By the Waters of Liverpool. Helen Forrester

still crying. I was dreadfully hungry and quite apprehensive about what might have happened, but I went first to her and put my arm round her shoulders. She laid her head against my threadbare skirt. We never talked together – we had little in common except our sisterhood; yet we were often a comfort to each other.

      ‘Daddy, what has happened?’

      ‘She has to leave her job,’ said Father, beating an impatient tattoo with his fingers on the arm of his chair. Mother nodded agreement. Alan put down his book and watched the scene with a look of morbid fascination, glancing expectantly from one to the other of us.

      ‘Why?’ I inquired, puzzled.

      ‘She must,’ Mother agreed, and then added crossly. ‘It is not fit for a young girl – it is not fit for anyone to be there.’

      Alan interjected with an unexpected chuckle, ‘You could put it down to professional interest – after all, it’s all meat.’

      Mother was shocked. ‘Alan! How could you say such a revolting thing?’

      Alan grinned wickedly and folded his arms, as if enjoying the family’s evident distress.

      Father groped for words and finally said carefully, ‘The butcher’s shop in which Fiona is working is opposite an undertaker’s. Sometimes the undertakers invite the butchers over to look at the corpses. I cannot believe that it is the undertaker himself who does this – I think it is some of his employees.’

      Fiona lifted her face. ‘It is, Daddy. They do it when he is out – and the butchers always wait until our boss has gone to market.’

      ‘How awful!’ I exclaimed. ‘Imagine being stared at in your coffin by a pack of strangers. How morbid!’ I looked down at Fiona’s tousled head, and said to her, ‘Perhaps you should look for another job.’

      Fiona turned her face up towards me. She was so white that I thought she might faint. She said, ‘They had a young girl there this morning – and she wasn’t in her coffin – or even wrapped up. She was naked – and they were whispering and laughing afterwards about how they played with her. It sounded awful. So I was sick suddenly over the cash desk – and they laughed. After I had cleared up the mess, they sent me home early.’

      Nausea began to overwhelm me. Vague tales I had heard, whispered amongst the beshawled women beside whom I had sat on front steps or in the park while watching the children play, began to surface in my mind and come together. I had always discounted their mutterings as rubbish. Now I realised that it was not rubbish. They had been disapproving about something which had really happened. I took big breaths to control my surging stomach. How could men be so vile?

      ‘Heavens, I’m glad you told Daddy,’ I muttered.

      ‘I had to,’ responded Fiona flatly. ‘I was thinking about it again just before you came in – and I was sick over the floor.’

      ‘Humph,’ Mother almost grunted, ‘I thought it was something else, but I was wrong, thank goodness.’

      For a moment, I looked at her blankly and then remembered her bouts of morning sickness before every birth, and I said indignantly, ‘Fi would never get herself into trouble. She’s not that kind.’ But a sudden, different fear for Fiona had been planted in my mind. Did she know anything about sex? I was still vague myself about the precise details of this mystery, but since I never expected to have a boyfriend it did not matter in my case. It did matter for Fiona. I knew that she was already meeting a local youth secretly and going to the cinema with him.

      Father had been brooding during this exchange. Now he fumed, ‘They should be reported.’

      ‘Who to?’ asked Mother.

      ‘The police, of course.’

      ‘Could the police do anything?’

      ‘Oh, yes. It is a serious matter.’

      ‘Oh, Daddy,’ wailed Fiona, ‘if you do tell the police there’ll be such a rumpus in the shop. The men will say I’m a lying troublemaker, and the boss won’t want to give me a reference.’ She rubbed her wet eyes with the backs of her hands. ‘The story will go all round the local shops, and then what will I do? With no reference, I won’t stand a chance.’

      She clung to me and I suddenly leaned limply against her. I was beginning to feel faint with hunger.

       Four

      Fiona’s situation was grave. When fifty youngsters were competing for even the most menial of jobs, lack of a good reference could be crippling.

      ‘You can stay at home and keep house,’ Mother said briskly. ‘You spend all you earn – I never see much of it.’

      ‘Oh, Mother, Fi only gets fifteen shillings a week, and she pays all her expenses – even buys some of her clothes,’ I intervened vehemently.

      Fiona’s hands clutched convulsively against my hips. She, too, feared becoming the family’s forgotten, unpaid maid-of-all-work.

      Mother fumbled in her handbag for a cigarette and lit it from the fire with the aid of a newspaper spill. ‘She would be more use at home,’ she reiterated.

      Father got up from his chair and moved restlessly up and down the narrow space between table and hearth which formed a passage between the front hall and back kitchen. He was very thin, and his grey tweed office suit with its shiny seat and elbows hung loosely on him. He looked haggard, as if this new problem was too much for him, and his face and prematurely bald skull shone pale yellow in the poor light. He took off his bent, gold-rimmed spectacles and rubbed eyes that were red-lidded and bloodshot.

      ‘If I want to leave,’ sobbed Fiona, ‘I have to give a week’s notice on pay day – that’s Friday, and it’s Friday night now. So it means I have to work almost another two weeks. And nobody is going to give a reference to a girl who leaves without notice – and how can I tell the boss the real reason I want to leave? It’s too horrid!’ She continued to dampen my skirt, as I held her.

      Mother looked scornfully at her two daughters, her lips curled in disdain. ‘Really, Fiona! All this fuss, when you could make yourself useful at home for once.’ She turned to Father, and almost shouted, ‘For goodness’ sake, stop prowling.’

      Father flung himself back into his chair, while Fiona cried, ‘No.’

      ‘She cannot mix with such dreadful people any more,’ Father sounded off determinedly. ‘What is the world coming to?’

      ‘They leave me alone most of the time,’ Fiona turned her puffy face towards Father. ‘I sit in the cash desk and lock myself in. It has glass all round it. They tease me but they can’t get in.’ She moved uneasily against me. ‘Only when I go to the loo sometimes...’ Her voice trailed off.

      Father started up. ‘What?’ he exclaimed. ‘What happens then?’

      ‘They chase after me and pinch my bottom,’ she announced baldly.

      ‘Oh, Lord!’ Father was really shaken, as if he himself had never in his life pinched the bottoms of our maids.

      Alan burst out laughing. ‘That’s better than being whacked on your rear with a ruler, like I am.’

      ‘Alan!’ exclaimed Mother. ‘What a lot of louts they must be.’

      Father looked at his pretty daughter, speechless for a moment, and then said firmly, ‘You will stay at home tomorrow, Fiona. Helen can phone from her office to say that you are not well. Then we will say later that you are not fit to go back. You can look for other work.’

      ‘I’m not staying at home.’ Fiona could be as woodenly obstinate as Avril and me, but she never seemed to draw her parents’ wrath as fully as we did. ‘I just have to get through the next two weeks as best I can.