Birmingham, 1911
Lily knelt over the pail of filthy water, gasping as the pains tore through her back and abdomen. The scrubbing brush hit the floor with a clatter. Though she could see her breath in the freezing air, she broke out in a sweat. Droplets of it ran down inside her frock. Then she felt a rush of wetness between her legs and realized her underclothes were soaked through. All morning these outbreaks of agony had been coming and going.
‘Oh!’ she breathed, shakily as the pain died away at last. ‘Oh God, help me, somebody.’ Looking down the ill-lit corridor, she could see no other human face, only the great expanse of floor which it was her job to scrub, as it had been ever since she came to the home. ‘Home’ certainly did not feel like the right name for the Bethel Home, two miles from the middle of Birmingham, which took in unmarried mothers. It had been a place of dread even before she got here, that and the gory stories of childbirth she had heard from the women in the bedstead factory where she had worked out the last months before her confinement. Their talk had frightened her terribly.
For a moment she slumped over the bucket, resting her head on her arms, too weary to care about the rank smell of the water.
‘I should’ve gone to the workhouse,’ she whispered to herself. They might even have been kinder there, she thought, than these so-called Christian Evangelical ladies who ran Bethel.
A door opened somewhere along the corridor and she was half aware of brisk, clicking footsteps.
‘What do you think you are
doing
?’ Lily heard, in scandalized tones. It was the one she disliked the most, a long-nosed, zealous woman who they referred to as Sister Leigh. She had a pale, waxen face, brown hair taken back severely under her black uniform bonnet, and a thin figure on which her long black frock hung unbecomingly loose.
‘Your job is to scrub the floor, you know that, Waters.’ She spoke with a harsh Lancashire accent.
Lily raised her head, straining to see the woman’s angular form in the poor light. For a moment her eyes were clouded.
‘It’s idleness that lets the Devil in. Don’t let me find you idling again. Get to work.’
Lily’s eyes cleared. She focused on the woman’s shiny black boots, loathing her with a passion, with all her self-righteous judgements, her certainty of her own rectitude. It was humiliating to have to beg her, but things had become desperate.
‘I’m in pain. The baby – I think it’s on the way.’
‘Nonsense, you look perfectly all right to me. You’re not due yet. I know you girls – not that you are a girl, Waters, which makes you even more of a disgrace – any excuse not to do a full day of wholesome work. No thought of the condition of your souls, any of you.’ She folded her arms. ‘You deserve to burn.’
As she spoke, Lily was gripped by another racking pain. She seized the sides of the pail and pressed down, crying out as the great muscular clasp of her abdomen pressed tighter until she was panting and moaning. In the midst of her distress she became aware of Sister Leigh’s lips urgently whispering words close to her ear.
‘Does it hurt? Does it tear and rend you? It should hurt, sister, and it should rend, because only through the time of trial, through suffering and repentance, will you find the light of Christ in the darkness of your sin and wantonness. Pray for suffering, to be put harshly to the test . . .’
Lily gave a loud cry at the height of her pain, feeling as if she was being torn in two.
‘That’s it, feel your punishment for sin, feel it hard . . . Did he do it to you hard, hard inside you? Did he? Did it burn . . .? You’ll burn, Waters, for your depravity, you’ll burn in the everlasting fires . . .’
‘For God’s sake, help me!’ Lily cried, when she had more command of herself. ‘It’s coming. Help me!’
Sister Leigh straightened up abruptly and came to her senses. ‘Always such a fuss, you women,’ she snapped. ‘You should deliver the fruits of your fornication in silence, not with all this carry-on. Get up. Your time has come, and you deserve to suffer.’
She grabbed Lily’s upper arm and hauled her to her feet.
