Minerva's Stepchild

by Helen Forrester

The moment she unlatched the heavy door, a heavenly aroma flooded the room, drowning out the usual odors of damp, pine disinfectant and unwashed winter clothes. Saliva ran from my mouth, and I hastily brushed it away.

  "Ah think it's cooked," she said, twisting one of the bird's legs with expert fingers. "Are yer goin' to carry it oop like it is.f^

  We had few plates and none big enough to hold a turkey, so I said that we would carry it up in the pan and bring the receptacle back in the morning, early enough for her to cook her own Christmas dinner in it. I did not tell that I could not bear to part with a single drop of fat in the pan.

  She agreed to this cheerfially, wrapped up the baked potatoes in a newspaper, then rummaged in the back of her dusty kitchen dresser.

  "Here yer are," she said triumphantly. "Here's a bit o'candle to hght you up them stairs."

  "Gosh, the pudding feels lovely and hot," exclaimed Alan, as he staggered up with the paper parcels of pudding and potatoes.

  The family, except for Mother, was gathered to greet us on the top landing, and a great oooh! sounded at the sight of the turkey.

  "ril wrap it in the newspaper," I said firmly. "Perhaps it will keep warm till tomorrow."

  I could see Father's Adam's apple bob in the candlelight, as he swallowed, and hope died on the children's faces.

  Avril kicked my shin to draw my attention to her. "I want to eat mine now," she said determinedly.

  Again the saliva gathered in my mouth, but I said, "It's not Christmas until tomorrow."

  "To hell with Christmas," said Alan bitterly.

  An hour later, there was only a white skeleton left, scraped clean by small clawing hands and teeth. Even Mother came alive, after devouring nearly a whole leg with the gulping enthusiasm of an ex-prisoner of war. We ate the baked potatoes, skin and all, we ate the sweets and pudding, every scrap.

  We slept.

  Malnutrition, when much prolonged, causes a terrible apathy, an inability to concentrate or think constructively, and that winter was so grim that my mind was closed to the intense suffering of my parents. A child's world is a small one, and given a reasonable round of home and school, his life is fairly fiall. Our little ones suffered unbelievably, however, as they dragged themselves to and from school through snow and rain. Even brave Alan cried when the great chilblains on his heels burst and went septic, and it seemed as if the clothes of all of them were permanently wet; good fires are a necessity in a climate as rainy as Lancashire's. In my parents' case, however, they suffered not only all that we did but also from social deprivation; they starved mentally as well as physically.

  To me, the suffering of Fiona and baby Edward was the more scarifying, because it was silent. Fiona never complained as the others did; she sat quiet and terrified in a kind of mental burrow

  like a fox that has been savaged by hounds, past comforting. Edward, who could now crawl rapidly and occasionally stood up, was making valiant efforts to speak. When he cried—rarely—it was with terrible deep slow sobs, not at all like Avril's ferocious bellows.

  We always had colds. Old copies of the Liverpool Echo were collected from anywhere we could find them and torn up for use as handkerchiefs. The paper was then used to make a fire in the tiny fireplace.

  The acid which I had spilled on my leg fi-om the battery of the radio caused a bum, which went septic, and the sore showed signs of spreading. Old Miss Sinford noticed the mark on my leg one day and commanded that I come into her room to have it examined. She sat me down on a wooden chair in her spotless room and, having put on a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles, she took a good look at it.

  "I'll poultice it for you," she decided. "You should have kept it cleaner."

  I just smiled weakly.

  She found a clean piece of white cloth, poured over it boiling water from the kettle, then wrung it out. Slapped onto the sore, it scalded the surrounding flesh until I clutched Edward too hard, and he cried out. She hurled texts about Good Samaritans at me, as she worked with trembly ancient fingers, and then ordered me to return the next morning for a repeat performance.

  It was from her that I learned that the house opposite, which was visited by so many seamen, was a House of Sin and the women who lived in it were harlots. "Harlots" was a word which occurred in the Bible, so I ventured to ask her what it meant.

