I flicked through Professor Morton’s diary, reading through the pages that she had marked, and photographed them for later. I propped up the photograph of Granny and Maria against my coffee cup, and clicked the first cassette into the slot of the ancient recording machine.
Then I took a deep breath and pressed PLAY.
My heart nearly stopped in my chest as the initial hiss of the tape gave way to a husky voice, burning with humour and intelligence. The bare seminar room and the rain-stained concrete outside disappeared as I listened, totally absorbed, each squeaky revolution unveiling layers of history that had been locked inside these cassette time capsules for nearly forty years.
The individual in my photograph had seemed fleeting, impermanent, like a willo-o’-the-wisp. Now this voice brought her vividly to life: bold, rebellious, and cheerful, even chirpy in spite of all she had faced. I would so love to have known her.
Three hours, several more cups of coffee and a stale cheese sandwich later, I loaded the fourth cassette into the slot and then, for the final time, pressed PLAY.
Cassette 4, side 1
‘How does it feel, talking about your time at the Hall after all these years?’
Strange, dearie, very strange. Like another life, and I suppose that’s what it was. Not that I minded so much, in the end, being in there. I had me friends and plenty of ciggies, and the sewing and that. Enough food, most of the time. The main trouble was that no one ever believed me, so I stopped talking about me past, locked it away inside me, kind of. Whenever I did talk about it they would say it was me voices, the old fantasy stuff.
But your history is what makes you who you are, doesn’t it? And after all them drugs and treatments I felt like a sort of non-person. Everyone, even the staff, insisted on calling me Queenie, so it’s hardly surprising that I almost forgot who I’d once been. They stole the real Maria away from me. It wasn’t till I got out, around nineteen fifty, that sort of time, that I started feeling like my old self again. It’s been lovely talking to you, my dear.
‘And I have enjoyed meeting you, too.’
Gawd, just think of it. That was more than twenty years ago.
She sighs
.
Twenty years of freedom, and I’ve counted me blessings every single day of it. Coming out has given me my past back and I’ve been trying to make up for it ever since. I was very angry for a while about the life they took from me, but it doesn’t get you anywhere fuming to yourself all the time, so I just decided to put the past behind me and get on with enjoying the years I have left. But I hear the place is closing down for good now, is that right?
‘So I understand. Most of the patients, like yourself, have been settled in the community.’
A fierce, bronchitic chuckle.
Hah, is that what they call it? I’ve seen them on the streets with their cardboard and their bundles.
‘Yes, I am afraid that’s the choice some of them have made.’
Don’t have no other choice you mean.
She lights a cigarette, and there is the deep rattle of her inhalation, and a long exhalation before she starts to speak again.
Still, s’pose I got lucky, having someone to come to. Didn’t have much luck in the rest of me life, so perhaps I was due some.
It wasn’t easy at first, mind. I was scared of every little thing: cars, and buses, and people everywhere, like swarms of ants. Making up me mind was the hardest thing: brown bread or white, butter or marge, jam or marmalade, tea or coffee? Just deciding what to have for breakfast was like a day’s work. We never had choices in there – you ate what you got, and if it wasn’t enough, or someone like Winnie nicked it off your plate, which used to happen a fair bit, you went hungry.
We went pretty hungry in the second war, I tell you, that was a miserable six years and all. Most of the male nurses went off to fight and the women into war work so there was hardly any staff left here to look after us. They had to close some wards and pack more of us into the rooms they kept open. I think I mentioned that I’d got myself moved to one of those villas out on the edge of the estate? By then I was sensible enough not to give them any trouble. Anything for an easy time. It was nice out there, peaceful, surrounded by beautiful gardens, very civilised. Almost like normal life.
But when the war came they closed the villas and moved us all back into the main building, all those terrible corridors echoing with the howls of crazy people. To top it off, we was stuck on the wards for most of the day because they couldn’t spare the time to take us out.
