A Girl Called Blue

A Girl Called Blue

‘Marita’s books are important.

She is a natural storyteller.’

MARTIN WADDELL

‘In all of Conlon-McKenna’s books
there is an underlying sense
of resilience, of self-reliance and
of enterprise in even
the poorest of people.’

CELIA KEENAN

The Big Guide to Irish Children’s Books

‘Conlon-McKenna sees herself very
much as a storyteller, and the
outstanding feature of her work is
its strong narrative thrust.’

VICTOR WATSON

The Cambridge Guide to
Children’s Books in English

A sincere thank you to Michael O’Brien and all at The O’Brien Press, especially to my dedicated editor, Íde ní Laoghaire; to Emma Byrne for creating a wonderful cover; and to Caitríona Magner for her help and enthusiasm. Thanks also to Carol Sheridan of the Public Relations department of Iarnród Éireann for her assistance.

As always, my deepest thanks go to my ever-loyal and supportive family: my husband James and my children, Amanda, Laura, Fiona and James. And a special mention for my dog, Mitzi, who sat patiently by my feet through the writing of this book.

Kick! Kick! Kick! Blue kicked the toe of her boot against the leg of the heavy mahogany table. She was fed up waiting in the cold, dreary parlour for the Hickeys to come. It was sunny outside, warm even, not that the heavy brocade curtains and lace nets that framed the bay window allowed any of the spring sunshine to spill into the damp, musty room. Blue hated this parlour, with its smell of waxy furniture polish, hated having to sit still in the chair waiting to be picked up and taken out of Larch Hill children’s home for the day.

She had washed her hair and brushed it till it shone, scrubbed her hands and nails and put on her clean, pleated skirt, good white blouse and navy cardigan. She was ready. Now she just needed Mr and Mrs Hickey to come and collect her.

She really liked the Hickeys. Mrs Hickey was very pretty with long blond hair and peach-coloured lipstick. She laughed a lot and smelled of sweet perfume. She had let Blue try on her high-heeled shoes and sprayed her with the same sweet scent when Blue visited their redbrick home on the other side of the city. Mrs Hickey talked about her sisters and their families and how much she wanted a family of her own.
They had taken her to the Metropole cinema to see
Mary Poppins
a few weeks ago and Blue sat in the darkness between them, entranced, laughing when they laughed and clapping like they did at the end of the matinee show. It was like being sandwiched between two parents. Blue was ecstatic. Afterwards they took her to tea in a restaurant nearby and she cleared her plate of the sandwiches and scones they ordered, and politely sipped her cup of tea.

Mr Hickey had said it was great to see a girl with such a good appetite. When he was driving her back to the children’s home he had pushed a shiny half crown coin into Blue’s hand, telling her to treat herself to something nice.

She wondered what they had planned for today. Maybe they’d go to the cinema again, or, since it was sunny, perhaps a walk in the park, the one with the lake and quacking ducks that her friends Lil and Jess had told her about. She waited, peering out through the curtains every few minutes for any sign of them. They should be here by now. The time was ticking away, wasted. At this rate she’d have no time to go anywhere, do anything. It just wasn’t fair.

The parlour door opened and she automatically jumped up. But it wasn’t them. It was only Sister Monica, ‘Monkey’ as the others called her. But Blue liked her. Sometimes she thought Sister Monica was her only friend in the whole world. She was an old nun, retired from the African missions, and she was in charge of opening the door to visitors.

‘There you are, child.’

Blue nodded.

‘They’re not coming,’ said the nun gently. ‘I’m sorry, but Sister Regina got word a while ago that they won’t be coming to take you out today.’

Blue swallowed hard, pretending it didn’t matter, that it didn’t hurt.

‘Mr Hickey’s busy. They don’t have time for a visit.’

Not coming today … ‘Are they coming next Sunday?’

She could see the look of pity in the elderly nun’s eyes as Sister Monica searched for an excuse. She always told the truth. Now she said nothing.

‘The Sunday after?’

