Nobody Came (7 page)

W
hen the bell rang the boys rose up almost as one body. Once again they stood behind the benches, bent their heads, closed their eyes and chanted their prayers thanking the Holy Mother for their supper. Nicolas nudged me, indicating we should do the same. I moved my lips hoping that the old nun would think I was saying the right words. When they had done they stacked their plates, folded their napkins and then, row by row, turned on their heels and filed out in total silence.

Once outside in the early evening sunshine, Nicolas started firing questions at me. ‘So why are you here? Haven’t you got a dad? Is he dead or something? What about your mother?’ He didn’t pause for breath or wait for answers between each question.

‘I dunno. I dunno why they put us here.’ I felt the tears welling up again. ‘My mum and dad aren’t dead. My dad’s sick, though.’

I knew Stanley must be ill because I’d heard a policeman say he was sick in the head.

‘If they’re not dead they’ll come for you, won’t they?’

Why hadn’t I thought of that? Gloria wouldn’t just leave us here, would she? Wasn’t Stanley always good to me? So as soon as he was well they would come. Wouldn’t they?

My new friend paraphrased my thoughts as though he had read my mind. ‘Well then, when he’s better they’ll come for you. You’re lucky; mine are both dead. Maybe I’ll get adopted, though.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked. Adopt wasn’t a word I’d heard before.

‘It’s when grown-ups want to get a child. They come and look at us and decide which one of us they like best. Then we go and live in their house. We have our own bedroom and a bicycle and a puppy. But they only want to take children who look happy, so I always smile at them.’

I looked at the hope in my new friend’s face, but instead of feeling the same emotion I felt a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

What would happen if Gloria and Stanley didn’t come for us? What if Davie and I got taken away by one of these couples who wanted someone else’s children? How would John find us if we were taken away? I didn’t like the idea that we could be adopted.

Then another worrying thought came into my mind. ‘What happens if they only want to adopt one little boy?’

Nicolas immediately understood the meaning behind my question and said, ‘You’d tell them you were two boys, a pair, not just the one. They only want to take boys who are happy, so when they come, make sure you are together and smiling. Tell them you are brothers and you must look after Davie. Maybe they’d like two boys.’

Seeing that I still looked unconvinced, Nicolas quickly added, ‘Still, if your mum and dad are coming to get you when your dad’s better, you can’t just go off with them.’ Seeing that both Davie and I looked as if we were on the verge of tears, he gave up talking about adoption and asking searching questions.

‘Come on,’ he urged, pointing to an outbuilding that was joined to the main building by a covered walkway. ‘That’s where the lavatories and the washrooms are. Let’s get down to them quickly. We want to get there before everyone else.’

As he hurried towards the brick outbuilding in that uncoordinated lope peculiar to young boys, especially those wearing badly fitting shoes, I wondered why he was in such a hurry. He hadn’t said anything earlier about being desperate for a pee. But when I got there, I realised that you wouldn’t want to be the last one in the queue and have to wait for a space at a urinal or for a cubicle to become empty.

The moment we walked in, the stench of piss and shit attacked my nostrils, making my stomach heave and my eyes water. The uproar of boys jeering and clamouring as they fought their way to the urinals and cubicles filled my ears. Big boys shoved the smaller ones out of the way as they pushed forward. Cubicle doors were pounded the moment someone got inside, whilst shouts of ‘Hurry up, I want to go!’ bounced off the walls. Small boys clutched themselves through the front of their short trousers as, with crossed legs and bent bodies, they jigged desperately from side to side trying not to pee in their pants.

To the right there was a row of urinals too high for Davie or me to use. Wash-hand basins lined the left wall while the cubicles were facing us as we entered – just five cubicles for sixty boys.

We stood in the pushing, wriggling scrum of what passed for a queue and were jostled every few seconds by some larger boy whose need was clearly desperate.

‘Want to go now, Robbie,’ Davie said, uttering the first words he had spoken for most of that long day.

‘Don’t wet yourself,’ I begged, for Davie was not used to having to wait when he wanted to go. Something told me that in this place peeing yourself would be a punishable offence.

Nicolas saw our plight and pushed us quickly forward at the precise moment a boy came out of a cubicle.

‘Go on in. You both go, I’m all right. I’ll use those,’ he said, jerking his hand in the direction of the urinals, which were nearly hidden by the mass of small boys using them, often three at a time using the same urinal.

Almost limp with gratitude, I closed the door, then bile rose in my throat when I saw the inside of the cubicle. Fat bluebottles buzzed above my head, and if the smell outside had been bad, the stench inside was indescribable. Lumps of faeces and clumps of soiled toilet paper clung to the sides of the lavatory, turds floated on the surface of it and yards of that hard transparent toilet paper, so popular in institutions, trailed in the puddles of urine that splattered the floor.

