Lots of old people live very happily in residential homes, I tried to convince myself. We just had to get over the difficult first few weeks, until everything settled down.
Cassette 3, side 1
Is that thing running again? Where did we leave off, can you remember?
‘You discovered that you were pregnant, and trying to get rid of the baby.’
Oh my Lord, what a place to start.
She sighs, and clears her throat.
I was up the duff, three months gone, out of wedlock, and he’d disappeared back to France with never a word. I knew that I’d lose me job and had no one to turn to. Each night I lay in bed weeping silently so as not to alert Nora or the maids. I could not imagine how life could go on, and the thought of ending it all was never far from my mind.
The River Thames was quite close by, and it wasn’t uncommon to read in the newspapers of them poor souls who’d jumped from a bridge into the cold, dark water, their corpses discovered downstream several days later. But in truth I was too much of a coward to attempt anything so drastic, so I just tried to blank the whole thing out of my mind, and got on with work. I was nearly five months gone when Nora noticed.
‘For Christ’s sake, look at you. Whatever have you gone and done?’ she whispered one evening as we undressed for bed. The maids were asleep already, of course, so we ended up sitting on the floor outside the door, with me sobbing on her shoulder.
‘Have you tried to get rid of it?’
‘I’ve tried everything,’ I wailed. ‘Nothing works. I’m done for, Nora.’
‘Have you written to him? You never know, he might take some responsibility, help you out somehow.’
‘There’s nothing he can do, Nora. He’s away at the war.’
‘The bastard,’ she hissed.
Even then I still loved him so much that I made excuses. ‘I did write and tell him,’ I lied. ‘The post from France is very unreliable.’
‘You poor bloody fool. When will you ever learn?’
‘But what am I going to do now, Nora? No one will ever employ me in this state.’
‘What you are going to do, my love, is go back to The Castle and ask the nuns if they will look after you till you’ve had the baby,’ she said, firmly. ‘Then you can get it adopted and go back to work.’
Even as she spoke, the baby fluttered in my belly and I knew I would never give it up, no matter how hard life might become. Nora stopped badgering me after a bit. As the child moved more and more I fell in love with it, and was glad now that my efforts to lose it had been unsuccessful.
I started the next panel on the quilt, holding in my heart a picture of the child wrapped in it, sleeping sweetly in his cot. Such love went into those tiny embroidery stitches, that fine appliqué! I still think it’s the best work I have ever done.
Meantime of course my belly went on growing and although careful adjustments to my uniform helped to conceal the bump for a few more months, by September it was really starting to show. The day would come soon enough.
A few weeks later, Mrs Hardy called me into her room and looked pointedly at my bulging belly. ‘Miss Romano, as you will probably appreciate, your condition makes it impossible for us to continue employing you,’ she said, with a pinched voice. ‘You will pack your bag and meet me here in twenty minutes.’
‘Where …?’ I started, but she held up her hand.
‘You will be looked after,’ she said, and my heart lifted, poor fool that I was, thinking that I might be sent away to have the child and then allowed to return. ‘No further questions. Now go.’
I ran to the sewing room. Nora’s face told me that she already knew. She’d earwigged Finch and Hardy talking about me. They’d clocked that it was the prince’s child, she said, and she’d heard Mrs H say ‘we’ll have to take care of it’, but nothing more.
‘She says I’ve got to leave now, but they won’t say where I’m going,’ I blubbed. ‘Oh God, I am going to miss you so much, Nora.’
She took me in her arms, stooping down for me as usual, and stroked my hair. ‘It’ll work out, you know. It always works out somehow. You’ve survived plenty of bad things in your life and you’ll survive this one too. Write when you get there, I’ll come and see you on my days off.’ I nodded, mute with misery, and then ran upstairs to pack.
My belongings were precious few, but what I had was truly precious: the panel of quilting that I’d started for the prince, along with the scraps of silk that I’d half-inched from Miss G’s box, were already in the old kit bag I’d brought from the orphanage. I had kept them there, under the bed, for secrecy and safe storage. On top of this I threw in my few belongings: some socks and boots, the single dress for Sunday best, my hairbrush and the cherished bottle of
eau de cologne
, along with the barely-opened bible the nuns had given me when I left The Castle.
