Liverpool Miss
The second volume of Helen Forrester’s powerful, painful and ultimately uplifting four-volume autobiography of her poverty-stricken childhood in Liverpool during the 1930s.The Forrester family are slowly winning their fight for survival. But life remains extremely tough for fourteen-year-old Helen. Along with caring for her younger siblings and suffering terrible hardships she is also battling with her parents to persuade them to allow her to earn her own living. Helen is desperate to lead her own life after the years of neglect and inadequate schooling.Written with an unflinching eye, Helen’s account of her continuing struggles against severe malnutrition and dirt (she has her first bath in four years) and, above all, the selfish demands of her parents, is deeply shocking. But Helen’s fortitude and her ability to find humour in the most harrowing of situations make this make this a story of amazing courage and perseverance.
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HELEN FORRESTER
Liverpool Miss
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
The News Building
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2012
This edition published by Harper 2016
Copyright © the estate of Jamunadevi Bhatia 1985
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Cover photograph © Picture Post/Hulton Getty
HarperCollins has made every effort to find copyright holders and obtain permission for the use of copyright material in this book. If any material has been used without the owner’s permission please contact HarperCollins and we will give appropriate in future reprints or editions of this book.
Helen Forrester asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008180959
Ebook Edition © Dec 2016 ISBN: 9780007369317
Version 2016-11-08
To my family and friends who helped me to remember
Table of Contents
It had begun to rain and I was shivering, as I manoeuvered the squeaking Chariot over the road to the corner of Castle Street. Avril was red in the face with rage. She stormed at me because I would not take her out of the pram and let her walk amid the busy lunchtime crowd. At the other end of the pram, beneath the leaking hood, Baby Edward grizzled miserably for the same reason.
Since the October day was too cold for us to walk in the park, I had brought them into the city, thinking that it would be more sheltered and that we could amuse ourselves looking in the shop windows. And now we had wandered into the business district.
Pretty secretaries, rushing back from lunch, and smart businessmen, carrying umbrellas and briefcases, glanced impatiently at the intruding pram with two grubby urchins in noisy protest. It belonged away in the slums, like the tatterdemalion who pushed it.
I did not care. I was resigned to people staring at my long, wind-chapped, bare legs, at my toes sticking through a pair of old plimsolls, at an outgrown gym slip worn without a blouse, a ragged cardigan covering part of my nakedness.
Through the increasing rain, I pushed the pram dreamily amongst them. In my mind I was not walking in black, depressing Liverpool; I was in the countryside and then in the fine, old southern town from which I had been unceremoniously plucked two years before. It was market day, and Father and I were looking at the horses brought in for sale. As we moved about, the ploughmen, the shepherds and the farmers would touch their forelocks to the distinguished-looking gentleman, strolling around with a little daughter in the uniform of a good private school.
‘Echo! Liverpool Echo. Read all about it!’ shouted a man in a cloth cap, thrusting a paper towards the hurrying throng. I blinked, and hurriedly swerved to avoid him.
Would we always have to stay in Liverpool, I wondered depressedly. Would we always be cold and hungry?
‘Oh, shut up, Avril,’ I scolded crossly, and stopped the pram while I tucked an old overcoat round Baby Edward’s knees and then pushed the edges of it up over her lap. ‘Look, love. See up there – on the top of the town hall. There’s Minerva. She’s looking at you.’
Avril turned her woebegone face upwards towards the dome I had pointed out.
‘See,’ I said. ‘She’s smiling at you. Hasn’t she got a lovely golden face? But I think she’s got smuts on her nose, just like you.’ I touched Avril’s damp, little nose with a playful finger, and she sniffed and stopped crying.