Davie pulled his pants down and tried to hold them up with his knees. He placed both his hands on the broken wooden seat and gingerly sat on them, trying to stop his legs coming into contact with the filthy wet seat. He finished and climbed down, his shorts bottoms wet from the mess on the floor.

There was loud banging on the door. ‘Get a move on in there!’ shouted a voice, and another one joined in. ‘Come on or we’ll break the bleeding door down.’ My fear at that loud angry voice almost stopped me being able to finish peeing.

The area where we washed our hands was hardly any better. The stained basins were beyond grimy and the floor, trampled by sixty pairs of feet several times a day, was smeared with filth. The smell from the nearby urinals was sour and pungent. All of a sudden that outside privy in Devonshire Place, with its neatly cut-up squares of newspaper and its neatly tiled floor, seemed luxurious by comparison.

I washed my hands, then found there was no soap and the soiled roller towel was broken. I just shook them dry, ran them through my hair and went outside to wait for Nicolas.

Davie’s head drooped sleepily. He wanted to sit down. ‘I’m tired, Robbie,’ he said plaintively. ‘Want to go to bed.’

‘He can’t,’ Nicolas told me when he appeared. ‘We have to go to chapel now. If we’re late we get into big trouble with the nuns.’

‘What sort of trouble?’ I asked.

‘Whopped with that leather strap they carry – or even worse, that belt they always wear. Seen the buckle on it? You don’t want to feel that, I can tell you. Sister Bernadette, she’s the worst. She likes hitting us.’ Grabbing Davie’s hand, he helped me to pull him along.

Without his help that day, what would we have done? We were so grateful that he even managed to earn a trusting, watery smile from Davie.

I had never been inside a church before, although this was something I thought it best not to admit. I did know that we weren’t Catholics or ‘Left-footers’, as Gloria had always called them disparagingly.

I told Nicolas that and he looked at me with astonishment. ‘Don’t be stupid, Robbie. Everyone in here is or becomes Catholic. Sister Bernadette makes sure of that.’

‘How?’ I asked.

‘She’ll turn you into one, make you read stuff, say all them prayers and things. Now stop asking questions,’ he said good-naturedly, before I could tell him I wasn’t very good at reading yet and had never been taught to say my prayers.

It was only when we reached the doors of the chapel that I saw the girls who lived in the orphanage for the first time. Wearing long grey skirts with matching baggy jumpers and thick stockings, their eyes were cast demurely downwards, avoiding contact with ours. They walked in a straggly crocodile with a nun bringing up the rear.

‘Shush,’ whispered Nicolas when I pointed them out. ‘We’re not allowed to speak to them. Not ever.’

‘But my sister is in here. She’s a baby.’

He gave me a pitying look. ‘If she’s a baby, she won’t be here long.’

I asked him what he meant but all he would say was that I would find out for myself. I wondered if there was another place where they took babies, just until they grew up a bit more.

Then we were inside. The girls sat on the left facing the altar, the boys on the right. And all the time we were in there, I was conscious of the nuns, two for us and two for the girls, scanning our faces and looking for any sign of disrespect, any sign of a small child falling asleep, or any giggling, talking or smiling – in fact any sins that would give them an excuse to punish us later.

Nicolas and I propped Davie between us. I felt my eyes begin to close as the sounds of the priest’s monotonous voice droned hypnotically on. The words were in Latin and had no meaning to me and my body sagged with tiredness. Dimly I listened to the sermon that at least was in English. I felt my body roll sideways and my eyelids grow heavy. Seeing my eyes flicker shut Nicolas nudged me hard in the ribs and mouthed a warning: ‘Stay awake.’ I dug my nails into my hands trying to stop my eyes closing again and concentrated on prodding Davie, who was dangerously close to sleep.

I saw one little boy about Davie’s age, his thin face white with concentration and his huge unblinking eyes stretched wide as if matchsticks had been inserted to keep them open. He stared straight in front of him but gradually tiredness overcame him, his head drooped, his eyes fluttered shut and his small body swayed forward in the pew. From just behind him a pair of hands shot out and pushed hard in between his shoulder blades. There was a loud thump as he fell forwards, hitting his head on the pew in front. It was as if no one heard the noise; it was completely ignored.

The boy looked dazed as he picked himself up but instead of crying, which I expected him to, he just wrapped his arms around his body protectively, fixed his enormous eyes on the priest and sat silently for the rest of the service.