  She blinked at me through her spectacles. Then she pointed a bony finger at me and said sharply, "Girls should not ask such questions." Her voice became shrill. "It is a word you must not use. Out! I must pray!"

  Bewildered, I took myself back upstairs and lefi: my leg to heal by itself, which it eventually did. And the next time I went to the library, I looked up the offending word. It really sounded very wicked indeed.

  Fiona came home from school one day, in tears. She said she had a pain in her back and chest. I felt her forehead. It was

  burning with heat. Helplessly, I looked at her, and we were both terribly afraid.

  When Father came home, I told him about Fiona. I had laid her on the bed, but she had tossed aside her wrappings and was muttering feverishly.

  Father clamped his mouth tight, and perspiration glistened on his forehead.

  Alan came softly up to us. "Don't you think we had better send for the doctor, Daddy?" he asked.

  "I haven't any money to pay him, ' was the despairing response.

  "We could tell him that." Alan's lips trembled. Like all of us, he loved Fiona. "He might come anyway."

  I said, "We have nothing to lose by asking. Is Fiona very ill. Daddy?"

  "Yes, " he replied. "I am not sure what it is, though."

  "I'll go and ask, " said Alan in his bravest voice.

  "Yes, do so," said Father. "Helen and I had better stay here. Tell the doctor about the pain and the temperature."

  Tony, Brian, and Avril tiptoed into the room and went silently out again.

  Alan plunged out into the February wind once more. Terrified of facing whoever would answer the doctor's door, he seized the brass knocker and banged it.

  The door was answered by a neatly dressed older woman. "The doctor's out," she said before Alan could open his mouth.

  "It's my sister," said Alan. "She's awfully ill, and we haven't any money to pay the doctor. But, please, will he come?"

  The boy's evident fear made the woman soften her tone. "Well, " she said, "step in, lad. I am not sure that the doctor can come. He's very busy."

  Alan, shivering, stepped into the linoleumed hall. In the faint light, the lady surveyed him. She sighed at what she saw and took down a notebook fi*om beside the telephone. "Tell me your name and address, and I'll ask him."

  Alan told her, and explained the symptoms of the illness as best he could.

  "Now mind, " said his questioner. "I don't know whether the

  doctor can come. If he does come, it will be after office hours, about half past nine."

  The hours dragged by. We took it in turns to sit by Fiona. She would not take the tea we offered her. I wetted our only towel and wiped her face and hands with cold water. This seemed to console her a little. Occasionally, she was racked by coughing.

  Mother came home and stared dumbly at her second daughter. She seemed numbed, unable to accept any more trouble. Her unkempt hair had escaped from her hat, and her hands were swollen with chilblains, in spite of Mrs. Hicks's gloves. The heels of her shoes were worn down so badly that she walked almost bandy-legged.

  "We must keep her covered," she said at last.

  It was difficult to see in the reflected light from the street lamp, and Father said worriedly, "How can the doctor see to examine her—if he comes?"

  "Couldn't we borrow a shilling to put in the electric meter?" I asked.

  "The couple below didn't have one. I can't ask Mrs. Foster— we still owe her a week's rent—and I can't ask Mrs. Hicks because I haven't yet paid her back the last shilling I borrowed."

  This was the first intimation I'd had of his borrowing from the other tenants; it accounted for a gene
ral coldness toward us recently.

  Without a watch it was difficult to tell the time, but finally the front doorbell rang. Hopefully, Brian pounded down the stairs.

  We heard steps on the stairs, then a firm voice said, "Wait, I'll put my flashlight on."

  Brian laughed shrilly and called, "Daddy, Daddy, Helen! The doctor has come!"

  The bedroom door opened, and the beam of a powerfril flashlight blinded me momentarily. The doctor must have had long experience of the straits of poverty.

  "Come in, come in, " said Father, his voice filled with relief

  The doctor put down his bag. "Now, what have we here? " He took Fiona's wrist in long, capable fingers.

