bell clanged sonorously through the house. I expected to hear the clatter of our landlady coming down the stairs to open it, but there was no sound from the upper regions of the house, so very diffidently I rose and answered it.
At the door, stood an enormously tall man in long, black skirts. In his arms he carried Fiona.
I quailed before the apparition on the doorstep – it reminded me of an outsize bat and my overstimulated imagination suggested that it might be a vampire; in the chaotic mess that our world had become, anything was possible. The voice that issued from the apparition’s bearded face was, however, gentle and melodious, and asked to see my mother.
Nervously, I invited him (it was obviously male, despite the long, black dress) into the hall, and he slid a whey-faced Fiona to the floor, while I went to see Mother. She told me to bring the gentleman into our room, and, for the first time since our arrival, a slight animation was apparent in her face.
He entered, leading Fiona by the hand, and immediately my mother assumed the gracious manner which had, in the past, contributed to her reputation as an accomplished hostess.
‘Father!’ Her voice was bell-like. ‘This is a pleasure! Come in. Do sit down.’ She ignored poor Fiona, who came and stood by me, and stared dumbly at our new-found friend.
‘Father’? It was beyond me. I had never seen an Anglican priest in high church robes, nor yet a Roman Catholic one, in the small towns in which we had previously lived. I stood, with fingers pressed against my mouth, and wondered what further troubles this visit portended.
He was explaining to Mother that the school was an Anglican Church school. After Fiona had come out of her faint, the headmistress had wormed out of her something of what was happening to us, and had then telephoned him. The advent of four well-dressed, well-behaved children entering a slum school had already caused some stir among the teachers and considerable jeering and cat-calling among the other pupils, so the headmistress had asked him to call upon us. Here he was, he announced gravely, and could he be of help?
As I examined the beautiful, serene face of the young priest, Mother poured out a condensed version of the story of Father’s losses. He was a Liverpool man originally, she said, and had come back to his native city in the hope of earning his living there. To me, the well-edited tale still presented a picture of foolishness, extravagance and carelessness.
Now, at last, I knew why we were in Liverpool and what the word ‘bankruptcy’ really meant to our family. I knew, with terrible clarity, that I would never see my bosom friend, Joan, again, never play with my doll’s house, never be the captain of the hockey team or be in the Easter pageant. My little world was swept away.
I looked at Alan, who was standing equally silently by the window. His eyes met mine and we shared the same sense of desolation. Then his golden eyelashes covered his eyes and shone with tears, half-hidden.
‘Have you no relations who would help you?’ asked the priest.
‘I have no relations,’ said Mother coldly, ‘and my husband’s refused to know us at present.’
The priest combed his beard with his fingers, and smiled when Avril tried to reach up to touch it. He took her hand gently and held it, and within thirty seconds she had established herself triumphantly on his knee, from which safe throne she surveyed the rest of the family gleefully.
‘There is a great deal of unemployment in Liverpool,’ he said. ‘I fear your husband may find difficulty in finding work.’
Mother just stared disconsolately at him.
At that moment Father entered, dragging his feet slowly and looking almost as hopeless as Mother. The children ignored him, the exhausted baby slept.
Desperate to fill the silence, I cried gladly, ‘Daddy!’
He managed to smile faintly.
Mother introduced him formally to the priest, and he sat down and waited politely to hear why the priest was there. This was explained to him, while he shivered with cold and rubbed his blue hands together to restore the circulation.
Finally, the priest said to him, ‘First things first. You must have a fire or your youngest child will die. Probably I can persuade old Wright to bring up a hundredweight of coal. I have some small funds and I will bring some food. After you have eaten perhaps I can advise you a little.’
He put his hand out over the children’s heads in a gesture of blessing, said goodbye, strode out of the room and let himself out of the house.
The boys immediately broke into jubilant conversation with each other at the idea of food, and gradually Father began to relax a little for the same reason, though his face looked pinched and white. He had spent hour upon hour in the employment exchange, being chivvied from one huge queue to another, until he had finally got himself registered for work as a clerk. He was not eligible for unemployment insurance as he had never contributed to that fund, and the employment exchange clerk just laughed when he asked when he might hope to be sent to apply for a job. There were, he said, a hundred men for every job, and my father’s age was a grave difficulty – at thirty-eight he was too old to hope seriously for employment.
He had hardly finished telling us of his adventures, when the doorbell rang again. I answered it quickly this time.
A surly voice from beneath a large hump inquired where it should put t’ coal, and not to keep ’im waiting cos ’e ’adn’t all night to run after folks as ’adn’t enough sense to get it in the daytime.
The landlady had shown me where our coal could be stored, and the coalman clomped through the house behind me, scattering slack liberally around him, and heaved the coal expertly over his head, out of the sack and into a broken-down box in an out-house. Then, still muttering about improvident folks, he stomped back through the passage and departed into the darkness.
I flew in to Mother, and it seemed no time at all before we had a huge fire glowing, with Father’s coat and jacket and Edward’s nappy steaming in front of it. The already heavy atmosphere of the room was intensified by the cloying stench of these garments drying, but we did not care. We learned then that, when one has to choose between warmth and being half-fed, except in the last extremities of starvation, warmth is the better choice.
An hour later the priest presented himself again, carrying two large boxes and accompanied by a boy carrying two more. The boy dropped his burdens on the step and trotted away. The priest came in, at my shy invitation. He smiled at the sight of the comforted children kneeling by the fire between the drying clothes, and, with Father’s aid, he unpacked the boxes.
The table was soon loaded with six loaves of bread, oatmeal, potatoes, sugar, margarine, a tin of baby milk, two bottles of milk, salt, bacon, some tea, a bar of common soap, a pile of torn-up old sheeting (for cleaning, and for the baby, he explained apologetically) and, wonder of wonders, a towel, a big one.
The priest sat down, and called the boys to him, while Father and I made baby formula and porridge, and Alan collected all the dishes he could find. It felt oddly like a Christmas celebration, and even Mother seemed to come a little out of her apathy as she sipped the tea and ate the porridge Father eventually brought to her. I fed the baby while the children stuffed themselves with porridge, bread and margarine and chattered excitedly, Avril’s shrill falsetto and Brian’s contralto occasionally emerging from the general hubbub. At the priest’s insistence, Father and I finally ate, and Father became more his old, lively self.
We boiled another panful of water, and I took Fiona, Brian, Tony and Avril to the bathroom, and washed their hands, faces and knees. They had not had their underclothes off for thirty-six hours and did not smell very sweet, even after my washing efforts, but a quart of water does not go very far in washing four people, and I reasoned that the beds stank so much that they were bound to smell by morning no matter what I did.
Afterwards I took them into