by Emily Gunnis
While Kitty grew up in a life full of love and warmth, unaware of her birth mother, Elvira’s tragic story continued when she was adopted by a young couple, only to be returned to St Margaret’s at the age of six. There she stayed for two terrible years, working in the laundry as a child slave, and where, in a cruel twist of fate, she met my great-grandmother, Ivy Jenkins.
Sam paused from typing the article and looked down at Ivy’s letters on the desk next to her. Letters she had pounced on like an addict, missing the signs from Nana that all was not well. So desperate to escape her job and living in Nana’s cramped flat with Emma that she found herself walking into a trap of her own making, where her search for the holy grail of a story meant that she had to shine a floodlight on her own life. A tale that started with a young, innocent girl falling pregnant in 1956 and ended with her own car crash of a life: a single mother and soon to be a divorcee at the grand age of twenty-five.
‘So is there going to be an inquiry?’ After three unreturned phone calls to the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Authority in the weeks following the fire at St Margaret’s, Sam had finally got hold of one of their inspectors.
‘You’ll have to speak to the press office,’ said the man, his voice flustered.
‘I’m not press, I’m related to one of the children involved in the trials,’ Sam lied. ‘I just want to know if this is happening or not.’
Eventually she had got Scotland Yard’s press office to confirm there would be an inquiry into the drugs trials that had taken place at St Margaret’s.
‘But it will be years before any kind of conclusion is reached, and we can’t mention the trials in the meantime,’ she said, looking up at Miles, the news editor, who was perched on the edge of her desk.
‘And what about the deaths of everyone in these letters?’ he said, looking down at the list of names in her notebook.
Sam thought about all the people whose deaths she was sure Elvira had been responsible for. From being at the scene of her father, George Cannon’s, fatal car crash in the winter of 1961, through to Father Benjamin, whom she had probably lured into the tunnels underneath St Margaret’s nearly fifty years later.
‘They’re saying there isn’t enough evidence to reopen the inquests. Too much time has passed, I guess.’
‘None of them?’ Sam shook her head and Miles looked away. ‘What about the psychiatrist?’
Sam scanned the press cuttings on her desk and lifted the one showing a portrait photograph of Richard Stone under the headline: Psychiatrist found dead in apparent suicide.
‘I think Elvira had a part to play, but she did a pretty good job of covering her tracks – as always.’ Sam smiled weakly, thinking back to the morning she had spent in the coroner’s court, listening to Richard Stone’s son talk about how his mother’s death had affected his father deeply.
‘Did you know that Kitty Cannon was a client of your father’s?’ the coroner had asked the middle-aged man in a grey suit, white shirt and narrow black tie. His skin was pale, the dark circles under his eyes highlighting his bright blue eyes.
‘No, but I knew he had one client he refused to stop working with, despite being well into his eighties. Mother was always trying to get him to retire completely, but he said he owed it to this woman to do his best. Now I guess we know why,’ James Stone had mumbled into the small microphone in front of him.
‘And did you know of his history with the drugs trials at St Margaret’s?’ The coroner had stared over his half-moon glasses, waiting patiently for Mr Stone’s reply.
‘Not really.’ James coughed, and paused for a moment. ‘I knew there was something unspoken about his past – and his relationship with my grandfather deeply troubled him. I know they didn’t speak. Father used to descend into these periods of depression, which my mother called his black days. Looking back, I think she knew what was troubling him, but she protected us.’
‘Do you think it is fair to assume that your father committed suicide, Mr Stone?’ The coroner had removed his glasses, placed them on the desk in front of him and scribbled something on his notepad.
James Stone cleared his throat before speaking. ‘The papers are saying that this woman Kitty Cannon was born at St Margaret’s. Could she have been part of the trials and blamed him in some way? I mean, was there any evidence that she was there when he died?’
‘Not that we are aware of, Mr Stone. Her fingerprints are in his consulting room, but that is to be expected.’
