Luckpenny Land (34 page)

But then Polly was an exception. Most of the other girls were in Greenlawns for the same reason Kath was. Yet others, simply because they might become pregnant. Their crime, since that was how it was viewed, had been to ‘entice’ some young man into an ‘immoral act’, or even the threat of one.

At first she had protested vigorously at the very idea of Katherine Ellis, darling daughter of Larkrigg Hall, being incarcerated in such a place.

‘There must be some mistake,’ she’d said, over and over. ‘There is absolutely no reason for my being here.’ Not that anyone listened, and those that did only laughed.

‘Do you mean that bump isn’t a baby growing in your belly?’ asked one particularly coarse warden, making even Kath blush.

‘I don’t see that has anything to do with you. I’m leaving this very minute.’ But all the doors were locked. And remained so, morning and night.

‘There’s no way out, once you’re in,’ one old hag told her. ‘I came in as a girl for the same reason you’ve been sent here. By my loving, caring family. Ashamed of me they were, as yours are of you. That was so long ago now I can scarcely remember when it was.’

Kath stared in horror at the grey bedraggled locks of hair and the wrinkled skin. ‘I don’t believe it. My family have no idea where I am. It’s a mistake, I tell you. I thought I’d come here for a job.’

The old hag had cackled with laughter as if Kath had made a joke.

The most humiliating part had been the shockingly intimate examination she’d been subjected to on the day she was admitted. For venereal disease, the wardens had told her. If she’d been infected she wouldn’t have been accepted. Kath had wondered since if that would have been so terrible.

Gradually her panic and temper were forced to subside as the awful reality that dear Aunt Ruby had known exactly what was wrong with her niece, and where she was sending her. But Kath refused to believe that her mother knew of her fate. Let alone her lovely, kind, adoring daddy. She refused to believe that they would ever condone locking her in such a place.

‘I shall write home at once and they’ll come for me, you’ll see.’

She had indeed written, countless times. Rules permitted one letter home per week, though all were carefully vetted. Any sign of criticism and the letter was instantly destroyed. Kath made that mistake only once. The letter had been destroyed and she wasn’t permitted to send any more for the next two weeks.

Nevertheless Christmas had come and gone, treated as any ordinary work day with no sign of a celebration. Up at six, work all day, watched the entire time by the sharp-eyed wardens. The midday meal taken at one. Stew, always stew. Half an hour was allowed for this followed by a walk around the cold yard then back to work. A similar walk was permitted in the evening but there was no hope of escape. The walls were high, the great iron gates kept permanently locked. Nobody outside knew what lay behind them, nor bothered to ask.

‘This is as bad as a Victorian workhouse,’ Kath protested, half in disbelief, half in fear.

‘Aye,’ Polly agreed. ‘Only worse, because you generally died quicker in them days.’

January passed in an agony of bitter weather, getting colder as the snows filled the February skies, with still no sign of release, no reply to her letters. She was trapped, abandoned by those who claimed to love her, for the sin of carrying a child that would be born with the dreadful label of illegitimate, using one of the kinder words for it.

The pregnancy grew daily into a heavier burden.

To think that not so long ago she had refused Richard Harper and turned her nose up at the very idea of marrying Jack Lawson. The thought made Kath feel ill.

Sometimes, on a Sunday after church, they were permitted to read books. Kath had fallen upon this small pleasure with relief at first, until she found that so many sentences were blacked out, even whole pages removed, that the story was rendered senseless. Or they might be shown a film only to find that that too had been given the same treatment. The wardens considered some passages inflammatory to a young girl’s passions, be it only a simple kiss or word of affection, they were obliterated.

Knitting socks for servicemen, chopping and tying up bundles of firewood and endless mending were the only recreations considered safe.

The regime at Greenlawns must, in Kath’s hotly held opinion, be far worse than any soldier’s at the front.

‘What is it you’ve done this time, madam?’ Miss Blake was eyeing the ruined fabric, glaring fiercely at Kath.

