A
ll these years later, many of my memories of that place and the girls I met there are absent. Only the matron’s and one other face remain clear in my mind, but it is not the staff who worked in the home or the other girls’ stories that come to me when I think of that time. It is how I was then at thirteen, with the love I felt for the baby growing inside me, the fear of the pain of the birth and the grief I felt at the impending adoption that are dominant in my mind.
I have vague impressions of the three girls I met the first day, but their names have long ago slipped away into the mists of time. The first one, the one whose face I remember, was tall and, apart from her tell-tale bulge, thin. She was aged around twenty, which then looked quite old to me. When I think back it is only her words she spoke at our first meeting that I can remember.
‘Jesus, you’re a bit young, aren’t you? So who knocked you up?’
And I can still remember her disbelieving sniff when I told her my stock answer of ‘I don’t know’.
‘Course you don’t, luv,’ she sneered. ‘Bet it was some fat old uncle who told you to be quiet. Wonder what he threatened you with. Told you not to tell? Said everyone would be mad at you, did he?’
As I looked with something approaching amazement at her, I saw the malice that glinted in the depths of her brown eyes, made big by thick, dark mascara and eyeliner, and I knew that she saw me as someone on whom to vent her frustration with the world. But worse than that, I thought, she saw me.
‘Or did you like him too much to tell?’ she continued. ‘Bet it wasn’t rape.’
She laughed then when she saw me wince as her barb hit home.
After all, what answer could I give? I didn’t think that what the man next door and I had done was rape, but I was not even sure what rape was, so I said nothing.
Another cruel peal of laughter left her mouth as she took my silence for an admission of something. I was not clear what that something was but knew that her mocking laughter judged and defiled me.
Other girls, seeing my shame and distress, told her to be quiet. I remember that, but I can’t remember what they said, only that they were kind.
It is the home’s routine that I can still recall. Every morning we had to get up at seven thirty, make our beds before having breakfast in the dining room and then take it in turns to do the washing up.
I was excused the work of preparing lunch and washing floors that the other girls did, for I was the only girl of school age and had lessons to attend. Five days a week I sat in the common room trying to complete the exercises that the visiting teacher left for me several times a week. In the hours after I had done my evening chores I sat in my room, the exercise book on my desk, and tried to concentrate on the work the teacher left for me.
I suspect that the other girls thought I got off lightly but they did not know that I would rather have been working with them than sitting in isolation, poring over school books that held little interest for me.
At the weekends I was given the task of brushing and sweeping the staircases and cleaning the bathrooms and toilets – the two most unpopular chores – but I suppose they thought that as I got off so lightly in the week I could make up for it then.
The common parts were everyone’s responsibility, and should we leave behind any item, however small, the guilty person was fined one penny. As I had no money with me I learnt quickly to be very tidy. The girls did their own laundry and ironing, which was something I enjoyed, for I liked having clean clothes to wear every day.
It was while I was in the home, with its polished floors, clean bathrooms and immaculate kitchen, that I realized just how much I disliked upswept lino, grimy surfaces and creased, crumbled clothes and shuddered when I thought of how my mother kept the house.
The older girls taught me to cook simple meals and in the evenings showed me how they unravelled old jumpers bought from charity shops so that the wool could then be knitted into baby clothes. Not having the money to purchase anything, I contended myself with helping the girls roll the wool into large balls and watched how they were turned into small infants’ garments.
In addition to the common room there was a formal lounge furnished with high-backed velvet-covered chairs, a floral covered settee and several small tables. This was only used once a fortnight when birth classes were given by a visiting maternity nurse on how to breathe during our labour and how to care for a newborn.
As we practised, my mind would wander. I used to think of the couples that, like us, were waiting for their babies to be born. How different their experiences would be to ours, for they would get to keep their babies. They would have each other, and then their baby would join them. They would be a family, and love would surround them.
The nursery was where the new mothers stayed after giving birth and was under the supervision of the matron. It was on the same floor as our bedrooms but closed off by two sets of doors. There the new mothers cared for the newborns under the careful eye of the woman who had also delivered them.
Within a few days of being in the home I began to fear both the pain of the birth and being dependent on the matron for easing it. There was something so cold and unforgiving in the glances she gave us that I knew she thought we were girls who had sinned and it was clear she had little if any sympathy for us.
