Helen Forrester - Liverpool Miss

He hesitated for a moment. Then he said, ‘You just stay where you are for the moment, until Mother comes home. Fiona’s making the tea. I’ll ask her to bring you a cup. She peeked in here and thought you were sleeping, so she has laid the table for you and cut the bread and butter. I will make the fire in the kitchen for the children.’ His voice was kind.

With eyes screwed tight to help me bear the raging pain, I put my head down again on the inhospitable green leatherette. I heard him open the door, pause a moment and then say, ‘Don’t be afraid, old lady. This is nothing to be frightened about. You don’t need a doctor.’

I did not answer him, because I did not believe him. I could not understand how anyone could be in such pain and not need a doctor. ‘Mummy, come soon,’ I sobbed. Cold, indifferent Mother seemed to be the key to it all.

The door clicked again and I opened my eyes. Fiona entered, carefully balancing a coarse china cup on a saucer which did not match. Despite her care, the tea slopped as she put the cup and saucer into my hand. She looked at me anxiously from beneath a roughly cut fringe of nut-brown hair.

‘Daddy said to drink the tea while it is very hot. What’s the matter, Helen? You look awful.’

I was shaking so much that, as I raised myself a little, I slopped the tea on to the new settee. ‘I don’t know, Fi,’ I answered, as I tried to sip the scalding liquid. ‘Daddy says it’s nothing – but, oh, Fi, I’ve got such a terrible pain in my back and tummy – and I’m bleeding underneath.’

Fiona’s pink cheeks blenched. ‘Bleeding?’

I nodded affirmatively. The tea was comforting and I drank it eagerly, though it was hot enough to burn my tongue.

‘Oh, Helen!’ she whispered.

‘Daddy said to stay here till Mummy came. Can you manage?’

‘Yes, of course. Daddy’s making the fire and Alan is fetching the coal for him. You rest. Mummy will come soon.’ She was trying hard not to panic herself.

‘Where’s Edward?’ I asked.

‘He’s in the kitchen. He’s fine.’

I could feel a warm trickle between my thighs and I took deep breaths to avoid screaming in fright.

‘Go and have your own tea,’ I told her in a strained whisper, and she went, stopping at the door to look back at me with fearful violet-blue eyes.

‘Don’t be afraid, Fi,’ I panted and tried to muster a smile for her sake. ‘I’ll be all right.’

She smiled back with sudden relief and shut the door quietly after her.

I was sure, as I sank back on to the settee, that I was on my death bed. And Father did not care!

Mother sat down on the green leatherette easy chair opposite to me, and took off her hat. She looked tired and irritable.

‘Oh, Mummy,’ I wailed. ‘I’ve got such a terrible pain – and I’m bleeding.’

‘Oh, stop crying, Helen,’ Mother snapped wearily. ‘There’s nothing the matter with you. This is what I told you about years ago. All girls bleed every month.’

I looked at her with wide-eyed horror, while I pressed my hands into my raging stomach. ‘I don’t remember your telling me.’

‘Of course, I did – when you were about nine.’

If she had told me, the information must have been given so obliquely that it did not then register on my childish mind.

My teeth were chattering, as I asked incredulously, ‘Every month – and pain like this?’

‘Of course not. It doesn’t hurt at all. You have just worked yourself into a panic, and that has caused the pain. It will go away quite soon. We’ll try to get some aspirins, before it is due next time.’

Mother smoothed her hair, ruffled from her hat, and got up briskly. ‘I’ll put a kettle on and when it is boiled, you can come into the kitchen to wash yourself. I’ll get a piece of cloth and show you how to keep yourself dry.’

‘Will it be like this ever again?’ I asked between dry sobs.

‘I doubt it, if you don’t have hysterics.’

Twenty minutes later, I was seated by the kitchen fire, washed and tidied, drinking another cup of hot tea. The heat from the fire helped and gradually the pain receded, as Mother had promised.

The boys stared at me because they had been told that I had had hysterics over a perfectly normal tummy ache; and they went away, Alan to night school, Brian and Tony to play bus on the stairs.

It had been a terrifying promotion to womanhood. I felt humiliated and stupid, and blamed myself for my pain. I had been aware of changes in my body, but I was so undernourished that the changes were slight and they had come slowly enough not to scare me.

Three weeks later, I collapsed with pain in night school. The English teacher made me swallow two aspirins, told me I would be all right in an hour and sent me home. Mother said the same thing and sent me up to bed, where I groaned and moaned my way through the next eight hours or so. In the early hours of the morning I fell asleep, ex- hausted.

From month to month the pain persisted, and Mother became more concerned. She bought dried mint and made a tea for me to drink at the onset of the first ache. It did not help. Cristina, my Spanish friend, recommended a thick paste made with ginger spice and hot water, to be licked off a spoon. Trustingly I downed this horrible concoction, but the pain continued. Cristina laughed, and said all the pain would cease either on marriage or after having a baby.

I knew I was too bad-tempered and too plain to hope for marriage; and I was certain in my mind that, however babies came, I was not going to have one outside marriage. So I smiled dimly at her and did not reply.

All the well-meaning adults in my life assured me that menstruation was just part of growing up and that some girls had more difficulty with it than others did. Nobody suggested that I should see a doctor. Since doctors cost money, and I rarely thought of acquiring anything that required payment, it did not occur to me either.

For a week or two, I would forget the pain in the bustle of caring for the children’s endless needs, and running off to night school through misty streets, where strange, shadowy women lurked; and then apprehension would begin to creep over me. I would ask Mother for some of her aspirins and store them behind the alarm clock on the kitchen mantelpiece. I learned that heat was comforting and when I saw a pile of new bricks lying on a building site, I begged two cracked ones from the bricklayer and brought them home. I heated them in the oven beside the kitchen fire, and when the onslaught began I wrapped them in newspaper and lay on the green leatherette settee, clutching them close to me. Edward began to think it was a new game and wanted a brick for himself. He thought it was a great joke to cuddle up close with the bricks between us. Since he must often have been cold, the heat was probably comforting to him, too.

One freezing winter day, I fainted in the butcher’s shop. When I came round I was in an easy chair beside a fire, in the living quarters behind his little shop. His wife was forcing brandy down my throat. She must have succeeded in getting me to swallow quite a lot, because the pain did dull slightly and I felt exhilarated and yet sleepy. Edward had been propped in a matching chair on the other side of the fireplace. White rivulets down either grubby cheek marked the passage of tears. He had, however, a cheering ring of red jam round his mouth and in one hand was holding the crumbling remains of a tart.

The tiny, stuffy room was packed with furniture, and the blaze in the hearth glanced off a gilded china shepherdess on a shining sideboard opposite to me. It danced off the glass dome covering a pair of stuffed birds and made the glasses of my hostess flash.