The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames

by Justine Cowan

  Once on the roof, she tiptoed toward a row of four windows to the left, small bits of tar and gravel crunching under her shoes. To her relief, the first window she tried slid open. She hoisted herself through the window and dropped gently onto the parquet floors.

  She hadn’t thought about what to do once she escaped the washroom, and with nowhere else to go, she made her way to the playroom, where she waited for her classmates to return from services.

  I found myself rooting for Dorothy, and equally surprised by her daring to take on the evil Miss Wright. I thought about how Miss Wright would react when she entered the room, what kind of punishment she might enact. Apparently, Dorothy was thinking the same:

  I . . . tried to imagine what Miss Wright’s face would look like when she opened the washroom door to find I had escaped. But since Miss Wright was intolerant of even the slightest infraction, I was also highly apprehensive about what would happen to me. This was no small transgression but my most brazen act of disobedience ever, and I had to gasp at my own audacity. To my knowledge, no girl in the school had ever committed anything like it.

  Dorothy feared the worst as her classmates filed in after church services had ended. A girl named Margaret took the seat next to her, and the two girls began to whisper, Dorothy keeping an eye on the door as she waited for Miss Wright to enter. Dorothy’s mind raced as she imagined Miss Wright’s anger at her impudence. She would be fiercely beaten, she thought. When Miss Wright finally did arrive, Dorothy froze, locking eyes with her grim-faced tormenter. She braced herself for the punishment that was certain to come, but after a brief disapproving gaze, Miss Wright continued on as if nothing had happened.

  Dorothy was perplexed. There was no thrashing with a belt; she wasn’t dragged from the room to be locked up in a windowless room, she wasn’t told go to bed without food.

  Nothing happened.

  Bewildered, she returned to her conversation with Margaret, who was telling Dorothy about her foster parents, the Braithwaites. They lived near the river Thames in Chertsey, Margaret said, in a bungalow she called “Bob-Dor-Ree.” Dorothy listened with envy as Margaret spoke of their kindness, and how happy her life had been, a stark contrast to her own early years with a belittling foster mother. Margaret had grown weary of being bullied by the staff, confiding in Dorothy that she longed for the warmth and kindness she had felt as a young child in Chertsey.

  “I’m going back there,” Margaret whispered. “I’m going to escape.” She felt certain her foster parents would let her come home to live with them, if only they knew what it was like at the Foundling Hospital.

  Dorothy was stunned at Margaret’s confession. Margaret was pretty, with large blue eyes and a clear, innocent-looking face. Her short light-brown hair had a natural wave to it, swirling into a cowlick on her forehead. She was quiet, and always a good student who was not often in trouble. She didn’t seem like a girl who would consider such a dangerous violation of the rules. But Dorothy wanted in.

  In all my years at the school I had never heard of anyone even mentioning that they’d like to run away, or heard of anyone who had. It probably never crossed our minds, captive and dependent as we were. It wasn’t that we were happy there, but simply that we had been isolated from the world since the age of five and this was the only world we knew.

  Dorothy wasn’t averse to taking occasional risks, as she’d just demonstrated, and Margaret seemed to have slowly come to some sort of breaking point. And so, in excited whispers, right there in the playroom under Miss Wright’s nose, the two girls began to plan their escape.

  Their first concern was food, but as they whispered, Dorothy and Margaret quickly came up with an idea. Each Sunday the children received a sweet bun, and if the two could manage to smuggle their buns out of the dining room, they could hide the contraband in their playroom lockers until they made their escape. The next obstacle was how they would get to Chertsey, where Margaret’s foster family lived. They had no access to maps, but Margaret believed Chertsey to be just south of London. It would be simple, they thought, to walk to London, then continue south until they reached Chertsey. What they didn’t realize was that Chertsey was directly south of the Foundling Hospital, while London was to the southeast. Walking to London on their way to Chertsey would add an extra twenty miles to their thirty-mile journey.

