by Anne Bennett
The break in Hannah’s voice betrayed her distress. Gloria didn’t argue further, but patted her shoulder as she got to her feet. ‘I’m really sorry for you,’ she said. ‘And as guilty as hell that it was me that pushed you into that man’s arms, for the sake of a house and a well-paid job. They can be cold comfort if the man’s wrong and maybe money and material possessions aren’t everything.’
‘Will you be able to go back to Leeds?’ Pauline asked Hannah when she told her she’d be going with Arthur to see Angela’s new school. Josie had told Pauline Hannah’s story and she’d been horrified by it. ‘Won’t it bring back awful memories for you?’
‘Maybe,’ Hannah said truthfully. ‘But I must go and see the sort of place Arthur has chosen for her.’
But Hannah had to fight down the rising tide of panic the following day for the convent school was the very place where she’d been incarcerated for months in 1944. In Hannah’s time there, there had been no gates, just the evidence of where they’d been, but now large wrought-iron gates framed the entrance with ‘St Anne’s Convent School’ written across it on a board in letters of gold.
She’d known where they were heading with a dread certainty as soon as Arthur had turned and headed north before they’d reached the centre of Leeds and she’d been sick with fear. At first, she wondered if it was Arthur’s idea of a joke, if he’d found out about Michael and was going to throw it in her face in the very place she’d given birth. She knew Arthur would be capable of it, but doubted that he would involve Angela in any plan like that. But still, when Arthur stopped the car, she had the desire to leap out and run and she fought to control the urge, sitting on her hands so that Angela wouldn’t see them trembling.
Arthur opened the gates and Hannah saw the familiar gravel drive. But there the similarity stopped. The lawns before the house had been turned into a rounders pitch, where a cluster of little girls, who all looked much bigger than Angela, had begun to play.
Angela studied them intently and they were just as interested in her. They stopped their game and stared back until the teacher clapping her hands, broke the spell.
Hannah had time to have a good look herself when Arthur stopped the car again to close the gates and she had to admit the children looked very smart. They all had smart white Aertex shirts with a maroon trim and little maroon games skirts, their white socks had a purple trim and they had white plimsolls on their feet. ‘What are they playing?’ Angela asked.
‘Rounders,’ Hannah answered.
‘It looks fun,’ Angela said.
Arthur slid back into the car as she spoke and heard the remark. ‘Of course it’s fun, darling, and that’s just the start. You’ll enjoy yourself so much here, you won’t have time to miss me at all in the week and at weekends, I’ll be along to visit you.’
She didn’t ask if her mother would come too but Hannah hadn’t really expected her to. To prevent herself getting emotional, she studied the house before her and wondered if she’d ever have the courage to go inside.
However, gone was the grey forbidding fortress. In front of Hannah was a beautiful building with a cream coloured facia. Each sparkling window had a window box in front of it, arrayed with beautiful colourful flowers, and a set of white steps led to the front door. It was no longer like the door of a prison with a huge clanging bell and reinforced with metal bands, but far more modern, light oak in colour.
But still, as Hannah stood before it, her limbs began to tremble. She’d been mad to come. What if she was wrong? What if the very nuns who’d tormented her years before were still here? Should she have taken the risk to have her ultimate shame denounced before her husband and child?
She would have turned back to the car, but the door was opened at that moment by a smiling young nun, as far removed from Sister Carmel as if they’d lived on separate planets. ‘Mr and Mrs Bradley and Angela?’ she enquired. They were most welcome, she said, the headmistress, Sister Beatrice, was expecting them and did they require a nice cup of tea after their journey?
They stepped into a hall that seemed bathed in light. The floors, a light walnut colour, gleamed and Hannah remembered the pregnant girls scrubbing the same hall on her first visit as she herself had done many times after it. But those floors had been dark and dull, not this honey-like colour, which matched the panels of the door.
