Street Kid

by Westwater, Judy

  ‘Is there anyone we can telephone? Have you got a parent we can contact?’

  ‘We don’t have a telephone.’

  ‘Well, if you give me your address we’ll go and find your mother.’

  I didn’t know what to say then. I only had the Newlyn Mansions address, so I gave her that. They’re going to find out now that I’m all alone, that there’s nobody living there.

  And then, an hour later, my father arrived.

  I remember nothing of the next few weeks: who nursed me or how they did it. I can’t imagine Freda or my father feeding me soup from a spoon, or helping me to the bathroom. I think I might have been at Cherie’s for a while, before being taken to Freda’s flat in Hopkins Street, as I dimly recollect hearing a woman’s voice saying ‘Let’s soak a cloth in vinegar. It might bring the fever down.’

  When my fevered head finally cleared of its swarm of muddled sounds and dreams, I found myself lying on a sofa in an unfamiliar room. I was on my own. I dimly remembered being collected by my dad and taken somewhere in a taxi so I guessed that this was where he was living. I was too limp to feel nervous or even curious. It must have been early afternoon as I could hear the noise of children coming home from school. I drifted off to sleep and when I next woke it was early evening. I knew immediately I wasn’t alone in the room.

  ‘Oh, you’re awake.’ Freda’s cold tones made me tense up inside as instantly and involuntarily as a mollusc reacts to an unpleasant invader.

  I hadn’t seen Freda for about ten months. When we were sharing living space at the Allendene I’d hardened myself against those knee-jerk feelings of trauma which always threatened to throw me around like a puppet. I hadn’t exactly grown inured to her malice but had found a way of blocking it out. It hadn’t been so hard as she’d hardly been around and, when she was, she mostly ignored me. Now though, unprepared as I was, I couldn’t protect my soft underbelly quickly enough. Just seeing Freda’s pinched, hateful face was like being thrown across the room by a sharp cut to the solar plexus. I felt violently sick.

  When my father came home, much later that evening, I had retreated to a state of weakness, caring about nothing, so seeing him didn’t have much effect on me. Like Freda, he barely looked at me. At one point she had brought me a cup of soup and a slice of bread but beyond that gesture, it was as if I wasn’t there.

  For the next three months, from June to September, I lay on Freda’s sofa recuperating. I had no choice but to help myself to eggs and bread from the kitchen and borrow Freda’s soap when I bathed, though I was always nervous about doing so. Sometimes I dipped my finger in her bottle of shampoo or jar of face cream, but I was always careful to wipe any drips or stickiness from the rim afterwards.

  I didn’t know why Freda had taken Dad back, or why she put up with me in her flat. It wasn’t as though my father was any nicer to her. He was still spending the daytime with Cherie and would talk to her on the telephone in the hall every evening after he’d come in. Presumably, for form’s sake, Cherie hadn’t wanted him to move into Newlyn Mansions with her, so Dad had tracked down Freda to provide him with a bed.

  In spite of everything, Freda still felt some attraction to my father and wanted to see if she could win him back. I watched her vain attempts to try and look attractive and fashionable, but nothing ever looked right on her. She’d changed the way she did her hair, from the tight curls and Kirby grips, which women had worn in our Manchester neighbourhood, to an even less becoming backcombed style. She’d tried to go blonde but the dye had made her dark hair turn a nasty mustard colour, and the hair was so thin that you could see her scalp through the puffed-up beehive on top. Worse still was how badly the style suited her sharp, sulky face. I didn’t wonder that my dad barely looked at her when he came in.

  ‘How was your day?’ she’d say.

  ‘So-so,’ was the only response she got.

  My dad was particularly jumpy in the flat at Hopkins Street. It can’t have just been that he was penned in with Freda and me. There was definitely something else bothering him. I wondered if the school board had been on his tail again, otherwise he wouldn’t have asked Freda to put me up. But I sensed that he had other, bigger worries.