When I got back to Mrs Hardy’s room Finch was standing at the door.
‘You’re to come with me, Miss Romano,’ he said, in a sombre voice.
I thought this a little odd, for a lowly seamstress to be chaperoned by the prince’s valet, but assumed that as his master was away, he had little else to busy himself with.
‘Where are we going, Finch?’ I asked.
‘I am not at liberty to divulge the location,’ he said, formally. ‘But you will be quite safe there, don’t you worry.’
We took a motorised cab, which was alarming enough in itself, and when we reached the station the sight of all those train engines, steaming like great angry metal animals in their pens, was terrifying. But once we climbed into the carriage and set off, I became so fascinated watching the houses and factories and fields go by that I forgot my fears and even my worries about the future. After staying silent for the whole journey, Finch finally declared that ours was the next stop, and we climbed out and took another cab.
Well, as you know, I’ve lived in large buildings all me life, but I’d never seen such a huge, rambling place before, nor anything in the world like it in the newspapers or penny magazines. Helena Hall looked like a mansion, when we pulled up, only brand new and more spread out than Buckingham Palace, what with its guard house, the grounds reaching as far as I could see, the main building with its high clock tower, and all the other villas in the distance. There was trees and lawns and flowerbeds being planted, all new, with gardeners tending them.
‘You’ve fallen on your feet again,’ I said to myself. How little I knew.
It was a bit of shock to be met by a man in a white coat, but he shook my hand all civil-like and introduced himself as the medical superintendent and told me not to worry because I would receive the best possible care. I asked his name and he said Doctor Wallis and looked at my belly and, poor fool that I was, that’s what I took him to mean.
I turned to Finch and was about to tell him that I didn’t need to be in hospital as I was only having a baby, but at that moment he pulled out a large brown envelope from the inside pocket of his greatcoat, and passed it to the doctor with an odd glance that I couldn’t read.
‘The terms we agreed?’ he asked.
The doctor nodded and put his finger to his lips. ‘It will all be taken care of, sir,’ he said, ‘with the greatest discretion.’
I got all flustered then, saying I was perfectly well and didn’t need a doctor thank you and anyway I didn’t have any money to pay for one, but the doctor calmed me, saying again that I would be given the best possible care and it wouldn’t cost me a penny. I turned to Finch again, but he was already back in the cab, closing the door with a slam, and looking straight ahead as the tyres spun on the gravel driveway. I never saw hide nor hair of him again, but what did I care? He was no friend of mine.
‘Come this way, my dear,’ the doctor said, taking my elbow. He took up my bag and we climbed the steps through the main entrance doors and an echoing hallway. We walked for what seemed like miles along a wide, straight corridor with gaps for windows but with no glass, all open to the fresh air. The floors and walls were tiled in shiny green, up to about head height and, above that, the red brick this whole hospital is made of. Heaven knows, they must have kept the local brickworks going for years when they first built the place. All the time he’s talking to me, telling me how this was the best hospital of its kind in the world, with all the top doctors and the best possible care, and I’m beginning to think the prince has organised this for me, so I can have our baby in comfort and safety and will be looked after until the time we can be together again.
The mind can play terrible tricks, you know. Every so often, as we walked, we would pass heavy metal doors, painted in the same sickly green, and from inside we could hear the most terrifying howls, like dogs baying at the moon, what set my skin tingling with fear. And even then I wasn’t suspicious: I just supposed they was crying out with the pain of childbirth.
Finally we stopped at one of the doors and he took out a heavy key. As it opened, the first thing to hit me was the smell, a stench of piss and carbolic, enough to make you faint. Ahead of us was a long room with dozens of beds ranged along either side – around thirty in all – and in them, or wandering between them, were women so shabby and in such a state that they seemed barely human. Their clothes were baggy sacks of rags, worn and soiled, and some were barely covered. Madness has no respect for modesty, one of the nurses said to me later, and I’ve remembered it to this day.
