Orphan of Angel Street (2 page)

In Kent Road, Aston, the bolts were being drawn open behind the heavy doors of one of two solid, red-brick institutions which faced each other along that street. On one side of the road stood St Philip’s Elementary School. Across from it, with its pointed gothic windows and wrought iron railings, Joseph Hanley’s Home for Poor Girls, founded 1881, as spelt out by the brass plaque beside the front porch.

One of the heavy doors now opened and a middle-aged woman stepped out, hair caught up in a bun, clothes covered by a white apron and holding a workmanlike broom. She leant the broom against the wall and raised both hands to try and fasten some stray hanks of her hair, then stopped, catching sight of the little bundle in the narrow porch.

‘Oh my Lord!’ – stooping at once. ‘On a night as cold as this. It’ll be a miracle if . . .’ She lifted the baby close to her, and was satisfied to hear her breathing. The baby woke and began to snuffle, then cry.

The woman, who was called Meg, carried the baby down the steps to the street, instinctively rocking her and saying, ‘Ssssh now, will yer.’ Seeing no one she could connect with an abandoned baby, in truth hardly expecting to, she turned back, shaking her head.

She didn’t see from the steps of the school, a little further along, a young woman in a blue velvet cloak squatting to watch her over the low wall. One of her hands was clenched to her heart, the other pressed tight over her mouth as this stranger holding her child climbed the steps.

Meg looked round one more time and then stepped inside and closed the door. As she did so a great moan of anguish escaped from the young woman at the gates of the school.

‘Looks a fine enough child,’ the matron said, unwrapping the baby on a table softened only by a piece of sheet. She picked her up for a moment, carefully scrutinizing her face, and went to the window through which poured hard winter light. The baby sneezed twice. ‘Doesn’t seem blind, at any rate. Pale of skin though, is she not? Could almost be an albino, except the eyes look normal enough.’

‘Don’t we ’ave to get the doctor in?’ Meg suggested nervously.

‘Oh, later’ll do.’ Matron carried on with her inspection at the table, pulling at the naked limbs as the child yawled furiously at the cold and interference by this heavy-handed woman.

‘Well, this one’s got a pair of lungs and a temper to match!’ she bawled over the baby’s screams. ‘That umbilical cord’ll need some attention. You can take her up to the infants in a moment or two, Meg.’

Matron’s hands felt along the top of the baby’s head, fingers burrowing in the fuzz of gold hair for the fontanelles. The screaming rose higher. Meg, a softer-hearted woman, winced. This new matron, Miss O’Donnell, fresh over from the west coast of Ireland, seemed more at home with livestock of a farmyard variety than children.

‘No deformities that I can see.’ She started to close the white garments back over the child. ‘Honest to God, leaving a child on the street on a night like the one we’ve just had. The ways of these people! Shouldn’t be allowed to breed – someone ought to have ’em castrated, the whole feckless lot of ’em. Mind you – this one’s not of bad stock, I’d say – good strong spine and limbs . . .’

Meg was waiting for Matron to say something about the quality of the child’s fetlocks when the woman exclaimed, ‘Well now – what’s all this then?’

From where they had been tucked between the layers of soft white linen, Miss O’Donnell’s thick fingers drew out a wadge of money, and folded neatly with it, a white handkerchief. The matron seized on the notes, counting them eagerly.

Meg picked up the handkerchief and held it out to Miss O’Donnell who was still taken up with the money.

‘Five pound – would you believe it! Well, isn’t this the fruit of genteel fornication if ever I saw it. Five pound!’

‘Look – there’s this too.’

Miss O’Donnell took the handkerchief. On one corner of it, embroidered in mauve silk thread, she read one word: MERCY.

‘Have mercy,’ Meg pondered.

‘Ah well.’ Miss O’Donnell tossed it back on the table, slipping the folded notes into her apron pocket. ‘If she’s given her nothing else at least the child has a name. Let her be called Mercy Hanley.’

June 1907

‘Mercy – come on, ’urry up!’

The second morning bell clanged down in the hall. Even up in the dormitories they could sense Matron’s impatience as she rang it. Waiting around for anything was not one of Miss O’Donnell’s favoured occupations in life.

‘If you’re late for breakfast again there’s no telling what she’ll do!’

Amy, three years older, tugged the worn flannel dress which was really too small, over the younger girl’s head. Mercy knew she was quite capable of dressing herself but each of them adored this game of mothering and being mothered.

