Passage Across the Mersey

by Robert Bhatia

  Was she still on the rebound when she agreed to marry Paul Huband? Or did she feel he was a kindred spirit with a similarly lonely background to hers?

  ‘A wartime marriage was just about the worst thing that she could have done, especially to a man who had no real home life,’ Helen wrote to Avril. Their father had not sustained any serious physical wounds but was obviously haunted by memories of all he had experienced at the Western Front and could not settle down to domestic life. Instead, as the First World War drew to a close in 1918, he re-enlisted as a regular soldier to sail out to Russia and fight another war, leaving Lavinia behind in Hoylake, expecting his child.

  When writing in Twopence to Cross the Mersey, about her troubled relationship with her mother, Helen dated it back to this: ‘the only sin I had committed was to be born to my mother at a time when she would otherwise have divorced my father. She could never forgive me for it.’ Certainly it’s understandable if my grandmother was furious that her new husband left her alone and pregnant the year after their marriage to fight a war he need not have fought, a war that did not affect British national interests directly. She must have been terrified for her own welfare and that of her unborn child.

  After the Bolsheviks took power in Russia in October 1917 and subsequently signed a peace treaty with Germany, the Allies became concerned about the possible spread of Communism. For this and other strategic reasons, starting in 1918, Britain, Canada, the United States and a few other countries sent troops to fight alongside the White Russians, a loose confederation of anti-Communist forces resisting Bolshevik rule. Why Paul Huband joined them is a matter of speculation but it was likely that the difficulty of reintegrating into civilian life, along with a strong sense of obligation, was a factor.

  During the winter of 1918–19 my grandfather travelled right into the very heart of the country, from Archangel in the frozen north down to a little town called Pless, around 320 kilometres from Moscow. He wrote a diary in the early months of his time there.

  We commenced the experience of a lifetime. A trek through Russia … The road consisted of a track cut through a forest as big as England. No surface to the road. It was frozen like iron and it was marvellous we had so few sprained ankles. At times we passed through desolate marsh, it was like the end of the World, no news and absolutely dependent on our own rations … Our grub was bully beef and biscuits. Never shall I forget the vivid imagination one had of fine meals and a comfortable room, as we struggled along.

  In March 1919 he succumbed to shock brought on by exposure in the harsh temperatures, which averaged around -15°C, and spent two days in hospital thawing out before rejoining his small patrol. He recalled ‘sharp encounters with the enemy, in pathless forests, where my greatest fear always was that I would get lost’. A shed that had been turned into an improvised hospital was set alight during a raid and several of his wounded friends died inside: ‘It was a hopeless inferno in seconds,’ he later told Helen. And then there was an ambush, in which he became separated from his comrades. It must have been unbelievably terrifying. My mother later wrote to Avril about it:

  I read again Father’s description of a small troop of them being sent out into a sort of no man’s land, of icy ridges and no population, of their being cut off from any news whatever of what was happening to the rest of the British force. No wonder that he was hopelessly lost, when he was the sole survivor of a small patrol. Presumably, it was Bolsheviki who did the ambush and the killing, and it was ironical that it was a Bolshevik who found him and took him home.

  That Bolshevik was a man named Stupan. He took my grandfather back to his farm, where he used him as a labourer in an arrangement that may have started out as a prisoner/gaoler situation but soon became more about companionship. Within months the two men were close friends and Helen later wrote, ‘I sometimes think that Stupan, the Bolshevik, was the only real friend my father made after his school days. He still had his photo with him when he went into hospital and died.’

  Conditions were harsh, though, and when Paul was eventually found by a British patrol and given a medical examination, it was found that his hands were so badly affected by frostbite that surgeons considered amputating them on the ship home. Fortunately for him, they decided they could be saved, although for the rest of his life they would lose circulation and cause him a lot of pain in cold weather.

