Whispers in the Dark (4 page)

Those first days in the workhouse broke my heart. Were it not for what happened later, I would say they were the worst days of my life. Even now I am taken back to them in dreams and awake to find my pillow wet with tears. An old woman weeping a child’s tears. And yet, why not? We all carry the child in us to the grave. And beyond.

A sharp-nosed, sharp-tongued woman whom I soon came to know by the name of Mrs. Moss led my mother and me to a cold, tiled room where we were bustled into cubicles and told to strip. The clothes we had come in—poor enough rags by then—were searched, labeled, and stored away in a tin chest.

My mother had held on to a few scraps from our past, bits and pieces she had bundled into a cheap cloth bag. There were photographs, a lock of my father’s hair, the wedding ring she had refused, against all promptings, to sell or pawn, a Bible given to her by her mother, a handful of letters tied with ribbon, letters my father had written to her and that she would never let me read, some dried flowers, a locket with my father’s photograph inside. All were snatched from her and piled inside the chest.

Years later, when I came to retrieve our belongings from that chest, the ring and locket both had gone. Mrs. Moss had broken the law in the first place by admitting to the workhouse a pair with such treasures to sell. The very possession of such items meant that we had not yet been dragged down to that very lowest level of poverty, that state of utter indigence that the Poor Law commissioners had decreed to be the necessary condition of any admitted to the palatial comforts of the workhouse.

Our former lives were stripped from us forever, at a single stroke, as though they had never been. I had brought a small rag doll with me, whom I had named Annabel, and who had been my constant companion from an early age. In spite of my loud protests, Annabel was torn from me and tossed with everything else into the smelly chest.

A cold bath with carbolic soap followed. Then we were made to sit on hard stools while our hair was cropped. Does this seem harsh? It was harsh. You must remember that the workhouse was not the forerunner of our modern welfare state. It had not been set up to ease the misfortunes of the impoverished or save them from starvation. Its purpose was to force the idle poor to seek outwork, however mean or hard or dangerous or ill paid. Fear of the workhouse was the goad. And a very effective goad it was.

I had always had the most beautiful copper hair, hair that fell below my shoulders, almost to my waist. It had been washed and brushed every day by Hannah, and I had been promised that when I was older, I might wear it up as a sign that I had become a lady. Now I felt cold shears slicing it from my head, and I wept bitterly to see it fallen on the ground, no longer part of me.

I remember the expression on my mother’s face while all this was going on, a look of infinite despair, infinite hopelessness. None of this made the least impression on Mrs. Moss, not my tears, not my mother’s despair. She had seen all that before, all that and worse. What were a few more tears, a few more looks of anguish to her? From the day I entered that terrible place to the day I left, I never heard her address a kind or cheering word to me or to anyone else.

We were given coarse woolen frocks to wear, and hobnailed boots with iron tips in which I found it hard to walk. You could always tell a workhouse child by the way she walked, they said, because of the boots. The frocks were dingy white in color, with long blue stripes running from top to bottom. They were waistless, shapeless bags that came down to our ankles, and looked as though they had been cut and sewn by the handless victim of some terrible accident.

Nothing was bright or pretty or soft in that place, there was nothing to lift a fallen heart. No pictures on the bare, whitewashed walls, no flowers on the high windowsills, no smells but those of boiled cabbage, carbolic, and disinfectant. And our hearts had fallen so far, so very far, we could not imagine them ever being raised again. I have been married, I have had children and grandchildren, I have lived a life of reasonable comfort; but my heart has never really lifted since that moment. That moment and what followed.

I thought of my brother Arthur, all alone in the men’s wing, my gentle brother with his fair hair shorn. The thought chilled and wounded me. If his terrible dreams should come, I thought—and what other dreams could a child hope to have in a place like this?—where would he go, who would he turn to? Even now I shudder to think of it, what dreams he may have had in that place. The awful thing. . . The awful thing is that I think I know.

My mother and I were parted for the rest of that day. I learned later that they took her directly to a large, cold room full of other women in the same drab dresses, all sitting on hard benches picking oakum. That was still a common occupation in many workhouses, and one that went on in a few, I think, until they shut the places down for good in 1930. Later I spent some time in that room myself, though I was spared at first on account of my age.

