by Louise Allen
Deep down I was exhausted. I was drowning in pain and rejection and yet I was trying to keep afloat. I started pulling out hair again – eyelashes, clumps from my head. I counted as much as I could, when I could remember to. I watched those seeds avidly over the next weeks and months, willing them to come up. It felt a slow and difficult time waiting, as there didn’t seem much to see yet. Meanwhile, my health was failing and I began to get feverish. I got very sick and took to bed for days. In the end I was ulcerated and in agony all over my mouth, my face, my lips, my guts and my windpipe. Eventually I felt so bad I took myself to a local GP, who took one look at me and called an ambulance. I was whisked into the local hospital, where I was told I might have AIDS. I was put in isolation, as AIDS was a big deal at that time, called ‘the gay plague’, and everyone was terrified of it as a killer.
Word got back to my flat and the landlord burned my bedding, believing AIDS was infectious. After more blood tests the hospital worked out I had a rare viral infection called Stevens–Johnson Syndrome, which is an extremely serious stress-related breakdown of the immune system. I lay in bed for about three weeks then, sweating and shaking, in agony.
This is an illness you can die from, and a lot of the time I didn’t care if I lived or died. A couple of friends visited and I asked them to look after my rescue pets. I had to give Barbara’s number to the hospital as next of kin and, indeed, she did visit once. She stared at me down her pointy nose and didn’t touch me, didn’t comfort me at all, and then left.
Barbara must have told Julie, who turned up briefly, took one look at me and said, ‘Is it catching?’ and then left, holding her nose. The only help I got was from one of my friend’s mums, who would bring me bits of tasty food she had cooked – some quiche or fruit or jelly. She took pity on me, as she could see I was alone, suffering and fading away. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to get better, if there was anything to live for any more. Life was too tough and I was weary of struggling.
Eventually, after a few weeks, I turned the corner and did recover, gradually. Julie popped in towards the end of my hospital stay and I gathered up the courage to ask her to lend me £10. I’d been in hospital for about six weeks and hadn’t been able to get any money from anywhere. She looked at me, really put out.
‘Oh no, I haven’t got it – I’m short this month,’ she said, examining her pink nails. ‘Didn’t Barbara give you anything?’
She was wearing new shoes, clothes and jewellery, as usual. I didn’t ask again. So when I eventually got home, thanks to a lift from my friend’s mum, there was nothing in the fridge and I had literally no money to buy anything. I was incredibly thin and pale, fragile and delicate. I lived on crackers and herb tea and whatever I could scavenge, or on the kindness of friends.
Soon after I came home there was a knock at the door and a policeman handed me a cat collar: my lovely puss had been run over. Could things have got any worse? I was dodging the advances of the landlord, who was straight round for his rent ‘payment’ in kind. It was clear I couldn’t deliver, as I was exhausted, and didn’t even have bedding, as he’d burned it. It was a horrendous, disastrous mess, and I had no idea how I was going to get out of it and get my life on track. I was at the lowest possible point and I had no idea how to raise myself up again. It would be a long, slow haul back to health, and I would have to do it alone. Would I survive a day longer?
A few days after I got home from hospital, I ventured out into the back yard, wrapped in loads of layers. There, in the corner, to my surprise, was a beautiful sight: an array of stunning flowers swaying in the breeze. They looked like magic; like they were sprinkled with sparkling fairy dust. I could pick out bright blue cornflowers and pretty pink and purple sweet peas; there were poppies, campion and forget-me-nots – my favourite little blue flowers with the black centres. My wild ‘mixed seeds’ from dear old Sean and Iris and John, who I used to visit with Ian and William as a child in Oxford. ‘Don’t forget-me-not,’ John had quipped. I hadn’t. Now they had finally bloomed. And saved my life.
At the lowest of my low points I had thought there was nothing to live for. I felt, as I swayed there with weak knees like Bambi, that the flowers were speaking to me: ‘Go on, Louise. Go on, you can do it. You can make it. Keep going.’ They had actually bloomed just for me. There was hope. Life went on. My life could go on. Spring did always follow winter, no matter how bleak. The flowers were a revelation to me. I drank in their beauty and stared at them, and thanked them for being there. They were a sign that in my darkest of dark hours I simply had to go on. They were a blooming beacon of the power of hope.
Every day from then on I watered the flowers and thinned them out and tended them. I remembered tending Sean’s little garden with him when I was a child. I would scatter the seeds and he would water them with his big silver watering can. Then he would show me how to thin them out and say, ‘Well done, girlie’ to me. He also had vegetables: carrots, cabbages, lettuces and onions. I thought it was magic then – seeds turning into beautiful, living things – and I still did now.
So, despite living in a total grot-hole, I cleared a little bit of garden, just like Sean had taught me, and I began to feel better and recover. I managed to get back to a couple of cleaning jobs, which kept the money coming in. I also succeeded in getting some benefits, so I could pay the landlord his rent and keep him at bay for a while. I was determined to get myself straight. And as I tended my beautiful corner of colourful flowers, I began to learn to tend to myself, too. I realised I needed to look after myself as, if I didn’t, I would simply die.