‘So he took a sedative, then cut his wrists in the bath?’ James Stone had said, his voice breaking.
The coroner nodded, then put his glasses back on and looked down at his notes. ‘It appears that way. And not just any sedative: your father wrote to Cranium Pharmaceuticals a fortnight before his death to request a sample of cocynaranol for research purposes. Cocynaranol was the drug used in the trials at St Margaret’s.’ He looked up again. ‘It would seem that the part he played tortured him more than anyone realised and in the wake of his wife’s death overwhelmed him.’
‘Well, we know there was a mass grave under that house,’ said the news editor, snapping Sam back into the present. ‘We can say there is going to be an inquiry into the drugs trials. We’ve got confirmation that the swap happened, and that the skeleton of an eight-year-old girl was found in the septic tank with the others. Is that right?’
Sam nodded, biting down on her lip at the thought of what little Kitty must have been through that night at the hands of Mother Carlin. Her remains had been found in the tank along with hundreds of others who were still being identified with the help of the records surrounding Richard Stone’s body.
‘It’s still an incredible story, even without the deaths,’ Miles continued. ‘We want a first-person piece on this, Sam: you and your grandmother telling us how a baby taken from its mother affects generations of women.’
‘But I don’t want to be the story; Kitty’s the story,’ said Sam.
‘Of course, but Kitty Cannon’s dead, and you and your grandmother can bring it all back to life. You represent all the hundreds of women out there still affected by the evil of that place. I think you should open with the reunion between your grandmother and Ivy’s mother. Do your best, Sam, I need it by tomorrow,’ he added, as a colleague called him over and Sam watched him walk away.
Sam stared at the blinking cursor in front of her and felt the weight of responsibility for those hundreds of women who had given babies up at St Margaret’s bearing down on her. Women in their sixties, seventies and eighties, picking up their copy of The Times as they ate their breakfasts, sitting alongside their husbands, who possibly knew nothing of their pain and suffering.
She let out a heavy sigh and lifted the page on top of the pile – the first of Ivy’s letters, which had started it all.
12 September 1956
My love,
I am fearful that I have not heard from you. All my anxieties have been confirmed. I am three months pregnant. It is too late for anything to be done; it is God’s will that our baby be born.
Nana: that baby was Nana. She still struggled to get her head around it and still felt angry with Nana for not telling her the truth about the letters right at the beginning.
She knew Nana hadn’t planned for her to find Ivy’s letter in the way she did; it was an accident that she had fallen asleep reading it. But to then lie to her about finding the second letter, then the third; to not try to warn Sam when she was running headlong into a cataclysm that would affect them both so deeply – it was still hard to accept. She was her grandmother after all. Sam knew it would have been incredibly hard for her to find the words to explain, but she should have tried, for Sam’s sake and Emma’s.
‘Why on earth won’t they discharge me?’ Nana had still been in hospital several days after the fire. ‘I feel fine, and they are so short of beds.’
‘Nana, you had a heart attack,’ said Sam quietly.
‘A mild one,’ Nana snapped. ‘And I’ll have another on
e if I have to eat any more of this disgusting hospital food.’
‘I’m sorry, but I really need to understand what happened with Ivy’s letters.’ Sam had looked at Nana, who was still staring at her uneaten lunch. ‘Why didn’t you just tell me?’
‘Just tell you?’ Nana had glared at her in a way that was unfamiliar to Sam. ‘Which part? The letters? Kitty preying on me? I never even told Grandad about it. Once it all started, it was impossible to find the words. I knew you would have so many questions.’
‘But I had a right to know.’ Sam felt her voice shake; she had never argued with Nana before. Just another beautiful thing to have been infected by the toxins of St Margaret’s.
‘Of course you did, and I’m sorry. I hadn’t read those letters in thirty years. I only got them out because it was my birthday and I wanted to think about the woman who brought me into the world, have a little cry. And for the first time, Grandad wasn’t there to ask questions.’
