Mothers and Daughters (27 page)

Suddenly there was just Connie left waiting impatiently, absorbed in her George Eliot but missing the gang who’d become her confidantes. Evelyn returned with Errol, Sheila with Lorraine. Doreen’s twins, Donna and Darren, were kept in the hospital, being underweight and sick. Doreen never saw them again.
Darren died and Donna went straight into a foster home. Still Connie’s bulge didn’t budge.

Seeing the state of her new-found mates was worrying. There was too much time to brood and watch them struggling to nurse their babies and heal their stitches. She’d now been in Green End for nearly three weeks and it was becoming her world. When would it all end?

‘Get yourself on a number thirty-six bus, Connie. If that driver doesn’t get you going, nothing will. He’s a right bone-shaker,’ Evelyn yelled, while little Errol was nuzzling her breast with relish. The poor girl winced every time she changed position on her rubber cushion.

‘Who would have told me that bliss is a salt bath? Fifty stitches and I can feel every one of them. I’m not letting no willy up there ever again,’ she winked. Despite her grumblings, Evelyn had taken to motherhood. A tribe of sisters called who took it in turns to juggle the tiny creature. She was going to go back to the detention centre for a few months while her family would look after her son.

At Connie’s next examination the doctor gave her a rough internal that rattled her down to her toes, all to no avail. This lazy blighter was content to sit
curled up. Doreen was sent home early and they clubbed together to send flowers for the tiny baby that didn’t survive. She was going to get a job in a woollen mill as soon as she was fifteen. They all hugged her tight and wished her well.

‘She’s one tough cookie,’ Sheila whispered. Doreen had never mentioned Donna once. But the stitches across her stomach told another story. Connie had heard her crying in the lavatory when she thought she was alone. She’d crept away, not wanting to disturb her private grief.

When June came back with Matthew, she was amazed to find Connie still with the antenatals. She put her little boy in her arms and he smelled of warm sweet condensed milk. All their babies were different: Errol was chubby and squat; Lorraine was long, with no hair. Matthew looked sharp and alert like his mother. Connie wondered just what her baby would be like if and when it bothered to turn up.

‘I am not giving him up,’ June whispered. ‘I prayed with the chaplin and wrote to my parents in Halifax and told them the truth. I asked them to pray for guidance and to come and see their grandson. There’s a nursery at the hospital and I will try to get him in there, if I can. The Lord will find a way through,’ she smiled, her eyes shining with hope. June was radiant. Connie felt sick. If only she had her courage and faith …

‘It’s not fair,’ she cried. They were all through their
ordeal and hers was still to come. She wanted to be back with them in the mother and baby room; she needed their support. It was funny how the world outside no longer existed. They were all cut off, cocooned behind the hedges of Green End.

‘Come and watch Benny Hill!’ shouted Sheila, and Connie shuffled down to join her on the sofa. They were all laughing. Benny Hill was silly and rude, so even Connie started to giggle and couldn’t stop. She was wetting herself with laughter, but the trickle soon became a warm flood that soaked her skirt and the seat, and she jumped up.

‘I’ve started! I’ve started!’ She was dancing around with relief.

‘Shut up.’ They were all glued to the screen. Connie crept up the stairs, leaving a trail of water, checking her bag, changing herself ready for the big showdown to begin.

What was there to say about birthing a first baby? Every detail of that evening was imprinted on her mind. The Beatles music on the radio. The journey in the ambulance and back again, when she couldn’t produce a contraction worth measuring.

She returned, deflated, lying awake, looking through the curtains into the night sky humming an annoying tune that stuck in her brain. Something must happen soon, so she had a bath, with Matron hovering behind the door but still nothing. They had shaved her pubic hair with a scratchy razor, and she
felt naked and silly without that familiar tuft. ‘Hands, knees and bumpsey daisy.’ She was singing it to her bump.

Matron suggested she took cod liver oil, and that she would give her an enema to hurry things along. Drinking the stuff was worse than everything else put together. She went through all that rigmarole and still not a contraction to show for it.

‘I’m afraid you will have to go back. You’re vulnerable to infection now your waters have broken. They’ll start you off if you don’t oblige.’

So it was back in the ambulance once more, wheeled in a chair like an invalid, desperate for the loo. Then she was put in a sort of dentist’s chair and into the stirrups, feet in a sling, bottom to the air and the indignity of a line of gynaecology students examining her procedure.

