Passage Across the Mersey

by Robert Bhatia

  Helen loved roaming the countryside on the earl’s estate and watching the people she came across. She recalled poachers lying on the banks of streams tickling the trout under an overhang until they were relaxed enough to be caught by hand. A band of gypsies camped nearby and she knew the ones who worked in the stables at the racecourse from when she went there with her father. She also knew the local farmers and their dairymaids, shepherds, cowherds and ploughmen, and enjoyed seeing them at seasonal events such as May Day, horse shows, market days and harvest festivals.

  In the 1990s, my mother and I visited Bromfield together, and as we toured the area she spoke warmly of her early memories of growing up in the countryside, somehow managing to separate these happy recollections from all the pain of life behind closed doors in the Huband household. We found the racecourse and St Mary’s Parish Church but try as we might we couldn’t find the cottages. In the dark and the rain, we both felt that Ludlow itself seemed rather melancholy after that. Mum described the trip to a friend.

  It is possible that the rain made the town more depressing than it really is. It did not seem to have any life in it. My kilt was so soaked that it felt a dead weight, and Robert was not much better.

  Like many English villages, Bromfield, so lovingly described by Ellis Peters in her Father [sic] Cadfael novels, is barely surviving. Even the church was being held up by scaffolding. The house in which I had lived had been bulldozed to make way for what looked like a small factory. I felt quite sad.

  However, she remembered her child’s-eye view of the village with great vividness.

  We knew everything that went on in Bromfield, from all the heavy innuendo of adult conversation. Hatches, matches and dispatches were all part of our little world, together with delicious scandals, which we did not quite understand, amongst a bunch of genuine Welsh border peasants – not a dull character amongst them.

  With the aid of a lot of old lace curtains plus long-abandoned bowler hats, ladies’ hats, walking sticks, ancient handbags, and other discarded clothing, the whole pantomime of life was re-enacted in our play in the back garden.

  Our long-suffering cats, wrapped in shawls, became dead babies, tenderly laid in a shoe box by weeping mothers – they always seemed to escape before being actually buried in a flowerbed. Though, once we did give a dead pet rabbit a full funeral, together with practically all the flowers from the front garden. I will pass over the row which resulted from a bare front garden!

  With one of my father’s old collars turned back to front and a walking stick, my eldest brother became the image of our rather pompous Vicar.

  For myself, I can remember wrapping myself in trailing lace curtains, as I imitated my mother going to a Ball in full regalia.

  With a large dock leaf for a mirror and a stone for a lipstick, I peered into the dock leaf and applied the pebble, while I said, ‘Goodnight, darlings!’ and NEVER glanced back at my brother and sister who were pretending to go to bed.

  This was all very well but it did not make up for the lack of loving parents. As Helen remarked: ‘Children learn from what they observe and they know very well when no one cares about them.’

  *

  With her parents engaged in their mad social whirl and with Edith busy caring for the two younger children, Helen was thought to be in the way. For several months at a time she was sent to stay with her father’s mother in Hoylake, and these periods would become incredibly important to her. In 1992, she gave a speech in which she sang her grandmother’s praises and explained just how important an influence she had been.

  My parents did not believe that it was really necessary to educate their girls; girls got married. What else did they need? But, I had a grandmother, who had been educated by her grandmother, born in the eighteenth century. I usually spent about six months of each year with her, until I was ten.

  She taught me patience, fortitude, endurance, persistence, a stiff, narrow kind of honesty, at the same time as she taught me to knit, first on a pair of butcher’s wooden skewers, and, later on a threepenny pair of bone knitting needles. Finally, she bought me a set of four real steel pins. Promotion at last! She also taught me to sew and to mend, which was just as well, when I, later, had nine sets of socks, stockings and other garments to mend, patch or darn.

  But, most important of all, she taught me to read out of the King James Version of the Bible, a huge tome with big letters, bound in leather and having a lock to close it when not in use. If you are used to hearing the familiar forms – thee, thou, thy, etc., it is not a difficult book – and it has wonderful stories in it.

  So very early I was exposed to one of the most beautiful examples of the English language that there is. She would not, however, let me read the Songs of Solomon and she did not seem very keen on Hosea. These books were closed off to me by a clothes peg at the top and another at the bottom of the pages – and to this day I use clothes pegs to hold my chapters and other papers together.

  Since Grandma started me off at the age of three, I did not understand a lot of what I read – and Grandma had to do a lot of helping out. She once explained that Mary Magdalene was a Fallen Woman – which did not help me much. She also taught me to print. I never did learn cursive writing – I had to do what I could by experimenting with joining up the printed letters that I knew.

  Helen was a natural reader and soon began exploring her grandmother’s personal library.

  Grandma had complete sets of the works of Dickens and Sir Walter Scott and the Brontë sisters, plus a number of books by a man called Lever, whose heroines always had swanlike necks and alabaster arms. I read the lot. Recently, I was browsing over Nicholas Nickleby, and I wondered how on earth I got through it.