Amy was kneeling, frantically trying to fasten Mercy’s buttons with her bony fingers, her waif-like face puckering with frustration. Playfully, Mercy picked up the two mousey-coloured pigtails from Amy’s shoulders and stuck them up above the girl’s head like rabbit’s ears.

‘Oi – pack it in. You don’t care, do yer!’

Mercy’s solemn little face stared back at Amy as she tugged her plaits back into their normal position, tutting to herself. In spite of herself Amy smiled, and saw a gleam answer her in the little girl’s wide grey eyes. Mercy grinned all of a sudden, an expression of complicity and mischief which she reserved for no one else but Amy, and flung her arms round her friend’s shoulders, clinging tight like a baby monkey.

‘Give us a love, Amy.’

‘Mercy!’ Amy was pushing her off, laughing. ‘Yer ’opeless, yer really are. Come on.’

The last sounds of the other girls’ feet were already receding down the stairs. The dormitory held fifteen girls aged between seven and fourteen. The black iron bedsteads were arranged at regimented intervals along the bare floorboards, three rows of five. There was nothing else in the room except a portrait of Queen Victoria at least twenty years before her death, a frozen expression on her face, her eyes focussed on the far distance. At the long windows hung threadbare curtains in a sun-bleached navy.

Amy seized Mercy’s hand and the two of them tore along the echoing corridor, feet clattering on brown linoleum, then down the stone stairs. They managed to close the gap between themselves and the last stragglers into the dining room. Miss O’Donnell stood outside glowering.

‘You two again – get along now.’ She was fingering a bunch of little plaited leather strings she kept tied to her waist in case she felt the need to dole out punishment at short notice.

The dining room smelt of stale wash-cloths, disinfectant and porridge. The girls joined one of the long tables at the far end but there were not two spaces left for them to sit together. Mercy couldn’t bear to be separated from Amy.

‘Move up,’ she hissed at another girl.

The girl shook her head.

‘Move up.’ Mercy gave her such a sharp ram in the ribs with her elbow that she had to stifle a squeal.

‘You’re a little cow, Mercy.’ Rubbing her side she surrendered the space so that Mercy and Amy could sit together.

The two of them were inseparable in the orphanage, and now that Mercy had started school across the road at St Philips, Amy with her ethereal looks and Mercy, blonde and tiny, were forever together in the playground.

They’d been the closest of friends since they were tiny infants. Amy arrived at the Hanley Home aged two, the year before Mercy. As the two of them grew up they developed an almost miraculous affinity for one another. Since Amy was older she spent much of her days in a different room from the austere nursery where the babies lived out their regimented, white clad existence. But there were frequent cries of, ‘Where’s that child gone now?’ when Amy slipped away into their territory of strained, milky foods and plump hands to find baby Mercy. Miss Eagle, with her assistants, was in charge of the babies. She came back into the nursery one day to find Amy sitting beside Mercy who was then about a year old, a heavy scrubbing brush gripped between both hands, trying to brush Mercy’s mop of hair with it. Mercy was crowing with delight, hands waving. The tiny girls’ eyes were fixed laughingly on each other’s. Miss Eagle slapped Amy hard and sent her away.

‘We thank Thee Lord for these Thy gifts . . .’ Miss Rowney, the Superintendent of the Home intoned piously over the meagre breakfast. The girls stood motionless. Mercy saw a fly looping round Miss Rowney’s head and hoped it would fly up her nose. The live-in staff ate together at a smaller table near the door: Miss Rowney, Miss O’Donnell, Miss Eagle and Mrs Jacobs – Meg, who had first found Mercy. Others, like Dorothy Finch, the kindest of the staff, only worked there in the daytime.

The tin bowls clattered on the tables and one of the older girls doled out a ladle of watery porridge into Mercy’s bowl. Above the fireplace hung two small Union Jacks and a portrait of King Edward’s well-fed face after the Coronation in 1901.

They were expected to eat in silence, so the chief sound was the tinny rattle of spoons in the bowls. Mercy wrinkled her nose at Amy. The porridge was lukewarm and slimy on her tongue. She dripped it off her spoon mouthing, ‘lumpy’ and Amy grimaced back. The food left white tidemark moustaches on their top lips. Even though it was thin, lumpy and tasteless they ate every scrap, for lunch would almost invariably be watery stew and tea a thin soup.

