Street Kid (5 page)

The next morning, the nun came in at first light and I got dressed with the others while she put the little kids on their potties, five of them in a row. I was confused by the clothes the nun had put out for me, having no idea in what order to put them on. There was a huge pair of woolly pants with a pocket in the front, then something that was a bit like a vest with buttons. I watched another girl and copied her, putting a checked blouse on top of that, followed by a blue pinafore.

The rest of the day seemed to pass in a blur of bells and corridors, and nuns giving me instructions that I couldn’t understand. I didn’t know how to play with other kids and felt uncomfortable being near them. I was little more than a wild animal, used to fending for myself alone, and the orphanage was a very frightening place to me. Here, you weren’t allowed to act alone; you were always part of a large group of children. The nuns only knew how to herd the flock, and shepherding was at the very core of their belief system. From the first, I was both a threat and a challenge to them. A feral, alert-eyed, lone wolf, snatching food and hiding away.

In the playroom, the nun couldn’t work out why I crouched in the corner alone all the time and was frustrated that I wasn’t playing with the other kids. She kept dragging me out of my hole, saying, ‘Will you sit down and play.’ But I didn’t understand what she was saying. I only knew how to scurry and scavenge, and hide from strangers in my hole.

After supper in the evening, three of the older girls took us to the washrooms. We all got undressed and stood there naked and shivering before being lifted into an enormous bath. I was almost panting with fear at being handled by the girls and having to sit naked with five other children and fought like a wildcat, trying to get away. I couldn’t see over the sides of the bath at all. When one of the big girls got a flannel, rubbed it on a giant green block of soap, and started to scrub me all over I panicked when the soap got in my eyes and mouth.

The nun’s at St Josephs were an order of Franciscan missionaries who staunchly upheld their vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. They believed they were setting us on the divine path and controlling our baser instincts when they punished us. They didn’t have any understanding of the psychological trauma feral children face, and so, to them, my behaviour was seen as deliberate disobedience; my habitual silence, insolence; and my fierce independence, obstinacy.

In the years immediately after the war, orphanages were spilling over with children and the nuns were needed at home to look after them. Many no doubt felt bitter that their dreams of travelling to a distant land as missionaries hadn’t come to anything, and perhaps that made them act more harshly towards us.

About five months after I’d arrived at St Joseph’s, I was
moved out of the nursery. By now I was used to my cot and the playroom and moving into the Juniors was a whole new challenge. We had to go to school and attend chapel three times a day, and there was a tough set of routines to learn.

It was an icy January day, four months before my fifth birthday, when I was first taken up to the girl’s dormitory. I wasn’t prepared for the sheer scale of the room. There had been only twenty of us in the nursery, but this room must have had at least a hundred beds. Each was just a chair apart from the next, and instead of the white eiderdowns we’d had in the nursery there were tough wool blankets. On closer inspection, I realized that my blanket was in fact an army greatcoat. There were no toys on the beds, nothing at all to distinguish one from the other. Further along, some of the beds had curtains round them. I later discovered that these were for the older girls. At the far end of the room was the ‘cell’ where the nun on duty slept.

That first night I felt small and lonely under my army greatcoat. I could hear the little blonde girl in the next bed crying. I lay there looking at the stars – tiny pinpricks of twinkling light in friendly little groups – through the window and wondered if I belonged up there in the sky with them, if they were my real family, and if they were watching over me. Then my thoughts turned to my mum and sisters and I wished I had Mary and Dora here beside me, one on each side, holding me safe.

When morning came, I didn’t feel a whole lot better. From the moment I opened my eyes, it was a mad rush and, as hard as I tried, I couldn’t keep up with the others. First there was chapel, then breakfast and chores. After that, everyone gathered in the hall and started lining up
in a crocodile. Each girl was with a partner. I stood on my own, awkwardly, panicking slightly. Then Sister Cecilia came over.

‘Don’t just stand there, my girl, you’re holding everybody up.’ She beckoned to one of the other girls. ‘Mary, come over here and line up beside Judith.’ The girl came over to stand next to me. She waited until the last minute before putting her hand in mine. I didn’t like having to stand with her either; I always felt much safer on my own.

