Helen Forrester BY THE WATERS OF LIVERPOOL First Edition
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Helen Forrester BY THE WATERS OF LIVERPOOL First Edition
First edition, first print hardback of BY THE WATERS OF LIVERPOOL by Helen Forrester, and published by The Bodley Head Ltd., London in 1981.The book is in very good condition (clean blue boards and gold lettering on spine) with only slight wear to the dust jacket, which is not price clipped (light creasing to edges, a small closed tear to top corner, minor fading to the spine). Internally, the pages are clean and tight and there are no tears and no inscriptions. There is slight tanning to the pages.
The third part of Helen Forresters autobiography takes Helen from her poverty-stricken upbringing into adulthood and her account of the war years in Blitz-torn Liverpool.
"Helen's childhood had been a painful struggle against poverty and parental non-interest. She missed most of her schooling by having to stay at home to look after her six younger brothers and sisters, while her father searched for work and her mother, trained as a demonstrator, flitted from one job to another. In her late 'teens Helen won her battle with her parents for the right to go out to work herself, but it was an almost impossible task to survive when she had no money to pay her tram fare and was too weak from years of malnutrition to manage the long walk to the office where she found employment.
Then came the war and with it unexpected relief from some of the pressures. The younger children were evacuated, there was more money coming into the house and Helen was beginning to discover that there was more life than the everlasting drudgery of bare survival. Then a most important thing happened: Helen fell in love.
Helen Forrester was the pen name of June Bhatia (n?e Huband) (6 June 1919 24 November 2011) was born in Cheshire (now in Merseyside) to an affluent middle class family. When her father was made bankrupt during the Great Depression, the family was thrown into poverty and moved from a comfortable home in southern England to a slum area of Liverpool, where her father hoped to find work. In the first two volumes of best-selling autobiography Twopence to Cross the Mersey and the follow-up book - also a bestseller 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. But it is a story with a happy ending. In the third volume of her autobiography, By the Waters of Liverpool. Her first book was published in 1959, by which time she had settled in Ottawa with her husband. She continued to write until 2004, producing 16 books in all.
Twopence to Cross the Mersey, was inspired by a critic of her fiction who implied she knew nothing of poverty. It was later turned into a successful musical. She was awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Liverpool in 1988 and by the University of Alberta in 1993.
This is the third part of Helen Forrester's funny, painful and touching account of her childhood and growing up in Liverpool through the Depression. The earlier volumes, Twopence to Cross the Mersey(1974) and Liverpool Miss (originally published as Minerva's Stepchild (1979), have brought her a stream of correspondence from all over the world, nearly all of the letters asking, 'And what happened next?' By the Waters of Liverpool is the moving answer to that question."
Remarkable that from so bleak and unloving a background came a writer of such affectionate understanding and unsettling honesty - Sunday Telegraph
279 pages.
ISBN: 0 370 30909 X
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Helen Forrester BY THE WATERS OF LIVERPOOL First Edition