Father Unknown

by Lesley Pearse

  Postscript, 1971.

  I suspect now that Ellen was pressured into giving up Daisy for adoption, perhaps by the family she worked for at the time, in conjunction with the doctor who arranged it.

  I feel this because of a letter from Ellen which was forwarded to me by the doctor in Bristol, along with two photographs, one of Daisy taken in hospital, and one of her and Josie at the farm.

  Sadly the original letter was accidentally lost, but in it Ellen said she was unable to forget her baby, and she asked me to tell you when you were old enough to understand that she wasn’t given any choice in the matter. She asked me to keep these pictures safe until that time too. She added that it was her hope that one day you would meet, so she could explain everything to you.

  The tone of Ellen’s letter was of someone haunted by the past, deeply regretful, yet appreciative that her daughter had gone to a loving home. It was written beautifully, in clear, neat handwriting, her spelling and grammar proving she was intelligent and thoughtful. Although it is considered inadvisable to enter into any correspondence after an adoption has been made legal, I was so deeply moved that I sent back a reply through the same doctor, enclosing a recent picture of you and details of your progress at school, and your delight in the twins. I told her that I’d made a little story for you about adoption, and that later on when you were old enough to understand fully I would go into it in more depth. I told her too that by giving you to us, she’d blessed us with more joy than she could possibly imagine.

  I found it staggering to see the similarities between the picture I sent of you, and the one she sent of herself Aside from the early Fifties clothes, it could have been the same child.

  The doctor’s name was Dr Julia Fordham, 7 Pembroke Road, Clifton, Bristol. In 1964 she would have been around forty-five. We met and talked on the telephone several times. She struck me as being a very domineering but good-hearted woman.

  Please bear in mind, Daisy, that you cannot judge any of the decisions made on your behalf right back in the early 1960s by present-day standards. Up until 1967/8, unmarried mothers were virtually outcasts. There was little financial help for them, and accommodation would have been difficult to find. The societies which did help them were mostly run by the Church, and in most cases, unless the father was willing to marry the girl, or help came from her family, unmarried mothers had very little choice but to give up their child. The advent of the Pill and the Flower Power era, with its Free Love ethic, changed everything dramatically just a few years later. Social workers moved heaven and earth to help young unmarried mothers, and of course babies put up for adoption were few and far between. So don’t judge Ellen harshly, everything I was told about her, and what I gleaned from her letter, points to her being a very decent, sweet girl who was just a victim of circumstance.

  Daisy picked up the photograph of the two girls and looked at it more carefully. Mum was right, they were very alike. She thought Ellen’s family must have been quite poor, for the girls’ dresses looked very shabby.

  She then picked up the slimmer envelope and opened it. It enclosed a letter from Mum dated April of this year, and a cheque for six thousand pounds.

  Dear Daisy, she read. I always liked to get the last word in, didn’t I? As I sit here writing this, preparing to put it in the box with all the other memorabilia that I collected for you over the years, I sincerely hope that the doctors may be wrong in their prognosis, and that in a few years’ time we will go through the box together and laugh at its contents.

  But if I am unable to share it with you, I hope you will find comfort in it, for it was accumulated with a great deal of love, and my little notes, though a little embarrassing to me now, do show how I felt at the time.

  No child was ever loved more than you were. The utter joy your father and I felt when you were handed to us still gives me a lump in the throat now, after all these years. That joy was almost certainly the reason why five years later I managed to conceive the twins, when we had been told that was impossible.

  You filled our lives with happiness after many years of disappointment and we were always so proud of you. Stay close to the twins, for the ties of a shared childhood are just as strong as blood lines. I wish you as much joy and happiness in your life as I had in mine, and the only sadness I have is that I won’t be around to see my grandchildren. The cheque I’ve enclosed is a share of the money left to me by my father. He too died without seeing the grandchildren he hoped for, and saving some of it for you, Lucy and Tom was my way of honouring him. So spend it wisely, my darling. A final goodbye is no time for lectures, and I’ve given you enough of those in the past. So all I can say now is that I love you, and that I shall be watching over you.

