Father Unknown (22 page)

Josie was touched that with problems of her own the woman had still taken time out to help her. As Fee left to go home, she patted Josie’s cheek and told her to be a good girl. ‘I sure hope you run on home to your momma, sugar,’ she said. ‘But if you can’t do that, you get a good job, and then find yourself a nice place to live. You take a good look at what it’s like round here. Then get away from it before you get sucked in.’

Chapter Ten

As Josie was crying in Westbourne Park, Ellen was sobbing into her pillow too. She could hold herself together during the day, but as soon as she’d put Nicholas and Simon to bed, grief took over.

When she first arrived in Bristol and Mr and Mrs Sanderson with their two little boys met her at the station, she felt as if all her troubles had vanished. They appeared to be good people, understanding, intelligent and very practical. They had their own wholesale grocery business, but Mrs Sanderson was struggling to cope with working with her husband, plus looking after her home and the two boys. They were as grateful to get help as Ellen was to be offered a job and a home.

From the first evening with them, when they insisted she must call them Roger and Shirley, and Shirley gave her a couple of her old maternity dresses that were really pretty, Ellen felt everything was going to work out just fine. She liked the boys. Nicholas was five, Simon three. They were well-behaved, funny little things, and they welcomed her wholeheartedly because from now on they wouldn’t be packed off to their granny’s, auntie’s or neighbours while their mother went off to work.

The Sandersons’ home wasn’t a grand one, just a three-bedroomed semi-detached in suburban Westbury Park, but to Ellen it was paradise – warm, cosy, with all the luxuries like television, a refrigerator, washing-machine, fitted carpets, and central heating that she’d never experienced before. Yet the nicest thing of all was that the Sandersons had a very modern outlook. They were young, only in their early thirties, an ambitious couple who wanted to move up in the world. They were fun-loving too; friends called at the house constantly and almost every weekend they either went to a party or threw one themselves. They were very happy to let Ellen have a free rein with their children.

Until well after Christmas Ellen hardly thought about her own family. It was so good to wake up in the mornings knowing there would be no ugly scenes with Violet, no fear of her father discovering her secret. The housework side of the job was very easy, and the boys were thrilled to have someone who would play with them, read to them and take them out for walks.

It was only in January, when Ellen had to go to the maternity hospital for the first time to be examined, that she was reminded of what lay ahead. She didn’t relish leaving the Sandersons’ in March and going into the mother-and-baby home.

One evening in late February, she and Shirley were in the kitchen. It was snowing outside, and Ellen was doing some ironing while Shirley sat at the table painting her fingernails. Ellen had been impressed from her first day here by how well-groomed and elegant Shirley always was. She was slender, with blonde hair which she put up in a beehive, and she never went out without her full makeup on and her nails painted.

Ellen had been taken by a social worker to see the mother-and-baby home a couple of days previously and she had just admitted to Shirley that she was nervous about going there.

‘You don’t have to,’ Shirley said unexpectedly. ‘We’ve got to think of you as one of our family now, so you could stay here, and we’ll take you to the hospital when your time comes.’

‘But…’ Ellen said, thinking that would be wonderful but then she’d have nowhere to go back to afterwards.

‘I meant that we’d like you to carry on taking care of the boys afterwards,’ Shirley said, as if she’d read her mind.

A lump came up in Ellen’s throat. She hadn’t thought for one moment that Shirley and Roger felt so attached to her. ‘But I have to go,’ she said wistfully. ‘They arrange the adoptions and everything at the home.’

‘That can be arranged from the hospital, a good deal less painfully,’ Shirley said crisply, blowing on her nails to dry them. ‘This business of keeping your baby until six weeks after the birth is brutal. I think it would be far better for you to hand the baby over at birth, before you get too fond of him or her.’

‘The Matron said it gives us time to really make up our minds,’ Ellen said.

‘Well, it does for girls who have a boyfriend who might marry them, or a supportive family prepared to step in to help,’ Shirley said, putting a second coat of polish on her nails. ‘But you haven’t got either of those, have you, dear?’

