Passage Across the Mersey

by Robert Bhatia

  At the end of September, Dianne and I dropped by after going out for dinner for my birthday. I sat with Dad holding his hand while Dianne and Mum talked in the kitchen. After ten minutes or so, the raspy irregular breathing from my stick-thin father stopped.

  Our first reaction was for the three of us to embrace and laugh with the extraordinary relief that his long struggle was over, but of course that was very quickly supplanted by grief.

  My mother wrote to inform her cousin Marjorie, who had lived with Helen’s aunts and grandmother in Hoylake, in simple but moving terms:

  This is just to tell you of the death on 27 September of my darling Avadh, after much suffering.

  It was a love affair which lasted 34 years, and I cannot imagine life without him.

  Dad was a Hindu. He practised his faith privately and was not connected to a Hindu temple or community, so my mother and I had had to consider the appropriate form of funeral for him. Well in advance, we approached the local Anglican [the Canadian equivalent of Church of England] priest at a church three minutes’ walk away from our house. We explained the situation and were received warmly and graciously. He visited my father a few times and, when the time came, we had a simple service at the church attended by several dozen friends, colleagues and family. Dr Stuart Woods, a long-time physics colleague delivered the eulogy. Exhausted and numb with pain, my mother coped with the ritual well but, as people left, she pleaded with them not to forget about her.

  In fact, in the early days, she received many offers of help – not all of them useful. To a Canadian acquaintance who worked in publishing, she wrote:

  I have, of course, heard about Betty Jane Wylie’s book for widows, and thanks for reminding me about it. I am not sure that for the moment I can stand any more advice upon the subject of being a widow! I seem to have entered a mysterious, secret world of widows, all of whom give advice! It is all very well meant but nothing goes in, really. I am quite capable of managing the business side and I had been doing this steadily – it is practically a full-time job. The rest of me has to sit quiet until the shock has passed, before I can do anything. I exclude my writing, because that is a world apart from my dear husband, which I am now able to cope with; everybody says I am lucky to have it, so I suppose I am. In a little while, maybe I will be able to face Betty Wylie’s book.

  Thanks for sharing my grief and for all your help. I’ll be better soon.

  A month later Venket and Bharati [the friends from India, who eventually moved to Calgary, Alberta] and their son, and a few other friends joined Mum, Dianne and her parents, and me on a cold November day to sprinkle Avadh’s ashes near a gravestone of red Indian marble. Mum told her brother, Brian:

  The saddest thing I ever had to do was to sweep the snow off his grave plot, so that we could scatter the ashes on the earth. Somehow, it got me down that the snow came before we could hold the ceremony. A Brahmin read from the Gita [a Hindu scripture] and an old friend sang a song much loved by Gandhi, about freedom of the spirit. Then some 20 old friends came home for tea. After they left, I was alone in the house throughout the weekend, and frankly, it felt terrible. Then I was also alone the Remembrance Day weekend, and it was just as bad. At least at Christmas I shall be with Rob and Dianne and her family.

  Just a few weeks later, I told Mum that Dianne was expecting our first child. The news of a grandchild, to be born nine months after my father’s death, gave her some comfort in her grief.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  I never know quite what will come out until I begin to write. Then characters crawl out of the woodwork and from them the plot evolves. However, I am always reading, with an eye to a future book.

  During 1984, as my dad’s illness worsened, Mum’s career had continued to flourish. Robert Hale Ltd., which had published Three Women of Liverpool, offered, out of the blue, to publish The Latchkey Kid in England. Fontana was contemplating republishing Alien There Is None as Thursday’s Child and Helen was snatching whatever time she could to work on Lime Street at Two. She was also toying with the idea of a Lebanese heroine, who would form the backbone of The Lemon Tree.