  While my grandfather was holed up in the wilds of central Russia, Lavinia was working as the first lady cashier in the National Provincial Bank in London Road, Liverpool, presumably to be near to her new husband’s family home in Hoylake. And then in June 1919, her baby was born. Helen wrote about her arrival in the world to a friend in Ireland; I presume she heard the story from one of her aunts.

  In 1919, my mother had booked herself into a nursing home [a private hospital in Hoylake called Brynmor]. My father was missing, presumed killed, in Russia, though he did come home eventually, a broken neurasthenic after being a prisoner of the Bolsheviki.

  When my mother presented herself at the nursing home, her pains having started, it was packed with desperately wounded men awaiting places in military hospitals for long-term treatment.

  Since I could not be left on the sidewalk to be born, they let mother in. A soldier who could walk gave up his bed and there I was born, with him assisting a hastily called in midwife. It was he who brought food to my mother, washed my first diapers and generally looked after the pair of us for ten days lying-in. He himself slept on the floor.

  My mother, being a very spoiled beauty, seems to have accepted this help as of right. She never thought of keeping in touch with such a humble, kind man. If it had been me, I would have taken a lifelong interest in him and his family.

  On Helen’s baptismal certificate, Paul Huband’s occupation is given as private in the King’s Liverpool Regiment and as bank clerk, the job he had done before going into the army. The baby’s name is listed as June Elizabeth Louise Huband.

  My mother wrote to her sister Avril about how her names were selected: ‘June was a natural choice for me. They were going to call me Joan (Auntie Phyllis’s second name) but she [Auntie Phyllis] said that June would be similar but prettier. So they added Elizabeth after Granny Huband and Louise after Uncle Percy’s wife, who was one of my godmothers.’

  Her father missed her christening because he was still in Russia and believed lost by his relatives back home. He stayed on Stupan’s farm until a British Army squad was sent in many months later to round up stragglers. So far from civilisation, he would have had no way of getting back to England on his own.

  No one is entirely clear when my grandfather returned to Hoylake to meet his little daughter. Helen said he told her that ‘if he had been there, I would have been called Milinki, which, I think, means little girl in Russian.’ The name he had in mind was likely ‘Milinkaia’, which translates roughly as ‘cute’, or Malenkaia, which means ‘little’. He did not think that June was a nice name to give a girl, in view of the notoriety of June, Lady Inverclyde, the mistress of the Prince of Wales. (I imagine it was a bit like calling a child Madonna nowadays!) When I was little, of course, I did not understand the inferences of it all!’

  It is clear that Paul had been psychologically damaged by the war. Helen described him as ‘neurasthenic’, a somewhat vague disorder commonly diagnosed at the time. Today we would likely say that he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. He woke screaming in the middle of the night and ‘was in such a mental state that he badly needed a calm, gentle, loving wife to help him heal. Instead, Father said that coming home to my mother was like getting into bed with a perfect stranger: not a very good beginning to any marriage. They managed another two babies, Alan and Fiona, within two years, and they fought like cats.’

  The First World War ruined many lives, and it seems clear that my grandmother and grandfather’s were among them.

  Chapter Two

  It is impossible for me to ever love my parents; the best I can do is to remember th
at neither of them had much home life or training in family life, and just found children a damned nuisance.

  Soon after Paul returned from Russia, the Huband family moved to Ludlow in Shropshire, where he got a job in a bank. At first they stayed in an apartment in what is now the Feathers Hotel in the centre of town. My mother later wrote:

  Accommodation was very difficult to find, immediately after the First World War, and we expected to spend some years in our apartment. However, one night its Elizabethan fireplace fell out. Termites had been very busy in the beams. So we had to find somewhere else. My father served in the army with the Earl [of Plymouth] at the beginning of the war, and he very kindly rented us one of a row of brand-new cottages he had built for his staff returning after the war.

  The earl’s cottage was in the village of Bromfield, three kilometres north-west of Ludlow. There my grandparents kept several servants, although I imagine that in order to do so they were living well beyond the means of a bank clerk. A nanny called Edith was hired to look after the children while their parents enjoyed a hectic social life.

