‘I don’t care.’ She didn’t, she didn’t care about anything any more. If Mother McLevy was going to lose her job, just because she’d been thinking about her, she wouldn’t be able to bear it. It wasn’t
fair
, and the doctor had said it would all be all right. He’d lied to her. The awfulness of the thought turned her stomach over. She had to
do
something, but what? What could she do?
The thought that had been there earlier resurfaced. She would run away. She sat quiet, lost in the enormity of it. But she could, and she’d leave a note to say
she’d
lit the candle, not Mother McLevy, and that it was all her fault. A little glow of martyrdom warmed her briefly. She could say she was older and get work as a scullery maid or something in a big house. She knew she could do it. A girl had done something similar in the
Sunshine Review
, a twopenny magazine that Cissie Wright had had smuggled into her and which had been passed round the dormitory.
And then Mother McLevy wouldn’t get wrong, and she wouldn’t have to see the Matron again, or Mary Owen, or any of them. Her innate honesty forced Sarah to acknowledge her motive wasn’t totally sacrificial. Would Rebecca miss her now this new girl had come? The pain which had been grinding away since Rebecca’s visit intensified, causing her to press one small fist hard against her mouth. She hated skipping anyway, it was stupid. They were all stupid.
At ten o’clock she slid out of bed carefully and crept to the door. Mother McLevy was sharing the slightly larger room of Mother Bryant next door, they had squeezed another bed into the limited space earlier that evening, and Sarah had been listening to continuous snoring for over half an hour now while she thought out her plan of action.
First she’d have to pay a visit to the laundry - she couldn’t run away in her shift - and she just hoped there were some boots drying in the boiler room; it’d been raining that day so there might be. Course, they’d likely be boy’s boots - her small nose wrinkled fastidiously - it was normally the boys who got theirs soaked, but it couldn’t be helped. And then . . . then she’d climb out of the laundry-room window - the main front door and the two side doors would be locked by now - and if she skirted round to the front and kept to the edge of the main drive she should reach the gates within five minutes. Her stomach turned over with a mixture of nervous anticipation and fear.
It was a pity she didn’t dare go to the dormitory first; she’d have liked to have taken the blue velvet ribbon Mother McLevy had bought her for her last birthday, and the sampler she had been working on for the last twelve months and recently finished. It didn’t occur to her the sampler was the indirect cause of all her present trouble, precipitating, as it had, Mary Owen’s fermenting envy and spite. But she didn’t dare - she shook her head in agreement with her thoughts - it’d be just like Mary Owen to wake up and start yelling her head off, she’d got a voice like a foghorn as it was.
The corridor outside was ominously dark and empty, and again her stomach jerked and trembled. Mother Shawe had said the bogeyman would get them if they left their beds at night. She paused on the threshold as her eyes darted into the gloomiest corners, but facing Matron in the flesh was more frightening at this moment than spectres unknown, and so she padded out into the blackness on shaking legs.
When she reached the ground floor the chill of concrete on Sarah’s bare feet made her increase her pace to the laundry room, situated at the far end of the corridor. She found this part of the building even more scary than the upstairs, it being almost totally devoid of light and having only two narrow windows, one on either side of the front door.
Her heart was beating a tattoo by the time she twisted the knob on the door and slipped inside the large square room - the familiar smell of damp clothes and disinfectant causing her nose to wrinkle briefly - but it was her physical condition, rather than Mother Shawe’s bogeyman, that caused her heart to pound. Lying in bed she hadn’t realized how weak she was, but now she was feeling dizzy and somewhat sick, and every little bit of her ached.
She sank to the floor with her back to the door for a few minutes, the cold seeping upwards through her bare bottom and causing her teeth to chatter, then found the strength to stand up and walk over to the far end of the room by the window, where the dry clothes and bedding were stored. She found a pair of the regulation red flannel bloomers along with a calico petticoat and pulled them on quickly over her flannel shift, before slipping into one of the institution’s blue smocks which was a trifle too big for her. But it didn’t matter, nothing mattered, except getting away as soon as she could. She didn’t bother with a pinafore, instead she opened the door to the boiler room which led off the first room and peered inside, having to wait for a full minute for her eyes to adjust to the lack of light.
There were no boots. She could have cried with disappointment. What was she going to do? Should she risk going back upstairs and finding the dormitory, and hope no one saw her take a pair from the end of a bed where each child placed their footwear at night? She didn’t dare. But she couldn’t go without any boots. She shut the door, panic high, and then she saw them - a pair of old, and obviously adult boots, tucked in one corner close to the big airers. Her feet slid into them, lost in the cavernous depths, but she found that if she laced them tightly and moved slowly they would just about stay on her feet. ‘Beggars can’t be choosers.’ One of Mother McLevy’s pet sayings came back to her and she nodded to it. They’d do.
The last thing she did was to select one of the thin blankets and tuck it under her arm. She might have to sleep under a hedgerow or in a barn for a night or two. That’s what the heroine in
Sunshine Review
had done, and she’d eaten berries and wild mushrooms and things, and a farm boy had shared his lunch with her . . .
Getting through the window proved more difficult than she’d thought, mainly due to the fact that every time she heaved herself up the boots slipped off, so after two tries she took the boots off and dropped them out first, hearing them thud onto the ground below with a sense of inevitability. She had to go now, she couldn’t leave them out there, and she knew once she was outside she would never get back in, the window being six foot up from the concrete path. She stabilized herself on the chair she had pulled across to the window again, and pulled herself up with her thin little arms, her legs waving madly for a few seconds as she steadied herself on the flaking window frame. It took some manoeuvring to get through the gap, mainly because she was frightened of shooting out on to her head, but eventually she was hanging by her arms outside and with a little plop she landed on the ground.
