‘I don’t care, I’ll tell her what you said and that you’re a liar.’
‘You’re being very silly. You know that, don’t you? Now, sit down and begin your work.’
The ringing in her ears was worse, cutting out all conscious thought, and Sarah was as surprised as Florence when she found herself clinging to the teacher’s bony back as she tore and bit and kicked for all she was worth. She was aware of screaming, and a resultant pandemonium that was all noise and frantic movement, but even when she was hauled off the now prostrate figure beneath her flailing limbs she continued to fight, until the red mist before her eyes gave way to a deep consuming blackness that took her down and down.
‘Sarah? Sarah, lass, open your eyes. Come on now.’
Sarah recognized the voice as belonging to Mother McLevy, her favourite Mother, who was big and buxom and had a northern accent so thick you could cut it with a knife. Most of the other Mothers tried to adopt the pseudo-upper-class intonation Matron favoured for her staff, but Mother McLevy was a northerner born and bred, and proud of it, besides being something of a rebel to boot.
She was sitting by the side of Sarah’s bed in the infirmary, and had been for nearly an hour despite the heavy cold that had confined her to bed earlier in the day, and her faded blue eyes were full of pity for the young girl lying so deathly still in the narrow iron bed. What a to-do, and all because of Florrie Shawe’s evil tongue, the wicked old bitch. What on earth had possessed her to go for the bairn like that? She shook her head at herself - why ask the road you know? The mere sight of the bairn had been like a red rag to a bull from the moment Sarah had left the confines of the foundling nursery and moved into the main house. Sarah was too beautiful, that was the trouble, and Florrie couldn’t stand it.
There were some, like herself, who had come in as Mothers from a life outside. A life that had been full - a darn sight too full in her case, she thought wrily, bringing her to a place where she needed food and shelter and didn’t mind working all hours of the day and night for the security it represented. And then there were the other sort, like Florrie. Born and raised in the workhouse, Florrie had been institutionalized from birth, and looking like she did there’d been no man prepared to take her on. So, to Florrie and others like her, the Home was a step up from the workhouse and to be grabbed at, but resentment and frustration were always there just under the surface. But this was the last time Florrie was going to vent her bitterness on this bairn, by all that was holy it was, Maggie promised herself grimly. She’d see to that.
‘Mother McLevy?’ Sarah’s whisper brought Maggie’s eyes to her face. ‘I feel funny and . . . and my head hurts.’
‘Aye, I know, lass.’ There’d be a darn sight more than her head hurting before Matron was finished with her, Maggie thought grimly. That particular lady wouldn’t let a little thing like provocation or justice interfere with her punishment at such a severe and public flouting of her rules. The reflection prompted her to say, gently, ‘Whatever made you do it, lass?’
‘She said . . . she said . . .’
‘Aye, I know what she said, lass.’
There was silence for a full minute and then the whisper came again, ‘Mother McLevy, it isn’t true, is it, what - what she said?’
Now how did she answer that? Maggie took one of the limp hands lying so still either side of the small shape and thought rapidly. She was under no illusion as to why Matron had sent for her to sit with the child. The old biddy was sharp-eyed and cunning with it, she knew the little lass would accept the truth from her when she might continue to fight against it if anyone else spoke to her. Aye, she was a cunning old biddy, the Matron, but she ruled her little empire with an iron hand and it wouldn’t do the lassie any good if she was to lie to her now, much as she’d like to. Matron wanted the lid placed back very firmly on this can of worms. The smooth running of the institution had been affected this morning, and order and discipline must be re-established immediately, whatever the cost to the individual.
‘
Is it?
’ Sarah’s eyes were beseeching her to lie. ‘My mam did want me, didn’t she? She didn’t try to do away with me like Mother Shawe said, and leave me in - in . . .’
‘Look, you listen here, lass.’ All right, the truth had to be told, but how she did it was up to her, and a little embellishment after all the lass had gone through was only human.
‘The fact is, you were found in a public place, an’ that don’t suggest to me that you was tried to be done away with, now then. How you got there, an’ who put you there, no one knows; not Flor—Not Mother Shawe, not no one. Life was hard for a lot of folks a few years back. There was the General Strike of 1926 an’ the Depression. I know whole families who were put out on the streets to starve, an’ starve they did, bairns too. Perhaps your mam was tryin’ to save you from that, eh? You considered that?’
Sarah shook her head, tears seeping out of her eyes as she kept her gaze fixed on the old woman by the side of the bed.
‘You think it’s hard here, lass, you want to see what I’ve seen out there.’ Maggie inclined her head towards the window. ‘Why do you think half the bairns in here have their mams or other kin visit ’em of a Saturday, eh? It’s not that they’ve got no family, but their folks can’t afford to have ’em.’
‘I don’t have no one come to see me.’
‘No, I know you don’t, lass.’
‘Even Mary Owen’s mam comes.’
Maggie thought of the big blowsy woman who worked the roughest streets of Sunderland and was notorious amongst even the foulest-mouthed sailors, and shook her head slowly. ‘You don’t want the likes of her visitin’ you, now then.’
She did, right at this minute she did, and that humiliating self-knowledge, when added to the leaden sorrow and despair that was a burning pain in her chest, was unbearable. Her mam hadn’t wanted her. Whatever Mother McLevy said, her mam hadn’t
wanted
her, and she’d left her in a dirty old lavatory somewhere, where anyone could have taken her. She curled up into a little ball in the narrow bed, jerking her hand from Maggie’s and stuffing one fist into her mouth to stop herself screaming out loud. She wanted to die. If she prayed right now for the Lord Jesus to let her die, was that like taking your own life and a mortal sin? She didn’t care anyway, she wanted to die. She should have died ten years ago, that’s what Mother Shawe had said.
