Don't You Love Your Daddy? (10 page)

‘Cheese on toast,’ I answered promptly.

She told me she’d had something more substantial in mind but as this was my first night I could have it. ‘As long as you eat some fruit afterwards.’

That night my aunt supervised my bath and looked at the rash thoughtfully. ‘You know, Sally, there are some new creams on the market now,’ she told me, studying the cream my mother had packed. ‘I think they would help more than this one.’

The next day she took me to the clinic where she worked as a nurse. My rash was inspected, a new cream prescribed and each night she smoothed it into my skin. She gave me fresh fruit every morning at breakfast time and told me I had to eat more vegetables and fruit: if I did, my eczema would start to get better.

Later she took me shopping and bought me some new shoes and a dress. ‘Early birthday presents,’ she told me when, pink with pleasure, I stammered my thanks.

When we returned to her house there was another surprise waiting for me. A gleaming black bicycle was standing outside the back door. My uncle had collected it that afternoon while we were out. ‘I thought you’d like this. It’s got trainer wheels for while you learn to ride it, Sally, but as soon as you can, I’ll take them off,’ he said, when I stared at it in amazement. ‘Your aunt and Emily go cycling most weekends and I’m sure you’ll want to go with them.’

It was Emily who gave me my cycling lessons, and after a few days I could ride it. Once the small wheels were removed I triumphantly rode up and down the road outside their house.

That weekend we headed out to the countryside. Emily’s friend Milly and her little sister Charlene, whom everyone called Charlie, joined us and we all went cycling along the country lanes. My legs pedalled furiously to keep up but they would stop to wait for me if I fell behind.

My aunt suggested we stop around lunchtime when I was beginning to feel tired and hungry. Wheeling our bikes, we went down a path to a riverbank. There were groups of people sitting under trees with picnics, cars parked on a gravel strip and more cyclists kept arriving. ‘Picnic time,’ she said, but I couldn’t see anything to eat.

That was when my uncle drove up and took a large wicker hamper from the car. The older girls and my aunt helped carry rugs and cushions from the boot. They opened cold bottles of lemonade and laid out cheese, hard-boiled eggs, chicken drumsticks and apples on thick paper plates.

‘I did it while you were all out getting hot,’ my uncle told me. ‘He does this every time we go cycling,’ Emily said, with a grin. That was the day when I started to see how normal families lived. I watched my uncle Roy talk to his daughter and joke with Milly and Charlie, and knew that he had never made his daughter touch and hold that hard thing. I saw how he helped his wife with unpacking and packing the hamper and how at ease all three girls were with him.

I felt a lump in my throat and tears pricked my eyes when I remembered what it had been like in our home: my father’s impatience with my mother, her tears, his lack of sympathy, and how he made me touch him when we were alone.

I wished that my mother could come here so we could all live happily together, for while I missed her dreadfully I didn’t miss the rows and tension that polluted our home.

When she saw that my eczema was responding well to the new cream, my aunt decided the next thing to tackle was my speech. She enrolled me with a private speech therapist and explained that I had a speech impediment, which needed correcting. ‘ “Wownd and wownd the wugged wocks the wagged wascal wan,” ’ was all I could manage at first, but over the weeks that, too, began to improve.

The days sped past and each one made me feel more content as I settled into the family’s routine. Weekdays were spent practising my speech, reading, visiting friends with Emily and exploring the neighbourhood. We had our evening meal together before we were allowed to watch one hour of television or play with toys. Every weekend when my aunt was free from work, she planned different things for us all to do.

One Saturday she decided to take us to Birmingham’s famous Bull Ring Shopping Centre. We set off after breakfast and drove down a motorway that, as we entered the city, tangled with three others. Supported by immense pillars hundreds of feet above the ground, strips of roads, on which cars and trucks moved nearly bumper to bumper, twisted above, below and around each other. ‘It’s called Spaghetti Junction,’ my aunt said, as I craned my neck to look. ‘It’s just opened – and it also means we’re nearly there.’

After we had parked the car in one of the many car parks, we entered the grey building where, on a wall, a huge mural of a bull informed us we were at the right place. Staring up above me I saw brightly lit floors full of restaurants and shops connected by something I had never seen before: a bank of glass and silver staircases that rose and fell of their own accord.

‘They’re called escalators,’ my cousin said, so I stepped on and rode up and up. Exhilarated at being able to look down and see everything around me, I wanted to keep riding. We wandered around, looked in shop windows and went to the cinema where we watched
The Adventures of Robin Hood
, the latest Walt Disney film. Afterwards we sat in a caf矷here we ate ice cream out of tall glasses and drank cold fizzy drinks. Then it was time to return to my aunt’s house.

That evening my aunt got out writing paper and envelopes and laid them on the table. ‘I’ll help you write a letter to your mother,’ she said – she wrote it and I drew pictures. Between us we told her about the bicycle rides and what I had seen at the Bull Ring. Then I wrote lots of love and drew a row of kisses.

Letters came back from Mummy, telling me she was missing me but was very happy I was enjoying myself. She drew pictures of fairies with pale wings and a blonde-haired girl in little woodland scenes at the end of each letter.

Gradually the summer was drawing to an end and I knew that, soon, a new school year would start. ‘When am I going home?’ I asked my aunt.

‘Sally,’ she replied, ‘you have to stay here a little longer. Your mother still needs to rest. I’ve arranged for you to go to a lovely school here.’

Before I could question her any more she told me that we were going shopping. I needed nice new school clothes. We had to go into Birmingham to buy them, and I forgot my questions at the thought of more rides on the escalators in the Bull Ring.

We bought a dark grey pinafore dress, white cotton blouses, a grey blazer, a woollen jumper, regulation underwear, a gym outfit and a pair of lace-up shoes.

