by Dawson, Jill
So one day in late December, Stella brings over a black wig and a heavy fur coat big enough to cover me, and playfully insists we go and get some things for the baby. “You’ve not been in the papers for a while. Surely they’ve got better things to think about than one little gunman’s moll from Bethnal Green?” Only Harrods will do.
Tony brings a car and puts on a chauffeur’s cap to look the part. It’s a freezing day with the whole of Knightsbridge cast in ice like something glittering on a Christmas card. Our heels make that lovely fresh crunch in the light frost and our noses are tipped with pink and nothing, nothing could be nicer than to be out and about that day, carrying a baby under my fur coat, in the sharp fresh air.
Tony waits for us as we load up, and I haven’t lost the gift: I manage a dozen nappies, safety pins, plastic pants, a gorgeous pale pink nightdress with silky ribbon at the neck, tiny pillow, sheets, scratch mittens, blankets with silky trimmed corners, a fancy carry-coat, a posh grey pram . . . actually, we don’t hoist these bigger things. We put them on a tab. It’s the account of a very well-off, influential gentleman Of Some Importance who used to come in the club. He bought me perfume and stockings once before and I’d come to Harrods with him and memorized the number of his account by looking over his shoulder. I’m amazed to find that, like lots of numbers, it’s still in my head. The shop girl lets me sign for it and smiles and says, “How lovely, might be a New Year baby!” as I sign with a flourish. Poor sod, probably saw the list of stuff one day and had a heart attack, thinking some mistress was in the pudding club and about to blackmail him.
Stella thinks this is a hoot, but one glance at Tony’s face tells me he thinks otherwise.
“How come you remember that geezer’s account number so well?” he asks me, later, when we’re on our own in the Dog and Duck on Dean Street.
“I don’t know. I just have a good memory for numbers, or something . . .”
“What, after one fucking glance?”
His look is threatening, and I can tell by the set of his jaw how angry he is, how much he’s trying to hold back. For the baby, I think. Now I’m so big, it’s impossible not to see how vulnerable I am, like Humpty Dumpty, or a big egg that might easily smash.
Then later that month Tony thinks it might be OK for me to go to the New Year’s Eve party at Winston’s Club on Clifford Street, as long as I’m in disguise (and partly perhaps because being pregnant does make me look genuinely unrecognizable—my face is puffy and my bosom’s up to my chin). He’ll tell everyone we’re married and I can cover up with the fur. I’m thrilled because Winston’s is a new club and looks really ritzy. I’ve seen the poster everywhere—Barbara Windsor in her sparkly bikini and Amanda Barrie with their “augmented cabaret.” I’m longing for a touch of the old glamour, to see the New Year in. Winston’s isn’t quite the old crowd—so not too many chances of someone recognizing me—and I’d heard that stars like Gina Lollobrigida or Gary Crosby (son of Bing) went there.
We never end up there. Stella wants to call in first at this new place in Soho, a bombed-out church that’s been converted into a club. It’s mostly West Indian guitarists and colored dancers, and Stella’s got it into her head that it’s much the most fashionable place to be. We can hardly move in the crush. Tony brings us two enormous warm rum punches with slices of lemon floating in the warm butter, from a bar decked with bamboo and fishing net, and Stella and I jiggle on the dance floor in a version of dancing; barely able to see one another through the smoke, buffeted around too much to really move, but smiling at one another; tapping our toes and nodding our heads like crazy pecking birds.
The band pause for a break between numbers, sipping on their beers, and I suddenly need to rush to the lavatory, battering my way through the elbows and hot bodies to get there. As I flush the loo behind me I glimpse a little red tadpole swimming away. What on earth is this? Something to do with the baby? I’m just about to whisper to Stella, waiting outside the cubicle for me, when a great juddering pain swarms all over my belly—Stella takes one look at me as the door opens, and without bothering to tell Tony, lost somewhere in that cavernous place, rushes us outside to hail a black cab.