  He paced up and down the apartment, and would check the post nervously. He peered through the glass doors in the lounge at the street below any time he heard a noise outside. Whenever I could, I escaped to the balcony and let Freda and him have the room to themselves.

  Little by little, from muttered phone conversations and the odd thing he let slip to Freda, I picked up what Dad was up to. It was more than a year since the closure of the Triangle Band Healing Sanctuary, after which he’d been hissed off the platform at one of his Spiritualist events. Realizing that they had been supporting a con man with a tendency to seduce the more vulnerable members of the congregation, the Spiritualist church in Johannesburg had banned him from preaching. Never one to feel shame or sit licking his wounds for long, Dad was soon cooking up new business schemes with Cherie.

  One of these was a ‘spiritual postal service’, which involved placing advertisements in the local papers. There was no shortage of lonely old ladies, lovelorn spinsters, or bereaved people who’d willingly send postal orders to my father. In return, he’d send them a taped message from a departed loved one, or a personal horoscope. I hated to see my father prey on these sad, vulnerable people.

  It was the beginning of summer by the time I was well enough to leave the flat. It had been a difficult few months. I felt so powerless and weak, and at the mercy of Freda and my father’s moods. Neither of them ever hit me now – maybe they thought I was too big at thirteen for that – but it was hard sharing a living space with two people who never so much as looked at me. They hadn’t once asked where I’d been living for the nine months I’d been sleeping rough. I think each presumed I’d been living with the other. Anyone else would have shown some curiosity, however unfeeling; but Dad and Freda almost enjoyed demonstrating that they had absolutely no interest in me. It made me horribly on edge; and although there was some respite when they both left for work, I soon felt my stomach tensing again, waiting for their return each evening.

  With a great deal of grumbling, my father forked out for a school uniform and exercise books, ready for the new term. It felt very strange going back to Barnato Park; but although I was nervous about it, something inside me had changed since being confined to the flat all those weeks. I’d had a lot of time to think.

  I’d never run away from my father and Freda when I was very young – I hadn’t known where to run to, since I didn’t know where my mother lived; and, anyway, I was so terrified of being caught by my dad. Later, once Mum had made contact, she never actually asked me to come back to live with her. Now I realized I was old enough to take responsibility. There was no one else in this but me. I could see a way out, and I was determined to make my way back to my mother and sisters again.

  I knew that if I was to have a future which didn’t involve staying with my father or living on the streets, then I’d need to work hard at school and find a part-time job to earn some money. I made a pledge to myself that, at seventeen, I would pass Standard Seven with honours, and that on the day I left school I’d throw my hat into the nearest dustbin.

  I’m going to get through this and I’m going to show them that I’m not the loser they think. I’ll make something of my life and help other kids like me, if I can.

  This was going to take some doing. I’d now lost a year and had been kept down in the same class. I was still banned by Miss Schmidt from attending Afrikaans lessons, which was a big problem. Without that subject, I couldn’t pass my exams; but I was determined to find a way around that. It’s strange how everything is possible when you know what your goals are and have the single-mindedness to reach them.

  In my first week back at school I went downtown to the public library and asked the librarian which books I’d need to teach myself Afrikaans. She looked at me kindly. ‘You might be intere
sted in this,’ she said, handing me a leaflet. ‘There’s a free tuition scheme available for immigrants wanting to learn Afrikaans. It’ll be much easier than learning it from a book.’

  I was in luck. Soon I was having a lesson every week and made quick progress. I was diligent with my school-work as well, spending hours on the balcony of the flat, catching up on what I’d missed.

  Something else happened that summer to make me all the more determined to earn my independence. A letter from my mother arrived. How it reached me, I don’t know, but I suppose my dad must have kept Mum’s solicitor informed of where he was living.

  In her letter, Mum asked me how I was and told me how my sisters were doing at school. ‘I often wonder how you’re getting on in South Africa and how much you’ve grown,’ she wrote. ‘It must be very different from Manchester. I expect you’re as brown as a nut with all that sun. I wish we could have a bit of it here.’