Shirley’s suggestion seemed to be the answer to all Ellen’s problems, so she was only too happy to let her intervene and make arrangements for her. Within days she had met Dr Fordham, a woman doctor in nearby Clifton, who arranged adoptions privately. From then on Ellen was to have her ante-natal check-ups with her too, and Dr Fordham told her she would arrange for a foster-mother to come and take the baby away from the hospital after the birth.

At that point Ellen hadn’t even considered that there might be an alternative to adoption. No one mentioned one, and the implication was that adoption was the easiest, least painful solution. Ellen would be free to go home to Cornwall afterwards if she wanted to, or to choose a college or start a career. No one ever need know her secret.

But Ellen hadn’t reckoned on the powerful emotions that came with the birth of her little girl.

She was exhausted after a seventeen-hour labour. She thought all she wanted to do was sleep, but when the midwife placed her baby girl in her arms, one look at that tiny, scrunched-up, angry face was enough to make the tiredness disappear.

Ellen knew all about the wonder of new life. She’d helped her father with calving and lambing countless times. She’d seen cows and sheep nuzzle and lick their new babies and observed how the adult animal would from that moment on protect their offspring with their own lives, feeding and nurturing it. Yet somehow she hadn’t expected that she would respond to her own child in exactly the same way.

As Ellen’s fingers caressed her soft skin and felt the firm grip of her tiny fingers around hers, suddenly she was overcome by a fierce desire to put her baby to her breast, to keep her forever, no matter what hardships she had to endure. The feeling was so strong she could hardly bear for her to be taken from her, even to be bathed.

She called her Catherine, and she was allowed just four days with her. Even during that brief time Catherine was always being whipped away to be washed and changed, and for medical examinations. One day Ellen begged the ward sister not to take her away again, and the woman turned and looked at her sharply. ‘Why ever not? You’re giving her away anyway, aren’t you?’ she said bluntly.

When Shirley came to visit Ellen, she tried to explain to her how she felt. She cried and asked her if she knew of any way she could keep Catherine. Shirley was sympathetic, but she said adoptive parents had already been selected, and the only alternative was for Ellen to take her baby back to Cornwall.

Maybe if Ellen had been given a little more time to think that idea through, she might have decided on it, for even the thought of Violet’s nastiness was far less troubling than the horror of parting with her baby. But she was still too sore to walk anywhere; she had no clothes in the hospital for either herself or Catherine, nor any money.

Without any warning or consultation with her, the foster-mother who would be looking after Catherine for six weeks arrived to collect her and took her away. Ellen had been told that Catherine was only being taken away for a bath in the nursery. When she went to look for her, she found an empty cot with the label saying ‘Baby Pengelly. Girl 61b 50z’ still on it.

That was the cruellest thing of all. She hadn’t been allowed to say goodbye, to give her baby one more kiss, or the opportunity to say she wanted time to find a way to keep her. No one had considered she had any rights or feelings.

Shirley and Roger came to take her home to their house a little later and found her in floods of tears.

‘You are just overwrought because on the fourth day the milk comes into the breasts and causes “baby blues”,’ Shirley said. ‘Now, buck up, dear, this is what you agreed to. By next week you will have forgotten all about it.’

The ward sister gave Ellen pills to take to make her milk stop, and she wished there was another pill to make her stop picturing her baby, and to take away the terrible feeling of desolation. Yet she couldn’t let her true feelings show, even if she did feel she was the victim of a confidence trick. Shirley and Roger had helped her when no one else would, so she had to walk back into their house, kiss and hug the boys and make out everything was fine.

The weather turned warm soon after her return home. Each time she took the boys to the park or up to the Downs nearby she saw women with prams, and she tortured herself by going and looking at their babies. Each day she told herself it would hurt less, but it didn’t. Her mind was running on a single track, unable to think of anything but her baby being fed, bathed and changed by a woman she’d never even been allowed to meet.