That forty-minute journey back to the East End is the longest of my life. Stella is dabbing at my face with Quickies to wipe away the sweat, squeezing my hand, and watching the meter—we’re going to have to do a runner, she hasn’t any money. She stuffs a clean handkerchief in my mouth because she doesn’t want the driver to know what’s happening, and I’m like a cat in a box, scrabbling to claw my way out every time a new pain strikes. She’s already asked the girls in Soho and found out about a home in Lower Clapton that will take me in, no questions asked, if I can only hold on until then, and not have the fucking baby in the cab! Tony has paid the woman up front; it’s all sorted.
That night I have two surprises. The first is that the woman who opens the door to me and Stella in the net-curtained terrace in Lockhurst Street is none other than Beattie Rolls, a little fatter and less glamorous in her apron and her slippers, but easily recognizable as one of Annie’s Green Bottle friends. She smiles and ushers us in. This is what she does for a living now. This and abortions.
The second surprise—after hours of grunting and struggling, up on all fours like an animal, in a back room on a bunch of blood-sodden sheets, with a baby who seems like someone trying to get out of a sweater when they’ve not quite lined their head up with the neck-hole—comes later. Like other times in my life, I note the pain, and choose not to comment, only ducking my head like a horse and biting down on the various whiskey-soaked rags that Beattie brings me. Stella chews her nails and flaps uselessly, but she did have to stay behind to “pay” the taxi driver for our journey—me being too big to “leg it”—so although there isn’t time to say so, I’m thankful to her.
There is a moment where I think I’m standing at the edge of a cliff, and staring down at a black and boiling sea swirling beneath me. “I don’t want to have a baby,” I say to Beattie. “Can we stop now? I’ve changed my mind.” Beattie is as calm as a bar of soap; she keeps mopping at my brow, and patting the small of my back, and she doesn’t answer, and I look down at the churning sea, from the great height, and wonder if I should jump. There’s Mum at the bottom, in the water, and Nan, too, and all the other women who’ve had babies, eddying around and panicking, but beckoning frantically to me. Surely Mum is holding up a little wrapped thing, and it’s terrible; it’s going to sear me with pain worse than I can ever imagine, than anyone could ever imagine, and I won’t get through it; there aren’t even words for it; how will I be able to do it and survive?
Then Beattie is gently bringing me back down to the grassy side of the cliff edge and the sea is calming; ceases its mad churning and rearing up at me, and another contraction passes over.
“That’s it, my gel,” Beattie says. “Nice and slow. Easy . . . holding yourself back . . . that’s right . . .”
My baby arrives at last, just as the sky erupts into red, flushing through the net curtains, on the dawn of the first day of 1957. Beattie swears and sits back on her heels, wiping her hands on her apron; Stella bursts into tears.
I fall on my back on the mattress and the bundle is handed to me, warm and strange, and slipped onto my chest. A little heart beats against mine. And that’s the second surprise. The name I had for her, for the little girl I always knew I was carrying, just won’t stick. Ida, I’d planned to call her, after Nan. The warm weight of her, light as an empty paper bag, hastily wiped clean and wrapped in a white muslin cloth, stares up at me. Ida, I try again. But she seems to be studying me, each almond-shaped eye open and quizzical, a very deliberate and stubborn gaze. I want my own name, she seems to be saying. Don’t give me something that belongs to somebody else. I glance away from the baby’s face, overwhelmed by the clamoring feeling inside me every time I look at her. Beattie kneels beside us, bringing me a cup of tea.
Maria.
The name floats in from somewhere. I feel a shiver run through me, as Beattie suddenly says, “Is it me, or is it chilly in here?” and closes the window to the bedroom. Too late—the name flew in, and settled, like a moth. Maria.
8
Becoming a Mother
That first week with Maria was like falling in love. Nothing in my life before or since felt stranger than that unreal week. The baby herself was magical: the faint vanilla smell of her; her vivid dark eyes, which as the week went by altered in color from inky blue to the blue of a mussel shell to a lighter, more astonishing color, pale and vivid as a thread of blue ice in snow. I stared at her tiny fingers; lifted up her hand, marveling at the lightness of it, no more weight than a rose petal. I felt that she was studying me, too. Perhaps not marveling quite as much. I almost wanted to apologize in advance. Thinking of that magistrate’s comments. The terrible childhood idea. I’m so sorry it was my life you landed in. This is it. This is who you got. I’ll do my best.