Hannah had no time to see more than this before they were ushered through the door marked ‘Headmistress’. A nun sat the other side of a large desk with sheaves of paper before her. At their entrance, she rose to meet them and came forward, her hand outstretched in welcome, a smile on her face, and Hannah realised with a slight jolt that she never remembered a nun smiling at her before and now two had done just that.
Sister Beatrice was, as far as any nun’s age can be judged, middle-aged and kindly-looking. Hannah saw she was very taken with her daughter and little wonder, for she looked very pretty. She was dressed in a flowery summer dress and the green colour in the dress and that of the ribbons holding back her beautiful auburn hair picked out the green of her eyes. Sister Beatrice smiled. ‘I can see at one glance who you take after,’ she said, looking from Angela to Hannah, who to mark this occasion was wearing one of the outfits bought for dinner at the Banks’ and so was looking very beautiful herself.
‘Like mother, like daughter,’ the nun went on and if she didn’t understand the frown on Angela’s face, she put it down to the strangeness of the situation and the quite natural apprehension of the child.
‘Approximately half of our girls are boarders,’ Sister Beatrice said, beaming at them. ‘We have only four to a room, more homely, we thought. All the girls have a personal tutor, though for the younger girls this is often more of a substitute mother, who deals with their emotional needs. They also have access to the priest from our local church, St Anne’s, that the convent is affiliated to and where we attend Mass and so on.’
‘Where is Father Benedict?’
For a moment, Hannah thought she had spoken aloud but then from everyone’s unchanged demeanour, she realised she hadn’t. She’d often thought of the priest’s intervention that night and knew it was kindly meant, even if what happened to her afterwards at the home wasn’t. There had been no alternative open to her anyway, none but suicide. The workhouses, bad though they were, had been rightly closed down, but nothing had been put in their place and because of their community’s lack of charity, many girls had been left destitute and desperate as she had been herself.
But these feelings were not ones she could share and she pushed them to the back of her mind and concentrated on what the nun was saying because her daughter was going to spend her formative years in this school, whether she liked it or not.
Hannah soon realised that here, Angela had every opportunity to do what she most wanted in life. They were shown the classrooms and the prep room and the language and science labs, the music room and art room, the magnificent gymnasiums, showers and changing rooms.
The vegetable plot which Hannah had spent back-breaking months tending in 1944 had been covered in Tarmac and some of it marked out for netball. There was no sign of any garden now, although she had noticed the large conservatory attached to the main building with girls moving around inside. To the right behind them were the tennis courts and stretching away from the school yard were the extensive grounds.
These grounds had been her salvation when she’d been resident there. You were allowed to walk around them in your free time. It was getting free time that had been the problem. ‘The devil makes work for idle hands,’ was one of the nuns’ favourite sayings. But whenever Hannah could escape, she did and imagined there was no home, no baby, no shame and that she was back in Wicklow amongst her family.
But she wasn’t in Wicklow, not then, not now and she’d shaken off her daydreaming and gone after Arthur and Angela who were following Sister Beatrice to the stables to see the ponies.
Back once again in the Headmistress’s office, she again extolled what
the school had to offer. The girls, they were told, were encouraged to take up a hobby, to participate in sport, learn at least one foreign language, learn to play an instrument. The list of opportunities was endless. They inspected the cosy dormitories with their matching candlewick bedspreads, fluffy blankets and snow-white sheets, and the bathroom shared between the four occupants.
‘How long have you been established?’ Arthur asked.
‘Not long,’ Sister Beatrice said. ‘The house, of course, has been here for years. It was used as a home for unmarried mothers in the war years. Morality then, I’m afraid to say, was very lax,’ she said, looking from Arthur to Hannah with a disapproving air.
‘Oh. Quite,’ Arthur said, but Hannah stayed silent.
‘Then after the war, there were fewer girls coming forward and more families wanting a better education for their girls,’ Sister Beatrice said. ‘Before the war, many thought it was senseless educating girls who’d just marry and raise families. The war changed that conception of women forever. They had to do what formerly had been seen as men’s jobs and, I believe, did them very well indeed in the main.
