Читать книгу Street Kid: One Child’s Desperate Fight for Survival - Judy Westwater - Страница 9

Mealtimes would often be difficult at the orphanage. Sister Bridget always broke out in a rash of irritation with me at my refusal to eat anything milky and slimy, a hatred which must have stemmed from Mrs Epplestone’s force-feeding me porridge. One lunchtime, I sat with my bowl of rice pudding in front of me, nervously moving it around with my spoon. I’d tried to get some of it down, but it was no good. Every time I put some in my mouth I began to retch, so I’d had to give up. Sister Bridget was sitting next to me, watching me like a hawk.

‘Judith, will you stop this nonsense this minute,’ she said. ‘I won’t have you wasting the good Lord’s food.’

I tried again but couldn’t help gagging.

‘Eat it now! We will not have waste here.’

She watched me a moment then snatched the spoon out of my hand. ‘Open your mouth!’

She shoved the spoon in my mouth. I felt immediate and violent panic and had an instant and terrifying flashback to the time Mrs Epplestone had held my head back by the hair and almost suffocated me shovelling porridge down my throat.

I began to choke violently, my eyes streaming. Then I gave one mighty heave and threw up all over Sister Bridget’s arm. There was a moment of absolute quiet in the hall. You could have heard a pin drop. The children sat, frozen in horror. Then Sister Bridget stood up sharply, breaking the silence, and grabbed me by the hair.

‘Look what you’ve done, you filthy child!’ Her voice was almost a scream. ‘What have you to say?’

I had absolutely no idea what I had to say and couldn’t speak anyway as I was still gasping for air.

Sister Bridget then repeated, ‘What are you going to say?’ and tugged my hair.

I shook my head and this seemed to make her anger boil over even more.

‘Grateful!’ she shouted. ‘That’s what you must say, “I must be grateful.”’

She then turned on the other kids. ‘Why can’t any of you ever be grateful?’

With that, Sister Bridget dragged me out of the room by my hair and down the corridor to the chapel.

‘You’ll stay there until bedtime,’ she said. ‘And you’d better ask God’s forgiveness. He doesn’t like ungrateful little girls.’

I was left alone in the cold, musty chapel with its dark pews and scary painting of Christ, pale and bloody on the cross, eyes rolling back in his head. I sat there waiting for a thunderbolt to strike me.

After this, I was desperate to get out of the orphanage. I longed to visit the shop. In my imaginings, Auntie Gertie would be at the counter, or stirring the ice cream, when I came in and would look up and smile. Then she’d wrap her comfortable arms around me and call me her poppet.

Two days later, as soon as lunch was finished, I slipped out of the orphanage grounds. I felt I could breathe again. But when I entered the shop, that good feeling drained away. There was no Auntie Gertie smiling a welcome. Instead, a strange woman I’d never seen before was behind the counter. I stood for a moment, staring at her. Then she said ‘Yes?’

I turned and ran out of the shop and down the street. As I slipped through the gate of the orphanage grounds, I felt even more lost and hopeless than before.

There was a group of us at St Joseph’s who were known as the ‘forgotten’ children. We were the ones nobody ever came to visit, and on those Sundays that were visiting days it was particularly hard for us. Those kids with parents or relations who came to take them out for the day were in a fever of excitement for days beforehand. After chapel, they’d go and sit bolt upright in the visitor’s room, washed and scrubbed and smart as new pins in their Sunday best.

Some of the women who visited in their flowery dresses came with soldiers in uniform. There was a lot of laughing and perfume and kissing and then, as the room emptied out through the morning, there was a sad hour or so when one or two kids usually remained, uncollected, the excitement having leaked out of them bit by bit. It was worse for them; at least us forgotten kids weren’t expecting anyone, so our hopes hadn’t been raised and dashed cruelly in that way.

In my second year at St Joseph’s I got to know a boy called Tony. He was a forgotten kid like me, but his mum must have sent the odd message to St Joseph’s because on the day I first spoke to him he was sitting on the steps outside, waiting for his mother to arrive. It was nearly teatime when I saw him there in his Sunday best, trying to look unconcerned. It was clear to everyone that his mum wasn’t going to come that day, but Tony wasn’t going to give up.

I went and sat next to him. I didn’t normally choose to go near the other kids, preferring to keep a wary distance. But now I felt an urge to comfort the boy which was strong enough to override my natural fear of people.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked. I knew the answer, but couldn’t think of anything else to say.

‘Waiting for me Mam.’ Nothing else was said but I sat there for a while with him.

Tony and I didn’t have much to do with each other at St Joseph’s as the boys and girls were separated at all times, but we played with each other when we were sent away on our summer holiday, and delighted in inventing stories in which the nuns had their comeuppance and the kids were the heroes.

Every August, the orphanage children would be taken for a two-week holiday to Freshfields, near Southport. It was a college connected to the Order and was situated very close to the beach. You could see the sandhills from the grounds.

The rules were much more relaxed at Freshfields and boys and girls were allowed to mix with each other. It was there that Tony and I played hide-and-seek in the dunes and jumped in the water to see who could make the biggest splash.

Tony was a rebel, which I think is what drew me to him. He often tried to escape the orphanage and would be brought back in a taxi by one of the nuns. He knew everything that went on at the orphanage. What we spoke about most that second summer at St Joseph’s was the Child Migration Scheme.

One of the most devastating things to happen to many children in Catholic care homes in the 1950s was the migration scheme to Australia. The British Government had decided to send children of ‘good British stock’ to populate the country, and the Catholic orphanages were major players in the scheme. It all sounded very exciting to us, but we didn’t know that many children were being sent off without their parents’ permission; some of them were even told their parents were dead when they couldn’t be found.

