Father Unknown

by Lesley Pearse

  At ten that same night Josie was in very different surroundings – a dismal little attic room on the top floor of a house in a place called Ladbroke Grove – and she was crying.

  She had left Will’s flat full of excitement and gone over to the park where she sat and studied the map of London. Having seen the Tube station called Queensway just a little further down the road, she worked out exactly where she was.

  Stopping a couple of girls who looked only a little older than her, she asked them where the best place was to find a flat, and how she should go about it. They said the Evening Standard newspaper was the best bet, but that didn’t come out on Sundays. She chatted to them for a while and discovered that the Bayswater area they were in was very expensive, even one room could cost as much as twelve to fifteen pounds a week. They suggested she walked along to Notting Hill and looked at adverts in shop windows because she might find somewhere cheaper. They asked if she had a job, and when she said she had only just arrived here and would have to look for one, they recommended she went to one of the employment agencies in Oxford Street on Monday. They were so friendly and nice that Josie thought everyone would be like them, but a few hours later, with blisters on her feet, she had discovered this wasn’t so.

  She found a shop window with adverts and jotted them all down, and then she began phoning them. Few people even answered the phone and those who did seemed impossibly snooty, asking her all sorts of questions about what sort of job she had and if she had a previous landlord’s and bank reference.

  Two out of fifteen of the people she phoned said she could call round, and gave her the address, but as soon as she got to the front door, they looked her up and down and said the room had already been let. As they couldn’t really have let it so quickly she had to assume that her being so young put them off.

  Another thing that surprised her was how quickly the area called Notting Hill changed from smart to seedy. Some roads were lovely, tree-lined with beautiful houses, but then she’d turn the corner and there were overflowing dustbins and paint peeling off front doors. The further she walked away from Notting Hill, the seedier it became, and soon she wasn’t seeing neatly typed advertisements in shop windows, but hastily scrawled ones that suggested the owners wouldn’t be so fussy.

  She had three more invitations to go round and view a room. The first one was so horrible and dirty she backed out with an excuse she had to see somewhere else. In the second, a grubby little man with a bald head touched her bottom as she went up the stairs in front of him and frightened the living daylights out of her. The third house seemed entirely occupied by black people, a group of them sitting on the wall outside. She had only seen two black people in her life before, and that was from a distance, and she was so unnerved she walked straight on past the house, far too nervous even to knock at the door.

  Finally she ended up in Ladbroke Grove. It was horrible. Lots of dirty children were playing in the streets, men were lying on patches of bare ground drinking, and there were so many black people that it was as though she was in a foreign country. Even the shops had a sort of pall of dirt hanging over them. She saw an overhead railway ahead of her, but by then she was too tired even to attempt to go somewhere nicer and she sat down on a low wall and began to cry.

  Her nervousness of black people abated when a big black lady in a pink floral dress came up to her and asked why she was crying. She had a nice face, soft, sad eyes and a singsong sort of voice. Something about her made Josie pluck up her courage to explain her predicament, and the woman took her into a café, bought her a cup of tea and a sticky bun and tried to persuade her to go home to her mother.

  ‘London ain’t no place for little girls on their own,’ she said, patting Josie’s hand in a motherly way. ‘All they do’s get themselves into trouble.’

  Josie said that she couldn’t go home now, and asked if she had any idea where she could get a room, to tide her over until she found a job.

  That was how she got this room, right up in an attic in a street called Westbourne Park Road. The lady, who introduced herself as ‘Fee’, knew the landlord, Mr Sharman, and took Josie round to see him. He agreed to let her have the room for four pounds a week, and because Fee had introduced them he wouldn’t ask for any deposit.

  Josie didn’t really understand what he meant by a deposit, but the fact he didn’t want one suggested he was a kind man. So she paid over the four pounds and he gave her the keys.

