by Ruth Sutton
‘My cousin’s in Chorley, making planes,’ said Ann.
‘That’s what I’ll do,’ said Jessie. ‘Give the baby away and get out of here and start again. No ties. No looking back.’
The other two were silent, shocked. Jessie had never spoken like this before. Not long afterwards they heard more screams from down the corridor, then a man’s voice raised in anger. As grey light dawned, the three young women heard the new baby cry.
Jessie’s child was born in the early hours of a cool damp morning. She had strained in silence throughout the night, gripping the midwife’s hand as tears ran down her rigid face. They let her see him for a few minutes, to glimpse the dark eyes and the wisp of dark hair, before he was wrapped tight and taken from her. Four days later, still unnamed, he was carried away by Enid and Arthur Pharaoh. No papers, just an agreement to give the boy a respectable home and them the child they had always wanted, while his real mother turned her face to the wall.
Jessie’s body punished her. Milk leaked from her breasts, the tear in her vagina burned and itched as it healed. She wept in the night, ashamed and bereft. Lying sleepless, haunted by a baby crying in the next room, Jessie planned a future without Clive, without her baby, and without her family. She was twenty years old, she could earn a living and support herself and she knew that she would survive. If there was no one she cared for, no one could hurt or betray her, or die and leave her. Self-reliance was her only choice and she embraced it. She was no longer Jessie Thompson. She would take Clive’s name, the only thing he could leave with her. She would be Jessie Whelan, whose birth certificate had been lost in the chaos of the war.
Cora wrote to Jessie, cutting her out of her life just as she had done with the husband who’d disappointed her and had been driven away.
‘It’s over now.’ Jessie read. ‘No one must know. You can’t come home for a while. I’ll tell people you’ve found a teaching job already. Go somewhere, anywhere you won’t be seen. For pity’s sake don’t tell anyone. I couldn’t bear it.’
The war dragged on. Jessie’s job in Chorley paid well, and sharing a tiny house with four other girls was tolerable. Jessie lied about her family, rubbed Vaseline into her stinging hands, counted her money at the end of the week, spent little and saved as much as she could. Just before the war ended she found the address of the teachers’ college at Edge Hill, just outside Liverpool, and wrote to the principal. She told them that she had been in teacher training for two years, but had been forced into war work to support her widowed mother. Now she wanted to complete her studies and follow her vocation.
‘Surely, Miss Whelan,’ said the plum-faced man sitting at the centre of a long polished table. ‘ with such a long interruption of your studies, er, that will be a problem for you, will it not?’
Jessie thought for a moment. She’d expected this question.
‘You might think so, of course,’ she said, smiling at the younger woman sitting at the edge of the table. The lies came so easily now. ‘My mother was anxious about that too, I know.’
The woman smiled back and Jessie went on, shifting her eyes to the plum-faced man who seemed to be in charge.
‘I have kept up with my reading when I could, in the local library, you know. And being at work has helped me to understand more about the lives of our children, and what they need from their schooling. I feel I’m a better person now, better able to do the job that will need doing. I just the need the chance to complete my training, now that my mother has married again and no longer needs me.’
Jessie looked down at her gloved hands and the panel murmured.
Outside the room, Jessie watched the light play through the stained glass in the window and smiled. She’d planned for this chance, and knew that they could not resist her. When they offered her a place at the college, she was modestly grateful. Jessie Whelan would be a fine teacher.
Chapter 2
Ulverston, Lancashire: May 1937
In the front bedroom of a tidy terraced house in Ulverston, just ten miles from Barrow near the northern shore of Morecambe Bay, Enid Pharaoh lay dying. Inside her thin skull, veins had furred and narrowed. Recent memories had disappeared into a void: those of long ago were sharp as pins. On the other side of the room, a young man with dark hair and dark eyes stretched his long back against the wall and looked across at his mother. He knew she was close to the end. Part of him was willing it to come, soon. She looked already dead, flat in the narrow bed, hair scraped away from her forehead and toes turned up under the grey blanket, like an effigy on a marble slab.
