Nobody Came (10 page)

T
here were other boys like Davie and me who had living parents but for one reason or another had been placed in the orphanage. Sometimes one parent had died, leaving the other unable to cope. Or a husband had gone to England to work, leaving behind a family with no money and only the promise of a cheque that never came. Then there were the children the nuns considered the woto court disappointment.rst: children whose mothers had never been married to their father – usually because as soon as the man in question was told of the pregnancy he promptly disappeared off the island. Sometimes it was the gossip and turned heads in our small community or the financial struggle to bring up a child alone that was too much; other times it was the appearance of a new man who didn’t want another man’s child giving a constant reminder of previous relationships. Whatever it was, all these children ended up in the orphanage.

There were many explanations and just as many excuses. Stories would be told by excited little boys of the promises their grandmother, mother, elder brother, even sometimes their out-of-work father had made to them. The promise was that the moment a house or a job was found, a pay packet arrived from England or the new man discovered he really liked children, then they would be going home. But however many promises weren’t kept, however many little boys’ hearts were broken and however many tears fell when their dreams turned into shattered hopes, the one thing that all those boys had that Davie and I hadn’t were relatives who came to visit.

I watched with longing as other boys chatted with family members, who promised them that soon they would be leaving and going home. Each time I saw the short-lived happiness on those boys’ faces, I yearned to see someone walk through those doors looking for me.

Surely Stanley must be better now? Surely soon he and Gloria would come for us? Every time I saw a bed suddenly become empty, I knew that little boy had gone somewhere better. Sometimes a relative had been able to meet their promise; other times we knew they had been adopted and taken to a new home.

Occasionally there were visiting days when other people came to see us as well, and they were referred to by the nuns as ‘visitors’. We all knew why they were there – because they wanted a child of their own. Mostly it was couples that came, the woman roughly Gloria’s age, though there the similarity ended. Whereas Gloria favoured thick make-up, colour-enhanced long hair and tight-fitting clothes, these women had pale faces unadorned with make-up, demure pastel jumpers over pleated skirts that covered their knees, and shiny hair that they wore in a simple pageboy style.

Those couples usually walked straight past us boys to the area where the small children and toddlers were. There they stopped, knelt down and made baby-talk noises. We grinned at each other with bravado to show we didn’t care that they had no interest in us. It meant we were big boys, didn’t it? We had already learnt that to express a wish even to ourselves was to court disappointment.

To begin with, I did worry that so many of the couples seemed to want to adopt babies. What if Denise was adopted? How would we ever find her again? Whenever I got a chance, I would try to peer through to the babies’ section but I never caught so much as a glimpse of her. But as time went on, I’m ashamed to say that the memory of Denise faded.

Other ‘visitors’ came to the dining room after grace had been said. They sat at a table with little boys who looked bewildered at the attention. The women would wipe crumbs off sticky cheeks, brush silky strands of hair back from solemn little faces and smile sweetly into pleading eyes. The men would ruffle the hair on an upturned head, but say very little.

We were never told which boy had been picked. It was not until about a week later that his empty bed told us who had been the lucky one that time. ‘He’s been adopted,’ Nicolas always said knowingly, with a wistful look on his face.

I would try to imagine what those boys’ lives would become. Would they be wearing new clothes perhaps knitted and sewn from the patterns in
Woman’s Weekly
, riding a shiny new bicycle and playing with their very own puppy?

We always knew that we would never see that boy again; the happiness of the outside world would swallow him up.

Sometimes the visitors were older couples who had lost a son in the war and wanted to give a home to a deserving orphaned boy. With them it was always the men who asked the questions, such as which school subject was their favourite and what hobbies did they have.

The boy always replied as he had been instructed: ‘I like reading, sir, but I don’t have a great deal of time for it as I have a lot of schoolwork to do each night’ – omitting from his answer the fact that Sacre Coeur’s routine left little time for hobbies and that the only reading material allowed was religious books.

The next question was nearly always the same: ‘What do want to do when you leave school?’ No boy hopeful of adoption ever gave the truthful answer: ‘Don’t care, as long as I get out of here.’ Instead they gave the acceptable one: ‘I would like to go to university, sir, and study …’ It was only the desired subject that changed from one boy to the next.

Every time a new visitor arrived, each child old enough to understand hoped that this time they were going to be the one; the one who was going to be chosen to live in a big house, eat tasty, home-cooked food and sleep between crisp, clean sheets in their own bedroom.

The visitors I didn’t like were the single men, the ones who told us they wanted to be an uncle. Mainly in their thirties and forties, they were well-dressed, usually in blazers and flannels. With their sleeked-back hair and tanned faces, even to my untrained eyes they looked wealthy. White teeth flashed under waxed moustaches as they fussed over little boys aged between five and nine years old. I watched the happy faces of those boys, saw their hopeful expressions and then, over the following days, watched their excited anticipation. In these cases we always guessed which boy had been chosen. It was the one they had sat on their knee, the one to whom they had surreptitiously given a bar of chocolate, the one they had hugged when leaving.