It was then, to her horror, she saw a familiar face in gown and mask, trying not to catch her eye. She was so embarrassed. Paul Jerviss stared and then looked away. Connie was mortified. It was then that she cried out, ‘Why won’t this bloody thing come out?’

A dapper little man with a carnation in his buttonhole, obviously the consultant, felt around her. ‘Put Mother on a drip,’ he ordered.

It was Paul who had to insert the needle into her hand. At least he had the grace to blush as he fumbled for the vein. ‘Sorry … I’ll try again.’

‘It’s OK. You have to practise on someone,’ she offered. What else were they to do but pretend neither knew the other?

Within half an hour she wished she had not been in such a hurry to deliver, still trying to avoid the eye of Paul. This was the stuff of nightmares. Of all the hospitals in the North of England he’d ended up here!

She had read the leaflets and listened to the girls’ tales of woe but nothing prepared her for the agony as the contractions ripped through her in waves. She cried out for Mama in long-forgotten Greek, screamed the place down until someone took pity on her cursing and swearing, sticking something into her thigh and she drifted away.

Then it wore off and she struggled to gain some control of this vicelike grip of new pain burning its way out of her body. When the pushing began they heaved her onto her back.

‘Why do I have to push against gravity?’ she gasped.

‘So we catch the little devil without straining our backs,’ said a jolly midwife. ‘It won’t be long now.’

She was a liar and Connie was tiring. A doctor came with a lamp on his head and ferreted for scissors and still that stupid song rang in her head. She hummed, trying to forget that it was Paul bending over her, encouraging her on with the pushing, Paul about to deliver her baby.

‘Just a snip,’ said the midwife, and Connie thought about poor Evelyn and her stitches. Why was she
laughing and pushing? Then suddenly with another push and a gush and it was all over. Everyone fell silent, but Paul lifted the baby up to her and said, ‘It’s a girl!’

She saw the tiny creature turn from puce to pink with a helmet of red hair and then it was whisked away in a towel.

‘What’s wrong? Why are you taking it? Paul, please. I want my baby!’ Connie screamed. ‘Give me my baby!’

The midwife stood in the doorway for a moment, cradling the bundle. ‘We’re to take this one away …’ she whispered to the doctor on duty.

‘Are you sure?’ she heard Paul intervene. ‘Is it in her notes?’ Someone brought her card and there was a discussion. Connie was exhausted. But she had to see the baby again. Nothing was decided. How could they do this to her? ‘Oh, please, let me have my baby!’ There was further discussion in the corridor and then suddenly Paul brought the baby back. He smiled. ‘They got the wrong mother.’

Connie fingered the tiny hands, her plump cheeks and loved what she saw. I have created this out of my own body. How beautiful she is, she sighed.

The colours of my love I give to you
.

Then a terrible thought nagged at her. What was she going to do? She was wheeled into the postnatal ward where the nurses were brusque. Everyone could see the U on her notes, which meant she was unmarried.

She was attempting to breast-feed when a nurse shoved a bottle in her hand. ‘Don’t start what you won’t finish!’ Connie wanted the ground to swallow her up. The other girls on the ward must think she was giving her baby away and she saw them looking at her with disgust.

Connie tried to feed her baby but she was so tense and inexperienced. No one wanted to help her master it but she was going to try all the same. The baby struggled with the nipple, not latching on properly. Why did Evelyn and June find it so easy, and not her? Was the baby rejecting her too? She cried so much that she gave in to the bottle and the baby wolfed it down.

Visiting time was the worst as husbands shuffled onto the squeaking ward, armed with flowers and presents. The other girls spent all afternoon making themselves ready to hold court with their families. Connie pretended not to care and carried on with her George Eliot, pulling the curtains around her so as not to see the families worshipping their new arrival. She wrote to tell Diana the news and got a big card back by return and a promise to visit soon.

She wanted to cuddle her baby all the time but they didn’t like them being handled except for feeds. Desperate to groom her and sniff her, cuddle her, she disobeyed instructions and they took the cot away, saying she would spoil the baby.

They were on borrowed time, the two of them, days filled with feeds and nappies and rests. The other
girls kept to themselves, sneaking off the ward for cigarettes and illicit wanders down the corridors. Connie wanted this time to go on for ever, but then the chaplain of Green End, the Revd Terry Anderton, came to talk things over with her about adoption.