  And she wrote that she missed me.

  As I held Mum’s letter, hope flared up brightly, and I felt warm inside.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  For the next three years, I worked as hard as I could. Soon after my fourteenth birthday, I managed to get a Saturday job on the sweet counter at the OK Bazaars. It paid badly, but it was a start. Shortly after that, I got another job at a dairy on the main street in Yeoville, working an early-morning shift before school.

  Every day, before dawn, the African nannies would travel into Johannesburg and stop off at the dairy on their way to work to pick up the babies’ milk. I had to be there by half past five to serve them. Wearing a pinafore over my school clothes, I stood at the counter for the next two hours, carefully counting eggs into brown paper bags. If one broke, the money would be docked from my pay, and I hated that. Every penny I earned I hid in a sock, which I kept under the sofa. Counting my savings, shilling by shilling, was my one real pleasure. Losing even a penny of it hurt.

  It would never have occurred to me to spend my money on records and clothes like the other girls of my age. I had other plans.

  Soon after I got the job at the dairy, I walked into the travel agency on Commissioner Street and went up to the counter. A smallish man with thinning hair looked at me with interest, obviously wondering what a fourteen-year-old was doing on her own in his shop.

  ‘Hello, can I help you?’

  ‘I want to buy a ticket to England,’ I replied. ‘Can you let me know how much the cheapest fare would be?’

  ‘Well, let me see.’ He took a file from the shelf behind him and leafed through it for a moment. ‘The cheapest way of getting there will be by boat and that’ll set you back a hundred and twenty pounds.’

  I put a pound down on the counter and the man looked at it without expression. I thought it was to his credit that he didn’t react as he might have done, with a raised eyebrow or a patronizing smile. He showed me the same formal courtesy he would have offered any other customer.

  ‘I’d like to leave that as a deposit,’ I told him.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking, but aren’t you a bit young to be travelling on your own?’ he asked.

  I decided, as he’d treated me well, that I’d let him into my plans. ‘I want to go to England to live with my mother,’ I said. ‘And I don’t yet have a passport and I won’t be able to go before I’m seventeen when I finish school. I realize that.’

  ‘Well, that’s okay then.’ He nodded his head, satisfied with my explanation. ‘By seventeen, you’ll be old enough to travel on your own and all you’ll need is your birth certificate and a photograph and you’ll be able to send off for a passport yourself. That shouldn’t be a problem.’

  ‘So you’ll take my pound?’ I asked him.

  ‘Of course I will. I’d be happy to.’

  With that he opened a big accounts book and turned to a fresh page at the back. ‘Here we are. Let’s log it in then. What’s your name?’

  ‘Judy Richardson.’

  ‘There we go, Judy. One pound.’ And he entered the date. ‘I’m Mr Harvey, by the way. Delighted to be of service. Just let me know if there’s anything else I can do for you. You only have to ask.’

  Every week, on a Saturday morning, for the next two years, I visited Mr Harvey’s travel agency and put my money on the counter. Little by little, in a quiet, reserved sort of way, we became firm friends.

  As soon as he spotted me at the door, Mr Harvey would fill two cups he had ready on the counter with coffee. I always felt warmed by this gesture as I knew it meant he’d been looking forward to my visit. Then, as I sat perched on a stool sipping my coffee, Mr Harvey turned to the big colour map on the wall behind him and showed me how far my latest pound would take me on my six thousand mile journey, moving the drawing pin he used as a marker a fraction closer to England each time.

  ‘Ah now, Judy, we’ve cause for celebration this week. You’ve just crossed the Equator.’

  By the time I was seventeen, I was working so hard that I barely saw my father and Freda. I’d got a well-paid job at the Regent Cinema in Kensington after a tip-off by the manager of the Gem, a local fleapit, who lived below our flat in Hopkins Street. He knew the manager at the Regent and said he’d heard he needed part-time staff.

