The Bad Penny (7 page)

‘Matron would be furious if you tried any such thing. Even if you managed to escape and get back in again without someone on the staff seeing you, you can be sure some interfering busybody would tell her,’ Selina warned. ‘Look, queen, I used to worry about my mam an’ dad, just as you do, but I could see there weren’t no future in it. What’s important … well, what’s important to me, at any rate … is getting out of this place and getting a proper job so’s folk won’t need to know I come from Durrant House. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the place, because they do their best and we get a decent education if we’re bright enough to make use of our lessons. But when I’m grown up I want a good job, a husband and kids of my own, and I’m telling you my mam and dad don’t matter to me any more. After all, if I’d mattered to them they’d not have dumped me on Lime Street station, even if they did give me a name. And what’s a name, after all? I used to think if my mam didn’t care enough about me to hang on to me, bring me up, then she’d no
right
to go givin’ me a silly name like Selina. I would have loved to be called Polly, or Jane, or even Mary, like everyone else,’ she ended, her voice wistful.

‘Well, I think Selina’s a lovely name,’ Patty said obstinately. ‘But I’m glad we’re both foundlings, not just me. Are there others, do you know? And how did you find out about me, anyroad?’

‘Now that I’m old enough to be useful I help Miss Freeman, the secretary,’ Selina explained. ‘All our files are in the basement and sometimes, when it’s raining and I’m bored, I go down there and ferret around. I noticed that my file wasn’t in with all the others but was on a different shelf … yours was there too … and I read them to see why we were kept separately. As for other foundlings, there are several, but I shan’t tell you who they are. Matron doesn’t go blabbing information like that about in front of the whole orphanage because she knows some people would jeer at us if they knew. But you and me, we’re too bright to have the wool pulled over our eyes. Even if I’d not told you, you’d have found out for yourself, in the end. So no harm done, eh?’

‘No, no harm done,’ Patty echoed, hearing the tone in Selina’s voice which meant that the questions must come to an end. She slipped off the desk, then hesitated. ‘Thanks ever so, Selina, for telling me. I wonder if all the other kids know, though? I mean, I never have a letter or anything like that and no one visits me. You’d think they’d have guessed – but I didn’t, did I?’

‘No. But in fact if you take a bit of notice of other people in your class you’ll find that there are several girls with one parent, or brothers and sisters, or aunts and uncles, who don’t get letters or visits, either. Your mam and dad can’t visit you because they don’t know where you are, but there’s no excuse for the others. And I’ll tell you what, I’ve just had a really corking idea. When I leave, next year, I mean to go into nursing. I had my tonsils out when I was ten and ever since then I’ve known that I’d rather be a nurse, and help people to get well, than anything else. Oh, you don’t start as a nurse, of course, but I don’t mind working my way up. I’ll go as a ward maid or a kitchen worker or something until I’m old enough to become a probationer, and then I’ll work like fury and be State Registered as soon as I can. And … this is the corking idea … I’ll write to you, send you the odd present. What do you say to that?’

‘Oh, Selina!’ Patty gasped, quite overcome. ‘Would you really? That would be just wonderful! Only … wouldn’t Matron and the teachers mind?’

‘It’s none of their business. The letters will be addressed to you, so you will be the only person to read them. Only mind you reply – I’ll give you my address – because it will be interesting to hear how you’re getting on.’

‘Oh, Selina,’ Patty said again. ‘And you can tell me all about your hospital and what job you are doing. And when I’m grown up I’ll be a nurse too, just like you.’

From the moment Selina had told Patty about her past, things, Patty thought, had begun to improve for her. The other girls in her class grew accustomed to her and Patty, with an intelligence beyond her years, decided that being top of the class was making her more enemies than friends. She did not intend to let herself slip very far but realised that being second or third, or even lower sometimes, would make life easier for her.

Laura, who had to struggle to gain pass marks in any subject, turned out to be a good friend. Though not clever, she had a lot of common sense and, once she realised that Patty often acted thoughtlessly, gave her a great deal of good advice. ‘You’re very pretty, with that lovely blonde hair and such blue eyes,’ she said earnestly one day, as they lay on their tummies in the Corporation Playing Fields, watching the rounders match in progress. ‘People
want
to like you, they even want to be your friend, but you put them off by knowing best and by not listening when they try to tell you something. I know you’re clever, but that shouldn’t stop you from being nice, as well, and at the moment even the teachers pick on you, don’t they?’