‘Bit of an accident, Miss Blake,’ explained the cheerful Polly. ‘My fault, not hers.’

‘Don’t you argue with me, you little brat.’

‘I didn’t, I only said.. .’

‘
Silence.
’ Grabbing hold of the girl’s arm, Blake twisted it painfully behind her back, making Polly gasp and sink to her knees. Tears filled the girl’s eyes as the arm, looking as if it might come off if it were moved another half inch, was held in a merciless grip by Miss Blake, the familiar smirk upon her face.

‘Very well, if you wish to take the blame, you can spend your recreation time this evening scrubbing that sheet until it is as white as snow. See that you show it to me before you go to bed. Is that clear? I’ll teach you to recklessly ruin perfectly good linen.’ She gave the arm a final tweak before dropping it. Polly fell to the ground on a low moan.

Kath was incensed. ‘For God’s sake, we don’t finish work till gone eight and we have to eat the loathsome stew you give us after that. How will she have time to wash your damn sheet? It’ll need to soak all night at least. It’s stupid to expect otherwise.’

There was the most awful silence, the only sound that of the swish and grind of the rollers, the thump of wet fabric being scrubbed and beaten clean, scouring away the sins of the wicked, or so the girls were told.

Not a soul in the laundry glanced in their direction. No one moved to lift the sobbing Polly, whose arm hung at a dreadful angle. Kath understood everyone’s desire not to get involved in case worse trouble should fall upon them, but it infuriated her all the same.

‘What did you say, girl?’

‘I said, leave her alone, you great bully,’ Kath repeated, and pushed at Miss Blake with the flat of her two hands. Perhaps she used more force than she intended, or the woman’s heels caught on something, but she fell backwards on to the giant rollers.

The hem of her skirt got caught between the chewing rollers, winding her in like a rag doll. The breadth of her flat hips soon brought it to a halt but not before the flailing fingers of her right hand had been crushed to pulp.

The machine was switched off instantly by a quick-thinking girl but Miss Blake’s screams echoed on and on.

Kath was marched off into solitary confinement. She went quietly enough, her moment of rebellion spent, frightened by the consequences of her temper. There she remained for seven days and seven nights on nothing but bread and water.

The fingers, except for the tip of one which had to be removed, were saved, though they would never grip a girl’s arm quite so savagely again, nor knit another pair of socks. Kath couldn’t help but hope that the disability would be a constant reminder to Miss Blake of her lack of charity.

Polly was ‘removed’ to another home. Friendships were not encouraged in Greenlawns and Kath’s days seemed longer as a result. By the end of March she was close to her time and exhausted. The callous treatment and the loss of Polly, the unrelieved treadmill of work, brought a grinding ache to her lower back which seemed never to leave her. The inadequate diet and the sense of hopelessness that permeated the place had quenched even Kath’s sense of rebellion. And still there had been no letter from home.

She longed for the day when her baby would be born. ‘Then I can leave,’ she insisted, refusing to heed the dour words of the old hag, that there were a hundred other girls in Greenlawns who had already given birth and remained, for their own ‘safety’, locked up.

Their babies were sent for adoption or to the orphanage, name and identity quickly changed to avoid the lifetime’s stigma that accompanied such a birth.

‘That won’t happen to me,’ Kath insisted. ‘My family will come for me any day. You’ll see.’

She went into labour on a freezing morning at the end of March. ‘I want Meg,’ Kath cried as the full impact of the first pain seared its scorching path across her back. Nobody took the slightest notice. Miss Blake’s leering face grinned down at her, her whining voice grating in Kath’s ear.

‘Don’t waste any sympathy on this one. Hard-hearted little madam she is, and a troublemaker to boot.’

They put her in an empty room and left her to get on with it.