I cut down on the drink and drugs and gave myself herb tea and better food. I needed to move out of that place, and I soon did, to a better room with nicer people and no evil landlord. I also decided to focus on getting into art school again and, this time, despite my poor education, I managed it. It was a total turning point: I was going to go to Portsmouth School of Art and I was getting a grant to go there. I was completely over the moon. They were persuaded by my work and, despite not being able to spell properly or having any qualifications, I was able to present myself well at interview. My art – of which there was a lot by now – spoke for me, and luckily it was good enough to get me a place.
It was the beginning of my new life. A lifeline. I was on my way: wanted at last.
And Finally…
It took me a long time to get back on my feet but I was determined to succeed. I understood I had to work hard and save every penny. I was used to deprivation and could endure a huge amount of discomfort, and my eye was firmly on the goal of succeeding, no matter what. When I finally got my place on the Foundation course, I was ecstatic and worked incredibly hard. I wanted to go on to do fine art, but my lack of education and qualifications got in the way. It was before there were ‘Access’ courses, and they were simply not willing for me to proceed. Undeterred, I managed to get onto an HND in environmental design. I got scholarships to go to Berlin and New York. It was a great time.
After this course, I worked as an illustrator and got jobs in fashion, in magazines and window dressing, just about anything I could do that involved art. I painted all the time and continued to work on portraits. I was artist in residence with deprived children, I taught art in prison, and also got work at Portsmouth Art School as an art teacher, so I was in a creative, artistic environment for over twenty years.
I scrimped and scraped and decided very early on that I needed to save money to buy a property, and that is exactly what I did. A girl with absolutely nothing, and nothing behind her, had to get something and make something of herself – and that was me. It took a long time for me to earn enough, but I was able to get myself into all sorts of amazing jobs by sheer force of my personality and drive. I had a lot of energy and determination. I was short on paper qualifications (except for my HND), but I was driven to make things work. For this I needed inspiration to keep going, so I made any place I lived look as beautiful, artistic and wacky as a modern-day Blenheim Palace.
Ian died shortly after he retired, of cancer, at sixty-seven years old, but Barbara lived on until she was over eighty. She moved to a smaller property in Oxford but she didn’t look after herself well. I visited a few times a year, taking her nice food or helping her with things in her little house, and although she was never warm and I nearly always left in tears, due to something nasty she’d said, I couldn’t walk away.
Later in my life I looked after her, visiting regularly, helping her physically. She was never kind, she never said sorry, but I could sense she was pleased I was there. Barbara began to get dementia, and I could tell on one of my visits that she was struggling. Amazingly, Barbara fell out with Kevin, who started bullying her once I’d left home and Ian died. She became frightened of him. Then he married and moved away, ignoring her in her old age. She was very bitter about this.
Eventually she was moved into a local hospital by a concerned neighbour, and as I walked into the ward I saw her sitting up in bed, her hands over her face, crying. I sat down next to her and said, ‘What is it?’ She was doing a kind of dry crying, without tears, but she whispered in a husky voice, ‘The baby was mine, the baby was mine.’
Barbara was clearly very distressed, and said this as if she was sharing a terrible secret. I leant in and sat quietly beside her. ‘Which baby was yours?’ She peeked out of her cupped hands and looked up and down the ward to see if anyone was watching. ‘Shush,’ she said. ‘Don’t tell anyone, my mum will be angry.’ Then she paused. ‘It’s Tony. He’s mine.’
Tony was Barbara’s brother. Her father was an impoverished musician and heavy drinker, and she was brought up in Harlesden, London, in the 1920s (she was born in ’26, just as the Great Depression hit). Her mother was a cleaner. They had a wild and wandering life, moving all the time, paying rent, picking up odd work here and there. Then they ended up in the workhouse. Barbara had told me over the years, bit by bit, that her father was a violent, abusive drunk. She feared him deeply.
That afternoon, sitting up in bed, she went back to being a child, rocking back and forth. She spoke through her hands, covering her face in shame, about the men her father had taken her to for sex as a small child: the father and son next door, the local policeman, other men from the pub. Barbara had been her father’s ‘nice little earner’. She had been raped over and over. She had got pregnant, probably around the age of eleven or twelve, and she had given birth to Tony, her so-called ‘brother’, who was taken in by the family as if he was their son.
She gave birth in an outside ‘lavvy’ and the doctor sewed her up too tightly, possibly as a punishment to keep her on the straight and narrow. She was in agony. Barbara breathed out this story: ‘It hurt, oh, it hurt so much – it was too tight.’ I could see now why Barbara said ‘all men are rapists’, as she had actually been raped: by the next-door neighbours, the local policeman, men from the pub, perhaps even her own father or brother, or other men in the workhouse.
Her mother must have known, as did her father, but it was never spoken about. She whispered about the violence, the harshness, being made to eat dog poo by one of the workhouse warders as punishment one day. There had also been a warder who tied the children to their beds – exactly as she had done to William and I.
