Mourning a loved one was a common experience for women in Liverpool during the war years. There is a memorial on Tower Hill to the 24,000 men of the Merchant Navy and the fishing fleets who gave their lives trying to keep the population supplied with the goods needed for subsistence during wartime. If Helen could have talked about her grief it might have given her some small consolation, but no one knew of her engagement so no one knew of her bereavement and she carried the burden all alone.
Almost fifty years later she wrote to a grieving friend:
When I was staying with my brother [Tony] near London, we were talking of old times, and he mentioned the memorial to merchant seamen in London. He thought my first sweetheart’s name might be on it. I did not really believe that he would be listed, because he was the only man who died on his ship. But he was, and on seeing his name I wanted to cry as if I had just lost him. I was again the lonely half-starved girl of that time. Yet I would have sworn that I had got over it long ago. I guess that once bonded to a person, the tearing wound of loss is always vulnerable to bleeding again.
In 1985, Helen related this poignant story to a friend:
You said idly that you wished you knew what I looked like when I was young. Well, enclosed is a photo of me in 1940.
I am afraid the picture is very dark. I had very thick brown hair with red tints in it, and I still have green eyes. I was very white and I had acne, but so did everybody else have. We were all so poorly fed.
The story of the taking of this photo is rather sad. I wanted a picture to give to my fiancé and I saved up for a professional photo. He was killed just before it was taken, and I was so innocent that I imagined that if one had made an appointment one had to keep it! So I had a photo taken just the same. I am wearing one of the dresses he brought me from New York. It was black with white trimmings, and I wore it for a long time as a mourning dress. The mouth in the photo is smiling, because the photographer said, ‘say, cheese!’ Which I dutifully did. But the eyes have no laughter in them because there was none in me.
*
The first major bombing raid on Liverpool took place on the night of 28 August 1940 and continued for three terrifying nights, during which 160 planes dropped their load on the city. Over the following three months there would be 50 raids and with each the civilian casualties mounted. On 18 September 22 prisoners were killed when Walton Gaol was hit by an incendiary bomb. On 28 November an air-raid shelter in Durning Road was destroyed and 166 souls perished inside.
The raids usually began about six o’clock in the evening and lasted until eleven or twelve. It was everybody’s ambition to be safely at home, or wherever they were going to be in the evening, before the air-raid warning howled its miserable notes across the waiting city. This was usually an impossibility for me, because, as the raids gained in intensity and the bombed-out sought our aid, the load of work in the office increased proportionately.
Helen had many hazardous walks home during air raids: ‘when a stick of bombs began to fall nearby, and the whistle of each succeeding missile became closer, I would instinctively duck for shelter in the nearest shop doorway and crouch down, hands clasped over head, until the last resounding bang.’ The sky glowed with eerie green flares as the Germans tried to locate targets on the ground and lit up the crowds huddled in doorways. Despite the danger, Helen’s mother continued to steal money from her handbag, depriving her of the tram fares that could have got her home more quickly and safely. It made her feel doubly unloved as she mourned the death of Harry.
The nightly explosions and the smell of smoke were particularly hard for Helen’s father. They brought back all the horrors of the First World War, in which he had lost so many friends, and he trembled as they huddled on the stairs down to their basement during raids. Helen seems to have become closer to him during the war years. They often went for walks together and he told her more about his experiences in the first war, confiding in her in a way that he never did with his wife. Helen commented: ‘Mother and he were never the good companions that older people can become. At best, they carped at each other continually.’ He still smoked and drank heavily, neither of which were a great idea for a man who’d had a heart attack at the age of thirty-three, but it was just his way of coping.
Alan was sent overseas with the air force, and Brian volunteered to be an ARP (Air Raid Precaution) messenger boy. It was the job of the ARP boys to rush around on their bicycles telling fire crews and rescue squads where they were needed, and taking messages to hospitals, air-raid wardens and rescue centres, especially when the bombing meant the telephone lines were down. It was dangerous work, as they cycled the streets in the dark, during raids, but at sixteen years old, Brian was still too young to fight and he wanted to do something for the war effort.