Every weekend, I worried about what would happen if the nuns had not told the visitors that Denise, Davie and I already had a mother and father. Had they explained that we were only there because Stanley was sick? When those visitors who wanted a little boy came, I refused to put on a happy face. I lowered my head or, if possible, hid in a corner and tried to keep Davie at my side and as quiet as possible. From there, I silently watched the comings and goings.

Sometimes there was a different type of visitor; the nuns called them the ‘searchers’. Most of them were tired-looking Frenchmen and women whose lined faces and stooped shoulders gave off a mixture of sorrow and faint hope. I didn’t understand why that sadness clung to them, but I recognised it. The nuns hovered around these people; nuns whom I had never seen show any compassion laid comforting hands on arms and spoke softly. They stood close, trying to form a gentle barrier against hurt. The searchers always seemed to be looking for someone they had once known and it was always the older boys they approached.

‘Do you know the name of your papa, your mamma?’ they would ask hopefully. ‘Do you know where you came from?’ As bewildered boys shook their heads, disappointment blazed briefly in the searchers’ eyes.

Sometimes those people were elderly and spoke with American accents. They puzzled me, those sad people, and as a child I wondered if it was their grandchildren they were looking for. It was not until I was an adult that I worked it out.

During the German occupation of Europe underground organisations helped to hide Jewish children, in attics and cellars or in the middle of someone else’s family in deserted country areas, anywhere they might be safe. They were known as the ‘hidden children of Europe’. Parents said their goodbyes in the hope but without any belief that one day they would be reunited, before turning to face their own fates.

As the war spread across Europe and the Nazis’ relentless purge of Jews stretched its tentacles to every corner of each country they occupied, friends became foes, children were found, fair-haired women were exposed as Jewesses and the records of the hidden children were destroyed for their own protection.

For years after the war ended there was hope that there were more of those ‘hidden children’ surviving somewhere. Not one orphanage in Europe was left unvisited by relatives hoping that there was just one more member of their family left. I wonder now if those searchers ever found a child who had been hidden safely as a baby. I certainly hope so.

A
s the summer faded and the evenings drew in, draughts crawled under windows and doors, pinched fingers and sent shivers up spines; our breath misted windows as we peered out on dark frosty mornings.

That winter, I learnt the reality of the word cold.

Christmas came. Our morning routine was the same except that after breakfast we had an even longer mass than usual. Before lunch we were taken to a room where toys were stacked. They were the discarded, forgotten teddy bears, trains and model cars of children who had outgrown them so their parents had donated them to the orphanage.

‘Choose one each,’ Sister Bernadette told us. ‘And no pushing, mind.’

I found a packet of crayons and took those. Davie picked up a battered Dinky car with only a hint of paint left on it. I looked in vain to see if there was an easel and thought longingly of the one Stanley had given me the previous Christmas. Where was it now, I wondered.

The New Year was rung in, the days eventually started to grow warmer and I woke up one morning to the realisation that a whole year had passed since I’d walked through the doors of Sacre Coeur. It was then that I began to panic because my family were becoming blurred images. All of a sudden, instead of the clear picture that I always used to be able to see in my head, it was becoming fuzzy. ‘What will happen if they don’t come soon?’ I worried, anxious that I wouldn’t recognise them.

Sometimes I felt with despair that not only had I lost John but, in a different way, I’d lost Davie as well. My plump, chatty little brother with his ever-ready smile and cheerful nature had disappeared, leaving in his place a thinner, more solemn child, who spoke rarely and smiled even less. He was the last contact with my family and my only barrier against loneliness and, in desperation, I would try everything in my power to coax a smile from him.

‘Come on, Davie,’ I said time after time. ‘Look, I’ll draw you a picture, make you a paper aeroplane or tell you about my day at school.’ Not the really bleeding awful times I had there, I won’t tell you about them – I’ll try and find the nice bits for you. ‘Just smile for me, Davie. Please smile at me.’ But he never did.

I would take paper and a crayon out of my school satchel. ‘Let me draw you a picture of …’ and I would list all the things he had asked me to draw for him in the past – animals, cars, boats – but he would just knock my hand to one side. ‘Don’t want,’ he said and looked away from me as though by needing his attention I had become his enemy. ‘Don’t want,’ he repeated – two words that had become his favourite ones, with ‘no’ coming a close second.

