Helen Forrester - By the Waters of Liverpool

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2012

This edition published by Harper 2016

Copyright © the estate of Jamunadevi Bhatia 1985

Cover layout design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2016

Cover photograph © Bert Hardy / Getty Images

HarperCollins has made every effort to find copyright holders and obtain permission for the use of copyright material in this book. If any material has been used without the owner’s permission please contact HarperCollins and we will give appropriate in future reprints or editions of this book.

Helen Forrester asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780008180935

Ebook Edition © Dec 2016 ISBN: 9780007369300

Version: 2016-11-17

To dear Robert who helped so much

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

March 1950

Footnotes

Keep Reading …

Read the First Chapter of Lime Street at Two

About the Author

By Helen Forrester

About the Publisher

I was seventeen going on eighteen, and I had never been kissed by a man. It was not surprising. Who would want to court the favours of a gaunt, smelly beanpole? I was five feet four inches tall, and that was real height in underfed Liverpool.

As I strode primly along Lime Street, on my way to evening school, the men who hung about the entrances of the cinemas hardly spared me a glance. I was most unflatteringly safe. And this, in a world where women still took it for granted that they would get married, was very depressing. Girls did not look for careers – they worked until they got married. If a woman was not loved and cherished by a man, she must be hopelessly ugly or there must be something else wrong with her.

I tried not to care that no young man had so much as winked at me. I stuck my proud Forrester nose in the air and vowed to make a career for myself as a social worker in the Charity which employed me. Dorothy Parker, the famous American writer, had once remarked that men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses; and I had a pair of too-small horn-rimmed spectacles perched on my nose. There was nobody to suggest to a shy, shortsighted girl that she might occasionally take off the ugly impediment to show the sad, green eyes behind.

‘Perhaps your yellow skin will improve, as you get older,’ my childhood Nanny, Edith, had suggested; and she scrubbed my face harder still with Pear’s Preparing To Be A Beautiful Lady soap. To no purpose. All time and our subsequent poverty had done was to add a revolting array of acne spots, spots that were made worse by the lack of soap, hot water and clean towels at home.

And here was the year 1937 rolling along. Soon I would be eighteen. And nobody, I felt, really cared what happened to me. To my mother I was a trying daughter who brought in a wage each week; to the rest of the family a pair of hands, very useful for cooking and darning socks.

It was seven years since Father had gone suddenly bankrupt, plunging us into a poverty so great that I was frequently surprised that the nine of us had survived it, seven skinny children of whom I was the eldest, and two equally thin parents.

I sighed as I trudged up the hill. Though Mother and Father now both had work, they were very poor managers, and we were still cold and hungry most of the time, surrounded by the unpleasant odour of neglect and poor nutrition.

I handed my small wages to Mother every pay day, except for three shillings and sixpence. This totally inadequate sum was supposed to clothe me, pay for lunches and tram fares, make-up and all the small things a girl at work was expected to have. Mother was bent on making me give up my employment and once again stay at home to keep house, something I dreaded; so she made it as difficult as possible for me to go to work.

I found pupils to coach in shorthand in the evenings, but I earned very little because my free time was extremely limited.

I was doing very well at evening school, I comforted myself. One day I might be promoted and earn enough to live on. My ugly, kind bookkeeping teacher had assured me recently that, if I took one more course, I would be able to become a bookkeeper. She had added that parents were always glad of a girl at home who brought in a wage; it contributed to their comfort in their old age.

She had put into words something I dreaded, something only a husband could save me from. I could be faced with spending the rest of my life maintaining and waiting on two irritable, shiftless, nagging parents, the usual fate of the daughter who did not marry. Because I was plain and shy and frightened of my mother, I knew I could be bullied into being a nobody, a nothing.

Some women with gentle parents found their care a labour of love. Not me. I knew I would be crushed as flat as a shadow. I had already had a spell as housekeeper, from the age of eleven until I was fifteen. It had been a nightmare, looking after six young children and two quarrelling parents. Mother had, before Father’s bankruptcy, never had to care entirely for her children. We had had servants. In fact, I hardly knew her until we were plunged into a slum together. She escaped from her unruly brood by working as a demonstrator in department stores.

In a frantic effort to escape myself, I had at the age of fourteen raged and threatened, as only a fourteen-year-old can, until I got permission to attend evening school, to repair in some part my lack of education.

At fifteen, with the unexpected help of Miss Ferguson, a deaconess at the local church, I had fought another battle to take the job I at present held. Housekeeping was divided between a very angry mother and me.