Whenever I caught a glimpse of myself in shop windows, I used to be really surprised that a normal kid looked back at me. I thought that I must be something so hideous for people to have treated me the way they had, like a piece of plasticine that’s been pulled and twisted into an ugly blob; but here I was, an ordinary-looking child with brown hair in a clip. I couldn’t recognize myself. So I would think, There must be two of me, an outside person and an inside person. And that got me thinking, They don’t know who I am. They have no idea. And I realized then that I had to protect the inside person. They could beat the outside person as much as they liked. I knew me and I knew how I felt, and they didn’t. I’m going to have to look after the me in here.
Chapter Eleven
I grew very fast that summer. It was almost as if the warm days had made me shoot up like a sunflower. I was still as thin as a whippet, but the backflips and head-stands I’d been practising had made me supple and strong. When I returned to Duke Street school in September, Mrs Jones made me move to a desk at the back as I was now one of the tallest in my form.
Being at the back of the class is usually the most coveted place, especially if you’re a kid who’s often picked on. However, for me it was a disaster. My eyes had been growing increasingly short-sighted over the past year, and now it was difficult to pick out the words and sums on the blackboard. I copied down what I thought I could see, but I often made mistakes.
By this time, we were old enough to use ink pens. All the kids in my class felt much more grown up now they had their own pen, but I found that I missed my pencil. The nib on my pen was old and splayed and sputtered ink all over my exercise book as I worked. Mrs Jones was fanatical about neatness. She used to walk up and down our rows of desks, watching what we were doing like some huge bird of prey. It was hard enough to work while her eyes were boring down on you; but when your pen nib just wouldn’t behave, it was torture. My knuckles were constantly red from where she’d rapped them with her ruler.
Although I made many mistakes in class, my work was progressing well, largely due to with Miss Williams’s lessons at Sunday School. I was so willing to learn, so keen to impress her, that my writing and drawing came on in leaps and bounds.
I was ten and a bit when my mother and sisters came back into my life. I had sensed that there was something wrong and that Freda and my dad were rowing more than usual. Usually, they sat in frigid silence in the evening after Dad had come in from work. She’d darn his socks while he read the paper, and it seemed like rarely a word ever passed between them. For the past few months, though, my father’s fuse had been especially short, and Freda was as jumpy as a cat. I realized that the rows had something to do with his divorce and that Mum’s solicitor had managed to track him down; but I didn’t glean much because I hid in my room most of the time, keeping out of harm’s way.
The full reason for my dad’s behaviour became clear to me one day when he called me downstairs.
‘You’re going to your mother’s tomorrow,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to go every Sunday and you’d better not put a foot out of line, my girl, or I’ll give you such a hiding.’
My heart gave a great jump in my chest and for a minute I couldn’t breathe. She’s found me. She wants me back!
Dad turned then to Freda. ‘Dress her in her Sunday best, and make sure she’s tidy. I don’t want that bitch saying we’re not looking after her properly.’
It took me ages to get to sleep that night. It had been seven years since I’d last seen my mother and sisters. I wondered what it would be like when I saw them again. Would they hug me? Had they missed me at all? Might they even fight to keep me?
The next day, my father took me down to Victoria Bus Station. When we got there, a tall fair-haired girl was waiting for us. I instantly recognized Dora, but was shocked that she wasn’t the four-year-old sister I remembered. I sensed there was little recognition on her part. She looked tense and I realized that seeing Dad after all these years must be a big shock to her. He greeted her tersely, showing no warmth at all. As far as he was concerned she was part of the enemy camp, one of my mother’s spies.
‘Get her back on the five o’clock bus. I don’t want to be hanging round here waiting.’ With that, Dad turned and left and we got on the bus together without a word.
Sitting on the top deck of the bus with Dora was excruciatingly awkward. She didn’t say a single word to me, and I certainly wasn’t able to start any sort of conversation with her. I wouldn’t have had a clue what to say. Every minute of the journey was painful, and it was obvious we were both relieved when it was over.