  Nor did they consider that England was a nation still at war. In January 1944 Hitler had launched the final bombing offensive in retaliation for Royal Air Force raids on German cities. Dubbed the Baby Blitz, it did not compare to the relentless bombing endured in the early days of the war, but nonetheless it took the lives of approximately fifteen hundred people, injuring nearly three thousand more.

  Now that they had a plan in place, the next step was getting beyond the school grounds. A low concrete wall surrounded the campus, topped with spiked iron railings five or six feet high. Leaving through the front gate was not an option, since that would require ringing a bell to alert one of the two gatekeepers, who would never open the gate for a foundling. They settled on a side gate adjoining the girls’ playing field, used mostly by the hospital’s secretary, Mr. Nichols. Dorothy had never interacted with Mr. Nichols, but she would see him go through the gate as he walked to and from his house nearby. The gate was secured by a heavy iron chain with a padlock. Dorothy noticed that in the morning he sometimes left the padlock hooked to the chain, unlocked. The two girls agreed that slipping through the gate offered their best chance of getting away unnoticed.

  An escape route, a bit of food, and a general idea of the direction in which they needed to go . . . Neither girl ever considered the need for money; it simply wasn’t part of their world. They had learned sums in class, sometimes using shillings and pounds as written examples, but had never actually laid eyes on a pound note or a sovereign coin.

  The night before their planned escape, Dorothy was overwhelmed with excitement. It never once crossed her mind that they would get caught or lost along the way. Her only fear was that Margaret would change her mind and tell the staff about their plan, and there would never again be an opportunity to get away.

  When morning came and Nurse Knowles, the dormitory supervisor, ordered the girls out of bed, Dorothy looked eagerly across the room at Margaret, hoping to catch her eye. She anxiously sidled up next to her on the way to the washroom, and to her great relief, Margaret whispered a conspiratorial affirmation.

  The plan was on.

  After breakfast, while the rest of the girls filed into the playroom, waiting for the go-ahead to proceed to their morning classes, Margaret and Dorothy lingered near the cloakroom. When the coast was clear, they grabbed their brown cloaks and, sweet buns in hand, stepped into the deserted hallway. They looked down the corridor, with several classrooms on either side, aware that a teacher could emerge from one of the doorways at any time. Steadying themselves and exchanging tremulous looks, the girls scurried down the hallway and opened the door to the outside. The next part of their journey was the most treacherous, or so they thought. They would have to walk down a path and pass through the very gate Mr. Nichols used each morning. If luck wasn’t on their side, they risked encountering him on his commute. A more likely and even worse possibility was that Nurse Knowles might glance out her bedroom window, which overlooked the path leading to the gate, and spot them.

  But Dorothy and Margaret scampered down the path and through the unlocked gate undetected—at least by the staff. Above them, in the playroom, their classmates stood in a row, noses pressed against the Palladian windows, silently watching with envy and admiration as the two cloaked figures made their daring escape.

  As they scuttled away from the grounds, Dorothy was bursting with energy, exhilarated to be unsupervised and out of her prison at last. They walked past meadows, a few cottages, and a gray stone church where the white-haired vicar who often conducted sermons at the Foundling Hospital chapel waved at them tentatively. The girls waved back, unaware that the vicar would soon telephone the
school to report the unusual sighting of two foundlings out on their own.

  As they continued on their way, soon passing Bovingdon Airfield, Dorothy remembered the kindness of the Americans, how special she had felt in their presence. The girls debated stopping but decided not to, suspecting that the Americans would have no choice but to return them to the hospital. Unbeknownst to them, D-Day was just weeks away; the base was in full swing, preparing for one of the greatest invasions in history.