I often heard sobs in that home. Sometimes they were suddenly stifled as though a face was turned and pressed into a pillow. Other times, like on the day the new mother had to hand over her baby for adoption, they were wrenching, tearing cries of loss and despair. I saw those sad young girls leave the home pale faced, their breasts still leaking the milk that would never be suckled, clutching their suitcases as they walked with hunched shoulders and faltering steps out of the doors and turned in the direction that took them to the bus stop. I wonder where they went, those girls who had not been collected by their unforgiving families or written to by the man they had thought loved them. I pictured the lonely bed-sitters and squalid boarding houses that were the fate of young girls ostracized by their families.
All these years later those girls at the home are just a blurred memory of large bellies. Some were angry, others sad and most were just defeated. They all had sad stories to tell; of boyfriends who had left them, families who had rejected them, even one or two whom a man they had trusted had forced unwillingly into having sex. But like their faces, those tales, of which I heard so many, have mainly become indistinguishable from each other.
There were a few, a very few times that did end with happy faces. Those were the girls who left carrying their tiny swaddled bundle, collected by a family who had relented and decided to welcome them both back into the home. There was even the odd rare occasion when it was a young man who turned up to meet his ready-made family. He had written her a letter full of remorse, and said he wanted to marry her.
That girl left the home with the widest smile of all.
I
was the youngest girl in the home and the only one still at school. The day I arrived I was shown my room, and because I had to study I had been given a single one. There was a single bed, a locker for my few belongings, a desk with a wooden chair for me to work at in the evenings when the common room was full. When I saw it, my heart sank, as it dawned on me that this bare room, with none of my personal possessions and memories of childhood, was to be my home for several months. I felt waves of loneliness, for already I was missing my family and even my bedroom in which I had recently spent so much time confined.
The first night I was there I was woken several times by the noise of the town: the rumbling of commuter trains, cars driving constantly up and down the street, and laughter and shrieks from weekend revellers as they walked back to the flats and bed-sitters in the road. No sooner had I become used to these sounds than the overworked central-heating boiler shook and moaned in the darkness of the night. I had never been in an old house of this size before and it seemed to groan and sigh all of its own accord as it too settled down to sleep.
Tucked away at the top of two flights of stairs, the attic rooms that had once housed the servants had been turned into a little chapel. Every Sunday all the girls except those who had recently given birth were herded up to listen to the service given by a local minister.
There was something about the space, maybe the simplicity of its plain cream-coloured walls and the austere wooden seats, which comforted me. But the words of the minister, who made much of our sins and how we must ask for forgiveness, always failed to.
The matron always followed his sermon by giving us a short talk that from week to week hardly varied. The theme was repetitive. We were sinners and she hoped we had had time to reflect on our sins and that when we went back into the outside world we would find it in ourselves to lead a better and more virtuous life.
I let her words and the monotonous tones of the minister float in the air above my head. Instead of listening and thinking of repentance, I concentrated on the beauty of the stained-glass window which, to give the chapel a more religious feel, had been set into the wall when the attic was converted.
Through it I could see a patch of sky, sometimes dark and at other times blue, and it was to there that I directed my silent prayers.
‘I know I’ve been bad,’ I would say, ‘but please believe me, I’m so sorry – sorry that I have sinned.’
I would ask for forgiveness and help, not for me, but for my baby. ‘Please,’ I would pray, ‘keep her safe.’
Before I knew it, Christmas week had arrived and even the saddest girls seemed infected by the festive spirit. We were told that on Christmas Day not only were we going to have a proper Christmas dinner with all the trimmings, but that we could use the formal lounge and even the babies who were barred from the common room were going to be allowed in with their mothers.
On Christmas Eve two huge fir trees, donated by one of the local businesses, were brought in, one for the hall and one for the lounge. Large boxes of decorations were handed to us and we were told, for once with a smile, that we could spend the morning decorating them. A radio played Christmas carols and we sang along to them. The girls, all in varying degrees of pregnancy, surrounded the trees and amidst peals of laughter the less unwieldy ones climbed on chairs held firmly by another to string ropes of coloured lights and streamers around every branch. Being the smallest, I was told to decorate the lower branches and was in the middle of hanging glittering silver and crimson balls on them when the matron appeared to tell me I had a visitor.
‘The man next door has come,’ was the first thought that came into my mind, but when I followed the matron into the hall to my amazement I saw my aunt, the one I had been bridesmaid to years before, standing there.
‘Hallo, Marianne,’ she said, and I felt tears come into my eyes.
I wanted to throw myself into her arms, I was so pleased to see someone from my family, but shyness at my condition stopped me.
