I
blinked hard. My memories of the past receded, along with it the filthy room and the social worker’s suffocating disdain, and I was once more in my own gleaming white and chrome kitchen.
I picked up the letter again. Not only had my daughter written down her address but her telephone number too. I knew that by giving them to me she was indicating that she would be waiting for my call.
She had written that it had taken her several years to find me. She had started looking when she had a child as she had wanted her daughter to meet her biological grandmother. Being pregnant and giving birth had stirred up many thoughts of her own gestation and birth and her longing to find out who I was had grown alongside her baby.
Deep in thought, I slowly folded up the letter and replaced it in its envelope, but the words in it continued to reverberate round and round in my mind. The silence of the house, which just a few minutes ago had felt peaceful, now felt oppressive and I wanted it filled with the chatter of voices.
‘What will the contents of this letter do to our marriage?’ I asked myself that morning.
‘My husband loves me,’ I was reassured by my inner voice. But that whisperer of doubt that lives inside each of us continued, ‘Yes, he loves you, he loves his family and he loves his marriage, but will he also love this?’
I flicked the switch on the kettle, topped up my coffee, picked up the comforting warm mug and, cradling it in both hands, walked into my sitting room. Sitting down on the settee, I was unable to withstand the lure of the past again – it felt so close with the arrival of that morning’s letter.
The facts of life had been covered at school. It was the one lesson that had held my complete attention. But I already knew how babies were made. Once my periods started, the man next door had told me that he would take care of ‘all that’.
He had said that there was only a certain time of the month that a girl could get pregnant. I had believed him then, but I also knew what two missed periods meant.
I told him.
I fervently hoped for kindness, a hug, followed by his reassurances that he would take care of me, gentle words that said everything was going to be all right. My hopes were dashed as soon as the words expressing my fears had left my mouth.
His hands gripped the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles turned white and his eyes flashed with temper.
‘How do you know it’s mine?’ he asked spitefully.
I cried. I told him there had never been any other boys, but he just looked at me as though I was an object he hated.
‘Look, Marianne, you keep shtum about this, do you hear me? Don’t you be blabbing your mouth off with lies about me! Who’s going to believe you anyhow?’
‘My dad …,’ I began.
‘Your dad, what? When he was hurling accusations at your mother, saying that brother of yours was not his, what did he do, eh? Dave was still walking around when your father thought it was his, wasn’t he? And who got the beating instead? Why, your poor pregnant mother did. So work it out for yourself, Marianne: you talk, you make things even worse than they are. And who do you think will get a thumping, cos it won’t be me?
‘Nah, if your period doesn’t come, you just say that you were messing about with the boys at school, and you don’t know which one it is that got you knocked up.’
‘But I haven’t,’ I protested through the torrents of hot tears raining down my face.
‘Look, don’t make it even worse for yourself. See, the law is you’re not allowed to have sex with anyone over sixteen, and you have. So just you keep saying you don’t know whose it is. That is, if your periods don’t come back. Mind you, I don’t think you’ll get that many questions.’
He was right. I didn’t.
D
ora rarely visited our house. I never thought much about it but just assumed that she preferred the cleanliness of her own neat home. But the morning that my mother decided to ask me about my periods, she was also sitting at our kitchen table.
The pot of tea was on the table, the other children were all outside playing with an assortment of toys that she had brought round for them and Jack was on a blanket on the floor, a grubby dummy in his mouth. He was still not talking and, despite his age, my mother seemed content to keep him in nappies. He was chuckling to himself as his plump toddler hands tried to catch the sunbeams dancing on the floor.
‘Marianne, come and sit with us,’ Dora said, and recognizing the difference between an order and a request, I felt a sinking sick feeling in my stomach. The tone of her voice gave me a warning that this was not just going to be a normal talk.
But unable to come up with an excuse not to, I pushed the usual messy pile of nappies, plastic pants and a hairbrush off a chair, sat down and silently waited to see what it was that they both wanted to say to me.
I didn’t have to wait long.
‘So tell me, Marianne, where have you been putting your sanitary towels these last weeks? Why haven’t you been giving them to me to burn?’ asked my mother abruptly, and that sick feeling in my stomach increased. I was suddenly aware of four female eyes boring into me.
Feeling the weight of their joint gazes, I squirmed in my chair and remained silent.
‘Marianne, answer your mother,’ said Dora sternly.
‘What business is it of yours?’ a little voice inside my head yelled, but the words stayed inside me. Suddenly I realized that this visit had been arranged just for this one purpose, to question me.
‘I gave them to you the last time I had a period,’ I replied, aware of the glances that passed between the two women as I spoke.
I wanted to leave the table, run outside and be anywhere but in that room with the two accusers. I did not want to answer their questions. Even when I had talked to the man next door I had not put a name to the word that frightened me. Ever since then that word had been pushed to the back of my mind but now I knew it was going to be dragged out – ‘pregnant’. But I couldn’t be, could I? My hands felt clammy, my mouth dry and I looked down at the table.
