What happened to Helen Forrester?
Son’s new book reveals rest of memoirist mother’s remarkable life story
Helen Forrester found some success in Canada, but true fame in Great Britain.
Her four autobiographies — Twopence to Cross the Mersey, Liverpool Miss, By the Waters of Liverpool and Lime Street at Two — sold millions of copies, inspired a musical, and according to her obituary in The Guardian, “spawned a genre of gritty, working-class memoir.”
Forrester, whose real name was June Bhatia, wrote frankly about her family’s harrowing descent into poverty during the Great Depression.
Her parents fought often, ran up debt, couldn’t provide enough food for the family and forced young Helen to leave school and care for her six siblings.
Forrester wrote 11 novels, and though some of them drew on events from her own life, her memoirs ended abruptly in 1945, leading fans to wonder how the rest of the author’s life unfolded.
“Of course, what happened next was really as interesting as what had gone before,” said her son, Robert Bhatia, whose new book, Passage Across the Mersey, fills in some of the gaps between her birth in 1919 and her death in 2011.
Bhatia took advantage of his mother’s personal archive, which included more than 20 boxes of letters and speeches. He also used the Internet to check facts and find colourful details about the places and people Forrester encountered during her life.
Though Forrester’s youth and young adulthood was full of trauma — she was beaten by her father and lost two fiancées in one war — she had a pattern of persevering and turning her turmoil into engaging stories. As a girl, she developed her storytelling skills with her grandmother, who fed her Dickens and Bronte and encouraged her to write letters.
In March 1949, in Liverpool, she met an Indian academic named Avadh Bhatia. They got engaged, but he was already married, and it took months for them to plan a life together and negotiate competing cultural norms.
The couple’s correspondence from this period comprises a significant portion of the book, for good reason. Their letters are thoughtful, but tense at times, and full of drama and emotion.
“I am getting so excited at the thought of really being with you that my legs feel quite weak at times,” she wrote to him in one letter.
In 1950, she finally went to India, got married, and committed to making a life there.
But they didn’t stay in India for long. The couple moved briefly to Edinburgh, but eventually settled in Canada, first in Ottawa, then Edmonton.
For the most part, Bhatia lets his mother speak for herself, via her letters and speeches from library and school visits.
But some of his own observations and memories are most telling: for example, he recalls his mother returning from a department store in tears because a clerk had made fun of her English accent.
Forrester was by all counts a celebrated author, with honorary degrees from the University of Liverpool and the University of Alberta, but as her son points out, she was an outsider in every place she lived.
“Later in life, she was very aware that she was an English writer whose readers were primarily English, but, since 1952, she had only lived in the United Kingdom for two years,” Bhatia wrote in the book. “No wonder she felt lonely.” The death of her husband in 1984 must have been devastating, but after he died, she threw herself into her professional life, which, as she wrote about in one of her letters, she viewed as separate from her life at home.
Though June Bhatia would have been grief-stricken, Helen Forrester had a book to promote and professional standards to live up to.
We learn from her son that Forrester was a thorough researcher who did substantial rewriting and wrote a minimum of three drafts per book.
Though rejection happened — 10 publishers said no to Twopence to Cross the Mersey before one said yes — only one of her manuscripts remained unpublished.
Of course, what happened next was really as interesting as what had gone before.