‘Want John,’ he said when he knew only I could hear him. And as those words left his mouth, tears filled his eyes and dribbled down his cheeks; and this time his tears filled me not with pity but with rage. For every silver drop that stained his cheeks only served to remind me just how much I also missed my eldest brother. His not being there was a constant ache that never left me. In bed, when they thought I was asleep, I talked to John, asked his advice, and if I imagined hard enough I could sometimes believe that I heard a reply. Over those first weeks in Sacre Coeur, he promised me that we would all be together again. And each night I asked him when. And he answered with the same repeated word: soon. On hearing it, I was reassured and fell asleep comforted by those words.

When I saw Davie’s drooping mouth and the tears in his eyes that were fearfully gulped down when he saw the nuns, I started to feel the beginnings of a dull resentment; a resentment that grew little by little, day by day, until I begrudged taking him to the toilet, sitting next to him in the dining room and listening to his muffled sobs at night.

His constant presence began to irritate me. The only time he was not with me was when I was at school, but when I turned seven in a few months’s time I knew that was going to change. Davie was due to start at the Infants the same term that I was being transferred into the Juniors.

Davie had one friend there, the little boy called Jimmy whom I had seen pushed off the bench at our first evening mass, the boy whose mother had died in childbirth and whose father had gone to England to find work. They were the same age and even shared the same birthday. I rarely saw them talking to each other but they walked around everywhere together as though they were joined at the hip and I could feel they had a strong connection.

When Davie and Jimmy both turned four, there was no celebration to mark the day; instead they were told that as they were no longer babies they were old enough to have their own chores to do. So at five forty-five on the morning of their shared birthday they joined the orphanage’s workforce. Their only presents were a duster and a tin of furniture polish, and even those only belonged to them for the first two hours of the day. When their work was finished these items had to be returned to the nuns.

That meant that instead of staying in the special room for babies and toddlers until breakfast time, Davie followed me out to the hall. He had been ordered to dust and polish the right-hand side of the staircase while Jimmy did the left. Nicolas and I already had the huge hall to clean, a task that took all our efforts to finish in time before breakfast. First it had to be swept, then mopped and rinsed. Water had to be used sparingly; we couldn’t make it easier by throwing soapy buckets of water over the floor because it had to be dry enough for us to polish before we finished. Otherwise, if Sister Freda’s sharp eyes found a dirty mark on its shiny surface, we had to do it all over again and miss our breakfast. So we rubbed and rubbed with those damp mops and then got out the block polisher. Each holding an end, we worked that polisher back and forth until sweat dripped from our brows and onto the floor.

Sister Freda usually supervised the cleaning duties with eyes that missed not even a speck of dirt, but one day I realised she had wandered off. Maybe she thought that all the months we had spent in those highly disciplined conditions had sufficiently cowed us that we wouldn’t dare to misbehave.

Without her forbidding presence and watchful sternness, I felt a sense of freedom that I hadn’t experienced since we had been thrown into the back of the black police van. I jumped on top of the block polisher and grinned wickedly at Nicolas.

‘Go on, Nicolas – give me a push.’

He had been in the home much longer than me, and at first he gave me a mystified look, but as he caught my mood this was replaced by mischievous glee. He put his weight behind the polisher and shoved with all his might.

‘Push harder,’ I instructed.

He laughed, and suddenly we reverted back to being little boys instead of the frightened, small robots the nuns had tried to turn us into. Whooping with the unexpected feeling of exhilaration and sheer pleasure, we raced up and down the hall until I lost my balance and fell. The sight of me sprawled on the floor sent Nicolas into spasms of infectious laughter, making me giggle so much that I couldn’t get up.

When they heard the unexpected sounds of merriment, Davie and Jimmy stopped what they were doing and leant over the banisters to see me rolling on the floor. For the first time since we had come through the wooden doors of the home, I heard Davie laugh out loud. And seeing my little brother laugh, my resentment of him vanished as quickly as it had come and I loved him unconditionally again.

With his little face uncustomarily flushed, Jimmy decided he wanted to join in the fun and clambered up on the top of the banister and sat astride it. With a whoop he slid down, waving his hands in the air as he gained speed, and came to an abrupt stop when he reached the next landing down.

‘Come on, Davie. You can do that,’ I called. He leant his little body over the banister and threw one leg over, sat confidently astride it and started his descent, laughing out loud with the freedom and excitement of this act of rebellion.

Unfortunately, little boys having fun can neither do it silently nor can they think ahead to the repercussions of being caught. At first we didn’t see Sister Bernadette and Sister Freda running into the hall, clutching their leather straps in their hands with looks of outraged fury on their faces. Then simultaneously all four of us became aware of their presence. There was a sudden silence: us frozen with fear, the nuns transfixed by the sight of four boys having the audacity to have fun. It only took a few seconds for that spell to break. Sister Bernadette’s head turned towards me, her eyes locked on mine and the viciousness in their depths made me recoil. Then she turned her gaze to the stairs.