‘Shall we pray about it?’ he offered when she said it was too soon for her to decide. He seemed a pleasant enough sort of priest, with big ears that stuck out like jug handles. She kept her eyes on his imperfection to distract from his words.

‘I am Greek Orthodox,’ Connie replied, hoping he’d leave.

‘God hears in every language,’ he smiled, but he didn’t pursue his arguments. She had earned a reprieve.

When they got back to the hostel it was not the same. There was a new intake of mums-in-waiting, the place full to bursting. Miss Willow said it was all this pop music making girls loose and easy prey.

She took one look at Connie’s baby and asked, ‘What are you calling her for now?’

There was only one name in Connie’s head for this precious infant. ‘Anastasia … after her grandmother. It is the custom,’ she replied proudly.

‘That’s a handful for a tiny mite,’ was Miss Willow’s reply.

‘I think it’s a beautiful name,’ June offered, seeing the look on Connie’s face.

‘It was my mother’s name and her grandmother’s name before that. She’ll probably get called Anna for
short,’ Connie said, suddenly feeling sick that it might not be her who would shorten it.

June’s parents were coming to collect her. They had written to offer forgiveness. June was jumping with relief but Connie felt jealous. She’d like to think that Mama would have been like them but she couldn’t be sure of anyone else now, not even Diana, who had not visited. She was on her own.

Sheila went home without Lorraine. Her mother would not relent and insisted she came home alone or else be out on the street. It was a tearful farewell when her fiancé came to collect her. She made one last trip back to Leeds with her baby and came back distraught. How could a mother do that to her child? Sheila’s plight was driving home to Connie now what a stigma being an unmarried mother was.

Connie clung to her baby, trying to work out plans. She owed it to everyone to do something with her A levels, but Anastasia must come first. She deserved the best in the world, this bright-eyed, perfect creature. She must have a lovely home, a good education, with two parents to dote on her, not one who would be tired, resentful and hard up.

All she could offer was second best. If she had married Neville things would be different, but that was not an option now. Not even ‘a breast full of milk’ as Rossetti’s hymn said. She might find a grotty bedsit and they’d live on love with no trimmings.
It wasn’t enough. Love was about doing the best for your loved one, no matter what. The chaplain said if God could sacrifice his only son to die on the cross, he would give her the strength to give up her daughter into a loving home waiting to receive her even now.

How could she not believe he was right? She was so racked with guilt and fear and shame, knowing she was too irresponsible to look after this little thing in her arms. At night she whipped herself with every reason why she was not worthy to keep her baby. But still she held out from signing those forms.

Everyone was older, wiser, and slowly they were taking the decision out of her hands, gently, persistently wearing down her resolve to find a practical solution. In desperation she’d even written to Gran, begging her to reconsider. Now she was wavering, exhausted, and putty in their hands. Never had she felt so alone, so torn between what was right or wrong, selfish or noble, alone on a raft drowning in the crushing waves of arguments, pressed down from all sides. How could she not capsize?

One glorious morning in June, when roses wafted their heady scent down the path, Connie took her own via dolorosa to the welfare office in town. The baby was in a borrowed carrycot, green canvas with a hood, topped with the blue check blanket, for mornings could be chilly. She’d made a woolly pompom toy for Anna to look at, and round the
baby’s neck Connie put her own gold crucifix with the Greek cruciform shape, given to her on her confirmation years ago. Anna had to have something of her. The baby was dressed in a brand-new knitted pram suit, turquoise and white stripes, from a pattern borrowed from June. The colour suited her eyes, those aquamarine eyes. Everybody commented upon them, but no one was willing to take a picture of them. She still refused to sign the forms. She wouldn’t, not yet, not until she was sure.

A woman in a tweed suit accompanied her, afraid that she might run off.

‘Can she keep her name? She must keep her name,’ Connie insisted to the assembled officials. ‘It is part of her heritage.’

No one spoke.

‘And the gold cross?’ she pleaded, pointing, but they shook their heads.

‘It will be in her file for safekeeping. Baby must have a fresh start. You can have no say in her future. Perhaps one day she may request information. Perhaps not,’ said the social worker, ready to lift the carrycot.

But Connie leaped up. ‘Let me hold my baby one more time,’ she cried, desperate now for every second to be an hour. ‘She will have loving parents?’ she asked, trying to be brave in the face of all this cold officialdom.