Passage Across the Mersey

by Robert Bhatia

  A rather plain teacher at the evening classes suggested that Helen’s parents would be glad of a daughter who brought home a wage and could look after them in their old age, a prospect that terrified her.

  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 flat as a shadow.

  Helen was desperate to work, in order to contribute to the family coffers but also to buy herself a little independence and an escape from the drudgery of eternal childcare, cooking and cleaning for the entire family. A local church deaconess, Miss Ferguson, found her a job as a telephonist working for the Personal Service Society, a charity in Bootle that distributed aid and advice to the area’s needy. There was an almighty row about it at home, but for once Helen stood up for herself.

  ‘I am going for the interview, whether you like it or not. I may never get such a chance again. I must take it.’

  ‘Helen, you forget yourself,’ exploded Father.

  ‘Oh, no I do not. For once, I am remembering myself.’

  Alan interceded on Helen’s behalf, saying that he would lend a hand around the house, and besides, all girls worked nowadays. Fiona also agreed to help, and this time Helen was adamant. Despite the lack of parental consent she attended the interview, got the job and started work.

  The Personal Service Society offered advice to the poor, making them aware of any funds they might be eligible for and distributing some benefits themselves. There were long queues every day of men and women desperate for help for their families, families that were just like Helen’s: ‘They seemed people who had lost all hope, and my heart went out to them.’

  Working for the charity was nerve-racking for Helen at first, but it gave her a sense of purpose and of her own self-worth. She handed over most of her salary to her mother, keeping back enough for the odd roll at lunchtime and her tram fares, but more often than not she found that her mother had sneaked into her handbag and stolen any pennies she found there. Eventually she sewed a little cloth bag to wear around her neck in which to keep her money safe. This didn’t stop her mother from stealing her new stockings, whenever she managed to find the funds to buy such a thing, but Helen persevered, trying inch by inch to improve her quality of life.

  Still she was hungry most of the time. She confessed to Avril, in one of her last letters to her, that during that period hunger sometimes led her to overcome the prohibition on stealing that had been drummed into her as a child.

  The P.S.S. bought a grocer’s box of biscuits to serve with office tea, and I used to steal some for lunch! And the Head Cashier swore that SOMEBODY was stealing the office biscuits! But she never pinned the theft on me, thank God. She thought it was the cleaning ladies who came in the evening.

  I have always thought it very ironical that the office girl of an eminent charity should be almost starving! And the Committee who ran the charity had a full lunch sent in for all of them on the days they met at the office – mind you, I don’t think the P.S.S. paid for the lunch – I think they paid for it themselves. But when I laid the table for the Committee, I was dreadfully envious of them.

  The charity had a holiday home in Kents Bank, a small village on the north shore of Morecambe Bay, for the use of its employees. When Helen was sent for a two-week holiday there, she revelled in the blissful peace of a room of her own, hot baths whenever she wanted them, plentiful food, and beautiful surroundings to walk in. She made friends with an elderly man called Emrys Hughes and his brother, Gwyn, who owned drapery stores in North Wales. They enjoyed long conversations on all kinds of subjects: ‘If I had been less innocent, I might have been troubled at [their] affability. But as I responded to [Emrys’s] good-humoured teasing I knew only a great gaiety and lightness of heart. A liveliness I did not know, began to emerge.’

  Emrys was at Kents Bank to recover after suffering a heart attack and he fell ill again while they were there. Two months after Helen’s return, she was desperately sad to receive a letter from Gwyn telling her that Emrys had passed away. He had given her a great gift, she mused. ‘He revealed to me that, given normal circumstances, I could be a cheerful, merry companion. He gave me self-respect, a belief in myself.’

  This would stand Helen in good stead when, in her late teens, she began to have the beginnings of a social life and to test her own firmly held belief that she was unlovable and unlikely ever to attract a husband.

  Helen discovered that as well as Kents Bank, the Personal Service Society also had a holiday home in Hoylake – the village across the Mersey where, as far as she knew, her grandmother still lived. By forgoing the use of trams and her lunchtime soup, as well as darning her stockings to make them last even longer than usual, Helen managed to save the money to visit there in June 1938. In her mind was one thought: visiting the woman who had been so kind to her when she was a young girl.

  She arrived at the house and was ushered in by one of her aunts to find her grandmother sitting in a chair, ‘a tiny, shrunken person, swathed in black’, by now in her nineties. Helen wrote in By the Waters of Liverpool: ‘I had forgotten what great age did to the human frame. To me she was eternal. I was suddenly and brokenly aware of all the years that I had missed being with her.’ They sat and shelled peas together, then went out for a brief walk in the fresh air. Helen described her job at the charity and her ambition to become a social worker, but did not tell her grandmother anything about the privation the family had suffered over the last few years, the ‘steady hunger and cold’ they had endured. She was simply too old to be bothered with it. The visit passed pleasantly enough and Helen said goodbye and returned home.

