Alone Beneath The Heaven

by Bradshaw, Rita

  When she reached the ground floor the chill of concrete on Sarah’s bare feet made her increase her pace to the laundry room, situated at the far end of the corridor. She found this part of the building even more scary than the upstairs, it being almost totally devoid of light and having only two narrow windows, one on either side of the front door.

  Her heart was beating a tattoo by the time she twisted the knob on the door and slipped inside the large square room - the familiar smell of damp clothes and disinfectant causing her nose to wrinkle briefly - but it was her physical condition, rather than Mother Shawe’s bogeyman, that caused her heart to pound. Lying in bed she hadn’t realized how weak she was, but now she was feeling dizzy and somewhat sick, and every little bit of her ached.

  She sank to the floor with her back to the door for a few minutes, the cold seeping upwards through her bare bottom and causing her teeth to chatter, then found the strength to stand up and walk over to the far end of the room by the window, where the dry clothes and bedding were stored. She found a pair of the regulation red flannel bloomers along with a calico petticoat and pulled them on quickly over her flannel shift, before slipping into one of the institution’s blue smocks which was a trifle too big for her. But it didn’t matter, nothing mattered, except getting away as soon as she could. She didn’t bother with a pinafore, instead she opened the door to the boiler room which led off the first room and peered inside, having to wait for a full minute for her eyes to adjust to the lack of light.

  There were no boots. She could have cried with disappointment. What was she going to do? Should she risk going back upstairs and finding the dormitory, and hope no one saw her take a pair from the end of a bed where each child placed their footwear at night? She didn’t dare. But she couldn’t go without any boots. She shut the door, panic high, and then she saw them - a pair of old, and obviously adult boots, tucked in one corner close to the big airers. Her feet slid into them, lost in the cavernous depths, but she found that if she laced them tightly and moved slowly they would just about stay on her feet. ‘Beggars can’t be choosers.’ One of Mother McLevy’s pet sayings came back to her and she nodded to it. They’d do.

  The last thing she did was to select one of the thin blankets and tuck it under her arm. She might have to sleep under a hedgerow or in a barn for a night or two. That’s what the heroine in Sunshine Review had done, and she’d eaten berries and wild mushrooms and things, and a farm boy had shared his lunch with her . . .

  Getting through the window proved more difficult than she’d thought, mainly due to the fact that every time she heaved herself up the boots slipped off, so after two tries she took the boots off and dropped them out first, hearing them thud onto the ground below with a sense of inevitability. She had to go now, she couldn’t leave them out there, and she knew once she was outside she would never get back in, the window being six foot up from the concrete path. She stabilized herself on the chair she had pulled across to the window again, and pulled herself up with her thin little arms, her legs waving madly for a few seconds as she steadied herself on the flaking window frame. It took some manoeuvring to get through the gap, mainly because she was frightened of shooting out on to her head, but eventually she was hanging by her arms outside and with a little plop she landed on the ground.

  She was immediately conscious of the chill of the night, the blackness, the whispering of the tall looming trees surrounding the building and the other two buildings in the distance taking on the appearance of forbidding sentinels with a thousand eyes. She shrank back against the wall for a moment, the dizziness returning more strongly, and then sank down to the floor to pull on the boots, her teeth chattering uncontrollably with a mixture of fear and cold. Everywhere looked so different compared to the daytime.

  She sat there for some time. Her arms and legs seemed to have lead weights attached to them and her head was aching badly; the bed she had just left took on the form of heaven. She must have fallen asleep for a few minutes because she suddenly jerked awake with a panic-stricken start as an owl called out into the charcoal-streaked sky, and then she remembered, and rose slowly to her feet.

  She had to get out onto the road beyond, that was the first thing, and then . . . then everything would work out.

  The gate was locked, the seven-foot wrought-iron fence either side of it equally unscalable with vicious points to deter even the most intrepid climber - which Sarah wasn’t.

