Liverpool Miss (6 page)

‘Where is the newspaper?’ he demanded irritably.

I put down the broken china and picked up the paper from the floor, where it had been thrown down during the quarrel. He shook out the pages and vanished behind them.

Washing greasy dishes in cold water without soap is not easy. The grease impregnates the hands and forms an oily ring round the basin. I had two saucepans left over from lunchtime to wash, and their exteriors were covered with soot from the fire. To save the gas, I had put the pans on the living-room fire to finish the cooking of the children’s midday dinner. Now the soot floated revoltingly amid the grease. I did not dare to put a kettle of water on the fire as I was afraid of irritating Father further by pushing past him. I let the water from the single cold water tap cascade into our tin wash basin to sweep out some of the soot, and stood gazing at the backs of my hands in the light of the candle I had just lit.

My hands were small and well-formed. The skin
was ingrained with dirt and round the quicks the nails were almost black. The nail tips were long and uneven and filled with grime. Sometimes I tried to clean my nails with a sliver of wood, but without plenty of soap it was a hopeless task. I remembered the scathing remark of the sweet-shop lady, and, with a stomach clenched with apprehension, I realised that to make myself thoroughly clean and neat for work would be very difficult.

In a painfully sweet voice, Mother suddenly called me from the front room, and I was jolted back from depressing contemplation to frightening reality.

I wiped my hands on the family’s solitary towel which hung on a hook on the back door. The towel was nearly black from use by nine people and it invariably stank. I added a streak of soot to it.

Father had joined Mother and the deaconess, Miss Ferguson, in the front room, and was perched uncomfortably on the edge of one of the easy chairs. I could feel the blood draining from my face; and, as I gave Miss Ferguson a nervous smile, I wanted to faint.

‘Miss Ferguson insists on hearing from you personally that you do not want to go to work,’ announced Mother frigidly, and Miss Ferguson shifted uncomfortably around in her chair. ‘I understand she spoke to you in the library this afternoon.’

‘Yes, she did,’ I whispered, in answer to the second statement.

Miss Ferguson took a large breath, as if the effort to speak was going to be too much for her. Then she turned her worried-looking face towards me, and said very carefully, ‘I have been trying to persuade Mr and Mrs Forrester that it would be greatly to your advantage if you could go to work and be trained for some worthy occupation, and that it would be possible for them to spare you from the house to do this. I tentatively made an appointment for you for tomorrow afternoon at three o’clock.’

Father made a wry face, and I had the feeling he wished he was a hundred miles away.

Mother interjected, ‘Helen will not be keeping the appointment, I am sure.’

Undeterred, Miss Ferguson pressed on. ‘I have assured your mother that you will be working with nice women, all from good families, and I am sure you will be well trained.’ She turned to Father and said very earnestly, ‘She would be quite safe there,’ as if any other place of work was probably a cesspool of immorality.

Father was embarrassed. ‘I don’t doubt it,’ he muttered, and looked across at Mother.

I looked down at my hands resting on the back of the easy chair, and burst into tears. It was easy to
see that my parents were boiling with suppressed anger at the intrepid little deaconess’s foray into our affairs. They would raise hell when she was gone. I put my head down on my hands and cried until the tears ran through the fingers on to the shiny green leatherette of the chair.

Avril, who had been sitting on a matching poof, sucking her thumb and watching the proceedings very quietly, suddenly started to cry as well, and was immediately whisked into the hall and the door shut on her. I could hear her wailing in the dark.

‘Don’t cry, Helen,’ said Father ineffectually.

Mother turned to Miss Ferguson, as she shut the door after Avril.

‘Helen is obviously very upset, Miss Ferguson. Perhaps we should discuss the matter with her and let you know in a day or two what has been decided.’

I was not just upset; I was nearly out of my mind with despair. But the tears came with such tremendous force that I could do nothing to stop Miss Ferguson being quickly, though politely, eased out of the house.

When I heard the latch on the front door click shut, I flung myself wildly on to the settee and continued to sob. What was the use of a day or two, when the appointment was for tomorrow?

