Читать книгу Street Kid: One Child’s Desperate Fight for Survival - Judy Westwater - Страница 7

As Freda’s beatings grew worse, so did my health.

I was never warm, and felt like I was fighting an endless battle against the cold. Nor do I ever recall feeling full. After a few months, the cheese triangles and meagre scraps I’d taken from the bins took their toll on my body, which grew stick-thin and covered with sores. I slept badly as the abscesses on my back were oozing yellow pus, which made turning over agony.

I’d wake in the morning feeling the sharp pain of hunger, which would persist every minute of the day. Once I found a plug of gum that someone had chewed and stuck to a window sill. It was grey and hard but I was so desperate that I peeled it off and put it in my mouth. I chewed it for a bit but it tasted of nothing; then I swallowed it. Soon afterwards I overheard two boys talking in the street.

‘Did you know that if you swallow gum it gets tangled in your lungs?’ one of them said. ‘And then you can’t breathe and you die.’

I could almost feel the horrid, stringy stuff tightening in my chest and had to force myself to breathe in and out. I can’t tell anyone I’ve eaten it, so I’m going to die, I thought.

One Sunday evening, a few days after Freda had beaten me with the curtain rod, Dad was home and he and Freda were having a row downstairs. Freda always wanted me out of the way when my father was around, so she had sent me up to bed early without any tea. I could hear my dad’s voice booming under the floorboards of my room, and Freda’s tone was as bitter as an acid drop.

I wasn’t ready to go to sleep – my hunger pangs wouldn’t let me – so I sat on my bed feeling restless and ill. It occurred to me then that there might be some food I could steal in one of the boxes stacked up round the bed, so I started to rummage through them. Then I stood on one of the boxes to get a better look. It tipped a bit as I shifted my weight and suddenly I lost my balance. To stop myself falling, I grabbed instinctively at the pile of boxes next to me. At the top were stacked a few tins of ice-cream wafers and one of these toppled over and fell to the ground with a loud clatter.

My heart almost stopped. Then I heard the voices downstairs go quiet and, a moment later, my father’s heavy footsteps on the stairs. I looked down and saw that the tin had come open and broken wafers were scattered everywhere. Oh no! Don’t let them catch me! I started scrabbling at the wafers on the floor, cramming them into my mouth in a desperate attempt to swallow the evidence.

The door flew open and my father stood there with Freda. They looked at me as though I was no more than a piece of dirt on the floor.

‘See what I mean? She doesn’t do anything I say,’ Freda spat at him. ‘Every bloody day I have to put up with this!’

Now she’d got started, it all spilled out – every vindictive little piece of nastiness Freda had been storing up.

‘… and she’s always stealing … sneaking around getting the neighbours to stick their noses in … and dirtying her clothes when she knows I don’t have time to run around cleaning up …’

My dad heard this torrent of poison, all the while looking at me.

‘You little brat!’ He took a step forward and grabbed my arm, pulling me up. My legs almost buckled under me. ‘You want something to eat? I’ll give you something to eat.’

Dad dragged me downstairs and sat me on one of the kitchen chairs. Then he took off his braces. I didn’t understand at first why he was getting undressed but then he leaned over and stretched the braces around my body, tying me to the chair so I couldn’t move my arms. Then he crossed to the kitchen alcove and pulled out a loaf tin and a spoon from a cupboard.

‘You want food, do you?’ I stared back at him, mutely. ‘Answer me! Do you want some food?’ I didn’t know what to answer, but I knew that whatever I said wouldn’t stop him now.

Dad squatted down at the hearth and picked up the coal shovel. He scraped at the back of the fireplace until there was a pile of soot in the grate and then he shoveled it into the loaf tin. I knew now what he was going to do.

‘Open up!’ He held a spoonful of soot in front of my mouth. I didn’t open my mouth at once so he jabbed the spoon between my teeth and forced it in.

My mouth was already dry from the wafers. I tried to swallow, but the soot was clogging the back of my throat. It was bitter and made my eyes stream; then it got into my windpipe and I choked.