‘You look so pretty and grown-up,’ my aunt said, when I had tried on everything. In the mirror the girl looking back at me seemed very different from the one who had arrived in the Midlands just over a month earlier. My eczema was nearly gone, my hair was drawn back from my face into a long neat plait and my tanned face glowed with health. My aunt took me for lunch and ordered a hamburger and a milkshake for me. It was then I summoned up the courage to ask her the question that was worrying me.

‘How long am I going to stay with you?’ I blurted out. Although I was happy with my aunt and her family, I still missed my mother terribly, especially when we were buying the school uniform.

‘Just until your mother feels better,’ she answered, then, in an attempt to divert my attention, she asked me what I wanted for dessert.

I might have not turned seven yet but I sensed her unwillingness to answer any more questions.

A few days later my aunt took me to my new school. Unlike my brother, who had disappeared the moment we walked through the gates, she held my hand and introduced me to the teacher who was in charge of my class. I was seated between Charlie and a red-haired girl whose freckly face broke into a wide smile when she saw me. ‘My big sister is in the same class as your cousin,’ she told me.

For the first time I had someone who stood beside me in the playground and invited me to visit her at her house. ‘It’s my birthday next week,’ she said. ‘You’ll come to my party, won’t you? I’d love you to come.’

Suddenly I had friends, little girls who said my hair was pretty and who held a rope for me to skip over during break. After one class where we had to draw pictures, Charlie and my new friend Katy said mine was the best. By the end of the day the fluttery feeling of apprehension that had been in my stomach when I’d thought of starting at a new school had disappeared.

No one talked about me behind my back or teased me about my looks. My skin and speech had improved so much I was like every other child there – but when I came out of the gate to see my aunt waiting for me, I realized again how much I was missing my mother.

As autumn and its warm, golden days drew to an end, the sky darkened, with birds migrating to warmer climates, and the early-morning frost made the grass stiff and white. Christmas was fast approaching and still there was no talk of me returning home. Every time I asked how my mother was and when I was going to see her, I was told she needed to rest and the subject was skilfully changed.

Each week I wrote long letters telling her about my new friends and what I had learnt at school, and by return she sent me hers, but they seemed shorter now, there were fewer drawings and the writing was spidery.

It was when our class was rehearsing for the annual nativity play that the headmistress walked into the room and beckoned me. My aunt was coming to fetch me and I should gather my things, she told me. With a child’s unclouded instinct I knew that something had happened to my mother.

When my aunt arrived I noticed that, apart from two red spots high on her cheekbones, her face was pale and drawn. She took me back to her house and all the way there I wanted to bombard her with questions but fear of her replies silenced me.

It was when we were sitting together on the sofa that my aunt took my hand and faced the heartbreaking task of telling a frightened child who was not yet seven that the mother she loved was dead.

‘Dead’ was a word I refused to understand; ‘gone away’ was something I could cope with and that was the expression I clung to.

‘But where is she?’ I kept asking.

‘She’s in heaven, Sally,’ my aunt kept telling me.

‘When will she come back?’ I asked, and my aunt was left struggling to explain that she wouldn’t. With each word she uttered I felt my head pound and my heart thump as what she told me began to sink in.

As though to comfort me, the memory of the story my mother had told me the night before I left came into my mind. ‘Can she still see me?’ I asked urgently. ‘From heaven, can she see me?’

For a brief moment my aunt looked puzzled, then her arms tightened around me. ‘Yes, darling, of course she can. She’ll be there watching you for ever.’ She told me how much my mother had loved me and, even though she had gone, she wanted me to be happy. She did not tell me about the months of pain my mother had endured. Nor did she say how my mother had shrunk to four stone and that even the bed sheets spread gently over her caused excruciating pain as the cancer tore away at her emaciated body. Neither did she tell me how, despite the morphine, my mother had begged God to let her die.

It was my brother who told me these things, but not until many years later. He had been there whenever he could and bunked off school to be at home with her. Finally, when she was dying in the hospital, he had held her bony hand and dripped water on to her parched lips when she could no longer sip from a glass.

He also told me she had known she was dying when she sent me to my aunt. She had told him I needed a mother and her sister had a home she wanted me to stay in to be cared for and loved. But that day I knew none of that. I only knew that I was a very sad little girl who was never going to see her mother again.

My aunt told me then that my father was insisting he wanted me to go home and they were taking me back in a few days. I thought of a home where there was no mother and shrank back against the settee. A thick fog of misery engulfed me. When my aunt tried to talk to me and hold me, I turned away.

That night sleep would not come. I heard Emily going to bed and later my aunt and uncle too. My door was opened and my aunt whispered to me, asking if I was awake.

I held my breath and pretended to be asleep because I didn’t want to talk.

In the darkness I listened to the creaking sounds of the old house settling down as though it, too, was ready for rest, but my mind refused to be still. The place I had once called home seemed remote. It was when I was drifting into that stage between consciousness and sleep that the image of the house came into my mind and, half dreaming, I saw myself entering it. My mother was somewhere inside, but instead of opening the kitchen door I climbed the stairs. I peered through the door of the room that had been my bedroom and saw it was cold and bare. I passed Pete’s room with its ‘keep out’ sign on the door and his teenage mess inside.

Finally, as I had done so often when my mother had had a ‘bad day’, I peeped into my parents’ room, looking for her. There was the bed with the crocheted throw I had watched my mother make, and a silky scarf was tossed carelessly over a chair, but the room was empty.

I found her downstairs. Her green eyes sparkled, a smile was on her lips, but as I moved towards her, willing her to speak, her image faded to be replaced by one of my father. Tall and handsome, he opened his arms and stretched them out for me to run into. It was his voice I heard echoing in my head.