At last the priest gave what I learnt was the benediction. In his hand he held a golden cross, and he moved it across his body and raised it in the air as he gave his blessing.

I watched the choir follow the priest towards the doors, then the nuns and finally the altar boys who, like the nuns, were dressed in black and white. Still that little boy sat frozen, without a scrap of emotion on his face. I found that my eyes were constantly drawn to him.

When it was time to go outside, Nicolas said we had an hour free before getting ready for bed. The little boy just stood in a corner of the yard, still with his arms hugging his body, staring at something only he could see. He was a skinny scrap of a thing with dark hair and bright blue eyes.

‘His name’s Jimmy,’ Nicolas told me. His mother had died a few months earlier giving birth. The baby was born dead. His father had gone to England to work. There were no other relatives to care for him so he had been put in the orphanage. When visitors came he stared at them, then looked away once he realised that his dad was not among them. This disappointment was to be repeated many, many times for Jimmy’s father never came.

I was dropping with tiredness but we had to sit through half an hour’s religious studies before we were allowed to have a wash and go to bed. By this time Davie was only semi-conscious and I had to half-drag him up the stairs. We followed the crowd to a dormitory, somehow pulled on the sets of pyjamas that were handed to us, and crawled into the beds we were shown to. Exhaustion wiped out the events of the day and I fell mercifully asleep.

O
n my first morning at Sacre Coeur the unmistakable wails of a baby woke me even before the sun had risen. For a few seconds I thought it was Denise and, believing I was at home in Devonshire Place, I stretched and reached my arm over to shake John awake – but my hand touched only air.

I sat up in the bed and realised that I was in the middle of a row of beds and on the opposite side of the room was a matching row. Between us were babies’ cots arranged in a circle and it was from one of them that the cries were coming.

The sound rose, the cries turning into howls of outrage at being ignored. Then I saw a boy of around ten crawling from his bed and going over to the cot. He lifted the baby out, carried him over to his bed and laid him down. I wondered if Denise might be there, so I ran over to have a look but there were only two other cots there and neither of the sleeping babies was her. ‘I’m looking for my baby sister. We arrived yesterday,’ I said to the boy who had picked up the baby. ‘She’ll be in the girls’ section,’ he whispered.

I learnt later that the very young babies, some virtually newborns, were looked after in a nursery that was located in the girls’ section, but once they slept straight through the night the baby boys were brought into our dormitory. At night, before lights out, a large metal pot was boiled in the sick bay, glass bottles were sterilised and the last feed was prepared. They were given to the babies by one of the nuns, assisted by several of the boys who were aged ten or over. The same routine was followed in the morning. They were given their first feed of the day shortly after five-thirty, which was the time the orphanage sprang into life.

That first morning as I watched the boy with his small charge, the events of the previous day came rushing back. I wanted to cry as loudly as that baby but I already knew that if I did no one would come to comfort me.

A bell rang. Boys threw back the bedclothes and jumped out onto the cold floor. Davie remained curled in the foetal position under his covers. I went over to him.

‘Come on, wake up!’ I tried to pull him up but he just lay there, refusing to open his scrunched-up eyes and look at me.

His thumb was in his mouth and tears ran down his cheeks, which already seemed to have lost their plumpness. When I put my hand out to touch him he felt feverishly hot and clammy.

I was too intent on trying to persuade Davie to get up to hear the footsteps approaching our beds and I jumped with fright when I heard a woman’s voice, sharp with anger, addressing my little brother. She spoke so close to my ear that I could feel her breath on the back of my neck.

‘Get out of bed now.’

Davie’s body twitched but he made no sound and didn’t attempt to sit up. Fear slithered up and down my spine and I looked round to see Sister’s Bernadette’s second-in-command, Sister Freda, glaring down at us.

‘Either he gets out on his own or I’ll pull him out and, believe me, he won’t like me doing that,’ she told me angrily.

‘Davie, please,’ I pleaded frantically. ‘Please get up.’ Somehow the fear in my voice penetrated his pitiful lethargy. Without speaking, he slid out of bed and leant sleepily against me, his fingers seeking out my own.

‘First of all,’ she said, ‘you have to learn how to make your own beds.’ She showed us how to make sure the sheets were pulled tight, that not a crease showed and that the corners were tucked neatly in. ‘You will do this every morning. Now come with me,’ she said.

Davie and I were still wearing the faded pyjamas we had been issued with the night before. Did she want us to get dressed or come as we were? She hadn’t said and I looked up at her, worried and confused. She sighed with impatience at what she obviously saw as my stupidity.

