The Wedding Dress Maker

by Leah Fleming

  The telephone rang in the hall passage. The bairn stirred but it was Angus who answered the phone. He stood nodding in the doorway, holding on to the lintel, his face drawn and ashen.

  ‘What now? Not Netta? Is it bad news?’

  ‘Bad enough… I didna want to worry you but I went down to register the bairn as we agreed while you were at the hospital. I didna have the right stuff, certificates and such. I told them what I knew about the wedding and the father’s name and him being killed and the mother very ill. Allan Laing accepted me as next-of-kin and said he could make enquiries for the details under these special circumstances.’

  ‘So what’s the bother?’

  ‘They cannae find her marriages lines. There was no Hunter wedding there on that Saturday or any other day that month.’

  ‘You’ve got the wrong dates then or the wrong place.’ Peg could feel her heart thumping.

  Angus shook his head. ‘They checked. It’s no registered anywhere in Scotland.’

  ‘Oh, dear God! That can’t be right, surely? She has to be married or else…’

  ‘Aye, if she’s not then our grandson’s a bastard.’

  May 1949, Saturday Morning

  The holiday was over. It was time for Netta to return to Yorkshire. Time to pack up the van, to make a flask and sandwiches for the long journey, look out the AA map, pump up the tyres, check the indicators were working and say her farewells. She hated this moment above all others, seeing the look of relief on Peg’s face as she shoved a package on to the passenger seat.

  ‘I think these’s what yer looking for. Safe journey.’

  ‘Mind and stop when you get tired, Netta, and keep the radiator topped up. I’ve put a bottle of water in the boot,’ said Father, sucking on an empty pipe. Gus was jumping up and down, waving. His fist was clenched tight around the half crown she had shoved secretly into his palm when he’d told her his throat was hurting. “’Bye, Auntie Netta!’

  She headed down the bumpy track, not looking back, but in her mirror she could see him running behind her to open the gate. He waved her off enthusiastically and she turned towards Kirkcudbright and the A75 southwards to Dumfries. Crossing over the River Nith to the Carlisle road, Netta turned off right at St Michael’s church and took a sentimental detour past the hospital. She parked her car and made for the open section of the beautiful grounds, strolling into the parkland and the rockery, sitting on a bench to gather her thoughts.

  Not many people had such affection for their lunatic asylum, this strange alma mater with its own coat of arms and mottoes. What was the maxim behind its philosophy now?

  ‘Absence of occupation is not rest.

  A mind quite vacant is a mind distressed.’

  The treatment she’d suffered in there had served her well enough in its way. Yet her stay was like some half-remembered dream, like pieces of a jigsaw she could never quite assemble, for some of the bits were missing. She looked up at the sun-lit grandeur of the buildings. Park Royal was one of the most famous institutions in Scotland: ‘A Ritz among Madhouses,’ some wag had once joked to her. Within these walls rich and famous alongside poor and homeless – housed separately, of course, in different buildings amongst the grounds – found respite from an unsympathetic world.

  Here began her first exile, her trial of tears, those amber days. Why had Park Royal become such a safe haven against the terror of her illness and the harshness of those outside who didn’t understand it? Netta smiled to herself, recalling all the babies she had made there.

  3

  Amber

  ‘Colour of the dancing child.

  Frozen life trapped in the sun’s kiss

  Worn for energy

  Too much orange drains the mind.’

  Snapshots from The Royal, 1945

  There was still a merciful mist of forgetfulness veiling those first months at Park Royal like a sea haar on a grey shoreline. Everything was bleached and threadbare like over-laundered linen, as tasteless as bland vegetables; vague memories of drugged limbs dragging themselves round the grounds, the occasional blue flash, the smell of burning rubber and taste of acid on the tongue. There must have been a progression of sorts from acute ward and restraints to a single room with an iron bed where sometimes Netta felt she was sent to bed like a naughty child for some misdemeanour. ‘What am I doing in this place?’ said her own voice through a mist.

