Punished: A mother’s cruelty. A daughter’s survival. A secret that couldn’t be told. (9 page)

D
uring the summer holidays in 1958, the year I was eight, Mum began packing all our belongings into boxes, suitcases and tea chests.

‘What’s happening?’ I asked.

‘None of your business,’ she said brusquely. ‘You’ll find out.’

My first, instinctive fear was that she, Dad and Nigel were moving somewhere else and they wouldn’t take me with them.

‘Are you going away?’

She gave me an exasperated look. ‘We’re all going, if you must know. We’re moving house. We’re leaving Bentley Road.’

‘Where are we moving to?’

‘I’m not answering your questions,’ she said. ‘It’s because you’ve been so naughty that we have to move. God told me that you stole sweets from the corner shop down the road.’

This was nonsense, of course. I would never have dared. I braced myself for punishment for this supposed crime but none was forthcoming. Mum seemed distracted, and didn’t pay us much attention.

The voices in my head were working overtime. ‘You’re going to the home for naughty children,’ one said. ‘No she’s not, she’s going to a very old house beside water.’ ‘It’s far away, and no one lives nearby.’ ‘There’s an old well in a lane by the garden.’ ‘Maybe they won’t take her with them.’

It was hard to know what to believe.

I asked Dad if I was being taken to the children’s home and he gave Mum a sharp look and snapped, ‘No, of course not.’

It was obvious that the atmosphere was very strained between them. They were frequently snapping at each other, and I could hear raised voices at night as I lay in bed. The reasons for our move were never explained to us, but I sensed there was something odd about it. Hardly anyone I knew had moved away – it was much more common to stay in the area you came from and when you wanted a bigger house, you only went a couple of streets away. Now we would be further away from our families and from Dad’s work and, in the event, Mum lost all her dressmaking clients because it was just too far for them to travel for fittings.

I had a feeling that one of the reasons for the move was because Mum didn’t like Aunt Edna knowing about her punishment of us kids and that we had to get away from a place where someone knew the truth about what went on behind closed doors.

Arrangements for our house move continued. The ornaments, pictures, mirrors and rugs disappeared, along with most of my clothes and toys. On the morning the big, grey removal vans turned up outside, all that was left in the kitchen was one bowl each for Nigel and me to have cereal and a few cups and teaspoons so that Mum could make tea for the removal men.

Whirly was put into a cardboard box for the journey and his hutch dismantled to go in one of the vans. Nigel and I were sent into the back garden out of the way, and I sat beside Whirly’s box, whispering reassuring words in case he was scared. One by one our sofas, beds, tables and chairs were carried out to the vans. Aunt Edna came into her back garden to say goodbye to us over the fence, and she had tears in her eyes.

‘You two will look after each other, won’t you? Remember, I’ll be here if you ever need me.’

‘Thank you, Aunt Edna,’ I replied politely, though I had no idea how I would ever reach her if I needed her. ‘Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye, sweetheart.’ She gave me a final kiss on the cheek and hurried back inside her house.

I felt nervous, but at the same time my head was buzzing with voices, all telling me different things, and I had a sense of excitement about the trip.

When everything was packed, Mum, Dad, Nigel, Whirly and I got into the car and waved goodbye to 39 Bentley Road. There was a sniffing sound and, looking over into the front seat, I realized Mum was crying. She was dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief and desperately trying to control the sobs that slipped out. It was quite shocking. I had never in my life heard her crying before.

‘What’s wrong, Mummy?’ I asked tentatively.

She didn’t answer, so after a minute or so Dad said, ‘Your mum’s a bit sad to be leaving all her old friends behind. That’s all.’

I pondered this for a while. I’d never known any of Mum’s friends. She didn’t have visitors except the ladies she made clothes for who came for fittings, and she never went out in the evenings. I’d never heard her chatting on the phone, the way Nan Casey did when we stayed there. Somehow I couldn’t imagine Mum with proper friends.

Dad tried to make desultory attempts at conversation but Mum was not responding. She seemed quite cross with him – cross and sad and distant.

Nigel tried asking again, ‘Dad, where are we going to live now?’

