I can personally attest to the long hours my mother spent checking facts. As far as possible, she confirmed memories with family members and friends to make Twopence and its sequels as accurate as possible. She wrote it, only partly consciously, in an innovative style, with a significant amount of direct dialogue. This style was unusual in autobiographies at the time. Helen wrote to a Canadian critic who had commented positively on the use of dialogue in the book: ‘Your remark about the conversation in Twopence is so right. I still have living five brothers and sisters [Fiona had died of cancer in 1969] and between us we were able, knowing our own speech patterns, to reconstruct fairly accurately some of the conversations. Some are seared on my memory, like the ones with the old man in the park, God bless.’
In contrast to her experience with The Latchkey Kid, reviewers in both England and Canada heaped praise on Twopence to Cross the Mersey on its publication in 1974. My mother had often talked to me about her childhood so by the time I read it, at age nineteen, I already knew much of the story. All the same, it was compelling reading, and it made me cry.
This was the book with which my mother had truly found her voice as a writer. In subtle ways, she was evolving from a mother and housewife who wrote, into an author who was still a dedicated wife and mother. The big success of Twopence didn’t come until five years later, when it was reissued, but soon after the original publication, almost imperceptibly at first, her confidence began to grow.
Writing the book had a cathartic effect on Mum, too. It forced her, as a mature adult, to work through in her mind the traumatic events she had experienced. Helen said she never understood her parents but I think writing helped her to put her experience into a longer-term context of her life and theirs.
Many readers were inspired by Helen’s resilience and they wrote to share stories of their own suffering during the Depression. While the book resonated most directly with those who had lived in the ravaged cities of the North of England, the stark hardship also struck a chord with Canadians who had suffered mightily on the drought-stricken prairies during the 1930s.
Quite unexpectedly, Helen felt the love and admiration of thousands of strangers. Even today, loyal fans maintain a Facebook page dedicated to her books and her memory.
Chapter Twenty
I was determined that [my son] should be thoroughly prepared for a better life than I had, and at a time – the 1960s – when it was the fashion to lie about and smoke hash – he got propelled through university, my husband being of a like mind to myself.
During the late 1960s there was a lot of talk about the ‘generation gap’ between parents and children, but in our family it was pretty mild. There may have been bruised feelings occasionally, but I never felt any real alienation. I was always very close to Mum and I grew closer to my father when I was sixteen, after an odd opportunity arose for us to spend time together. Dad had to travel to Vancouver for a colleague’s PhD student’s final examination. It happened to fall on a Friday and he asked if I would like to come along for the weekend.
The celebratory dinner for the student took place in Vancouver’s Chinatown and was the most unusual feast I have ever attended, consisting entirely of dishes that would never be found on English-language menus at the time such as Peking duck and whole baked cod (complete with eyes and fins). We went to see the James Bond movie Diamonds Are Forever and attended our first professional hockey game. This little trip marked the first time I saw my father travelling and working on his own, without my mother. Dad’s competence and independence surprised me because I had always viewed her as the person who organized everything. Dad and I grew closer that weekend and continued to be close afterwards. Even after I moved away from home, we used to take evening walks together during which we discussed whatever aspect of life needed discussing.
After finishing school, I studied Economics at the University of Alberta, which had the huge advantage of being just two minutes’ walk from home. One afternoon in March 1974, I came home from classes to find my father in bed and my mother at his bedside. She had just called an ambulance as it appeared Dad was having a heart attack. That turned out to be the case. It was scary; he was pale and was quietly suppressing the pain as we flitted in and out of the room watching for the ambulance. Years of pipe smoking and being overweight had caught up with him. Fortunately he received very good medical attention, along with strict orders to lose weight and stop smoking forthwith.
When he had recovered sufficiently to return to his lectures in September, this opened up a new cycle for my mother of caring for my still-fragile father. She had to learn how to cook without salt or butter, a skill she soon mastered after an initial panic at the impossibility of such a change. On about the fourth warning from an exasperated cardiologist, Dad’s pipes were ceremonially dispatched to the garbage.
Writing was sidetracked for months but not abandoned. Helen completed a formulaic romance novel called Most Precious Employee. It was published in 1976 under the pseudonym June Edwards because it was written for a different market from her other books and has the distinction of having been translated into Dutch and Italian. This type of novel could be quite lucrative for writers able to produce them in bulk but Helen dipped her toe in and wisely stepped back.
Liverpool Daisy, the story of a woman who turns to prostitution to support her family and pay for her friend’s medical treatment, was completed in 1976. It was promptly turned down by Jonathan Cape, the publishers of Twopence. When submitting it to a senior editor at The Bodley Head, Helen wrote in her covering letter:
The pile of letters of approbation and the phone calls I have received as a result of the publication of Twopence to Cross the Mersey confirmed to the hilt the accuracy of that manuscript. And I feel the same acceptance will be extended to Liverpool Daisy.
I lived for many years within two blocks of Catherine Street, a well-known red light district of Liverpool, and walked through it most evenings for seven years on my way to night school. It was a very harsh introduction to the idea of sex. As a social worker I often came into contact with women like Daisy.