  ‘The times were quite wild,’ Helen wrote. ‘They were known as the Roaring Twenties. The hippies of the 1960s and 1970s had nothing on their parents of the 1920s.’ She mused to one of her editors about writing a novel about this time but unfortunately chose not to. ‘I had at one point thought about going back to my beginnings and writing a child’s view of a rather wild period, encompassing the days of the flappers, the General Strike, the excitement of owning a motor car, the Hunt Balls, County Balls, etc., that my parents used to go to. Probably it has been done already. There was a great poignancy in that period.’

  Her parents threw lavish parties at the house and had a large set of friends, mostly ‘men who had served in the war and their wives’. In Twopence, Helen remembered the women as ‘doll-like creatures … in short, beige georgette dresses, their Marcel-waved hair covered by deep cloche hats’. Afternoon tea or cocktails were served by a parlourmaid wearing a black-and-white uniform. Helen was allowed to attend daytime parties, dressed up in a smart frock, where she would sit nibbling cake and watching the guests.

  They were intelligent and well educated, business and professional men, and I learned a lot from their conversations about law courts and stock exchanges and medicine and foreign countries, and, of course, about the First World War.

  My father was a strong conservative and politics were a favourite subject of conversation and argument. One thing that sticks with me, especially in these cynical days, was the absolute love of these men for their country. There was no place like England, no one like the English. Scots and Welsh were brethren with different histories. Anything that touched England touched them personally. Anything that hurt English interests was a personal loss to them.

  The war cast its shadow, with many of the men still affected by their wounds. Helen remembered one man who let her ‘reach up and touch the silver plate the doctors had implanted to replace the top of his skull’; another had ‘an artificial leg which creaked when he walked’. They were ‘bereaved, disillusioned, wounded in a war of frightful, unnecessary suffering’.

  In a letter to my dad, Avadh, in 1950, Helen described the visits of two local aristocrats.

  I can remember as a small girl of four or five years sitting in my bath in front of a roaring fire in a largish cottage we had in the country, playing with wooden ducks brought me by a couple of gentlemen who used to ride over on horseback. They were the Earl of Plymouth and Viscount Boyne. Both of them lived in young palaces, but they loved to come to our cottage, sit in the steam and warmth and drink hot tea with rum in it. They used to stay and talk literature and country law with my mother and father and then back they would go home. I often laugh and say that I must be one of the few ladies in the land who had a couple of Earls to bath her at one time! But the real point of the story is that wealthy people often enjoy simple comforts for a time because they are different from the normal routine.

  Paul and Lavinia were generous hosts, who were able to contribute to the intelligent conversation and present a public front as a glamorous young couple of means, but as soon as the last guest left, they were at each other’s throats. My mother wrote about their vicious arguments in a letter to her brother Alan when they were both grown up and living their own family lives. ‘I used to lie in bed, simply terrified, as they screamed at each other. I clung to Edith [the nanny], and kept out of the way of Mother as much as possible.’

  She remembered that the rows were ‘often over stupid, small things’, and speculated on the many tensions in their relationship.

  Their marriage did not really have much chance: neither knew the first thing about family life or managing money, because they were both consigned to boarding schools by the age of six. Though they knew each other for some time before their wartime marriage, the coming of the war and the separation caused by it, complicated the relationship.

  I think that they certainly started out by being in love, and, despite anything I think they held together because their experience from infancy was similar, yet different from that of the circles in which they lived.

  Father was not by nature aggressive, but he drank a lot, like ex-soldiers did in those days, and could become irritated by the children and aggressive in regard to them. Mother went into the attack like a trained defence dog. I suspect that, with no parents to help at all, she had had to defend herself all through her young life. I dreaded her. Nowadays, I feel sorry for a very talented woman with good brains, who never had much chance.

