Minerva's Stepchild

by Helen Forrester

  "He's got a bad tooth," I explained. "He can't go to school today, because it hurts too much."

  "Well, poor luv!" she exclaimed, her double chin, with its little crown of spiky hairs, wobbling sympathetically. "Na, then, I got some oil of cloves. Come daanstairs with me, luv," she called to Brian, who was hovering nervously in the background. "Ah got somethin' as will help yer. Come on, na."

  Brian allowed himself to be beguiled downstairs, where he spent the afternoon lying on Mrs. Hicks's horsehair sofa in front of her blazing fire, having hot cloths put on his cheeks and quantities of oil of cloves dabbed into his cavities.

  Nobody had ever made such a fuss of him, and, despite the pain and the foul taste of oil of cloves, he loved it. He loved also the warmth, the coziness, and the old tin teapot keeping its contents warm on the hob.

  Mr. Hicks, an out-of-work bricklayer, called him a brave lad, and, when he was feeling better, Mrs. Hicks invited him to return on a day when his teeth were not hurting, and have a cup of tea and a homemade scone with them.

  He came back fiall of glee, in spite of his swollen face, and

  remained Mr. and Mrs. Hicks's devoted friend and message runner for years.

  The Hickses had very Htde, and yet they managed to make their dark basement cozy. Mrs. Hicks must have been an excellent housekeeper, and unhke many of her neighbors, she understood the nutritional value of many cheap foods like herrings and lentils, and she pointed out to me that brown bread was better than white. My mother, like many middle-class English people at that time, knew very little about the need for a well-balanced diet.

  Another good cook was the Spanish lady who had given us the Chariot. I found she had a Spanish husband, who was a warehouseman in a fruit warehouse, and he kept her well supplied with oranges, apples and other delicacies in season. He was, she confided to me as we sat on the steps, a man of choleric temper and colossal jealousy. But, ah me, what a man!

  I smiled sympathetically, and bounced Edward up and down on my knee to his great delight.

  She pulled her black, knitted shawl tightly around her shoulders, and looked at me coquettishly.

  "You do not understand yet, I think. But you learn."

  "I expect so," I replied guardedly, not at all sure what I would learn.

  She cooed in Spanish to Edward. He could crawl a little now, but he was not a pretty baby. His head, which looked too big, was covered with scurf, and his stomach stuck out grotesquely. His smile, however, was sweet.

  "My last boy, Peter, he go to school with your Tony. Say your Tony very clever—can read well and do his arithmetic."

  This was news to me, there being no contact between home and school. My father, eternally busy at being unemployed, had given no consideration to his children's progress. My mother, after the brimstone and treacle season came to an end, kept trying unsuccessfijlly for other work, and long walks to see prospective employers took up much of her time. She was now well, in the sense that she had recovered from Edward's birth and her subsequent major operation. But she was nearly starving and was still walking the razor's edge between mental health and nervous breakdown.

  The Spanish lady was speaking again: "What your Dadda work at?"

  "He is registered as a bookkeeper-clerk." But I did not want to tell our story to anyone who asked, and I parried all further questions.

  Frequently, I walked down the avenue to Princes Park and, seated on the sun-warmed bench in the rose garden, had long conversations with the old gentleman who had defended us against the parkkeeper.

  "I was never rich," he once volunteered in his precise English. "I have always worked as an interpreter—and I still do sometimes, for Arab and Chinese seamen in the magistrate's court."

  "Were you bom in China, sir?" I ventured.

  "No. I was bom in Lebanon. My father was a German, and as I think I told you once, Mother was an Arab. So I had three languages—German, Arabic, and French, which is widely spoken in Lebanon. Father was an engineer by profession, and I had the chance to learn Chinese and English while he was working in Singapore, then Spanich in Mexico and Portuguese in Brazil. I taught myself Italian." He paused for breath, and then went on. "Now I study Greek and Hebrew, so that I can study the Scriptures in more detail."

  I was awed by such a catalog of learning.

  "You must have been able to live quite comfortably," I hazarded.

  "I had sufficient. But, you must know, child, that scholarship does not often bring one money. One can earn, yes—but it is the enrichment of the mind rather than of the pocket which it gives." He laughed softly. "I was rich in friends, a good wife, three sons. ..." His voice broke, and he stopped.

  "Do your boys live with you?" I inquired innocently.

  He looked at me. "My boys—my wonderful boys—all died in the war. My dear wife followed them three years ago. Soon I shall join them." He snapped his little book shut as if to show how suddenly he would finish.

  I was ashamed at having pried into his aflPairs. Adult suffering had a way of springing upon one from unexpected sources, and I had yet to learn how heavy a burden the adult world carried at times.

  "I'm sorry to have been so impertinent, " I mumbled.

  I hoped passionately that he would not die. He was the only

  clean, civilized person I knew in Liverpool, and he was as wise as my grandmother, who lived a whole twopence away. That my parents were civilized did not occur to me. They always seemed to be so far away from me.

  The old gentleman shook away his depression, realized I was distressed, and comforted me.