If I have any expert knowledge of anything, it is of poverty, having lived in it and worked three years to alleviate it amongst others. My wanderings in Liverpool, in India, in Mexico, in New York and even here, in Edmonton, have added to it.
You will have probably heard Rod Stewart singing his smash [1971] hit, ‘Maggie May’, in praise of the present generation of Liverpool daisies, who specialize in young men. They don’t seem to have changed much.
The Bodley Head turned it down. Helen was forever grateful to Robert Hale for publishing Liverpool Daisy in 1979. She had a particular affection for her smelly, maternal prostitute; she always smiled and her eyes lit up when talking about her. I think she felt she had created a uniquely sympathetic character, firmly based in reality, one whose story deserved to be told.
In one memorable scene Daisy, wife of an absent seaman, is confronted and engaged by three drunken seamen on a dark street. While not exactly politically correct by twenty-first-century standards, Helen describes the events with deft humour:
‘And there, in no time at all, at all, Mog, I found meself with another half dollar [half-crown] in me hand,’ she later told her stony-faced cat. ‘And another one coming up t’ jigger at me.’
As the third youth approached, it seemed to Daisy that her real self stood outside her body watching in scandalized horror a completely alien Daisy, filled with excited anticipation, await the boy coming towards her.
‘Mog, it was as if the divil himself was in me. At first I thought I’d run away up to top of t’entry. But I could hear the rats rustling in the dustbins – and I’m more afraid of rats, as you know, Mog, than I am of any boy. So I waited for him.’
It is a testament to the broad appeal of the story that it resulted in another Beaver trophy (also displayed proudly) just before it was accepted for publication.
*
Helen paid a great deal of attention to
the use of Liverpool dialect (Scouse) in her books. She wanted to give just enough to ensure that the characters sounded true to their Liverpool roots but stop short of it becoming obtrusive to readers elsewhere. When a reader wrote to her querying the use of t’ instead of the, as in the passage above, Helen replied:
You raise a very good point about the sounding of the word ‘the’ in Scouse. Although all the dialects are now getting flattened out, alas, as you may know, there are at least five distinct dialects in Liverpool, not to speak of variations in specific localities. When I was a social worker in Bootle, my senior colleague could, if a person had lived all his life in one street, tell him within a street, where he lived! It always used to surprise them.
The sound I was trying to convey is a kind of swallowing of the word ‘the’, so that it hardly sounds. And I agree with you that t’ is not the best way of showing it.
I think that it is more accurately what is known in German as a Glottal stop, a fractional pause used in German between words. I think it has come down from a very long time ago to us, possibly from an early form of German.
When I was travelling down from Liverpool to London just before Christmas, I sat by an old lady of 88, who had lived all her life in or near Park Road, and her speech was full of these abbreviated the’s.
To really translate Merseyside speech onto paper is impossible, if all one’s readers are to understand, bearing in mind that many of those readers are Americans, Australians and Canadians.
It was also no coincidence that Daisy confided in her cat. Helen loved cats and owned a series of them through much of her time in Canada. All her life, she recalled the way cats like Mog struggled to survive back in Liverpool in the 1930s. My son recalls seeing a note with feeding instructions from the vet, on which Helen had carefully crossed out, and doubled, the quantities.
*
From 1978 to ’79, Avadh spent a sabbatical year at Oxford University, while I stayed behind in Canada. Helen particularly enjoyed it there since they had the company of one of Avadh’s close collaborators and his wife, Norman and Joan March, who had became good friends. At Christmas that year, my parents travelled to India and combined lecturing, family visits and holidays. I joined them for five weeks, my first visit to India. As I travelled around, staying some of the time in university guesthouses, I was introduced to hundreds of the tiny vignettes that make life in India so fascinating.
At the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, we were invited to the faculty New Year’s Eve party, the best New Year’s Eve I have ever experienced. It was dominated by children performing impromptu dances and running around with endless blowout noisemakers. Huge quantities of Indian snacks and sweets were on offer together with fresh lemonade. The excitement was unbridled.
During that trip my half-brother, Vijay, travelled across the country from a remote part of eastern India to see us. My father had funded him through university and he was now a highly successful professional engineer of almost thirty years of age. He greeted us warmly and presented me with a length of silk, which a tailor in Varanasi made into a shirt overnight. We got on well and in 2014 I would return, with my wife, Dianne, to stay with him and his family during Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Lights. It was a fabulous experience.
In Old Delhi, a walled city inside Delhi, we visited my Doctor Uncle, who had been so instrumental in helping Avadh through his marriage crisis. I also saw the fine old family house and compound in Bulandshahr, which had become a home for the family’s widows and was decaying sadly. We then spent a few days in Kanpur, a large industrial city. My Kanpur uncle, a charming, funny and self-effacing man, was an expert in ceramics, a significant industry in the city. He and his wife and his children and their families entertained us and showed us a very interesting Indian city where few tourists go.
