Don't You Love Your Daddy? (27 page)

I could still feel the blood trickling out into the wad of toilet paper I had stuffed into my pyjama bottoms. ‘I’m bleeding. Down there,’ I told her, indicating approximately whereabouts.

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, has no one told you about periods?’ she asked. Then, seeing my confusion, she realized they hadn’t.

For once she showed me some kindness. She sat me down with a warm drink and two aspirins. She then explained that this was something that would happen to me each month. ‘I suppose you’ll have to take the morning off school. I’ve not got anything to give you,’ she said, which I later learnt meant that she didn’t have any sanitary towels, which she would have thought more suitable for a girl of eleven than the tampons she used. The annoyance returned to her voice when she said she would have to go to the chemist.

She phoned the headmaster, and I squirmed with embarrassment at the idea of him knowing. Then, again showing some sympathy, she gave me a hot-water bottle, told me to stay in bed until my cramps had subsided, and drove off to the chemist. On her return she showed me how to wear a sanitary belt and gave me a packet of mauve-paper-wrapped towels.

Although she had said I should go to school in the afternoon, she allowed me to stay at home for the rest of the day. The next morning when I went back to school I was terrified that somehow the children would be able to tell what had happened. My fears were realized when one curious child looked in my briefcase and saw two spare towels tucked behind my schoolbooks. If I had thought they’d mocked me before, it was nothing to what I had to put up with then. I became the butt of more jokes.

It took several more months before their teasing brought down the wrath of the headmaster – not on them but on me. The bell had rung for the end of the last lesson and, picking up my briefcase, I had walked through the school gates.

Outside, a group of my classmates were standing giggling and somehow I knew that it had something to do with me.

‘Here, Sally, look at this,’ said one, as I tried to scurry past.

‘Leave me alone,’ I cried when, not wanting me to escape, the same boy grabbed my arm.

‘Don’t be in such a hurry – you’ll want to see this.’ He pushed me forward until I was looking at the school wall.

I felt my face flush when I saw what they were all laughing at. In big red letters were written the words ‘Jimmy loves Sally East’ and underneath was a large red heart.

Whoops of laughter came out of every throat. I tore myself away from my persecutors and walked off as fast as I could.

The next morning I hoped against hope that the red letters would have disappeared overnight but they were still there when I arrived.

The headmaster waited until the middle of my first lesson to show his displeasure. He came into the classroom and instructed me to follow him outside. As I walked to the door I could hear the barely repressed sniggers coming from the rest of the class.

Without explaining what he wanted, he marched me across the playground and through the gates, then stood behind me as again I was forced to look at the offensive writing. ‘What is the meaning of this, Sally? Explain yourself.’

‘I don’t know, sir,’ I replied. ‘I didn’t write it.’

‘So why is it there? What’s the meaning of it?’

‘I think it means the opposite,’ I replied sadly.

But there was no sympathy in the headmaster’s face. ‘Well, whatever you say, it’s probably something you’ve done that’s caused it. You can wash it off in your lunch break.’ Then he marched me back to the classroom.

As soon as I had eaten in the canteen, a prefect brought me a bucket, scrubbing brush and a bottle of chemical cleaner. ‘The head says you know what to do with them, so get to it,’ he said, with a knowing grin.

Humiliated, I crossed the playground hearing more catcalls.

‘What’s the matter, Sally? Don’t you like your message?’ they shouted, and burst into loud, ridiculing laughter. I squared my shoulders and ignored the taunts until I got outside.

It took me that entire break to wash the wall and I used up more than half of the cleaning fluid. When I had finished I took the empty bucket back to the headmaster’s office. ‘Well, see that nothing like that happens again. You can go back to your classroom now,’ were the only words he spoke to me and, unhappily, I did.

It was one of the teachers who finally sat me down and gave me my first lesson on survival. ‘Sally, I know you get bullied,’ he told me, ‘but only you can put an end to it.’

