Mothers and Daughters

by Fleming, Leah

  Connie spent the summer with her head in Winnicott’s The Child, the Family and the Outside World, tomes by Bowlby and Titmuss, and whatever books on the science of sociology she could get hold of. There was a place available for a degree course and she’d applied with Jacob’s help and her good A levels. No more sitting around feeling sorry for herself, not with what Rosa was going through.

  Rosa’s suffering had galvanised Connie into making decisions for the future. There was so much to read and take on board and she wanted to be well prepared. It was ages since she’d done any studying and she felt so rusty. She would have to learn to share a room with a stranger, live off a grant, but Granny Esme had coughed up for her trunk and book list, no doubt relieved to have her back on track.

  They tiptoed round each other at times. It was if Anna had never happened and that part of her life could all be shoved under the carpet. The love she’d felt for her as a child had shrivelled away. Esme had let her down, they’d all let her down, but most of all she’d let herself down in not holding out a little longer. They both sensed the anger inside her but Connie dare not speak out. It wasn’t the time. One day perhaps, but now she was leaving for good to be a student and all because of Rosa’s accident. How strange that someone else’s tragedy should be a force for good.

  Neville was determined to send Rosa the best bouquet he could afford and that meant searching out the florist who’d made such a display in St Wilfrid’s. Consider the Lily was tucked behind the High Street down a cobbled alleyway, but once inside, the shop was an Aladdin’s cave of blooms, foliage, vases: everything for the flower arranger. The smell of lilies was delicious, and Neville stood transfixed by this assault on his senses.

  ‘Can I help you?’ said a young man in jeans and smart shirt.

  ‘I want something cheerful to send to hospital for a very special patient. Something like your wife did for the Gorman–Santini wedding. It’s for Rosa.’

  ‘Yes, I heard about that in the paper … terrible.’ The man smiled. ‘But it’s me you have to thank. Nigel Norris, at your service!’

  ‘You did those displays?’ Then Neville saw the framed gold medal certificate from Chelsea. ‘I heard about this but I assumed …’

  ‘I know, everyone does, but it’s been my obsession since I was a child. I just love colour.’

  ‘So I see.’ Neville appraised the guy before him. The signs were all there: the flamboyant designs, the scent of expensive aftershave and, yes, that giveaway stance but he was going to be careful. ‘Neville Winstanley.’ He held out his hand. ‘Winstanley Health and Herbs, down the road. Business going well?’

  ‘Early days but much better since the wedding, thank you. I’ve been open only a few months but Mrs Bertorelli has been so kind. I hope to do flower-arranging classes in the winter, a night school class at the technical school.’

  Was he fishing for punters? Neville smiled and looked over his stock. ‘Some of those … and those, and those blowsy dahlias. I want something theatrical. Rosa was a dancer, but heaven knows now …’ He sighed.

  ‘I had a friend … in National Service. He fell off the back of a lorry and broke his back. Paralysed from the neck down. You’ll want some of this bronze foliage to set those off. I can do it now, or later, if you like?’

  Was that an invitation? Neville felt the old familiar flutter in his groin. Here we go again. But hell, if Rosa’s accident told him anything it was that life was for living now.

  Rosa strained to listen to the radio to take her mind of her misery. It was one of her bad days when, try as she might, she felt a useless lump of broken meat. It was one of those days when she wished she’d never woken up from the accident. How could you be normal one day and a helpless cripple the next?

  She wasn’t the only poor sod here to be struggling. Tim across the end had dived into a swimming pool at the wrong end and broken his neck. Garry had been in a car accident. Barbara had complications with her spina bifida. They all had their off days too. Now it was her turn to feel sorry for herself.

  Now Marty was talking about going back on the building site with his dad to put up a bungalow with everything on one level for a wheelchair. He had brought in plans, and she’d wanted to scream at him. She wanted to be normal, not confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life. What about his career? How could she let him have to do all that intimate stuff?