Mercy looked round the table as she ate and Lena, the girl opposite, pulled a face at her. Mercy didn’t care, and stuck her tongue out until Amy nudged her to stop although she continued to stare back defiantly. Mercy and Amy’s closeness seemed to rile some of the others. Affection was very thin on the ground here, living in a house with sixty other girls with no one to provide real care or attention. Maybe the others were jealous. But Mercy didn’t bother about what they thought. She’d got Amy and that was all that mattered. When they’d finished eating she pushed her hand, warm and slightly tacky with porridge, into Amy’s under the table.

Miss Rowney stood up, chair scraping the floor.

‘Get wiped up now and stay sitting for a few moments. I’ve got something to say to you all.’

The girl in charge of each table hastily smeared the pale globules away with a sour-smelling cloth. They waited.

Miss Rowney walked to the middle of the dining room and stood looking round at them. She seemed rather excited about something and was massaging the back of her left hand with her right, her expression coy with pride.

‘Now girls, today I have a very special announcement.’ Her voice echoed slightly. ‘I’m going to read out the names of eight girls, and I’d like them to come up here to the front and stand in a neat line.’ She pronounced the names rather grandly, as if they were the titles of queens.

‘Lisa Maskell, Josie Flanagan, Sarah Smith . . .’ The last, and youngest on the list was Amy Laski.

Amy glanced in bewilderment at Mercy, and, pulling her hand away, obediently joined the line of girls with their backs to the staff table.

‘I am delighted to tell you that with the help of the John T. Middlemore Homes we have secured places for eight girls to begin a new and rewarding life. So—’ She beamed round at them. ‘On 9 July, Lisa, Josie, Sarah . . .’ she reeled off their names again . . . ‘will all be travelling on a big ship across the Atlantic Ocean to
Canada
. . .’ this was spoken in fairy tale tones ‘. . . to a place called New Brunswick where they will all be given homes by some kind and godly Canadian people.’

She put her hands together and everyone saw they were expected to clap, which they did as mechanically as striking clocks, watching the faces of the eight girls, the emotions of wonder, pride, bewilderment, uncertainty, flitting across them like summer clouds.

You could hear her screams from one end of the orphanage to the other.

The other girls were ready, regimented in crocodiles downstairs in the long dayroom where all chairs had been pushed to one side.

‘She’s gunna get it good and proper now,’ a snotty-nosed little girl called Dulcie whispered to to the child she was paired with. ‘They’ll give ’er a right belting.’

The staff, trying to keep the other children quiet and orderly, listened with tense faces. Mercy again. Today of all days. A couple of the girls started giggling and were given a sharp smack round the back of the head for their cheek. They were all scrubbed clean after last night’s toiling with tin baths of tepid water, last minute rough wiping of porridge from faces after breakfast, the starching of pinafores, plaiting of hair and polishing of little boots, so that they were not just Sunday clean, but cleaner than ever the whole year round.

‘Now just you remember I want to see smiles on all your faces,’ Miss O’Donnell boomed at them after breakfast. ‘When Mr Hanley graces us with his presence today he’ll not want to see sullen faces round him, but a good example of Christian Cheerfulness. Just you remember – if it wasn’t for Mr Hanley, none of youse would have a place to lay your heads or fodder in your bellies. Would you now?’ Silence. ‘WOULD YOU?’

‘NO, MISS O’DONNELL,’ they all droned, sitting in lines down the long tables.

But now, here was Mercy, splayed across her bed, clinging to the iron bedstead and screaming as if someone was trying to murder her. The white-blonde hair was slipping out from its shoulder length plaits, her face a livid pink, and she was violently kicking her legs. Miss Eagle, who had been despatched to try and force her back under control, could barely even get near her.

‘Will you stop that!’ Miss Eagle, a thin, flint-cheeked woman tried to catch hold of Mercy round her waist and was rewarded by a backward sock in the face as the girl loosed one of her hands for a second and flailed it behind her.

‘You miserable little bugger! You needn’t think I’m going to ruin my best dress just because of you – ’ere, you can ’ave another of these!’ She landed a hard slap on one of Mercy’s bare legs which produced only more anguished yells and metallic screeching from the bedsprings. The child was not big for her age, but she was a red hot wire of fury and the energy in her was extraordinary.