That’s when I knew the man next door was right; no one was going to demand that I revealed who the father was.
I shook my head miserably. But somehow I already understood that he did not want to know the name. ‘They already know, they know it’s him,’ that voice whispered, but I refused to hear it, because the enormity of that was just too much for me to comprehend.
Dumbly, I waited to hear what else he was going to say. I did not have to wait long.
‘Well, while you are at home you are to stay out of sight, do you hear me, Marianne?’
‘Yes, Dad,’ I whispered miserably.
‘Help your mother with the young ones. But don’t you let me catch you in the lane. In fact don’t even put your face out of the front door. Do you understand me, Marianne?’
‘Yes, Dad. Mum already told me.’
‘Oh, and another thing,’ and I wondered what he could say to me that could make my lot even worse.
‘I don’t want to see you peering out of the window again either.’
So he had seen me, I thought, and he must have known who I was looking for.
I waited for him to say something else but all he said then was, ‘Now go and sit down and eat your supper.’
Trying to hide my dismay, but relieved that at least I had not been given a hiding, I crept past him, took my place silently at the table and tried to swallow some of the stew that had been placed in front of me.
The man next door had predicted their indifference. But at least I had not been beaten.
A
lthough my mother visited her, Dora did not come into our house, and for the weeks that followed my expulsion from school and my confinement to the inside of the house I only saw my parents and the children. I could not escape the four walls, my mother’s coldness, my father’s indifference or the man next door’s desertion. But I could seek refuge in a special place inside my head. I made up stories again, but this time they were not about furry little animals or children from another era, but about a sweet-smelling baby girl who slept in my room and wore pretty pink woollen clothes that I had knitted. I pictured her with blonde hair and blue eyes, very much like my doll Belinda. In my imagination I saw her grow into a toddler who stretched her arms out to me, called me Mum and loved me more than anyone else had ever been loved. I chose a name for her – Sonia – and smiled at the thought of her arrival. For those fourteen days when I rested my hands on my stomach and imagined my baby growing inside me, I was blissfully unaware of what my parents had planned for me.
Did my mother even realize that my calmness was because I believed the worst that could happen was over? If so, she said nothing to disillusion me.
That she left to the social worker, who came on the fifteenth day. A knock on the front door announced her arrival. Remembering my mother’s instructions to go to my room should anyone call, I started for the stairs.
‘Stay where you are, Marianne,’ my mother said sternly and, puzzled, I paused at the foot of the stairs, waiting to see who had arrived that my mother did not mind me meeting. It did not take long for me to find out.
My mother opened the door to a neatly dressed woman in her mid-thirties whose rather plain unmade-up face was not one I had ever seen before. She introduced herself as Miss Cooper and told me that she was to be my social worker. She said that she had been given my case when the school had reported my pregnancy to the authorities. She was, she told me, in charge of making arrangements for me when, as she delicately put it, my time came.
She asked me who the father was, a question to which I just muttered my stock answer of ‘I don’t know’.
‘Yes,’ she said through pale lips pursed with what I recognized as distaste, ‘your headmistress told me that.’
She doesn’t like you, said that treacherous voice in my head; she just wants to do her job and get out of here, and I knew the voice spoke the truth.
Without a trace of concern in her voice she went on to tell me what arrangements had already been made for my future.
I was to go into a home for unmarried mothers once my pregnancy reached six months.
‘Why?’ I asked, for the town she mentioned was over twenty miles away. ‘Why can’t I have it here at home like Mum?’
‘That’s not possible, Marianne,’ she said. It was then that I heard the word ‘
adoption
’ for the first time, and as that word sunk in so did the understanding of what both my parents and social welfare had decided. My baby was to be given away; a suitable couple had been chosen as the parents. I was to only have six weeks with her. Then it would all be over and I would be able to return home.
I turned disbelievingly to my mother. Surely this could not be true? But one look at her averted face as she refused to meet my eyes told me it was.
‘You are only thirteen years old, Marianne. You are still a child,’ I heard the social worker say in her cool, emotionless voice. ‘You have to go back to school. You can’t look after a baby and, let’s be honest here, your behaviour up to date is hardly that of a responsible girl. You don’t even know who the father is, do you?’
I had no answer to that, which for different reasons both she and my mother were aware of.
‘You’ll stay in the home for the last three months of your pregnancy,’ she continued, taking no notice of my evident distress. ‘Your mother wants you there for that time so that her other children don’t see your pregnancy. Then you’ll stay for another six weeks after the baby is born.’
Fear, the fear that almost paralyses – where breath is held, legs tremble with sudden weakness and the stomach churns acid – filled me. It stifled my voice, stopping me from opening my mouth to argue. Instead I felt limp, with waves of despair engulfing me. Not only had my parents arranged behind my back to have my baby adopted, but also they were sending me away. Apart from that night so long ago when I had been a bridesmaid, I had never spent a night apart from my family. The thought of spending so long away from them all petrified me.
