Kitabı oku: «Twopence to Cross the Mersey»

Two

‘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 skyscraper.

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.

Father had no knowledge of the legal rights of a bankrupt to clothing and bedding, so he sent the key of our house to his main creditor, a moneylender, with instructions to sell the house and its contents, and to reimburse himself from the proceeds. From a misguided sense of honour, he left everything we possessed, except the clothing in which he and his family were dressed, taking only a pair of blankets in which to wrap my mother and the new baby, Edward. Then, with his last ten pounds in cash, he bought tickets on the train to Liverpool, which was his birthplace.

He remembered Liverpool as a bustling, wealthy city and hoped to find employment there, perhaps as an accountant, in a shipping company. Having lived for years in prosperous, southern market-towns, he could not visualize what the Depression was doing to the north of England. He could not imagine that a man who desired work would not be able to find it.

Liverpool looked a dreadfully dismal place to my un-tutored eyes. Water swirled along the gutters, carrying a horrid collection of garbage. Across the road, the fine Corinthian pillars of St George’s Hall looked like a row of rotting teeth, and to my right, down William Brown Street, marched a series of equally large, black buildings. When I peeked farther out of the station I could see the entrance of a big theatre, the Empire, and farther along at the corner was a public house, the Legs o’ Man, near which a number of seamen stood laughing and joking, oblivious of the rain. Much later on, a sailor told me that sooner or later everybody in the world passed the Legs o’ Man and if you waited long enough you could meet there anybody you cared to look for; certainly, it was a great meeting-place.

Along the pavement men in shabby cloth caps shuffled from litter-bin to litter-bin to sift through the garbage for food and cigarette-ends. In the gutter stood four unemployed Welsh miners, caps held hopefully out while they sang over and over again in sad tenor voices ‘Land of our Fathers’ and ‘All through the Night’.

‘Are you lost?’

I jumped and Avril stopped wailing. A policeman, water running down his cape and helmet, was bending over us, his red face concerned.

‘No, thank you,’ I said primly, and, since he continued to look down at us doubtfully, I added, ‘Mummy is in the waiting-room.’

He smiled in a friendly fashion.

‘Better go back to her, luv,’ he said, ‘Lime Street is no place for a nice young lady – and ye’ll get wet.’

Reluctantly, I retraced my steps to the waiting-room.

Father had been away four hours or more. Baby Edward had not been fed and was crying lustily. Brian and Tony, aged six and five respectively, were playing tag round and round the high, varnished benches. Despite his determined effort at playing, I could see that Brian was afraid. Taut and dark as an Indian, so highly strung that he suffered constantly from nightmares, his little hands were clenched tight and his heart-shaped face was grim. Tony was playing the game with his usual cool care, watching his elder brother closely so as to anticipate every move he made. His mind seemed to work with such intelligence that it was as if he had been born with a brain already mature and furnished with knowledge. Sometimes when I stroked his silky, flaxen head I was almost unnerved by the idea of the latent power beneath my hand.

Fiona, aged nine, was still sitting silently by my mother, nursing her favourite doll, her huge, pale-blue eyes wide with dumb fear. We all loved Fiona with unquestioning devotion. She never had tantrums as Avril and I did; she never seemed to get dirty or forget her table manners. I always had a book in my hand, hated to miss school and loved an argument; Fiona adored her large doll family, accepted school but learned little. She was our placid refuge when we had been spanked, which was not infrequently, but now she needed asylum.

Mother lay on the stretcher, her eyes closed, her face ethereally white. An empty teacup on the bench beside her spoke of the kindness of the lavatory attendant, who stood leaning against her cupboard door, smoking a cigarette and regarding us curiously. There was no one else in the waiting-room.

None of us had eaten since breakfast, a meal of toast hastily consumed, and now it was after four o’clock. I knew that my mother had no money in her handbag, so it was no good offering to go and buy something to eat from the station restaurant.

I went up to my mother. A tear lay on her cheek.

‘Are you all right, Mummy?’

‘Yes, dear. I got up and walked for a few moments a little while ago.’

‘You’ll soon be better, Mummy?’

‘Yes – yes, I have to be.’

I picked Edward up from beside her and, holding him against my shoulder, tried to stop his healthy bellows for food by walking up and down with him and patting his tiny back.

Alan had been kneeling on a bench by the window, watching the horses and drays in the station yard. Now he came and walked with me. We did not talk; both our hearts were too heavy.

I knew that Mother had been ill after Edward was born and had been in hospital until Christmas Eve, a scant eight days ago. I realized, with a sense of shock, that Christmas and New Year had passed uncelebrated, lost in a foggy nightmare of quarrels, recrimination and general disorder in the house. Mother had discharged herself from hospital, before the doctors thought she should, so that we could come to Liverpool.

As I clucked sympathetically at Edward, it seemed madness to me to embark on such a journey. I could not understand why the moneylender could not wait a few days more before taking legal action, so that Mother could get a little stronger before she moved. I had no conception of the panic gripping my parents, a panic which had made them lose completely any sense of proportion. They had been brought up in a little world of moneyed people, insulated by their private means from any real difficulties or hardships. When there was no money, they had no idea what to do, beyond trying to obtain a ‘suitable’ position. A moneylender was, to them, a ruthless Scrooge, and I do not think that it occurred to them that if he had been apprised of Mother’s illness he might have had a little compassion. And so they compounded their troubles to an unnecessary degree.

My relief was overwhelming when my father, soaking wet, came into the waiting-room, with a muttered apology to the attendant. He went straight to my mother. She opened her eyes and surveyed him sullenly.

‘I have obtained two rooms. Not very good. Just for a week.’ He sounded breathless and on edge. ‘Had to pay in advance. Walked back. I’m going to get a cab.’

My mother closed her eyes, and my heart sank. They were trying not to talk to one another again.

Father vanished again into the vast cavern of the station, and Mother told me to help the boys get their overcoats on.

A few minutes later, Mother was carried on the stretcher with the aid of a porter to a taxi-cab, the children trailing behind and the baby and Avril still crying. The procession caused some interest in the station, and I remember my face burning with embarrassment under the shadow of my velour school hat. Well-bred people, I had had it drummed into me, did not draw attention to themselves.

Mother crawled into the cab, and the porter folded up the stretcher, which belonged to the railway company. Somehow we all squeezed into the taxi, a hungry, forlorn group too tired to talk.