirling sweeps across the stone sets, almost obliterating the Royal Liver Building and the squat Cunard Building. The Church of our Lady and St Nicholas was lost amid the white downpour. As if from nowhere, the sounds of the fog horns and the harsh bells to guide the ferry boats came floating round my head. One or two shadowy people scurried past me.

Surrounding the tram superintendent was a tight knot of drivers and conductors, red ears sticking out from navy-blue caps and glowing cigarettes drooping from their mouths. They were arguing about stopping the service. I was shivering, and clutched the macintosh collar round my neck to stop the snow trickling down inside, as I waited for
their decision. The wind from the river seemed to penetrate my bones.

The superintendent vanished in search of the telephone.

I blew my nose on a square of newspaper, then shoved my bare hands into my mac pockets in an effort to keep them from freezing. The heavy flakes clung to my hair and I brushed a rosette of snow off my bun. The drivers and conductors climbed back into their respective trams to get out of the wind. I did not dare to follow one of them for fear I missed my own tram, which had not yet arrived.

Long before I saw the tram I needed, I could hear the driver pinging its bell with one foot, as he edged the great vehicle slowly round the curve of Mann Island. Between the sharp pings of the bell came the sound of the slap of the river water around the floating dock behind me, the sound of the Mersey which lay between Grandma and me. For a moment, I felt like chancing my tram fares on a ferry fare instead and running away to her.

‘Don’t be a fool,’ I told myself sharply. ‘You haven’t got the fare for the bus on the other side – and an eight-mile walk in this storm is impossible.’

The supervisor, bustling with importance, came towards the newly arrived tram. The driver stepped
down to meet him; he did not want to take the tram out again. The supervisor irately pointed out that on his return journey he normally picked up men coming off a night shift in an outlying factory. After some argument, the driver reluctantly climbed on to his platform, and I thankfully clambered into the back, shaking myself like a collie dog. I sat down on the wooden bench which ran the whole length of the car, bent over and lifted an almost solid crown of snow from the top of my head. It splashed all over the ridged floor as I dropped it. The interior of the vehicle was comfortingly warm, but I continued to shiver and my feet were bitterly cold. I was the only outgoing passenger and I stared glumly at the empty bench opposite, until the conductor came to collect my fare.

The driver slammed open the intervening door, letting in a great gust of snow-laden air. He shouted down the length of the car to the conductor that they would be lucky if they saw their beds that night. He was not going to be responsible if the bloody tram got stuck; he’d told the bastard back there that they would never make it up the hill. These remarks did not cheer me up. The tram was already far behind schedule and I would be very late for the lesson.

At Pembroke Place the points of the track were
solid with ice and did not yield to the driver’s poking at them with a metal bar. The conductor climbed down and a committee of two was held over them. Then, shaking themselves free of snow, they climbed back in again. The driver eased the brake off and let the tram roll slowly backwards down the hill for a few yards. Then he took the line up London Road. We were off the proper route, but not so far that I would not be able to run to my pupil’s house.

As we crawled along, the thin, underclad conductor came into the body of the tram and closed the back door. He sat in the far corner from me, silently smoking cigarette after cigarette.

I was heavy with the cold which I had caught nearly three weeks earlier and had failed to shake off. As the chill from my waiting at the Pier Head wore off, I gradually began to feel stiflingly hot, and I almost envied the driver out in the wind. My head ached abominably and I laid it against the cold windowpane and closed my eyes. I suffered greatly from headaches, partly, I think, from eye strain, so another one was nothing to worry about.

After what seemed an interminable time of grinding noise as the tram laboured onwards, I was jerked awake. The tram had stopped. The lights were still on and the motor was throbbing.

The driver pushed open his door and came in, puffing and blowing, his face nearly purple between his peaked cap and great muffler. The conductor looked up.

The driver addressed me.

‘Can’t go no further, Miss,’ he announced.

‘God spare us,’ exclaimed the conductor, and threw his cigarette butt angrily on to the floor. ‘Where are we?’ he asked.

I picked up my wet shorthand books from beside me, as the driver replied, ‘West Derby Road, near Green Lane. I thought I could work my way round, like, to me proper route. But I couldn’t turn at Shiel Road like I hoped. Had no luck at all. And now there’s two abandoned trams on the track ahead of us. I can’t see no sign of drivers or conductors.’

