By the Waters of Liverpool Read Online Free PDF Page B

advice on how to improve her appearance, Fiona would have fitted well into these higher-class shops, but she was untidy and grubby, despite the fact that Mother bought her new clothes as often as possible. I said with caution, ‘You could try them.’ I picked up the letters that she had written the evening before. ‘I’ll put these into the Echo office for you.’
    ‘Come on, Helen,’ shouted Alan from the front doorstep.
    Mother told Fiona what to give the children for lunch and fled through the back door to catch her tram. Suddenly poor Fiona was left standing alone in the dirty, cluttered living room.
    Some time back, I had been very ill and for two years had not been strong enough to walk to work. Recently because I felt better and, anyway, could no longer afford the tram fares, I had begun to walk again. Alan had always been provided with tram fares, but he started to accompany me. This long march to and from the city was hard on shoes. We both had pieces of cardboard poked into our footwear to help to fill up the holes in the soles. I had painful ingrowing corns on the bottoms of my feet from the exposure of the tender flesh to hard pavement. At times it was like walking on knives.
    We always went along the side of the Anglican Cathedral. It was the last of the big Gothic edifices to be built in Europe, and clearly on the morning air one could hear the tiny taps of the stonemasons’ hammers, as if a band of elves was hard at work. In pouring rain the great building looked like a huge red sandstone peak, and I loved looking at it, though I had never yet plucked up enough courageto enter it – I feared I was too shabby. Alan did not share my cat-like interest in new territory, so when I suggested that we go into it together, he shrugged and asked, ‘Whatever for?’
    Along Rodney Street, with its charming Georgian frontages, its trim white front doors and gleaming brass plates, he made me stop several times. It was a street of medical specialists, whose cars parked in the street reflected their owners’ status. Alan would pause to touch reverently a polished door handle or a new shiny mascot sitting proudly on a bonnet, and would point out to me the merits of the various makes.
    Sometimes he would talk enthusiastically about the cricket matches which he played in the park. He was always the hero batting steadily against the opposing team’s wicked bowlers.
    Occasionally, he would ruefully rub his bruised bottom and mutter maledictions against the ruthless bookkeeper under whom he worked as an office boy. Older men were heavy-handed with their apprentices. They believed in knocking a young man into shape. They had never heard of bruised egos, and a bruised bottom was just one of the hazards of being young. Boys of fourteen found themselves a small minority amid older men and they learned their trade and how to behave,whether they liked it or not. Perhaps that is why in those days there was less vandalism and less theft. In big, soulless places like the docks, however, theft was a fine art.
    I rarely talked to Alan about my own affairs. I was, after all, a stand-in mother to him. I listened. It was unusual for me to talk very much to anyone except my friend, Sylvia Poole. I never seemed to be able to stop talking to her. Ever charitable, Sylvia always said she learned a great deal from me. She certainly received a great number of lectures on British and French history.
    Neither Alan nor I mentioned the necrophiles amongst whom poor Fiona had found herself working. To me it was another sickening facet of human behaviour to be shunned, condemned and put out of my mind. Alan had made a joke of it, and I wondered if he really thought it was funny. It must have been in his mind, because he said suddenly, as we hurried down fashionable Bold Street, ‘You know, Fi is very dumb. She was lucky she didn’t get raped in that place.’
    ‘She’s not so stupid, really,’ I replied. ‘She had enough sense to lock herself