  ‘Oh.’ She gazed up at the gate, and then her eyes went higher still as she muttered, ‘Please, God, do something, will you? Please?’ There was no answer, no sudden creaking of the gate swinging open, but there suddenly popped into her mind a conversation she had overheard when working in the vegetable garden a few weeks before. Two of the older boys had been congratulating themselves on finding a gap in the fence, through which they had been able to squeeze and undertake a raid on a farmer’s orchard some way down the lane. They had been tall boys, too; broad-shouldered. If they could get through . . .

  It took Sarah some time to find the gap, which was nothing more than a slight bending of two of the iron poles, but she was through in a trice and out onto the grass verge beyond, where she stood for a moment looking from right to left. The sky was patchily moonlit but still overwhelmingly dark, the rain of the afternoon making the ground stick to her feet. She pulled the blanket round her shoulders in the form of a shawl, and began to trudge along the verge, feeling very tiny and very alone.

  She didn’t have anyone who loved her. There was a cold wind blowing against her face, and it was only when it stung her cheeks that she realized she was crying. Her mam hadn’t loved her, there hadn’t been a pink pram and a silver rattle, it was a story, just a story. The pain in her chest was making it tight and she pushed her small fists, in which the edges of the blanket were clasped, into her breastbone.

  Mary Owen said you didn’t have to have a da to be born, just a mam. She didn’t know if she believed that, she admitted to herself, but any road everyone was agreed you had to have a mam, and hers hadn’t wanted her. Why? She stopped suddenly, the dizziness intensifying. Her mam was somewhere, somewhere, and she didn’t know where. And she wanted her mam. She did, she wanted her. She didn’t care what she looked like - she could look like Mary Owen’s mam even, she didn’t care, she just wanted her mam. But her mam didn’t want her. She didn’t know where she was, what she was doing; she could have died and her mam wouldn’t have known.

  It was becoming increasingly difficult to walk; the nausea was strong now but it was her legs that were all wobbly. She set her face and continued to plod on. The boots were rubbing painfully when she’d covered no more than a few hundred yards, and after hobbling along and twice sprawling on the ground when she tripped over her own feet she decided to take them off and carry them round her neck for a while. She sat down on the verge, but once the boots were off and hung round her neck by the laces she found to her amazement she couldn’t get up, an exhaustion so severe as to be paralysing weighting her down. The vomiting took her by surprise, but once it was over the dizziness felt slightly better, although the will to move was quite gone. She curled up into a little ball in the damp grass, pulled the blanket around her and over her head, and shut her eyes as it began to rain again.

  ‘I told you I saw something, Edward, I knew it. What is it?’

  There was a little squeal. ‘It’s not a dead body, is it?’

  ‘For crying out loud, Josephine, let me get to it.’ A pause and then, ‘Good grief! It’s a child, a little girl.’

  ‘She’s not . . . ?’

  ‘No, she’s alive, and it looks like she’s from the Home back there by her clothes. Josephine, get out of the damn car, will you, there’s more at stake here than your new shoes. And bring that rug from the back seat while you’re about it.’

  Sarah was aware of the disembodied voices floating above her head but they belonged to the twilight world she had slipped into; they weren’t real and she didn’t want them to be real. Sh
e was comfortable, she didn’t hurt any more, and it was only the lack of pain that made her realize how much she had been hurting before.

  When, in the next moment, a warm hand was placed on her cheek and a voice said, ‘Can you hear me? Can you open your eyes?’ she kept them tightly shut, but then as she felt herself lifted up her eyes opened of their own volition.

  ‘Hallo there.’ The man’s voice reminded her of the doctor, but he was older, much older. ‘Don’t worry, we’re going to take you home. You’ve gone and got yourself lost, haven’t you.’

  Lost? She wasn’t lost. She wanted to tell him so - the panic at being returned to Hatfield jerking her limbs - but the nausea had returned, stronger this time, and all she could do was turn her face as she began to retch.

  There were words passing over her head, but on the perimeter of her awareness, as she grappled against unconsciousness and the crippling sickness, but once the vomiting was over she knew she was being carried again, and then she was inside the car and the engine started.

