time, we obtained a bug-ridden terrace house at a few shillings less rent than our rooms. I no longer had to face the irate complaints of the tenants in the rooms beneath us, about the noise the children made. The bugs bit unmercifully and they made a horrible smell, but the children did not complain.
I had high hopes, when Father started work, that I would be allowed to go to school and then to work, and that Mother would become the housekeeper. But Mother had obtained part-time employment as a demonstrator in various department stores, and she announced that she would be continuing this work.
‘Why can’t you stay at home, like other mothers do?’ I implored.
‘The doctor said I should work – remember?’
‘Yes. But that was when you were convalescent. He wanted you to walk about in the fresh air to get strong again. But you are quite well now.’
‘Oh, don’t be stupid, Helen. Stop arguing. We need the money.’
‘But must I always stay at home, Mummy? I’m over fourteen now. I should be at work – like other girls are. Couldn’t we find someone to help out at home?’
‘Really, Helen. Be sensible. How could we afford to pay anyone?’
We did need the money, it was true, and we never paid anybody we could avoid paying but I had all the adolescent’s doubts about my elders, and I distrusted Mother’s motives. There had never been much love between us. I had always been taken care of by servants; in fact, Mother had never had to take complete care of any of her children. I sensed angrily that she found it easier to go out to work than to stay at home and face the care of seven noisy children. I found coping with six brothers and sisters, who daily became less disciplined, very hard indeed.
So, as I walked through the rain along Castle Street and absent-mindedly played with Baby Edward, and diverted Avril’s attention to Minerva and then to a warehouse cat stalking solemnly across the street, I was bitterly unhappy.
We had to stop, while a desk was carried across the pavement from a furniture van into an office building; and I looked again up at Minerva.
She seemed almost to float in the misty rain, and I wondered suddenly if something more than a statue was really there, some hidden power of ancient gods that we do not understand, and I said impulsively, ‘Hey, Minerva. Help me – please.’
The big man in a sacking apron, who was supervising the transfer of the desk, turned round and asked, not unkindly, ‘Wot yer say, luv?’
I blushed with embarrassment. I must be going mad with all the strain. I’m crazy.
‘Nothing,’ I said hastily. ‘I was just amusing the baby.’
‘Oh, aye,’ he replied, smiling down at Edward, while the desk disappeared through a fine oak doorway. ‘You can get by now, luv.’
I was twelve when we first came to Liverpool, and my parents were able to keep me at home because the Liverpool Education Committee did not know of my existence. I had come from another town and did not appear in any of their records. Six weeks before my fourteenth birthday my presence in Liverpool was reported by my sister, Fiona’s, school teacher. And much to my parents’ annoyance, I had to attend school for those six weeks.
Now I was over fourteen, my parents had no further legal obligations in respect of my education. So, at home I stayed, simmering with all the fury of a caged cat.
I had had an aunt, a spinster, kept at home all her life to be company to my grandmother, who lived on the other side of the River Mersey. This aunt seemed to have no real life of her own, and I dreaded being like her, at the beck and call of my relations, a useful unpaid servant, without the rights of a servant. She was such a shadow of a person that I never ever thought that she might help me.
I raged to myself that I was always the last to be provided with food and clothing. I did not even think about the lack of pocket money or other small pleasures – they were beyond my ken.
In our hard-pressed family, shoes and clothing were given first to those who had to look neat for work, and then to those who went to school. I could always manage because I did not have to go out, I was told sharply.
As housekeeper, I had to apportion the food. I fed Baby Edward first, then Avril, who was nearly five, then the two little boys, Brian and Tony. After them, frail, lovely Fiona and cheery Alan. I would then serve Father, who never complained about the small amount on his plate. What was left was shared between Mother and me. Sometimes there were no vegetables left for us, and frequently no meat, so we had a slice of bread each, with margarine, washed down with tea lacking both sugar and milk.
Mother still looked so dreadfully haggard that I would sometimes say, with a lump in my throat, that I was not hungry and would press the last remaining bits of meat and vegetable upon her. All my life I had been afraid of her tremendous temper, but such fear had long been overridden by a greater fear that she might die.
In response to my frequent complaints at not being allowed to go to work, Mother often said absently, ‘Later on, you will marry. Staying at home is good practice for it.’
But I had always been assured by Mother and the servants that Fiona had the necessary beauty to be married; and I – well, I did have brains.
‘You can’t help your looks,’ our nanny, Edith, used to say, as she scrubbed my face. ‘Maybe your yellow complexion is from being ill so much. It might improve as you get older.’ She used to seize a brush and scrape back my straight, mousy hair into a confining ribbon bow on the top of my head; but she spent ages curling Fiona’s soft waves into ringlets.
‘Why do you have to be so disobedient? You’re nothing but a little vixen, you are. Nobody’s going to marry a faggot like you when you grow up,’ she would shout exasperatedly. ‘Get those muddy shoes off, before I clout you.’
In a desperate effort to save myself from spinsterhood, I learned to obey a raised voice like a circus dog. But it did not do me much good. I was still sallow and plain, sickly and irritable.
After Father found a job, I fought a great battle with my parents for permission to attend night school three evenings a week. It became the single joy of my life. There was order and purpose in the musty, badly-lit classrooms with their double wooden desks in which, for most classes, sat more than forty pupils. The bare board floors, the faded green paint and chipped varnish were much more pleasant and clean than my home.
For the first two winters of my attendance, nobody would sit by me, because I was so blatantly dirty and I stank. Only the teachers spoke to me. In some subjects I was so behind that I needed dedicated helpers. And the teachers gave me that help.
The bookkeeping teacher taught me the simple arithmetic which I had forgotten through long absence from school. The English teachers gave me essays to write, in addition to the business letters they demanded from their other pupils. They drew my attention to poems and to essays I should read. Later, I took German and French, and again the teacher drummed additional grammar into me, and introduced me to the translated works of foreign authors. Shorthand, a possible gateway to employment, was largely a matter of practice, and I practised zealously.
I dreamed of becoming the treasured secretary of some great man of affairs, like Sir Montague Norman, the Governor of the Bank of England, to whom I had once been introduced. He had given the silent, small girl by Father’s side a new shilling, and I had curled up in an agony of shyness and refused to say thank you, much to Father’s embarrassment. But, of course, when I became a secretary, I would always be ready with the correct, polite remark and flawlessly typed letters ready to be signed.
During the day, as I walked little Edward in the squeaky Chariot and, particularly after my more trying charge, Avril, had joined her brothers and sister at school, I read books balanced on the pram’s raincover. I discovered Trevelyan’s histories