Street Kid (13 page)

As I stood up too, feeling very small and not at all victorious now, I didn’t know what to do with my legs, my arms, my mouth – any part of me. I felt so self-conscious and afraid that I ended up putting my hands on my hips – they felt so awkward that I had to put them somewhere. I sensed the headmistress freeze, and saw the shock on the faces of the other teachers. I then realized that I’d only managed to look defiant. They must have been surprised that this quiet kid, who always sat at the back of the class and finished her work without any trouble, wasn’t the girl they’d supposed she was.

‘I want you both outside my office straight after assembly,’ the head went on to say. ‘And the rest of you remember, I simply won’t tolerate fighting at the school.’

I got the strap that day, but at least the fight ensured that I had no more trouble from any of the other girls. They still weren’t particularly friendly, but I knew they had some respect for me now.

School wasn’t the only big change in my life that autumn. I noticed that the whisperings and rows emanating from Dad and Freda’s bedroom at night were becoming more frequent as the weeks passed. More often than not, they coincided with a trip to the Rippons’ house. Neither of them bothered to tell me what was going on, but I watched and I listened.

The first thing that happened was that Freda gave up her cleaning job and started busying herself around the house and packing things away in boxes. I came home one afternoon to find that the piano had gone.

Friends from my dad’s Spiritualist circle started popping
round over the following weeks to pick up pieces of furniture, the sewing machine, and boxes of kitchen stuff. Once, when I was upstairs in my room, I heard Freda let someone in and I decided to pry on their conversation. I quietly walked half way down the stairs and sat there listening hard.

‘So when are you off, Freda?’ the woman asked.

‘We don’t know yet,’ she replied. ‘But we’re looking forward to the weather in Australia, although I hope it’ll be bearable for us.’

‘Well, a nice change from the drizzle and smog here. I must say, I do envy you.’

‘Well, it won’t be easy, but at least Jack has a business for him when he gets there. He’ll be running a fleet of taxis.’

‘Good for him, and good for you. I do wish you all the luck,’ the woman said. I sensed then that she was moving to get her coat, and so I nipped back up to my room.

After that, Freda started telling the milkman, the paperboy, and the shopkeepers the same story. I found it strange, as she was usually very slow in coming forward with information she considered to be nobody’s business but her own. The reason, however, became clear to me one evening while I was playing with Cathleen.

‘We’re getting ready to move to Australia,’ I told her.

‘No you’re not. You’re going to South Africa,’ she answered. ‘And we’re going too.’

‘But I’ve heard my mother tell everyone,’ I said.

‘It’s not right,’ she insisted doggedly. ‘My mother showed me South Africa on the map, and we’re definitely going there.’

I went silent then, sensing that she was telling the truth and that Freda and my dad had been spinning their usual web of lies, preparing in advance to cover their tracks.

It was now the beginning of December and I was feeling very jumpy. Not knowing when we were going, and even whether I’d be taken along, was making me nervous. Freda had already told me I was no longer allowed to go to Sunday School, and I was very upset that I wouldn’t have a chance to say goodbye to Miss Williams. She must have been wondering if I was ill, or if something had happened to me. I hated to think of her buying the fairy cakes for our tea and then finding that I hadn’t bothered to turn up …

One afternoon, after I got back from school, Freda took me down to the hairdressers on City Road.

‘Can you cut her hair?’ she asked. ‘I want it all off, as short as possible.’

The hairdresser raised an enquiring eyebrow. Girls never wore their hair like that.

Freda was quick with her explanation. ‘They’ve all got nits at school, and I don’t want her catching them.’

I wondered why Freda was doing this and why she was bothering to lie. Up until now, she’d always cut my hair herself, so why was she forking out on a hairdresser? And her story about the nits was complete nonsense. The nit nurse, whom we used to call Nitty Nora, hadn’t visited our classroom in months, and it was a while since we’d had an outbreak. You always knew when a kid was discovered with nits because all the girls wore these pointy wool hats in class to keep their hair safe, and the boys came in with hardly any hair at all.