  Yet it was Fee’s sweetness that really affected Josie. As they’d walked round here Fee told her a little about herself. She said she and her husband had come from Trinidad ten years ago with high expectations of a better life. But even though her husband now worked as a porter in a hospital, they and their three children had to live in one room. She said people were mean to black people, they made them pay higher rent and gave them all the worst jobs.

  Josie was touched that with problems of her own the woman had still taken time out to help her. As Fee left to go home, she patted Josie’s cheek and told her to be a good girl. ‘I sure hope you run on home to your momma, sugar,’ she said. ‘But if you can’t do that, you get a good job, and then find yourself a nice place to live. You take a good look at what it’s like round here. Then get away from it before you get sucked in.’

  Chapter Ten

  As Josie was crying in Westbourne Park, Ellen was sobbing into her pillow too. She could hold herself together during the day, but as soon as she’d put Nicholas and Simon to bed, grief took over.

  When she first arrived in Bristol and Mr and Mrs Sanderson with their two little boys met her at the station, she felt as if all her troubles had vanished. They appeared to be good people, understanding, intelligent and very practical. They had their own wholesale grocery business, but Mrs Sanderson was struggling to cope with working with her husband, plus looking after her home and the two boys. They were as grateful to get help as Ellen was to be offered a job and a home.

  From the first evening with them, when they insisted she must call them Roger and Shirley, and Shirley gave her a couple of her old maternity dresses that were really pretty, Ellen felt everything was going to work out just fine. She liked the boys. Nicholas was five, Simon three. They were well-behaved, funny little things, and they welcomed her wholeheartedly because from now on they wouldn’t be packed off to their granny’s, auntie’s or neighbours while their mother went off to work.

  The Sandersons’ home wasn’t a grand one, just a three-bedroomed semi-detached in suburban Westbury Park, but to Ellen it was paradise – warm, cosy, with all the luxuries like television, a refrigerator, washing-machine, fitted carpets, and central heating that she’d never experienced before. Yet the nicest thing of all was that the Sandersons had a very modern outlook. They were young, only in their early thirties, an ambitious couple who wanted to move up in the world. They were fun-loving too; friends called at the house constantly and almost every weekend they either went to a party or threw one themselves. They were very happy to let Ellen have a free rein with their children.

  Until well after Christmas Ellen hardly thought about her own family. It was so good to wake up in the mornings knowing there would be no ugly scenes with Violet, no fear of her father discovering her secret. The housework side of the job was very easy, and the boys were thrilled to have someone who would play with them, read to them and take them out for walks.

  It was only in January, when Ellen had to go to the maternity hospital for the first time to be examined, that she was reminded of what lay ahead. She didn’t relish leaving the Sandersons’ in March and going into the mother-and-baby home.

  One evening in late February, she and Shirley were in the kitchen. It was snowing outside, and Ellen was doing some ironing while Shirley sat at the table painting her fingernails. Ellen had been impressed from her first day here by how well-groomed and elegant Shirley always was. She was slender, with blonde hair which she put up in a beehive, and she never went out without her full makeup on and her nails pai
nted.

  Ellen had been taken by a social worker to see the mother-and-baby home a couple of days previously and she had just admitted to Shirley that she was nervous about going there.

  ‘You don’t have to,’ Shirley said unexpectedly. ‘We’ve got to think of you as one of our family now, so you could stay here, and we’ll take you to the hospital when your time comes.’

  ‘But…’ Ellen said, thinking that would be wonderful but then she’d have nowhere to go back to afterwards.

  ‘I meant that we’d like you to carry on taking care of the boys afterwards,’ Shirley said, as if she’d read her mind.

  A lump came up in Ellen’s throat. She hadn’t thought for one moment that Shirley and Roger felt so attached to her. ‘But I have to go,’ she said wistfully. ‘They arrange the adoptions and everything at the home.’

  ‘That can be arranged from the hospital, a good deal less painfully,’ Shirley said crisply, blowing on her nails to dry them. ‘This business of keeping your baby until six weeks after the birth is brutal. I think it would be far better for you to hand the baby over at birth, before you get too fond of him or her.’