  My mother was exhausted physically and emotionally from the burden of caring for Dad, never mind the pain of actually losing him, but she did not wait long after his passing to throw herself into the book world again. In December 1984, just two months later, she was off to the south of England to promote her books. One result of this trip was her decision to engage an agent, Richard Scott Simon, at long last, as her career was burgeoning and its complexity was growing.

  In early 1985, after completing Lime Street at Two, she wrote to an old friend:

  This is absolutely the last book I write about myself. Everybody is rushing round me, saying, ‘You must write the love story of you and Avadh’. But they have had it. As if they have no idea of the pain inside one! It is very well to write of things that happened 45 years ago – 40 years is just about time in which to recover. Anyway, with the success of Three Women of Liverpool and Liverpool Daisy, they know that I can write novels, so at least the publishers will probably shut up.

  On the morning of 6 June 1985, Mum’s sixty-sixth birthday, I was scheduled to take an aeroplane tour of irrigation facilities in Southern Alberta but, on a hunch the night before, I cancelled it. It was just as well. As Helen wrote later that month: ‘I was blessed on my birthday this year by a special gift. Stephen James Avadh Bhatia made his entry into the world a little early. He is a very small baby, but healthy and Dianne is simply marvellous with him. She is feeding him herself.’

  At the same time she was moved beyond measure by some other news:

  The University of Alberta also wrote to tell me that the physics building will in future be called The Avadh Bhatia Physics Laboratory in honour of Avadh. It made me weep because, like most prophets, Avadh was not honoured in his own country, and I think it is only since he died that the University has realised what a great man sat in their midst.

  Later in the year Helen moved from the house she had shared with Dad to an apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows looking over the river valley and across to the University. Not only was the apartment less work and easier to leave when she wanted to travel, but it was also a symbol to Helen of her independence and success. She put her stamp on it by surrounding herself with books, the collection of fans she had been accumulating slowly since the 1970s, some treasured mementoes from India and floral-patterned bedspreads, cushions and teacups. More than one visitor commented that it looked like an English cottage. Her grandson, Stephen, enjoyed looking at all the interesting things in her apartment and hearing the personal stories that accompanied them.

  While the trauma of Avadh’s illness and death faded excruciatingly slowly, this was an intensely creative and productive period in Helen’s writing. There was an added boost when she heard Fontana would be publishing yet another book in 1987: The Moneylenders of Shahpur, which had been languishing unloved by publishers for a long time. Helen wrote enthusiastically to her editor at Fontana, Andy McKillop, about several future books.

  I think that Richard [her agent] jumped the gun when he said I was about to embark on a novel with Indian settings and Liverpool connections. I obviously did not make myself clear. What I meant was that, if The Moneylenders of Shahpur is a reasonable success, I could write another Indian novel, perhaps giving it Liverpool connections.

  As you know, I am at present writing a novel about Liverpool [Yes, Mama], set in its most prosperous time, 1886 to 1922. It is a picture of a well-to-do family carefully burying a scandal, a bastard child, running parallel with the horrific life of the slums which form the background of the child’s nanny. The child’s slow realization of why she is treated differently from other children corresponds with [the] financial decline of the family, and I propose to allow her to escape to Canada – finally.

  I still have in mind to write a book with the background of the Liverpool soap trade [what would become The Lemon Tree], following the above, pro
vided I can put together all the facts I need. In this, I also want to show the connection between the British and Lebanon in those days – there were many Britons in the fruit and silk trades out there. I thought I might take a girl from Lebanon and drop her into a middle-class soap merchant’s home in Liverpool. Remembering some of the astute women I had met in India who were purdah bred, I thought I might make her into a sort of Helena Rubenstein of the Liverpool soap trade. (Helena Rubenstein rose to be one of the greatest producers of cosmetics who ever lived, in case you don’t know the name.) This is why I mentioned that I had been reading histories of the Middle East, not to speak of travel guides, et cetera. None of it will actually go into the book, but it gives me the rich background of a potential heroine …

  I was very interested in your remarks about writing longer books. It is sometimes nice to have more elbow room in which to develop characters.

