Read the First Chapter of Lime Street at Two
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.
I called Miss Ferguson my Fairy Godmother, and it was of this devout, cultivated lady that I was thinking, as I kicked a stone up Copperas Hill on the way to evening school. The street was quiet in the fading spring light, the misty air balmy – and I was shivering with pure fright.
Miss Ferguson had laid on my shoulders a fear worse than that of death, the fear of hell, Dante’s hell.
How could she do such a thing? I wondered miserably, with a superstitious shudder. She was my Fairy God-mother.
She had first visited the family in order to recruit my two middle brothers, Brian and Tony, into the church choir. She knew them because all the children attended the church school. She had seen my situation as unpaid maid-of-all-work, and, perhaps to give me an hour or two of rest, she had pressured Mother into allowing me to go to church on Sunday evenings. At first I had no suitable clothes to go in, but once I could look at least neat, I thankfully attended.
We were Protestants, an important point in a city where the division between Protestants and Catholics was bitter and sometimes bloody. Children were aware from the time they could speak which side of the fence they stood on, and the implanted bigotry is to this day not entirely rooted out.
No amount of churchgoing could erase the vaguely erotic dreams which haunted me occasionally, or a terrible sense of empty loneliness. Ignorant, innocent, half-starved, practically friendless, my flowering body was trying to tell me of needs of which I had little notion. Almost all the myriad of novels I had read ended with the hero kissing the heroine for the first time. I had never considered what happened next. I felt a kiss would be the ultimate height of happiness.
But