By the Waters of Liverpool Read Online Free PDF Page A

the…?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Oh, they run over every time the undertaker has a nice looking one.’
    ‘And have they been pinching you all that time, too?’
    ‘No, Daddy, only just recently.’
    ‘You must have encouraged them, Fiona.’ This from Mother.
    ‘Oh, no, Mummy. I suppose they notice me when they’ve nothing much to do. Anyway, how can a derrière encourage anybody?’ she asked innocently.
    This made Father smile, even in the middle of his disquietude. Fiona’s flawless figure, now burgeoning, would in years to come cause many a heart to throb and provide a good deal of temptation.
    Father’s voice was very gentle, as he looked at his younger daughter. ‘I am sure you don’t encourage them, my dear.’ He smiled knowingly at Mother, who did not smile back.
    Alan began to whistle softly to himself and moved restlessly against the table.
    ‘If I had a sheet of the butcher’s notepaper,’ said Mother suddenly, her face brightening, ‘paper with his heading on it, I could write an excellent reference for Fiona.’
    ‘Mother!’ I exclaimed, scandalised. ‘That would be forgery.’
    ‘A new employer might phone the butcher to check it,’ suggested Alan.
    ‘I don’t think so,’ replied Mother, ignoring my outburst. ‘As a demonstrator going from shop to shop, I carry written references – I’ve heaps of them, because all my jobs are short-term ones. I don’t think anybody has ever telephoned to check them.’
    Fiona looked up quickly, and then mopped her eyes agitatedly with my hanky which I had handed to her – it was the only one I owned. ‘Mummy! Could you do it? Really?’
    Mother looked as pleased as a Cheshire cat. ‘I don’t see why not.’
    ‘If I go to work tomorrow, I can get the papereasily. I have some in the cash desk.’ She straightened up, sniffed and rubbed her nose hard with the hanky. ‘I could start looking for a new job on Monday.’
    It took Mother and Fiona some time to convince Father that it was the most sensible way out. But he was genuinely worried about his favourite daughter, and he finally gave in.
    Alan thought it was a huge joke, and asked Mother if she could do anything about forging pound notes. I thought she would strike him, but instead she laughed.
    Though it seemed to me to be wrong, that it might be better if Father had a quiet talk with the butcher himself, I did not want to start a family row, so I held my tongue.
    On Saturday, Fiona went to work as usual and returned triumphantly with the required sheet of notepaper. Mother concocted an excellent letter for her, written in a round, illiterate hand quite unlike her usual beautiful penmanship. She ended it with a phrase popular amongst tradesmen, ‘And oblige your obedient servant’, followed by a flourishing signature.
    Father often bought a Liverpool Echo on his way home from work. The day’s copy was lying on his chair, so Fiona and I spread it out on the tableand conned the Situations Vacant columns very carefully, though it was nearly midnight.
    We found two advertisements for office girls, and Fiona begged Mother’s penny pad of notepaper from her, took the cork out of the ink bottle and sat down at the table, pen poised. She looked up at me expectantly. To my dictation, she wrote in a round schoolgirl’s scrawl letters of application to both companies.
    Mother looked disparagingly at her handwriting. ‘Really, Fiona. I should have thought you could write better than that.’
    But Fiona could not, and never did. The teaching of handwriting in the elementary schools was so poor that few people seemed to leave with anything better than an ugly, irregular hand. Good, flowing handwriting, like the right accent, marked one’s place in the social scale, and Fiona’s laboured, round letters indicated a girl with a poor background, in a world which was very snobbish. Only Alan, who had been taught in preparatory school, wrote the same exquisite Italian hand which my mother did.
    Fiona had a