  They were taking her back . . .

  Part Two

  Fighting Back: 1947

  Chapter Five

  As the train drew into King’s Cross station Sarah smoothed down the jacket of her new blue serge suit, and glanced at her reflection in the smut-smeared window. It didn’t look homemade, she reassured herself for the hundredth time, her heart thumping against her ribs. It looked smart and practical, but feminine too - Rebecca was a dab hand with her sewing machine. And anyway, the skirt wasn’t as full or as long as some she had seen since the hourglass look first came in some months ago. It was all very well for critics to condemn the New Look as frivolous and wasteful, but women were so sick of ration books and clothing coupons. It had certainly been worth the fourteen coupons the material for the suit had taken to feel less provincial for her arrival in London.

  The thought of the hours Rebecca had spent in making the suit, and the six coupons her friend had insisted on giving her towards the material, caused Sarah’s throat to tighten and her eyes to blink rapidly, the mental picture of Rebecca, Maggie and Florrie as they had waved her goodbye on the Sunderland platform vivid on the screen of her mind. But then the train had stopped and the picture was swept away as she opened the carriage door and hauled her big brown suitcase onto the bustling platform.

  Sarah had been down to London once before, when she had attended the interview for the housekeeping position she was now taking up, but that had been on a Sunday when it was much quieter and slower. Nevertheless, then, as now, the pace of the city had excited her, stimulating the need to leave Sunderland’s familiar shores and venture further afield.

  She had decided to splash out on a taxi for the first time in her life - it was her first day at a new job after all - and when an obliging porter offered his services to the taxi rank Sarah gladly relinquished her tussle with the heavy suitcase and her big cloth bag, and trotted along at his side as he wove in and out of the jostling throng. ‘You new to these parts?’ he asked mildly.

  ‘Yes, I’m from Sunderland.’

  ‘Sunderland?’ There was a note of surprise in the cockney tones. ‘I’ve a brother who moved up that away some twenty years ago now, and he was speaking the lingo within months. You don’t sound as if you’re from the north.’

  ‘Don’t I?’ She didn’t tell him she had been practising every night for the last few years, once she was alone in her room, to remove even the slightest inflexion from her voice. Not that she was ashamed of her beginnings, she told herself quickly, it wasn’t that, but like it or not it mattered how you spoke if you wanted to get on. And she did, she did want to get on. The thought was accompanied by the pounding of her heart. And this was the first step. She was here, here in London, where anything could happen . . .

  ‘You had your fair share in the war from what our Bert tells me? Too near water you see, with the docks and all.’ He had raised a hand as he spoke to a taxi driver who was leaning against the side of his cab eating a sandwich. ‘Mind you, can’t compare with what we took down here. I told our Bert the last time I saw him, it’s a miracle any of us survived to tell the tale and that’s the truth. Old Hitler had it in for us Londoners, but he didn’t know what he was up against.’

  She nodded as the sharp eyes turned to her, but didn’t say anything. The war had been over nearly two-and-a-half years, but for some people it was still all they could talk about.

  He ushered her into the back of the car as the taxi driver opened the door for her, nodding at her as she gave the address to the driver. ‘He’s a good bloke, Brian Mullett, he’ll look after you,’ he said in a stage whisper, his head bobbing as he pocketed the tip she gave him. ‘Knows his way about and don’t take the long route, if you get my meaning.’

  ‘Thank you, you’ve been very kind.’

  ‘All in a day’s work, love. All in a day’s work.’

  He stood and watched them as they drove off, and she didn’t know quite whether to wave or smile so she did both before settling back in the leather seat, her hand clutching at her throat as she stared through the window at the teeming traffic which seemed a law unto itself. They certainly didn’t drive like this in Sunderland. But it didn’t matter, nothing mattered, because she was here - she’d arrived, she’d done it! She shut her eyes tight for a moment, then forced herself to let out her breath in a long slow sigh.

