Читать книгу Abandoned: The true story of a little girl who didn’t belong - Anya Peters - Страница 10

Kathy was only nineteen when she fell pregnant with me, and neither she nor her married lover knew what they were going to do. Because their affair had to remain a secret she had no one she could talk to about it either. Even if my father hadn’t been a married man, life would not have been easy for an unmarried girl who found herself pregnant in the small-town Ireland of the early 1970s. Everyone was still under the fist of the Catholic Church at the time, and unmarried mothers, I was always told as a child, were still being put away in sanatoriums, their babies taken from them and put up for adoption as soon as they were born. Many chose instead to catch the boat to England or America, to have their babies and start brand-new lives.

When she could no longer conceal her pregnancy, Kathy came to England to find her eldest sister. Mummy had lost touch with her family, but Kathy knew she was living somewhere in London. While she was in Ireland, Mummy was the only one who had ever found out that Kathy was having an affair with a married man.

‘Don’t come crying to me when he gets you pregnant,’ was the last thing she warned Kathy, washing her hands of it before she left for England.

‘I won’t,’ Kathy said.

But two and a half years later, that was exactly what she did.

By that time it wasn’t easy to find her sister in London because she’d moved several times without giving any of the family her new address. She’d divorced too, something that would have brought disgrace on her family in the Ireland of the time, and would have been the main reason for not keeping in touch with them. But somehow Kathy found her.

Years later, Kathy told me she was sure she must have had the wrong address when, late one evening, she turned up at the one she’d scribbled on the back of her ferry ticket: a block of flats in the middle of a sprawling, red-brick council estate in a run-down part of East London. She walked up the dark stairwell to the second floor landing and knocked on the red front door, half hoping her sister didn’t live there. But when her sister opened it, with Michael – who was a toddler by then – hanging off one arm, and rocking an even younger child, who she’d had illegitimately, in the other, Kathy realised why her sister had lost touch with her family. She knew then that she would help keep her secret from their parents because, staring at baby Liam, she saw that her sister had been keeping secrets of her own.

I’m not sure what Kathy planned to do once she came over to England. Maybe she was going to have an abortion and her sister or her conscience talked her out of it. Maybe her lover did. Maybe she believed he would leave his wife and his ‘empty-shell’ marriage, as I was later told it was, and come over to take care of her and her baby in London. Or maybe she was going to have me no matter what.

Fate made the decision for them in the end. A telegram arrived, two weeks before I was due to be born. It was from her father. And it ruined everything. Her mother had suffered a serious stroke and the outlook wasn’t good. Until that moment, post had been going only one way, with Kathy sending ever-briefer letters and postcards home, trying to edit out any clues, while making excuse after excuse for extending her holiday.

There can’t be too many excuses you can use for extending a holiday when a telegram arrives bringing news of your mother’s illness, but they had no choice but to rustle another one up; this time a broken leg which hadn’t reset properly. For all they knew, though, their mother could have been on her deathbed. They couldn’t phone to find out because neither Mummy nor her parents had a telephone then. But whatever her mother’s condition, she couldn’t possibly go home a few weeks before she was due to give birth to an illegitimate child. So in the end Mummy agreed to go instead.

Mummy had her own reasons for being reluctant to go home. She had divorced without telling her parents, and instead of just the three children they knew about – my elder sisters Marie and Sandra and my brother Michael – she now had my brother Liam as well.

Liam’s father, my uncle, was the kind of drunken, irreligious Irishman her mother would probably have crossed the street to avoid. Mummy had never married him, but they were living together, ‘in sin’ as it was called in those days, which to her Catholic parents would have been worse. On top of it all they were living in a council flat on a run-down estate.

Theirs was a good Catholic family in small-town Ireland, and their parents would never have accepted her lifestyle. Maybe, as her new partner drank more and more, and started to become violent, she was too ashamed to tell anyone what her life had come to, let alone her parents. A false pride I can now understand only too well, given how I ended up living years later, too ashamed to bring myself to let anyone know.

With her sister gone to Ireland, Kathy was left to deal with the final two weeks of her pregnancy alone, which no doubt gave her a taste of her own possible future as she struggled to look after her sister’s four children in an already cramped, three-bedroom flat. After almost a week, Mummy decided her mother’s condition was perhaps not critical, and returned to help Kathy with a pregnancy which, since she couldn’t phone to find out, might already have been over. It wasn’t, but within days of her sailing home I was born, already six days late, and even on the day of labour in no hurry to arrive. Maybe I realised that it wasn’t the greatest ticket to come in on, and needed the extra coaxing: labour began at 2 a.m. and ended just the right side of midnight the following evening.

A few days after my birth another telegram arrived. Again it was from their father, this time even more urgent than the first. Their mother had had a second stroke, almost immediately after Mummy had left Ireland. ‘Critical’, the telegram said, and this time it didn’t leave it to Kathy’s conscience to do the right thing – it ordered her home. No excuse on earth would have done.

Mummy rang our ‘uncle’ Brendan and asked him to go down to her mother and monitor the situation. She arranged for him to call her every night at the same time, on the red telephone box outside the pub where she bought her ‘Irish’ cigarettes. The reports that came back can’t have been good.

Kathy stayed with me as long as she could. I was hastily christened, keeping her surname rather than taking Mummy’s married name, the name all the other children in the family had. After all, if Kathy was going to be coming back for me there was no reason for me to have any name but hers. Ten days after I was born she flew home to Ireland to take care of her mother. There was no other option.

I can’t imagine what it must have taken for her to do that. What pain she must have been in, before she shut her emotions down, taking care of her mother in that sealed-off world, without a telephone to contact her sister to find out how her baby was doing. Maybe wondering how angry my uncle was at my still being there week after week, and having no one but her married lover to tell her secrets to. Not wanting her mother to die, but knowing too that that was the only way she could go back to get her baby. As her mother’s illness worsened – her mind slipping away into dementia, her behaviour more and more childlike by the day – maybe Kathy saw it as some kind of divine retribution, left there washing, dressing and feeding her, nursing her mother instead of the baby she had left behind in England.

As a little girl I heard various versions of what Kathy had planned to do as soon as her mother died or was well enough to leave. In them all she was going to come back to get me. But my grandmother didn’t die, though she didn’t recover either. Her condition deteriorated and Kathy stayed there looking after her at home for another nine years.

Meanwhile, I grew up in London with my aunt and uncle. And from then on my aunt was the only mother I knew or wanted. And the only one I ever called ‘Mummy’. I called my uncle ‘Daddy’ too, just like my four elder brothers and sisters, and ‘the girls’ Stella and Jennifer, who came along a few years after I arrived. There were seven of us children in all.

‘Don’t worry,’ Mummy would always whisper after their drunken – often violent – rows, when my uncle would threaten that he wanted me gone by the time he got back from work, ‘I won’t ever let him send you away, or let anyone come to take you from me.’

‘Cross your heart and hope to die?’

‘Cross my heart and hope to die.’