Only Nicholas and Simon gave her any real comfort. Taking their small hands in hers, holding them on her lap, or washing and dressing them helped. She could lavish the love meant for her own baby on them, and their dependence on her as Shirley stepped up the hours she spent at the office was a kind of balm. Yet alone in her tiny bedroom at night she invariably gave way to tears as she thought of her baby in another woman’s arms.

When a letter came from her father in July to say Josie had run away from home, Ellen was suddenly brought up sharply. She had been so immersed in sorrow that although she’d hastily sent her sister a handbag and a card for her birthday, she hadn’t written any letters for weeks. Now she had guilt to add to her unhappiness, for it seemed to her that Josie must have thought she didn’t care about her.

It was to Dr Fordham that she turned for advice, for even though the woman was rather stern, Ellen had come to trust her. During her ante-natal check-ups, and the two meetings since Catherine’s birth, the last one being when she had to sign the first of the adoption papers before the chosen parents took her baby home, she had built up a strong relationship with the doctor. Dr Fordham alone knew just how Ellen felt, and a great deal about her family and home life.

‘Why don’t you go home to see your parents?’ she said, when Ellen had explained about Josie running off. ‘It’s time you went, you need to see your father, and while you are there you could contact some of Josie’s friends. They are far more likely to tell you if they know where she is than your parents are.’

‘But I’m so weepy and miserable,’ Ellen said. ‘What if I let the truth about my baby slip out?’

‘People only let slip what they want to,’ the doctor said firmly. ‘Remember, you have your good friend Mrs Peters there too. You can confide in her, and talking about it can only help, not make it worse.’

‘Violet will blame me for Josie going,’ Ellen sighed. ‘She won’t be pleased to see me.’

Dr Fordham took both Ellen’s hands in hers. She was a small, rather schoolmarmish woman, but her grey eyes were kind. ‘Ellen, my dear,’ she said, ‘you’ve come through a terrible ordeal, but it’s over now. Catherine is safe and loved by her new parents. I know you won’t believe this, but what you’ve been through will have made you stronger, and you’ll be well able to cope with Violet. What you have to do is pick up the pieces of your life again, discard the bits you don’t want any more, and decide what you want for yourself. You can’t do that until you go back and see what you left behind.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Ellen said.

‘You will in time,’ the doctor said with a little smile. ‘Just go and see what transpires. As for your sister, remember, you aren’t responsible for her. Love her, worry about her by all means, but she has her life, you have yours, and you must plan it so it’s a good one.’

In early August Ellen caught the train home to Truro. Shirley and Roger were taking the boys away on holiday for two weeks, so she hadn’t put them out in any way.

It seemed Josie had sent a postcard home from London, and Ellen had one too, but there was no contact address on either. Ellen had given this a great deal of thought in the last couple of weeks. She had discounted Josie being pregnant, she wouldn’t have gone to London if she was, but would have come to her in Bristol to get advice. Not giving an address wasn’t necessarily sinister either; she was under age and didn’t want anyone dragging her home. But that didn’t stop Ellen worrying about her sister. From what she’d heard London was a dangerous place.

‘It was you clearing off that made her go,’ Violet said spitefully only a few minutes after Ellen arrived at Beacon Farm. ‘But I daresay she’ll make more of herself than you have – look at you, like something the cat brought in!’

Ellen bit back tears, and later when she looked in the bedroom mirror she saw Violet had a point. She was scrawny and pale, and the cream dress she’d bought for her first date with Pierre, which only a year ago she’d thought so smart, had been washed so many times that it looked like an old rag.

At the end of the two weeks Ellen still didn’t know whether it had been a mistake to come home, or a good thing. Violet had never let up in her spite. Her father seemed suddenly old and weary and had little to say to her. None of Josie’s old friends had heard from her, all they did was repeat the same story that her father had been told by the police, that she’d got a lift up to London with two men.

But it had been good to talk to Mavis Peters. Ellen found she could tell her all the things she hadn’t been able to say even to Dr Fordham. It was good to be entirely alone too, taking long walks along the coastal path and sitting for hours down at the cove looking at the sea. She thought she understood what the doctor had meant now. She
had
to come back here again, if only to see for herself how little the place had to offer her.