As the war went on the food got worse and worse – almost everything disappeared: there was no tinned milk or bananas, no lemons or chocolate, and there was very little butter or cheese, and meat. They were all rationed of course. You would hear the cooks grumbling about it, as they slapped their latest concoction of brown slosh onto your plates, made out of carrots and turnips mostly, day after day.
They dug up the gardens to grow food, the men did, but their seedlings got the carrot fly and the white fly and the black fly, every kind of fly in the kingdom flew to Helena Hall, because they didn’t have the know-how to deal with that sort of thing and no chemicals neither – they was all saved for dosing up the patients. The plants withered in their weedy patches and our stomachs grew hungrier by the day.
The sewing room stayed open, thank the Lord, ’cos without it I would have truly lost my mind again. But we was full-time sewing heavy khaki serge, into army uniforms, you see, doing our bit for the war effort. It was terrible fabric to sew, especially on our little machines – they weren’t designed for industrial work. The needles would break and the shuttles would jam every few minutes, and our fingers and backs ached from pressing the material flat enough to flow under the foot.
I still managed to steal a few minutes each day, during the break and over lunchtimes to work on me quilt, though. By now they trusted me with scissors and needles so I didn’t have to be watched every minute, like most of the others. The two central panels – the one for the prince, and the one for the baby – were finished, so I started work on designing a third.
The supervisor found me some left-overs: scraps of lavender-stripe cotton we’d been making into uniforms for the junior nurses, grey shirting for male patients, and some cream poplin shirts we’d had in from the admin side which were beyond mending. The colours blended well enough, but the fabrics was plain and dull after the brocades and intricate designs I’d been working with on the inner panels. So I decided this panel was going to have to be completely different and I asked for some magazines to give me ideas. Have you heard of cubism, dearie?
‘It was an artistic movement, wasn’t it?’
Something like that. I read about it in one of them magazines, about how they were turning pictures into blocks of colour – even people and landscapes – so I tried to think of a way of using my plain fabric in blocks. They was certainly easier to patchwork than curves, I can tell you.
The idea came to me as I was doodling my name: M for Maria. Also for Margaret. If I could join a row of capital letter Ms in a row, in blocks of contrasting fabrics next to each other, it might create an interesting pattern. After I’d played about with the ideas for a bit I came up with a pattern that used the Ms and also like the zigzag of a staircase, which felt right to me, given the stairs my short legs have had to climb in all of them tall buildings I’ve lived in.
I was lucky, you know, because I nearly lost the lot, my life included, one terrible night in 1942. Those ruddy Germans bombed the place and made a direct hit on one of the women’s wards, just along the corridor from where I was sleeping.
What they thought they were doing, bombing a place full of crazies, we’ll never know. I expect it looked like a factory or a hospital, and of course the army was stationed just down the road so perhaps they thought they was killing soldiers. Anyway, it caused mayhem, and though we pulled a few of them out alive, thirty-six patients and two nurses died that night.
‘You helped to save people? They allowed you out?’
One of the bombs fell that close, the blast blew the door off our ward too. Just as well we was all cowering under our beds by this time otherwise we’d have been thrown across the room. So once the bombs stopped and we could hear the wailing and the shouting all the night nurses ran out to help and I went too, no one stopped me. It had blown the wall right off the end of the building, you see, and the ward with it, just knocked over like a great hand had come and swiped it. The bricks and the roof was all on the ground in a heap and bits of people sticking out, cursing and crying for help … it makes my skin crawl when I think of it, even all these years later.
There was no one in charge, so I just got stuck in and started pulling lumps of bricks and mortar away from the bits of people I could see, calling to them that help was on the way. My hands was cut to shreds in a few moments but I never noticed, not till much later, that they was bleeding all over the place. After a bit the wardens and fire service arrived and started telling us how to dig without harming the poor blighters any further. We did pull quite a few of them free but they was mostly in a bad way, broken arms and legs and the rest, and stuck into ambulances and off to the proper hospitals for treatment. I’m not sure if many of them ever returned.