  Joy had come at last and cried in her arms. Poor Joy, exhausted by guilt and regret and blaming herself. It had been such an emotional visit and Rosa was left so drained.

  Neville bounced in behind a bouquet the size of shrubbery, trying to be jokey and cheerful. There was a twinkle in his eyes that meant only one thing: he was on the prowl again. Good luck to him, she thought. Would she ever lie in Marty’s arms again? Frustration was making her weep.

  They’d wheeled in the television last night to watch some tame variety show and the dancers were awful – loose arms, bad timing and poor ideas – and it made her head buzz with frustration. I could do better with them than that. She might not be able to dance again but that didn’t stop her from teaching it, choreographing routines. Lemody Liptrot, her old dancing teacher, had visited her and asked if there was anything she could do. Everyone wanted to help but it wasn’t now she needed help, it would be later, when they were faced with the fact she was a permanent cripple. There had to be some hope. Day by endless day, in the stillness of her body she was learning to be patient, willing something to happen, but it was no use. The damage was done.

  This battle with her moods and despair was making her head tingle. In fact, it was making her tingle all over. Suddenly she was becoming aware that the tingle had lodged itself down her left leg and into her ankle.

  For a second she thought she was imagining the sensation. Something strange was happening down there … a stirring, an itch? She didn’t know what it was but she rang the bell and called for help, just in case …

  PART IV

  MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS

  26

  December 1968

  ‘Joy’s on the phone!’ shouted Gran. ‘I told her you were sticking in your book again. You’re taking my cupboards over with all them scrapbooks …’

  Connie left her cuttings, bracing herself for Joy’s usual litany of success and enthusiasms. She put her ear to the phone, mumbled a ‘Hi’ and let Joy spout forth.

  ‘We’re opening the new emporium on Tuesday … a month’s trading before Christmas, I hope. You must come to the launch; cheese and wine. Everyone will be there!’

  ‘I’ll try, but I’m on placement and I’ve loads of reports to do.’

  It had been one of those days when she’d been rocked to her foundations, finding an old man dead, unvisited, frozen in his own living room, and she was in no mood for Christmas cheer.

  ‘If Rosa can make the effort you can too. Anyone would think you’d gone into exile. It’s going to be fantastic. You’ve just got to come. I won’t take no for an answer. I’ve given you plenty of notice.’

  ‘Yes, Joy, but no more matchmaking. I’m happy as I am.’

  ‘Would I ever? I’m too busy trying to bag one for myself. Six thirty and dress up funky. No last-minute dropping out. I know you!’

  Connie smiled. Joy meant well, trying to fix her up with dates, but this new job was draining her of every ounce of energy. Joy had taken on a new lease of life since her divorce and Connie must support her new venture. She would make an effort, and seeing Rosa was always a tonic.

  She sat down to arrange her cuttings. It was a ritual at the end of every month to gather up all the news and local bits, snapshots and postcards for the yearbooks, as she called them now.

  There was a picture of her on the steps of the Parkinson Building of Leeds University after her graduation, looking sombre in her cap and gown, and Gran standing proud as her guest. She’d had to go back to Leeds, of course. No other centre would do in case of a chance encounter with her little girl. It was stupid to yearn for her fantasy chil
d like this but she couldn’t help herself, the yearning never went away, or the guilt, but those three years had gone so quickly and now she was on a placement near Bolton for her social work qualification.

  An upper second degree wasn’t bad for all the work she put in between student demos and protests. It had been a terrible year: the assassination of Martin Luther King and then Bobby Kennedy but then the terrible betrayal of Czechoslovakia and the crushing of the ‘Prague Spring’ by Russian forces. She’d kept all the headlines out of respect, alongside more intimate family pieces from the local paper: the birth of Rosa’s miracle baby, Amber Valentina, and Arthur Walsh making the youngest ever member of the Grimbleton Junior Football Team.

  The reality of being a trainee social worker was hitting home; the realities of dealing with broken homes, violence and abuse, incest and unimaginable child neglect. It was another world away from her cosy billet with Gran at Sutter’s Fold; the dark side of the 1960s, but this was what she’d chosen to do in reparation for her own betrayal.