My dad forced a second spoon of the stuff into my mouth.

‘Eat up, brat! There’s plenty to go yet.’

When he couldn’t get any more soot in my mouth, my Dad untied me. My chest was heaving violently and my eyes were watery and unable to focus. All I could see through the blur was the terrifying face of my father, ghoulish white with eyes like two black coals fixing me with a cold and psychotic hatred. He reached for his braces and whipped me hard across the head with them before dragging me back up the stairs and flinging me on to my bed.

‘I hope that’s taught you a lesson.’ Then, pointing at the mess on the floor, he said, ‘You can clean that up in the morning.’

I lay there, barely able to move my arm to cover myself with the rug. My mouth was sore and bleeding. Sleep came as a blessed relief, but when I woke the next morning the soot still stung my tongue as a terrible reminder of the night before.

Two days later I woke up in the middle of the night feeling very dizzy. The ear that Freda had clouted, bursting my eardrum, was running with pus and my hair was stuck to my face with the fluid. My chest hurt and there was a hot, hard lump on the side of my neck which was making it difficult to breathe. My body was burning up and my throat felt too parched to cry out. It was like being in a bad dream when you try desperately to scream but no sound comes out.

I tried to climb out of bed, but my legs gave way and I fell onto the floor. I crawled across the room in the darkness and when I reached the bedroom door tried to raise myself up to open it, but I didn’t have the strength to push myself up with my arms. Freda must have heard me fall out of bed because a moment later I heard her trying to open the door. My body was in the way so she couldn’t get in at first. When she managed to push her way in and saw me lying there, I heard her draw in her breath sharply, then run out of the room and down the stairs. She must have gone outside to call an ambulance from the public telephone box in the street because the next thing I knew, a man was lifting me over his shoulder and carrying me down the stairs.

I was taken to a large hospital, where I was put in a steel cot. When the nurses tried to hold me down I struggled like a wildcat, so they had to tie my arms to the bars of the cot with bandages so they could dress my sores. Being tied up meant only one thing to me, so I punched and fought to get away, convinced I was going to get a beating.

Eventually, one of the nurses managed to soothe me. I looked into her soft brown eyes and felt my terror ebbing away.

The next day they took me into surgery and made cuts in my neck and arms and inserted tubes to help drain the big lump below my ear. One of them was threaded all the way down to my stomach. When I came to, I was back in the steel cot, covered from head to toe with bandages, and my arms tied to the bars again. I must have slept through the rest of that day and the next night, but don’t remember anything.

On the second night, as I lay in my steel cot, arms tied and face covered, balaclava-like, with bandages, I tried to pierce the darkness with my eyes. I could hear the other children’s breathing and occasionally they would moan or say something in their sleep. But there was also another noise, which sounded sinister, as if something ghostly was roaming the room: swish, swish, swish, pause, then swish, swish, swish again. I felt like a fly trapped in a web waiting for a hairy, black spider to come and eat me. Swish, swish, swish. The noise was very close now, just the other side of my cot. Then I saw a face looking down at me and realized with relief that what I’d heard was simply the nurse’s starched uniform swishing against her legs as she patrolled the ward, pausing to check on her patients as she went.

When I was well enough to look around, I saw that I was in a big square room with white walls and a brown lino floor. The sun was streaming in through two tall windows, and along one wall was a row of four steel cots. Facing them were four beds for the older children. In the middle of the ward was a blue table and eight small chairs.

The gentle nurse I remembered from the night they brought me in was talking to me. ‘I know you’ll like being here between Christening and Lemon.’ She pointed at the kids in the cots on either side of me. What daft names, I thought. It was only later when another nurse came along to change my dressings that I realized that the children were in fact called Christine and Leonard. It was hard to hear anything clearly with my right ear.

Having my dressings changed was horrible. Only the gentle nurse removed them slowly and carefully. The others all assured me in their no-nonsense way that it was much less painful if they ripped them off really fast.

‘There, that wasn’t too bad, was it?’ I hated that false chirpiness and the fact that they clearly didn’t want an answer from me.