  At the schools he attended my grandfather had been beaten for every small misbehaviour so it is not surprising that he considered it normal to hit his children. Helen recalled:

  Reading was such a quiet pursuit that it rarely got me into trouble! My eldest brother was not so lucky – he was much more energetic – he had a marvellous ability to fall out of trees and have to be stitched up, break things, spill things, shout in the garden, forget to say, ‘please’ or ‘thank you’, etc., ad infinitum. I used to feel quite smug, until parental wrath caught up with me, too, for some dreadful misdemeanour, like smirking over my brother’s fall from grace – or simply looking sulky – or being in a room in which children were not allowed. The pair of us were slapped, slippered and occasionally, caned. Our nanny, who protected us as much as she could, scolded us as a ‘pair of little varmints’. She saw no hope for us.

  Despite the chastisement (which was doled out by both parents), Helen had a soft spot for her father. She wrote: ‘He was quite a gentle person in his way and would tell us funny stories about his time in Russia. His college had taught him Shakespeare’s plays so well that he could recite some of them from beginning to end. But imagine his trying to cope with the real world – after a World War.’

  An army doctor suggested to Helen’s father that if he could tell someone about his horrific experiences, it might improve his nerves. He was sure his wife would not understand so the doctor suggested he tell his children instead. At first he was shocked at the idea of telling them about the brutal cruelty of real war and of the horrors of the civil war in Russia but the doctor persuaded him by pointing out that fairy tales are very often gruesome.

  ‘Gradually, small channels of communication were opened up between Father, Alan and me,’ Helen wrote. ‘We soon learned that if, after Tea, we could get him going on Russia, we could be sure of not being sent to bed before at least nine o’clock.’

  As well as describing his war experiences he taught them other lessons as well: ‘My father had a friend who owned a string of race horses, and we used to go to the Ludlow races to watch them. And Father introduced me to betting. I did not like losing the sixpences he gave me, but I learned to love the horses – and some of them knew me.’

  She might have enjoyed spending snatches of time with her father but it was not fun to be around her mother. Lavinia was too volatile. She had a terrifying temper and could fly off the handle on the flimsiest pretexts. Serv
ants came and went as they got fed up with receiving the sharp edge of her tongue, or were sacked for some imagined misdeed. ‘I remember her screaming like a maniac at me and at the servants,’ Helen wrote.

  I was afraid of [her] and up to the age of six, always sought refuge with my nanny. I am sure that up to the age of seven, had I met my mother in the street, I would not have recognized her. By the time I was six, I knew my father all right, because he formed the habit of taking me for a walk occasionally. It was the most split up kind of household that I have ever come across.

  *

  The name of Edith, the nanny, came up frequently in my mother’s stories of her early childhood. She was obviously a very special woman who provided much-needed stability for the children: ‘I clung to her,’ Helen recalled. ‘She was a grey-eyed, plump country woman used to caring for half a dozen small siblings, and naturally at ease with children.’ From Edith, young Helen learned a love of nature that would stay with her all her life.

  Edith would pick a primrose, count the petals – so that I learned to count – show me the stamens and the pollen and explain how insects carried the pollen from one flower to another. To this day, I find interest in watching insects.

  She would point out birds in flight – and say that spring or winter was coming – and explain migration.

  She could recognize a person from half a mile away. ‘I know by the tilt of her head – or the way she walks,’ she would say. So I learned that the body talks as well as the tongue.

  The children sometimes caught rabbits in the field next to the Bromfield house (likely with a makeshift snare or net) intending to turn them into pets, but found they either died or escaped in no time at all. In a letter to Alan, Helen reminisced about those rabbits and also recalled a rather terrifying incident involving Edith: ‘I remember that same field one harvest, all golden, and I walked out into it – the stalks were as high as me – and it caught fire from a spark from the railway train passing at the bottom of the garden. I remember Edith rushing into the crop to haul me out – and, do you know, I have always been terrified of fire ever since.’