  In April 1987, a fan from Prince Edward Island wrote to Helen ‘one of the most marvellous letters that I have ever received’. It began a friendship and planted the seed of a new book. Vincent Elordieta had been a member of Liverpool’s Basque minority and wrote to Helen to share his history of Spanish people in Liverpool and his wartime experiences. His story was compelling and had connections to Helen’s own experiences. She replied to him:

  It was ironical that you should be in a ship in the Mersey River at the time of the May Blitz. I was working at the petroleum installation during that terrible week and probably saw your ship sail into port from my office window. I thought you might enjoy the enclosed book, Three Women of Liverpool, in which I used the raid as the basis of a novel. It has been one of my most successful books.

  You mentioned seeing the Mauretania II being launched [in 1938]. Presumably, you were actually in Cammell Laird’s as it slid down the slipway.

  You will be amused to hear that, standing on the Pier Head, was a very hungry young girl spending her lunchless lunch hour watching the same launch. Of course, it looked quite small from where I was, but it is the only ship I have ever seen launched, and I was quite excited.

  It is so strange, because we probably passed each other in the street at times.

  I can understand how hard it was for you to come home to Canada after being in Liverpool. It is as if it is impossible to tear free from one’s roots entirely. Of course, my real childhood was not spent in Liverpool, but I get the same lost feeling after returning to Canada from any part of Britain.

  She and Vincent began an active correspondence that took her down a creative path she had never anticipated. Within a few months, she decided to visit him in Prince Edward Island, where she interviewed him for hours, and his story became the inspiration for The Liverpool Basque (published in 1993), which followed Yes, Mama (1987) and The Lemon Tree (1991).

  Helen’s life was madly busy in the decade after Avadh’s death, not least as she became grandmother to another baby. My and Dianne’s second child, Lauren, arrived on 6 June 1988, sharing her birthday with her older brother and her increasingly famous granny. Organizing birthday celebrations for the month of June was a complex business in our household since the guest lists and interests of the honorees were rather different.

  At the start of 1988, anticipating the new baby and acknowledging her growing fame, Helen wrote to a friend:

  I shall be away from Edmonton quite a lot this year – a Canadian publicity tour during March, a speaking tour on Merseyside in Britain in April, Writers Union Annual Meeting in Ontario in May, Rob’s and Dianne’s baby requiring my presence (they are due in June), a week lecturing at the University of Western Ontario in August, a tour of Western Canada with my brother [Tony] and his wife throughout September, another publicity tour (probably but not certain) in England in October and a 16-day visit to India in November. And looking at this paragraph, I feel tired and wonder what it’s all about! Except for the visit to India, to which I am looking forward.

  On top of these other plans for the year, Helen received the thrilling news early in 1988 that the University of Liverpool had decided to bestow upon her an honorary Doctor of Letters. The ceremony was to be on 8 July, perilously close to the baby’s due date, but it was agreed that I would accompany my mother to Liverpool.

  We flew over and stayed at the Bowler Hat Hotel in Birkenhead. Brian and Avril attended the ceremony and sat alongside me as Helen went up on stage in cap and gown to receive her doctorate. The citation was delivered by an Emeritus Professor to Lord Leverhulme, grandson of the founder of Lever Brothers soap company (now Unilever), and it included many lovely sentiments, including the following: ‘We honour a woman of immense character, a woman with the will to emerge with undiminished spirit from the greatest adversity, and the skill to describe that triumph with heart-warming humility.’

  It was a proud moment for me to see my mum receive the recognition that I, together with her millions of readers, felt she so richly deserved. It was also particularly fitting for her to be honoured by a university. Her thirst for learning had led her to develop a deep and broad knowledge far beyond what could be expected of someone with so little formal education, and this contributed greatly to the success of her writing. In different circumstances, Helen’s intellect would have propelled her into higher education. That the recognition should come from Liverpool was entirely appropriate and very welcome; it was, of course, the same university that had granted Avadh his PhD in physics years before.