This, my first trip to India, was my mother’s first return to India after almost thirty years and my father’s first visit in at least ten years, and we all enjoyed and appreciated it from our own perspectives. To me it was new and exciting; to my father it was familiar and a source of great pride. Not only was he able to show me his country of birth but, as a scientist successful in the west, he was revered and in constant demand in the university communities. My mother enjoyed observing both my reactions and the welcome extended to my father by the family and by fellow physicists. She, no doubt, enjoyed renewing her love affair with the country.
I came back with a strong feeling of connection to India, quite unlike that for any other country I have visited – except, not surprisingly, England.
*
While my parents were in Oxford, my father, never very strong, had begun to feel more tired than usual. Back in Edmonton, the doctor diagnosed a form of anaemia for which there was no cure. The only treatment was to have massive infusions of red blood cells every six or seven weeks.
For my parents, life began to be timed in intervals between these infusions, which gradually got closer and closer together. My father continued to teach and do research while my mother did everything she could possibly think of to help him and to keep him safe from infection, to which he was highly susceptible.
While Jonathan Cape had sold all its copies of Twopence on first publication back in 1974, the print run had been limited. In the late 1970s, The Bodley Head agreed to republish Twopence if Helen would like to write another volume of her own life story. In a speech in Edmonton, she described her response to this offer:
I did. It was called Minerva’s Stepchild [later changed to Liverpool Miss]. Sales climbed. Letters from fans came by shoals. ‘What happened next?’ they asked. So I wrote By the Waters of Liverpool. And that, I thought, is that. I was fed up with writing about myself.
I happily published two novels [Liverpool Daisy and Three Women of Liverpool], both of them doing very well. Both hit the bestsellers list.
But my fans were not satisfied. They asked for more of my life. So I wrote Lime Street at Two, a quiet tale of a war, my war.
In May 1983, I went to Britain to do a tour promoting By the Waters of Liverpool. Little did I realize, dear Readers, what I was starting.
The tour lasted ten days. Some thirty thousand copies of the book had been ordered by bookshops and Fontana [the paperback publisher] was delighted. There was also a good demand for the earlier books, so they hastily put in orders for reprints of them.
Well, when I arrived in Liverpool, to do a signing at W.H. Smith & Sons, the shop was so packed that they had had to form a queue, which went right round the block. That afternoon I signed 600 books in Smith’s and 441 in Pritchard’s at Crosby. At Smith’s, Birkenhead, the next morning I signed 820 copies and in the afternoon 545 at Bookland, Wallasey. And so it went.
In connection with this promotion tour, the Fontana people gave me a marvellous party on a ferry boat. They asked 150 north-western booksellers to it, and 180 came – typical Merseyside.
En route to the airport, to come home, I went to Russ Hill Hotel nearby, where Fontana Paperbacks was having an annual sales meeting. I received a standing ovation as the computer ticked over 250,000 in sales for the trilogy. Books were selling that day at the rate of two thousand per hour, and the whole Fontana organization was concentrating on my books.
Engulfed in flowers, I was escorted to the airport where the bookshop was simply covered with posters and copies of my book. It was the most exciting day of my life.
Avadh described this day in his diary: ‘Fontana gathering of sales representatives. Beautiful surrounding. Stupendous reception of Helen, with introduction as best selling author of Fontana. H’s speech very nice. Flower bouquet to H. Very moved by it all and very happy for H.’s success after all these years.’
I did not accompany Mum and Dad on this occasion but when they landed back at the airport in Edmonton, I heard about her momentous trip in detail.
It was unspoken, but we all knew how important it was that my dad was able to be there. His struggle with anaemia was getting harder. There was not much
time left.
Chapter Twenty-one
It was a love affair which lasted 34 years, and I cannot imagine life without him.
In 1974, while at the University of Alberta, I had met Dianne, who was studying to be a teacher. We were married in a university chapel, filled to capacity with 150 guests, on a very hot day in July 1981. Very hot, but nothing compared to Ajmer – and there was no fire to walk around. My aunt Avril and her eldest son came from England for the occasion.
By this stage, I had spent a year at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario (1976–77) then come back to Edmonton, where I was lucky enough to get a good position with the government of the Province of Alberta. My mother wrote to a reader, ‘The boy is now an economist, with a great interest in how people manage.’ This comment, when I was still in the early stages of my career, was particularly perceptive since leadership and executive coaching have been my focus for the past thirty-five years.
My mother regularly told me about her writing and what her characters were doing or might do in the future. A number of times she entrusted me with early drafts of her books on which I would comment honestly but always with the conclusion that it was going to be wonderful.
During the summer of 1984, the year following the Fontana sales conference in Liverpool, my dad was told he had just months to live. He was compiling a book, to be called Mechanics of Deformable Media, with a post-doctoral fellow from India, whom he liked very much. Throughout the summer the young man visited frequently and they worked together, with him sometimes sitting by my father’s bedside.
By August, Dad could no longer eat and we all knew the end was getting near. He wanted to be at home but the medical system only provided minimal support. Fortunately a physician who had recently moved in next door realized what was happening and, with great compassion, took over the medical side. The strain on Mum was enormous as she cared for him one way or another, all day, every day, knowing that the only possible outcome was that she would lose him. She had no time to do or think of anything else.
Passage Across the Mersey Page 26