Out in the street, we walked past the alleyway that led to the yard in which I’d spent so many long days. I felt almost homesick for it now.

‘Hey, scaredy-cat!’ It was the girl behind me.
Oh no, she means me.
I didn’t turn round.

A foot deliberately trod down the back of my sandal so that I tripped forward. ‘Hey, scaredy-cat!’ I turned this time to see the two girls behind me smirking. ‘What’s the matter, can’t you walk proper?’

I didn’t react, but just pulled my sandal back on my foot.

I was feeling frayed to the point of tears by the time we arrived in the playground of the big red-brick school. Every few steps, the girl behind me had trodden on the back of my sandal, tripping me up. I stood there and our crocodile of kids seemed to dissolve all of a sudden, leaving me alone in the playground. I ran to the door I’d seen the crowd of kids disappearing through and made my way after them. Everybody else seemed to know exactly where they were going.

I didn’t think to ask anyone where to go. Instead I wandered the corridors until I found myself a classroom. I saw an empty desk and sat down at it. So far so good. At least I hadn’t had to ask anybody for help.

‘What are you doing here?’ The teacher had stopped
what she was doing and was looking at me.

‘I’ve come to school,’ I whispered.

‘You’re in the wrong class,’ she said. ‘You’d better come with me.’

I followed her, feeling thirty pairs of eyes on my back.

There was a certain comfort in having my own wooden desk and the teacher was nicer to us than the nuns. But I still didn’t have a clue what I was meant to be doing, which book I was meant to be using, how to sharpen my broken pencil, or what to do when it was break time. I felt horribly confused.

At lunch time, when we were due to go back to the orphanage, I panicked again.

Where are the St Joseph’s kids? I can’t remember what they look like. What if they leave me behind?

Then I recognized the pinched-looking girl I’d walked to school with in the otherwise unfamiliar sea of faces, and went over to her. I felt completely exhausted, but knew I had to walk back, kneel in chapel, eat dinner, and do my chores before being allowed to go to bed. It seemed like the most interminable day of my life.

Things began to get a little better as I became used to the daily routine; and at school, over the following months, I was taught how to read. It made a wonderful difference to me, being able to read books in the girls’ room in the afternoon and after supper. It became a precious way of escaping and I lapped up any stories of rebellious heroes I could lay my hands on, such as Richmal Crompton’s William Brown.

Although I eventually got the hang of them, however, I hated the orphanage rules and never ceased trying to act independently – always the lone wolf. That often got
me into trouble with the nuns, especially Sister Bridget, who was a bitter woman and often very cruel.

Every item of clothing had to be put on the chair beside our beds in a certain way, with our cardigans neatly wrapped round the back. If I got so much as the smallest detail wrong I would be hit with Sister Bridget’s cane. Then there were the kitchen duties: washing and putting away the dishes, laying the table, peeling the vegetables, sweeping the floor; and the cleaning of the bathroom and toilets. If you so much as put a spoon back in a kitchen drawer the wrong way round you’d be for it. At five years old, it was impossible to get every tiny thing right.

Many of the rules at St Joseph’s seemed pointless. When I heard Sister Bridget locking the door to the toilets outside in the corridor, after we’d gone to bed, I thought,
What on earth is the point of that? What if someone needs to go to the toilet in the middle of the night?

One morning, Sister Bridget heard one of the new girls in our dormitory crying. She went over to her, said something, then stripped the sheet and blanket from her bed.

‘Look at this wet bed!’ she said. ‘There’s only one way to make disobedient little girls learn the rules. Hold out your hand.’ She took a small cane out of her habit and whacked the girl’s hand.

As soon as Sister Bridget had left the room, a couple of the older girls came over to comfort the girl.

‘Don’t worry. If it happens again we’ll nick you another sheet from the cupboard,’ one of them said, kindly. ‘We can smuggle the wet one out under our clothes and dump it in the canal. We’ve done it before!’ This produced a trembling smile from the girl.

‘In the boy’s dormitory they do it in their boots and tip it out of the window!’ the older girl’s friend said.

Something made me rejoice in this piece of rebellion. It was refreshing to find that not everybody obeyed the nuns like sheep. I resolved then never to let them beat me down. I sensed that a child could easily lose the sense of who they were in a place like this.

