Minerva's Stepchild

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.