  The following year, in June 1939, they got word that her grandmother had died without ever seeing her son Paul or the rest of her grandchildren again. Lavinia’s first thought was to wonder if there might be any inheritance for them, but it had been swallowed up long ago by the interest on the money Paul had borrowed from his sister when he got into financial difficulties. Helen received a gold watch with a black wristband, but by far the greatest gift her grandmother ever gave her had been the lessons of her early years: ‘She had taught me more subtle things than reading and sewing, to put on a cheerful face so that one does not depress others, to face with fortitude what cannot be changed, daily courtesies, which always surfaced when I was with people of my own class.’

  I never heard my mother speak ill of her grandmother. But I find it disturbing when I read Helen’s description of the grandfather clock in the hall, the antique china pieces on a small shelf, and her aunt’s ‘pink-striped Macclesfield silk dress’ – all signs of a life of middle-class plenty – while on the other side of the Mersey the Huband children were starving.

  In 2015, after attending the play of Twopence to Cross the Mersey, my wife, Dianne, my son, Stephen, and I went to Hoylake to see my great-grandmother’s house. By a stroke of luck, the current owner was outside and, when she found out who we were, she invited us in. As I walked down the hall where the clock must have stood, shivers went down my spine.

  Chapter Six

  I don’t think the Germans sank a single ship that did not have Liverpool men on it. I dreaded the days when I walked around the corner to my office, to see a large queue outside. Another ship had gone down, and widows’ pensions had to be applied for; money to bridge the time until the pension was paid had to be found. The waiting room was chocabloc with weeping women and howling children.

  In the late 1930s, as Jewish refugees flooded into the charity where she worked and the newspapers daily reported the slide towards war, Helen was writing to a German penfriend called Friedrich Reinhardt, a young officer in the Luftwaffe, who was about two
years older than she. They had met on a train years earlier when she was on her way to visit her grandmother and had exchanged addresses. Helen did not write to him at the time but years later when she began studying German in one of her evening classes she got in touch with a view to improving her language skills.

  The correspondence flourished and it seems she and Friedrich began to think of each other in a romantic light but Helen worried that he would not be allowed to marry an Englishwoman at a time of such heightened tension between their two countries. In June 1939 he sent her an ivory edelweiss on a chain for her twentieth birthday, and it became a treasured possession. Friedrich assured her that the Führer did not want to go to war with Britain, but all around preparations were being made. Gas masks were delivered to every household and local air-raid wardens came to insist that blackout curtains were installed because any visible light at night-time could attract German bombers.

  The first wave of children was evacuated to the countryside on 1 September 1939, just as Hitler’s tanks crossed the border into Poland. Over the next three days 1.5 million British children were sent to rural locations to avoid the expected bombing, and Edward, Avril and Tony were among them.

  The atmosphere was heavy with tension, and it almost came as a relief at 11a.m. on 3 September when radios up and down the country, including one in the Huband household, broadcast Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s famous words:

  This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin Nevile Henderson handed the German Government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by 11 o’clock, that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, that a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.

  Inhabitants of Liverpool knew the city was bound to be a target because of the docks. They scanned the sky, as if German bombers might appear at any moment, and Helen worried that Friedrich might even be one of the bomber pilots.

  A few evenings after the start of war she was astonished to be summoned by the police to an office in Lime Street, and told to bring all the correspondence she had had with anyone in Germany. Her father accompanied her to the meeting at which a young man interrogated her at length about the nature of her relationship with Friedrich, as well as another German penpal called Ursel.

  ‘Why had she studied German rather than French?’ he wanted to know. She replied that she studied both. He read the letters she handed over. How had she met Friedrich? She explained. She also told him that she had been put in contact with Ursel after replying to a letter in the Observer newspaper asking if anyone wanted a German penpal. It transpired the writer of that letter had been a known Fascist, and that’s why Helen was subjected to an intense interrogation that lasted many long hours. ‘It was an ordeal,’ she wrote. ‘The fear of internment, perhaps imprisonment, haunted me… At times I thought I would surely faint.’ Finally they asked her to sign a statement confirming her testimony and she was released at half past midnight. Looking back, she realized they suspected she might have been supplying information to the enemy!

  *

  During the early months of the war life went on in Liverpool much as before, except that the blackout every night meant it was easy to tumble in the pitch-dark. Helen wrote in By the Waters of Liverpool:

  Only people who have had to walk without a torch or cycle without a lamp through the total blackness of a blackout can appreciate the hazards of it. Innumerable cats and dogs trotted silently through it, to be tripped over by cursing pedestrians; pillar boxes and fire hydrants, telephone poles and light standards, parked bicycles and the occasional parked car, not to speak of one’s fellow pedestrians, all presented pitfalls for the unwary. Many times I went home with a bloody nose or with torn stockings and bleeding knees.

  One evening, after a long walk home because she did not have a tram fare, Helen broke down. She sobbed inconsolably as she contemplated the deprivation of her life, the hunger that still regularly made her feel faint, and the lack of any hope of improving her lot. Surprised by her outburst, since she normally kept her feelings to herself, her mother and father agreed that she could keep more of her earnings for her own use, and that her mother would buy her some new clothes and even treat her to a perm, the fashionable hairstyle of the day. Everyone agreed she looked pretty with the new soft curls, and it was the first time Helen had ever thought of herself as attractive.

