I got to know her slightly through sales, orders, launches and conversations about books and other subjects and I and the other employees there always appreciated her good humour and intelligent conversation. As an author, reader and book person she frequented her neighborhood bookstore, Volume II Books, where I worked for a few years. Full of new revelations and fascinating detail never before revealed, Passage Across the Mersey is a story of an extraordinary woman, and of the journey that took her thousands of miles from the place she called home…īritish/Canadian author Helen Forrester, author of Twopence To Cross The Mersey, Liverpool Miss, By The Waters Of Liverpool, and Limestreet at Two and several other novels was a pioneer of the type of gritty and unsentimental (though not without humour) memoir that became more fashionable in the 1980's and 1990's and still flourishes today. Now for the first time, her son Robert recounts the unexpected life that Helen went on to live of the remarkable love story with a young man from a background a million miles away from everything a Lancashire Lass like Helen would have known and of the astonishing lengths she went to in order to achieve happiness. It was a story filled with tragedy and small triumphs but many readers wondered what happened to Helen when she grew up what became of the fragile young girl who had so much responsibility heaped on her shoulders? Later in life, Helen wrote a ground-breaking series of memoirs, starting with Twopence to Cross the Mersey, which told the harrowing account of her family’s struggles in Depression-era Liverpool.

When Helen Forrester’s father went bankrupt in the 1930’s, she and her six siblings fell from a comfortable middle-class existence into wretched poverty.

The remarkable story of Helen Forrester, author of Twopence to Cross the Mersey, and how she turned tragedy to triumph.

Twopence across the mersey