Mum and Paddy had been given a bigger house than ours by the council. It was semi-detached and I knew if Freda could see it she’d have been spitting with envy. Dora led me down the side passage and through the back door into the kitchen. Mum was standing at the sink and wiped her hands on her pinny when she saw me. She was much older-looking than I remembered, and the lines around her mouth and eyes weren’t happy ones; her face was scored with the marks of discontent and worry.
‘Hello Judy,’ she said. ‘I see Dora found you then.’
Her movements looked somehow leaden, and forced. She came over and held me for a moment, but it was a strange, stiff sort of hug. I sensed that she was determined to play the motherly role as well as she could but that she’d never really known how, so it felt very uncomfortable to her. And if Mum felt awkward, I felt doubly so. She seemed like a stranger but it was as though something, some loving bond, was expected of us both and neither of us knew how to create it. I didn’t know how to be chatty and outgoing; I was too used to hiding away. I must have seemed a charmless, wooden sort of girl to them.
I could see Mum had made an effort as the kitchen table had been laid with a cloth and plates of sandwiches and cake. But everything about that day had a strange formality that didn’t make it comfortable for any of us. She took me through to the front room, where my three other sisters were sitting on the settee. The scene looked almost staged, and I sensed that the whole thing had been set up for my benefit. Mum introduced me to Mary and to my two half-sisters, Lily and Rose, and they said hello quietly and politely. It felt horribly awkward to have such a stilted first meeting with Mary. I wanted to say, Don’t you remember me? Your little sister, who you used to hold in your arms, wash and feed? Have you forgotten that?
As the day wore on, I realized that Mum was desperate to create a perfect family picture that I could take home with me to taunt my father with. And I knew that he wanted to rile her too. He had drummed into me on our way to the bus station that I must paint a rosy picture of my life in Wood Street. It was obvious that, although my parents were now divorced, they were still obsessively locked in their own private dance, full of anger, revenge and competitiveness. And, as usual, I was just a pawn in their own selfish game. That was the reason Dad had taken me in the first place, retrieved me from the orphanage and continued to keep me. He just couldn’t let Mum win.
My sisters had obviously been told that they couldn’t go out with their friends, or disappear to play their usual games, and I sensed their feeling of resentment as we all sat in the front room.
‘You’d better go and play in the garden with Judy,’ Mum said after a few minutes. ‘I’ll call you in when it’s tea.’
The girls sullenly trooped off, with me following. As soon as we got outside, however, they relaxed a bit and after a while they began to play a game. I stood back, watching from the sidelines. Mary hadn’t come with us into the garden. At sixteen, she wanted to be off doing her own thing and it was clear that she wasn’t interested in getting to know me.
I saw my mother and sisters once a month through the winter. I’d hoped that the more they got to know me the more they’d want me to be with them as part of the family. Things certainly began to get easier; I still found it impossible to join in the chit-chat around the table, but at least my sisters became more relaxed around me. Occasionally, though, if one of them got a bit mouthy,
my mother would shoot a warning look and I’d know that they were still walking on eggshells in case I reported back that my sisters were being badly brought up.
As I got more familiar with the family, I started to see everything wasn’t all that rosy at Malvern Grove. I noticed that Mum was usually careful around Paddy, and I sensed that the charming, brawny Irishman she’d fallen for had turned out feckless and difficult to manage, especially when he’d been drinking. When he came home after we’d had our tea, it was plain from his behaviour that he didn’t want me in the house. He never spoke to me or looked my way. He simply acted as if I wasn’t there, and gave everyone else grief by stomping about the house and slamming doors. He was never very nice to Mary and Dora, and I saw he treated Lily and Rose very differently to them.
You can’t have had an easy time of it, I thought. But at least you had each other.
One day, a couple of weeks before Christmas, Mum came up to me whilst I was putting on my coat to go home.
‘Here, Judy,’ she said, ‘I want you to have this.’