  How she wanted to be of public service to others, but it was a shock to see the deprivation and suffering in the backstreets of every town and large city on a scale that overwhelmed her at times. She had been so cosseted by the family as a child.

  But the worst test of all came early on in her placement when she was sent to remove a baby from its adoptive parents. She was told to go and collect the baby, who’d been with his new family almost three months.

  Now within the statutory period of grace, the birth mother had changed her mind and refused to sign the final consent forms. Good for her, Connie thought as she drove to a smart suburb outside Manchester. If only I’d been so strong, she sighed.

  She knocked at the door, looking prim in her trouser suit. ‘I’ve come for Simon,’ she announced as if she was collecting some stray post. Mrs Sargent was standing in her dressing gown, smiling at first, but then her face crumpled.

  ‘Ralph!’ she shouted, and her husband tumbled down the stairs, half asleep. ‘It’s Miss Winstanley … you’d better come down.’

  ‘Where’s the baby?’ Connie barged in as she had been taught.

  ‘In his cot, asleep. What’s wrong?’

  ‘Then I’ll get him, if you can put a few things together.’ She was trying to be professional, cool and uninvolved. ‘The sooner this is done …’ She heard herself say.

  ‘What’s going on?’ The man barred her way. ‘You can’t just walk in here and snatch our baby.’

  ‘Mr Sargent, he’s not your baby. The mother has had a change of heart and will not be signing her consent so he must go back into his birth family. Better just to do this now. We don’t want to upset him.’

  ‘What about his toys and his clothes? He needs a feed … please. How can you be so cruel? Where is your authority?’ The mother was fighting now. ‘We thought you were on our side!’

  Connie pulled the forms out of the bag and wafted them, looking round at the pretty rooms and the manicured lawns, the open aspect and obvious affluence of the couple.

  ‘You can’t do this, he’s ours! We’ve waited so long for him,’ Diane Sargent pleaded.

  ‘He never was yours until the final consent forms were signed and they won’t be now. He has to come with me. Don’t make it hard on yourselves.’

  The couple clung together in disbelief at her words. Then Mrs Sargent, as if in a dream, went upstairs and brought down the startled three-month-old, pink from sleep, and wrapped him in a shawl. He smelled of baby sweat and dried milk.

  ‘How can you do this to us? You were glad enough for us to have Simon. We will report you!’

  ‘I’m sorry, but it is the law. There will be other babies.’ How could she say that to them when she knew damn well that white babies were getting scarce since the pill and the abortion act? They’d be lucky to have another chance of adoption at their age.

  She placed him in the waiting carrycot, but one look at her strange face and Simon howled. She put the new dummy in his mouth as she’d been told and he sucked on it in fury.

  ‘He never needed one of those with us,’ cried Mrs Sargent, bending over him, tucking him in. ‘Please let us bring him in ourselves. He’ll be frightened with strangers.’

  Connie stood firm. She had right and might on her side. No one should separate a child from its rightful mother ever again. If she couldn’t do this for herself, she would do it for some other poor mother.

  She left the Sargents on the pavement sobbing as she drove back through Salford and Farnworth to a council estate in New Bury, but the baby cried so sore she had to stop the car and comfort him as best she could. The distraught faces of the couple kept flashing before her eyes. How could she do this to them? They had bonded with baby Simon and now he was torn away from the only parents he’d known, but the law was on the young mother’s side. Why now did she want to take him back to the Sargents? This was not professional behaviour. Suddenly she was sweating and crying at what she had just done so coldly. For once bureaucracy seemed cruel, cold and clinical, and she was ashamed of her part in this act.

  It didn’t help when she turned up at the scruffy house with the battered-down fence and overgrown grass, where a girl of about fifteen snatched the infant from her.

  ‘Darren’s here,’ she yelled, and everyone stood in the doorway, trying to pacify the screaming child.

