Street Kid (6 page)

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.’

Chapter Six

T
he next morning, Freda showed me what my duties were. She took a cold and savage pleasure in pointing out every little thing that needed to be done, jabbing her bony finger at a hospital corner on her bed-clothes, or a crevice in the iron range that needed to be cleaned just so. She had her other hand on her hip and spoke to me as if I was an idiot.

So began my new life as a seven-year-old slave in the town of Hulme.

The next morning, as soon as it was light, I got up, dressed and went downstairs. Freda and my father were still in bed and the house was chill in the grey light of early morning.

First, as instructed by Freda, I emptied the ash dust out of the grate in the kitchen fireplace, then cleaned the fire back and put aside the partially burned pieces of wood to use later. Next, I let myself out of the back door, loaded two buckets with coal from a heap in the yard, and chopped the large logs of wood into smaller pieces with an axe.

I struggled to remember what Freda had told me and kept getting it wrong or would forget something. She’d
instructed me how to lay the fire and I knew she wanted the coal positioned in a certain pattern, but I couldn’t remember if the smaller pieces should be put on first or the bigger. I felt hot and panicky. If it wasn’t just so, I knew that Freda would hit me.

After laying the fire, I scrubbed the hearth, then cleaned the ashes off the mantelpiece. By now, I was exhausted but I still had to lay the kitchen table for breakfast and fill a kettle with water so I could wash up last night’s pots and pans.

A week later, black and blue from Freda’s beatings, I started at Duke Street School; and then things became even tougher for me, as all my chores had to be done before I left.

Freda had a part-time cleaning job in the flat behind the local newsagents. She wasn’t home when I got back from my first day at school. She’d given me a key to let myself in with which I wore around my neck on a string. I soon realized that she didn’t like to be there when I was doing all the afternoon chores; so if she wasn’t working, she’d be down at Lewis’s or Pauldines, Manchester’s big department stores, shopping with her friend Madge or having tea round at her house.

I let myself into the house and quickly got to work. I started by sweeping the floor, then washed the lino in the front room with a scrubbing brush and a cloth. Next I went upstairs. I was dreading going into Freda and Dad’s room as I felt at any moment that one of them might walk in. I quickly made the bed then hung up any clothes strewn about the room. Lastly, the worst job of all.

I bent down and slid the chamber pot out from under the bed. It was full of urine and, to my disgust, there was excrement there too, the smell of which made me gag.
I carried the heavy pot across the room and down the stairs. A couple of times, on the way to the outdoor toilet, urine slopped over the sides so that, after scrubbing and drying the pot, I had to get a cloth and bucket and wash the stairs too.

My next job was scrubbing the kitchen floor. If Freda so much as noticed one little pool of water left between the uneven flags I’d get a beating. Everything had to be perfect. She’d slapped me across the face the previous week when I’d failed to do up the buttons on her blouse before hanging it up. I didn’t even know that was how it was meant to be done, but I knew excuses would be pointless.

Freda also delighted in inspecting every nook and cranny in the range, knowing that it was the hardest job to do well. If she’d been cooking something that had boiled over, like a rice pudding, I had to use wire wool to clean the brown, crispy gunge from the oven and it made my fingers bleed. Once a week, I had to black-lead the range – the previous day it had taken me an hour and a half.

I’d just finished my chores by the time Freda got home. The moment I heard her open the front door and put down her bags, my heart began to pound. I stood hiding behind my bedroom door, hardly daring to breathe and listening with every nerve-end to the sounds she made as she moved around the front room and kitchen inspecting my work.

Then came Freda’s steps on the stairs. I heard her walking round her bedroom checking everything. Then she came back out onto the landing outside my door.

Please go downstairs. Please let everything be perfect!

Freda opened my door. ‘Get out from behind there!’ Her voice was icy. ‘You’ve been lazy again, you idiot girl. Can’t you ever do anything right?’ Freda’s mouth was set in a
hard line and her eyes were slits of fury. Snatching the library book I’d been reading, she lunged at me, whacking me across the head with it.

‘I’m confiscating this, and maybe then you’ll learn.’

Somehow, with an unerring instinct, Freda knew that this would be the worst punishment of all. In taking my book, she took away my one source of escape.

I lay on my bed dry eyed. I could almost feel myself pushing down the emotion I felt and locking it away in a cold, secret box in my chest. However beaten or bullied I was, however great the injustice done to me, I could never speak up to defend myself and I’d never learned to cry. I discovered from the moment I was born that tears would never bring comfort or caresses, only harsh words. And now here I was, seven years old and never daring to speak in case I got hit across the mouth for it.

I lay there in the dusk, watching the gas lamp’s greenish glow cast strange shadows on my wall and feeling the cold box in my chest weighing me down, a huge, hard lump that could never be eased by tears.

My father would get up after I’d left for school in the morning, have his breakfast and leave for work. He had a job as a fitter and turner at a company called Three Six Five. He was a vain man, obsessed with maintaining the new veneer of respectability he and Freda had created, and didn’t want to be seen coming home in his overalls like the other blue-collar workers. He hated the idea of our neighbours knowing he was a fitter, so he changed into his normal clothes at work before coming home.