She took hold of my wrist and fastened a watch around it. Although she was as brusque as usual, I could sense something, like a little tendril of affection, stretch out and touch me.
‘Happy Christmas, dear,’ she said and patted my shoulder.
I felt then, for the first time, that Mum had wanted to see me again. She wasn’t just being driven by the desire to be a thorn in my father’s side. But, whether because of Paddy’s bullying or her own feelings of guilt – or both – she hadn’t felt capable of doing anything about it. And once she did have me back, she hadn’t known quite what to do to make amends to the child who’d been torn from the family.
I wished then that I could have told my mother everything: how my dad and Freda had treated me, about the deckchair man, and how unhappy I’d been at home. But I knew I’d never dare. She’d only spill the beans to Dad, and then I’d get into the most terrible trouble. It was hard having secrets that I couldn’t share. I was afraid that too much would come tumbling out if I did share them, and then I might get beaten to death for it.
When I got home that evening, I went up to my room and took the watch out of my pocket. It had fallen off on my way to the bus – it had a faulty clasp and was much too big for me. I realized it must have been an old one of Mum’s that she didn’t wear any more. I sat for a long time on my bed, looking at the watch in the palm of my hand. It felt such a precious thing, and I just wanted to hold it forever. As soon as I heard Freda’s footsteps on the stairs, though, I quickly stuffed it into a sock and hid it away. I knew that if she ever found out I treasured anything she’d do her best to destroy it, as she always had.
My dad and Freda didn’t celebrate Christmas like other families. We never had a tree, and there were no cards or decorations about the place. We didn’t sit down together for Christmas lunch or give each other presents either. It was just an ordinary day, the same as any other.
The previous Sunday, Miss Williams had asked if I’d like to come with her while she went round to the poorer folk’s houses – people who had lost someone in the war or who had undergone some other hardship – to give out hampers of food and toys. I loved being out on the dark streets beside her. She looked almost jaunty in her little pillbox hat, red nose peeping out over the folds of her scarf, as we walked along together in the smoggy night air, the bitter smell of coal smoke tinged with burning rubber from the Dunlop tyre factory.
I gazed through the windows of those houses we passed where the curtains hadn’t yet been drawn to see strings of Christmas cards hanging on the walls and Christmas trees, twinkling all over, with presents piled up underneath. Whilst I thrilled to see them, I couldn’t help but wish I had a home where there was a present under the tree waiting for me to open, a stocking bulging at the foot of my bed, and a family who loved me.
Chapter Twelve
Over the previous months, I’d noticed that my dad and Freda had been making more frequent visits to the Rippons, the wealthiest members of their Spiritualist circle. I sensed that my father was cooking something up but didn’t know what. He and Freda were always whispering and scheming on the days we visited and, before we left the house, Dad used to spend more time than usual picking imaginary specks off his cream suit and tying extra flourishes in his cravat with long, perfectly manicured fingers. You would never know from his pale, soft hands that he worked in a factory.
Alec Rippon was a white-collar worker, an engineer in Manchester, and he and his wife and daughter lived in a large Victorian house in the posh, leafy suburb of Prestwich. It seemed like a palace to me when I compared it with our two-up, two-down in Wood Street. Freda seemed a little cowed by its grandness but my father wasn’t one to act humbly, cap in hand, around the Rippons; and although the difference in social status between our families was huge, he always played his Christ Almighty role to the full.
Alec Rippon believed that he had the healing gift and had dreams of his own. Unlike my dad, he was a sincere man who genuinely wanted to help other people. As was usual in the Spiritualist church, he’d been assigned to a master – my father – to help him develop his powers. At the end of his training, he’d have to take some exams set by the National Spiritualist Union. My father set out to dazzle his apprentice, sensing that here was a lamb worth fleecing.
The Rippons’ shiny, blue front door opened into a large porch as big as our front room. An umbrella stand stood next to the door, full of ivory topped canes. Freda, clearly both jealous and cowed by the grandness of it all, made me take my shoes off.