  ‘Thanks, love,’ said a careworn mother who stood, fag in mouth, smiling. ‘Give it here … he looks well enough … Thanks. Best back with his own.’ She pointed to the girl. ‘She’ll be his sister from now on. If anyone asks, he’s my son. Her uncle did it to her. He’s in gaol and he’s going to have to pay for what he done to her.’

  ‘I shall be visiting regularly,’ Connie added, but they were all doting on the baby as if he was a new puppy.

  ‘You do that, love, if you can find us in! Knock six times or we might think you’re the rent man!’ Darren’s new mother laughed.

  Why did she feel so confused, uncertain? He was back in this chaotic nest, his rightful place to grow up with a pack of lies about his parentage. She smiled. It was no different from what she and Joy had experienced, and it hadn’t done them any harm – or had it? Nothing was certain any more but one thing was for sure, she didn’t want to work with children. It was too close to the bone.

  Now she was hoping to focus on work with the elderly. They might grumble and moan for hours, but dealing with their forms and assessments was safer than making judgements on families. She never wanted to be in that horrible dilemma again.

  She loved it, though, and it was taking over her life, especially her social life. Gran was failing and needed someone around so here she was like a teenager, back living at home, on her way to becoming a right old maid.

  Connie picked up the photo of Rosa and Amber at her christening. Rosa’s recovery was slow but never complete, and although walking was difficult, she didn’t complain about her lot. She travelled with Marty when she could. He was now in demand as a sound engineer for the stars, making records, setting up concerts in strange places.

  Rosa took every therapy on offer, even acupuncture for the constant pain. She went with Maria on a pilgrimage to Lourdes and the result of her prayers, she was convinced, was Amber. No disability stopped her in her tracks. In public she put them all to shame, but Connie knew there were still private dark days when they sat smoking, talking about the old days.

  She picked up a photo of them all on Gran’s birthday: Neville and Nigel, Joy and Kim and Su, Levi, Shirley, and she thought of the absent ones … her baby, her mother and some of the Olive Oils. Diana died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage. Her obituary cutting must go in. How had Connie thanked Diana for all her kindness and common sense? By hardly visiting her when she was a student in Leeds. It was too painful to return, too many memories to fight, and now she was dead. She had been such a link to Mama. Now she knew what was meant by ‘thankless youth’.

  Neville and Nigel lived over the premises of Consider the Lily.
Since last year’s act permitted some homosexual practices in private, they could live discreetly as a couple. Levi had made an honest woman of his Shirley now that Ivy had debunked to St Annes to run a boarding house with the proceeds of her settlement.

  Connie kept these yearbooks faithfully, much to the teasing of the Winstanleys. Any quirky item that took her fancy went in there: theatre programmes, rude postcards, bills for expensive meals. Auntie Lee got to be District Commissioner for Brownies and got herself in the paper. Levi stood for the Town Council and lost, due to a fierce Gregson lobby.

  Now the Mercury would be sending a reporter to Joy’s launch of The Silk Route. With her exotic background and their mini tours as the Silkies, it seemed a good name for her fabric, furnishing and ethnic goods business. The Beatles were making all things eastern hip and cool. Never one to miss an opportunity, Joy was getting out of her home-selling empire and renting an old furniture shop in the centre of town to display fabrics, carved furniture from the Far East, jewellery, scarves and accessories for homes and gardens in psychedelic colours; cushions, stools and incense sticks. Grimbleton didn’t know what was going to hit them.

  Now she wore her hair hippy-style, long and straight, with clothes to match: swirling skirts and tie-dyed prints. Kim was her little shadow, now at private school. Connie’s heart ached when she saw how much she’d grown.

  On Tuesday night Connie made an effort to get herself there on time for once. The Winstanleys must support their own. ‘All this work and no play makes a dull Jill!’ Esme said, eyeing her preparations with dismay. ‘Put some colour on your face and stop wearing black. Anyone would think you were going to a funeral. I don’t know, Constance … Yer only young once!’