Tender Mersey

The name June Bhatia might be more recognizable to readers as Helen Forrester, the nom de plume of the author of a number of charming stories that often used her homes in England, India and even Edmonton as the settings.

She passed away in 2011 but now her son, Robert Bhatia, has arrived on the scene with his own book of her life. He delved into his mother’s collection of unpublished letters and other writings as the starting point to offer his own insights for Passage Across the Mersey, which he is bringing to the St. Albert audience on Tuesday.

In a way, he’s telling the story that she never told.

“She never wrote the story of her early childhood, which I think was pretty interesting, against the backdrop of the Roaring Twenties. So, I took up the challenge of writing her full life story.”

She had a life that certainly warranted writing about. Born in 1919, June was the eldest of seven children. Her father went bankrupt in the early 1930s, and they were evicted from their lovely family home, practically wearing only the clothes on their backs.

“It took the family from the south of England to Liverpool forcing the family from the south of England to Liverpool where things were particularly bad. The family was plunged into incredible poverty. That’s the story of Twopence to Cross the Mersey.”

The family of nine was forced to live together in a single room, and relied on very modest handouts from the parish and the kindness of strangers to sustain themselves.

From those trials, however, she never lost her astounding memory of things. She would rely on the details of her young life to bring her biographies and novels into astounding colour with a warm humanity that earned her a very fond and lengthy readership.

Bhatia said that she fell into the practice of the occasional autobiography because of complaints from the readers of her fictions.

“My mother started out writing novels. Because of a little incident where someone questioned her credibility to write about hardship, she decided that she would write a memoir of some of the most difficult times in her life.”

And write she did. She published 16 books in all, and many were bestsellers, especially in Britain. They covered her life in England, Scotland, India and later, Edmonton, where she moved with her husband, the late theoretical physicist Avadh Bhatia.

Forrester left approximately two-dozen boxes of her correspondence. That material would form the basis for Passage.

“I went through a lengthy winnowing process to find the most interesting pieces and the pieces that I needed to tell a coherent story of her full life. That’s what I did. It ties into the memoirs in that people already had an interest in her life through the memoirs but I was able to answer the question that quite a lot of readers asked: ‘Okay, what happened next?’”