Trust Me (12 page)

‘She’s fine,’ Susan lied. It wasn’t fair to add to Reg’s worries right now. His trial was set for the middle of September and she felt he had to be kept buoyant until then.

‘I can’t begin to tell you how grateful I am for all you’ve done for my family,’ he said, his voice cracking with emotion. ‘I don’t know what we would have done without you.’

‘That’s what friends are for,’ she said. ‘And speaking of friends, O’Keefe telephoned me last night to say your commanding officer is prepared to act as a character witness for you.’

‘Captain Duncan!’ Reg’s bright smile came back. ‘Bless him!’

‘Mr O’Keefe’s written to tell you all about it, but he wanted me to give you the good news today. Now, tell me how things really are with you. You never say in your letters.’

‘What is there to say?’ His smile vanished, even his voice went flat. ‘I’m doomed, Susan. I didn’t push Anne, but no one’s going to believe me.’

‘I believe you, and your mother does,’ she said stoutly. ‘O’Keefe and Captain Duncan do too, I think PC Hewitt does as well.’

‘But they won’t be on the jury. You can bet the prosecution will find dozens of people that will say I’ve got a nasty temper. Even if Captain Duncan does speak up for me, if they cross-examine him he’ll be forced to admit I got in a few fights in the army, and let’s face it, Susan, I don’t look like a choir boy.’

He didn’t, but Susan knew from Maud he had been one, and an altar boy, and that made her want to cry. ‘Oh Reg,’ she sighed. ‘I wish I could do something more to help.’

‘You’ve already stuck your neck out far enough for me,’ he said with a half-smile. ‘I bet that headmistress of yours isn’t best pleased. O’Keefe reckons the prosecution will call her as a witness. If he challenges her, and he’ll have to, where’s that going to leave you?’

Susan suddenly saw the explanation as to why Miss Willoughby had become so unpleasant to her before the end of term. Clearly she’d been told of her teacher’s support for Reg. ‘I’ll get another teaching job,’ she said defiantly. ‘Lee Manor isn’t the only school in London.’

‘You’re amazing,’ he said with open admiration. ‘I bet until all this happened the nearest brush you’d had with the criminal world was when someone swiped the milk off your doorstep. What on earth do your family make of you visiting a man in prison?’

‘They brought me up to believe in fighting for the right,’ she said simply. ‘Of course they were anxious about me coming here today, but they wouldn’t have tried to stop me.’

Before Reg had a chance to say anything more, a warder suddenly appeared behind him, announced the visit was terminated, and yanked Reg away, not even giving him time to say goodbye.

All at once Susan felt the real horror of his predicament, treated as a criminal even before he was tried, and slammed back into a cell without a chance to end the visit with dignity. As she hurried away from the prison, tears rolled down her cheeks for him. She guessed he had wanted to know a great deal more detail about the girls and his mother. He hadn’t even had time to give her any messages for them.

Maud had told Susan once how as a child Reg used to go up to Blackheath to look at the rich people’s homes, and Susan felt a twinge of conscience that her family home was probably one of the very ones he’d admired. It was a pretty Georgian villa overlooking the Heath, the front garden a profusion of flowering shrubs. Her childhood had been idyllic. There had always been nursemaids for each of the four children as babies, a woman came in daily to clean and wash, so her mother had plenty of time to spend with her children. It was a secure, happy home, the days marked by Father leaving for the office at eight-thirty and returning at six. School was a small private one nearby, they had a large playroom, a sand-pit and swing in the garden, all of them learned to play the piano, and Susan and her younger sister Elizabeth had dancing lessons too.

Every single August the entire household went down to the same large house in Broadstairs where they would be joined by various aunts, uncles and their children too. Hunger, debt and lack of warm clothing were unknown to her family. While there was no wild extravagance, her mother was a careful housekeeper, there were always good hearty meals, fires in each room in winter, toys and books. Yet her parents were modern in their thinking, the children were allowed to play ball games on the Heath, to ride bicycles, to bring schoolfriends home, and on many a night the house would resound with the sound of laughter as the children put on plays or concerts.