  In another bookcase, my two aunts had a huge collection of Edwardian novels, which they allowed me to read. I have long since forgotten their names, but I do remember that they all seemed to have heroines, determined to be free and live alone, for various reasons. They all seemed to end up in country cottages covered with climbing roses. The books, like most books in those days, were illustrated, and all the heroines wore straw boaters from which fetching strands of golden hair emerged around their necks. They often had freckles and snub noses. All the books ended with a tender kiss from a tall, dark, very rich man. No wonder I married a dark man!

  Both my parents read a lot too. They bought books and they did not seem to mind if I took them out of the bookcases to read. So I read many of the authors of the 1920s, including a number of books by various army generals, on the First World War, and a lot of eighteenth-century French history, which was, all my father’s life, his particular interest.

  Helen’s grandmother was the first person to encourage her to write. ‘When I was little, my grandmother taught me how to write pleasant letters of thanks for gifts or for invitations to parties. When I was not staying with Grandma, I wrote a letter to her every week, telling her what had happened in my life during that week.’ These letters must have provided an early form of training in how to describe her life in an entertaining way, a talent that would stand her in good stead in later life. In 1985, she wrote to thank a teacher whose class had written letters to her, saying, ‘I think letter writing is one of the best ways of learning to write, and at the same time it gives pleasure to the persons who received the letters!’

  At her grandmother’s tea parties, Helen learned to hand round cake, talk about the weather, listen while the old ladies described their various ‘indispositions’, and gasp at the latest escapades of their sons or nephews – girls did not seem to have escapades officially. She was also allowed to play with some hand-picked local children – something that was strictly forbidden in Bromfield: ‘One of the Earl’s labourers lived next door to us with his family. But we were not allowed even to peer through the hedge at them – they were working class and therefore beneath us!’

  Auntie Phyllis sometimes took my mother down to the seashore to dig holes in the sand and learn a little about marine life. They wen
t to inspect the local fishing fleet’s catch of the day and always bought fish directly from the fishermen.

  Sundays in Hoylake meant spending the morning in church, with a silver threepenny piece in hand for the collection. Helen recalled:

  I thought it was wonderful theatre. My mother sang in amateur opera; and to give Nanny a break she sometimes took me to rehearsals; since nobody told me otherwise, I imagined for a long time, that the church service was a theatre show made for God.

  At an early age, Grandma taught me to say my prayers. ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, look upon a little child,’ and also to sing, ‘There’s a Friend for little children above the bright blue sky.’ She also taught me the 23rd Psalm, ‘The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want.’ She implanted in me a firm belief that above the clouds walked a Friend for little children called Jesus.

  The idea of this friend was crucial to me and stayed with me all through the terrifying years I would later face; it kept me alive, that he would one day take me out of the misery I was enduring.

  The time Helen spent at her grandmother’s house provided a refuge from the trauma of home life: listening to her parents’ endless arguments, being beaten by her father and tongue-lashed by her mother. She must have dreaded the day when each visit came to an end and it was time to leave that little house in Hoylake and head back to the unpredictable chaos of home.

  Chapter Three

  Because I did not get to school much – in fact, very little at all – and did not therefore have a circle of friends, I thought all boys and girls had the same kind of family life as we did: unmitigated quarrelling. I am told by psychiatrists that children just accept what they see daily as normal but ours was a pretty odd family, and Alan and I would, nowadays, be considered definitely abused.

  In 1924, the Hubands had another baby – Brian – followed in 1927 by Tony, bringing the number of children to five by the time Helen reached her eighth birthday. Avril was born when Helen was nine, then her brother Edward when she was eleven. It ‘was absolute insanity’, Helen wrote in later life, ‘at a time when none of their friends to my knowledge had any children at all; and birth control was quite widely practised by the middle classes.’

  Her parents’ limited resources had to be stretched even further to feed each new arrival and their marriage deteriorated to new depths under the strain of raising all those young children. Helen believed that her parents were often unfaithful to each other and at one point she tried to make light of it: ‘I am not sure what the DNA of we children would show!’ If any of the children were not my grandfather’s, it might help to explain the atmosphere of tension and the frequent battles in that volatile household.

  Some time after Helen’s sixth birthday, her parents enrolled her in a girls’ school in the local market town, Ludlow. No one had explained to her that all children have to go to school and she had very little experience of socializing with other children, so it came as a huge shock.

  School descended upon me totally unexpectedly one morning when Nanny dressed me in a white cotton blouse, a black serge gymslip, a black blazer – and black woollen stockings and laced-up shoes. Have you ever worn coarse black woollen stockings? They itch unmercifully; and I had never worn laced-up shoes before. Since they had been bought without fitting me, they hurt. Nanny said soothingly that I had to have them for school, so that I could learn to read and write.

  Since I had been able to do both for a number of years, I thought she was just being awkward, and I rebelled promptly.

  It was a very tearstained little girl, with a bottom which must have been very red – though veiled, of course, by thick fleecy-lined bloomers – who was delivered to the school by an irate father.