I was given a boy’s crew cut and after we got home, I went upstairs and sat on the floor, feeling the shorn ends with my fingers and feeling horribly naked.
What will people say when they see me?
I thought to myself.

I felt even more self-conscious when Freda made me try on a pair of jeans, a thin checked jersey, and a cotton
windjammer jacket. It was clear to me that my father and Freda had decided to dress me as a boy, although at that stage I didn’t know the plan they had cooked up, a plan that included their taking me out of the country, making sure they covered their tracks and giving my mother, her lawyer and the welfare people the slip.

‘Why do I have to wear these?’ I asked her.

She was abrupt. ‘Just do as you’re told. You’re going to need them for the cold weather.’

All the rest of my clothes were bundled up and given away. When I got back from school, I found my bed had gone and that all my things, including Susie, my books, and the watch my mother had given me, had been put in carrier bags in the front room.

I went to Freda and begged her, ‘Can’t I just keep my bear?’

She turned on me sharply. ‘Stop being such a baby,’ she said. ‘No, you bloody can’t.’ She cuffed me out of the way. ‘Now just get lost. Can’t you see I’ve got enough to do without listening to you whinging?’

I went and sat upstairs forlornly, not realizing that the worst was yet to come.

The house was all packed up now and the rooms were bare of everything except a few suitcases. My dad was home, as he too had left his job by now, and I stayed out of his way, knowing that the slightest thing would set him off. I was upstairs with Gyp when he called me.

‘Judy! Get Gyp down here. Now!’

Gyp pricked up her ears when she heard her name and got off the bed, thinking she might be in for some scraps. She trotted eagerly out of the room and I followed her, catching her up in my arms, sensing that something was amiss.

Two men were standing at the bottom of the stairs with my father. One of them beckoned me down.

‘Here, give her to me.’ I went up to him and he took Gyp out of my arms. He held her like he thought she might bite him. Gyp gave a whine and tried to struggle out of his grasp, but I just stood there, frozen in horror. I wanted to ask them why they were taking Gyp, but I didn’t make a sound.

Neither my dad nor the two men looked my way, but one of them must have sensed my anguish. He stood awkwardly, and began clearing his throat. ‘Righto. We’ll be off then,’ he said.

Gyp was looking at me with such piteous eyes that I sprang forward, darting round my father to follow the men. They were walking now across the cobbles towards their van, holding the struggling dog tightly. Inside it, I saw other dogs looking out through the glass from behind an iron grill. They started barking when they saw Gyp, who just cowered as one of the men opened the back of the van and the other shoved her inside.

I stood outside in the road, wanting to whimper and howl myself; but I made no sound as I saw the van pull away. Gyp’s pleading eyes never left my own, and they burned themselves into my soul.

After Gyp went, I didn’t really care what happened to me. I moved about the house listlessly, feeling dead inside. The only time I felt that a part of me was still living was when my thoughts turned to Gyp, and then the pain cut through me like a knife. That night, as I lay on my bedroom floor, it felt like my heart was being ripped from my chest, and scalding tears poured down my face.

In the middle of the night, I was shaken awake by Freda.

‘Get your clothes on,’ she said. ‘We’re going.’

I hurried to put on the boys’ clothes I’d been given to wear and left my room to join her and my dad downstairs. He was loading suitcases into a van outside. There was snow on the ground.

‘Get in the back, and not a sound from you,’ Dad said, grabbing me by the collar and pushing me into the back of the van. ‘And don’t put your head anywhere near the window.’ There was barely room for me to lie down among the cases but I did as I was told.

I heard Freda and my dad get in the front and we moved off down the street. It was freezing on the bare metal floor and I had nothing I could use as a pillow, and no blanket to keep me warm. Every bone in my body protested as the van bounced over the cobblestones.

At some point along the way, it suddenly occurred to me that maybe I wasn’t being taken with my dad and Freda to South Africa. After all, there wasn’t a suitcase for me, and all my things had been destroyed or given away.

They’re going to dump me beside the road somewhere,
I thought, panic-stricken.
What will I do? Where will I go?

But the van didn’t stop, except once, after a few hours, when we drew up at a transport café. My father opened the doors at the the back of the van.