  My love,

  Mummy

  Daisy read the letter three times, sobbing uncontrollably. It was so like Mum to have had the foresight to put something in writing that Daisy could hang on to, yet at the time she wrote it and sealed the envelope she must have been so afraid for herself.

  What an incredibly brave and honourable woman she was, with such compassion for others, and an indomitable spirit. In the face of such courage and goodness, Daisy knew that now she had to put her own house in order and justify her mother’s faith in her.

  She picked up the picture of the two little girls again later. Ellen had to be about eight, her half-sister six. They were standing under a tree, arms around each other’s shoulders, both smiling. The picture was crackly with age, the feel of it suggested Ellen had kept it close to her for a long time before sending it to Mum. Why send such an old picture? Did it hold some special significance?

  Daisy thought about this deeply for some time. Most people would send a recent, flattering picture just of themselves, especially if they were in a position like Ellen’s, hoping to make a good impression. Therefore it stood to reason that this picture was very important to her. But why?

  Chapter Three

  Cornwall 1955

  ‘You’re mad, Ellen Pengelly, just like your mum,’ Sally Trevoise screamed out above the tumult of sixty noisy children turned loose into the small playground of Mawnan Smith primary school. ‘Go and jump off a cliff like she did.’

  Trouble had started between the two eight-year-olds in the classroom a few minutes earlier. They had been painting at easels side by side, when Sally had spoilt Ellen’s picture by daubing a large black cross over it. Ellen had retaliated by concealing some blue paint in her hands as the bell rang for playtime, and the moment they got outside she’d grabbed Sally’s plaits and smeared the paint on to them.

  A sudden hush fell over the playground, all the children as taken aback as Ellen by Sally’s statement. Silently they grouped themselves around the two girls, expecting a real fight to start.

  But Ellen just stood there staring at Sally, utterly confused by what she’d just heard. Her mother was home on the farm, just as she always was.

  Sally’s parents owned the grocery shop in the village, and her appearance confirmed that they were rich by local standards. She wore a pleated skirt, and unlike the many cheap ones in the playground that had no depth to the pleats and lost them altogether after a few washes, hers swung with style. Her red hand-knitted cardigan coordinated perfectly with her skirt, and the blouse beneath had a lace-trimmed collar. Her socks were snow-white and knee-length, shoes patent leather bar-straps. She had an air of supreme confidence, along with blonde hair and blue eyes, and few people noticed her mean, narrow lips and tightly pinched nose.

  Ellen, by contrast, was a ragamuffin. Her curly red hair rarely saw a good brushing, her grey pinafore dress had a badly sewn patch by the hem, and the jumper beneath it which had once been pale yellow was now matted and a dirty ivory colour. She wore plimsolls on her feet, and knee-socks that hung in festoons around her ankles.

  Yet Ellen was popular with both adults and other children, for she had a sweet nature and a sort of glow from within. Her teacher, Mrs Palstow, said she was a rewarding pupil, always enthusiastic and e
ager to learn. Few people ever really noticed her shabby clothes – she was after all a farmer’s daughter, and there weren’t many parents in the area who could afford to deck their children out like the Trevoises could.

  ‘You’re the one who’s mad, Sally,’ one of the older girls called out. ‘I saw Ellen’s mum just this morning, or do you think I saw a ghost?’

  Sally puffed out her chest and folded her arms defiantly. ‘Don’t any of you know?’ she asked, her eyes scanning her audience. ‘That isn’t her real mum; she only got hooked up with Mr Pengelly after Ellen’s mum killed herself. She killed her baby too.’

  There was a gasp from all the children. Even the boys who had previously carried on with their games of tag and leap-frog came closer, picking up that they were missing something shattering. ‘I heard my mum and dad talking about it,’ Sally said proudly. ‘They said she was mad, and if she hadn’t thrown herself off the cliff she would have been taken to the loony bin.’