He hesitated before replying, and I butted in. ‘I know where we’re going.’ The voices in my head had been telling me all about it for days now. ‘It’s a very old cottage and there’s some water just beside it. There aren’t many other houses nearby but there is a big garden with a well in the lane beside it. That’s where we’re going to live.’

Dad’s foot jerked on the accelerator and the car lurched. ‘Did you tell her that, Muriel?’

Mum turned round to glare at me. ‘How did you know that? Who have you been talking to?’

I whispered my reply, nervous about their response. ‘It was the voices in my head.’

‘Don’t lie!’ Mum snapped. ‘I’m fed up to the back teeth hearing about your bloody voices.’ She turned to Dad. ‘She must have overheard us talking about it, that’s all.’

No, I didn’t, I thought, but I was smart enough not to say it out loud. I had only spoken of the constant chatter of voices in my head a few times, without thinking. It had become a normal state of affairs to me – this varied commentary that went on in my head – and sometimes I forgot that it was best not to mention it. It used to drive Mum into a rage so I’d learned to keep quiet about my invisible companions.

We seemed to drive for ages but eventually we turned off the main roads into a setting that was much wilder and more rural. Straggling hedges grew by the roadside, separating us from wide-open expanses of fields. Up above, the sky seemed a brighter shade of blue than it had been closer to town, and wispy trails of cloud floated past. Nigel had fallen asleep, as he always did on long car journeys, and I sat quietly looking out the window and listening to my voices, which were very loud and almost continual that day.

‘We’ll play with you,’ they said. ‘No one else lives nearby but you’ll always have us.’ ‘Don’t tell your Mum about us. She doesn’t understand.’

I wasn’t sure if any other children heard voices like me. Nigel said he didn’t. While Mum and Dad preferred it if I didn’t talk about them, Nan Casey didn’t mind hearing about them and had recently told me the voices I heard were those of angels, which was a very nice thought. I got the impression that maybe she had heard them as well.

Suddenly there was a thud and Nigel and I were nearly jolted off the seat; of course, no one wore seat belts in
those days. Dad had turned on to a narrow, bumpy lane full of ruts and potholes. We turned a bend and there were four cottages: three small, pink-painted ones on the right, and a big, dilapidated one on the left exactly like the picture I had in my head. I immediately knew that was where we were going to live.

‘Here we are, kids,’ Dad said in a falsely jolly voice. ‘This is Shernal Green, your new home.’

An old woman appeared in the doorway. ‘Look!’ I shouted in excitement. ‘Nan Casey has come to welcome us.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ Mum asked sharply. ‘There’s no one here.’

‘Oh,’ I said, disappointed, because as we got closer I could see it wasn’t Nan after all. ‘It’s another lady.’ She was wearing a long, black dress and a white apron, and there was a lace-trimmed bonnet on her head. ‘Who is she?’

Dad parked the car outside the gate. ‘Who do you mean, Lady Jane?’ he asked, peering round to see where I was pointing.

‘There!’ I gestured. ‘She’s standing in the doorway.’ As I watched, she turned and walked back into the house, right through the closed front door. I blinked hard.

‘There’s no one there.’ Dad frowned. ‘Are you seeing things?’

‘Did you see her?’ I asked Nigel, and he shook his head.

Just then I heard more voices saying ‘The new people are here – but have they got children?’ and I gave a little shudder. I was used to the voices and I wasn’t scared of them any more after my chat with Nan, but who was the
woman who had walked through the door? Why could no one else see her? ‘She used to live here,’ a voice told me. ‘A long time ago.’

The cottage had crumbling, redbrick walls, a red, tiled roof, lots of windows and a huge chimney-breast at either end. It looked as though it hadn’t been inhabited for a long time, because the gate was hanging off its hinges, the garden was overgrown with nettles, and tall weeds were releasing white fluffy spores that floated through the air.

As we climbed out of the car, I saw the canal. About ten feet wide, it ran right alongside the house and through the isolated little hamlet. ‘There’s the water, just like I said,’ I couldn’t resist pointing out.

Dad had pulled a key-chain from his pocket. He selected one and walked up to the wooden porch to try it in the front door. It didn’t work and he had to try every last key on the chain before getting the right one. I could tell it was making him a little bit bad-tempered. Mum stood back with her arms folded, obviously in a bad mood herself. I went to get Whirly’s travelling box from the boot and he looked up at me as if to ask what was going on. Where were his hutch and his carrot tops?