She told me afterward how hard it had been and showed me her hands, what had become of them, all callused, raw, and bleeding. They made no allowances for those who were unaccustomed to physical labor or whose hands had not already been hardened by what it pleased them to call honest toil. They gave my mother a bundle of old ropes cut into lengths, most of them hardened with tar. Her quota for that day was a full three pounds, and even by supper she had not half finished. The idea was to unpick the ropes, turning them back into loose fibers that would then be used for jobs like caulking ships. What work it was. What mind-numbing, senseless, unending labor. How my mother hated it. How it destroyed her.

They sent me directly to the workhouse school, a separate place hard by the main building. By that time, most workhouses sent their children outside to the state schools, but ours was one of the exceptions, so I had to buckle down and learn to be a schoolgirl under conditions far from ideal. Until then, my education had been a wholly private affair. Both Arthur and I had been tutored at home by a tribe of day governesses, not a few of whom were of dubious merit. They did not last long, coming and going as the season drove them, or the state of their pockets, or the availability of interesting men. My mother did not think it necessary or economical to engage a live-in governess, so near were we to the city and a constant supply of half-educated young women in search of genteel employment.

The schoolhouse had been divided into two quite distinct halves, one for boys, the other for girls, with a high wall between. Not even at playtime were we allowed to mix. Of all things during those years, it was what I most longed for, to see that rule broken or suspended, that I might see Arthur once more, perhaps even exchange a few quick words with him, so I could tell mother how he looked, how he was growing.

The girls’ section—I imagine the boys’ was much the same—consisted of a large room about ten feet high and twenty feet long, with small square windows painted over with whitewash. They painted them like that to stop us looking into the adult yard, which was directly underneath. It was stuffy, winter and summer both, for the windows were always kept tightly shut, and the only ventilation we had came through little holes under the ceiling and rows of zinc tubes with small perforations in them, running from wall to wall.

As I was brought in, the teacher looked up with a scowl on her face. I shall never forget her. Miss Golightly was her name, and she used to make a pun of it: “My name’s Golightly, but I’ll not go lightly with you.” And the punning would be followed by a beating with the short leather rod she carried in her pocket.

I was hurried to the front of the class, where I stood, shivering, struggling to hold back my tears.

“Who are you, girl? What’s your name?”

I could say nothing, I was frightened to death by the teacher and the eyes of the other children all fixed on me, as at some Roman spectacle, scenting blood.

"Stop sniveling, child. Sniveling won’t get you anywhere. You’re not here to snivel, you’re here to work.”

“I . . .” I began, but I could get no further.

The teacher reached out for me with a long, practiced hand and grabbed me by one ear, pulling me hard toward her.

“My name’s Golightly, but I go lightly with no one, d’you hear? You’ll speak when you’re spoken to, jump when you’re told to jump, sit when I say sit, and move your bowels when I say it’s time and not before. If I catch you talking or laughing or playing behind my back, you’ll regret it for a long time afterward. Ask these other girls, they’ll tell you all about me. They’ve known me long enough, they’ve known the back of my hand and the little stick I carry.”

She took the truncheon from her pocket and waved it menacingly in my face.

“I undertake to use Old Martin”—that was her name for the stick, we never could tell why—“a dozen times a day. He’s never short of occasions for work, and I'm ever ready to put him to good use. If you’re a second late to class, it’s Old Martin you’ll answer to. If you get your sums wrong, you’ll find it easy enough to count his strokes on the palm of your hand. Now stop that infernal sniveling, take that empty place by Annie Greenup, and keep your arms folded. We’ve wasted time enough.”

And the lesson continued. I took in none of it, nor of that afternoon’s, nor the next day’s, and I received a few whacks from Old Martin in payment for my inattention. There was no one to sympathize with my plight, not even my mother, for we were scarcely allowed to meet and had to sleep in different dormitories. And even when we did meet, she was so wearied by her own exertions and so immersed in her own reflections that she had less and less of herself to give me. From the first day I had to start standing on my own feet.