‘Some of them do,’ Patty admitted grudgingly. She was enjoying this rare treat and felt lazy and contented for once, the sun was warm on her back through her thin cotton dress. Presently, she knew, the teacher would start to call in those girls not already on the playing field itself, and Patty, who was not fond of games, would be forced to exert herself. She thought it was a pity that Laura had chosen this moment to deliver her lecture. ‘But I’m being quite careful in class now, you know. I don’t always put my hand up when I know the answer to a question and the other girls are much nicer to me now. Why, even old Briggsy isn’t as bad as she was; Teresa and me were talking in the dining room queue yesterday and she shook us both but didn’t slap either of us. Wharrabout that, eh?’

Laura laughed. ‘You are much better,’ she acknowledged. ‘And then there’s Selina, of course. She’s the most popular prefect in the school and everyone knows she’s your pal. Oh, I do like Selina most dreadfully! She’s nice to everyone and she’ll give you a hand if you need it, and though she’s really clever she never lets on. I’m thick as porridge, but when I’m talking to Selina I feel – I feel as if I’m just as clever as her, somehow.’

‘It is nice, being friendly with Selina,’ Patty admitted, smiling dreamily to herself. ‘I don’t see much of her, mind, and next year she’ll have left – and won’t I miss her! Did you know she were going to be a nurse when she leaves the Durrant?’

‘No, but I’m not surprised …’ Laura was beginning, when Miss Dawson’s stentorian voice broke across the sentence.

‘Any girl not already on the pitch, to me, if you please! Come along, come along, you aren’t here to idle away the afternoon watching others do all the work, you know! My goodness, I hadn’t realised how many of you hadn’t had a game yet, but there’s still an hour before we have to go home, so that’s plenty of time to get you on the move. Patty Peel, Laura Reilly, you can both pick a team. Laura, you start.’

For an hour, therefore, the girls played rounders, and when Miss Dawson clapped her hands and told everyone to get into pairs for the walk home they were all conscious of a pleasant glow. These trips to the Corporation Playing Fields came perhaps two or three times a summer, and were much prized even by those girls who did not enjoy games. To be sure it was a long walk from Durrant House, but it was a change from the everlasting circling of Prince’s Park. What was more, Miss Dawson was not a disciplinarian and seemed oblivious of the fact that, on the way home, instead of proceeding in a neat crocodile, the girls sauntered along in small groups, chattering and laughing, sometimes falling behind and having to run to catch up. Perhaps it was because she was only a part-time teacher, but whatever the reason it made her lessons, if you could call them lessons, extremely popular.

After that one trip down Peel Street, Miss Briggs had reverted to their usual route, so Patty had not even had the doubtful pleasure of traversing the road in which she had been left. As Patty and Laura strolled along, it occurred to Patty that this was the ideal opportunity to take another look at Peel Street. Miss Dawson, with the third and fourth years in her charge, would not have noticed had ten of them gone missing, and because they did not walk in pairs the fact that Patty was not with the others would certainly go unnoticed. However, in all fairness, she must take Laura into her confidence; if blame was to be cast at anyone, it must not be at her friend.

Laura was the only person to whom Patty had confided the secret of her beginnings and Laura had been much impressed. She herself was from a broken home, for her mariner father had gone off with a girl half his age and Laura’s mother, left to bring up seven children, all under ten, had put five of them into orphan asylums. She had long ceased to either visit or even write to her daughter, but Patty knew that Laura clung to the hope that she would be reunited with her parent one day.

When Patty told Laura that she meant to sneak off and take a closer look at Peel Street, she half expected her sensible friend to raise an objection, but Laura was all in favour of the idea. ‘I’ll come with you,’ she said excitedly. ‘If we get a move on, we can easily get well ahead of Miss Dawson, then we’ll have time to take a good look at the street and still rejoin the other girls before Miss D. starts getting them into line again. You know how everyone dawdles on their way back to the Durrant.’