  "When you are eighty-one years old, you look forward to being once more with your loved ones," he said.

  We sat quietly together. I tended to agree with him that death was something to look forward to.

  "Do you believe in God—and Heaven?" I asked timidly.

  "Yes, indeed," he said. "My mother was a Muhammadan, and my father was a Lutheran, and neither impressed a religion upon me. They both explained their beliefs to me, but they made me study and search for God."

  "We are Church of England," I said. "That is. . . "I hesitated. "That is, when we are clean and rich we are Church of England. I suppose at present we are nothing."

  He sat contemplating the placid lake for a minute, and then said, "You should go to your parish church."

  "We could not," I replied emphatically. "We are so dirty— we can't afford soap."

  He nodded understandingly. "God tries us all, child. Pray to Him for help. He will hear you."

  I thanked him, and got up heavily from the bench. There was no hope in me. But all the way home I prayed silently in the well-known words of the Anglican prayerbook, in the belief that there is no harm in trying.

  One of the penalties of poverty is being cut off from the rest of the world. Newspapers, radio, and letters cost money. Some of our neighbors had radios, and they clung to them, no matter what else they had to part with. It was their main source of both entertainment and news, as long as they had a penny to put into the electric meter or could afford to get the wet batteries recharged.

  My father read several national newspapers and the Liverpool Echo whenever he went to the library. My mother, also, would skim through the Echo during a quick visit to the library-, to jot down details of jobs advertised. They were the exception,

  however; most people around us found reading a laborious effort, and there was a fair sprinkling among the older inhabitants who could neither read nor write.

  The newspaper room in the library seemed to be the preserve of adults, who did not like a dirty ragamuffin with a baby on her hip pushing in front of them. In consequence, I knew more about Walsingham and Lord Burghley, than I did about George V's ministers.

  I knew nobody of my own age and was cut off from all forms of play. Some girls of fourteen lived in our vicinity. They were tough, brassy lasses, who regarded themselves as adults and worked all day in factories or shops. Each girl had a best friend, known as her mate, and together they w
ent to the cinema or to dances, where they danced together. If a boy asked one of them for a dance, she circled the floor with him in silence, her face exhibiting about as much expression as the back of a tram. Every Friday evening they solemnly washed and set each other's hair, and on Sundays, dressed in their best, they would walk together in the streets, regarding hopefril males with joint disdain. This was a matriarchal society where ferocious grandmothers and nagging mothers reigned supreme, and men seemed to have hardly a toehold in the home, and these young girls were already aware of this.

  They were cheap labor and at the age of sixteen they would often be unemployed, like their elder sisters. But in the meantime they were frequently the most affluent members of their household, with money to spend in Woolworth's on cosmetics and rhinestone jewelry. I envied them their neat, black, work dresses and, even more, their best Sunday coats and hats and high-heeled shoes. They never spoke to me, except sometimes to jeer at my rags.

  The local boys bullied both Avril and me, just as they did a subnormal boy who lived in the next street and a little black girl, the daughter of a medical student, who lived around the comer. None of us was human by the standards of these lads—we looked different, and we ranked with dogs and cats, to be teased and mishandled.

  Our family received no letters. It was as if everybody we had known before that first day in Liverpool had dropped dead. My

  parents always hoped for letters in reply to their endless applications for work, but nothing arrived. Occasionally, my mother would write to an old acquaintance to beg for financial help; there was no response.

  I longed passionately to go to school, to have some small communion with a more ordered world where I might find some spark of hope of a better life. I continued to pray that, since my brothers and sisters attended a Church school, the priest would one day call upon us and discover my existence; I was sure he could make my parents send me to his school. But the Church knew us not, and I was thrown back upon my library books and what I could remember fi-om the past.

  Unlike many children, I had always enjoyed going to church. The major festivals of the year were to me wonderful theatrical productions, and my introduction to the works of many great composers had been through hearing their music pouring forth from a well-played organ on such occasions. Some of the churches I had attended were hundreds of years old and had priceless paintings, tapestries, vestments, carvings in stone and wood, magnificent brasswork and gold ornaments, a wealth of beauty on which the eyes of a small girl could feast. The beauty of the language of the King James Version of the Bible and of the Church of England prayer book was not lost upon me either, and enriched my knowledge of the English tongue.

  Now, when mental stimulus was most required and religious comfort desperately needed, these things were gone from us.

  In addition to the scholarship and intellectual wealth of the Church of England, I had been exposed to stimulating talk fi-om my parents' friends. Allowed to leave the nursery and sit with my elders in the drawing room, I would sit like a sleepy owl on a stool by the white marble fireplace, admiring Mother's collection of Georgian silver while conversation flowed.

  Well-tailored gentlemen, some of them economists and bankers, others wealthy merchants, debated points with Father, while a younger group clustered around my mother talking witty nonsense. I did not always understand what was discussed, but I soon became aware of the upper-middle-class world. There was a place called the Stock Market inhabited by bulls and bears, and there were faraway countries, like India and China, where men

  made fortunes. There were terrifying food shortages called famines when men died in the streets; there were wonderful farms, full of sheep, in Australia, and others equally full of wheat in Canada. There were ships to be built, railways to sell, and venturesome investments to be made in car, radio, and electric-light-bulb firms.