‘How do I do that, sir?’ I asked, not believing anything would save me from it.

‘Turn round and tell them to shut up. Bullies are cowards. Show them you don’t care.’

‘But I do,’ I wailed.

‘And they know it, Sally,’ he answered. ‘Think of some retorts to put them in their place so they’re the ones who look foolish, not you. Then give it to them and walk off with your head held high. If you play the victim they’ll do it more. You’ll see, when they realize they’re having no effect on you, they’ll stop. Will you try it?’

‘Yes, sir,’ I replied, although I had little confidence that it would work.

I thought about his words that night, then remembered how Sue managed my father when he had done something to annoy her. She ignored him.

‘Spotty,’ yelled a child, the next day.

‘Oh, don’t be so stupid,’ I retorted, copying one of Sue’s often used phrases.

‘Don’t be so pathetic – can’t you find someone your own size to pick on?’ That was a good one to use on someone fatter, older or bigger than me.

‘Leave me alone. I’m too busy to listen to your nonsense,’ was another that worked with my tormentors.

By the end of a week I found that the teacher was right. Faced with my seeming indifference and the snubs I’d stolen shamelessly from Sue’s repertoire, the teasing eventually stopped.

As Sue had told me I would, I gradually grew into my uniform and, although my inability to participate in sports stopped me being popular, I was accepted.

I also tried to put my burgeoning self-confidence into practice at home. But I was no match for my father. The one thing I had learnt, though, was that victims were picked on and my pleas and cries excited him as much as the acts he made me take part in. I stopped the cringing and protesting. Instead I tried to show him the same weary contempt that had worked so well at school.

‘What’s the matter, Sally? Don’t you love your daddy any more?’ he would ask teasingly, when I looked coldly at him.

And, of course, even though I told myself I no longer did, I still wanted him to care for me.

‘Good marks, Sally, well done,’ he said, when my school reports arrived. And my cheeks would redden with pleasure. ‘You’re my special girl, aren’t you, Sally?’ he would still say on other occasions and, despite my intention to ignore him, I would find myself smiling back. ‘Still a daddy’s girl,’ he would say when, after paying me a compliment, he saw pleasure reflected on my face. ‘Got a kiss for your old man, have you? Or are you too old for that now?’ Under the gaze of a resentful stepmother, my lips would dutifully pucker up and a daughterly kiss would be planted on his cheek.

‘That’s my girl,’ he would say, and over those years when I crossed from child to teenager, I was.

Talk of what I was going to do when I left school started as soon as I turned thirteen. Did I want to train as a secretary? To which I hurriedly answered, no. Hotel work, maybe? But that also held no interest for me. Neither did any of the other careers that Sue and my father proposed.

‘A nurse,’ I said finally, for that profession came with an escape route from Sue and my father. No one pointed out that living in a nurse’s home would mean that Dolly could not go with me. Instead they greeted the idea with enthusiasm. ‘Working on the children’s wards or even with babies?’ said a misty-eyed Sue, who still dreamt of a baby of her own.

To please her I said, ‘Yes.’ But it was not until I was fourteen that I decided what I really wanted to do when I left school.

I was eager for more pocket money so Sue and her father had persuaded me to work at the local old people’s home. Because of my age I was only allowed to be a part-time helper, but the very low wages such a job paid still made me feel rich. Sue’s father knew the matron and had recommended me to her. He was a self-made man, as he told me repeatedly, who had started work in the building industry when he was only a year older than I was then. He had never forgiven me for the lies I had told four years earlier, and advocated hard work and serving others as a way of redeeming my reputation and preparing for the future. ‘Hard work never harmed anyone,’ was his mantra, an ethos that did not seem to extend to his own daughter. ‘It’ll make you less introverted too, Sally,’ he said. ‘It’ll get you to see how the real world works instead of daydreaming with your head stuck in some book.’