Standing on Leamington Spa railway station all those months ago, once she had delivered Eustace Bartlett to his relatives, Lily had felt utterly alone. Eustace was a most obnoxious child and she was overjoyed to be rid of him, but now was the first time she really confronted the question she had been avoiding: what could she do next when she had nowhere and no one to go to? Her solitariness in the world and the precariousness of her situation overcame her. For a moment she thought about how near to Coventry she was, to Sam, but she pushed the thought angrily away. She had got this far without him. She had to manage her life alone. But amid the passengers and movement of luggage, the cars and carts coming and going, she felt like a tiny dot, invisible to everyone else and impossibly small.
As she stood, fearfully looking around her, the station tannoy announced the next train north to Birmingham. It was not somewhere she had ever thought she would return to, but at least she knew it a little and she ached for something familiar. She had hurriedly picked up her holdall and made her way to the Birmingham train.
The home, to the east side of Birmingham, had space for twenty women at a time. When Lily walked in through the forbidding front door she had vowed to do what she always did in a new situation: keep herself to herself, not answer questions or give anything away.
It was a terrible trial being back in England, in this drizzly, soot-begrimed city with its filthy streets and pale, threadbare people, but the home was even more of a shock. The girls were all expected to wear the same clothes: coarse grey frocks, baggy as sacks, to accommodate their swollen bodies, and their hair tied in a regulation plait down their backs. They were housed in bleak, splintery-floored dormitories of six or seven beds. At first Lily loathed the idea of sharing with such rough women after all she had been used to, and the lack of privacy. But she quickly saw that most of the girls in the home were so very much younger than herself. At twenty-eight she was almost old enough to be mother to some of them. And far from being nosy, most of them were desperate to find a listening ear to pour out their own woes and stories to. Lily had a bed in the corner, away from the window which looked across on to the frontage of a sheet-metal works, and next to her was a poor, malnourished-looking girl called Rachel, whose belly was the only rounded thing about her otherwise wasted form.
‘It was my dad done it,’ she whispered to Lily on the second night. ‘He and my mom threw me out and told me to go to the workhouse. So I come ’ere instead. But they’re cruel ’ard ’ere, that they are. Sometimes I wish I’d gone and finished myself in the cut.’
Lily listened, her sense of horror increasing even more when she learned that Rachel was only fifteen. After Rachel had fallen asleep she lay looking up into the dark. For the first time in a long while she allowed herself to think of Sam, and she ached with longing and sadness. But, she thought, if she had had nothing else in her life she had had those days with him, that night, and those looks of love, or what she had thought was love. It seemed Rachel’s life was over when it had barely even begun, ruined by her father’s incestuous attention.
As she got to know some of the other girls better she discovered how young many of them were and how sad their stories. Most of them had been taken advantage of in their naive innocence. Only one, Madge, was older, and at twenty-five had been deserted by the man who promised to marry her. Lily found that the younger girls looked to her, and over those days before the baby started coming she had tried to encourage them and be kind to them. Some of them seemed to have had so little warmth or kindness in their lives.
But now she was in one of the two delivery rooms down in the cellar of the big house and there was no one to show warmth or kindness to her. Sister Leigh half dragged her down the stairs, barely allowing her to stop as the pains came over her again. She tore away from the woman’s needling fingers and knelt, groaning, on the stone stairs.
‘Come along. Stop all this ungodly noise,’ Sister Leigh scolded, pulling at her shoulder. She gave Lily a hard slap round the face. ‘This is nothing you haven’t brought on yourself so you’ll have to put up with it.’
Lily threw her off. Nothing would induce her to move in the middle of this terrible agony. At last Sister Leigh led her down into the stone-floored room which contained a sink, a trolley laid out with various implements and a high, flat bed covered by a sheet up against the wall. There was a gaslight hanging from the ceiling close to the bed, which Sister Leigh lit resentfully.
‘Loosen your clothes and get up there,’ she ordered. ‘Someone will come to you.’
