Open Writing

The tourist sights of this voyage were quite different to those I had experienced eight years previously. We were not allowed to go ashore at any port, and the shores of the Suez Canal were strewn with the rusting wreckage of military vehicles and ships destroyed during the desert campaign.

When we docked at Liverpool, I became very excited as I looked down and saw my ‘beloved’ June (Hoogstraten) standing on the quay. I must have temporarily deafened people standing next to me when I yelled out her name.

My fantasized image of June was completely destroyed however as soon as she spoke. She had acquired an affected accent since we last met. I was so bitterly disillusioned that I could not bring myself even to speak to her. My long-distance ‘romance’ died for me at that moment. I felt betrayed and extremely angry at being let down in this way. It was extraordinarily rude and hurtful of me, especially as she appeared overjoyed at seeing me. I just could not help the way I felt nor could I explain to June the reason for my rude juvenile behaviour. I felt even more remorseful about this some years later when I heard that she had been murdered after moving to Johannesburg in the nineteen fifties.

As soon as the customs and immigration people cleared us, we moved in with June’s family in their up-and-down tenement house in bomb-damaged Conway Street in Birkenhead.

We found the run-down semi-detached tenement house very depressing compared to the comfortable well-furnished large home we had left in Kharagpur.

The career of June’s father, Eric, had not advanced during the years that we had been in India.

June’s mother, Mavis, used the tiny front area, no more than eight feet square reclaimed from the front parlour, as an agency for people wanting to swap rental accommodation from one Liverpool suburb to another. The work was neither remunerative nor taxing.

Mavis spent most of her day sitting beside the coal stove in her kitchen behind her office smoking cigarette makeovers. It was very sad to see what poverty had done to this once beautiful woman.

Our parents occupied the two bedrooms on the second floor. On the third floor Gloria and June shared the front bedroom while Peter and I used the bedroom overlooking the tiny backyard.

Like his father, Peter had become a keen body-builder. The barbells they used were stored under Peter's parents' bed.

Peter, as part of his fitness regime, threw the window open each night as we went to bed. He woke me early each morning to start the next day with deep breathing exercises and callisthenics. Not being long out of the tropics, I found this activity very difficult and not particularly healthy, as the morning air was bitterly cold and it did not seem very fresh.

Another more personal problem for me at night was negotiating three flights of ill-lit narrow stairs, some of them missing, on my way down to the privy in the backyard, especially when carrying a potty full of you-know-what! At times Peter and I were forced to pee out of the open bedroom window. We did not need to be too concerned with being punished for this, as the odoriferous back lane masked the evidence.

I spent most of our next six months in Birkenhead hiding away in nearby movie theatres. If I was not at the local Gaumont or Odeon movie theatre I was listening to the BBC. The classical music for me at that time was merely a fill-in between drama and comedy programmes.

Sometimes, on rare clear days, for a few pence, I took a bus to an ancient stone church in the outskirts of town where I would walk through its ancient churchyard, climb over a style and find myself in rolling fields of heather.

I have always been amazed at how the scenery in the English countryside varies radically in areas of such close proximity. Here I was living in the middle of an inner city’s depressing bomb damaged street showing the appalling effects of war, and yet, in a few minutes I was in open fields of heather with only an occasional building in sight.

For my mother, those six months in Birkenhead were particularly trying, as she had the responsibility of coping with the food and clothes rationing, with living in someone else's home and trying not to dip too much into our capital. She busied herself sewing and knitting outfits for Gloria and herself. There was one task however, that my mother could not bring herself to do and that was to stand in a queue with the local women for our daily bread ration. That became my chore.

For the next few months, Dad opened a small photographic business with his 35mm Leica camera in Liverpool. He had ‘acquired’ a 100’ roll of black and white film from one of his US air force friends before they were transferred out of Kharagpur. Dad’s business was primarily taking passport photographs of people who went for short holidays to Ireland where there was no food rationing. He earned just enough to pay our day-to-day living expenses. Nevertheless, it got him out of the house and being in Liverpool, he was able to keep up his pressure on the shipping agents for our forthcoming passage to the North American continent.

One late September afternoon he came home looking downcast and told us that he was only able to arrange for a single berth on Cunard's SS. Queen Elizabeth's maiden commercial voyage due to sail in a few weeks from Southampton to New York. Should he take it, he wondered? Mum grimly agreed that he should not miss the opportunity. He should go ahead, find a job and prepare for the rest of us when we were able to follow him. Never have I known us all to be such low spirits.

Dad continued his unrelentingly pressure on the booking offices. With only a few days before the ship’s departure, he came into the house with his body bent and his face as long, if not longer than ever. However, it wasn’t long before he pulled himself up and broke out into his ever-ready mischievous grin and said, "If we get ourselves ready with no more than forty pounds of luggage each, we can all go.’’

We packed up everything we could, once again to keep within the weight restrictions. We decided to leave our two Indian carpets and Mum's sewing machine with our ‘friends’ Bill and Norah who promised to send them on to us as soon as we were settled. Bill had been our cabin steward on the Empress of Scotland. Since we had arrived in Birkenhead both family's had visited each other regularly and had become, we thought, good and loyal friends.

© Clement 2006