‘Then of course many young women were left widowed, or with a disabled husband, and often with a family to bring up. Many parents came round to thinking it might be a good thing to educate their daughters as well as their sons. Fathers, in particular, wanted a school with a strict moral framework for their daughters. A convent school fitted that criteria.’
‘So not all the girls are from Catholic homes?’
‘Ah no, alas, though the great majority are,’ Sister Beatrice said. ‘But most families have no objection to their daughters having religious instruction and attending Mass. Who knows, perhaps some of these girls will be tomorrow’s converts – more souls saved.’
‘Indeed,’ Arthur said.
He seemed wholly and completely satisfied, smug, and Hannah wondered what he would do if she was to leap to her feet and shout that she’d been one of those girls with lax morals and that she’d given birth to a bastard son in this very building. That would wipe the smile off his face all right. But she knew she couldn’t do such a thing and so she shook hands with the nun and meekly followed Arthur and Angela to the car.
Chapter Sixteen
‘So, what d’you think?’ Arthur asked Angela as they drove away from the convent.
‘I like it, Daddy.’
‘I like it, Daddy,’ parroted Hannah in her head and wondered what was the matter with her. Of course the child would like it. Even she, who’d been totally against Angela boarding anywhere, had been impressed with the place. The whole atmosphere of the school was good. There was no danger of any ghostly reminders of humbled, pregnant girls there, or those in labour screaming for their mothers as the pains became almost unbearable.
‘Won’t you miss your home at all?’ Hannah asked.
Angela appeared to give it some thought and then, ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not really. I mean I’ll see Daddy every weekend. He promised.’
And she’d be completely satisfied. Angela needed only her father, Hannah knew that, she’d accepted it, so why had she laid herself wide open to further hurt by asking her about it?
Arthur smiled the sort of smile that made Hannah want to poke out his eyes or pull the remaining hair from his head in large clumps. He turned to Angela and said, ‘That’s right, darling, I promised. Now shall we find a little hotel and stop for lunch?’
‘Ooh, yes.’
Hotel! Hannah told herself not to panic. There were many, many hotels in Leeds. Why would he go into the hotel she once worked in? It was just chance that her daughter was going to go to school in the same building as the one where she’d given birth to her half-brother. Coincidences weren’t going to dog her all day.
But, it appeared, they were, for Arthur turned away from the city centre. He seemed to know his way around the area and although Hannah didn’t comment on this, he said in explanation, ‘Used to stay in Leeds and around the North a fair bit in the early days of travelling. Reg wanted to break into Yorkshire. Funny people, I thought, stick in the muds, many of them, and blunt isn’t in it. ‘Course, I stayed in dingy boarding houses then, but I always promised myself that one day I’d eat at The Hibernian and as today’s a celebration …’
Hannah felt faint. For a moment, Arthur’s voice seemed to come from a great distance away and she forced herself back to full consciousness as she said, ‘Why don’t we find a nice café somewhere?’
‘Because I’ve just said I always promised myself I’d eat there,’ Arthur said and he turned to Angela beside him, patted her knee and said, ‘It’s the best and biggest hotel in Leeds and nothing is too good for my girl.’
Hannah could have told him that and she began to tremble all over and was glad that Arthur had insisted she sit in the back of the car and let Angela ride in the front, for Arthur would have known there was something wrong with her if she’d been beside him.
She told herself it was years since she’d been thrown out of The Hibernian. She looked totally different, she was no longer a young girl, or even a young woman. Anyway, hotels were notorious for the high turnover of staff. She was worrying about nothing.
But the worry was affecting her bladder and she mentioned to Arthur as they went in that she needed to find a ladies’. ‘I’ll see if I can book us a table,’ he said brusquely. ‘Don’t take all day.’
‘Do you need the toilet?’ Hannah asked Angela and how glad she was just moments later for the mute shake of her head, for when she came out of the toilet she came face to face with Tilly.