  ‘To dance had been the first ambition of my life, and the first to be crushed,’ Helen wrote in By the Waters of Liverpool. She had been forced to give up ballet lessons just before the age of seven when a large wardrobe had fallen on her, damaging one leg permanently. Now, in the winter of 1939–40, she began to take ballroom dancing lessons at a little school run by dance professionals Doris and Norm, and found she had a talent for it. What’s more, she made a little group of friends and gained social confidence through chatting to them as they whirled around the floor.

  Among the men she danced with was a ship’s engineer called Harry O’Dwyer, who asked her out for a cup of tea after class. It was her first ‘date’ and the conversation flowed. They each found the other liked reading and both had studied to improve their prospects in life; they discussed their work and what they did with any leisure time. But when Harry told her about a sailors’ home where he sometimes went with a friend, and mentioned that they occasionally picked up girls there, Helen became suspicious.

  ‘Do you consider that you picked me up?’ I asked tartly.

  He grinned, hesitated, and then said, ‘No. I hope I’ve made a permanent acquisition.’

  When she told him about her difficult family circumstances, Harry listened sympathetically, then gave her a hug and a kiss on the cheek. He confided that he was estranged from his mother; she had wanted him to become a priest and could not forgive him when he refused. He was heading off to sea for the next five weeks but they exchanged addresses and she gave him her phone number at work, asking him to call as soon as he returned.

  It was a nerve-racking time as she scanned the papers for any mention of his ship, worrying about the German U-boats patrolling the Atlantic and the mines that were being laid to damage shipping. Because it was on the west coast, Liverpool became the main entry port for food, fuel and raw materials to supply the whole country, transported on merchant ships such as the one on which Harry worked. It also became the hub for the Royal Navy’s fleet during the Battle of the Atlantic, and it would be the entry point for the American troops who arrived later in the war.

  When Harry returned from that first voyage, he told Helen that his convoy was scattered by U-boats and chased all over the Atlantic, but reassured her that their superior speed got them back safely. He’d brought her a present from New York, a beautiful red dress with a thin leather belt, much the most glamorous garment she had ever owned. It was only their third date, but Helen had to admit to herself:

  I was in love. I knew it. It was ridiculous, absurd, stupid, certainly unwise. I told myself piteously that there was no harm in loving, as long as one did not expect anything in return.

  Harry was Roman Catholic while Helen was Protestant and had not even been allowed to play with Catholic children, never mind consider marrying one. In the fiercely sectarian Liverpool of that time marriage would not be easy. However, wartime brought a sense of urgency to relationships and Harry would soon be going to sea again. Helen and Harry weren’t the only couple to make up their minds about each other after only a few meetings. Everyone wanted to feel loved, to buoy themselves up against the horrors of war, and remind themselves of the good things in the world. Before he went back to sea again, Harry proposed to Helen.

  ‘Love, I know this is too quick. But I want to marry you, if you’ll have me … I’m askin’ you now because I’m away so much that I could lose you to somebody else … I’ve always wanted a wife like you – someone I could really talk to – and so pretty.’

  Fo
r Helen, this was overwhelming and quite wonderful. She accepted straight away – but she made the decision not to tell her parents. Not yet, anyway. She couldn’t bear to have them pour cold water on her plans. She wasn’t ready to introduce Harry to them and risk her mother being rude or scornful, from the upper-middle-class snobbery and intolerance of Roman Catholics she retained. For now, her engagement was a delicious secret that Helen hugged to herself.

  When Harry got back from his next trip to New York, he brought her three dresses from the Manhattan garment district, and she had to lie to her mother that she had bought them in a second-hand shop. He also bought her an engagement ring, which she wore on a string round her neck to prevent the family seeing it. How sad that she couldn’t share her joyful news with them! They planned to marry in the summer of 1940 when Helen would have turned twenty-one, meaning she no longer needed parental consent. Harry put down money on a little house that was still being built, and told her that by the time of their wedding he would have enough saved to furnish it with the essentials they would need to start their married life together. But then he went to sea again, promising that they would be wed as soon as he got back.

  In August 1940, Helen was expecting Harry’s imminent return. At work, she spent her time helping the widows of men who had perished at sea. They wanted advice on how to claim their widows’ pensions. One day she began to take down the details of a new client, an older woman, and suddenly it dawned on her that this was Harry’s mother. The woman explained that her son had been killed at sea and that she wanted his pension paid to her. Helen leapt to her feet and rushed from the room, leaving a colleague to deal with her. She was devastated by the news, and furious that this woman, who had been estranged from Harry, would try to profit from his death.

  A few days later the Liverpool Echo confirmed the news: ‘O’Dwyer, Henry, aged 33, lost at sea, beloved son of Maureen and John O’Dwyer, and loving brother of Thomas and sister-in-law Dorothy. RIP.’