There was a silence in the air after my answer that Dora was the first to break.
‘Your mother told me that was quite a few weeks ago,’ she said, and again that little voice inside my head told me to ask why it was her and not my mother who was asking the questions. But still I said nothing.
‘Tell you what, Marianne,’ she said when she finally realized that she was getting no response from me, ‘come over to my house a little later. I’ll try and help you. Not healthy for you to miss for too long.’
I felt a surge of hope. If only she could do what she said, bring on my period. But that nagging worry which never left me would not go way.
My mother’s eyes refused to meet mine, and the moment Dora left, plainly wanting to avoid any conversation on the matter, she rose and cleared away the cups. I wanted to speak, wanted her to say something to me, but she busied herself with Jack, bending down so that her hair fell across her face, obscuring her expression.
‘Mum?’ I said when the silence had stretched out long enough to make me even more nervous. ‘I’ll go over to Dora’s then, shall I?’
She just nodded, but I still could not see her face, and as I went out of the door I noticed that for once she neither asked me how long I thought I would be, or to take the two eldest with me.
When I walked into Dora’s living room there was nothing about her demeanour to make me feel uncomfortable. She was the same friendly person, with no trace of the sternness I had seen at my mother’s table. Her smile was as wide as usual and her voice was warm when she asked me to lie on the settee so that she could have a ‘little feel’ of my stomach.
Feeling reassured that she just had my best wishes at heart, I lay down obediently, my head propped on one armrest, my feet on the other and my dress tucked tightly under me.
‘Come on, Mar,’ she cajoled, ‘can’t see what’s wrong like this. Let’s get your skirt up,’ and her hands quickly pulled it up to my waist. She ran her hands over my stomach, and as she prodded me, intent on her purpose, I noticed for the first time the dark roots in her blonde hair, the wrinkles around her eyes and the smoker’s lines ringing her mouth. There was a hardness in her face that I had not been aware of before, and I suddenly felt that she was a stranger, one who over the years since I had met her, I had never really known at all.
‘All right, Marianne,’ she said finally. ‘I think I know what the problem is. I’ve got something that will help sort you out.’ She told me to stay where I was and went into the kitchen. There was the rattle of pans, the noise of cupboards being opened and shut, then after what seemed like ages she came back carrying a tray. When I saw what was on it I started shaking. Not that I knew then what she was going to do; I just knew that I found the things on the tray repellent. There was a coil of black rubber tubing with a funnel at one end, a jug with steam rising from it and something that looked like a thick red balloon. She put it down, pulled a blanket off the back of the settee, threw it on the floor and placed the tray next to it.
‘You’re going to have to get down on the floor for this to work,’ she said, still with no explanation of what she was going to do.
Down I got and looked nervously at her. ‘Wait a tick,’ she said and walked to the front door, locked it and then she drew the curtains and put on the lights.
‘Knickers off this time,’ she said cheerfully, as though having my nearly naked body lying on the floor was an everyday occurrence. Feeling my cheeks burning with shame and fear, I wriggled out of my knickers and futilely tried to cover myself with my skirt.
‘Oh, don’t be a silly prude,’ she said laughingly and once again pulled it up to my waist.
‘Good heavens, Mar! Didn’t know you’d got so grown up down there,’ she exclaimed, as she placed a cushion under my bottom and pushed my legs apart. I squirmed with both embarrassment and the beginnings of shame.
‘This won’t hurt. Just lie very still,’ she said as she picked up the tube and to my horror inserted it into me, and before I realized what she was going to do she picked up the jug and started pouring its contents of warm soapy water into the funnel. I could feel the warm liquid running into me.
There was no smile on her face then, just a grim determination to complete the task she had started.
‘We have to wash out whatever is in there,’ she told me without saying what that something might be. ‘It’s stopping your period.’
It was then that a picture of what might be inside of me came into my mind. In my imagination I saw a very small baby, a baby whose tiny limbs started thrashing as it started to drown in the water that was being poured into my body. I remembered the baby kittens in the sack and shuddered in fear and horror.
I wanted to tell Dora to stop, but it was too late, the jug was empty. More cushions were placed under my legs and I was told to keep still for as long as possible.
‘The longer that water’s inside you, the better chance we have of it working,’ was all she said.
Later, she helped me onto a bucket where I emptied myself.
‘When you start bleeding it will be heavy,’ she warned me, ‘so make sure you have your sanitary towels ready. You might have cramps, so here are a couple of tablets that will help,’ and she put two white pills into my hand.
I left her house and went home. My mother did not ask me any questions.
Dora was right on one point – I did get cramps, tearing painful ones that doubled me up and left me gasping for breath, but she was wrong about the bleeding.
My period refused to come.
For forty-eight hours both Dora and my mother asked me repeatedly if my period had come. I told them about the cramps and said I felt sick, but they were only interested in whether or not I had started to bleed. Each time I said ‘No’ they looked at each other but said very little to me.