At least Maria wasn’t born into squalor and starvation. I found myself doing little calculations like that. Trying to weigh up the ways in which my life and hers would be different. The tasseled Moroccan flat was filled with sweet-smelling freesias and roses, and fruit—someone even found bananas from somewhere, though I had to hide them when Bobby was around. There were constant visitors that first week: Stella and Tony and Gloria and Beattie and Bobby, and each of them lifting the baby and gazing at her as if she was the most breathtaking, astonishing, miraculous thing—which she was, of course. She slept soundly, snuggled in cashmere, her wrist encircled in a gold christening bracelet. She didn’t enter the world with her mother in shackles either, in D-wing of Holloway. But I did go back there, sooner than I’d hoped, and my little respite of cashmere and gold, freesias and fruit, was brief.
Here’s what happened: about a week after the birth, Gloria was visiting. I was suddenly in staggering, burning agony, wondering if something wasn’t very wrong indeed. I went to the bathroom, to try and examine myself, but somehow couldn’t even crouch down to do it; my body from my vagina upwards was ablaze, and the next thing I knew, I blacked out on the bathroom floor. I had no memory of falling, or of anything else after that. If Gloria hadn’t been there, I dread to think what might have happened, how long it might have been until someone came.
I woke in a hospital bed. Metal bar behind the pillow at my head. Handcuffs on my wrists.
After giving birth, Beattie had stitched me, rubbing me first with an ice cube to numb the pain and doing it as swiftly as she could, giving me a huge slug of whiskey to try and get me through it. It was brutal, but that pain was nothing to what I felt on waking up, in Homerton Mothers’ Hospital, to the sight of police and doctors and that clinking sound between my wrists and the knowledge that I was defeated.
I knew Gloria would be sorry that she did what she did. She told me later she was scared, more scared than she’d ever been, and she thought I was going to die. In fact she was right: I would have died if she hadn’t made the decision to get me to Homerton Mothers’ Hospital and in fact driven me there herself and left me there in reception—not wanting to be caught for aiding and abetting a prisoner on the run—but that wasn’t much comfort, then. I wanted to die. Turned out I had septicemia from the stitches, and, without the help of antibiotics, the feverish spasms that were shaking my body from my bowels to my head would have cost me my life. That was nothing to me. All I could think of was how stupid Nature is, as my dumb cowlike body continued to produce milk from my aching breasts, flooding my hospital gown; not understanding that it had all been for nothing and there was no use for that milk now. It would never reach the baby. How could I know when I’d see Maria again?
PART THREE
That’s the story then of Maria’s birth, and how I managed to have her born free as that song goes, despite then facing a longer sentence than ever for absconding. The septicemia, the doctors told me, meant that my fallopian tubes were buggered (well, I’m not sure that’s the word they used) and I’d never have any more children.
Gloria was right to take me to hospital, though it took me a while to see it that way. What made me forgive her was this: she kept Maria. She persuaded her old man Ronald, and by some greater miracle she persuaded Welfare and the rest of them to let her take care of Maria, unofficially foster her while I was inside, and that there was no need to give her up for adoption. She did all of this with great diplomacy, without dropping anyone else in it—Stella or Tony—or offending Dad or Annie, who also wanted to take care of Maria. She even managed to win her little stepdaughter Betty round, by persuading her the new baby was a novelty, a little dolly to lavish affection on, rather than a threat to Betty’s own position. And as soon as I was allowed visitors and out of the prison hospital, Gloria got done up to the nines and brought Maria to Holloway in a bonnet of enormous proportions. Gloria was a marvel. That glimpse of her resourcefulness I’d seen, back in my early hoisting days—that gift for deceit and beguiling others—hadn’t left her. She was a force to be reckoned with.