In 1938, when Susan was just seventeen, her elder brother Stephen, who was up at Cambridge, brought a friend home for Christmas. Susan took one look at Douglas Broadhurst, and although she’d always been shy of young men before, fell for him instantly. Everything about him, his height, slender body, dark floppy hair and clear blue eyes was perfection to her.

By the time Christmas had passed, it was clear to both her parents that there was a blossoming romance, for they’d noticed the way Susan sparkled and fizzed with Douglas, and that he looked equally entranced. They gave Susan a serious talking to, reminding her that she was very young, that she had yet to start her teacher training, and that Douglas had to concentrate on his studies. But right through the spring and summer of 1939 she and Douglas wrote to each other, and he often came as a guest for weekends.

But in September the war came, and both Douglas and Stephen joined the airforce, determined to become fighter pilots as they had both previously had a few flying lessons. It was then, at Christmas of 1939, that Susan’s parents gave their permission for her to become engaged to Douglas, on the understanding they would wait until the war was over before they got married.

Douglas was shot down over the English Channel in March of ‘41, his Spitfire plunging into the sea before he could bail out. When Susan heard the news she wanted to die too, and in the months that followed she fully believed she would never laugh, dance or be happy again. It was her parents who pushed her back into finishing her teacher training, encouraging, cajoling, telling her that Douglas wouldn’t have wanted her to grieve for ever.

So teaching became the new love in her life. It filled the empty feeling inside her, pushed the loneliness and hopelessness away. She didn’t want or need a new man in her life, children were enough. Her brothers teased her sometimes, saying she would end up an old maid. But she didn’t mind, maybe she was in a rut, but it was a warm, comfortable one.

Then along came the Taylors, and suddenly she was jolted out of that rut, bombarded with new experiences that were often far from comfortable. She might have known love and grief, taught working-class children for some years, but she had no real knowledge of what it meant to be poor. To avoid embarrassing Maud she had to watch and learn how she ran her life. This meant groping her way through an almost alien language to understand the real meaning of what Maud said, because down in Deptford what often sounded like an insult could be an endearment and vice versa. She had to say goodbye to her own standards of hygiene, soon discovered that Maud would go hungry to feed the children and her fierce pride could not accept charity. Susan couldn’t buy a meat pie from the shop to give to Maud, that was insulting. But to bring something cooked from home and to say that it would go to waste if it was kept another day was okay. Likewise an old jumper would be accepted with pleasure to be unpicked and knitted up for the children – new wool was suspect. Yet as Susan found her way through this often baffling maze she began to see that Maud’s way was a good one, she kept face, she had standards that were never broken. Maud would never dream of stepping out into the street without her battered felt hat and her proper shoes. She went to Mass every single Sunday, and for that she had to put on her corsets, best dress and gloves too. Pride was everything when you knew you were very close to the gutter. It made you whiten your doorstep every day, clean the windows once a week, and always keep a few dried goods at the back of the pantry so that if there was an emergency in the street, a sudden death or sickness, you’d have a little something to offer your neighbour.

After Douglas died Susan really believed she’d sealed her heart up, but she soon found this wasn’t so. What began as mere affection for a couple of motherless little girls was fast growing into love, and with that came the question of how she would fill the emptiness if they were removed from her life. Then there was Reg. She knew she thought about him more than was natural, that she shouldn’t be building her life around his trial and his family. Yet they had all found a way into her heart, and try as she might, she couldn’t distance herself from them.

It was teeming with rain as Susan and Maud came out of the court, one of those typical September days when the summer ends abruptly and without warning. Susan felt the weight of the old lady leaning on her arm, heard her laboured breathing and silently cursed all twelve jury members for their blind stupidity.

Reg had been found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment. At a stroke they had robbed two children of a loving father and destroyed his mother.