West Derby Road! I was miles from where I should have been and at least three miles from home. I looked in alarm at the two men discussing what they should do. They seemed to be fuzzy round the edges. I got up from the seat. My legs wobbled, and I sat down again quickly. I was suddenly afraid of the bitter cold outside.

The driver said, ‘We’d better all get home as best we can. If I can find a phone box on the way, I’ll phone the boss to say where the tram is.’ He took off his big scarf, as he spoke, and shook a shining
cascade of snow off it. ‘Could try taking the bloody thing in in the morning, when I’ll be able to see better.’

Trams can be driven from either end. They do not have to be turned, so I asked, ‘Couldn’t you drive it back again to the Pier Head?’

‘What for, luv? There’s nothing there but wind and water.’

The conductor peered ineffectually through a bit of window he had rubbed clear of steam. ‘Snow’s so deep, we’d probably stick anyway. Best get home, like you say.’

I nodded and the pain jabbed through my head. How was I to find my way through a maze of narrow streets, snow-choked and deserted? Yet there seemed nothing else to do. Once the driver turned off the power, the tram would quickly become very cold indeed.

‘Do you know how I can get to the Rialto Cinema?’ I asked.

They looked at me appalled. ‘Eee, you do have a way to go,’ exclaimed the driver.

Again, a committee of two was formed. The driver lived in Holt Road, the conductor in Old Swan, which in normal circumstances was no great walk from where we were stranded. The conductor decided to leave us. He turned up his overcoat
collar, said ‘Ta-ra, well,’ very dolefully, cautiously stepped down into the street and plodded away into the night.

The driver, sighing heavily, decided to drive the tram back along the route he had come to the nearest point to his home street or until the vehicle stalled. This would help me, too, and he said he could direct me home from where he lived. He floundered outside again and succeeded with difficulty in reversing the trolley on the overhead wires, and then heaved himself into the rear of the tram to drive it.

He left the communicating door slightly ajar, so that he could talk to me and I moved up to the end of the bench closest to it. We sailed slowly down the same side of the street up which we had travelled. I hoped we would not hit another vehicle which might be coming towards us. There seemed, however, to be no other thing moving in the city, and our tram finally refused to go any further after reaching Shiel Road.

The driver slammed the vehicle’s doors shut, and took my arm. Together we struggled on foot along Shiel Road, while the wind blew the snow into our faces, down our necks and up our coat sleeves. The driver had boots, an overcoat, a cap, a scarf and gloves. I had on a cotton dress, a macintosh and
a second-hand pair of walking shoes which I had bought from the pawnbroker for two shillings. My head and hands were bare, and rayon stockings did not offer much protection. I was also very thin, with no proper layer of fat to help ward off the cold. I regretted bitterly ever having set out.

By the time we found the driver’s brick, terrace house, with his wife peeping anxiously through the tiny bay window, the wind had eased and the snow was thinning.

His wife invited me in to rest and shelter for a while, but my mind seemed to be fogged up and all I could think about was the desperate need to get home and into bed. Stupidly, I said that the snow was easing and I could manage to walk home.

She nodded doubtfully at me, as her husband stamped about behind her in the narrow hallway, and she closed the door slowly as I moved away.

Durning Road to Tunnel Road, from dim gas lamp to dim gas lamp, alternately freezing and perspiring, I struggled on, through totally deserted streets. This was not a district of private cars, but here and there a van or truck had been abandoned and snowdrifts were rising round them. Each window sill I passed had a neat traycloth of snow on it, each doorstep its unbroken drift.

I was beginning to think that I would have to
knock at the nearest door and ask for shelter, when I suddenly found myself at the junction of Upper Parliament Street and Smithdown Road. And through the unearthly silence, came unexpectedly the distant rumble of a tram. I looked quickly down Smithdown Road from where the sound seemed to come. I saw the electricity spit and its reflection flash across the snow as its trolley crossed a wire. I half stumbled, half ran towards it.

The driver – there was no conductor – was astonished to have a passenger suddenly emerge from the storm. He stopped, and let me on through the front of the tram.