My first meal was a bowl of disgusting brown liquid that looked like dirty water. It must have been beef broth, or something similar, but tasted of nothing. The nurse spooned it into my mouth. ‘Come on, just a few more mouthfuls and then you can have jelly and custard.’ The spoon was very painful as my lips had cuts on them, so she brought a straw and I sucked up the lukewarm liquid with that. I really wanted the jelly and custard so I sucked away at the foul stuff until it was finished.

Four or five times a day a nurse would put each of us little ones on our potties. I’d be lifted out of my cot, still attached to all my tubes. A few days after I’d arrived, the nurse on duty forgot about me half way through her potty rounds. She’d been distracted by one of the other kids, a naughty red-headed boy who was often in trouble, and had forgotten to come back to me. I waited and waited and after an hour or so thought to myself, I’m just going to have to go. I wasn’t used to asking for help so it didn’t occur to me to do so now. I set about trying to get free instead. I wriggled and wriggled my wrists in their bandage ties until one of them came free, then I managed to untie the other. I tried to get out of the cot but my tubes were preventing me, so I took them out of my neck and arms and grabbed hold of the bars to pull myself to my feet. The cot was quite high off the ground, easily taller than me, but that didn’t stop me clambering over the side and dropping to the floor.

On wobbly legs, I made my way across the ward to the door I’d seen the older kids use when they needed the toilet. I was sitting there when I heard a huge commotion, a high-pitched raised voice and then a loud click-clack of shoes on the floor. A moment later, my door was flung open and the duty nurse stood there, extremely furious.

‘What are you doing, you silly, silly girl. Don’t you know you might have died?’

I stared back at her, feeling shocked. I could have died? It was only at that moment that I realized how severe my injuries had been.

Later that day, a group of people walked into the ward. As they approached my cot, I realized with a sickening jolt that one of them was my father. He was a head taller than the rest and as our eyes met I felt quite breathless with fear. He fixed me with a look which said, If you so much as utter one word I’ll kill you. Stiffly, he walked over to my bed, accompanied by my doctor, two nurses and a man and woman wearing dark suits. My favourite nurse slid the side of my cot down, untied my hands from the bars and started gently removing the bandages from my head.

Sensing my alarm, she spoke to me soothingly. ‘Don’t worry, pet. We’re just going to have a little look and see how you’re doing.’

The other nurse, who was wearing a dark-blue uniform and cap, then spoke. ‘Judy, can you tell us how your head and face got hurt.’ I shot a nervous look at my father and when I saw his cold grey eyes boring into me, I shut my mouth tight.

Then the man with white hair took a step closer. ‘Do you remember how you hurt your legs, Judy. What happened?’

I shrank back from him and when I didn’t speak, the man turned to the doctor and said, ‘Can she hear me?’

The doctor then came closer and bent his head down. ‘Can you remember anything at all, anything about how you got hurt?’ I pressed my lips together and shook my head.

At that, my father stepped in, looking like he’d had well enough. ‘How many times do I have to tell you?’ he said. ‘She rode her bike down the hill and crashed into the school railings.’

I couldn’t tell the others what I knew: that the school wasn’t down a hill, and that I didn’t have a bicycle. But I sensed that the people round my bed didn’t believe his story anyway.

The white-haired man spoke again, this time to my father. ‘Mr Richardson, I’m afraid that during our investigations your daughter will have to stay here in hospital.’ My father stiffened a little but didn’t say anything.

Then it was over and they turned to go. My favourite nurse stayed with me and gently put my bandages back and tied my hands again. ‘You’ll see, Judy. We’ll have you as good as new in no time,’ she said with a smile.

Other than my dad, I didn’t have any visitors for a couple of weeks. Every day, after lunch, there was a queue of people waiting to be let into the ward to visit the kids. We could see them through the window that separated our room from the corridor. They stood there making faces and blowing kisses through the glass. I remember Leonard’s family coming to visit him in the second week. When he spied his parents he stood up in his cot, calling out and waving at them with both hands. Then his mum and dad came in and they swooped Leonard up and gave him a big cuddle. Later, when they’d gone, Leonard showed me two oranges they’d given him, holding them through the bars of his cot. I wished I could have had one.