Then Tony came, and he brought Maria. I sobbed to see him holding the tiny baby so tenderly on his lap, and when he left with her, assuring me that Gloria was outside in the Rolls, that “Maria won’t want for nothing, doll, you can be sure of that,” I noticed he had included in my parcel some tobacco and papers (he knew they went further than cigarettes in prison and tobacco was valuable currency), some soap, socks; and the small square of white muslin that Beattie had wrapped Maria in, when she first arrived, hoping, I suppose, to comfort me, because it smelled of her. I sniffed it once, alone that first night, and the shock of longing swept me like a wave, almost knocking me off my feet. I had to fold the muslin up and stuff it to the back of my cupboard. I never reached for it again.
Holloway hadn’t improved any in my five-month absence. I had a new cellmate: a colored girl called Tracey, with huge eyes and scars all the way up both arms. She had the habit of farting like a man whenever she felt like it and then cheekily saying “pardon” as if she had forgotten herself; and yet she was the one always putting in complaints about me: apparently I disturbed her at night by sleepwalking and going through her pathetic belongings, helping myself to things. She went on and on about this photograph of hers she said I nicked: a photo of her little boy back home in Jamaica, a boy called Matthew. I did see it once, I remember it, stuck on the wall above her bed with toothpaste. It couldn’t have been her son because he looked ten or eleven and she was about twenty-two at most. He was standing barefoot outside a shack: a skinny negro boy with a very stern gaze, directly to camera. Yes, I remembered the photo well enough, and yes, it was now not in her cupboard and—yes, OK, after some rummaging—it was discovered in mine. That didn’t prove anything. She could have put it there herself.
I don’t know about the sleepwalking. I rarely slept, or remembered sleeping. My sleep was scraped and scratched all night long by the sound of a baby crying. A haunting, distressed, and definitely newborn baby’s cry. Like the mewing of a cat, building up eventually to a full head of steam.
“Why doesn’t somebody pick up that baby?” I’d say to Tracey. If she was awake she’d shake her head and tell me to fuck off; the mother and baby wing was a whole separate building; that there was no way I could hear a fucking baby from our cell. Lock-up was 8:45 p.m. and it was the most terrible moment of the whole long day: the time when I knew I had to face it again, hours and hours of that baby crying and not being comforted.
I grew to understand eventually that it wasn’t outside the cell at all and that no one else could hear it; I learned not to mention it again to the prison doctor or the screws or to Tracey and finally to accept the extra medication I could have to help me sleep. The Jolly Trolley was everyone’s friend in prison, but, remembering Moll, I was wary, and if I could, I wanted to get through nights without help from “Pills on Wheels” or the “sweet shop.” I saved them up, the pills, determined only to use them fo
r the very worst of nights.
Gloria was devoted, and week after week she brought Maria in to see me. She kept a diary and wrote down what Maria had done, and showed it to me: every feed, every hour of waking, every nappy change and gurgle was in there. Gloria assured me she’d bought Dr. Spock and was following his advice to “respond to the baby’s needs,” and not doing strict four-hour feeds, or refusing to pick Maria up when she screamed blue murder. Her Ronald was a bit tight with money and Gloria didn’t have her own, so we’d decided to use some of my whack from the jewelry robbery to pay for extras; a decision which made me feel better at once, I realized, as if I was more in charge.
“You don’t let her cry for long, then?” I repeated, holding the sleeping hot Maria, stroking her dark tufty head, and minutes later, my fingers registering the little packet of tobacco Gloria had successfully snuck in, hidden in Maria’s toweling nappy.
I managed to smile for Gloria; I knew she was trying, but it was so hard to cuddle Maria, feel her to be the only living thing in the grey stone of Holloway, and not to feel sick with worry: surely the place would defile her in some way?
Those nights after Gloria’s visits were always the worst: that’s what I saved up my sleeping tablets for. The nights after seeing Maria. Tracey’s advice, in fact the advice all inmates give, was not to imagine it. Life on the outside, they mean. You get by just living day to day, by focusing on the present. Your routines: breakfast, gardening duty, lunch, work in the kitchen, tea time, exercise yard if you’re lucky, telly time, dinner, lock-up. Or the same routine hour by hour, but with your smokes, your bits of smokes, eking them out. Forget what’s going on outside and your “bird,” your time, will fly by at last, swallowed up in the long grey corridor that forms prison life; that’s the popular view.