  At this Josie Pengelly, Ellen’s younger sister, pushed her way through the crowd. The girls were as alike as two peas in a pod, only two and a half years between them and two inches in height.

  ‘You’re a liar!’ she exclaimed. ‘I’m going to tell my dad what you said and he’ll come round and knock your dad out. So there.’

  ‘Shut up, Nosy Josie,’ Sally said. ‘You don’t know anything about this, you weren’t even born then. Ellen isn’t even your real sister.’

  ‘She is,’ Josie screeched at the older girl, running forward to batter her with her fists. ‘You’re a nasty, lying, stuck-up cow.’

  At that point Mrs Palstow appeared in the playground. She had observed something going on from the staff-room window, and remembering that Sally had ruined Ellen’s painting, guessed she was taking her revenge. When she saw Sally’s blue-stained plaits she decided justice had already been done, so she blew her whistle for the children to return to their classes.

  All of them moved into line with the exception of Ellen. She was left standing alone, looking stunned. The rest of the children filed into school but still Ellen remained where she was.

  ‘Go and wash your hands please Ellen,’ Mrs Palstow said, assuming the child thought she was in trouble. ‘It wasn’t very wise to put paint in Sally’s hair, I expect her mother will be cross. But I did see what she did to your painting and I shall tell her so.’

  Ellen didn’t answer but ran towards the school building and disappeared into the cloakroom. Mrs Palstow walked on back to her classroom, her mind now on the story she intended to read to her class.

  Ellen stood in the cloakroom, her hands under the running tap but her mind firmly fixed on what Sally had said. She very much wanted to discount it entirely, to laugh in Sally’s face, yet she sensed that the other girl had got the story from listening to someone in her parents’ grocer’s shop. Could it possibly be true?

  Her hands became numb from the cold water, but she didn’t feel it as she was picturing a woman with a baby in her arms jumping from a cliff top. It couldn’t be right; mothers protected their babies. Although she couldn’t remember back to when Josie was born, she could recall when she started walking. Mum was always shouting at her to watch her baby sister, and sometimes Ellen got blamed when Josie fell in mud. The confusion of it all made her cry, and with that she grabbed her raincoat from the peg and ran out of the school, across the playground and into the street, leaving the tap still running.

  She took the short-cut home across the fields, but it was still a long way and she had a stitch from running long before she got to the stile that took her back on to the road. It was only three weeks into the autumn term, but it was already turning colder, and recently heavy rain had turned the path to mud. At the back of her mind she knew she would be in trouble for leaving school, for not putting on her Wellingtons, and especially for leaving Josie to come home alone. But that seemed far less important than to see her dad to find out if what Sally had said was true.

  Beacon Farm, the Pengelly land, stretched for about a mile along the road between Mawnan Smith and Maunporth. But although this might have seemed fair acreage to a passer-by, it wasn’t good farming land, for it was a narrow strip, running down to the cliffs and the sea, with no flat fields for crops, and clumps of thick woodland and marshy areas. Only the very committed would have tried to farm it.

  But the Pengellys were too committed, or at least too stubborn, to walk away from it. It had been passed down through three generations, and each one of them believed it was better to eke out an existence on their own land than to go cap in hand to anyone else for a job.

  Albert, Ellen’s father, had finally come to own it when his father died back at the start of the Second World War, and Albert still farmed it in much the same way. He kept cows, chickens and a few sheep, and grew vegetables. Even if he had had the money to buy new modern machinery, it was doubtful that he’d have done so. To him, his ancient tractor and his muscle were enough. When times were hard, he would take himself off to Falmouth and join a fishing boat for a few weeks. That was the way his father, and his grandfather before that, had got by, and Albert knew no other way.

  The farmhouse reflected the hand-to-mouth existence of its owners. Situated in a dip and concealed from the road by woodland, it was in a sorry state. The roof sagged, the windows were ill-fitting, and wooden outhouses and extra rooms had been added in a haphazard fashion to the original stone-built two-room cottage. Inside was no better; there were no modern amenities, and the furniture was a motley collection of hand-me-downs.