There were raids right through Christmas and into the New Year, with a peak in the first week of May 1941 when 681 Luftwaffe bombers dropped their bombs on the port and the city. Over 6,500 homes were demolished, and 190,000 damaged – among them the home of the Hubands, which was not directly hit but was deemed structurally unsound. The family moved across the Mersey to the village of Moreton, where they found a run-down cottage, but Helen still had to commute into town every day to work. Bootle, where the charity was located, had the dubious honour of being one of the most bombed areas of the British Isles. The Germans were determined to cripple the Liverpool docks with these raids and many dock workers’ lives were lost. Somehow, through the incredible courage of all who worked there, the port remained in operation throughout the war.
Casualties mounted, of course. Between August 1940 and January 1942, when the last raid destroyed several houses on Stanhope Street, 2,716 people were killed in Liverpool by the bombs. St Luke’s church, which stands prominently at the top of Bold Street, was gutted by fire but its elaborate Gothic façade remained standing, a ghostly skeleton that has now become a memorial and a venue for community events.
Helen got a new, better-paid job working on the payroll at the Petroleum Board, which managed the wartime distribution of petrol. Maths was never her strongest subject and she struggled to master the payroll but enjoyed the social aspects of working amongst a group of young people. The camaraderie of this job came through strongly in the stories she told me when I was very little and as a result, I called it her ‘playpen job’. I remember she described painting her legs to look as if she was wearing stockings, and going down to the river with her coworkers to pick up oranges that had washed overboard from ships’ cargoes. There were clearly good times but it is hard to imagine a riskier place to work than an oil installation in the docks of a major port during wartime. She wrote about it to the curator of port history at Liverpool’s Maritime Museum in Albert Dock.
I remember the ends of our oil pipes being blown off and my being absolutely terrified of its consequences. We dared not even boil a kettle on the installation for three days.
A quiet employee of the installation won the George Medal for climbing onto the top of a full, huge tank of petrol and heaving off its floating roof a collection of incendiary bombs. By this brave deed, he saved streets of little houses running off Grafton Street from being decimated. I am ashamed that I cannot, for the life of me, remember his name. Fifty years is a long time!
Helen was filling the job of a man called Edward Parr, known to all as Eddie, who was an infantry private. One day in the autumn of 1941, when he came to the office while home on leave, Helen told him off for using bad language within earshot of the girls. He was embarrassed, as he hadn’t realized he could be overheard, but obviously took a liking to her as he showed her easier ways to do her job and then offered to walk her to the tram that night. It was pouring with rain but, instead of leaving her at the tram stop, he accompanied her all the way home. The path to the Hubands’ bungalow was flooded and, to Helen’s consternation, he picked her up in his arms and carried her.
While they were both drying off in front of the fire, Helen’s mother arrived home. She was cold an
d formal with the visitor, snubbing him and sending him straight back out into the downpour, and afterwards she scolded Helen for entertaining a ‘strange soldier’, especially one who was quite so ‘common’. Her snobbery knew no bounds.
A week later, Helen was glad to receive a letter from Eddie, from his posting at Dover Castle where, he wrote, he was supposed to be ‘guarding the White Cliffs of England’ but was instead providing ‘target practice for the Germans’. He and a friend had smuggled in a family of kittens and he wrote very amusingly about their attempts to keep the animals hidden from their superior officers. He and Helen began a correspondence during the winter of 1941–42 that started out friendly but gradually took on romantic overtones.