  Few visitors appeared: the Reverend Mackay brought news with his blessings around the beds; Father came once on her birthday in June, looking awkward in this confined space in his new heather tweed jacket smelling of bracken and open moors – the one ordered from Wee Alec behind his back. Netta could remember that incident but not her own baby’s face. Angus was his usual reticent self when she begged him for news. He produced one precious picture of Ray held by Peg under the apple tree but said little. It was kept proudly by Netta’s bedside locker to prove she wasn’t dreaming him up and shown to everyone who entered the room.

  There was no sense of time here and she was unaware of the victory celebrations, fireworks and bells ringing all over Dumfries. The seasons crawled by barely noticed: summer arrived when the upper windows were opened and the brown blinds drawn against the light. The gardens were crimson and gold with bedding. There was the sound of racquets from the tennis courts where the army officers who were billeted in their own hospital quarters challenged each other to long tournaments. Autumn soon followed. Kitchen windows misted over; there was the smell of bonfires, walks among the scrunchy leaf fall, queueing for the cinema in the ballroom theatre in a fug of cigarette smoke. Then the spicy smells of a kitchen preparing for Christmas celebrations.

  Her every mood swing was observed by nurses and reported to Dr Goldberg who was monitoring her progress. Over the months Netta had graduated from raving lunatic to drugged bed rest and then been allowed to shuffle along the corridor, deemed fit for occupational therapy and distraction.

  She found her fingers wouldn’t obey her orders. They were thick and swollen with stiff joints. She sat in the occupational therapy room watching the other patients struggling with basket work and weaving while the craft teacher guided slow fingers, chivvied restless patients into some task.

  She had taken a careful inventory of all Netta’s interests and skills but Netta still refused to look at a needle and cotton or knitting. It was a line of stuffed dolls that finally took her eye: dolls of all shapes and sizes, raffled and sold for funds and charities. Teddy bears and golliwogs, knitted soldiers in guards uniform, sausage dogs and draught excluders, dolls with cloth faces, puppets on strings hanging limply, and party dolls in gypsy costume. She fingered the baby dolls with matinee coats and lacy bonnets.

  ‘Would you like to make one of these, Jeanette?’ asked the therapist, gently guiding her towards the table. Netta hung back shaking her head. ‘I can’t, I already have a baby somewhere, you know…’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure you have, dear, but why not make one to give some poor wee orphan who has nothing?’

  ‘I can’t… my fingers won’t work.’ Netta’s mouth was dry and her lips would barely move. Her head buzzed with the electric shock treatment. Everything was in slow motion.

  ‘Let’s just start simply then, stuffing these teddies with old rags and kapok. No needles or sewing for you yet. Let’s get those hands moving again… See, Lizzie is showing you how.’ Lizzie lived in the same house block. She grinned and nodded. This was work for hands, not minds, Netta registered but her mind seemed far away from her body.

  She did notice that the teddies looked bare without a scarf or bow tie so she asked for some scraps to shape into mufflers. Her eyes never left the baby dolls. If she couldn’t have her own baby she’d make herself one for company.

  Her first attempt was misshapen and lumpy and she threw it on the floor in disgust. Once long ago, in a distant time, she had made a wedding dress. Why were her fingers so disobedient and her head so full of fluff now?

  She looked at the creature on the
floor and tears welled into a fit of weeping. You shouldn’t throw babies down, they might get damaged, so Netta gathered it up into her arms and hugged it tightly, putting it in her pinafore pocket for safekeeping. It was the first-born of many babies.

  Bumpy went everywhere with her after that: into the gardens for walks; to the canteen to show the other girls. He sat on her bed at night and she cuddled him in her arms, crying for the little boy in the picture who was out there somewhere, crying for herself, so obviously abandoned; crying for Rae to come and rescue her. And still nobody came.

  The stuffed babies lost their appeal and the lure of materials for dolls’ dressmaking was her next venture. It was like being a child all over again, choosing offcuts of shiny plain sheeting and net curtaining to make dolly brides with veils. Colours, especially bright colours, dazzled her eyes so her outfits were palest pinks and ice blues, creamy whites and beiges.