  The teachers were not trained teachers; they were simply middle-class women who had set up a school; and the main idea was to turn out refined young women with a modicum of French and music and of the classics, but, most important, with the correct English accent, which would indicate their place in the class structure. In such schools, manners were very important, also.

  After the first half hour of colouring a picture, I became bored. I loudly asked where I could find something to read. That was the second spanking of the day – for impudence, this time.

  Father picked me up in the afternoon, one of the few times I was glad to see him. I remember my tearful, total bewilderment among these strange women who shouted at me and shoved me about. It seemed as if my world had gone mad. I had no idea what a teacher was. No idea what I had done to be banished to this awful place.

  My father was not pleased at the report hastily poured into his ears by the teacher who handed me over. She said something which I did not understand, but it sounded bad so I remembered it. She said, ‘We’ll break her in time.’

  Helen endured about two weeks of fairly constant battles with the teachers at that school and a couple of canings from her father at home, before succumbing to a bad case of measles. She became so ill that her eyesight was significantly affected. She could still read with her nose pressed right up against the page, so for a couple of years none of the family noticed.

  While she was recovering from measles her brother Alan caught the disease. In those days, no child could attend school if another member of the family had a contagious disease and the isolation period was three weeks after the last spot had disappeared. Helen’s little sister Fiona came out in spots on the day Alan was declared clear of spots, so the return to school was delayed even longer. Helen and Alan spent their months’ long convalescence in the back garden, ‘making mud pies and burying a dead rabbit several times over with full funeral rites, as far as we knew them’. Nanny had to watch Fiona very carefully, because she was a delicate child with precarious health, but she pulled through her bout of measles unscathed.

  Helen did not return to her school after Fiona recovered because it was time for her to visit her grandmother. While there, she was educated in different ways.

  Auntie Phil [Phyllis] ran a little prep school in the dining room, and I sat in on it – and technically was at school! But I spent most of my time reading my way through the enormous number of adult books in the house. I don’t seem to have been any trouble with either Granny or the Aunts, because I don’t ever remember even being scolded, never mind hit. Grandma once tried sending me to the local girls’ school, but I went home in mid-term, thus wasting the fees, so she did not try again.

  Her grandmother began to teach Helen French, and she also taught her musical notation and embroidery, so she was getting an education at that time, albeit in a piecemeal fashion. Auntie Phil also taught Helen to draw with perspective and light and shade.

  Not all of the lessons were intentional, however. In 1997, she told an audience aboard the Queen Elizabeth II:

  Grandma never realized that little Big Ears sitting under her velvet-draped tea table, playing with an old Victorian toy tea set, was listening to her discussions with her daughters: and also to her discussions with her solicitor, who was also her financial adviser – in those days, solicitors made home visits. No wonder I know a fair amount of family law of the period!

  My father would have had a fit, if he had known how much his six-year-old daughter knew about him and about his brothers. And about lawyers. Those conversations have sparked many good ideas.

  These were by far the happiest times of my mother’s childhood. She was almost the sole focus of her grandmother and her aunts’ attention, since her siblings rarely came on these visits, for reasons that were never explained. Perhaps they were considered too young to be sent on the train unaccompanied. At any rate, she was fussed over by those three ladies and became very fond of them.

  When Helen got back to Bromfield after her 1925 visit, she found that her parents were packing up to move to Ross-on-Wye, where her father had a new job. It was the first in a succession of moves the family would make as their financial difficulties increased. At that age Helen did not know the reasons for the move but she found it difficult yet ag
ain being the new girl in school, and before long she was clashing with the teachers.

  Children are rarely kind to newcomers who are late in starting the school year. All the friendly cliques have already been formed. And, anyway, I was always in trouble for failing to answer questions correctly and, once, I was sent to Headmistress, because I had stood up and told the History teacher that she had not got her facts right. I had to stay after school and write, I must learn not to be impudent, five hundred times. In a haphazard way, I had read a fair amount of history, which fascinated me. I had also accepted as history The Iliad, The Odyssey and a book of Scandinavian sagas, not to speak of several children’s books on Egyptian Gods and myths.

  Just as she had memorized her classmates’ names and begun to make friends, it seemed the family were moving on to the next town and it was time for yet another change. Helen yearned for the kind of life she saw other girls leading.

  It began to dawn on me that other girls had regular schools, birthday parties and Christmas parties, family holidays and picnics – and none of these things seemed to happen to me. Once or twice, I had been to other little girls’ parties, where I knew no one – and do not to this day know how I was included.

  In one school, I managed to learn my arithmetic tables, so essential in the days before pocket calculators. A girl also taught me to skip. And in another school, a girl taught me how to play wall games with a bouncing tennis ball – with all the little rhymes that went with the games.

  But just as soon as Helen began to form a budding new friendship, it was time to go back to her grandmother’s, or her parents decided to move house again. Tensions also increased at home and Helen grew increasingly wary of her parents.