The other girls were no comfort in the beginning. Quite the opposite. My accent betrayed me, that and my soft hands and pale skin. They could tell at once how far I had fallen to be with them. But they had no sympathy for my fate, for it only served to remind them how far above them I had once been, how cosseted a life I had lived when theirs had from the beginning consisted of little but gruel and hard blows. Why would any of them step to my defense or suggest ways in which to ameliorate the conditions under which I was now forced to live?

In time I fell into the cruel routine of that place. All that cold winter, a loud bell woke us at seven, but from March to September we had to rouse ourselves at five or suffer the consequences. We had prayers at half past seven, then breakfasted on gruel and coarse bread. From eight I was in school, and my mother in the shed. Dinner came at twelve: a little bread and cheese on Sundays, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. On Tuesdays, it was meat and potatoes, the best meal of the week, on Thursdays a thin soup with bread, on Saturdays bacon. Then back to school. Supper was at six: more bread and cheese. And everything washed down with plain water, summer and winter.

I remember once that an old woman—a woman older than I am now, I think, or so she seemed to me then—managed to get a friend from outside to bring her a pot in which to brew a little tea from time to time. But Mrs. Moss discovered it and broke it into tiny pieces, scolding the poor old woman for this outrageous breach of regulations. Since then, I have never forgotten how important are the small comforts of life.

After supper we had more prayers—and how we all would have preferred a cup of tea to any of that—and were sent straight to our dormitories, children and adults alike. I can still remember the sound of the key turning in the dormitory lock at eight o’clock sharp, and then the interminably long nights that followed. I had my own dreams, of course, every night without fail. Nightmares preparing me for the nightmare that was yet to come.

Time passed very slowly, but it did pass. The other girls grew to tolerate me by degrees and, in the end, even to like me a little—a few of them anyway. My best friend was Annie Greenup, that same fellow sufferer beside whom I had been made to sit on my first day in the classroom and whose desk I always shared from then. We became allies, Annie and I, against Go-Hard Golightly and Old Martin, covering for one another’s errors where possible, exchanging knowing looks behind the teacher’s sturdy back. Annie taught me more than any of my governesses or the righteous Miss Golightly ever could have done. She had always been poor, she knew she always would be, and she knew all the tricks that made poverty bearable.

She was as good as an orphan herself, she told me. Both her parents were alive, or so she thought, but she had no idea where they were. On one occasion, she said her mother had run off with a sailor, leaving her and her brother to fend for themselves. The next time she spoke about it, the sailor became a soldier who had decamped to India, where her mother had followed him. And once—speaking the truth this time perhaps—she said her mother had died of consumption.

Her father was a drunkard whom she scarcely knew. She had spent most of her short life in and out of workhouses, and she dreaded the times her father came to take her out as much as the times he left her in. It was a long time before she told me why. In those days, the sexual abuse of children by their parents was something no one talked about. Annie had been abused for as long as she could remember. The workhouse offered her her only respite. Her eyes were filled with the hurt of it; soft, wounded eyes always on the edge of tears.

Annie and I were roughly the same age. She had no idea when her birthday was, but on an official form she had once been described as “eight years of age,” and every year since then she had added another year to her computation. Her brother Bob was a little younger, and it was this similarity in our conditions that brought us together most, though she and Bob were far from as close as Arthur and I had been.

Arthur. I saw him only once during the lime I spent in the workhouse. That was about a year after we first went in, in the week before Christmas. The local vicar had arranged a carol service for the workhouse children. He was a new man, fired with zeal to do the Christian thing, and we had seemed to him a worthy enough cause. When we were told of the plan, I knew there might be a chance to see Arthur, even speak to him. I had a lot to tell him, and there was so much I wanted to know. For over a fortnight I scrimped and saved, begged and borrowed in order to have something to give him as a Christmas present. It wasn’t much, just a lead soldier one of the girls had smuggled inside and which she sold to me for a high price paid in food from my dinner plate. But it meant the world to me, that soldier, thinking what it would mean to Arthur.