Ferguson found her voice and said rather hoarsely, ‘There is a great difference, Helen. We do not accept the supremacy of the Pope. Our King is head of our church.’
Mother nodded agreement, her mouth pinched with her disapproval of me.
I felt as if I had been backed against a wall by a member of the Inquisition. I had never thought about the legitimacy of being allowed to worship as one pleases. I had no profound knowledge of my own faith. Most of my age group did not even attend church, though the majority, if asked, would say that they were either Protestant or Catholic – so great was the religious division in Liverpool.
To Liverpool Protestants, Catholics were people who lived in the worst slums because they did not know any better, and their greatest entertainment was attacking Protestant religious processions. They were not ordinary, kindly people at all.
I saw through Miss Ferguson’s suggestion only the tortured faces of my own beloved martyrs. I ignored the fact that Protestants had, in their time, done their share of roasting hapless Catholics.
Miss Ferguson saw the need to reassure me, and she leaned forward and patted my knee. ‘The first Confirmation classes will be held in a fortnight’s time, my dear. Come along to the vestry. I am sure the good Father can explain to you much better than I can how good for the soul Confession is.’
‘But – but...’ I spluttered helplessly. ‘Miss Ferguson, I can’t – I just can’t.’
The good Father! Not the Vicar. Childhood memories of gentle, vague scholars in clerical collars sipping tea in various drawing rooms made me want to rush back in time to them. I seemed to recollect that they only extolled the basic virtues. Where had they gone? I must have been asleep during the weeks I had been attending Miss Ferguson’s church.
Mother was saying brightly that, since Miss Ferguson thought it wise, time would be found for my attendance at classes.
With her usual outward charm, she saw Miss Ferguson out of our grubby living room, into the narrow hall and finally out to the littered street. I knew very well that she would attend to me later in a very different fashion.
Though doubtless learned clerics were already discussing and challenging the concepts of hell and damnation and other long-held beliefs, eternal punishment for the heretic was a very real threat to a girl brought up by ignorant country servants and subsequently cut off from her contemporaries as I was. To defy one’s parents for any reason was bad enough. To defy one’s church was, in my opinion, likely to be much worse. As I contemplated Brian’s tattered sock, I was shaking with fear of the spiritual forces which might be ranked against me. I wondered if I would be struck dead if I argued with the priests, actually raised my voice in a church building. And death was only the beginning of trouble for those cast out of the church. I might burn in hell for ever afterwards.
Nevertheless, quivering like a mouse before a cat, I determined on a last squeak.
I could remember Mother at the age of twenty-four, an elegant beauty with fashionable short black curls and large, pale-blue eyes. Her fine legs were sheathed in the latest pure silk stockings, her skirts daringly short, so that a sudden flip of them would give a glimpse of ruffled silk garters trimmed with tiny roses or pearls, or French knickers heavy with lace. She attracted a great deal of attention from Father’s war-battered friends, and Edith said she could get anything by merely fluttering her eyelashes. It did not work, however, when I tried fluttering my scant lashes, and I decided it must be something magical, known only to grown-ups.
The slightest argument or objection, the smallest frustration, would unleash her ungovernable temper, from which shell-shocked husband and servants would fly. I was terrified of her and would cling to Edith, seeking safety in her starched white lap. Edith always said comfortingly that she did not care a tinker’s cuss about Mother’s tempers; the job was handy for her. We lived conveniently close to the young farmer who was Edith’s fiancé, and we frequently escaped to the warmth and laughter of his mother’s farmhouse kitchen. Alan, who was the child next to me in age, was also wheeled in his pram to the farm and got bounced merrily on many a rustic knee.
Now Mother was a middle-aged harridan, worn down by the illness she had suffered when my smallest brother, Edward, was born and by the privation we had all endured since Father’s bankruptcy. Her figure was shapeless from eating too much white bread, her lovely legs horrible with varicose veins, hands ruined like mine, from washing, scrubbing, blackleading fireplaces, and lack of gloves. We rarely had hot water or soap, either for cleaning or washing ourselves, and face or hand creams were luxuries to look at through the chemist’s window. All that remained of Mother’s earlier self was a great charm of manner and a quick intelligence, when she felt like using either of them. Her scarifying temper had been further fed by her total unhappiness at her present state.
Like alcoholics, an improvement in my parents’ lives could be brought about only by their facing their problems squarely and themselves determining on a new and careful path, in their case a financial path. But, like many alcoholics, they could not do it. So we all continued to suffer, despite the fact that five of us were at work.
Alan worked as an office boy in the city, and most of his small wages were handed back to him for tram fares, lunches and pocket money. Similarly, my pretty fifteen-year-old sister, Fiona, worked as a cashier in a butcher’s shop. She earned the same amount as I did, but, unlike me, most of her wage was handed back to her for her expenses. Her clothes were bought for her, new, by paying for them by weekly instalments through a system of cheques. Companies issued cheques, commonly for five pounds, and with these one could buy clothing or household goods of one’s choice at any store on the company’s list. The clothing was often shoddy and expensive, but Fiona was at least as well dressed as any other girl travelling to work on the trams with her. I struggled to keep myself in clothes by buying them from the pawnbroker’s bargain table.
Paying the cheque man was as much a worry to Liverpool housewives as finding the money to pay the rent, and it drained our income. We were permanently hungry, frequently cold and not very clean. Cleanliness is expensive. Our landlord had freed us from one plague of slum living. He had had our house stoved, so that we were no longer verminous, and our relief from bug and lice bites was wonderful to us.
Brian and Tony, who came next to Fiona, had inherited their parents’ brains and they also had some of Mother’s earlier vivacity and physical strength. Brian had won a scholarship from the church school to the Liverpool Institute, and I was very envious of him. Earlier, I had won a scholarship to the Liverpool City School of Art, but I had not been allowed to take it up. I had to stay at home to keep house.
Also at school was short, determined Avril, almost unnoticed unless she had a temper tantrum like Mother, and little Edward, beloved baby of the family, whom I had nursed along since infancy. Though Edward was not very strong, probably because of the lack of adequate food in early childhood, his mind was clear and he had the ability to apply himself with great concentration to whatever he was doing. He could already read well, and Father hoped that both he and Tony would also win scholarships. Neither Mother nor Father gave any heed to Avril’s possible abilities as a scholar. She was only a girl.
The only other members of the family to attend church were Brian and Tony, who for nearly three years had sung in the choir and had enjoyed a remuneration of a shilling and eightpence per month, which they were allowed to keep. Now they sometimes acted as acolytes. Nobody, as far as I knew, had pressed them to go to Confession. They were, however, the cleverest of passive resisters and even if pressed would probably have placidly failed to turn up for it. Brian’s hazel eyes and Tony’s calm blue-grey ones could look as blank as a factory wall, with an innocence and incomprehension of stare usually seen only in the subnormal. They were a pair of cheery scallywags, most unlikely to be faced with the inner qualms and soul-searching which always afflicted me.
I was dreadfully troubled when Mother ordered me to stop being such a fool, and to attend Confirmation classes. I made no