Jimmy had managed to climb off the banister and huddle down out of sight on the first-floor landing where I could see his scared little face poking through the struts. But when I looked up and saw where Davie was, I went rigid with fear. He was a couple of steps higher, still astride the banister, and his hands were clutching at the rail, trying to stop himself from sliding any further down.

‘What do you think you are doing?’ she shouted, her face almost purple with anger. One hand swished the leather strap in the air while the other clutched her habit, lifting it to just above ankle length as she took the stairs at a run, ascending two at a time.

‘Get off, Davie,’ I screamed. ‘Get down from there.’

I felt icy tremors creep under my skin making me shiver with fear. I saw the leather strap swinging in Sister Bernadette’s hand and we all knew that we would be made to pay dearly for our few minutes of joyous abandon.

I wanted to run up those stairs. I wanted to beg the nun to leave Davie alone; he was only a baby and it was entirely my fault, I had started it. Please, I wanted to say, he’s so scared, don’t frighten him any more. But my own fear kept me rooted to the spot and as hard as I tried to call out again, no sounds would come from my throat.

But then it was too late. The Sister had reached him and from the hall below I had a clear view of what happened next. Beside herself with rage, she raised the strap and swished it in the air once then twice above the small, crouching form of my terrified baby brother. He tried to sit up and at the same time he raised a hand from the rail to protect his head.

I heard Davie scream; I heard her shout and knew that the leather belt was raised to strike. The piercing sound of his next scream was followed by a silence, then a dull thud; the thud of something soft and small falling onto the floor below. My hands went over my eyes, my feet refused to move and I knew what it was without seeing.

I knew it was my brother.

A scream finally burst from my constricted throat. Sister Freda caught my arm with one hand and the back of my jumper with the other to stop me rushing to Davie. ‘Leave him alone,’ she instructed, holding me tightly.

‘Let me go, let me go!’ I yelled and I wriggled and squirmed in her grasp, trying in vain to break away from her. In desperation I kicked her as hard as I could on the shin. Shocked at this assault, she let go and I tore away. I raced across to where the small crumpled form of my four-year-old brother was lying. He wasn’t moving; he was so still I was convinced he was dead.

I heard the clatter of Sister Bernadette racing down the stairs. I heard her shout at Davie to get up and then with great clarity I saw her push him with her foot as though he was subhuman. I was screaming hysterically now. Sister Freda caught me and yanked me away from the immobile little body, just as I was about to touch it.

Other nuns, alarmed by the disturbance, came running from all directions to see what was causing this early-morning rumpus. One grabbed Nicolas and pinned him against the wall.

‘Get that boot cupboard open,’ Sister Bernadette shouted at no one in particular and they obeyed, as they always did. The door to that dark musty cupboard was opened and I saw Sister Bernadette’s booted, black-stocking-clad foot start to push Davie’s inert form towards it.

I shouted at her, using the same words she had so often shouted at me: ‘You’re evil, you are!’ Then I screamed Davie’s name over and over until a hand was clamped firmly across my mouth.

The other nuns helped Sister Bernadette to push Davie’s inert body into the dark cupboard.

I needed more than anything else in my life to get to my brother and make them leave him alone.

‘Jimmy, you can go in to breakfast now,’ Sister Bernadette said coldly. She obviously hadn’t seen him doing anything wrong. ‘But take those two to the sheds.’ She pointed at Nicolas and me. ‘Let them think about their sins in there.’

We screamed and shouted. We were beyond reason, even beyond fear. It crossed my mind that if they could kill Davie and not seem to care, they could also kill us. Other nuns stepped forward and helped Sister Freda to drag us from the hall and down the corridors. We struggled and hollered every inch of the way and we lashed out with our feet and hands as the terror we felt for Davie was compounded by the fear we had for ourselves.

‘You are wicked boys,’ panted Sister Freda. ‘So bad that even those godless parents of yours didn’t want you. Don’t think we don’t know everything about you and your older brother. Evil children, that’s what you are.’

I heard a bolt being drawn, doors being opened and the hand that was clamped across my mouth was removed. With a hard push I was propelled into the foul-smelling interior of the deep litter barns. Disturbed by the light of the open door, chickens flew off their perches and landed near my feet. Their feathers brushed against my legs. I thought of the way they always pecked at my hands when I lifted eggs out from under them.

Then my imagination ran riot and allowed other terrifying thoughts to enter my head. What if these chickens knew where their missing friends had been taken? What if they had found out that it was me who helped Neville to murder them? There were hundreds of them in that barn. What if they all attacked us? I visualised all those sharp beaks and the beady little eyes of all the angry revengeful hens and cockerels that were hidden in the dark and was gripped by an immense terror.

A trickle of pee started to run down my leg.

Whimpering with fear, I looked back at the door where Sister Bernadette stood watching us.