She was immediately conscious of the chill of the night, the blackness, the whispering of the tall looming trees surrounding the building and the other two buildings in the distance taking on the appearance of forbidding sentinels with a thousand eyes. She shrank back against the wall for a moment, the dizziness returning more strongly, and then sank down to the floor to pull on the boots, her teeth chattering uncontrollably with a mixture of fear and cold. Everywhere looked so different compared to the daytime.
She sat there for some time. Her arms and legs seemed to have lead weights attached to them and her head was aching badly; the bed she had just left took on the form of heaven. She must have fallen asleep for a few minutes because she suddenly jerked awake with a panic-stricken start as an owl called out into the charcoal-streaked sky, and then she remembered, and rose slowly to her feet.
She had to get out onto the road beyond, that was the first thing, and then . . . then everything would work out.
The gate was locked, the seven-foot wrought-iron fence either side of it equally unscalable with vicious points to deter even the most intrepid climber - which Sarah wasn’t.
‘
Oh
.’ She gazed up at the gate, and then her eyes went higher still as she muttered, ‘Please, God, do something, will you? Please?’ There was no answer, no sudden creaking of the gate swinging open, but there suddenly popped into her mind a conversation she had overheard when working in the vegetable garden a few weeks before. Two of the older boys had been congratulating themselves on finding a gap in the fence, through which they had been able to squeeze and undertake a raid on a farmer’s orchard some way down the lane. They had been tall boys, too; broad-shouldered. If they could get through . . .
It took Sarah some time to find the gap, which was nothing more than a slight bending of two of the iron poles, but she was through in a trice and out onto the grass verge beyond, where she stood for a moment looking from right to left. The sky was patchily moonlit but still overwhelmingly dark, the rain of the afternoon making the ground stick to her feet. She pulled the blanket round her shoulders in the form of a shawl, and began to trudge along the verge, feeling very tiny and very alone.
She didn’t have anyone who loved her. There was a cold wind blowing against her face, and it was only when it stung her cheeks that she realized she was crying. Her mam hadn’t loved her, there hadn’t been a pink pram and a silver rattle, it was a story, just a story. The pain in her chest was making it tight and she pushed her small fists, in which the edges of the blanket were clasped, into her breastbone.
Mary Owen said you didn’t have to have a da to be born, just a mam. She didn’t know if she believed that, she admitted to herself, but any road everyone was agreed you had to have a mam, and hers hadn’t wanted her. Why? She stopped suddenly, the dizziness intensifying. Her mam was somewhere,
somewhere
, and she didn’t know where. And she wanted her mam. She did, she wanted her. She didn’t care what she looked like - she could look like Mary Owen’s mam even, she didn’t care, she just wanted her mam. But her mam didn’t want her. She didn’t know where she was, what she was doing; she could have died and her mam wouldn’t have known.
It was becoming increasingly difficult to walk; the nausea was strong now but it was her legs that were all wobbly. She set her face and continued to plod on. The boots were rubbing painfully when she’d covered no more than a few hundred yards, and after hobbling along and twice sprawling on the ground when she tripped over her own feet she decided to take them off and carry them round her neck for a while. She sat down on the verge, but once the boots were off and hung round her neck by the laces she found to her amazement she couldn’t get up, an exhaustion so severe as to be paralysing weighting her down. The vomiting took her by surprise, but once it was over the dizziness felt slightly better, although the will to move was quite gone. She curled up into a little ball in the damp grass, pulled the blanket around her and over her head, and shut her eyes as it began to rain again.
‘I told you I saw something, Edward, I knew it. What is it?’
There was a little squeal. ‘It’s not a dead body, is it?’
‘For crying out loud, Josephine, let me get to it.’ A pause and then, ‘Good grief! It’s a child, a little girl.’
‘She’s not . . . ?’
‘No, she’s alive, and it looks like she’s from the Home back there by her clothes. Josephine, get out of the damn car, will you, there’s more at stake here than your new shoes. And bring that rug from the back seat while you’re about it.’
Sarah was aware of the disembodied voices floating above her head but they belonged to the twilight world she had slipped into; they weren’t real and she didn’t want them to be real. She was comfortable, she didn’t hurt any more, and it was only the lack of pain that made her realize how much she had been hurting before.
When, in the next moment, a warm hand was placed on her cheek and a voice said, ‘Can you hear me? Can you open your eyes?’ she kept them tightly shut, but then as she felt herself lifted up her eyes opened of their own volition.
‘Hallo there.’ The man’s voice reminded her of the doctor, but he was older, much older. ‘Don’t worry, we’re going to take you home. You’ve gone and got yourself lost, haven’t you.’
Lost? She wasn’t lost. She wanted to tell him so - the panic at being returned to Hatfield jerking her limbs - but the nausea had returned, stronger this time, and all she could do was turn her face as she began to retch.
There were words passing over her head, but on the perimeter of her awareness, as she grappled against unconsciousness and the crippling sickness, but once the vomiting was over she knew she was being carried again, and then she was inside the car and the engine started.
They were taking her back . . .
Part Two
Fighting Back: 1947
Chapter Five
As the train drew into King’s Cross station Sarah smoothed down the jacket of her new blue serge suit, and glanced at her reflection in the smut-smeared window. It didn’t look homemade, she reassured herself for the hundredth time, her heart thumping against her ribs. It looked smart and practical, but feminine too - Rebecca was a dab hand with her sewing machine. And anyway, the skirt wasn’t as full or as long as some she had seen since the hourglass look first came in some months ago. It was all very well for critics to condemn the New Look as frivolous and wasteful, but women were so sick of ration books and clothing coupons. It had certainly been worth the fourteen coupons the material for the suit had taken to feel less provincial for her arrival in London.