  Netta could not face the adult dressmaking classes – the rows of machinery, the responsibility of not wasting precious cloth, terrified her and she fled down the corridors. The door was open in the art department and the smell of paints and oils wafted up her nostrils. Here a mixed group of students, soldiers, men and women, were working quietly, bent over their boards. It was a peaceful scene until one soldier, who was scribbling furiously all over his paper with chalks, began to chunter to himself aloud.

  Netta paused behind him, quietly examining the tiny cartoonlike figures squiggled all over the scene. The officer’s hands were shaking: hands strangely mottled brown and white like a piebald pony. He turned round. ‘What are you staring at, young lady?’

  ‘There’s a lot going on in your picture,’ she commented.

  ‘Of course there bloody is!’ he screamed. ‘It’s an execution… can’t you see? And that’s my pal, Bigsy, getting a bullet through his brain!’

  ‘I’m sorry… how awful. When was this?’ She sat down beside him, staring intently at the horrifying detail with which he had drawn the event. ‘Were you there?’

  ‘Of course I bloody was! Why else does the flaming thing run through my head like a newsreel? Cowards, we were, standing to attention watching the whole damn’ show!’ Beads of sweat were pouring off the young man’s face. His skin was mottled coffee and cream, white and suntanned in patches.

  ‘I’m so sorry but you were prisoners too so what could you do?’ It felt good to be calming him down.

  ‘We did abso-bloody-lutely nothing but stand to attention, pardon my French!’ He put his arm round his sketch like a child at a school desk hiding work from a copycat. Netta moved away.

  ‘Would you like to join us?’ asked the art teacher gently. ‘There are plenty of paints and chalks. Come and join us.’

  She picked up a piece of paper and charcoal and began to etch a shape, then stopped. ‘I can’t… It’s been such a long time.’

  ‘Would you like to copy something? It’ll get your eye back in focus. Or go outside and find some shape that interests you? Go on… have a try, you might enjoy yourself!’

  With a chair and board Netta wandered out into the bright autumn afternoon feeling like a child again with a packet of crayons and a blank page to fill, not sure if her hands would express what she was seeing all around her.

  Park Royal Hospital was no ordinary asylum, no dreaded place spoken of in hushed tones as the repository of miscreants who needed to be kept out of sight for their own good, but a baronial mansion with a fine central tower. She thought it looked more like a home for one of Sir Walter Scott’s heroes with its red sandstone bricks edged with golden stone lintels. This was no fortress up a long drive lined with dark oaks; there was no studded oak door to imprison the inmates. It was an open place where patients were free to mingle and walk to take the air in all weathers. Only when she looked up could she see that some of the round galleries were criss-crossed with metal grilles.

  At its great heart was a huge parish church which was filled each Sunday, a place of contemplation and solitude for those who needed to find some peace. For those in need of company and music there were recitals and a choir, but best of all were the parkland and gardens, open vistas with green hills beyond, reminding her of home.

  Her mind was moving out from the cocoon of her room in Denny House, out from occupational therapy and shock treatment – dreadful though that had been to endure – out once more to the world beyond the hospital. Yet inside throbbed such a loneliness, a yearning to be with her baby, that it tore away her careful composure, reducing her to floods of stifled weeping which she was desperate to disguise. If she showed her weakness when would she ever be sent home? Would she always be stuck with a label with ‘mental’ written on it?

  The drugs trolley still came round regularly and the patients were dosed like children. On the days when Netta was given the latest shock treatment, she soon learned there was no breakfast and waited with dread to be wheeled down the long corridors, looking up at the fine scrolled ceiling until the last moment, trying to avoid seeing the table with the straps and black box on the trolley. She was laid flat, numb with terror, as out of the corners came those dark mysterious figures holding equipment, looming over her. Then there was nothing, for days afterwards just headaches and blanks. Now the fug in her head was clearing and the taste in her mouth fading. Her course of treatment was complete.