It was fortunate that Father and Mother had already exhausted themselves with one quarrel that evening, and Mother, therefore, contented herself with ordering me to control myself, while Father asked how they could talk to me when I was making such a racket.

I made a violent effort, sat up and dried my face with the backs of my hands.

Mother looked so terribly exhausted, when finally I lifted my eyes to look at her, that I felt an overwhelming guilt and said, ‘I’m sorry, I really am.’

Mother had been dreadfully ill just before we arrived in Liverpool. She had had no real care since then, so that she was soon drained of strength. I truly did not want to add to her hardships; yet I could not bear my present miseries much longer.

‘Have you been talking to Miss Ferguson or to the Fathers at the church, behind our backs, Helen?’ asked Mother. There was an implied threat in the question. Family affairs, we had been taught from infancy, were not discussed with servants or outsiders. Childish revelations, whenever discovered, had been dealt with by a sharp spanking or, sometimes, caning.

I was too upset to care or remember about Miss Ferguson’s tour of our house, so I said indignantly that I had not. I took off my glasses and wiped them
down the front of my gym slip, while I tried to think how my going to work could be managed.

‘You know, Daddy,’ I said, approaching the weaker partner, ‘the salary offered is quite good. It would mean three salaries coming into the house.’

‘Alice Davis wants ten shillings a week to look after Edward,’ interrupted Mother. ‘And there are still the other children’s needs.’

‘Surely if everybody helped, we could manage between us. It wouldn’t hurt Fiona and Alan to help – they are quite big now.’

Mother dismissed Fiona and Alan with a gesture.

‘On Sundays I could clean the house, and, if Fiona and Alan could make the tea, I could put Edward and Avril to bed when I came in.’

‘It is not very practical,’ Father said. ‘Someone has to be at home to make the children’s lunch.’

My temper was rising, that incorrigible devil which dwelt within me. I fought it by praying each night that I would manage to keep calm until prayers the following night, and so often I failed. I made tremendous efforts to control it, not realising that insufferable people and unbearable circumstances could make a saint angry.

I stood up and flounced towards the door.

‘I am going for the interview, whether you like it or not. I may never get such a chance again. I must take it.’

‘Helen, you forget yourself,’ exploded Father.

‘Oh, no I do not. For once, I am remembering myself.’

‘Helen!’

Mother’s voice came in behind him. There was more than a little malice in her tone, as she said, ‘You have no suitable clothing, anyway.’

‘I’ll borrow some,’ I replied recklessly.

‘Helen! That would not do at all.’ Father sounded genuinely shocked.

‘It’s no worse than borrowing money,’ I retorted, and his face whitened. I had hit home most cruelly. Savagely satisfied, I fled from the room and back to the sooty saucepans.

I peeped over the railings surrounding the area. The curtains had not yet been drawn over the barred windows of my dear Spanish lady’s basement living room. In the soft light of her oil lamp, I could see her sitting in an easy chair on one side of the fireplace, with a pile of crochet work on her lap. Her handsome, black-eyed husband, Alonzo Gomez, sat opposite her on another easy chair. He was reading the newspaper, while a large black cat crouched on his shoulder, its lemon-shaped eyes glowing in the light. The remains of their evening meal still lay on a nearby table.

I opened the iron gate and ran down the winding iron steps of the area, knocked at the plank door under the main entrance steps of the house and, after waiting a moment, walked in.

I was engulfed by skinny brown arms and a flood of mixed Spanish and English words of welcome. Alonzo put down his paper as I entered their living room.

‘Come, come,’ he said, gesturing towards the blazing fire with one hand, while he smoothed his handlebar moustache with the other. He got up and bowed me to his chair.

Suddenly, I was in a different world.