‘Eh, Miss. You must be frozen. Where you tryin’ to get to?’

‘The Rialto,’ I gasped, as I felt down my chest and eased out my little money bag, to get a penny from it. A pain like a knife wound was shooting through my back and my throat was swelling in its old threatening manner.

‘Eh, you don’t have to pay t’ fare,’ he said, through the slightly ajar front door, near which I had thankfully taken a seat. ‘I’m trying to get that far for me own sake. I got a flat in Catherine. But I reckon points will be frozen, so I won’t be able to turn.’ He jerked his head to indicate the way he had come, and added, ‘It was bloody
awful back there. I let me conductor off by his house.’

I nodded dumbly. In the warmth of the tram, my head was whirling as the snowflakes had been, and all I could think about was home.

The snow had stopped when, about fifteen minutes later, I pulled the string on our door latch and stumbled in, into my father’s arms.

I have a dim remembrance of Father rolling off my stockings in front of the fire and putting my feet into a basin of luke-warm water, to restore the circulation; of Mother holding a cup of scalding hot tea to my lips, and of being surprised at the anxiety in her pale blue eyes. Then I was in bed with Edward’s hot water bottle pressed to my back and Father was cursing as he tried to make a fire in the bedroom fireplace.

Faces came and went in the candlelight. Or was it sunlight? Medicine was forced down my throat, a poultice applied to my back. Fiona helped to hold me on a chamberpot placed on the bed. Once it seemed to me that Edith was there and I called out to her, but she faded away. I dreamed that Minerva came down from her seat on the top
of the town hall and shook her spear at me for being so foolish. Then there was a great nightmare during which I was arguing with the pawnbroker about the return of the typewriter. I kept shouting at him that he must give it to me because it was stolen property. I had long spasms of coughing, when all of me seemed wracked with aches and pains. I was dreadfully hot and kept throwing off the bedclothes, but they were always tucked round me again.

Then, quite suddenly, I was shivering in the light of the pale Liverpool sun coming through the bedroom window. My feet were sticking out from under the coverings, and I pulled them up close to me. The movement sent a shooting pain through them. A cold hot water bottle lay at my side and I tried to push it away, but somehow my hands would not obey so I lay still.

After a little while, I opened my eyes again and turned my head. A small fire was smouldering in the grate, and, in the double bed on the other side of the room lay Brian. He was tucked up tightly in a pile of bedding and coats. His hair stuck up like the hairs of a shaving brush and the face beneath was yellow with two bright red spots on the cheekbones.

I tried to ask him what had happened, but when I moved, such a pain shot through my head from
both ears, and my throat seemed so swollen, that I barely got the first word out.

He seemed to understand, and one small, chilblained hand crept out of his covering and he pointed to his throat. He managed a wry little smile.

Mother came slowly in. Her feet dragged, as she came over to me. Without make-up and without her hair combed, she looked faded and pinched. She must have been exhausted, after having two invalids to care for, particularly since I would normally have taken a lot of the load from her.

She saw with obvious relief that I was awake. To allay the pain, I lay perfectly still while she put her hand on my forehead to check the temperature.

‘How are you feeling?’

I tried to smile. ‘Ears hurt – and throat and legs,’ I croaked. ‘Brian?’

Mother nodded. ‘He has quinsy, poor boy. He is going into hospital this afternoon, to have it cut.’ The lines on her face deepened. Brian was one of her favourite children.

‘Where is he going?’

‘The Ear, Nose and Throat Hospital.’

Very carefully, I turned my face towards the other bed. Despite his illness, Brian’s eyes crinkled up cheerfully at me.

For a long time, I lay looking at the cracked,
grey ceiling, trying not to weep with weakness and pain, because crying only constricted the already painfully tight throat. Mother brought both Brian and me a cup of tea and supported us in turn as we drank.

The doctor came in the afternoon and dispatched Brian, still stoically cheerful, in an ambulance to the hospital. Then he turned to me.

‘I was beginning to think I’d have to send you in, too,’ he said, as he probed round my neck with his fingers.

I smiled weakly. ‘What have I had?’