  ‘The Matron said it gives us time to really make up our minds,’ Ellen said.

  ‘Well, it does for girls who have a boyfriend who might marry them, or a supportive family prepared to step in to help,’ Shirley said, putting a second coat of polish on her nails. ‘But you haven’t got either of those, have you, dear?’

  Shirley’s suggestion seemed to be the answer to all Ellen’s problems, so she was only too happy to let her intervene and make arrangements for her. Within days she had met Dr Fordham, a woman doctor in nearby Clifton, who arranged adoptions privately. From then on Ellen was to have her ante-natal check-ups with her too, and Dr Fordham told her she would arrange for a foster-mother to come and take the baby away from the hospital after the birth.

  At that point Ellen hadn’t even considered that there might be an alternative to adoption. No one mentioned one, and the implication was that adoption was the easiest, least painful solution. Ellen would be free to go home to Cornwall afterwards if she wanted to, or to choose a college or start a career. No one ever need know her secret.

  But Ellen hadn’t reckoned on the powerful emotions that came with the birth of her little girl.

  She was exhausted after a seventeen-hour labour. She thought all she wanted to do was sleep, but when the midwife placed her baby girl in her arms, one look at that tiny, scrunched-up, angry face was enough to make the tiredness disappear.

  Ellen knew all about the wonder of new life. She’d helped her father with calving and lambing countless times. She’d seen cows and sheep nuzzle and lick their new babies and observed how the adult animal would from that moment on protect their offspring with their own lives, feeding and nurturing it. Yet somehow she hadn’t expected that she would respond to her own child in exactly the same way.

  As Ellen’s fingers caressed her soft skin and felt the firm grip of her tiny fingers around hers, suddenly she was overcome by a fierce desire to put her baby to her breast, to keep her forever, no matter what hardships she had to endure. The feeling was so strong she could hardly bear for her to be taken from her, even to be bathed.

  She called her Catherine, and she was allowed just four days with her. Even during that brief time Catherine was always being whipped away to be washed and changed, and for medical examinations. One day Ellen begged the ward sister not to take her away again, and the woman turned and looked at her sharply. ‘Why ever not? You’re giving her away anyway, aren’t you?’ she said bluntly.

  When Shirley came to visit Ellen, she tried to explain to her how she felt. She cried and asked her if she knew of any way she could keep Catherine. Shirley was sympathetic, but she said adoptive parents had already been selected, and the only alternative was for Ellen to take her baby back to Cornwall.

  Maybe if Ellen had been given a little more time to think that idea through, she might have decided on it, for even the thought of Violet’s nastiness was far less troubling than the horror of parting with her baby. But she was still too sore to walk anywhere; she had no clothes in the hospital for either herself or Catherine, nor any money.

  Without any warning or consultation with her, the foster-mother who would be looking after Catherine for six weeks arrived to collect her and took her away. Ellen had been told that Catherine was only being taken away for a bath in the nursery. When she went to look for her, she found an empty cot with the label saying ‘Baby Pengelly. Girl 61b 50z’ still on it.

  That was the cruellest thing of all. She hadn’t been allowed to say goodbye, to give her baby one more kiss, or the opportunity to say she wanted time to find a way to keep her. No one had considered she had any rights or feelings.

  Shirley and Roger came to take her home to their house a little later and found her in floods of tears.

  ‘You are just overwrought because on the fourth day the milk comes into the breasts and causes “baby blues”,’ Shirley said. ‘Now, buck up, dear, this is what you agreed to. By next week you will have forgotten all about it.’

  The ward sister gave Ellen pills to take to make her milk stop, and she wished there was another pill to make her stop picturing her baby, and to take away the terrible feeling of desolation. Yet she couldn’t let her true feelings show, even if she did feel she was the victim of a confidence trick. Shirley and Roger had helped her when no one else would, so she had to walk back into their house, kiss and hug the boys and make out everything was fine.