Despite the general squalor, there were many people like Cristina Gomez who created real homes out of attic crannies or damp basements in once fashionable houses. There was never much money, though Alonzo Gomez worked as a carter for a fruit merchant in the city and the couple’s children were now grown up and had moved away; and yet the old kitchen had an air of cosiness, as if affection was exuded from the walls with the damp. The few pieces of well-worn furniture, the primitive cooking utensils hanging by the fireplace, the stone floor covered in the centre by a piece of coconut matting, all were clean and well cared for. Alonzo was known to have an explosive temper, but the explosions seemed to be rare, and at other times there was a lot of good-natured banter and teasing, when they laughed like children.

Cristina Gomez had a good collection of clothing. She had once told me that whenever her husband earned overtime money or won on the horses, he would spend the money on clothes for one or the other of them. And now I needed to borrow a whole outfit.

All Cristina’s clothes were black, even her petticoats, but that would not matter. Black was the uniform of work. It was usually worn by shop assistants and by many office workers.

After I had been cuddled and installed in Alonzo’s chair, while he sat on a straight-backed one, an orange was sliced and put on a saucer and a cup of strong, black coffee set before me on a brown-painted orange box. The health of all the family was inquired after by Cristina, and Mother’s poor health sighed over with much rolling of eyes and shrugging of shoulders.

At the mention of Mother’s health, my determination faltered. If I went to work, her load would inevitably be increased. Then, as Alonzo told a funny story about a carthorse which loved to steal apples from displays outside the Fruit Exchange, I realised that, on average, Mother did not earn much more than I would get, that if she stayed at home to look after the family, we would be very little poorer. And my resolve hardened.

Cristina asked me how I was faring at night school, and this gave me a chance to talk about my own troubles and the reason for my visit, to borrow a dress, shoes and stockings, if she would be kind enough to lend them to me.

‘Certain, certain, you can have anything.’ She paused and looked uneasily at her husband. ‘I would not wish to anger your good Mother, though.’

‘She need never know where I got the clothes from,’ I assured her. ‘I only need them for one afternoon. I’ll think of another way of getting clothes for the job itself.’ I had already thought of a possible source from which to obtain at least a dress, but not quickly enough for the interview.

Though Cristina might have qualms about offending my parents, her swaggering gallant of a husband had none. I think he had always resented my parents’ supercilious attitude towards their neighbours and his pride had been hurt.

‘Give them to her,’ he ordered his wife, with such a lordly gesture that the cat was disturbed from his shoulder and did a quick leap to the floor.

Cristina’s eyebrows went up expressively and she shrugged. She got up from her chair, flicked her black shawl up round her shoulders, and said kindly to me, ‘All right, my little one. Let us see what we can find.’

I bounced out of my chair, suddenly gay, and followed her. She had lent me old shoes on one or two earlier occasions, when she had observed that my running shoes were soaking wet; and long ago her gift of the Chariot had saved me the heavy task of carrying Edward everywhere when he was too young to walk.

Half an hour later, I glided through our back door, through the deserted kitchen and down the steps to the coal cellar, where I stowed away a brown paper bag containing shoes and stockings. On the inside of the cellar door, I hung a coat hanger which held a black dress with matching jacket shrouded in a piece of discarded curtaining.

‘Who is there?’ Father’s voice came sharply from the living room.

‘It’s only me, Daddy.’

I opened the door and went in. The gaslight had been lit. The mantle was broken and the flame hissed and flickered over the comfortless room. The fire was out. Upstairs, I could hear the boys fighting in their bedroom. Presumably, Fiona, Avril and little Edward were asleep, since there seemed no sound from them.

‘Where have you been?’ Father’s voice was freezing.

‘To see Mrs Gomez. Where’s Mummy?’

‘She has gone down to Granby Street to buy a
pair of stockings.’ He flicked over a page of his book impatiently. ‘You know I don’t like you mixing with local people.’

I hung my head, but did not reply.

‘If you have no homework to do, you had better go to bed.’

‘Yes, Daddy.’ I wondered if I should give him his usual good-night kiss, but he did not look up from his book, so I crept by him and went forlornly up to bed. I knew I had hurt him beyond forgiveness, and perhaps he really did not know how to cope with me.