She stood watching, arms folded, as Lily removed her sodden bloomers and petticoat and unfastened the buttons on her dress. Lily wanted to ask what was going to happen, longed for some sort of reassurance, but she wasn’t going begging to this granite-faced, sanctimonious woman and she held her tongue.
‘Get up on the bed and stay there,’ Sister Leigh snapped. She turned abruptly and left the room.
What seemed like a very long time passed. Lily lay on the hard bed. There was no pillow and only the grey wall for company. Every few moments there came a terrible onslaught of pain, burning through her, pressing down on her like a weight. Each time she curled convulsively on her side, gasping and sobbing. Once she bent up so abruptly that she banged her head on the wall. She wanted to get off the bed and each time the agony stopped she thought about getting up but never seemed to be able to raise the energy. She had no idea how long had passed but the pains were coming more and more frequently.
‘Oh God!’ she cried out at the height of one of the worst contractions. ‘God, help me, help me!’
‘You might well ask God’s help,’ a voice said. ‘He’s certainly the only one who can really help you now.’
The woman standing over her was a plump, blunt-faced person, but she did not speak with the vicious unkindness of Sister Leigh, more a matter-of-fact indifference to Lily’s pain. She had on a huge white apron over her black dress, and a white nurse’s veil.
‘Lie on your back,’ she ordered. ‘It’s more seemly and I want to examine you. Legs up and apart!’
To Lily’s horror she realized the woman was inserting her fingers up inside her, but she was determined not to cry out and humiliate herself further.
‘You’re nearly there,’ the woman pronounced. ‘It’ll be here within the hour, I’d say.’
Even in these last days, with the baby kicking vigorously inside her, Lily had shut from her thoughts the reality that there was a living being inside her that was part of her. She did not want to know, could not let herself take in what that might mean. She certainly would not let herself begin to love it, because unless she got rid of it, pretended that it, and Sam, had never happened, she would have no life. She would be condemned to a life of shame and disgrace, trying to bring up a bastard child on her own, pretending she was a widow or one of the tricks such women had to play to live with any ease in society. And now she was too overtaken by the sheer ordeal of birthing to give any thought to the outcome.
Time swam by. She had no idea how long had passed. Her whole existence was strung between the pains which seemed to arrive so close together that she was riding a sea of agony. She writhed, wanting to get up, to be on her knees, on her side, but each time she tried to move the woman in black forced her down.
‘Get on your back! I’m not having you moving about. It’s bad for the baby.’
Eventually the pains became overwhelming. Lily leaned back on her elbows, her legs apart and felt the enormous press of the child’s head bearing down out of her. She thought she might split right in two. Screams issued from her mouth. In the midst of it there came a sharp slap round her face.
‘Be quiet! How dare you make all that noise?’
It seemed to go on forever.
‘Push!’ the woman commanded her. ‘Breathe and push, push it out!’
‘I can’t,’ Lily cried, hoarsely. It felt impossible. She was completely exhausted. There had been no rest in this ‘home’. Only work and more work.
Finally, bearing down with every fibre of her being, she managed to deliver the baby’s head, and a few moments later she felt the slither of the body. She lay back, finished, panting.
That’s it
, was all she could think.
It’s over!
Then, into the silence came the cry, a cracked, desolate sound which seemed to seize her at the centre of her being and draw her towards it. She leaned up on her elbow again to see the nurse unceremoniously wrapping the child in a length of white cloth. All she caught a glimpse of was dark hair. Sam’s hair, she thought, filled with a terrible ache.
‘Let me see . . .’ Lily begged. ‘Oh, please, bring it here . . .’
‘It’s no good. You’re not keeping her, are you?’
‘No, but . . .’
‘Then it’s no good. You’ll have to feed her, but you’re not to see her now. Won’t do you any good. You must accept it. She’ll soon be gone – and if you’ve got any sense, so will you, a gentlewoman like you.’
She took the baby from the room and Lily was left alone, hearing again and again in her head that rending, newborn cry, a sound which she knew would stay with her forever.