  When Dorothy and Margaret came upon a giant concrete drainpipe set up to block the road against a German ground invasion, they decided to rest. With aching feet and empty stomachs, they crawled inside the pipe and devoured their sweet buns before setting off again, making their way along the narrow lane, its banks thick with uncut grass and lined with leafy hedges. The morning was overcast and slightly chilly, typical for April, but Dorothy soaked up the feeling of newfound freedom.

  After traveling another mile or two, the girls came upon a signpost with several arms, one of which indicated that it was twenty-five miles to London. The girls didn’t know how long the journey would take, but the distance sounded daunting. The distances on the other arm posts were shorter, and they were discussing the options when they were approached by two middle-aged women, both dressed in country tweeds and woolens. Dorothy and Margaret stepped aside and waited for them to pass, but the women stopped and asked whether they could help. It was a question Dorothy was unprepared for; help was something no adult had ever offered. And so she blurted out the truth—they had run away from a place where they were beaten with canes and locked in cupboards. They needed to get to Chertsey, to Margaret’s foster parents, who would take them in and save them from their horrible life at the Foundling Hospital.

  The women had introduced themselves, but Dorothy retained only one of the names—Miss Hopkins. Miss Hopkins was familiar with the Foundling Hospital and had attended a choral concert there, she said. She also seemed to be sympathetic to their plight. “My nephew is quite unhappy at his school, too,” she explained as she led the girls to her cottage.

  Miss Hopkins’s home was a simple two-story brick house surrounded by trees and shrubs, but what thrilled Dorothy was that it had a name—“Milestones.” She hadn’t seen the inside of a private home since she’d left her foster parents seven years earlier, and the charms of the old house weren’t lost on her. In a small homely room off the kitchen, with floral-papered walls and a sideboard cluttered with decorative china objects and pictures, Miss Hopkins gave each of the girls a piece of cake along with some hot chocolate as she checked the train schedule. A train was leaving soon, she informed them. The girls finished their cake while Miss Hopkins busied herself in the kitchen, and the small group then made its way to the village of Amersham, six miles and a lifetime away from Berkhamsted. Miss Hopkins used her own money to purchase train tickets for the girls, helping them into a carriage where two female passengers were already seated. Asking one of the women to help Dorothy and Margaret change trains in London, she handed the girls two box lunches and some money. As the train pulled away, Miss Hopkins and her friend waited on the platform, smiling and waving. Already, the experience of running away had been more than Dorothy could have hoped for:

  To have met two perfect strangers who were willing to listen to us, to assist us, to take our side against the mighty Foundling Hospital was simply inconceivable. It happened at a time when children were truly supposed to be seen and not heard, when they had few rights, when adults routinely upheld each other against them. And as Foundlings we had no voice at all. How unbelievably fortunate I felt that day. Whatever one’s beliefs, a higher power must certainly have been watching over us.

  As the train left the Amersham station, Dorothy and Margaret wasted little time in opening the box lunches, which were filled with savory ground pork pies, cakes, and fruit. Dorothy’s mouth watered, her stomach churning with hunger, but she stopped herself before taking a bite. She looked up at the woman who had promised to help them once they arrived in London.

  “Would you like something to eat?” she asked, pausing before helping herself. The fashionable woman smiled politely and shook her head.

  Reading her description of this stranger seventy years later, I could sense my mother’s awe, the way the image had imprinted itself on her twelve-year-old brain. Dorothy had never seen anyone like her. She couldn’t guess the woman’s age—she seemed neither young nor old. The stranger was “refined and elegant,” her clothes “subdued” in color and of “high quality,” my mother reflected. When she created the aristocratic persona that she later wore as an armor, was this the image in her mind?

  Their hunger sated, Dorothy and Margaret turned their attention to the money that Miss Hopkins had given them. They tried to count it, but, having never seen money, had no idea how much it amounted to. They spent the remainder of the journey gazing at the small towns and rolling hills passing by, soon replaced by factories, businesses, and cramped housing complexes. Finally they pulled into an echoing covered train station.