‘But I was,’ she had said quietly.
‘I wasn’t prepared for you to find them or for you to react the way you did . . . Nurse!’ Nana had called across the room to the stressed woman, who hadn’t heard her as she bustled past.
‘It’s unfair to try and blame me, Nana. You lied to me – you’ve never done that before.’ Sam had wiped a tear away with the back of her hand.
‘I’m not trying to blame you, but those letters made me feel sick. The way you reacted to them – it was overwhelming; you were like a hungry shark. Could you get the nurse, darling? I need to get home, I can’t sleep with all this racket, I can’t eat, this place is making me ill.’ Nana had tried to adjust the pillows behind her head, tugging and pulling at them in between heavy sighs.
‘Okay, Nana. Do you still want to see Maude? I thought I might bring her in tomorrow.’
‘Well, I’ll be gone by then, God willing, so she’ll have to come to the flat.’
‘You do want to see her, though, don’t you?’ Sam said gently. ‘She’s your biological grandmother after all.’
‘For goodness’ sake, yes, but I don’t owe that woman anything.’ Nana pulled her crossword puzzle book onto her lap and opened it as if signalling the end of the conversation.
Sam had left it then and gone to find the nurse, her mind preoccupied with how much she still didn’t know about her grandmother. About her life before they had found each other. About Nana having a daughter of her own who was taken into care, became a mother in her teens and then died an alcoholic. About the pain of being adopted and discovering her birth mother had suffered unimaginable unhappiness before taking her own life. She could hardly begin to take it all in.
Now she took a deep breath, turned back to the letters that had lit a fire inside her and tried to gather her thoughts.
The letters my great-grandmother wrote speak of a world of heartache and backbreaking work unimaginable for any woman, but intolerable for someone eight months pregnant.
‘The nuns are beyond cruel,’ she wrote in December 1956. ‘They beat us with canes or anything they can get their hands on if we so much as talk. A girl burnt herself so badly on the red-hot steel sheets that she developed a blister up her arm that is now infected. Sister Mary Francis just came over and scolded her for wasting time. The only time we are allowed to speak is to say our prayers, or to say ‘Yes, Sister.’ There are prayers before breakfast, mass after breakfast, prayers before bed. And then black emptiness before the bell at the end of the dormitory wakes us again at 6 a.m. We live by the bell; there are no clocks, no calendars, no mirrors, no sense of time. No one talks to me about what will happen when my baby comes, but I know there are babies here because I hear them crying at night.’
After the terrifying birth of her baby, Ivy’s daughter – my grandmother – was taken from her against her will. Ivy slowly spiralled into a pit of depression that left her unable to sleep or eat. Her only joy was meeting a little girl called Elvira.
‘So tell me once again why you broke into St Margaret’s on two separate occasions.’ Sam let out a sigh and thought back to the detective who had taken her and Fred into custody after the fire. She remembered him sitting back in his chair, his arms crossed over his bulging stomach. She had tried to answer his questions, attempted to stay calm, and be cooperative, but a childhood spent in police stations with her own mother haunted her.
‘I told you, my grandmother gave me some letters from a girl who had a baby at St Margaret’s.’
The police hadn’t shown much interest in Ivy’s letters or the fact that every person mentioned in them was dead. Their obsession began and ended with charging Fred for climbing up the side of St Margaret’s while they stood doing nothing. Despite saving Emma’s life, he was questioned relentlessly as to whether he’d had a part to play in starting the fire, and about how he came to be there in the first place.
‘Yes, so you keep saying,’ said the detective, looking up at the clock, ‘but I don’t see what right that gave you to trespass on private property.’
By the time they let her and Fred go with a warning, she understood why Elvira had killed all those people. She had known that if she didn’t, they would never truly pay for what they had done; they would have died peacefully in their warm beds, their consciences clear. And she had got away with it by being patient.
It was only because of the fire she had started that they’d found the children’s bodies at all.