During 1942 they met whenever Eddie had leave, often just a brief meeting for a cup of tea near Lime Street station. On one such occasion he demonstrated how to kill a man in hand-to-hand contact, but when Helen told him she had been thinking of joining the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s branch of the army), he talked her out of it, saying that the job she did for the Petroleum Board was of more value to her country. In fact, she became a test case whom the Government argued over – should she be doing war work? Finally, the Petroleum Board told the Government that if they lost their new female staff, they would have to close down the installation. This would block off one of the main sources for the delivery of fuel for the country. Helen stayed where she was.
As war proceeded, more and more items became scarce. Bacon, butter and sugar were the first foods to be rationed in January 1940, followed by meat, cheese, jam, tea, eggs, biscuits, rice, and cooking fat. Ration books listed each person’s weekly allowance, which was typically 50g (2oz) of butter, the same of cheese, 100g (4oz) of bacon or ham and one fresh egg. Helen wrote about the drudgery of the daily queues for food in her novel A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin. Her character Martha often joined a queue without knowing what she was queuing for, assuming the storekeeper must have some kind of food worth having. Rationing would continue in Britain for fourteen years, until June 1954.
Coupons were needed to buy any new clothes, and soap and coal were hard to come by. Stockings had long since vanished from the shops and girls applied fake colour to their legs (as Mum told me she used to do) or drew a line down the back with eyebrow pencil. More daring women took to wearing trousers but these were banned at Helen’s office.
In the winter of 1942–43, Helen travelled across the country to Doncaster to meet Eddie, as he was delivering a prisoner of war to a hospital there. She had to travel overnight and their train was shunted back and forth during an air raid, but she got to spend some precious hours with him. They discussed marriage at one point that day, and he said:
‘Neither of us will get married while the war is on – wartime marriages never seem to work.’
I thought of my parents’ unhappy wartime union, and replied, ‘I think you’re right.’
All the same they kissed, and over the next eighteen months the relationship continued to deepen. Eddie was a big, strong man: outgoing, friendly and tough. Although he had been an office worker, he was not highly educated; he was, however, kind, good-hearted and sensible, with a quiet sense of humour. My mother clearly fell very much in love with him during the three-plus years they spent getting to know each other.
In spring 1944, Eddie was once again home on leave before heading off to join the invasion of France. As they walked through the streets, he astonished Helen by proposing marriage. At first she didn’t know what to say.
‘I didn’t think you had holy matrimony in mind,’ I finally responded lightly.
‘Holy or unholy, I’ve got it in mind … I want to come back to you, Helen. Nobody else.’
… ‘Yes,’ I said, and put my arms round his neck. He kissed me again and, though I knew it would be different from all my young girl’s hopes, I felt it would be all right.
Eddie promised to buy her a ring and take her home to meet his mother on his next leave, but it was cancelled after D-Day, 6 June 1944, when Allied troops landed on the beaches of Normandy in a vast, meticulously planned military operation.
In June 1983, a fan wrote to Helen reminiscing about D-Day and about how all ‘fighting moms’ remembered where they were on that day. Helen replied to him:
I sympathize about D-Day. I always feel a bit low on it. It happens to be my birthday. On that great day I was working on Shell-Mex’s teleprinter in their Liverpool storage depot, and the Southampton operator, who knew me well (via the teleprinter) said, ‘You have the biggest birthday present you can imagine.’ He could not say any more, because it was Top Secret, but apparently he could see the troops gathering and the ships from his office window. It was a birthday present I could have done without, because one of my brothers [Brian] was in a minesweeper in it, and though he returned, my fiancé did not.
Eddie arrived in France in July 1944, and joined the British, Canadians and French pushing against German defences around Caen.
Reading the Liverpool Echo one evening, Helen ran her eye over what were widely called the ‘Hatches, Matches and Dispatches’ column – in other words, Births, Marriages and Deaths. I can’t imagine how devastating it must have been for her when she found Eddie’s name listed under ‘Deaths’.