Acting upon these words, the two girls slipped away from the others and were very soon traversing the streets which would lead, eventually, to their destination. Neither girl was at all familiar with the area but Patty stopped, every time she saw a sharp-looking urchin, to ask for directions and very soon they found themselves in the area they knew, with Prince’s Park on their right.

‘What exactly are you going to do?’ Laura panted, as they entered Peel Street. ‘There are lots of houses along here and you might have been found outside any of them. D’you mean to go up to the front door and ask?’

Patty stopped short and stared, round-eyed, at her friend. Until this moment, it had not occurred to her that visiting Peel Street was not an end in itself. Then she squared her shoulders and grabbed Laura’s arm, tugging her towards the houses on the right-hand side of the street, most of which had handsome hedges before their neat front gardens. ‘Selina said I were under a hedge, so we can miss out the stone walls,’ she said. ‘Would you say my mam probably had hair my colour, Laura? Only if I was to go to the door and someone what looked like me answered it … well, it might be my own mam, don’t you think?’

Laura giggled but looked extremely apprehensive. ‘If your mam lived here once, I don’t reckon she lives here now,’ she said nervously. ‘No one don’t dump a baby in their own front yard, or no one I’ve ever heard of, anyhow. She may well have lived nearby, but the more I think of it, the more sure I am that it couldn’t have been in Peel Street. It stands to reason, queen; she may even have come off the train at Dingle station and simply chosen a decent neighbourhood – and a nice thick hedge – so’s you’d be picked up the sooner.’

Patty stared at her friend whilst a cold feeling of dismay rose up in her. Laura was so sensible! Nevertheless, Patty told herself grimly, she would not give up so easily. She had intended to go to the front doors but decided, instead, to go to the back; perhaps one of the servants might remember a baby being found, you never knew. Suddenly, it was important simply to find out under which hedge she had been left. If she could discover that much, perhaps on subsequent visits she would find out much more. Resolutely, she seized Laura’s arm and dragged her to the nearest front gate bounded on either side by a thick laurel hedge. ‘We’ll start here,’ she said fiercely, towing Laura around the side path and scarcely noticing the size and splendour of the house in her determination to reach the back premises. ‘Surely someone will remember a policeman finding a baby under a hedge!’

Laura sighed, but accompanied her friend and presently Patty banged the knocker on a back door which was almost as imposing as the front one. The door was immediately snatched open and a girl’s head, with a maid’s white cap perched insecurely on her bush of hair, appeared in the gap. ‘Yes?’ she said baldly and then, realising that it was two little girls who stood on the step, added belligerently: ‘Wharra
you
want, eh?’ Over her shoulder, she remarked to someone the girls could not see, ‘It’s nobbut a couple o’ kids, miz Thornton, from that there orphing place up the road. I thought they wasn’t allowed out, ’cept in a line, like.’

‘Nor they is, poor little buggers,’ a voice in the background said cheerfully, ‘’cept, o’ course, when they’s left under an ’edge, like the kid what was abandoned here a few years back.’

The face at the door turned its back on Patty and Laura in order to say, incredulously: ‘Under an ’edge? I never heered nothin’ o’ that before, miz Thornton! But these ain’t babbies. They’s probably …’ Here she turned to survey the girls critically. ‘They’s prob’ly six or seven.’

‘We aren’t. Laura’s eight and I’m getting on that way,’ Patty said, some of her old belligerence flaring. ‘I come to ask you about that baby, but you don’t know nothin’, you just said so. Please may we speak to Miss Thornton?’

At this, another face appeared in the doorway, a round, red face, enhanced by steel-rimmed spectacles perched on a rubicund nose and topped by thinning grey hair. The woman looked fat and jolly and smiled down at Patty and Laura, though the eyes behind the spectacles which scanned them from head to toe were shrewd. ‘Couple o’ runaways, eh?’ she said genially. ‘I been cook here nigh on ten years and in all that time I’ve never seen any of them orphings, ’cept wi’ a teacher and walkin’ in a line. Here, catch hold o’ these,’ and, as if by magic, two buns, fresh from the oven, were handed down to them.