‘It was clever what she did,’ said the detective as he walked Sam out. ‘A rotting corpse isn’t dead at all, it’s teeming with life. Dead bodies release methane. Over decades it would have built up and become like a bomb waiting to go off. It was as if they were all working together to tell us where they were.’
Sam looked up at the three clocks on the wall in the Times newsroom. It was already midday. Four hours until she needed to leave with the first draft of her piece written.
On the morning she was to be admitted to a mental institution, Ivy took her own life, but not before making sure that her death would provide the distraction Elvira needed to escape and get a chance at life.
Elvira waited for two days in the freezing February cold, her feet in sandals, brown overalls her only clothing, until Kitty, smartly dressed in her warm red coat, turned up at church. The two girls instantly recognised one another, and ran away together to hide, but that night, when Kitty went to get help, in a cruel twist of fate the nuns captured her and, thinking she was Elvira, beat her so severely that they killed her. They threw her body into the septic tank at St Margaret’s, where it lay hidden until the fire exposed it and that of hundreds of other babies and young children who had suffered a similar and terrible fate.
Waking up in hospital with the father she had never met holding her hand, Elvira was told that her sister was dead. For fear of being sent back, the terrified little girl said nothing, but over the years, her soul remained trapped at St Margaret’s.
Sam’s fingers shook as they hovered over the keys. All around her, the rows of monitors glowed like the lights of a runway leading across the floor to the huge black letters on the white wall: The Times, centred with the Hanoverian coat of arms.
Everyone had been friendly enough at the start of her first shift, as Miles had walked her round and introduced her to the team milling about. She had smiled politely at each new face, her overwhelming nerves meaning she forgot everyone’s names as soon as they were told to her.
Now she sighed and looked around at all the unfamiliar faces, some glaring at their screens, others chatting animatedly with one another, and ached for Fred to be sitting next to her. Taking the piss out of her, comforting her, bringing her endless cups of watery coffee. She missed him so much more than she missed Ben, whom she had barely spoken to for the past month, other than to discuss their ongoing arrangements for Emma. She’d tried to call Fred a couple of times, but he’d quit Southern News and disappeared.
She had never felt so alone, the gulf of St Margaret’s eating away at her relationship with Na
na like a cancer. They never really spoke about it now, but still it sat there, the elephant in the room.
She hadn’t even really broached the subject of the piece with her – which was set to be a four-page spread in the The Times that Saturday. She’d had no idea her new boss would want to make her and Nana such a prominent part of the story, and the phrase ‘sell your own grandmother down the river’ was buzzing round in her brain like a trapped wasp.
She suddenly felt sick. She couldn’t do it; she might as well be sitting in the office stark naked given how utterly exposed she felt writing this story the way Miles wanted it. It wasn’t right. She’d just have to tell him – even if it meant losing the job she had fought so hard for.
She slowly highlighted the words she had spent the last two hours writing, and was about to hit delete when her mobile rang. Nana’s name flashed up on the screen. Sam picked it up.
‘Hi, Nana,’ said Sam.
‘Are you all right, darling? You sound tired.’ Sam could hear classical music playing loudly in the background.
‘I’m okay, bit of a rough day at work. How are you?’
‘I’m fine. Guess who has invited us all to Sunday lunch?’ said Nana. ‘Maude Jenkins, isn’t that lovely?’
‘That is lovely.’ Sam felt her voice breaking as she pushed back her chair and headed towards a quiet spot on the far side of the newsroom.
‘Her neighbour is going to host, as Maude says it’s too much for her to cook. Apparently you met her, Mrs Connors. You were very kind to her when her father died,’ Nana continued cheerfully. ‘Do you think Ben might want to come?’
Sam shook her head, her eyes filling with tears before she could stop them. ‘No,’ she managed. ‘No, I don’t think he’ll come. We’re barely speaking, Nana. He blames me for Emma being in that fire.’