‘You’ve had a nasty attack of bronchitis – in fact, it is still with you – but I think you will mend now. You also managed a bad dose of ’flu. And now we have to tackle your throat and ears.’

I nodded, while he took a camel hair brush out of his bag and a bottle of tannic acid, so that he could paint my throat. After he had done that, he put drops in both ears. He was very gentle, his handsome young face filled with concern. Afterwards, I learned that he did not charge for his visits to Brian, since he was already in the house to see me. Brian’s hospital stay would be covered by charitable contributions to the hospital, he told Mother. He came every day, twice, to paint my throat and check my ears.

All I could eat for a while was a cup of Oxo with bread mashed into it or a cup of tea, but I slept a lot.

Two days after my delirium left me, I remembered Miriam’s typewriter. I lay sobbing quietly for hours in great fear about it, while Mother did an afternoon stint in a department store.

Father was home first. I had heard Fiona come in, followed by the other children, but she was making the tea, judging by the sounds that floated up the stairs, and had not come to see me. Father came straight upstairs and still had his hat in his hand as he sat down on the bed, careful not to shake me.

‘Well, how’s my girl?’

‘Not bad,’ I whispered.

He patted my hand, and I asked him eagerly, ‘Daddy, do you know about the typewriter?’

He looked grim, as he said that he did.

‘Were you able to get it back? Has Miriam got it?’ It seemed as if my whole life hung on the answer.

He gave a little snort, with a hint of laughter in it. ‘Yes, dear. She has.’

‘Thank God,’ I muttered. ‘Thank God.’ The burden was off me.

He sat staring sombrely at the empty fireplace – we had run out of coal. After a minute, I asked huskily how he had done it.

‘Well, your Mother had applied for a five-pound cheque to buy some clothes for the boys – and the finance company granted it. So we bought everything we could on it and pawned the lot. And we didn’t pay the rent, so that made enough. Your Mother took the machine into the office – and I understand that Miriam was very nice to her.’ He sighed heavily, and then said, ‘Don’t worry any more. You should have told me immediately it happened. I doubt if I would have known about it at all, if you had not shouted your head off over it while you were in delirium.’ He looked down at me and laughed suddenly. ‘There was quite a rumpus.’

I could imagine the row there must have been between Mother and him, and I grinned back at him.

‘And I was out of it all,’ I chuckled. My throat hurt and I stopped suddenly. ‘It’s a dreadful load of debt.’

‘Nothing new,’ he said, with the same sort of optimism that Alan sometimes displayed. ‘You are not to worry. Just get well.’

‘How long have I been ill?’ I asked.

‘Eight days.’

‘When can I get up?’

‘It will be some time yet.’

I laughed again, this time a little more carefully. ‘Fiona still has to hold me on the chamberpot – so I suppose it will be a while.’ Then I began to cough and to wince with pain in my chest and head. The smoke from his cigarette had got into my throat.

One day, the doctor asked Mother to refrain from smoking in the bedroom. She was very offended and railed against him as soon as he had gone. He had also lectured her on the necessity for getting some weight back on to both Brian’s and my wasted bodies. He ordered cream, butter, potatoes, fresh vegetables, liver and eggs – and rest, lots of rest and fresh air for both of us.

Mother listened, and bowed her head politely from time to time, as he urged her quite passionately to stuff us with food. But when she had quietly closed the front door on him and had returned to the bedroom to give me a dose of cough mixture, she first fumed about his rudeness in asking her not to smoke, and then said crossly, ‘And where does he think I will get the money from for cream?’

Tears of weakness forced themselves through crunched up eyelids, as I lay back on the pillow. I remembered the slice of bread for breakfast, the lack of lunch until I had managed to buy myself a bowl of soup or a roll and butter, the tiny plate of dinner kept from the hot meal Mother made
either at lunch time or teatime, according to her work schedule. She did not eat much herself, but I was still growing; my needs were at least as great as Fiona’s. I thought of Alan, able to go to the cinema on the strength of his pocket money, of the lunch he carried each day, of his new shoes and his tram fares. Why could not I have had the same?

And the answer seemed obvious. Because you are a girl old enough to be more useful at home than at work; a girl, moreover, whose very existence was resented from the day of her birth.