The street parties on VE Day, 8 May 1945, were celebrated with gusto across Liverpool. Tables were hauled into the centres of roads and laden with food. Music played, flags waved, and children wore fancy dress. Three of Helen’s brothers, Alan, Brian and Tony, had served their country by war’s end, and all of them returned, but 13,000 Liverpudlian men would never come back to their families – among them Edward Parr and Harry O’Dwyer.
To lose two fiancés in one war was cruel indeed. As she watched the festivities, at the grand old age of twenty-six, Helen must have wondered what might have been if either of them had survived.
PART II
Chapter Seven
Avadh being a light brown was not expected to be in the least bit like English people, so he had an advantage. The fact was that he had been so well educated in British schools and came from such good family that his manners were old-fashionedly charming. My parents could not find fault with my choice. In fact, my father was delighted to have an intellectual with whom to talk.
The end of the war brought sheer relief that the physical danger had come to an end and no more lives would be lost to the conflict. Helen’s brothers returned: Alan from North Africa and Brian from the navy, with which he had visited ports all over the world. Tony went on to serve in Egypt and Rhodesia from 1945–48. Years of supreme effort and constant danger were over. Helen shared in the national joy but, having lost two fiancés, she felt victory was bittersweet. She was in mourning for both Harry and Eddie, a grief that returned to her on and off for the rest of her life.
When I was ten, Mum and I went to watch a noisy military tattoo in a darkened arena in Edmonton. Over the sounds of pipes and drums, and despite the darkness, I became aware that my mother was rocking herself and sobbing next to me. ‘What is it, Mum?’ I asked, desperately worried, and she replied that she was thinking of two men to whom she had been engaged during the war, both of whom had died. I was deeply shocked but I reached out my hand to try to comfort her. ‘It’s OK, lovey,’ she said. ‘It was a long time ago but I felt dreadfully sad suddenly.’
After that, she would mention Eddie from time to time. Some years after my father passed away, she decided to travel to see Eddie’s grave in Normandy, France. She knew exactly where it was because she told me that she had gone there soon after the war’s end, walking and riding in rickety, makeshift taxis through the devastated countryside of Normandy. In her oldest photo album there are a couple of tiny black-and-white pictures of hundreds of white crosses, row upon row.
I always listened to these stories sympathetically, but, for me, there was an unspoken awkwardness between us; it came down to an elemental realization that had Eddie lived, she would not have met my father, and I would not
exist.
After the war, Helen left the Petroleum Board and took a job with Broadcast Relay, a company that provided a rapidly growing cable radio service on a weekly rental. She was secretary to an electrical engineer in charge of cable wiring all over Lancashire. She travelled with him for about a year, a ‘plain thin shadow’ who saw that his shirts got washed, the mail went out and his travel and hotels were booked. ‘It was very, very boring – the hotels at that time had no heating, no hot water, too little bedding – and one carried one’s own soap, towels and toilet rolls. Food rationing was at its height, and hotel food was awful.’
Finally, exhausted, she came home to Liverpool. She had learned a lot about office work at the Petroleum Board and, together with her night-school education, she was quite well qualified. She took a job in a packaging firm, Metal Box Company, and grew to love it. Metal Box produced all kinds of containers, from tin cans to highly specialized and elaborate metal boxes for biscuits, cosmetics and other luxury items. As part of her job, Helen met representatives of the firms whose products used Metal Box packaging and, through them, she learned about industries such as food and cosmetics.
The combination of the creative with the eminently practical end purpose of its products appealed to Helen. She found the design aspects of packaging endlessly fascinating and, well into her eighties, she maintained a small collection of particularly attractive biscuit and chocolate tins from companies such as Gray, Dunn, and Meltis Limited. The sweet firm Waller and Hartley was one of her clients.
The elements of good design interested Helen throughout her life. ‘I am a nightmare to the men who design the jackets of my books – because that is packaging at its worst. I swear my books sell in spite of their jackets.’ I remember bracing myself for the onslaught when my mother told me that the artist’s concept for a new book’s jacket had arrived in the post.
Passage Across the Mersey Page 7