Inside the house there was a large, musty hallway and I immediately felt as though the atmosphere was creepy. It was certainly very rundown, with crumbling plasterwork, wobbling banisters and a pervasive smell of damp. There was a lounge with an old fireplace to the right of the hall and a dining room to the left, and the kitchen and utility area ran right along the back of the house. Mum showed us our bedrooms and I was pleased that mine had a view of the canal from its window.

The furniture vans arrived and Nigel and I were sent out to play in the garden so the men didn’t trip over us as they carried everything inside. It was a big garden, about an acre and a half, and when we walked into the lane outside, in front of the other cottages across the way, sure enough there was the old well I’d been told about by the voices. Some planks were balanced over the top but Nigel and I pulled them out of the way so we could drop stones down.

‘One elephant, two elephants, three elephants, four elephants,’ we recited before we heard the ‘plop’ way down below that told us the stone had hit the water.

There was a huge clump of hollyhocks at the top end of the garden and I eyed them warily because Dad had told me they were poisonous. Further round, behind the kitchen, there was a kind of enclosure that I later found out was an old pigsty. It was about ten-foot square with a corrugated tin roof, a mud floor and wooden picket fencing round about. The roof was tall enough that I could stand up in it – just – but Nigel had to stoop or he bumped his head.

Walking further, we spotted a huge water butt that collected run-off water from the roof and gutters. It had a little tap at the bottom so we played with that for a while, splashing each other and shrieking with laughter. Nigel had a thing about taps. Back in Bentley Road he’d often get into trouble with Mum for turning on taps to play with the water, then forgetting to turn them back off again.

We’d been told very firmly that we were to stay in the garden and not wander out near the canal, but the grown-ups were so busy that day that no one seemed to be keeping
an eye on us. We’d never seen a canal close up before and here was one just at the end of our garden. Glancing back to make sure no one was watching from the house, we slipped through a small gap in the hedge. There were cycle tracks along the grass verge, then huge clumps of brown bulrushes before the water’s edge. We sat down on a patch of grass and looked into the water. Much of it was overgrown with lime-green weeds that strained this way and that with the movement of the water. Between the patches of weeds that extended from either bank there was a dark blue-grey channel that looked very deep. As we watched, a silvery fish came up to the surface, gulped a fly and dived into the depths again.

It was very, very quiet. Just beyond the other cottages, there was a road but no cars drove along it. We couldn’t hear any traffic sounds at all. There was a very distant mooing of cows, the buzzing of summer insects, the wind in the bulrushes, and the muffled voices of the men carrying furniture into our new house.

‘Do you like it here?’ Nigel asked me.

‘Not sure,’ I said. ‘It’s a bit creepy.’ I couldn’t put it into words but I felt instinctively that I would be less safe in such an isolated spot than I had been in the neat semidetached house on Bentley Road, where we were surrounded by neighbours and with Edna next door.

‘The garden’s nice and big, though. And maybe Dad will let me go fishing in the canal.’

‘Maybe,’ I said doubtfully. A voice in my head was warning me something about Nigel and the canal but I couldn’t make it out.

‘Do you think we’ll still see Nan Casey?’ he asked, striking terror in my heart.

‘Course! Why wouldn’t we?’

‘I think she’s in the wrong direction. We’re much further away from her house than we were before.’

I hadn’t thought through all the repercussions of a house move. But perhaps it also meant that we were further from Grandma and Grandpa Pittam. I wouldn’t mind that at all – I hated going there so much, and I was never allowed to escape the awful task of making Grandpa ‘happy’.

But even if that was one good outcome of the move, we were still far from everything we knew.

‘How will we get to school?’ I asked.

‘We’ll have to start a new school,’ Nigel guessed.

‘I didn’t see any schools on the way here.’

‘S’pose there must be one somewhere.’

We sat gloomily for a while.

‘Who was that lady you saw at the door, Nessa?’ Nigel asked eventually.

‘I dunno, I think maybe she used to live here.’

‘Is she alive?’

I hadn’t thought this through properly but now of course I could see that she wasn’t, because she had walked through a locked door. ‘No,’ I told him.