  They’d arrived in London, Dorothy realized. It was everything she had imagined, and she soaked up its energy. Her senses were heightened by the trains pulling in and out, the plumes of steam rising, the banging and clanging and commotion of people bustling from place to place. They followed the woman who had been asked to care for them, and soon the three were in a taxi on their way to another station. Their host said little during the taxi ride, but pointed out sights as they passed by. Trafalgar Square made a particular impression on Dorothy, with its endless flocks of pigeons, its massive bronze lions, and a fluted concrete column stretching into the sky.

  When they arrived at Waterloo, their new friend gave them each a penny and sent them down a steep flight of stairs to use the toilets, past walls of shiny white tiles in the shape of bricks. The adults outside Berkhamsted continued to astonish Dorothy. She had not asked to use the toilets, yet an adult had anticipated her needs. She felt looked after, even cared for. The woman took them to the train platform and told them what time their train would leave, pointing out an enormous clock that hung over the cavernous station. Before Dorothy could thank her, she disappeared into the crowd.

  When their train arrived, a uniformed attendant asked the girls for their tickets. Dorothy looked down and found that in her nervousness, she had twisted the ticket around her finger, rendering it unrecognizable. The attendant pointed them in the direction of the ticket booth. As Dorothy raced across the platform, she was ashamed of what she had done, and also frightened, not sure whether she had enough to buy a second ticket and lacking any real concept of how much money she had. She heard a shrill whistle as she piled all that Miss Hopkins had given her on the ticket counter. To her great relief, she learned that she had enough to buy a ticket, and money to spare.

  The two girls traveled to Chertsey without incident. They had no address, but had assumed that Margaret would recognize the home where she had spent her first five years. Margaret remembered that it was close to a body of water, near Chertsey Meads. Dorothy asked a porter for directions, and soon the pair was walking along a footpath past humble houses, many partially hidden by thick hedges. They walked for an hour or more, Margaret scanning each house they passed. Then, somewhat unbelievably, they found it—the modest bungalow shielded by elderberry trees and large oaks where Margaret had spent her happiest years. She grabbed Dorothy’s arm and shrieked. No one was home, so the girls sat down on the veranda and waited for Margaret’s foster parents to return. Mr. Braithwaite worked at the Vickers-Armstrong factory where tanks were tested, while Mrs. Braithwaite worked in a canteen, providing refreshments to soldiers as part of the war effort.

  Mr. Braithwaite turned up first. The restrained man showed little reaction at finding the two foundlings on the veranda, listening quietly as the girls told the story of how and why they had escaped.

  His response was equivocal: “I have to tell your foster mother.” Like many people at the time, the Braithwait
es didn’t have a telephone, and he set off to contact his wife. When he returned, it was clear that he had also called the school, which had insisted that the girls be returned as soon as possible.

  Dorothy and Margaret were devastated.

  They followed Mr. Braithwaite into the house. Dorothy scanned the room, reveling in its coziness and warmth. Comfortable upholstered furniture, pretty ornaments, and photographs filled the space, so different from the austere rooms of the Foundling Hospital. Soon Mrs. Braithwaite appeared. She was full-figured and motherly, warm-hearted and tolerant, just as Margaret had described. She was calm as she set up a bed for the girls to sleep in, seemingly unangered by their escape, although Dorothy detected a worried look on her face.

  The next morning Mrs. Braithwaite prepared them a full breakfast that included, among other things, soft-boiled eggs in little china egg cups, something Dorothy had never seen before. On the way to the bus Mrs. Braithwaite even bought them fudge, despite the strict wartime rations on sweets, as well as knitting needles and yarn, perhaps to keep them occupied on the ride home. As the trio set off, Dorothy watched passengers get off and on the bus, captivated by their varied clothing and hairstyles. To her delight, they boarded a second bus—a red double-decker. Emboldened by the kindness they had received since their escape, Dorothy asked if they could ride on the top deck.