  ‘You all right, duck?’ The taxi driver nearly made her jump out of her skin as he slid back the glass partition separating the driver from the rest of the cab. ‘Not feeling bad, are you?’

  ‘Oh no, no, I’m fine, thank you.’ She smiled at him before adding, the lilt in her voice telling its own story, ‘I’ve just moved here from the north you see, and everything is so fast and exciting.’

  ‘Well it’s fast all right, but I dunno about the other.’ He grinned at her. ‘You say you’re from the north?’

  The tone suggested enquiry, and in answer to it Sarah said, ‘I’m taking up a position as housekeeper to Lady Harris. Do you know her?’

  ‘Lady Harris? Well, bless me soul, and there was me round there just the other day for a cup of tea and a cream bun.’ The teasing was friendly and light. ‘If I’d known you was coming I’d have put in a good word for you.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She was laughing now, and the eyes in the mirror smiled back.

  ‘So you’re a housekeeper are you? You don’t look old enough to keep house.’

  ‘I’m twenty.’ It was indignant.

  ‘Twenty? Oh, that’s ancient, that is. That explains it. Twenty you say, my, my.’

  ‘I’ve had a lot of experience.’

  Years, endless years, of drudgery, and those before she reached the grand age of fifteen and officially became a supervisor, the title of Mother for the Home’s helpers having become redundant two years before. It had been Maggie who had persuaded her to stay at the Home as a paid helper when the job was offered to her. ‘Get a bit of experience under your belt, lass,’ she’d said stoically. ‘I know, an’ you know, that you’ve bin doin’ the work for years, but you need it on paper. Use ’em, they’ve used you since you were a bairn.’ It had been the right decision.

  One year as a supervisor alongside Rebecca, who had then left Hatfield when she had married just after her sixteenth birthday; one as laundry assistant, rising to laundry manageress the following year; then two as housekeeper to one of Hatfield’s governors, before her employers, on deciding to emigrate, had recommended her for the post she was about to take up.

  She had upset more than a few at Hatfield when she’d gone for the housekeeping job to the governor, Mr Roberts, she reflected quietly. The general opinion had been that she should have stayed in the background and let others who were older, and in their opinion wiser, have their chance. But Mrs Roberts had liked her, and had appreciated having someone near her own age about the place, she having married a man old enough to be her father, so that had been that. And she hadn’t been unhappy there, not by a long cha
lk, with a comfortable room of her own and most evenings free, as well as a half-day a week to herself.

  She had been able to visit Maggie and Florrie in the evenings, more often than not with Rebecca, whose husband had been working permanent night shift in those days; but she’d known even then she wanted more. She had always known it, right from when she could remember thinking at all, but the self-knowledge had clarified and sharpened since the incident with Matron Cox when she was ten.

  It entered Sarah’s mind, and not for the first time, that it was funny how things worked out. Who would have thought the explosion that wrecked her life then and made her grow up overnight would carry the seeds that, growing and flowering, would encourage her to follow her own star? Because she couldn’t have left Maggie all alone in Sunderland, she just couldn’t have done it. But she hadn’t had to, Florrie was with her. And the two women’s friendship had begun that day ten years ago . . .

  She had still been very ill with the pneumonia that had nearly snuffed out her life - the result of her attempted escape from Hatfield - when Maggie had asked if Florrie could come to see her in the Sunderland infirmary. She hadn’t wanted her to but she had said yes anyway, because Maggie had indicated Florrie wanted to apologize for the part she had played in her troubles, and she had been curious to see the Mother Shawe she knew saying sorry to anyone - especially to her. But as Florrie had stood by the side of her bed, she had hardly recognized her old enemy in the white-faced, broken woman looking down at her, and it had seemed natural to hold out her hand when Florrie had falteringly asked her forgiveness. That the moment had been portentous hadn’t been clear at the time, but it had begun a steady metamorphosis in Florrie that had transformed not only their relationship, but also Florrie’s with Maggie and Rebecca.