The porch opened onto a large carpeted hall. It was the first time I’d been in a house with fitted carpets – everyone I knew had lino on the floor. Against the wall next to the stairs stood a grandfather clock with a gleaming gold face, and on the walls hung big oil paintings of hunting scenes. I’d read about houses like this before in my Noel Streatfeild books, places where there were servants and nannies, and nurseries with rocking horses.
I was too young to be flustered by the grandness of the Rippons’ house, but Freda always seemed on edge when we visited. Her lipstick looked a bit too red next to Gladys Rippons’ powdered elegance. She used to rub it on her cheeks too, calling it rouge, and I saw now that her whole look seemed brash and common compared to Gladys.
The Rippons had turned one of the many rooms downstairs into a healing surgery where my father could receive patients. Alec stood by as Dad’s assistant and Freda would act as nurse.
When patients arrived, they’d be ushered into a separate waiting room before Gladys showed them into the surgery. My father sat at the desk, a row of files on the shelf behind him, and, in his best doctor’s voice, would ask the person to sit down while he questioned them about their problem. He would then show Alec how to use his hands correctly and cradle their head in the right way.
Whilst the surgery or evening seances were going on, I’d be sent off to play in the nursery with Cathleen, the Rippons’ daughter, who was three years younger than me. She was an only child, and very spoilt. I don’t think she liked me coming over, and if I picked up anything in her doll’s house she’d stick out her lower lip in a pet and say, ‘That’s mine!’ She certainly wasn’t the kind of person I could play Tommies and Jerries with.
One evening, Cathleen showed me a board mounted on the wall in the kitchen. On it was a row of little bells and next to each was inscribed the name of a room in the house. She explained it was so that the servants knew where to go to when they were called to put coals on the fire or bring in a cup of tea.
‘We don’t have any servants, though, except for Mandy, who’s our daily,’ Cathleen said. ‘So we don’t use the bells at all.’
I thought of my mum, who’d been a maid at the house of a wealthy Spiritualist before she met Dad, and wondered if she’d had to wear a uniform and listen out for the bell ringing.
‘How about we play at being mistress and maid,’ I asked Cathleen. ‘You can be my maid, if you like.’
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br /> I liked pretending to be mistress of the house, grandly ordering Cathleen around.
‘Ah, Kitty, there you are,’ I said, waving an imperious hand from the sofa. ‘Go and fill the coal scuttle. I think I’ve got a chill coming on.’
‘What do I do next?’ Cathleen asked, not finding it as easy as me to slip into role play.
‘Curtsy, like this,’ I showed her how to bob. ‘And say, “Yes’m”. Then pretend to scoop coal out of the scuttle and put it on the fire.’
We started again and Cathleen managed her bob. After she pretended to put the coal on the fire, I showed her how to bring in the tea and pour it, picking imaginary sugar lumps from a bowl with tongs. At first, she sulked a bit, whining that she wanted to be the lady of the house, but she soon got into the game. I was getting an enormous kick out of our exchange of positions. In real life, Cathleen had the lovely home and the pretty manners, while I was the one who had to lug coal buckets in from the yard with raw hands every morning.
Things went on pretty much the same through the spring and summer of 1956, and then everything started to change. It was as if an earthquake was causing the foundations of my life to crack and its walls to fall in around me.
One day, my father called me downstairs and told me to sit down at the table.
‘You’re going to write a letter to your mother,’ he told me, pushing paper and pencil at me. ‘Do it now.’
He then started to dictate what he wanted me to write. ‘Dear Mother,’ he said. I wrote the words.
‘I’ve decided that I want to live with my father permanently from now on,’ he went on.
My hand stopped what it was doing and my pencil fell to the table. I couldn’t go on.
Dad picked up the pencil, eyes snapping with anger, and forced it into my hand. ‘Write it!’ he shouted. ‘Just do what I say!’
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