but in 1930, my father had gone bankrupt, as a result of the Depression. In an effort to find employment, Father had brought us to Liverpool, his birthplace. Like most of the people living in the south of England, he had no notion of the horrifying effect of the Depression in the north. The unemployment rate was 33 per cent and there was almost no hope of work. We had sunk into an abyss of poverty, which I have described in earlier books.fn1 By 1940, however, we had begun to climb out of the pit into which we had fallen, though we were still very poor.
My parents were still filled with the Public School snobbery of their youth, so I had told them nothing of my engagement to Harry O’Dwyer. They would have immediately condemned such a union as beneath me. Harry was from a respectable Irish working-class family and a Roman Catholic, originally intended by his family to be a priest. Since I was a Protestant, we had agreed to be married quietly in a Registry Office soon after I was twenty-one, when I would not need my parents’ consent. Harry had bought a little house, which was not quite complete when he was killed. I was twenty-one years and two months old when his mother told me of his death, under the very odd circumstances that she did not know she was talking to her son’s fiancée.
In 1940, I was a neophyte social worker in Bootle, a small town sharing a common boundary with Liverpool. It was a Roman Catholic area tightly packed with overcrowded terrace houses, factories and timber yards, hedged in by the docks along the river. Though the poverty was very great, Harry was proud to say that he was a Bootle man; men had sailed from Bootle since the Anglians settled there in AD 613, and perhaps even before that.
One morning in August, our waiting room at the office was packed with the widows of men lost at sea, who wished to seek our advice regarding claiming pensions. Among them sat Harry’s mother, long since estranged from him because he had refused to enter the Church. She was now bent on benefiting from his death by claiming a pension. I thought I would faint when she explained her business, and I quickly referred her to my colleague, Miss Evans. Then, deserting the waiting crowd, I fled to the unused cellars of the old house in which the office lay, and there in the clammy grime of a disused coal cellar, I stood shivering helplessly, so filled with shock that I hardly knew where I was. When, after a few minutes, my mind cleared a little, I was nauseated at a woman who could order her son out of their home because of a religious difference, and yet could coolly try to get a pension at his death.
I heard Miss Evans calling me and automatically I ran back up the stone steps. She met me on the upper staircase and scolded me for leaving clients waiting. Like a zombie, I moved to obey her orders. I did not cry.
I did not want to know this cold, grasping woman, Harry’s mother, nor did I say anything to my own parents; there was no point in facing their probable derision at such a humble marriage. I could almost hear their cultured voices ripping apart a man I had loved dearly, and I could not bear that they should do it.
Somehow, I kept my mouth shut, but the unexpressed grief was like a corrosive at work inside me. It caused such damage that I never truly recovered from it. In a body made frail by much illness and, at times, near starvation, it worked its will. In a character already very introspective from childhood, filled with fear of grown-ups, its effect was devastating.
As a little child, I learned early that my parents were simply not interested in me, and that I had to face all the fears of childhood alone. As a young adult, I continued that early attitude of solitary suffering, and it was reinforced by the loss of the one person I trusted implicitly.
Though I did not consider it at the time, I had lots of fellow sufferers and, as a social worker employed by a charity working in the dock areas, I had to help to look after them. Our waiting room was daily filled by rows of weeping mothers and wives; every ship that went down seemed to have a Bootle man aboard. My mind is filled with memories of the overwhelmed resources of our little office, when the Athenia, the Courageous, the battleship Royal Oak, and hundreds of others, big and small, were lost in 1940 and 1941.
Sometimes the position was reversed, and a seaman’s family was lost in an air raid.
My senior, Miss Evans, and I often faced a stony-eyed or openly weeping merchant seaman or a serviceman, sent home on compassionate leave because his home had been bombed and his family killed. Commanding officers did not always tell them why they were to go home. A few would go straight to their house, see the wreckage and realise what had happened. But quite a number reported directly to our office, as instructed by their commanding officer, and we would have to break the news to them. Because extended families frequently lived in adjoining streets, a man could find himself left with only a badly injured infant in hospital, and neither sister, aunt nor mother left alive to help him to care for the baby.
These heart-rending cases intensified my own sorrow to such a degree that I could not bear it any longer, and I decided I must try to obtain other work. Not only was I grief-stricken, I was also hungry. The salary that the charity was able to pay me was so small that I could not even afford lunch; I was poorer than most of the clients who thronged our waiting room.
Even in 1940, there was much unemployment in Liverpool, and the competition for any job was still very keen. At first, when the war began, the number of unemployed was increased by firms going out of business as a result of the war. For example, my mother, so acid-tongued at home, used her superior-sounding Oxford accent to good effect as the representative of a greeting card firm. The company was suddenly faced with an acute paper shortage, and, in order to remain in business, they had to turn to printing products essential to the war effort; they did not need a sales force. Mother, by this time very experienced and quite nicely dressed, soon found a new job as an accountant in a bakery. Girls like me, however, were in direct competition with a large population bulge made up of babies born after the servicemen came home from World War I. We were now in our early twenties.
Though by this time I was a skilled shorthand typist, as well as having had experience in social work, I was turned down again and again when I applied for secretarial posts.
The supercilious head clerks and typing pool supervisors looked me over as if I were a horse up for sale, often asked the most impertinent questions and always demanded references as to my moral character. They also asked about my education, and I had to own up that I had had only four years in school.
‘Why?’ they would snap suspiciously. ‘Were you ill?’ and I would have to reply that my parents had kept me at home from the age of eleven, in order that I might keep house for my parents and my six younger brothers and sisters; it was essential to impress on them that I was extremely healthy, because no employer would consider a person who might miss days of work through ill-health.
They looked disdainfully at a sheaf of evening school certificates showing high marks, and then would often change the subject by making disparaging remarks about my poor appearance.
I could not help the way I looked. My complexion was a pimpled white from insufficient food. My homecut hair hung lankly from lack of soap. In spite of working days and evenings, I could not earn enough to dress myself properly, even in second-hand clothes. When I could manage it, I bought little tins of Snowfire makeup from Woolworth’s, at threepence a tin, to improve my looks, but often enough the expense was too great for my limited funds. I was neatly shabby to the point of beautifully stitched patches on patches, darns on darns.
Seventeen shillings and sixpence a week, which was what I earned, was only two shillings and sixpence more than I would have received on unemployment pay. Before I received my wages, deductions were made by my employer for National Health and Unemployment Insurance and for hospital care. The remainder was demanded