The date was set and it was agreed that the social worker would return in two months’ time to take me to the unmarried mothers’ home. Having completed her job, she closed her file, rose and left with it under her arm.
‘No!’ I wailed when the door closed behind her.
‘It’s for the best,’ my mother said wearily.
‘Whose best?’
‘The baby’s, Marianne,’ she replied. With her mouth set firmly, my mother turned away and I knew the conversation was over.
There was nothing left for me to do except go to my bedroom and try and stay as far away from my mother as I could, at least until I felt able to face her again. She perhaps understood that and did not call me down to help her with the chores as she usually did.
Once upstairs I sat on the edge of my unmade bed, staring at the walls, my hands clasping my face tightly. My fingers left little white marks where I pressed them hard into my cheeks. I felt the tears sliding down the back of my throat until they solidified into a small hard ball that threatened to choke me. As I thought about the conversation with the social worker and my mother, I rocked my body back and forwards in utter despair.
‘What have I done? What have I done?’ kept repeating itself in my head followed by that tiny inner voice whispering, ‘What could you do?’ Those two questions chased themselves round and round in my brain, one that still felt numb with shock and emotion.
And that other question joined them again: Why had my parents not asked who the father was?
T
he morning I was due to go to the home I came out of a deep sleep suddenly. The haziness of the light that was seeping through my curtains told me that it was too early to be awake, but something had woken me, some noise that did not belong in my room. My heart started pounding as my ears strained to hear what it was. I climbed from my bed and went to my window, where the sound seemed the strongest, and peering closer I saw a moth trapped between the curtains and the glass. It was the sound of the beating of its wings that had woken me, as it desperately struggled to be free.
I opened my window to let it escape and watched as the pale wings fluttered and the moth flew off to enjoy its freedom. I wished I too could have followed it.
Eight weeks had passed since the social worker’s visit; this was the day I was leaving my home, and I still had to pack. I looked desolately through my small selection of clothes. I was not a girl with many clothes, but my expanding stomach meant I had even fewer options. Exasperated, I threw them in a heap onto the bed. I was finding even the smallest decision difficult to make.
Looking in the mirror I saw a different girl reflected in its mottled surface than the one who had been there when the social worker had called. The weeks that had slipped slowly by had changed me into someone I hardly recognized as myself. My belly, protruding from my slight form, could no longer be hidden. It would have been clear to anyone who saw me that I was pregnant. My tiny breasts, which had become tender to the touch, were larger, and there was a new fragility to my face. The roundness of youth had disappeared, leaving me with sharp cheekbones and a pointed chin.
This girl who stared back at me with dull eyes, red rimmed from constant weeping, was pale, with hair that had turned dry and brittle, and a mouth that looked as though it had long ago forgotten how to smile.
I felt heavy, my back ached, but worse than that was the overwhelming sadness that constantly consumed me. It dogged every moment of my waking hours and slipped into my dreams, making me wake to a pillow damp with my tears, as the impending loss of the baby that I already loved drew closer. As I thought of the day ahead I felt her move within that space inside me; that space that she had made hers – just under my heart.
I pictured her curled up inside me, for I knew that at six months she was already perfectly formed – that all she had to do was grow a little before she came into the world.
Every night before I went to sleep and each morning when I woke I talked softly to her, for I knew instinctively that my baby was a ‘her’. I told her how much I loved her, how I was looking forward to meeting her, but I could not bring myself to say or acknowledge the word ‘adoption’.
That morning I placed my hand on my belly, feeling its roundness.
‘Can you feel that, Sonia?’ I asked. ‘Can you feel my hand touching you?’
The realness of her tiny movements and the fullness of my teenage breasts that were preparing for her arrival heightened my grief at the emptiness that her leaving me would bring to my life.
‘How could they do this to me? To her?’ I asked desperately. I thought of the faceless couple that were also waiting for her birth and wondered what they were like.
I pictured them in a large house, one that without the sound of children’s laughter was lonely. There would be a bedroom freshly decorated in pastel colours all ready and waiting to receive my baby, a room full of soft fluffy toys with a white-painted cot, a tinkling mobile in the centre above it and by the window a rocking chair where my baby would be held by her new mother as she was fed from a bottle. Against the wall would be a chest of drawers full of lacy baby clothes, and on the floor would be a rug made out of wool, not the handmade rag ones that were in my home but a soft woollen one with a delicate pattern of roses on it. Their house would have an indoor bathroom and a patio and a new three-piece suite with matching brightly coloured cushions. I thought they must want a baby very much – that from the moment she went home with them she would be loved. Then I cried deep sobs of loss for she would never get to know me or me her.
T
ime to go, Marianne,’ the social worker said as she glanced at my small suitcase. ‘Is that all you’ve got?’
