Читать книгу A Child Called Hope: The true story of a foster mother’s love - Mia Marconi - Страница 5

Mum’s parents were from Ireland and they ended up in Catford, south-east London. Where they lived was badly bombed during the Blitz, so their home was surrounded by shattered buildings, but they knew they were the lucky ones. They still had a home.

It might have looked ugly, but the children loved clambering over the piles of rubble, looking for little bits of shrapnel. What they were desperate to find was a real bomb – that was the prize – but thankfully, they never did.

Mum’s father was soft and gentle and genuine, but drink did not agree with him. If he’d spent the night in the pub he could turn violent, and on those occasions my grandmother, like so many women, would be on the receiving end of his frustrations.

Nan became adept at hiding the bruises and honestly gave as good as she got, using a big heavy frying pan to defend herself. Sometimes they could both be seen with black eyes, their hats pulled down over their faces in an effort to disguise their battle scars, but the neighbours knew what was happening. It was happening to some of them too.

Friday night was always dangerous, because the minute Granddad received his pay packet, he would head for his local, The Black Swan, or ‘The Mucky Duck’ as they nicknamed it. He would stay there, laughing with his pals and drinking brown ale, until he got hungry and wanted his tea. When he opened the front door, Mum would be on red alert. As soon as she detected the tell-tale smell of brown ale on his breath, she knew that it would all kick off and there would be a fight. That was her cue to run upstairs, wake her younger brother Patrick, get him up and walk him round the streets until she thought it was safe to go back home. Sometimes close neighbours (whom they called Auntie and Uncle, although they were not related) would invite them in. As many of them knew the situation, if they saw Mum and Patrick walking round late at night, hand in hand, they would let them sit by the fire until things calmed down. Mum said that there was many a time when she and Patrick fell asleep in someone else’s house.

Despite the fact that he drank and became violent, Mum idolised her dad, and he never hit his kids. He wasn’t always drunk and he loved my mum and Patrick. She remembers sitting on his knee and feeling the rough stubble on his chin. She also remembers how he would sometimes bring home little bits of shrapnel for their collection and, very occasionally, produce a bag of sweets from deep in his jacket pocket.

My granddad was an ambulance driver during the war, so he must have seen some terrible things after the bombing raids. People with their arms and legs blown off; bodies unrecognisable because they had been blown to smithereens; dead children and babies. No wonder he drank; there was no counselling in those days to help him deal with the horrors, just brown ale.

All that horror wasn’t the reason he committed suicide, though. It was a year before the end of the war and the rumour was that my nan was having an affair, and someone who was out to make trouble sent Granddad a poison-pen letter telling him so. Not long after that, he took his own life. He was depressed, he’d had enough, and he put his head in the gas oven. A lot of people said it was a cry for help and that he had not really meant to kill himself, but he did.

Mum remembers the day he died as though it were yesterday. She was seven and Patrick would have been six at the time. They walked in from school, hand in hand as usual – they always held hands – and opened the door to find the house eerily quiet. Not only was it quiet, but also the smell of gas was so strong it was choking. She opened the door to their tiny kitchen, looking around for a welcoming, familiar face, only to see her father slumped on the floor, lying absolutely still next to the cooker and clutching the letter in his left hand. The oven door was open and the gas was turned on full. Mum knew enough to turn off the gas and open a window, then she touched him, but his hands were as cold as ice. She called his name, but he didn’t answer. He was dead. Panicking, she froze, pulled Patrick to her and fell to the floor next to her dad, not knowing what to do. Occasionally she whispered, ‘Dad, Dad,’ and shook him but got no response. She has no idea how long she sat there, but she stayed where she was, rocking Patrick, in shock, until her grown-up sisters came home from work and gently lifted her off the floor.

After that, my nan, Hetty, suffered a nervous breakdown. You can only imagine the torment she must have suffered. No one ever knew whether she was having an affair, but in those days, as far as everyone else was concerned, there was no smoke without fire. My granddad knew that; he felt shamed and he took his own life.

Nan blamed herself for his death and the guilt would have been terrible, particularly as she was a Catholic. Suicide is a sin for Catholics. Their belief is that my granddad would have gone straight to Hell, and Nan would have felt responsible for his eternal damnation, no matter how often she went to church and confessed to the priest, and no matter how many times she said the rosary. And though the family tried hard, they never found out who sent that poison-pen letter.

So it’s not surprising that Nan fell apart after Granddad’s death. And from then on, she could not look after Mum and Patrick. They were the youngest of five, and there were ten years between them and their older siblings, but it still meant that my grandmother had five mouths to feed on her own, and even though the older ones helped, it was hard work.

The family decided it would be best if Mum and Patrick were evacuated, so they were sent away to live with foster carers in Wales until things calmed down. It was 1944, the war was still raging and there was always the threat of a direct hit from German bombs. Nan welcomed that for herself – she thought she deserved it – but she could not bear the thought that if her children stayed, God could punish her by taking them too.

Wales was a million miles away from London in those days and my mum and Patrick arrived at the railway station with their gas masks round their necks and brown luggage labels tied to their coats with their names and dates of birth written on them. They were bewildered and bereaved, and every comfort they had ever known was back among the bombsites of Catford.

If luck, or God, had been on their side, their temporary family would have been welcoming and kind. They dreamed they would be placed with a baker and his wife who served sticky buns for tea on a Sunday, but the couple they ended up with were cruel and uncaring. Their favourite punishment was to lock them in the garden shed for minor misdemeanours. Mum said it was dark, damp and full of spiders, with shadows everywhere, and she was terrified in there. Her main concern was protecting her younger brother, who was just as scared as she was. To pass the time, she made up stories for him, happy tales about ice cream and lollipops, of unexploded bombs and sunny days in Catford. She very quickly learned not to cry – they both did, because if they cried they would be made to stay in the shed until they stopped.

Both children were totally dazed. It was as if they, too, were being punished for their dad’s death. That whole episode in Mum’s life was a massive trauma, one she never forgot, and it ultimately shaped the person she became.