Smile Though Your Heart Is Breaking. Pauline Prescott

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СКАЧАТЬ that my mother, who’d been a maid, had always told me that if I boiled them the way he said the eggs would burst. Shaking his head, John said, ‘Well, you don’t even know how boil an egg!’ Within minutes two raw ones were cracked on his head, the yolks dribbling down his face.

      Those silly spats all seemed meaningless as I headed towards Paul ill in a hospital bed. Meningitis. What was that exactly? It sounded so serious. What if he didn’t recover? The closer we got to the hospital the more my head whirled with all sorts of wild notions.

      By the time we reached the children’s ward and were directed to the little bed where Paul lay, I was all but convinced that we’d be too late. It was such a relief to see him, even if he didn’t seem as delighted to see me. He was sitting up in bed in his little hospital gown and we were even allowed to take him outside in the sunshine for some fresh air. John had brought his camera along again and took some photos of me holding Paul in my arms.

      When we brought him back to the ward, a doctor told us the results of his tests. ‘It’s not meningitis after all. He has a slight fever and we’ll keep him in a couple of days for observation, but don’t worry, he’ll be fine.’ I could have kissed him.

      The hardest thing was leaving Paul alone in hospital that night. It was late and John and I both needed to be back in Chester for work the following morning. We had to leave straight away and catch the last train, though we’d still not be home until the early hours. I sat alongside my sleepy toddler and stroked his hair. I kissed his face with my tears as he looked silently up at me with those big blue eyes.

      ‘Come on now,’ John said, taking me by the elbow. ‘You’ll not do Paul any good wearing yourself out.’

      Getting to my feet and gathering my things together, I took one last lingering look at my poorly little boy and blew him a kiss. ‘Night, night, darling,’ I said. ‘Mummy will be back soon. I promise.’

      Little did I know that it was a promise I would never keep.

      Thankfully Paul recovered quite quickly. It was some sort of mild virus, the doctors thought, and would have no lasting effects. I planned to visit him once he was back at the nursery as soon as I could arrange time off work.

      Then Mrs Cotter came to call. ‘Paul can’t go back to the Ernest Bailey Nursery, I’m afraid, Pauline,’ she told me. ‘They don’t keep children for more than two years and he’s already been there longer than anyone else. It would be in Paul’s best interests if he was placed in foster care now.’

      ‘But I never agreed to that!’ I cried.

      ‘This is what everybody thinks would be best for Paul. We’ve found a lovely couple in Wolverhampton who couldn’t have children of their own. They’re in their mid-forties. He’s a deputy headmaster and she’s a school nurse. What Paul needs now is the sort of one-to-one care only they can offer.’

      ‘How long?’ I asked.

      ‘Until his next review,’ she said. ‘In a year.’

      My stomach lurched. A year was such a long time in a child’s life. He was already growing so fast. Would he even know me after all that time? ‘Will I be able to see him?’ I asked, afraid of the answer.

      She hesitated. ‘That wouldn’t be advisable. He’d find it too unsettling, especially after his recent illness.’

      Both Mrs Cotter and my mother were immovable. They had made the decision for me, it seemed. There was no viable alternative that I could offer Paul. In a year’s time, maybe there would be. John had already been so kind. He knew how I felt about keeping Paul and if things developed between us as I hoped they would, then it went unspoken that the boy would end up living with us one day.

      OK then, I reasoned, trying desperately to put a brave face on a helpless situation, this buys me a little more time. After all, a lot can happen in a year…

       Six

      THE NEXT TWELVE MONTHS WERE PIVOTAL, NOT LEAST BECAUSE JOHN AND I were growing increasingly fond of each other. Ours hadn’t been love at first sight as it had for my parents, but over time we came to care deeply for each other and it seemed more and more likely that we’d end up together.

      John was still working on the ships, travelling back and forth to New York, mostly on the MV Britannic. He also went to Canada, the Middle East and South America on exotically named vessels like the Franconia, the Amazon, the Corinthia, the Mauretania and the Saxonia. He visited places I’d never even heard of like Auckland, Panama, Barcelona and Larnaca. Using a cine camera he’d bought in the United States he took footage of himself and his mates on the ships and on days off leaping among the giant stones of the Parthenon, on pleasure boats in Istanbul or walking European streets. More handsome than ever with his longer hair and fashionable sideburns, and wearing drainpipe jeans and winkle-picker shoes, he was quite the cosmopolitan man of the world. In New York, he became hooked on jazz and began to bring records back from around the world. I had already been switched on to jazz by my brother, so we now had something new in common. Whenever he returned from a trip, he’d rush home bearing gifts for everyone he knew and loved. He even brought an American washing machine back for his mother once, wheeling it all the way down Fifth Avenue to the ship, and having it rewired for her back in Britain.

      Always so thoughtful, he’d arrange all sorts of surprises for me, not all of them entirely within the rules. He and his fellow stewards used to take turns to do ‘firewatch’ on the Britannic, which meant guarding the ship when she was in dock to make sure she came to no harm. A quick bribe to whomever was on duty meant that John could smuggle me on board to spend the evening with him in one of the ship’s finest state rooms. It was highly irregular but, my-oh-my; we had a high old time in those luxury cabins.

      He surprised me another time by announcing that he was taking me to London for the weekend. We’d see all the sights, he said, and he’d booked us a nice double room at the Strand Palace Hotel. I’d never been to London before and was very excited. I wanted to see Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square and Buckingham Palace where, who knows, I might even spot the Queen. When John told my mother what he was planning, though, she imposed one condition. ‘I want to see the hotel receipt,’ she said. ‘Two separate rooms, John. That’s how it will be.’ Poor John did as she’d asked which made the whole trip doubly expensive. Not that we ever used the second room. Exactly the same thing happened when he took me to the Isle of Man.

      All seemed to be going well for us but not long after my nineteenth birthday I went down with a bad dose of the flu and was confined to bed. To my surprise, John turned up at my mother’s house to see me. I decided I must be delirious. Wasn’t he supposed to be in New York?

      ‘I’m not here by choice, Paul,’ he said. He’d always called me ‘Paul’, and I loved the endearment.

      I dragged myself up on my pillows and stared at him.

      ‘I’ve been sacked.’

      ‘Why?’ I mumbled, my head full of cold.

      He grimaced. ‘The air conditioning broke down and it was like a furnace below decks. I went to the captain to complain but he called me a troublemaker.’

      I knew John had been pushing to get better trade union representation at sea and I knew that his political passions weren’t popular with his employers, СКАЧАТЬ