People, least of all parents, do not analyse their attitudes to children; and I am sure Father and Mother saw me only as a recalcitrant, disobedient offspring who had to be brought to heel. Their lives had been ruined and they were too exhausted to think their children’s problems through. Mother used quantities of aspirin to sedate herself and Father, when he got the chance, vanished off for a drink. And they both smoked incessantly. They had neither time nor inclination to give sober, careful thought to what was happening to me.

Mother did, however, begin to bring me plenty of bread and margarine and big bowls of porridge with a little sugar and milk. But a great lassitude enveloped me. After a few mouthfuls, the throat seemed choked and I could not eat any more.
Frequent small helpings were difficult for her to arrange because she worked a half-day on most weekdays, and she was herself tired to death.

Fiona helped me to use the chamberpot and she and Mother washed me. At first I accepted these attentions with about as much response as a rag doll would give. Then, as I grew a little stronger, the wells of gratitude were loosed and I would thank them effusively for every service, however small.

I began to worry that such a long absence would mean dismissal from my job. And how long would it take me to get strong enough to face those awful stone stairs and heavy trays again? And my night school work would be weeks behind.

I asked Fiona to bring me my text books and I lay with them on the bedclothes, too weak, too tired to lift them up and read them. When Mother went to the library, she very kindly brought me a pile of novels and these were the first books that I read, as I grew a little stronger and was able to sit up.

As the fear that I might die receded, Mother began to get impatient with my slow recovery. She was weary, weary beyond words, after coping with Brian’s and my sickness, her own periodic jobs and all the tasks that I normally did. Fiona had been pressed into service, but Fiona was as good as Mahatma Gandhi at practising passive resistance;
she had no intention of inheriting my domestic shoes. She learned quickly that trade union habit of working to rule. And who could be angry with such a gentle, helpless, blue-eyed beauty? None of us could.

When Brian returned from hospital, and, after a week’s convalescence at home, was allowed to return to school, Mother seemed to feel that I should automatically have recovered as well.

I was unable to oblige, though our patient doctor had managed to bring down the inflammation in my throat, and the abscesses in my ears had burst and were healing. I was also able to sit on a chair, though I found a hard wooden one difficult to sit on because I had no fat on my buttocks.

Christmas was nearly upon us, though I had given no thought to preparing gifts and my parents had not mentioned it, when Fiona brought a letter up to me. Though the letter was addressed to me, it had been opened. It was from the Presence.

The Presence announced that she was very concerned that I had been so ill, and she would call to see me at three o’clock in two days’ time.

The thought of such an important visitor as my employer coming into our bedroom threw me into a panic. What would she think of the stuffy, dirtiness of it, of the lack of bedspreads, even enough
blankets? How would she regard a room furnished only with two beds, a candlestick, a wooden chair and an unscoured chamberpot? She was a gentlewoman, I reminded myself. She would be horrified.

‘What shall I do?’ I asked Mother when, later, she brought me a cup of Oxo.

‘I think you had better see her downstairs,’ said Mother. ‘The doctor said you can get dressed for a little while tomorrow, so you can probably get down the stairs all right.’

I agreed fervently. If Mother tidied up the living room it would look much better than the bedroom did.

‘How long did they pay my wages for, Mummy? Did they send any?’

‘Oh, yes. They’re still paying them. A money order comes every week. I cash it at the post office.’

‘That’s awfully kind of them,’ I said.

‘Well, they’re a charity. They should be charitable,’ Mother said, with considerable venom in her voice. She picked up my medicine bottle and shook it.

The sudden elation in me died at her remark. I shivered. How cold charity could be.

As I sipped the scalding Oxo, I told myself that I was stupid, inept, untrained and deserved the impatience of the filing clerks and Mr Ellis, the
irritability of the Cashier who had the unenviable task of making the charity’s ends meet. Two of the social workers, the ladies of the green overalls, had, at my first Christmas with them, given me gifts, one of sweets, the other of a bottle of lavender, which I had promptly used as gifts for Mother and Fiona; so they knew I existed. There were days, however, when I wondered if I was really a person to the staff or whether I was just an inefficient piece of machinery. Mother had never regarded her servants as people; perhaps they thought of me like that.