  As she sat by herself, sketching the outline of the tall church tower, her fingers clutched the charcoal tensely at first and then, as she relaxed, her hand flowed over the page filling all that her eyes could see. Not bad! she thought to herself, and to her surprise noticed that the usual black morning cloud which always floated above her head had lifted like a balloon set free. Her feet were no longer so full of lead and fresh air was stinging her cheeks. One of the young officers in the art class was leaning on the wall, dragging on his cigarette, watching her. She sensed his shadow falling over her sketch and fakes of ash wafted down on to the paper.

  ‘Not bad,’ whispered a deep voice in her ear. ‘Now who was it said a church is best viewed from the outside, a public house from the inside, and a mountain from the foot? I wish I could draw like that.’ Netta looked up at a shock of sandy hair, caught a whiff of tobacco breath. The voice was Scottish pan loaf, softened round the edges by years away from its native source. His uniform was smart enough but his shirt was undone and his trousers unpressed. Here was a washed out young officer eyeing her efforts like a judge at an art show. ‘Not one for God-bothering myself but that’s a fair attempt. Bit of a student, are we?’

  ‘No, this is my first attempt for years. Can you get out of my light? Thank you. It’s bad enough putting pen to paper without having an audience.’

  ‘Sorry, just trying to be encouraging. Some of the stuff in there is awful. Had to get out. Fancy a stroll?’

  Netta stared up again with surprise. He looked quite harmless, his face drawn and thin with sunken cheeks. His looks were certainly not the sort to grace any recruiting poster. ‘Just round the block, then. I’ve done enough of this.’

  They walked in silence, each kicking up a flurry of dried leaves, pausing now and then at fences and railings to admire the freedom of open hills across the valley.

  The fresh air on Netta’s cheeks felt good. Gradually she was coming back into possession of her body again. Even her monthlies had returned and she was beginning to feel normal, less weepy, wrung out and flattened. The officer stopped and lit two cigarettes, handing her one. Netta shook her head. ‘I don’t smoke.’

  ‘You ought to, it’s good for the old nerves and the waistline. Doctor’s orders. Give it a try.’ She puffed out of politeness but it made the dryness in her mouth even worse and she spat out the tip. ‘No, it’s choking me.’

  ‘Suit yourself. Just trying to help. What’s a girl like you doing in a joint like this?’ He was trying to mimic Humphrey Bogart’s accent, badly. Netta was instantly on guard.

  ‘I could ask you the same?’ She smiled sweetly and he shrugged his shoulders.


  ‘I’m just an old soak… too much of the hard juice. Told me I needed a bit of a rest cure. Getting bored, if you want to know the truth. I’m as dry as a bloody prune now.’

  ‘Are you staff?’

  ‘Do I look like staff? You don’t want to know about my escapades. I’m just another washed out soldier of fortune. Black sheep of the teetotal Stirlings, if you must know. There’s always one who takes a dram too many. Andrew Stirling, at your service, ma’am.’ He made a mock bow.

  ‘This war has sorted a lot of us out, one way or another. I’m Netta Hunter, wed, widowed, babyless in just a year. Been here so long I can’t even remember my own child’s face.’

  ‘That’s a shame for you. Hubby in the army… What show was he in?’

  ‘D-Day. He fell at Caen. I’ve not found out where yet.’

  ‘They got a terrible packet there. I was involved in one of the Forward Stations. I went right though with the poor sods, patched up, rested and sent back into the fire. Takes its toll, sending men to their deaths. No wonder some of us end up in the loony bin. In the end I couldn’t decide if I was GB, B or going BM myself, so they decided for me and sent me to this Ritz to sort out my bad habits.’

  ‘What’s a GB?’ asked Netta as she tried to keep pace with his long strides. ‘Slow down, there’s no bus to catch!’

  ‘Sorry! GB means going barmy, a B means you’re getting batty, and BM you’ve gone Bloody mental. Pardon my French.’

  ‘Then I was a BM, first class, I suppose. I had my baby and don’t remember much at all after that.’ Talking to a stranger was easy enough, she found, and noticed she told him the truth about Rae and the whole sorry tale, as if it had all happened to someone else.’