We were given one of the small offices to sit in and I waited for my aunt to tell me, not just why she was there, but also how she knew where I was.
‘It was your dad who told me,’ she said, answering my unspoken question. ‘Marianne, I don’t know what’s happened to you and I know he was angry, but he did ask me to come.’
I thought wryly that, with my belly sticking out as far as it was possible, it was pretty clear what had happened to me. But I was so taken aback at what she had said, that it was my father who had asked her to come, that speech failed me. I had thought he was the least likely person to have any sympathy for my plight, yet it was he who had talked to his sister.
‘I doubt if it was all your fault,’ my aunt said, and I saw her looking at my stomach. ‘My brother doesn’t really think it either, whatever he may have said to you. Before you ask, no, he’s not told anyone else, only me. Your mum doesn’t even know I’m here.’
She took a parcel wrapped in gold paper out of her bag and put it on the table in front of me.
‘Now don’t open it before the morning,’ she said. ‘We didn’t want to think of you not having a present to open tomorrow.’
She gave me a kiss, just a small one on my cheek, and then left in a cloud of perfume. The warmth of her visit stayed with me that night and all of the next day. All I could think was that my family had not forgotten me.
If I had been amazed to see my aunt standing in the hall, my next visitor was an even bigger shock.
When the matron told me for the second time that day that there was a person to see me, my heart lurched.
Again I wondered if it was the man next door; it wasn’t, it was Dora.
Clutching a parcel and wearing, for her, a nervous smile, she gave me a brief hug.
She looked different, less confident. Just in the few months since I had seen her she had visibly aged. There were new lines around her eyes and a grey pallor to her cheeks that her liberally applied make-up failed to conceal.
‘You look well, Mar,’ she said, using her affectionate abbreviation of my name. But I no longer saw the woman who had acted as my surrogate aunt for six years. Since I had been in the home, my memories of what I had thought was friendship and those random acts of kindness of hers had drifted behind a much clearer picture – that of her pushing a hose up inside me when she had tried to flush my baby out.
I wanted to ask her what she wanted and why she had come, but instead I led her into the office that I had been allowed to use for the second time that day. I waited for her to tell me why she had come. My composure, if I can call it that, seemed to unnerve her. Her eyes refused to meet mine and her fingers, unused to not being able to hold a cigarette, fidgeted with her wedding ring. She passed me a parcel, which was wrapped in much plainer paper than my aunt’s present, and was large and bulky. Again I was given instructions not to open it until the next day. It was not clear who it was from and I did not ask.
‘Your mother has had the baby, another boy,’ she told me.
I gulped at the thought of my mother sitting in our house by the fire with a newborn in her arms, while here I was, all alone in this home, waiting to give birth to my own baby and with the threat of adoption hanging over me.
‘That’s why she didn’t come with me,’ she continued, ‘but she said for me to tell you that when the baby comes, she will be here. Your dad’s going to borrow a car so he can drive her here. She will leave the new baby with me.’
‘And the man next door?’ I thought, noticing that not once was his name mentioned, not even with a ‘we’ or an ‘us’.
I guessed it was he who was lending Dad the car, but said nothing. It was clear that the man next door had disappeared from my life as much as he could, and again I felt cold pangs of hurt at his betrayal.
‘Does he know that his wife has come?’ I wondered, and that voice inside my head, the one that constantly reminded me of the truth, whispered, ‘Of course he does. He knows everything, and so does she.’
Dora carried on trying to make conversation, an effort that rapidly turned her attempts into a nervous monologue, for I could not bring myself to respond. I had numerous questions I wanted to ask formulating in my head. What is the new baby like? How are my brothers and my sister? Do they ask my mother where I am? Am I missed? And the last one that had become fixed in my mind ever since it was she and not my mother who had asked where I had put my sanitary towels: How long have you known? Not being able to summon up the courage to ask the last question, I swallowed all the others.
She, sensing that I was lost to her, finished speaking and, with a look of relief that her duty was done, rose to leave.
‘Be nice to have you back home,’ she said, but I knew she was not speaking the truth. ‘Won’t be long now,’ and for the first time her eyes slid to my stomach.
She gathered up her belongings – a woollen scarf thrown carelessly over the back of the chair, a pair of worn leather gloves, and finally her handbag. She gave me a quick kiss on my cheek with lips that felt dry and cold, then left. I stood at the door watching her retreating back until she had disappeared from view, then I shut the front door softly.
I went back to the lounge, picked up a silver ball and placed it carefully on the tree.