Helen Forrester

English and Bengali translations from Oriya poems.

When psychotherapist Frieda Klein left the sleepy Suffolk coastal town she grew up in she never intended to return. Left behind were friends, family, life and loves but, alongside them, painful memories; a past she couldn't allow to destroy her. So when an old classmate appears in London asking Frieda to help her teenage daughter, long buried memories resurface. But when tragedy strikes, Frieda has no choice but to return home and confront her past. And monsters no one else believes are real. Through a fog of alibis, conflicting accounts, hidden agendas and questionable alibis, Frieda can trust no one in trying to piece together the shocking truth, past and present.

Helen Forrester had a childhood most of us would like to forget. Bought up for the first twelve years of her life in the wealthy middle class of southern England, she was suddenly ejected from her pampered hot-house existence into the bleak realities of Liverpool during the Depression years. In the first two volumes of her autobiography – 'Twopence to Cross the Mersey' and 'Liverpool Miss', Helen bravely told the terrible story of the degradations her family – once so rich, now so desperately poor – had to face, and with only themselves to blame. This was a story that was frightening to hear – Helen's uphill struggle to provide her younger brothers and sisters with food and clothes and to placate her fiery-tempered mother and spiritless father, and her longings for the education that was cruelly denied her and for the small luxuries of life that would give her the youth she was missing. (From HarperCollins

But it is a story with a happy ending. In the third volume of her autobiography, 'By the Waters of Liverpool', Helen Forrester, still poor, ill-fed and shy, but now at least washed and neatly dressed, manages to make a life for herself away from the drudgery and oppression of her home. As she succeeds in the dance-halls of Liverpool, and finds after so many years without affection or joy, a man who can love her, she emerges from her terrible childhood, not unchanged but apparently undamaged.

In the early years of this century, many Basques left their homeland in the Pyrenees, between France and Spain, to seek a better life in the New World. Most passed through the great port of Liverpool on their way. The family of little Manuel Echaniz stayed. The Liverpool Basque is the story of Manuel's childhood and coming of age in the teeming streets of the Mersey docklands. It is a story of poverty, comradeship, hardship and generosity. Brought up by women while the men are at sea, Manuel grows up with a fierce pride in his heritage and a powerful will to survive in an era of deprivation and unemployment. Against all odds, he gets himself an education of sorts and sets off on the long voyage of his life.

One moment Helen was the petted eldest child of wealthy, privileged parents, disciplined and coddled by servants, dressed in silk for "best" and prim private school uniforms for "everyday." the next, she was the unpaid, half-starved housekeeper for an unemployed clerk and his harridan wife--her father and mother. Here she tells the story of her desperate girlhood during that grim period known as the Depression. At twelve, she was plunged overnight into the most appaling poverty, plumped down in the noisome slums of South Liverpool, and forced by circumstance to be nursemaid to her youngest brother and sister, and cook-housekeeper for her sick and frantic parents. It was accepted that Helen, the oldest, would grow up to be the old-maid sister, uneducated and unskilled, forever in service to the family. How she rebelled and won her way, step by aching step, to a life of her own is the theme of this powerful autobiography. In the course of relating her own struggles and setbacks, she gives a piercingly frank picture of privation at its most grim, seen--as few writers have been able to see it--from within and in contrast to the earlier life she had led. The title of the book is derived from the fact that Minerva is the patron goddess of Liverpool, the city in which Helen found herself to be the archetypical stepchild. Many years later, from the perspective of 5,000 miles away, she felt compelled to write the story of those terrible years; which culminated in the resolution of the war within her family, and her personal achievement of a place in the sun.