A blue curtain turned slowly in the breeze at the half-opened window. Light and sound filtered through, as if from the bottom of a deep sea. Muffled drumbeats from the market square, on the other side of the small town. There, and down the neighbouring streets, children waved and cheered as the coronation parade passed by. The nailed boots of the Boys’ Brigade band sparked on cobbles as they marched, tiny flags, red, white and blue fluttering over their heads.
The dying woman heard nothing but the buzz of a desperate wasp on the windowsill. Her fingers stroked the sheet and her mouth moved.
‘Arthur,’ she called, and again, louder, ‘Arthur.’
The young man stepped to the head of the bed and lowered his face to speak into his mother’s ear.
‘It’s John, Mam, John.’
Enid opened her eyes and peered at him. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said, impatiently. ‘You can’t be John. He’ll be home from school soon, ready for his tea.’
John sat down miserably on the end of the bed and looked again at the open window. He yearned to be outside, in clear air, far from the stale misery of sickness. He wanted to shout into his mother’s face, to drive out the chaos in her brain. It had been weeks since she’d seemed to understand anything, except perhaps a reality beyond his memory. For as long as he could, before his father’s death and his mother’s decline into madness, he’d been able to escape after work in the brewery office was done on Saturday afternoon, up to the great granite slabs of Wallerbarrow Crag or the challenge of Pillar. When John was climbing in the mountains all the lonely shyness of his schooldays was forgotten. He could relax in conversation about rocks and pitches, not personal things that left him silent and self-conscious. He was happy there, but not here.
For a few weeks at the back end of the previous year Enid had known that her mind was coming apart. That had been the worst time. In her lucid moments she would seize his hand and whisper fiercely into his face. ‘I’m going mad, I know I am. Can you finish me off? Please, John, please.’ The doctor had told him, ‘As it gets worse, it’ll get better. Quite soon she’ll lose the reality, and then she’ll calm down.’ And it was so. The panic had faded into innocent childishness, and all John had to do was accept the lunacy without question. But it irked him almost beyond bearing. Today of all days, when the brewery was closed for the coronation, he could be out, on a rock face, not here in this stifling house. He picked up a magazine from the floor and killed the wasp on the windowsill with a single blow.
The effigy on the bed stirred, but he turned away and escaped downstairs. He made tea and brought her some, propping her up on two pillows, helping her to drink with a spout that he held to her mouth. Enid sipped for a while and then lay back. After some minutes she opened her eyes again and began to talk. He listened, sitting once more on the end of the bed.
‘John was such a good baby.’
He strained to hear the words that fell into the azure quiet of the room. Enid’s mouth made a winding motion before she spoke again.
‘We got him quite early, he was just a tot, just a few days old, and he took his bottle straight away. Do you remember, Arthur, how he sucked so hard on the empty bottle, how he got the hiccups?’ She laughed, a hissing sound. ‘They told us his mother was a very respectable girl who’d made a mistake, not at all what you’d expect in that place in Carnforth. We brought him home on the train. The people in the carriage smiled at us. You were nervous hol
ding his head, it was too small and floppy.’ She laughed again. ‘We were so happy. Remember?’ The voice faded, and in a second or two she slept again, the left side of her face betraying the slight droop of mouth and eye.
John stared at the sleeping woman. He put his head in his hands and sat very still. Minutes passed. Enid was quiet again. He jerked suddenly upright. He had to move, to get away, down the stairs and out into the air. He crossed the deserted street and opened the front door of a house on the other side. ‘Mrs Barker,’ he called down the dark hallway. ‘I’m going out. I won’t be long.’ A woman, older than Enid, with tightly permed grey hair and vermilion cheeks, emerged from the kitchen at the back of the house, wiping floury hands on a flowery apron. ‘That’s fine, dear,’ she said, looking at him carefully in the dim light. ‘I’ll go back over and sit with her. You go out and enjoy yourself.’ She stretched to pat his shoulder. He flinched slightly.