By dawn, and this was August, mind, so dawn came early still, we got a proper view of the terrible damage, and nearly forty still missing as far as anyone could account for. We was herded back to our wards for a bit of patching up, and they had to chase a few crazies round the grounds to get them back as well. We heard later that they pulled two old dears out of the rubble twenty-four hours later, thanks to the sharp ears of a local copper who heard them whimpering.
I must have been in shock because they sedated me and I slept for hours after that, but not even the drugs could blot out the cries or the blood and broken bodies we saw that night. They return in my nightmares, even now that I’m an old woman.
There’s a long pause.
‘Are you all right, Maria?’
The sound of liquid – water? – poured into a glass and gulped down.
That’s better, thank you. Shall I carry on?
‘Yes, please. If you are feeling better?’
I think we’re on the home straight now, not much more to tell, because it was only a few years after the war ended that
the day
arrived. The best day of my life.
We didn’t get letters, you see, not usually. So that morning after breakfast, when I was getting ready to head over to the sewing room, and Matron came walking down the ward with an envelope in her hand I took little notice, until she stopped at my bed.
‘Letter for you, Queenie,’ she said, handing it to me. ‘Do you need any help reading it?’
She meant well, of course, but I snapped at her all the same, flustered by the strangeness of the moment.
‘I can read it for myself, thank you,’ I said, grabbing it and tucking it into the top of my blouse. She was desperate to know what it said, I could tell, but it was mine and I was sharing it with no one, thank you very much. My heart was hammering so loud in my chest it’s a miracle I could walk, but I got myself into the toilet and locked the door.
The envelope was addressed, simply, to Maria Romano, c/o Helena Hall Hospital, Eastchester. Everyone in here knew me as Queenie, so though I didn’t recognise the handwriting, I thought immediately that it must be from Margaret. It couldn’t be anyone else. She was the only one who’d ever asked whether I minded my nickname and when I’d told her I preferred my real name, she’d always used it from then on.
I’ve kept it all this time and got it out to show you. Look.
‘Would you like to read it out to me?’
Okay dear. Just need to get out me glasses. Here they are.
She clears her throat and begins to read:
Dear Maria,
I hope this finds you well. Do you remember me, your friend Nora? From The Castle, and the Palace?
I promised to find you, but after you went away they wouldn’t tell me where you was, so I have been looking all these years. Then I got a letter forwarded from the palace what they must have been sitting on forever. I left there years ago and am a widow now but am blessed with a son and daughter-in-law, living close by.
From the address I’m afraid you must be poorly. But perhaps that was just long ago and you are out now? If so, I hope they forward this on to you. I would dearly love to see you again, and learn what has become of you and the baby.
Write soonest and tell me where you are so I can come and see you.
Love Nora (née Featherstone, now Kowalski)
‘What a beautiful letter. You must have been so excited to hear from her?’
I’ll say, dearie. But at first it was like a dream, and I kept having to pinch myself to tell myself it was true. Nora! Alive, and coming to see me? The girl I’d always considered to be my sister, the only family I’d ever really had? The last thing I ever imagined was hearing from my childhood friend like that, after thirty years of being locked away in that place.
I thought she’d long forgotten me, or perhaps given up trying to find me, busy with her own life. I even wondered whether she might have died in the Blitz. So her letter was a complete surprise, like all the Christmases and birthdays you ever had, rolled into one, not that those days had ever been any great shakes for me, but you know what I mean. My heart seemed to swell till I hardly had room to breathe, my head felt as though it might explode with happiness, and I had to tuck the letter back in me blouse for fear the tears would smudge them precious words.
Then I pulled myself together and went back into the ward. As I passed the nurses’ station the matron looked up with question-mark eyebrows, and she must have known something good had happened because by then I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face, but I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of knowing, not just yet.