‘Mrs Hickey’s not that well, Bernadette. Perhaps it’s better for everyone that this is the end of it. There’s no point in going on with something that’s not going to work out, or that people have had second thoughts about. Perhaps it’s better this way.’

‘They’re not coming to see me ever again.’ She blinked furiously. She didn’t want the nun to see her cry.

‘I’m sorry, child, but I don’t think so,’ Sister Monica replied.

Blue gave the table an almighty kick, the sound filling the silent room and hanging between them. She waited for the nun to admonish her.

‘You’d better go upstairs and take off your coat,’ Sister Monica suggested. ‘Change out of your good clothes. Then you might go up and help in the nursery. I know they could do with an extra pair of hands.’

Blue got to her feet and with a cold, empty feeling in the pit of her stomach she ran out the door.

It was noisy and stuffy in the huge upstairs room where the babies slept and spent the endless hours of their day. Though the tall window was open, the smell of sour milk and nappies in need of changing assailed her. Big Ellen held a bawling child in her arms and was walking him up and down, trying to soothe him.

‘I think he must be teething or something,’ she said, bouncing him in her arms. ‘The poor little pet!’

Three or four toddlers were standing up in their cots, pulling at the bars, rocking themselves, ready to join in the fracas and demand attention too.

‘It’s mighty hot up here,’ complained Blue, fanning her face.

‘I thought you were going out today?’

‘I was supposed to,’ Blue explained, ‘but they didn’t show.’

She didn’t mind telling Big Ellen the truth, as she was one of the nicest people in the whole place. The older girl loved working with the babies and toddlers, forever washing and feeding and changing them, and had confided to Blue that when she was old enough she was going to try and become a nurse. Blue didn’t know how she put up with all the work.

‘I think Billy needs changing,’ suggested Big Ellen.

Blue gritted her teeth as she lifted the bald, whingeing six-month-old from his cot. He was like a little old man, she thought, and she wrinkled her nose as she carried the whimpering baby over to the changing table. He stared at her, big-eyed, kicking his chubby legs against her, wanting her to play with him. But she
wasn’t in the mood, not today.

‘Ah, Blue, will you give him a little tickle or a wee kiss or something!’ Big Ellen watched from a distance as Blue cleaned him, replacing the soaked and dirty towelling-cloth nappy with a fresh, dry one and dumping the soiled one in the bucket.

What a way to spend her Sunday. She should be sitting on a bench in the park or playing on the swings, or feeding the ducks, not stuck here minding these babies.

When she lifted him back up Billy grabbed at her hair, and, despite herself, Blue held him close and jigged him up and down, making him laugh and gurgle.

It wasn’t his fault nobody wanted him. She kissed his soft, baby skin. He smelt lovely now. She looked around the room. She, too, had spent the first two years of her life in this very spot, crying to be picked up and howling when she was put down. Chasing the thought away, she hugged Billy close.

‘You poor little sausage,’ she consoled, spinning him round the room in her arms. ‘You poor little sausage.’

By tea-time Blue was exhausted. She’d helped Big Ellen bathe and feed the fourteen babies in the room and her blouse was stained and wet. She’d hoped to get down and have her tea before all those who had been out got back, but she now realised she would be lucky to be in time to get anything to eat at all.

At last, she slid on to the bench in the dining room between Jess and Mary. Jess, back from her day out, was showing off the half-crown coin she’d got from Eileen, the woman who came to visit her twice a year. Blue pulled the two remaining slices of bread
on to her plate. The sliced pan was curling at the edges already as she spread it with a layer of greasy margarine. But she was starving, and she gobbled it down as fast as she could.

Blue tossed and turned in her bed that night, unable to sleep. She was still upset about the Hickeys, wondering why they hadn’t visited her. Maybe she wasn’t pretty enough, or clever enough. Maybe she wasn’t chatty enough, like her friends Jess and Mary and Lil. She sighed. She was just too ordinary.

The room was warm and stuffy and filled with the coughs and snores of the fifteen girls she shared the dormitory with. She could hear Mary grinding her teeth, and Annie rambling and talking in her sleep as usual. She sighed. The girl should be used to the orphanage by now.