He turned down the street, taking the familiar route to his aunt’s house in Church Walk while his mind churned. Late spring sun warmed his face and an early swift darted above the trees but he didn’t notice either of them. Some things made sense to him now, but others made no sense at all. Mam and Dad had always been kind and he’d lacked nothing they could give him, but something had never been right. He didn’t look like their son, different shape, different features, different everything. They seemed older than other people’s parents, more like grandparents. But he was their son, everyone said so. Could he believe what he’d just heard? His mother had been crazy for weeks. He broke into a run up the last few streets, towards the monument like a marooned lighthouse that stood on Hoad Hill beyond the town.
The varnished front door of the Church Walk house was open and John went straight in without knocking. Everything was quiet, save for a soft sound from the front room. There in an easy chair, short legs stretched in front of him, lay a man, fast asleep and snoring gently. Beside his stockinged feet on the floor was an empty glass. John stood for a moment, looking down at him. Uncle George had always been good to him, with none of the edge of his wife and her sister Enid. Did he know? Had he been lying all these years? John trawled his memory desperately for signs, issues avoided, conversations left unfinished. Nothing.
‘Uncle George.’ John’s voice sounded loud in the small room.
The figure in the chair stirred. George Youle grunted and opened his eyes, then sat up suddenly.
‘What the …? Oh, it’s you, John. Frightened the life out of me, standing there like that.’
‘The front door was open. I didn’t want to wake you, but …’
‘I must’ve nodded off. Anne’s out somewhere, doing good works probably, like she does. How’s your mam today?’
‘Rambling again, but she said something, just now. I want to ask you about it.’
The empty glass at George’s feet fell over and he bent to pick it up.
‘I’ll have another beer while she’s out. Want one?’
‘No thanks, but can you wait a minute? I must ask you this.’
‘Out with it then, lad, if it’s that important. But sit down, making me tired just watching you.’
John sat on the sofa, leaning forward to watch George closely.
‘It’s something Mam said, just now. She called me Arthur, though she’s done that before. I told her it was me, but she just carried on. Talked about the day they brought John – me – home from Carnforth on the train, just a few days old. That’s what she said, “Brought him home.” They always told me I was born in Barrow, before they moved here. Sounds as if they got me from someone else, as if I wasn’t their baby at all.’
George listened in silence. He leaned back in the chair.
‘Oh, God,’ he said, rubbing his face with his hand. ‘I knew this would happen sooner or later. I told her, both of them, but they wouldn’t have it. It’s not right lying to a kid like that. It’s going to come out sometime, and then what?’
‘What’s going to come out?’ John leaned further forward suddenly. ‘Tell me.’ His voice was louder, demanding. ‘Tell me Uncle George, please. Where did I come from?’
George got slowly out of the chair and put a hand on John’s arm. Then he raised the young man’s face and looked at him, waiting for the look to be returned.
‘Now then, lad,’ said the older man at last. ‘We don’t need your Aunty Anne for this. Just you and me, it’s time we talked. Long overdue. Let me tell you what I know. This might be a shock.’
George sat down again. He took out a large white handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose, giving himself a moment to think before looking up again and taking a deep breath.
‘Your mam,’ said George, ‘Enid, she didn’t give birth to you, John. Her and Arthur adopted you, just after you were born. Your real mam couldn’t keep you and they must’ve found out somehow. Enid were desperate for a kiddie, and they adopted you, loved you like their own. That’s all I know. All these years they kept it from you. I told Anne. It’ll come out, I said. The lad needs to know. But Enid wouldn’t hear of it, and Anne said that was that. Even Arthur couldn’t change her mind, and God knows he tried. And since he’s gone, well …’
John sat upright on sofa. George looked up at him, unsure what to do. Silence hung in the room. Through the open front door the sound of the coronation parade crept in, whispering around them like smoke.