‘It was horrible, terrible,’ whispered Barbara on and on, telling me things she had never spoken of before. She ‘confessed’ all this to me in her demented state, in a childlike voice, and I began to understand why she had done what she did. She had been abused and raped as a child, treated inhumanely, and knew no other way to be. After the workhouse, she was sent to a convent in the 1930s, which was also harsh and tough with cruel nuns who made her scrub floors with carbolic and make beds with hospital corners. Again, her love of making me clean everything, of carbolic and the constant random slaps and attacks had their root in her own terrifying early experiences. I understood now that she had deep mental and emotional problems from her own childhood. It had been a nightmare. This didn’t condone what she had done, but it explained it to me, as she had never received any mental help.
Sex was always painful for the rest of her life, so when Ian tried she hated it. She felt she was being raped all over again, as she had been as a child. Her unnatural interest in Kevin was also a re-enactment of her relationship with her brothers and other boys and men, possibly the only comfort she had had as a child. It was all very twisted but somehow, despite everything, my heart went out to her. Later, when I saw my own records, I discovered that many of the social workers had wondered about getting Barbara to see a psychiatrist during the months when I was fostered, and then adopted, in 1967 and 1968 and then later. Some questioned her ability, but there was a shortage of fosterers and a large amount of unwanted babies. There were many notes about her ‘not coping’ and ‘needing support’ but nothing was ever done.
Barbara herself had questioned if she was able to look after me, and my notes showed that twice I could have been given to someone else during that first crucial year before she legally adopted me in 1968. And yet each time the system failed to protect me or to give her the help or support she needed. No one asked her about her own childhood or her fitness to look after children. The system was under pressure to suck up the unwanted children as a result of the huge glut of illegitimate pregnancies that occurred after the ‘summer of love’ in 1967. I was the product of that, and Barbara’s early traumas were completely ignored, unchecked and untreated. If only…
It may sound strange, but during the years of her decline I visited her as often as I could, and I even made sure she eventually went to a good care home. She became increasingly confused and, as she lost her powers, I felt more tenderness for her. One day I took her out for a walk in her wheelchair and her face slumped on one side: she’d had a stroke. After that she quickly deteriorated. She ended up in a hospital at the end. Luckily I had organised a green burial site for her on the South Downs, which she knew about and approved of. I felt protective of Barbara; I could see she was vulnerable and alone and, despite all that she had done to me – and to William – I could not personally operate from hate or revenge. I didn’t want to hand on the pain. I wanted to be a better person. For my own satisfaction and sense of what was right.
The day she died I had been to see her in the evening, and I could see her breathing was shallow. She was propped up on pillows and was quite out of touch. I looked down at the pinched, pale and pointed face – the one I had stared at all my childhood in terror. Now she was tiny, reduced, fading. I tussled with myself for a moment: should I stay or should I go? I realised that although I genuinely loved her out of some deep human compassion for her own suffering in her childhood (that no one but me knew about), I nonetheless could not sit with her and see her out of this life.
Before I left I put a film on for her on the TV and left it running. Then I looked down at Barbara for the last time, touched her hand and said, ‘I’m off now, bye.’ She raised a hand weakly from the bed, and mumbled, ‘Bye.’
I didn’t say, ‘See you later,’ as I knew I wouldn’t. I went home and made a cup of tea and got on with my household chores. I had forgiven her for so many things, but she had done some really terrible things to William and I and had left big bruises and deep wounds on our lives. I understood now what had happened to her, and I empathised, truly, but it did not make me want to be there when she died. It was too intimate, too much about unconditional love. I spent so much of my childhood scared and crying t
hat I felt I couldn’t comfort her on her very last stage of her journey, despite having been there as much as I could be in her last years and months.
I felt that after throwing me away as a child she had to go alone into her next life, whatever or wherever it was. I had also learnt to look after myself now, and being there at the very end was simply one step too far.
Luckily, Kevin had married and moved away to another city, so I was able to avoid him completely. Also Julie moved on again to yet another man. Vernon died an early death (to Julie’s obvious relief: ‘He was a bit boring and moaned about my spending – men!’) and her two children emigrated. Julie often tried to get money from me once I was earning. I discovered she too had a very confusing and hurtful childhood. As her own father had turned out to be a bigamist, when he died, two families turned up for the funeral with no warning and Julie discovered she had brothers and sisters she had never seen or known. It was so hypocritical for him not to allow her to keep her own child when he was cheating all the while. What a mess! It was no wonder she was unreal.
Amazingly, I eventually also managed to track down dear William, after a lot of dead-end leads, through a notice of his marriage in a local newspaper cutting in Barbara’s papers. I found the cutting when I was clearing out her house, finally. We eventually met after thirty-seven years apart. It was an amazing moment. We sat together on one of my favourite University Parks benches and cried and cried and cried. We could hardly speak. We just held hands and sobbed. He repeatedly said, ‘Why didn’t anyone help us?’
Today we are still piecing together the mad story of our broken childhoods. William’s story should also be told, as I think there must be many Williams and Louises who got lost in the system in the free-love era of the 1960s baby boom. Hopefully they didn’t get put into a family that was already being investigated for child cruelty like we were, and then ignored and abused – that was something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. I still can’t understand to this day how that happened. And I would like to find out more, and make sure it never happens to any other so-called ‘unwanted’ children.