I thought about the man next door. Did he know about the tubing and soapy water? And I wondered why nobody mentioned the word ‘pregnant’.
It was Dora, not my mother, who took me by train to a London clinic.
I lay on my back, my legs held in metal stirrups while a doctor I had never seen before prodded me with a latex-covered finger. Something cold and metal was inserted into me and I started to cramp. Tears ran down my cheeks and I gulped to stop the sobs and turned my head away from them. The nurse who was gripping my arm stroked my hair but her eyes looked down at me with distaste.
He spoke to Dora, not me. I heard words ‘over three months along’ leave his mouth. I knew what that meant, that there was a baby inside me. I listened to Dora asking him if there was anything he could do and knew she was asking him to kill it.
‘No,’ he said, ‘she’s too far gone.’
I hoped the baby could not hear them.
‘Well, that’s that,’ said Dora as we left the clinic. She still did not say the word ‘pregnant’.
On the way home she told me that she had to go to my school to speak to my headmistress. Until she had done that, I was to stay at home.
‘Why her and not my mother?’ that voice inside me asked again, but I stilled it. Dora took me back to my mother, who looked at me blankly after Dora muttered something that I could not hear.
Questions of what was going to happen to me spun in my head. Surely now they will ask who the father is, I thought. The lies I had rehearsed were ready on my tongue; but they didn’t enquire.
I went to my school the following day, for nobody had told me not to. I never got as far as the classroom. Instead no sooner had I walked through the gates than a hand gripped my arm and my teacher’s voice told me to report to the headmistress’s study where I was shown straight in.
I was to be expelled. Words like ‘bad influence’, ‘unheard of ’ and ‘huge disappointment’ came out of her mouth in a torrent of words that I was too shocked and ashamed to decipher or comprehend fully. They filled my head, but sealed my lips, and silently I left the school without another word.
As I went through the gates part of me prayed I would find him waiting for me in his car, but he was not there.
Not knowing what to do, I went home.
On hearing that I would not be allowed to return to school my mother simply said, ‘Well, what did you expect?’ Before I could think of an answer her subsequent words left me reeling with shock, for she told me just what the following months were going to be like.
‘It’s better if no one sees you,’ she insisted. ‘Better if nobody knows.’
It was then that she laid down her rules. The lane, the fields and the pond were out of bounds. Not only that but I was never to go into the front garden where passing people might see me. If I needed fresh air I could go out to the back, where the lavatory was. When anyone called, unless it was Dora, I was to go to my bedroom and stay there until they left. I stared at her in horror as the thought of being imprisoned in the house for months sunk in.
I searched her face for some sign of feeling for me, some compassion, some caring, and for a second I thought I caught a glimpse of pity in her expression, then it was gone. Her face wore the same expression that I had seen on Dora’s when she had tried to get rid of the baby: steely determination. Seeing it and realizing its resolve, I knew that it was pointless arguing as nothing I could say would influence her decision.
‘Oh, and Marianne,’ she said ‘your dad wants to speak to you when he comes in from the fields, so stay in your bedroom until then.’
‘Why,’ I asked desperately, feeling the walls of the house closing in on me, ‘do I have to stay in my room?’
All she could offer in reply to my question was that his temper might improve once he had eaten. Until he had completed his meal she did not want him to see me.
There was an hour to wait until my father returned from work, and every minute of that hour ticked away slowly. My stomach churned with fear for the one question that was running through my mind over and over again was, if my mother could turn on me like she had, what might my volatile father be capable of?
I stood by my bedroom window, the curtains clenched in my fist, as I gazed across the gravel, wondering where the man next door was. All thoughts of the way he forced me to do those things I did not like left my mind that day. Instead I remembered the way he had saved me from the man with no legs. I heard his voice telling me how nothing bad would happen to me, that he would be there to look out for me. I wanted him to come into our house and somehow make everything better. My eyes strained to see him returning from work, but when he did his head was averted.
‘Does he not feel my eyes on him?’ I asked myself, and again that voice inside my head whispered to me, ‘Yes, he knows you are there, but he is not going to help you,’ and I watched him walking into his house without even pausing for a split second to glance up in my direction. I watched and watched from behind the curtain. Surely he would come out again and look up and give me that smile, the one that once was just for me, the one that told me that I was special. But he never reappeared; instead I saw the figure of my father cycling home along the lane.
He looked up as he dismounted, and although I tried to duck out of sight I knew he had seen me.
It must have been another hour before my father called me down and, on shaky legs that seemed to have turned to jelly, I timorously made my way down the stairs.
My father was standing watching me as I descended the staircase. He turned the kitchen chair round, sat astride on it and leant his arms on the back, looking me straight in the eye. I tried to avoid his stern gaze and cast me eyes downward and studied the pattern on the lino with great intent.
‘So what’s this bloody mess you’ve gone and got yourself into?’ he asked. I knew that question was just rhetoric, for without giving me a chance to answer he asked the second one, clearly also with no expectation of an answer: ‘I suppose you’re not going to tell me whose it is?’