  At first, I covered Saturday matinees and Sunday evenings, but after a few months I was asked if I wanted to do a couple of nights a week as well. The pay was good and I was given travelling expenses on top, which I always saved, although it was quite a distance to walk from Yeoville. I gave up my job at the OK Bazaars because it clashed with the matinee, and I soon chucked in the dairy too, finding that getting my homework done was becoming impossible. Instead, I cleaned shoes and worked in the kitchens of a local hotel a few hours here and there. By now, I was squirrelling away one pound ten a week.

  In my last term at Barnato Park, before school broke up in December, I was told that I had passed Standard Seven with Honours. I could hardly believe I’d done it at last. After all the homework, the extra classes, and the hours in our local library slogging away, it felt really, really good.

  As I walked up to collect my certificate from Mrs Langley in assembly, I couldn’t resist sneaking a glance at Miss Schmidt.

  You see, you mean-eyed old spinster, I managed to do it without you. I’m not such a stupid dunce after all, am I?

  I hoped my stare managed to convey all the ill-will I’d ever carried for her. I reckon it must have done as she didn’t manage to hold my gaze and was the first to turn away. I felt about ten feet tall.

  I achieved another thing on my list of goals that week when I tossed my hat into the bin outside the school gates.

  At about that time, I came across an advertisement in a local newspaper for a cheap charter flight to England. Instead of the hundred and twenty pounds a berth on the Windsor Castle was going to cost, it seemed I could fly for just sixty pounds. By now, I’d saved sixty-six pounds.

  The next day I went to see Mr Harvey and showed him the advertisement.

  ‘Do you think I’d be able to cancel my berth on the ship?’ I asked him.

  ‘Let me find out for you. I’ll certainly do what I can. Come and see me tomorrow and I’ll let you know how I got on. And I’ll see if the June flight’s still available too.’

  The next day Mr Harvey was all smiles when he greeted me.

  ‘It’s absolutely fine and I’ve reserved you the flight.’

  I was so overwhelmed that I couldn’t speak. I had to sit down on the stool by the counter for a moment to recover.

  ‘Now, if you haven’t done it already, you’re going to need to get your passport organized.’

  Mr Harvey went on to tell me where to go to have my photograph taken and how to get to the passport office.

  The next day, in the flat, I sneaked a look inside my dad’s brown case, in which he kept his personal papers. I don’t know what I’d have done if I hadn’t found my birth certificate amongst them; but, to my relief, it was there. What took me by surprise was the strong wave of disappo
intment I felt when I read my father’s name on it.

  All those years of reading books about foundlings who turned out to be princesses had left their mark on me. I’d always hoped that my father was just some wicked imposter. Now I knew for certain it was only a fantasy.

  I wrote to tell my mother I was coming, and when my train would be arriving at Euston. Over the past two years, I’d had three or four letters from her and she’d always written that she was missing me. Now, a month or so before I was due to fly, I had a reply from her, saying that Dora would meet me under the station clock.

  A few days before I left, I went down to the travel office to pick up my ticket and say goodbye to Mr Harvey. It turned out to be an emotional moment, which took us both a little by surprise.

  As I watched Mr Harvey leafing through his file for my itinerary, eyes a little brighter than usual, I thought, How strange it is that he seemed such a buttoned-up sort of person at our first meeting. I never guessed then what a kind and generous friend he’d turn out to be.

  ‘Well, I must say I’m proud of you, Judy,’ Mr Harvey said a little gruffly. ‘I don’t think many youngsters of your age would have stuck with it for the past three years. I’m really happy for you.’

  I thanked him for being so kind to me.

  ‘Oh, not at all, not at all!’ He brushed my words aside. ‘But do send me a postcard from Buckingham Palace, won’t you?’

  I assured him I would.

  There was now just one more thing I had to do.

  I’d left it until the night before my flight before telling my dad that I was going. He’d just come off the phone to Cherie and was toasting his toes by the one-bar electric fire.