Robert Bhatia - Passage Across the Mersey

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I would like to thank Gill Paul for bringing her outstanding editing skills to bear on the sometimes challenging raw material I had and for her patience, diligence and empathy.

Robert Bhatia is Helen Forresters only child. As a boy, he lived on Merseyside for a time and attended school where he learned to dance the Twist to the music of the Beatles. Thereafter, he developed a keen interest in and appreciation for English culture and history. Trained as an economist, he became a senior civil servant in Alberta, Canada. He and his wife live in Edmonton, as do their two adult children.

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This major best-selling memoir of a poverty-stricken childhood in Liverpool is one of the most harrowing but uplifting books you will ever read. When Helen Forresters father went bankrupt in 1930 she and her six siblings were forced into utmost poverty and slum surroundings in Depression-ridden Liverpool. Writing about her experiences later in life, Helen Forrester shed light on an almost forgotten part of life in Britain. Written with good humour and a lack of self-pity, Forresters memoir of these grim days is as heart-warming as it is shocking.

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The second volume of Helen Forresters powerful, painful and ultimately uplifting four-volume autobiography of her poverty-stricken childhood in Liverpool during the Depression. Written with an unflinching eye, Helens account of her continuing struggles against severe malnutrition and, above all, the selfish demands of her parents, is deeply shocking. But Helens fortitude and her ability to find humour in the most harrowing of situations make this a story of amazing courage and perseverance.

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Helen Forrester continues the moving story of her early poverty-stricken life with an account of her teenage years and the devastating effect of the Second World War on her hometown of Liverpool. Helen will experience at first hand the horror of the Blitz and the terrible toll that the war exacted on ordinary people. As ever, Helen faces the future with courage and determination.

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The fourth and final part of Helen Forresters bestselling autobiography continues the moving story of her early poverty-stricken life with an account of the war years in Blitz-torn Liverpool. The Second World War is affecting every part of the country and Hitlers Luftwaffe nightly seek to wreak havoc on her home city of Liverpool. Then, tragedy is brought shockingly close to home and Helen is left reeling when she receives some terrible news. A move brings more trouble for Helen, but she is determined that she will face it, as ever, with courage and determination.

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In my more comfortable early life, my six siblings and I did not communicate much with our parents. Theirs was a truly awful First World War marriage.

My mother was born on 6 June 1919 in Hoylake, then part of Cheshire, where her paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Huband, lived. It was to this home she so passionately wanted to return twelve years later when she yearned for twopence to cross the Mersey, a wish that would provide the title for her first volume of memoirs in 1974.

Mums father, Paul Huband, came from a cultured family with a pedigree traceable back to before the Battle of Hastings in 1066. My great-grandfather had been a successful wine merchant and property owner as well as a director of a railway company that later became Great Western Railway. Sadly, he passed away in 1900, when Paul was just six years old. Helen spoke of the abrupt turn this caused to the familys fortunes in a speech she gave in later life.

My grandfather built a very pleasant house out in the country in Tynwald Hill, off Green Lane [about five kilometres east of the centre of Liverpool]. I saw it at the beginning of the [Second World] war, when it had become home to a mass of poverty-stricken Chinese. When, at the age of 46, my grandfather died, my grandmother was persuaded by his executor thoroughly dishonest executor that she was now quite poor. She was a typical Victorian woman, who had never even bought a train ticket for herself, never mind done any business. She therefore sold her home and most of its contents perhaps I should say more correctly, allowed it to be sold by the executor. She then retired to a tiny, but very pretty little house in Hoylake together with a widowed daughter [Stella] and her granddaughter, Marjorie, and another single daughter [Phyllis]. Despite the threat of poverty, they lived very well and the money left by Grandpa must have been quite considerable, since one of my cousins, who finally inherited it, still lives very comfortably on it and when one remembers the amount of inflation which must have occurred since Grandpa died in 1900 this is no mean feat.

My grandmother submerged herself in black satin, with black-veiled bonnets and hats, which she wore for the next fifty years, Queen Victoria having made it the fashion. As a Victorian lady who had always been looked after, she was assured by her grown-up daughters and her lawyer that she could not possibly cope with bringing up her little son. So he was sent to a preparatory boarding school, where he also spent some of the holidays because of distance.

My grandfather might well have been sent to boarding school anyway, as so many other boys of his era and class were. I am not sure whether his older brothers, Percy and Frank, went to boarding school, too, but it seems likely. My mother believed this enforced exile from the age of just six years contributed to my grandfathers later difficulty in coping with his own children. She wrote to her brother, Tony, in 2000:

It always amazed me how much Father survived in his life. He had a rotten childhood. You probably know that his father died when he was six, and he was sent to a Preparatory Boarding School in Wales, until he was old enough to be sent to Denstone I dont know whether you have seen Denstone, but I did when I was about eight years old a horrible gloomy freezing cold place, stone floored, with huge dormitories for the boys. No electric light.