  The weather turned warm soon after her return home. Each time she took the boys to the park or up to the Downs nearby she saw women with prams, and she tortured herself by going and looking at their babies. Each day she told herself it would hurt less, but it didn’t. Her mind was running on a single track, unable to think of anything but her baby being fed, bathed and changed by a woman she’d never even been allowed to meet.

  Only Nicholas and Simon gave her any real comfort. Taking their small hands in hers, holding them on her lap, or washing and dressing them helped. She could lavish the love meant for her own baby on them, and their dependence on her as Shirley stepped up the hours she spent at the office was a kind of balm. Yet alone in her tiny bedroom at night she invariably gave way to tears as she thought of her baby in another woman’s arms.

  When a letter came from her father in July to say Josie had run away from home, Ellen was suddenly brought up sharply. She had been so immersed in sorrow that although she’d hastily sent her sister a handbag and a card for her birthday, she hadn’t written any letters for weeks. Now she had guilt to add to her unhappiness, for it seemed to her that Josie must have thought she didn’t care about her.

  It was to Dr Fordham that she turned for advice, for even though the woman was rather stern, Ellen had come to trust her. During her ante-natal check-ups, and the two meetings since Catherine’s birth, the last one being when she had to sign the first of the adoption papers before the chosen parents took her baby home, she had built up a strong relationship with the doctor. Dr Fordham alone knew just how Ellen felt, and a great deal about her family and home life.

  ‘Why don’t you go home to see your parents?’ she said, when Ellen had explained about Josie running off. ‘It’s time you went, you need to see your father, and while you are there you could contact some of Josie’s friends. They are far more likely to tell you if they know where she is than your parents are.’

  ‘But I’m so weepy and miserable,’ Ellen said. ‘What if I let the truth about my baby slip out?’

  ‘People only let slip what they want to,’ the doctor said firmly. ‘Remember, you have your good friend Mrs Peters there too. You can confide in her, and talking about it can only help, not make it worse.’

  ‘Violet will blame me for Josie going,’ Ellen sighed. ‘She won’t be pleased to see me.’

  Dr Fordham took both Ellen’s hands in hers. She was a small, rather schoolmarmish woman, but her grey eyes we
re kind. ‘Ellen, my dear,’ she said, ‘you’ve come through a terrible ordeal, but it’s over now. Catherine is safe and loved by her new parents. I know you won’t believe this, but what you’ve been through will have made you stronger, and you’ll be well able to cope with Violet. What you have to do is pick up the pieces of your life again, discard the bits you don’t want any more, and decide what you want for yourself. You can’t do that until you go back and see what you left behind.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Ellen said.

  ‘You will in time,’ the doctor said with a little smile. ‘Just go and see what transpires. As for your sister, remember, you aren’t responsible for her. Love her, worry about her by all means, but she has her life, you have yours, and you must plan it so it’s a good one.’

  In early August Ellen caught the train home to Truro. Shirley and Roger were taking the boys away on holiday for two weeks, so she hadn’t put them out in any way.

  It seemed Josie had sent a postcard home from London, and Ellen had one too, but there was no contact address on either. Ellen had given this a great deal of thought in the last couple of weeks. She had discounted Josie being pregnant, she wouldn’t have gone to London if she was, but would have come to her in Bristol to get advice. Not giving an address wasn’t necessarily sinister either; she was under age and didn’t want anyone dragging her home. But that didn’t stop Ellen worrying about her sister. From what she’d heard London was a dangerous place.

  ‘It was you clearing off that made her go,’ Violet said spitefully only a few minutes after Ellen arrived at Beacon Farm. ‘But I daresay she’ll make more of herself than you have – look at you, like something the cat brought in!’

  Ellen bit back tears, and later when she looked in the bedroom mirror she saw Violet had a point. She was scrawny and pale, and the cream dress she’d bought for her first date with Pierre, which only a year ago she’d thought so smart, had been washed so many times that it looked like an old rag.