Chapter Five

M
ealtimes would often be difficult at the orphanage. Sister Bridget always broke out in a rash of irritation with me at my refusal to eat anything milky and slimy, a hatred which must have stemmed from Mrs Epplestone’s force-feeding me porridge. One lunchtime, I sat with my bowl of rice pudding in front of me, nervously moving it around with my spoon. I’d tried to get some of it down, but it was no good. Every time I put some in my mouth I began to retch, so I’d had to give up. Sister Bridget was sitting next to me, watching me like a hawk.

‘Judith, will you stop this nonsense this minute,’ she said. ‘I won’t have you wasting the good Lord’s food.’

I tried again but couldn’t help gagging.

‘Eat it now! We will
not
have waste here.’

She watched me a moment then snatched the spoon out of my hand. ‘Open your mouth!’

She shoved the spoon in my mouth. I felt immediate and violent panic and had an instant and terrifying flashback to the time Mrs Epplestone had held my head back by the hair and almost suffocated me shovelling porridge down my throat.

I began to choke violently, my eyes streaming. Then I gave one mighty heave and threw up all over Sister Bridget’s arm. There was a moment of absolute quiet in the hall. You could have heard a pin drop. The children sat, frozen in horror. Then Sister Bridget stood up sharply, breaking the silence, and grabbed me by the hair.

‘Look what you’ve done, you filthy child!’ Her voice was almost a scream. ‘What have you to say?’

I had absolutely no idea what I had to say and couldn’t speak anyway as I was still gasping for air.

Sister Bridget then repeated, ‘What are you going to say?’ and tugged my hair.

I shook my head and this seemed to make her anger boil over even more.

‘Grateful!’ she shouted. ‘That’s what you must say, “I must be grateful.”’

She then turned on the other kids. ‘Why can’t any of you ever be
grateful?’

With that, Sister Bridget dragged me out of the room by my hair and down the corridor to the chapel.

‘You’ll stay there until bedtime,’ she said. ‘And you’d better ask God’s forgiveness. He doesn’t like ungrateful little girls.’

I was left alone in the cold, musty chapel with its dark pews and scary painting of Christ, pale and bloody on the cross, eyes rolling back in his head. I sat there waiting for a thunderbolt to strike me.

After this, I was desperate to get out of the orphanage. I longed to visit the shop. In my imaginings, Auntie Gertie would be at the counter, or stirring the ice cream, when I came in and would look up and smile. Then she’d wrap her comfortable arms around me and call me her poppet.

Two days later, as soon as lunch was finished, I slipped out of the orphanage grounds. I felt I could breathe again. But when I entered the shop, that good feeling drained away. There was no Auntie Gertie smiling a welcome. Instead, a strange woman I’d never seen before was behind the counter. I stood for a moment, staring at her. Then she said ‘Yes?’

I turned and ran out of the shop and down the street. As I slipped through the gate of the orphanage grounds, I felt even more lost and hopeless than before.

There was a group of us at St Joseph’s who were known as the ‘forgotten’ children. We were the ones nobody ever came to visit, and on those Sundays that were visiting days it was particularly hard for us. Those kids with parents or relations who came to take them out for the day were in a fever of excitement for days beforehand. After chapel, they’d go and sit bolt upright in the visitor’s room, washed and scrubbed and smart as new pins in their Sunday best.

Some of the women who visited in their flowery dresses came with soldiers in uniform. There was a lot of laughing and perfume and kissing and then, as the room emptied out through the morning, there was a sad hour or so when one or two kids usually remained, uncollected, the excitement having leaked out of them bit by bit. It was worse for them; at least us forgotten kids weren’t expecting anyone, so our hopes hadn’t been raised and dashed cruelly in that way.

In my second year at St Joseph’s I got to know a boy called Tony. He was a forgotten kid like me, but his mum must have sent the odd message to St Joseph’s because on the day I first spoke to him he was sitting on the steps outside, waiting for his mother to arrive. It was nearly teatime
when I saw him there in his Sunday best, trying to look unconcerned. It was clear to everyone that his mum wasn’t going to come that day, but Tony wasn’t going to give up.