Liverpool Miss by Helen Forrester Page B

rag. I combed my hair with my fingers and smoothed it with the dirty towel.
    My hands still looked awful. Then I remembered an old beauty trick of Grandma’s. Feeling as if I was robbing Edward of a breakfast, I took a small pinch of oatmeal, damped the hands again and rubbed the oatmeal in hard. The hands emerged looking clean and much whiter than usual.
    I put on the new pair of black woollen stockings which Cristina had lent me and found they would stay up fairly well if I twisted a piece of coal very tightly into the top of each.
    How did one behave at an interview? I worried. What did one say? During the past three and a half years I had been practically cut off from all social contact. At an age when most middle-class girls would be being taught social graces by their school mistresses and their mothers, I had been walking the streets of Liverpool in rags, pushing a baby in a pram. Sometimes I was afraid I would forget howto speak properly. Only at night school did I ever get a chance to express myself. The lack of mental stimulation, the ever present lack of food, and the lack of fun and young friends had played havoc with an already shy personality – and I knew it.
    As I scuttled round the shops in Granby Street with Edward in tow, and bought bread and potatoes and margarine, I silently said the General Confession and then the Lord’s Prayer, turning towards the only help I knew. God received a rather wild collection of prayers that morning.
    This mental exercise reminded me of Father’s question as to whether I had approached the Anglican Fathers at the church about a job. The pressure Miss Ferguson had put on my parents was more than might normally have been expected. Perhaps Miss Ferguson had, after her tour of our house, consulted the priests. None of them had come to see us; but they had hooked Brian and Tony into the choir, so they knew we were High Anglicans. The idea that they might be trying to help me filled my romantic teenage heart with a kind of joy and lifted me for a while out of my wretchedness.
    I fed the children when they came in for dinner and then dragged Fiona into the kitchen and confided to her the story of the job. Would shelook after Edward for me, while I went for the interview?
    ‘What if Mummy finds out?’ she quavered, her eyes wide with misgiving.
    ‘Oh, Fi, just take Avril to school and then slip back here. I’ll be back ages before the boys or Mummy and Daddy come. They’ll never know.’
    ‘I’m scared, Helen. Teacher may be cross, too.’
    ‘Look, I’ll take all the blame. You can say I bullied you into it. They’ll believe that. They’ll blame me anyway.’
    ‘Helen!’
    She was very frightened and yet I had to have a baby-sitter for a couple of hours.
    ‘Please, Fi, darling. Please.’
    She shifted around unhappily and finally agreed.
    While she took Avril to school, I put on the dress and the little jacket and then, as I squeezed a large acne spot on my chin and anxiously examined two more at the side of my nose, I agonised that she might not return. I peered anxiously at myself in the broken mirror. Behind the outgrown glasses my eyes were red with strain or pink eye. A further black rim round them from lack of food and rest did not add to my looks. I sighed, and ran to the window of the sitting room to see if Fiona was coming.
    I had nearly given up hope, when she suddenly rounded the corner and dawdled down the street towards our house.
    The walk down the hill to town was more painful than I had expected. The borrowed shoes pressed on the ragingly painful chilblains on my heels and toes. The wind blew the carefully arranged hair all over the place, and emphasised the need of a hat and a comb. Some of the euphoria which had sustained me evaporated, and was replaced by plain fear of the unknown.
    To add to that, I had defied Father and Mother and I feared that I might be punished by God for it. He had said, Honour thy Father and thy Mother, and I presumed He