Tilly was, if anything, more shocked than Hannah. Her mouth dropped agape, her eyes widened and her eyebrows nearly disappeared under her fringe. ‘Oh my God, you’re a sight for sore eyes, you bloody well are,’ she said, giving Hannah a hug. ‘You old bugger! Just disappearing like that. God, Hannah, what you put me through. If them nuns and that priest knew where you’d gone, they weren’t for saying. I searched all over the bleeding place. Where did you end up?’
‘Birmingham.’
‘Why Birmingham, in God’s name?’
‘There isn’t a logical reason,’ Hannah said. ‘I wasn’t thinking straight. I had to get away. One of the nuns was related to someone in Birmingham who’d helped girls like me in the past, finding them jobs and things like that. She had quite a busy guesthouse and she offered me a job with her and a place to stay. She didn’t know what she’d taken on at first, because I wasn’t easy in the beginning and used to have dreadful nightmares and flashbacks.’
‘But what are you doing here now?’
‘My daughter. She’s starting at …’
‘A daughter. You have a daughter? I am glad. It’s got to help.’
A shadow flitted across Hannah’s face, but all she said was, ‘And you?’
‘Oh, I’m married too. Married the year after you left. Two kids now, but we want our own place. We live with Ted’s mother, see? Houses are like gold dust up here and pricey too, so I help out waiting on. I do two evenings and two lunchtimes when the nippers are at school. It all helps. But tell me about your daughter?’
‘I’d love to, Tilly, but not now,’ Hannah said. ‘My husband knows nothing about my past and that’s the way I want it to stay. We’re here for a spot of lunch. If I can, I’ll slip away later and we’ll have a chat, if I can’t, I’ll leave my address behind the bar. At least we’ll be able to write then. But if I don’t go now, he’ll come looking for me and that’s all I need.’
As it was, Arthur grumbled all through the meal about the time she’d taken leaving the two of them sitting there like lemons, not even able to order till she came back. Hannah was tempted to say she was surprised either noticed her absence, but she wanted to do nothing to spoil the day for Angela and nothing either to further Arthur’s antagonism.
Tilly served at their table. Hannah had been surprised at that, but she told her later that a couple of the waiters who were there in her time still worked at the hotel and
might have recognised her and not have been as discreet as she was. She betrayed nothing. There was no sly wink or nudge. She served Hannah, Arthur and Angela as if they were strangers who’d walked in off the street.
After the meal and coffee, Arthur said, ‘I rather fancy a walk around Leeds, Angela. We’ll look at the places we can go to and things we can do when I come up weekends. What do you say?’
Angela was very agreeable. Although she’d enjoyed the meal, she was becoming bored with sitting. But as she got to her feet, she looked towards Hannah. Arthur caught the look and said quickly, ‘Mommy won’t want to come with us, darling. It will be just me and you.’
That should have been the point when Hannah protested that of course she wanted to come. Prove to Angela that she was as interested as Arthur.
But Arthur was glowering at her and she remembered Tilly saying she’d be free at three o’clock and it was past two already. She’d love a chat with Tilly and she felt she owed her something after disappearing the way she did years before. So she said to Angela, ‘Daddy’s right, darling. I’ll sit in the hotel and wait for you.’
She nodded her head, as if she’d almost expected that answer, and turned away from her to hold her father’s hand.
Hannah watched them go with fists clenched by her sides and then walked into the hotel bar and ordered a large gin and tonic. She’d never tasted it in her life, but she’d heard people talking about it. Amy swore it gave her a lift and Hannah badly needed one and seeing how much it cost, hoped it worked.
She did find the drink pleasant, much more palatable than the brandy Arthur had bought her on honeymoon, or the sips of beer she’d tried, or even the sickly sweet sherry she drank to please Gloria.
She was still nursing the dregs in the glass when Tilly found her. ‘Let me off early,’ she said. ‘There weren’t many in today and he’s a good sort, the head waiter. He knows too I’ll work over if they’re short-handed. What you drinking – G & T?’