I found two dozen boxes of material, including her manuscripts,” he said. And yet they were planning a life together.”īefore Forrester died in 2011 she talked to her son about using her correspondence to put together a biography: “My mother had cleared out her personal papers a couple of times when she moved, but kept the most important things. What makes the letters they exchanged so compelling is that each of them is trying to carry on their own life at the same time: my father was establishing his career back in India, while she was working in Liverpool. “So there was a significant personal drama going on. “Not only was my father married, he was also due to go back to India,” Bhatia told the Observer.

One day, as Forrester staffed the inquiry desk of the British Council office, a shy young man, Avadh Bhatia, described by her later as “the most exquisite-looking Indian”, struck up a conversation and “very precisely asked me if I would like to go to the cinema with him”. When peace came, she volunteered to arrange social events for students from abroad. Later she became engaged to Edward Parry, who was killed in action in France. Her first love, Harry O’Dwyer, had died in 1940 when his ship went down. Forrester, whose real name was June Huband, had already lost two fiances during the second world war tragedies that are described in three popular sequels to Twopence to Cross the Mersey, Liverpool Miss (1979), By the Waters of Liverpool (1981) and Lime Street at Two (1986) – sequels that jointly sold 4.5 million copies.īy the time Forrester met Bhatia’s father she had resigned herself to a single life. “My father had travelled to England from India to study for a PhD in physics at Liverpool University and he was already married, unhappily, when he met my mother,” said Bhatia, who lives in Edmonton, Canada. His book, Passage Across the Mersey, is out this week. Robert Bhatia, Forrester’s only child, has used his late mother’s archive of letters to piece together the secret turmoil that led her to leave Liverpool to find a new life abroad.

Twopence across the mersey