‘Get out,’ he said. I sat up and scrambled out of the van. I was so cold and stiff I thought my legs would buckle under me. I couldn’t feel my feet at all.

Dad took me to the men’s toilet and made me go in with him, to my shame. ‘Just remember,’ he said. ‘If anyone asks you, your name isn’t Judy. It’s Sprig.’

I wasn’t allowed to have a hot drink or anything to eat with the others at the transport café. My father didn’t
want anyone seeing me with them so I was bundled straight back into the van.

By the time we reached Southampton, I was starving and hugely relieved to get out of the van. It was an icy morning and there was a mist over the sea. There was a large ship at the dockside and I guessed we’d be going on it. I stood there in the cold as my dad unloaded the van, thinking bleakly that any chance I might have had to get to know my mum and sisters had now gone. They’d just forget me like they had before.

In the customs hall, a big hangar-like building, Freda and my Dad caught sight of the Rippons and went over to them. Cathleen had told me that her parents planned to set up a healing sanctuary in South Africa and I had guessed the rest – that my father had sold the idea to Alec and was preparing to sponge off him mercilessly. I don’t know what story he’d concocted for the Rippons to explain my being dressed as a boy, but they didn’t seem surprised. Cathleen couldn’t help staring, though, and her mother nudged her with a reproving look.

The customs officials were all sitting at long white tables along one side of the room. My father and Freda told me to stay with the Rippons and then queued up to have their papers stamped. I saw Dad turn and point at me and the customs man nod. I could just detect a tension in my father’s shoulders, knowing that an official in uniform was the one thing certain to unnerve him.

All of a sudden, I had a frantic urge to shout out loud, feeling the desperate sort of courage that comes when it’s your very last chance.
Don’t let them take me! Stop them taking me! I don’t want to go!
But Dad and Freda were waved through and the moment was gone. The breath stuck in my throat, my cry a silent one.

As we went up the gangway, Mrs Rippon handed me a bag of clothes my father must have asked her to bring along for me. I wondered again what she really knew.

Chapter Thirteen

O
nce on board the
Bloemfontein Castle,
we parted from the Rippons and my father led Freda and me down stairwell after stairwell to the bowels of the ship to find our cabin. Our ten-pound immigration ticket, paid for by the Rippons, afforded us a cell-like cubby hole, below the waterline, which smelt of damp. There were two bunks for Dad and Freda, and a tiny camp bed for me along the facing wall behind the door. On a small chest of drawers against the other wall was a tray with a pitcher of water and two glasses. There was barely a body-width between the beds.

I sat on my bed while Dad and Freda unpacked their cases in silence. When my father had finished putting his things away, he straightened up and turned to me. He was so tall that he had to bend his head so it didn’t hit the ceiling.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Let’s get a few things straight. On board this ship you’re to do exactly what I say and follow my rules.’ He proceeded to list them.

‘First, you’re not leaving my sight. And you’ll stay in the room unless I tell you to come with me.

‘Second, you’re to use the boys’ toilet and you’re to go only when I say you can.

‘Third, you’re not to talk to anybody. If you want to go anywhere at all, you ask me.

‘If I see you doing one thing out of line, you’ll be locked in the cabin. Remember that. You will not disobey me.’

I nodded but couldn’t force myself to meet his eyes, which were cold and expressionless. I felt panicked that there wasn’t any place for me to hide. Even shrunk back against the wall, as far as I could get from my father, I felt he was still near enough to me to feel his breath on my skin.

Outside the cabin, I could hear the excited voices of a party of other passengers. I sensed briefly what it must feel like to be in their shoes, setting out on the biggest adventure of their lives. But it was only for a moment, and then my world closed in on me again and I was back in the cabin, full of horror at being trapped in this tiny space with my abusers, and feeling nothing but a horrible sense of forboding.

We were stranded in port, fogbound, for three days and my father was growing jumpier by the minute. I knew the court had given my mum the right to see me and that taking me out of the country without their permission would get my dad into no end of trouble if he was caught. He didn’t let me out of his sight for a moment, and I knew he must have been nervous that at any moment officials might board the ship and arrest him.