‘Come on, hinny, don’t take on so. You believe what you want to believe, about your mam an’ things. No one knows for sure anyway.’
But they did. Sarah stared straight into the round fat face as she gnawed on her knuckles. Mother McLevy was being kind but she wasn’t talking like she usually did, her voice was too quiet and soft, and that alone told Sarah that this old friend of hers, the only adult in her small world she had any real affection for, believed what Mother Shawe had said. It
was
the truth. A sorrow so ageless and elemental as to be unexplainable filled her mind, and she felt herself shrinking, reducing down into a tiny quivering speck, into nothing. She shut her eyes tightly but the feeling was in her head, her bones, and she couldn’t escape it.
‘How about if I go an’ get you a sup of tea, eh? An’ after you’ve had that, I’ll come along with you to Matron an’ we’ll face her together?’ Maggie’s eyes were soft with pity but her voice was brisk now, it wouldn’t do any good to let the child mope.
However, it was a full minute before Sarah opened her eyes and then her voice was small and flat when she said, ‘All right, but I’m not sorry I went for Mother Shawe. I hate her, and Mary Owen and - oh, everyone.’
‘No you don’t, hinny, it just seems like it.’
The mild response wasn’t like the Mother, and when a reassuring hand was placed lightly against her cheek for a moment before the plump figure rose creakily to her feet, the enormity of the trouble she was in hit Sarah for the first time, piercing the anguish in her soul. She was going to get wrong for this. The thought began to churn her bowels, turning them to water. She couldn’t remember anyone ever going for a Mother before; what would Matron do to her? Various possibilities brought her sitting upright in the bed, her arms crossed and her hands under her armpits as she swayed back and forth in a state of animal panic.
Sarah, like every other resident of Hatfield Home, adult and child alike, with Maggie McLevy perhaps the only exception, had a deep and abiding fear of the matriarchal Matron Cox. Tall and thin, with iron-grey hair pulled tightly into a bun and almost opaque pearl-blue eyes, the lady in question had a presence about her that was undeniably threatening. In the twenty years in which she had been Matron she had changed the Home from a poorly run, flyblown hovel of a place, into three separate units that ran like clockwork. Her three Es - expediency, efficiency and enlightenment - which she drummed into her staff and their charges every Sunday morning before prayers, were the code she lived by. She was by nature a frosty, unsympathetic character, with a will of iron and an unshakeable belief in her own judgement that was awesome, added to which she didn’t like children. These attributes had made her the perfect candidate for the post of matron in the eyes of the governors who had taken over the running of the Home shortly before she had been appointed. They had been horrified at the slipshod disorganization, and had asked for a tight, disciplined ship that kept the children in their place - seen and not heard - with the minimum expenditure.
Hatfield consisted of three grey-stone buildings surrounded by several acres of land and enclosed within a seven-foot wrought-iron fence, that both repelled intruders and kept the inmates securely confined within its fold. The foundling nursery cared for the newly born infants and children up to the age of six, at which time they graduated into one of the two main houses - boys to West House and girls to East - regardless of family ties. The two sexes would rarely meet from that day on, unless it was on a Saturday afternoon between the hours of one and five, when children from both houses who had no visitors would be expected to work in the Home’s extensive vegetable garden.
The interiors of all three buildings were painted throughout in dark sombre green, and each was devoid of even the smallest home comfort, the ground floor in each building being of bare stone which gave off a chill on the warmest summer day. The first and second floors, used as classrooms and dormitories, had exposed floorboards, paper window-blinds and no heating of any kind, the only relief on the dark walls being religious tracts promising dire admonishment in the hereafter to all and sundry.
The occupants of East and West Houses received a limited education for three hours every morning after breakfast and exercise, and the afternoons and evenings, until bedtime at eight, were taken up with ‘home duties’, a lofty phrase for the unpaid labour expected of each child.
The younger children, from six to ten years of age, toiled at scrubbing floors and paintwork, laundering clothes, cleaning the washhouses attached to each building, and scouring out the privies. The older girls prepared and cooked food in the kitchens for the two houses and the foundling nursery, attended to the physical and material needs of the infants including washing their bedding and clothes and the mountains of dirty nappies each day, and cleaned the rooms of the Mothers and the separate quarters of the Matron. The boys tended the institution’s resident goats and chickens, collected milk and eggs, worked the vegetable garden and large greenhouses and kept the grounds neat and tidy.
The small army of workers were constantly reminded of how much they had to be thankful for, including the fact that they were being trained for the day they would leave the benignant confines of the Home and venture into the world outside to earn their own living. They were expected to be quiet, restrained and submissive at all times, to have no opinions of their own, and to hold the Matron and the Mothers in high regard. Any disobedience of the list of rigid rules pinned by each narrow iron bed earned immediate and severe retribution.
And now Sarah had done the unthinkable - she had not only verbally defied a Mother, she had actually had the temerity to attack her physically.
What was she going to do? What
could
she do? Mother McLevy’s uncharacteristic subduedness washed over her again, increasing her terror. The Mother knew what was going to happen and it was bad. Oh, why hadn’t she just kept quiet when Mother Shawe had had a go at her? There was no remnant of rebellion in Sarah now, just blind panic at what was in store. She’d ask Mother McLevy what to do when she came back; if anybody would know, she would.
Maggie knew there was nothing to be done but she couldn’t bring herself to say so when Sarah tearfully flung herself at her on her return. ‘There now, there, you’ll be spillin’ your tea, lass. Get this down you while it’s hot.’