I felt like retorting that his daughter was the reason I spent so much time alone, and that it was Sue who had made me look different when I was sent to the new school. I wanted to scream out that it had taken nearly all of the four years I had been there to be grudgingly accepted. I could also have said that because I wanted to do well in my end-of-term exams, which would have pleased him, my studious behaviour had earned me the label ‘swot’ and ‘teacher’s pet’ and that yet again I was subjected to teasing and ridicule. But I decided wisely that silence would benefit me more.

So, instead of voicing my thoughts, I smiled my thanks when he said he had arranged an interview for the following day.

The matron, a tall, rather thin woman with deep-set brown eyes and short dark hair shot with grey, seemed delighted that I was happy, during school holidays and at weekends, to work with the elderly. She asked me a few questions, such as what I wanted to do when I left school, which subjects interested me, and why I was interested in working there. A picture of my grandmother came into my head and I replied that I liked old people. Her rather stern demeanour changed as she smiled warmly at me. After explaining what my duties would be – helping with bedmaking, pushing round the trolley at mealtimes and anything else one of the permanent staff asked of me – she promptly arranged some shifts.

It was on a Saturday just a few weeks before Christmas that I started working there. Every house I passed already had its decorations up and some even had fairy-lights adorning the trees outside and hanging round their doors and windows.

The old people’s home was in a rambling Victorian building that many years before, when large families had a bevy of servants, had been occupied by just one family. In the fifties it had been turned into a residential home for the elderly and now it also housed people who had become too feeble to care for themselves. It looked from the outside as though Christmas was passing it by. Unlike its neighbours there were no coloured lights woven in the trees; nor could I see any decorations through the windows. The large front garden, which in summer would be a blaze of colour when the flowers were in full bloom, now only contained drooping shrubs and empty beds. It looked brown and drab. There were sturdy wooden benches on the leaf-strewn grass and I imagined how it would look when the sun shone on the elderly people who would stroll out there to sit and watch the world go by. In the gloomy winter light the house had a shuttered appearance, as though the people who lived there had long ago ceased to love it.

I had been told to arrive mid-morning, just as ‘elevenses’ was being served.

‘You can push the trolley and help serve tea. It’s a good way to meet the residents,’ I was told. As I wheeled it along the overheated corridors it was the smell that I first became aware of. Like other institutions and hospitals I had been in, there was the pervading one of disinfectant and overcooked cabbage but underneath it the acrid smell of urine and used bedpans.

‘Let’s get the worst over with first,’ said the young carer, who had been charged with showing me round. I pushed the trolley into the frail care ward where the weakest of the residents were. Some lay against the pillows with their eyes closed and their mouths open, and it was only the sound of their breathing that told me they were still alive. They were passing their final days in a semi-conscious trance and I hoped that their dreams were of happy times. I watched nurses holding baby-style feeding cups to sunken toothless mouths. Cracked lips smacked, dribbles ran down chins and were wiped away. Occasionally a withered arm would stretch out and the bed’s occupant would wave away the white-uniformed carer and insist they were strong enough to hold the cup for themselves.

My next stop was the lounge where the more mobile sat watching television. Strands of gold and green tinsel were strung around the room and in the corner stood a huge Christmas tree decorated with streamers, a few stars and a rather dilapidated angel that teetered on the top. Christmas cards from relatives and a few surviving friends hung on a string in front of the fireplace.

I was greeted with smiles and thanks as aged spotted hands brushed against mine when I passed cups of sweetened tea and the biscuits, which were immediately dunked in the cups. It was when I looked into the faded eyes shining out of the creased faces that I felt a special kind of warmth: they were so grateful to me for doing what I considered was so little.

So many inhabitants and so few visitors, I thought, over the days I worked there. I witnessed their delight when they received a Christmas card or a letter, and never heard a bitter word said about their absent offspring who seldom visited – even at special times of year. ‘They’re very busy’ or ‘They live so far away’ were the excuses I heard time and time again.