  But however dilapidated the farmhouse was, its setting was idyllic. The front of the house faced the sea, there were wooded hills to either side and before it the land gradually sloped down to a small rocky cove. The view was beautiful, whatever the season. Even in the depths of winter when the sea was dark and menacing and the trees bare of leaves, it had majesty, for the waves would crash over the rocks in the cove and frost stayed glittering on bare branches. Purple and white heather sprang up in crevices, rose-hips and other berries were bright on the bushes. In spring the stream to the right of the house, swollen from snow further inland, would gush down its rocky path to the sea; wild iris, bluebells, primroses and violets grew in profusion on its banks. There were rhododendrons too, huge masses of purple and pink, and as the new lambs skipped around their mothers it became a place of enchantment. By summer the trees made a thick canopy of leaves and welcome shade, the fields were bright with buttercups and the cove was paradise for children.

  Now, at the end of September, there were signs of autumn approaching. Dew-sprinkled spiders’ webs adorned every bush, Old Man’s Beard festooned the hedges, and elderberry bushes were weighed down by their purple berries.

  Normally as Ellen came down the narrow footpath through the woods to the farmhouse she would linger, looking out for squirrels, squeezing elderberries between her fingers to stain them purple, and checking the horse-chestnut tree to see the progress of the conkers, but today she didn’t even notice her surroundings. She was turning over in her mind what Sally had told her, cutting out everything else. As she finally came to the clearing above the farmhouse and saw her father cutting cabbages down below, she ran towards him at full tilt, tears pouring down her face.

  ‘Whatever’s wrong, me handsome?’ he said in alarm, lifting her up into his arms to comfort her.

  Albert looked like a gypsy, not just because of his torn checked shirt, the knotted handkerchief around his neck and his moleskin trousers. His skin had a leathery texture and deep brown colour, and his long, curly hair flowed out like a flag behind him as he strode around his fields. His hair had once been as bright as his daughter’s, for curly, red hair was the Pengelly trademark, but now that he was thirty-seven it was peppered with grey and growing thin. It wasn’t known for certain why he never cut it, but some old men in the village claimed it was intended as an insult to his father who had ill-treated him as a child and used to shave his son’s head to humiliate him.

  Yet
no one dared laugh at Albert’s long hair, or his tenacity in farming land that yielded so little reward. They even described him as a big man, although in reality he was just five feet eight and quite slender. But perhaps that was because his shoulders were powerful, his fists like sledgehammers, and he had a reputation as a man who was dangerous to cross.

  Ellen of course did not see him that way, for he was affectionate with her and gentle with animals. But then her knowledge of other men was extremely limited for the only ones she knew were other farmers who were as strong and silent as her father.

  ‘Sally Trevoise said my mum was mad and jumped off a cliff,’ she blurted out. ‘She said she killed her baby too and Josie isn’t my sister.’

  She felt a sense of relief once she’d got it out and she buried her face in her father’s shoulder, expecting him to chuckle and tell her it was nonsense. But instead he said nothing, just held her.

  ‘It’s not true, is it?’ she asked, not daring to lift her face and look at him.

  Albert Pengelly was thunderstruck. A quiet man by nature, only partially educated and scraping a meagre living from his land, he felt he had little to offer anyone. Over the years, the hard life and the bitterness that went with it had made him withdraw into himself even more. He had always known that a day would come when he would have to tell Ellen about her real mother, but he hadn’t expected it to come this soon. He silently vowed to get even with Meg Trevoise for her vicious, loose tongue. How could he explain something as complex as his wife’s death to an eight-year-old?

  ‘It isn’t true, is it, Daddy?’ Ellen asked again, this time looking him right in the face, her slender body tense with anxiety. ‘That is my mummy indoors, isn’t it?’ she added, pointing towards the house.