Helen Forrester - Twopence to cross the Mersey

Shut up, Avril, I said sternly, between chattering teeth. Everything is going to be all right.

Im cold and Im hungry. The wail threatened to become one of three-year-old Avrils howling tantrums, as she started to kick off her patent-leather shoes and tear at her blue satin bonnet-strings.

I loosened the wet elastic of my black school hat from under my chin. The hat, as usual, had been crammed down on top of a large ribbon bow, which held my front hair ruthlessly scraped back from a too high forehead. My spectacles were sprayed with rain and I could not see very well as I peered short-sightedly down Lime Street.

I lifted Avril up and hugged her to my damp school uniform.

Behave yourself, I ordered sharply. We are all hungry. You must be brave until Daddy comes back to collect us.

Fortunately, I did not know that my father, at that moment walking the streets of Liverpool in search of shelter for his sick wife and seven children, had no real idea of what to do to mitigate the catastrophe which had struck him. I presumed that adults always knew what they were doing and the likely outcome of their actions. I did not know that my mother, lying on a stretcher in the ladies waiting-room, her six-week-old son beside her, was sweating with pain after a major abdominal operation and was bordering on a nervous breakdown. I could not understand why we could not go to stay with my grandmother, who lived only a few miles away in the Wirral peninsula. No one had told me she had quarrelled violently with her son and his wife, whom she condemned jointly as worthless spendthrifts, and would have no more to do with us.

Busy with childish affairs of school and girlfriends, I had noticed only that during the last few weeks my parents friends were not dropping in for a drink as frequently as usual; in fact the house had been almost free of visitors for a couple of months.

Alan, who was a year younger than I, had pointed out to me a few months earlier that Mothers wonderful collection of Georgian silver had vanished from the antique sideboard on which it was normally displayed, and I had asked my mother where it had gone.

Girls should not poke their noses into the business of grown-ups, I had been told tartly, and I had retreated to Alan for consolation.

Perhaps it has been sold, he had whispered uneasily, as he ran his fingers through his corn-coloured hair.

Why? I asked, my eyes goggled in surprise.

He stared at me reflectively, his wide, blue eyes troubled. I dont know. There is something wrong. Mary Ann packed her suitcase and left on Saturday.

Mary Ann was our housemaid, a jolly, outspoken girl.

I thought she had gone home to visit her mother for a few days thats what she told me.

I dont think so. She seems to have taken everything with her. She even asked Cook for her curling-tongs back Cook was always borrowing them.

Our uneasiness grew while Mother was in hospital, until an idle word from a school-friend gave us a clue.

Father had done a mysterious thing called going bankrupt, a not uncommon occurrence in the world of 1930, but strange to me. I had heard vaguely that going bankrupt was an American disease which had struck Wall Street in New York, and that Americans committed suicide when this happened to them; mentally, I saw dozens of them hurling themselves off the tops of skyscrapers, and I wondered where Father would find a sky-scraper.

Father was a public school man who had been sent to boarding school by his widowed mother when he was only six years old; he had left it at nineteen to join the army in 1914. My mother, an orphan, had been brought up by nuns. Neither had had any training in the management of a family or a domestic budget, and they had enjoyed a high standard of living by being permanently in debt. Further, they had had seven children. Bankruptcy was inevitable, once the Depression set in and dividends dried up.

The remainder of our servants left in a body, while Mother was still in hospital, and I was left to manage the home as best I could, until we moved to Liverpool. One of our unpaid domestics took the opportunity, while my parents were absent, to take away my mothers entire wardrobe, leaving her only the outfit she had been wearing when she was whisked into hospital.