Maud had fought with the only weapon she had, her sharp tongue.
‘You bastards,
’ she’d yelled at the jury after they gave their verdict. ‘
I ‘opes you never get another night’s sleep knowing what you’ve done. You call this justice!
’

Susan had tried to restrain and quieten her, and the judge ordered that she would be removed from the court if she said another word. But Maud continued to hiss and swear, and so they both had to leave and wait outside. They didn’t hear the judge’s comments as he passed sentence. They had to learn from O’Keefe that the judge felt some sympathy that Reg had been so wantonly provoked by his wife, and that was the reason he was giving a lighter sentence than was usual.

Maud didn’t agree it was a lighter sentence. As she pointed out to O’Keefe, even with good behaviour it would be eight years at least before Reg would be free, Dulcie would be sixteen then, May thirteen, and she’d be pushing up the daisies long before.

Three months ago Susan wouldn’t have agreed with that last remark. Maud looked indestructible then, but now as she felt her leaning on her and saw the distress in her eyes, she sensed Maud was right. She had lost so much weight in the past few weeks that the skin on her cheeks and neck hung in folds, her legs were badly swollen, her blood pressure was sky high. But worst of all she’d lost the will to live because she knew she really couldn’t look after the girls satisfactorily any longer.

‘I pinned all me ‘opes on them deciding it were an accident,’ she said in little more than a whisper. ‘I really thought my Reg would be ‘ome tonight and all we’d ‘ave to do was find ‘im and the girls somewhere new to live. Why did that bastard ‘ave to say my Reg was a scrapper? All blokes is, ain’t they?’

In his summing up Kirkpatrick, the prosecution lawyer, had laboured the point of how beautiful Anne was, that she was better educated, ten years younger than her husband. He pointed out that maybe Reg could have continued to live with her lack of housewifely talents, even the occasional neglect of him and the children, but when he’d discovered she had a lover that was too much for him to bear, so he used his thirteen stone against her eight, attempted to strangle her and then tossed her down the stairs in a fit of understandable rage and jealousy.

O’Keefe had nothing so strong to fight with, all he really had on his side was Reg’s unquestionable love for his children. He put it to the jury that no father who cared so much would harm their mother. While he agreed that there were fingermarks on Anne’s neck, and that Reg freely admitted he had caught her momentarily by the throat a little earlier under extreme provocation when she said she was going to take the children from him, the facts were that she was killed as the result of a fall. He pointed out the speed at which Reg ran for assistance immediately after it, stressing this wasn’t the act of a guilty man. He finished up by reminding the jury that no one had actually seen what took place, and therefore if there was any doubt at all in their minds that Reg pushed or hurled his wife, they must pass the verdict of Not Guilty.

But by then it was clear the jury were convinced that hurling or pushing was exactly what Reg had done.

Susan hailed a taxi and helped Maud over to it. She felt broken up herself inside, she knew she had no way of comforting Maud or the children. It was shameful that none of Reg’s brothers or sisters had come to the trial to offer support for their mother, brother or young nieces; even the priest from the church Reg had worshipped at in Hither Green had declined to speak up for him. Yet the one thing that stood out most in Susan’s mind was the stunned expression on Reg’s face when he heard the jury’s verdict. That, she felt, was going to stay with her for all time.

In January of 1948, hailstones rattled against the windows of the first-floor conference room at the Welfare offices in Lewisham. The air was fuggy with smoke from one of the men’s pipes and a single naked electric light bulb cast a murky yellowish light down on to the central table and the six people seated around it. Each of the three men and three women had an open file in front of them. The topic for their discussion was the Taylor children.

One of the men was Father O’Brien, the priest from St Michael’s, the Roman Catholic church in Deptford which Maud had attended all her life, and latterly the children too. The remaining men and two of the women held positions as Children’s Officers. The last woman and the youngest by at least fifteen years was Susan Sims, and she was there only under sufferance because Maud and Reg had requested that she was to put forward their views about the girls’ future care.

Almost as soon as Reg had been convicted, the local Welfare bureau had stepped up their interest in the family, making several impromptu visits to the house in Akerman Street. In a report they had found it to be damp, infested with mice, and the lack of electricity, bathroom and outside lavatory concerned them. But their primary concern was Maud’s age and failing health.