She herself had been in Saint Brigid’s home, Larch Hill, since she was a baby. She had no memory of any other place. This was her home, the nuns who ran it her guardians. She had spent twelve years, five months and fifteen days here.

The children’s home had been open for over a hundred years, housing orphans and children whose parents could no longer look after them. The nuns always called it St Brigid’s after its patron saint, but the children who lived there referred to it as Larch Hill. Other people called it ‘the orphanage’ which was wrong, as lots of
the kids in Larch Hill did have parents, a mother or a father, even if they rarely saw them.

In the quiet of night, Blue wondered about all the other children down through the years who had slept in this room, and, like her, spent their whole life in Larch Hill. She could sense their ghosts in the corridor, their shadows at the window. She was not afraid of them.

Sometimes she wondered about her mother. Was she still alive or was she dead? Did she think of her? Remember her? Blue had been given into the care of the nuns when she was only a few days old and had no idea of her history or who she really was. It was the nuns who had named and baptised her Bernadette Lourdes Una O’Malley. The nuns had fed her and taught her to walk and talk and survive the hardships of life in a crowded children’s home. She never had any relations come to check on her or see how she was doing, and gradually she gave up any hope of them. Because her mother had not signed the papers, she could not be adopted. Perhaps one day her mother would come back and reclaim her and call her her own. Till then she was just another of the ‘orphan kids’, as the other girls in the school they attended down the street called them.

She kicked the blanket off, stretching her legs and toes and yawning. She just couldn’t get to sleep. She tried to push thoughts of Mr and Mrs Hickey from her mind. There was no point in being upset about them, as that wouldn’t change a thing. She bent down and scrabbled under the mattress. She pulled out her precious yellow magazine and, punching her pillow, curled up and began to
read. The street light outside was bright enough – Blue felt lucky it was placed just outside her dormitory as it gave her the chance to look at her favourite magazine undisturbed at night. Sister Monica had given her this magazine when she was eight years old. ‘I think you might like this, child,’ she’d said.

Like! Why, she had never seen anything like it. The magazine was called
National Geographic
and it had a picture of Africa, where Sister Monica had worked on the missions, on the yellow front cover.

The inside was filled with pictures of places all around the world and the people who lived there. Blue had studied it from cover to cover, over and over again, reading every precious word.

She knew every picture, every photograph, the colours, the faces, the animals, the landscapes – the rich detail filled her lonely heart. The magazine was like magic, somehow it could take her away from where she was. For a time she could live her life in another place, become another person, far from this grey, sad place.

She curled up, the magazine half-hidden under her blanket as she began to read and to gaze at the photographs. Teza’s African face smiled back at Blue as she carried water from the river to her family.

But there was a sudden interruption. ‘Blue! Blue, what are you doing?’

It was Molly, the new little girl who slept in the bed beside hers. She was only six years old and had been placed in Larch Hill by her father, who had gone to England to look for work following the
death of her mother four months ago. She looked like she’d woken from a bad dream.

‘Are you all right, Molly?’

The little girl shook her head, wordless, the tears beginning.

Blue sighed. ‘Do you want to come in with me for a few minutes?’

The dark head nodded and Blue put down her magazine and pulled back the blanket as Molly jumped in beside her.

‘Do you want to look at the pictures?’

Molly nodded, yawning.

Blue turned the pages slowly, explaining in a whisper one or two of the photographs, but it was late and she could see that Molly was too tired to take it in.

‘Would you like me to tell you a story instead?’

‘My mammy told me stories,’ the little girl said solemnly. ‘Every night.’

‘Well, then, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll tell you a story and when I’m finished you’ll get back into your own bed and go to sleep, promise!’

Molly agreed.

‘Once upon a time in a house in the big woods there lived three bears …’ she began as Molly snuggled against her, the small body gradually relaxing. In time, Molly would get used to it, to being on her own and having no mammy or daddy to take care of her.

‘… a big bear, a middle-sized bear and a little baby bear …’