  Nobody mentioned the kind of world in which I lived now. Perhaps my father's friends did not know of its existence. If they did, they preferred to forget it.

  I knelt by the window of our top-floor eyrie and looked down at the unemployed men in the street, playing one of their endless games of ollies, a form of marbles. I remembered how Joan had ignored me when I had met her. I supposed that Father's friends had done the same to him.

  So much for friendship.

  One form of communication, which was very rare in our part of Liverpool, was telephoning. The public telephone was beginning to make its appearance, but in my new world, phoneless families still sent one of the family with written or verbal messages.

  Museums were denied us too, to some extent, as I discovered. Father had several times taken us to museums in the past, and it occurred to me one day that Avril and I could go to the museum together. So I pushed the little girl and Edward in the Chariot all the way to the city and then up and down three huge flights of steps until I found the right building. I was just struggling to get the pram through a recalcitrant door when a voice boomed, "Where are you going with that thing?"

  A very large doorkeeper stood behind me.

  "I'm going to the museum," I replied nervously.

  "Not with that you're not."

  I looked sadly down at Avril. I was afraid to leave the Chariot outside, in case some urchin thought it was abandoned and took it to play with.

  I looked up at the doorkeeper and prepared to do battle, but he saw the indignant gleam in my eye, and said sharply, "Now you just take that thing back to where you found it, and don't let me find you loitering around here again."

  Loitering was something one could be arrested for, I knew,

  so I swallowed the bitter words that came to mind and bounced the Chariot back down the steps so fast that I ran into a distinguished-looking gentleman coming up.

  "Oh, I beg your pardon, sir," I said, horrified at having struck such a scholarly type of person. "I hope I haven't hurt you."

  "Not at all. My briefcase took the blow," he replied kindly, but he stared in surprise at Avril and me. His lips parted, as if to ask me something, but I had been so humiliated by the doorkeeper that I felt I was going to cry, and I hastened onward across the street. Once there, I looked back.

  The gentleman was standing at the door of the museum still staring curiously at me.

  I giggled suddenly through my tears. An Oxford accent coming from a bundle of rags and bones like me must have really puzzled him. It had not impressed the doorkeeper, however, or gained me entry to the museum.

  Summertime had always meant to me a period of waving green wheat slowly turning yellow, a time for walks along a meadow-bordered river, where buttercups waited to be threaded into chains, a time to lie under a plum-tree and read to my heart's content.

  Liverpool summers are not like that. In the 1930's not much was understood about pollution, and on days when it did not rain, the acrid smoke was enough to obscure the sun until a harsh, Atlantic wind temporarily lifted the veil. On hot days the alleyways and garbage cans stank. There were still a lot of horses in Liverpool and where there are horses, there are always myriads of flies to carry dysentery.

  Hens and pigeons were common in back yards. Men kept fighting cocks, though this was illegal, and many were the bloody battles in the long summer evenings, on which men wagered a large portion of their public-assistance money.

  Much of this the younger children were able to accept as a way of life as they slowly forgot their earlier life. Tony and Brian also had a dream world of their own, playing highly imaginative games in which they sailed the world—Brian always fell overboard and was rescued by Tony—or drove trains and cars which had innumerable comic accidents.

  Playing in the open, even if the air was polluted, made them more hungry and it was impossible to satisfy them. If we were to cook anything, we still had to buy coal, so that summer expenses were much the same as winter ones.

  We approached our second winter in Liverpool with undisguised dread. We had commenced the first bitter January there with one set of good winte
r clothing apiece and two blankets. Now, not one of us had a whole garment or a pair of shoes without holes in them. Indeed, four of us were reduced to ragged gym shoes or nothing at all on our feet.

  My father was a pitiful sight even in comparison with the ragged crew who lined up with him for public assistance. His elbows stuck through the sleeves of what had once been a tweed jacket, and his knees were equally naked. He had no socks, and there was very little left of his shirt. He used to thread the remains of his old school tie through the torn collar and knot it, in the mistaken belief that nobody would notice the bare chest underneath it. His underwear had, like that of the rest of the family, worn out, and his chest was red from being chapped by the wind, but he suffered most from pain in his hands.

  Both hands had been badly frostbitten during his military service in Russia (on the hospital ship which brought him home, the surgeons had debated whether or not they should be amputated), and intensely cold weather turned them white. I used to sit and massage them to revive the circulation. It was then that they became most painful.

  One freezing November day, urged on by two shipping clerks shivering with him in a queue, he applied to the relieving officer of the public-assistance committee for help to buy a pair of shoes and a pair of gloves. Clothing, he was told tartly, was given in kind and stamped with the initials of the public-assistance committee, so that it could not be sold or pawned.

  "I don't mind what it is stamped with," replied Father humbly, "as long as it lessens the pain in my hands."