Tam O’Cleary was not normally one to make a fuss, let alone get involved with other people. He’d left a perfectly good home at the age of sixteen when he’d realised that America was not the land of milk and honey his family had hoped for. An Irishman living in the Bronx in New York did not have an easy time of it. Tam didn’t want to struggle, as his father had done for years, trying to find work to feed a growing family. Besides, much as Tam loved his family, and there was no doubt that he did, every last one of them, he was young and could feel the blood pulsing through his veins, telling him to get out there and discover whatever there was to be discovered about life.

He’d packed his bags and gone off to seek his own fortune, not wishing to be a burden to anyone.

Since then he’d had more jobs than he cared to count, spent years exploring Europe at a time when it was safe to do so. Considered himself, at twenty-seven, a man of reasonable intelligence, a raconteur and wit even, on his better days. He’d come to enjoy his footloose existence and considered possessions and people an unnecessary encumbrance. Keep himself to himself, that was Tam O’Cleary’s motto.

Hadn’t he once tried to save a fellow traveller from certain death as he’d hung over the edge of a schooner? Only to have the man beat the living daylights out of him for his trouble. How was Tam to know the man had wanted to die anyway because of some broken love affair? People. You never knew where you were with them, unlike horses.

He’d nursed two broken ribs and a sore jaw for weeks as a result of that good deed, and vowed never to be involved in other people’s problems ever again.

Nor was wartime the moment to change that philosophy. He was Irish. His old country, and his new, were both neutral, and that was the way he liked to live his life, safe behind a screen of neutrality.

Yet here he was, breaking all those principles, over one young girl. Katherine Ellis was not even his type, and he’d known her only a few weeks. Yet he couldn’t help thinking how his own mother would react if Mary or Jo or Sarah got into similar trouble. She’d open her heart and her home to them with no recriminations. Tam believed that Kath’s family had failed her when she needed them most.

So how could he, her only friend, fail her too? He knocked again, louder this time.

It was the thought of that unwanted baby she carried, and the fact that she had disappeared, without warning, without even a goodbye. He’d thought nothing of it at first, but as the weeks passed by it had struck him as odd. He was not the melodramatic sort, never had been. But Katherine Ellis seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth.

For no reason he could justify to himself, he started hanging about outside Southview Villas, and seen no sign of her. Now, quite against his better judgement, he’d walked up the scrubbed path and lifted the polished door knocker.

A plain-faced girl of about fifteen came to the door. He raised his cap.

‘Good morning to ye. I wonder if I could be speaking with Miss Ellis? The name is O’Cleary, would you tell her?’

‘Miss Who?’

‘Ellis.’

‘I’ll have to ask Madam. Wait here.’ So saying, the girl closed the door in his face and Tam was forced to kick his heels and wait. When the girl came back she was again alone. ‘The mistress says as how Miss Ellis is no longer with us.’

‘No longer with you? Lord above!’

The round cheeks flushed scarlet. ‘Oh no, I don’t mean... Nothing like that. The mistress says she’s gone, that’s all.’

‘Gone? Gone where? Home?’

‘Ooh, I wouldn’t know.’

‘I’d be obliged if you’d ask.’

‘Ooh, I can’t do that.’ And she again closed the door.

Tam walked away. He’d try again mebbe, in a day or two. Or mebbe not. What a fool I am to be worrying over her. ‘She’ll have gone home to her mammy and daddy, you great soft ejit. Hasn’t she the right to go where she pleases, if she has a mind, without consultation with you?’ He muttered to himself, determined to put the matter out of his mind forthwith.

When the next pain came Kath was certain she was about to die. The world seemed to be swamped by it. The pain lashed itself around her back and plunged down into her groin as if a devil was dragging all the innards from her body. If she survived this ordeal, she thought, gasping for breath, she could survive anything.

When the wave eased for a moment, she tried to sit up. Maybe if she walked about a bit. She struggled from the bed and started to pace the room, but soon found the pain returning. A mile or more from the bed, Kath clung to a nearby washbasin. It was so loosely attached to the wall the thought flashed through her mind that she was not the first girl to cling to it as if it were a life support.