Although I wasn’t really expecting anybody to come and see me, I still scanned the queue every day to see if I had any visitors. I’d pretty much given up when one day I saw Uncle George and Auntie Gertie smiling and waving at me through the glass. I felt so warm and happy, it was as if the sun had suddenly poked its head out from between the clouds. I beamed back at them from my cot. By then, my bandages had been taken off so I could sit up.

‘How’s my little injun?’ George asked, having settled himself on a chair next to my cot. ‘Feeling better?’

I told him that I was. Then Auntie Gertie leaned forward. ‘You’ve got a bit of something on your cheek, poppet.’ I’d only recently finished lunch. ‘Here, spit on this.’ She held out a hanky and I spat on it and she rubbed at my face. ‘There, all clean now,’ she said.

They didn’t stay long and when I saw Uncle George stirring in his chair and glancing at his watch I turned to Auntie Gertie. ‘Can I go home with you?’ I asked. ‘Please!’

‘No chuck, not yet. You have to stay here a bit longer.’ She stroked my hand. I saw a look pass between her and George and I knew that my question had upset them both. Feeling too old and powerless to do anything made them feel unnerved and I didn’t think they’d come again to visit. The thought of me, small and vulnerable, in my hospital cot pleading for a home would, I sensed, become a painful memory that they’d want to push away.

When they left, they blew kisses until they were out of sight. I had an immediate pang of homesickness when they left, but later on I felt comforted by their visit. I’d been sensitive to the fact that the other kids had been wondering what was so wrong with me that no one cared enough to come. Now I’d shown them that I did have friends after all.

I must have been in hospital another week before Auntie Gertie and Uncle George came again. This time it was to take me home. As I sat on one of the little blue chairs in the ward, I wondered where I would be taken. I hoped I might be going back to the Roberts’ house, but instead we went to the shop. I was relieved that there was no sign of Freda or my father when we got there; and, as the flat was empty, Uncle George and Auntie Gertie stayed over that night to look after me.

My father and Freda came back late in the afternoon the next day. I slipped quickly to my room and from there heard the row raging downstairs. The Roberts were really angry and I could pick out almost everything the four of them were saying.

‘We’ve been horribly deceived by you,’ Uncle George was saying. ‘We thought you were a trustworthy pair but you’re wicked, just wicked.’

‘Oh, and I suppose you know everything,’ Freda spat at him. ‘Mrs Craddock makes bloody sure of that.’

‘It wasn’t just her, Freda.’ It was Auntie Gertie’s turn. ‘Your fancy man’s wife came round to ours and told us every last detail. That poor little kiddie.’

My heart turned to ice at Auntie Gertie’s words and my thoughts were spinning round and round, out of control. Mum came. She knew I was here. Why didn’t she take me home with her? I felt my heart breaking. Mum, you must have known how bad it was with him. Why didn’t you save me from them? Don’t you care for me at all?

Over the next couple of days, a stream of serious-looking visitors came to the house. From under the table I could see men with polished brown shoes and pinstriped trousers pacing the living room, and ladies with court shoes and nylon stockings sitting with their legs crossed, gloves and handbags placed close to their heels. They asked my dad and Freda a lot of questions in serious-sounding voices. At some point, Mrs Craddock was called in for her pennyworth. She used the ‘chicken’ word a lot and clucked her tongue in disgust as she reported how badly Freda had treated me.

The next thing I remember, I was on my own with Auntie Gertie and she was putting on my shoes and cardigan. The flat was quite empty. My dad and Freda had gone.

The bell sounded at the shop door. ‘Here she is,’ said Auntie Gertie, taking my hand and ushering me through the shop. A young nun was standing just inside the door. ‘Now Judy, you be a good girl and go with this nice lady.’ She gave me a little hug and patted my back. It never occurred to me that this was a final goodbye and that I wouldn’t be coming back.