Chapter 3
Newton, Cumberland: May 1937
Jessie Whelan, headmistress of Newton School, woke to the sound of rain on her window and started to worry about all the plans for the day ahead. She felt her pulse quickening and sat up suddenly. ‘For heaven’s sake, woman,’ she said to herself. ‘You can’t control the weather, and you’re not responsible if it rains.’
It was early, but the gleam of light encouraged Jessie to abandon the pretence of sleep. She’d tried so hard to keep coronation fervour under control at school, but the effort to do so was more exhausting than giving in to it. It would have been much easier to let the children spend all their time making flags and costumes at the expense of their normal routines, but if she’d done so Mr Crompton in the other class would have done the same and the place would have been in uproar. So Jessie had insisted on business as usual until the last minute, and now suffered the consequence of a night disturbed by anxieties about not being ready.
She lay on her back on top of the covers to settle her mind a little more. She had nothing to prove in the village, not after all these years, and had never regretted coming to Newton and staying so long. Teaching in Liverpool after she qualified had been fine for a while, usefully absorbing all her energy and time. But slowly, quietly, the dust had settled and she’d recognized what she wanted for herself. She had seen the job at Newton and applied for it even before she found the village on a map, at the mouth of the River Esk in Cumberland, between the mountains and the sea. The only place they could find her to stay overnight had been at Applegarth, with Agnes Plane. Stylish, generous Agnes and the glorious view up the valley both persuaded Jessie to overlook the overbearing Reverend Leadbetter, who told her that she’d got the job ‘because we couldn’t find a suitable man’. Agnes had rolled her eyes when she heard about that, and the two women laughed about it still.
The little clock on the table by her bed showed five-thirty. Too early. The coronation parade wasn’t due to assemble until after lunch, hours away. There were still some flags and bunting to put up in the village hall, and she wanted to make sure that the school rooms were swept and tidy. None of that would take very long. Some of the children were probably awake already, pestering grumpy parents about their costumes for the parade. Everything had been too rushed.
The band from Ganthwaite had been a last-minute thing too. Everyone wanted a band for coronation day, and a village as isolated as Newton wasn’t very attractive to the best of them. If she’d been headmistress of a school in Whitehaven or Millom the band would be no problem. She’d chosen to stay in Newton all these years because she lo
ved its distance from the world, and its timelessness. Farming was still much the same as it had been in the last century. No tractors yet, everything pulled by horses: a slower, softer pace, the sound of hooves, not engines. There were motorbikes around, and the occasional car, but mostly the silence was broken only by the insistent cawing of rooks, the mew of a buzzard or the chatter of geese on the wing above the estuary.
She took off her nightdress and washed herself in cold water in the basin, easier than bothering with a kettle and washing downstairs. As she dried herself she caught her reflection in the mirror on the other side of the room. Once she’d had a waist, a real waist. Not enough light to see the stretch marks but she knew they were there, and her breasts were flatter and heavier than they’d been twenty years earlier. Clive had loved her body: would he still? She wished she could get through a day without thinking of him. Being busy helped: maybe that was why she made herself do so much.
A few new clothes wouldn’t come amiss, she thought, looking through the uninspiring wardrobe. Maybe that navy and white two-piece she’d seen in the Whitehaven News the other week. ‘For the fuller figure’ the advertisement said. Agnes always looked so smart, but most of her clothes came from London. They’d been there once together, to stay with Aunt Elvira in Pimlico, and Jessie had tried to enjoy it but she’d felt awkward in such sophisticated company and had been glad to get away.
She looked at herself in the mirror again, turning her head from one side to another. What about the hair? It wasn’t fashionable to wear it long, but it had helped Jessie look older when she needed to, and the routine of controlling its dark thickness with pins and combs pleased her. The hair stays as it is, she resolved, no matter what. She chose a pale blue blouse and navy skirt, sensible but just bright enough for what was supposed to be a jolly day, despite the grey morning and threat of rain. And flat shoes. Too much walking around for anything else, thought Jessie, though she expected that Agnes would wear a little heel, and Caroline Leadbetter too, keeping up appearances as the vicar’s lady.