‘Yes.’
She picked it up. ‘Can’t have you carrying heavy weights now, can we?’ she said with a humourless smile as she led the way out of the front door.
I looked at my mother and saw the dark shadows that tiredness had brushed under her eyes. I saw her belly, larger than mine, straining against the worn fabric of her only maternity dress.
By the time I return home there will be another baby here, I thought sadly, but it won’t be mine.
My mother stood to the side of the door as I made to go through it. I wanted her to say something kind, some words that I could tuck away in my memory until at night, when I was alone, I could listen to them in my mind and be comforted.
‘Hug me,’ I wanted to ask. ‘Tell me I’ll be missed, or simply say you love me,’ but the words stayed in my head and my mother did none of those things. She just told me to take care, to look after myself, and then she stood in the shadows of the doorway watching me leave.
I glanced at the other house across the way but it was closed up. The man next door and his family were nowhere in sight.
The social worker put my case in the boot and told me to make myself comfortable. She drove out of the lane along windy roads lined with trees. There was little traffic, just the odd tractor and a few cars, but I noticed that she drove carefully, her eyes darting up to the mirror, her hands clutched firmly on the steering wheel.
I leant my head against the cool glass of the window and watched as we passed fields that were bare of crops, for they had been harvested some weeks ago. The sight of the farmhouse where my father worked brought the image of the man next door into my mind. I knew that he was out there somewhere servicing the farmer’s tractors or mending the cars, and I wondered where.
I asked myself, ‘Does he ever think of me? Think about what is going to happen to me, wonder if I’m all right? He must know about the baby but does he know it’s to be given away like an unwanted puppy?’
‘Of course he knows,’ screamed that voice in my head, and hearing it a slow burning anger at his betrayal coursed through my veins, making my face hot and my hands clammy.
A couple of miles further on we passed the woodlands where the man next door had so often taken me, and, remembering that, I shivered. It was only midday but already it seemed the day was growing dark. The weak winter sun disappeared behind the branches of overhanging trees and I peered through the lattice they formed at a sky dark with clouds that promised rain.
It was not until estates of new identical houses, which told me we were on the edge of the town, appeared that the social worker finally spoke. Up to then she had seemed lost in her own thoughts, or maybe she was just concentrating on her driving and not getting lost. She told me that at the home I would resume my school studies. A teacher would come in and give me work to do, and when I was ready to leave arrangements had been made for me to start at a new school in the spring term.
‘Nobody there will know anything about you,’ she said then. ‘You will be able to have a new start and put all this behind you.’
Her words fell on disinterested ears. How could she suggest that I could put my baby behind me?
The new estates with their square gardens gradually gave way to large Victorian terraced houses as we drove further into town. We passed those and turned into a tree-lined road of even larger detached grey-brick houses. Before the two world wars they had been built for the rich and privileged Victorians and Edwardians. These were households where butlers, scullery maids, cooks and the rest of the assortment of staff that houses such as those demanded worked from dawn to dusk and slept in the attic rooms. Now, when servants were no longer content to work for little more than their board and keep and death duties had decimated inherited wealth, the majority of these homes had been divided up into a maze of small flats.
The car drew up outside one of these houses. Double wooden doors and a single bell proclaimed that, unlike its neighbours, it still had retained its single-residence status.
‘Here we are,’ said the social worker in bright tones, as though this was an outing and our arrival an unexpected treat.
I peered out and saw a huge grey-stone building with ornate carvings over the dark double front doors and each of the downstairs windows. They were heavily curtained, hiding any signs of life inside. Clumps of shrubs, turned winter brown, dotted the lawn that ran from its walls to the pavement, and I, used to a front garden full of battered toys and tangled weeds, thought it looked curiously empty. In the distance there was a large fruit orchard, the leaves missing from the trees, and I imagined that in summer it shaded the prams of the infants that were born at the home.
While I looked about me trying to take in my surroundings my suitcase was lifted out of the car and I was instructed to follow. The bell was firmly pushed and you could hear its loud sound resonate inside the imposing house. In what seemed like seconds, the front door was opened.
I walked into a huge hall with the highest ceiling I had ever seen. It had polished dark-wood floors, and on the papered walls large paintings of old country scenes and portraits of austere Victorians looked down on us.
‘I’ve brought Marianne,’ said the social worker to the woman who, with her grey uniform and hair, was almost an exact match to the outside brickwork. In my dreamlike state it made me think that if she leant against the exterior of the house all I would see would be her round face with its double chin.
The woman, who later told me she was the matron, nodded at the social worker and told her that she would take over.
With a hurried goodbye my escort who, disinterested as she appeared to be in me, was my last link to my family left me standing in the hall with my battered suitcase at my side. A knot of apprehension tightened in my stomach as I faced the woman whose charge I was going to be in for the next few months.