A couple of weeks before our Freshfields holiday, a man had visited the orphanage to tell us about the migration scheme. He set up a projector in the girls’ room and showed us slides. He made the whole thing sound like a wonderful adventure.

‘You’ll have loving parents there,’ he assured us. ‘And you’ll go on a big ship, and have lots to eat. You’ll live on great big farms and you’ll have a wonderful time. It’s always sunny in Australia.’

Tony was sceptical. He knew much more than I did about what was really going on. I’d seen children lining up to have their medicals outside the sick bay before leaving on a coach; but Tony had actually been down to the Liverpool docks and seen the kids being herded onto the boat.

‘They allowed some of us to go to wave them off,’ he told me as we sat in the lee of a sand dune, sheltering from the wind. ‘They were all lined up and there was a man in a uniform at the bottom of the gangway, checking them all off on his list. And there was a black kid he wouldn’t take.’

‘And what happened then?’

‘Well, the kid was pushed back with us and another one taken from our lot who’d just come along to wave goodbye. Glad it wasn’t me.’

‘I think it would be fun to go,’ I said. ‘At least you’d be getting out of St Joseph’s.’

My wish nearly came true. I was on the list to go to Australia, being one of the forgotten kids. However, Father Gary, our chaplin, was sent out to find as many parents as he could and managed to track down my mum and dad. My father, rather than run the risk of my mother taking me back, and, still locked in his stubborn need to revenge himself on her in any way that he could, said he was now in a position to look after me, that he was getting married to Freda and that they were emigrating to Australia. He’d have a stable home for me now, he assured the authorities.

The next thing I knew, Sister Cecilia had sought me out just before bed one night. She told me that I was to be sent back to my father the next day.

‘You’re a fortunate girl, Judith,’ she said. ‘Not many of the children here have a parent who is willing to take them back. You’d better thank the Lord Jesus in your prayers tonight.’

I nearly fainted with shock. But they hurt me. How could you send me back?

Sister Cecilia ignored my stricken face. ‘You’ll be going to Australia and your father’s getting married. You’re a lucky girl.’

I didn’t know where Australia was; I didn’t have a clue. But I knew Freda, and I knew him.

In bed that night, the terrifying truth really started to sink in, and I couldn’t sleep a wink. I thought of the orphanage as my home now. Although I’d had some horrible times there, I knew the routines – what stairs to go up, what door to go out of – and was used to life at St Joseph’s. Now I was being told, ‘Off you go, we’re done with you here.’

I feel like one of the jigsaw pieces in the playroom that’s got into the wrong box; that doesn’t fit into any picture.

The next morning I waited, tired and listless, with my bag. Sister Cecilia had brought me the things Auntie Gertie had packed for me three years ago. It felt strange to see my pink dress and shoes again. I didn’t suppose they’d fit now. There was also a teddy bear I’d never seen before. It had a little card tied to it and I saw that it was from Mrs Craddock. She must have given it to Auntie Gertie to give to me, but the nuns didn’t allow any children to have their own toys so had put it away. Susie, as I christened her, was instantly my most treasured possession.

A young woman I’d never seen before arrived to take me away. She wore a camel-coloured coat with a belt and a pair of red shoes. She must have been a social worker. We sat on the top deck of the bus. I was fidgeting and biting my lip with nerves.

‘Will you sit still, child!’ she said to me impatiently. I tried to stop wriggling my legs but carried on chewing my lip.

I had no idea how far we were going or where my father and Freda lived now, but our bus journey only lasted about ten minutes. When we got off, the place looked very bleak. We set off across a bombed-out piece of land, which I later learned was called ‘the Croft’, in the direction of a row of terraced houses. The street had big cobblestones and the social worker had difficulty walking across them in her red shoes. I saw that some of the houses were missing from the row, and there were heaps of rubble which hadn’t yet been cleared up. We stopped outside a small two-up, two-down house on the end of the row with a green gas lamp outside it.

The woman knocked on the front door. My father opened it and she pushed me in ahead of her. She was obviously impatient to get away.

‘Here’s your daughter, then. Let us know if you have any difficulties.’

My father thanked her and she left. Then he turned to me. My reaction was instantaneous – a crippling fear that made my knees almost buckle under me. Nothing, I realized, had changed and, although three years had gone by, I felt no less afraid of my dad than when I was four years old. The old trauma surfaced so fast as I stood there in the hall that I shrunk away from him, filled with horror that I should be having to share a house again with this dark figure who’d inhabited my every nightmare like a malevolent ghoul.

‘Freda’s through there in the kitchen. Go and say hello.’

On shaky legs I walked into the front room and put down my bag. I walked through the room feeling as if I was on my way to the gallows, such was my trepidation at meeting Freda again. She had managed to create a respectable family room, complete with Singer sewing machine and piano, but I knew that she would be just the same vicious snake as she always had been. I walked through to the back kitchen where I could hear her at work.

Freda was washing dishes at a square, brown pot-like sink and she turned when she heard my footsteps on the flagstone floor.

‘So, you’re here. Grown a bit, I see,’ she eyed me critically. ‘You’d better go up and put your bag in your room.’

Upstairs there were two more rooms. Freda led me to the one on the left, containing a single bed with an eiderdown, which was a change from my old sofa and blanket at Patricroft. There wasn’t a light in the room, just a table, on which had been put a meccano set.

‘You are never, ever to touch that,’ Freda told me in a harsh, emotionless voice. The toy, I knew, was the one memento she had of the son she’d deserted.

‘And don’t think for a moment that I want you here. You’re a lying, thieving little sneak and always will be.’