As we went in the women nearest turned to look at us, their faces either terrifyingly blank or screwed up in agony, then some of them set up wailing like I’d never heard before – the sound that chills your soul. The nurses was trying to settle them, or get them into bed and even in that brief moment I could see it was a hopeless task, like herding cats. This was not the sort of hospital I had expected. I started to panic, and looked around for somewhere I could run, to escape, but the doctor gripped my arm like a vice.
The door clanged shut behind us. I will remember that sound as long as I live – it was the sound of my freedom being taken away.
One of the nurses came towards me with a smile pinned to her ugly face and said hello and welcome. Being a well brought-up convent girl I started to say good afternoon, and my name was Miss Romano, and they seemed to have got it wrong as I didn’t really need to be in hospital to have my baby, but I could see her face not listening and even as I was speaking a kind of animal survival instinct seemed to take hold of my legs. I took off down the ward as fast as I could run, between the rows of iron bedsteads, weaving between the women and their white faces like rows of moons, throwing myself against the door at the end of the room.
Of course it was locked, and they soon caught up with me, pinning me down as I shouted and snarled, scratched and tried to bite anything which came into range, like a trapped rat. They picked me up and held me down onto a bed as I felt my skirt being lifted and then the fierce pain of a bloody great hypodermic being stuck into me bum.
After that, I can’t remember a thing until the pain started and I was in labour.
There’s a sharp intake of breath as if she is being pricked again by that needle, and then she clears her throat a few times.
‘Are you all right? Can I get you a glass of water?’
Just give me a moment or two, to catch meself up again. They’re painful memories, and all, the worst.
‘Please, take your time.’
Another long moment passes before the voice starts again, slower and more sombre now.
They never let me hold him, did you know that? By God, that labour was so long and agonising I felt sure I was going to die. The only thing what kept me going through that terrible night was the thought of holding my child, our child, in my arms. But they took him away and, though I swear I heard him cry, they told me he died shortly afterwards, poor little mite. A boy, they said, just think of it, he would have been heir to the throne had he lived, because the prince never did have any other children, not that anyone knows of at least. If only they had let me hold him, I might have been able to accept it better. But they didn’t.
It was the day they declared peace, Armistice Day, though I only learned that later. It brought me no peace, no peace at all.
Her voice fades away and there’s a long pause, then she sighs deeply and starts again.
Have you got children, dearie? No, you’re too young just yet. But let me tell you, once you have carried a baby in your belly for nine months and felt its every movement, the little leaps of surprise at loud noises, the way it wriggles getting itself comfortable for sleep, the little bumps in the skin of your belly that its knees and elbows make as they press from the inside, you are already completely in love with the little scrap even though you have never seen it with your eyes and it has never yet taken breath. It’s a love that’s hard to imagine if you’ve never experienced it, so total it fills you up, drenching your whole body like a wet sponge, so there’s no room for feeling anything else.
Then, in a moment, all that is gone and it feels like they have torn your heart out, along with the baby. I’ve known despair in my life, and plenty of it, but that was the blackest …
Another long pause is interrupted by the familiar sounds of the cigarette pack rustling, the click of the lighter, the outgoing sigh of smoke.
Looking back, it turned me into a wildcat. I was fearless with anger, crazy with grief. I come into this place a sane woman but by now I was just as mad as the rest of them, just as unkempt and dishevelled as those lost souls I’d seen on my first day. They kept me drugged, of course, to stop me trying to escape, or attack the nurses. I spent years mouldering in the fog of phenobarbital, or the alternatives, which was shouting at yourself in a padded room or being tied up in strong clothes.
‘Strong clothes?’
Sorry love, that’s loony bin language, ain’t it? That’s what they used to call the straitjackets, made out of canvas, with arms that tied up. It’s no fun, I tell you. Several times I got close to killing meself, I was that miserable and that desperate. I figured that there was nothing left to live for and anyway life in this place wasn’t worth living. But when you’re being watched night and day, and your head is fuzzy with drugs, it’s not that easy to do away with yourself. It takes some planning and effort, I can tell you, and it was never that successful.