  Father explained the symptoms, and I nearly stopped breathing as the doctor listened to Fiona's laboring lungs and frequent coughing.

  "Pleurisy, I think," he said. "She must have hospital treatment immediately. I will telephone the Children's Sanatorium, and arrange for an ambulance."

  Father whispered, "It isn't tuberculosis, is it?" In those days, TB was still a major killer.

  "I doubt it. The hospital will take X-rays." He stood looking down at Fiona's face by the light of the torch. "Does she have a mother?"

  "Yes," Father replied. "You kindly took out some stitches for her some time ago. "

  "Oh? Yes, I remember. How is she?"

  Father looked uneasily at me, and then plunged in: "Her physical health has improved—as far as it can in our circumstances." He paused, and then added, "She isn't herself, though."

  The doctor nodded understandingly. He did not offer any more help. He would deal with our emergency; he could not do more. He had to treat first those patients who could pay. In the torchlight I could see the frayed cuflPs of his overcoat, and I guessed that he had very little himself.

  The doctor asked to see Mother, who had been up in the attic room dealing with Tony. Tony had had a nightmare and had woken up screaming.

  When she came, he instructed her to get Fiona ready for hospital.

  Mother said in a flat tone of voice, "There is nothing to do. She must go as she is. She has no other garments than those she has on—and I cannot wash her in cold water in her present state. "

  So Fiona went to a huge hospital on the farther outskirts of the city, without benefit of bath, toothbrush, or nightgown, and my poor, crushed mother suffered the indignity of seeing her almost unconscious child stripped of her clothes and plunged into a disinfecting bath, her head rolling on her neck as the probationers washed her crawling hair. The tattered clothes were rolled into a bundle and handed to Mother, with the curt information that she could wait.

  Mother was used to waiting. Fnally, about three in the morning, a night nurse remembered that she was still there and told her she could go.

  "I want to know what is the matter with the child, and I want to see her, now she is in bed."

  "You will have to come on visiting days. Your doctor will be informed regarding her illness, and he will tell you."

  My mother lifted her hand to slap this inhuman automaton, but she was afraid of what might happen to Fiona if she made a fuss, so she turned slowly toward the front door.

  She had come to the hospital with Fiona in the ambulance. Nobody had considered how she was to get home again, seven miles away. Outside was the dark and bitter cold of a February night.

  She paused on the step. The only way to get home was to walk. She was not even sure of the route.

  She set out, following the tram lines, which glimmered in the gaslight. The freezing wind cut into her, and after a couple of miles, she was so cold that she was staggering along the pavement.

  A dim light at a comer attracted her attention. It was a telephone box, and she quickened her step and sought refuge inside it. Paralyzed with cold, she gazed dully at the receiver on its hook, and at the instructions for making a call:

  "Insert two pennies. When the telephone is answered, press Button A. If no reply, press Button B for the return of the twopence."

  Return of the twopence! Hopefully she pressed Button B.

  Nothing happened, so, after a few minutes, she started again on her long hike homeward. When she reached the next telephone box, she entered it and, without much hope, pressed Button B. She was immediately rewarded by the happy rattle of two falling pennies. She snatched them up and took the next tram home.

  Our subsequent visits to the sanitorium were strictly regulated by whether we could find a telephone box where someone had forgotten to press Button B—and it was remarkable how many we found.

  Though Fiona's illness was long and our public assistance was reduced by the amount of her keep, we were not altogether sorry. She was at least fed in hospital—great hunks of bread and margarine, bowls of sugarless porridge, meat stews, boiled puddings, and steamed fish. Patients were expected to augment the hospi-

  taFs food by supplying their own sugar, jam, cake, and fruit. We had nothing to bring Fiona. The diet was, however, so much better than ours that, once the pleurisy was drained, she began to look much stronger.

  She was sorely troubled by bugs in the hospital bed. Father complained, and was told roughly that she must have brought them in with her.

  "She was stripped and bathed when she came in," he said. "Perhaps the bed could be stoved."