  Afterwards she wrote to her brother Alan: ‘The ceremony went off very well and everyone was very kind, both to me and to the family. I found it rather a joke to receive the doctorate from Lord Leverhulme, because I have made his grandfather something of a villain in my new book [The Lemon Tree]. I must now do some fast rewriting!’

  To a friend, she confided:

  When the University of Liverpool gave me an honorary doctorate, I would normally have hung the certificate on the bedroom wall and forgotten it.

  Lord Leverhulme, however, a very wise old owl, who was the Chancellor of the University and was my host, took my hand and said, ‘Be sure to use the doctorate, my dear. It will help you.’ He gave me such a knowing grin that I think he understood how white-haired little old ladies get patronized and shoved on one side.

  So I’ve used it – and he is right. It helps me in a whole lot of hard situations. But forgive my flaunting it at the top of my notepaper – it’s useful. I could never have earned it – I simply don’t have the brains, never mind the opportunity!

  *

  In 1993, Helen described her approach to research and developing character in a letter to a Canadian acquaintance in the publishing world.

  You asked me what my techniques are in historical research. There goes the trained mind! I have a mind almost completely unformed by ordered teaching, so I have always invented my own systems, no matter what I am doing. I occasionally reinvent the wheel, of course!

  I lived with Wallace Helena [the heroine of The Lemon Tree] for five years, through two previous books, while I sought for a way of using her. She was sparked simply by the newspaper headlines regarding the war in Lebanon. I had, of course, read a fair amount about the Middle East and knew about the horrors of the Christian massacres under the Turks and Druze. So, to confirm this knowledge, I read Hitti’s The Near East in History, an excellent book. Then, I had to think how to set the book in Liverpool, to please my publishers, and I hit on the soap industry. Soap firms were marvellous in giving me information about their companies and how they began – and there are many hippie books on soap making at home. And all the time, I was picking up bits from other books to strengthen my idea of Wallace.

  I knew Chicago had many Lebanese millionaires, who had been refugees of the massacre, but who took their money back to Beirut – and made it, incidentally, the banking centre of the Middle East. But Chicago was too easy to sustain the kind of hardship that would make a really strong woman. Hence, the idea of bringing her to Edmonton, a place which she could not easily leave. I literally learned th
e history of Edmonton from scratch.

  There comes a point when you close all the books you have read and start to write, to see what comes.

  I have a Safeway’s bag into which I drop cuttings and small books on the subject I have in mind, and a bit of bookshelf to hold the bigger tomes, and when I am ready to seriously start writing, I tip everything out and see what I have.

  In amongst the hard work, Helen did make time to travel for pleasure. She particularly enjoyed Swan Hellenic cruises on the Orpheus, where she could listen to talks by scholars on a number of subjects. She also travelled to India and France, and made a number of friends on these trips with whom she corresponded regularly. While she took an active interest in my own little family, much of Helen’s life was lived in her fictional world and in the very active correspondence she maintained with her readers, agent, publishers and other friends in the book industry.

  Helen stayed in very close touch with most of her brothers and sisters and wrote regularly to Alan, Brian and Avril in particular. In her book world, she guarded their privacy carefully but readers often wanted to know what had happened to them. In 1993, she wrote this to a schoolmaster whose class she had visited.

  My four brothers have never, to my knowledge, read any of my books! True brotherly love! They did, however, know what was in Twopence because I talked to them about it. Three of them are some of my best salesman, but the fourth one [Edward] is a bit shy of being identified as one of the children in the book, probably because he became a headmaster!

  My sister [Avril] reads them avidly, and is at present immersed in my latest one, The Liverpool Basque. My second sister, Fiona in the book, died in middle age of breast cancer, much to the grief of all of us. She left five adopted children who were brought up by her husband.