‘You’ve both got to get your uniforms, so you can come as you are. Hurry up now. I’ve not got all day.’ With an irritated sniff she turned and walked briskly away. Clutching my pyjamas for fear they might drop down in our haste, we followed her down the passageway into the washroom.

‘These are yours,’ she told us as we entered the cold, high-ceilinged room, handing us each a small pile consisting of a red facecloth, a bar of strong-smelling carbolic soap, a toothbrush and a tin of Gibbs pink tooth powder which, when mixed with water, turned into a paste. Finally there was a washbag to keep everything in. She indicated a numbered hook on the wall where we could hang our things. Davie’s number was 18 and mine, close by, was 20.

She pointed to large buckets of water placed alongside a smaller bucket and some tin bowls. She told us to use the small bucket to scoop water from the larger one, then we could pour it into the tin bowls and wash our faces, necks and hands.

I looked at the brownish cold water which had, unbeknown to me, been brought up from the well earlier that morning by the senior boys, and I recoiled from it. I didn’t want to dip my toothbrush in that muddy liquid, but then I thought of the grim expression on Sister Freda’s face and reluctantly started to wet my facecloth.

Once we had washed to her satisfaction, she sat first me then Davie on a straight-backed chair. She produced a large pair of rusting scissors and swiftly cut our hair so short that our scalps showed through it.

Next we were kitted out in the Sacre Coeur uniform – a uniform so distinctively ugly that no matter where we went there could be no mistaking where we had come from. First we were given our underpants and vests and pairs of long, thick woollen socks with hardened darn marks on the heel. I pulled these on and helped Davie with his and waited until the Sister passed us a pair of coarsely woven, grey woollen short trousers. They were so absurdly baggy that perhaps in different circumstances we might have collapsed in giggles. The woollen jumpers were in almost as bad a condition as those cast-offs of John’s that Gloria had given me when I started school about six months earlier. Lastly, she handed us our boots. Made of thick, scuffed black leather, they came halfway up our calves and laced down the front, and neither pair fitted us very well.

‘Those you will polish every day before morning mass,’ she told us, as she led Davie and me back into the main marble-tiled entrance hall and showed us a large cupboard tucked under the stairs, where polish and old pairs of boots were kept. She unlocked it and passed us a tin of black boot polish and a dirty rag. I remembered Nicolas saying that the nuns sometimes locked you in a dark cupboard and I shuddered, wondering if this might be the one.

Next we went to morning mass, which we were told took place at seven-thirty every morning in the chapel that took over the ground floor on one side of the massive building. As we walked across the courtyard the sun hadn’t fully risen. Nuns appeared through various doors, their black veils flapping like the wings of giant birds and the keys that hung from their belts clinking at every step they took. To my child’s eyes they appeared as dark spirits, moving down gloomy corridors.

At eight-fifteen we all queued outside the mess room until the door was unlocked, showed the sister in charge the cleanliness of our hands, entered silently, said grace and gulped down our breakfast, a bowl of revolting watery porridge. We then stacked our dirty plates and carried them into the kitchen.

Next we were told we would be given chores each day. We should change our boots for thick outside ones if we were working in the acres of vegetable gardens that stretched out in front of the buildings, or in the greenhouses or the dark litter barns where hundreds of chickens were bred behind the orphanage. If we were working inside, in the kitchens or the laundry that were on the opposite side of the courtyard from the chapel, we were to wear knitted slippers.

I don’t remember what jobs Davie and I did that first day. We tried to keep our heads down and obey orders, petrified as we saw children all around us being punished harshly for minor misdemeanours. I listened hard to what the nuns said, hoping to avoid punishment myself, but I soon realised they believed that all the children at the orphanage, even newborn babies, had been conceived in sin and were contaminated. They further believed that these children should be punished for the sins of their mothers and fathers. In fact it was the holy duty of the nuns to punish by rod, strap or birch any child who had an impure thought or had committed an act of disrespect to man, woman or, most importantly, God.

‘Your father tried to kill himself,’ one nun told me, ‘and that’s a mortal sin.’ I worried that I was going to be punished because of Stanley’s actions. How could I know if I was committing an act of disrespect when I didn’t know anything about their religion? It was all very confusing.

That evening followed the same routine as the previous one. At five-thirty we had our supper, then we had an hour to queue up for the lavatories, breathe in fresh air and get to mass. After mass we had half an hour of religious study, then at quarter to nine there was a rush to the washrooms, and nine o’clock was bedtime.

That first day was the beginning of a routine that seldom varied. And as the months passed in Sacre Coeur, I didn’t want it changed; change, as I quickly learnt, was seldom safe.