  A ferocious female, who looked as if she had been put through a starch solution with her uniform, said cruelly, "Of course, it will be stoved—after your child is discharged."

  Father's expression was like that in the painting of Christ crucified which hung over my grandmother's bed. He bowed his head and turned silently away.

  A sightly plumper waif of a child was returned to us six weeks later, to face hunger and cold again. There was no ambulance this time, and she found the long tram ride a sore trial.

  "The spring is coming, " we comforted her.

  The studied rudeness with which every member of the family was faced whenever dealing with officialdom, as personified by the public assistance committee, by the labor exchanges, by the voluntary agencies working in the city, was a revelation to us. We began to understand, as never before, the great gulf between rich and poor, between middle class and labor. It considerably improved our manners toward our less fortunate neighbors.

  When I grew up, I told myself, I would do some kind of work which would make it possible for people to be helped without at the same time humiliating them.

  When I grew up!

  But I was growing up. Even in my pinched body changes were taking place that indicated that soon I would be a young woman. A ghastly, ugly, uneducated wreck of a young woman but still a woman.

  As I sat on the doorstep in the weak April sunshine, Edward on my knee, I wondered what would become of me. Other girls went to school and then to work, but for me life had stopped in one place on my first day in Liverpool. The other children were getting at least a basic education; Alan talked hopefiilly of Tony

  and Brian being able to win scholarships to grammar school; he himself was too old to sit the examination, but he worked hard at school and read a lot afterward. At fourteen, he could leave school, and he hoped to get a job "with a future." Fiona, I thought, would sooner or later marry well—she was so pretty; I did not consider how, in this wilderness of slum, she would manage to do that.

  Avril, throwing her weight about both physically and verbally, was tough enough to take care of herself, and Edward, watching the world go by from the safe refuge of my lap, was young enough not to have to worry.

  Without an education, I saw myself being kept at home until my parents died and then becoming some bad-tempered old lady's companion-help, subject always to the whims and fancies of others. I knew I was far too plain ever to hope for marriage.

  I laid my cheek on little Edward's scurfy head and decided that such a life was not worth living.

  NINE

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Encouraged by the friendly old gend
eman on the park bench, I continued to read. When I explained to him that I ought to be in school, he said firmly and wisely that it was my parents' responsibility. He pointed out that, in studying by myself, I was following in the footsteps of many great Lancastrians, who, though doomed to poverty because they were weavers and caught up in the industrial revolution, found means to study and outshine their better-educated contemporaries. He cited the examples of John Butterworth, the mathematician, and James Crowther and Richard Buxton, the Manchester botanists, self-taught, poor, famous.

  I sighed. There was no help there. I wanted to eat and be warm every day of my life.

  Avril and I had discovered one beautifully warm spot in Liverpool: Sefton Park's fine glass palm house. It was kept at tropical temperatures to encourage the growth of the palms and similar plants inside. Avril, Edward, and I used to go into it oft:en and crawl under the great creepers to get warm, emerging later with our bottoms covered with earth, damper but warmer.

  Once we were discovered by two earnest young university students carrying notebooks and pencils. They were at first puzzled and then amused.

  "Hide and seek?" one young man inquired.

  I nodded assent, and like fellow conspirators, they rearranged the foliage over us and tiptoed away. A gardener on another occasion was not so kind.

  "We don't want no dirty ragamuffins in here," he shouted, and sent us packing.

  Crestfallen, we crept out of the glass house, and I pushed the Chariot homeward.

  Halfway up one shopping street, I came to a large, red-brick building surrounded by a matching brick wall. It was an elementary school, silent and deserted because it was Saturday. The

  remains of a poster flapping in the wind caught my attention. It announced the opening of evening school the previous September. Courses in commercial arithmetic, bookkeeping, English, shorthand and several other subjects were offered.

  I stopped.

  I had never heard of evening school, and I could hardly believe that one could go to school outside the normal hours. I could have skipped for joy.