Smile Though Your Heart Is Breaking. Pauline Prescott

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СКАЧАТЬ room to the songs of Fats Waller or the Ink Spots playing on the gramophone. Under dangling paper chains Dad would waltz me laughingly around on his feet, clinging to the back of his legs until I was giddy.

      The best part was when my brother Peter and I were allowed to open the presents my parents had placed either side of the fireplace for us. Apart from the usual apple, orange and banana, there would always be some special gift they’d saved especially hard for – like my brother’s bicycle or the sleeping baby doll I’d coveted ever since I’d spotted it in Garner’s Toy Shop window. When the doll was replaced by another just before the school holidays, I cried all the way home. To my astonishment, there she was on Christmas morning, batting her long eyelashes at me. From Mum’s wages as a part-time cleaner and my father’s as a bricklayer a little money had been put into a savings club until there was enough.

      Now aged sixteen, I was about to give birth to my own baby doll, the one I prayed would bring back its airman father from wherever he’d returned to in America. I’d written and told him about our child but he hadn’t replied yet. Maybe once the baby was born, he’d divorce his wife and send for me to marry him as he’d always promised he would.

      I thought back to Christmas two years earlier, the first that Mum, Peter and I had faced a few months after we’d watched Dad’s coffin being lowered into the ground. That Christmas, I was invited to a party at the local American airbase for children who’d been orphaned or bereaved. A scrawny fourteen-year-old, I’d stepped nervously into that mess hall and thought I’d been transported to Hollywood. The scene was like something in the movies that transfixed me every Saturday afternoon at the Regal Cinema in Foregate Street, Chester. The hall was filled with clowns, balloons and entertainers. A trestle table groaned under oversized platters of exotic food. There was cream and frosted icing, the likes of which I’d never known because of rationing. Smiling shyly at the handsome men in uniform who reminded me of Rock Hudson or Clark Gable as they handed out gifts, I was star-struck.

      Had that Christmas party only been two years earlier? Before my brother got sick? Before my widowed mother had her accident? Before I met the father of my baby? It seemed like a lifetime ago. The words of my favourite song, ‘Unchained Melody’, sprang unbidden into my head.

      Oh my love, my darling,

      I’ve hungered for your touch a long lonely time. And time goes by so slowly and time can do so much. Are you still mine?

      I need your love…God speed your love to me.

      

      The bell ringing in Sister Joan Augustine’s hand snapped me from my reverie. Her long black habit making her seem taller than she really was, she stood in the doorway of our dormitory as she had every morning for the three months that I’d been a resident at St Bridget’s House of Mercy, a home for unwed mothers in Lache Park. Apart from Mother Superior, whose office I’d tremblingly approached with my suitcase that first day, Sister Joan Augustine was the nun I feared the most.

      ‘Come along now, girls!’ she cried, clapping her hands together impatiently. ‘Stop dawdling.’ Dutifully, and in various stages of pregnancy, we twelve teenagers heaved ourselves upright, grabbed our wash bags and formed an orderly queue for the bathroom. With one bath shared between each dorm, we were only allowed a few minutes each before we had to dress and troop down to the chapel.

      Because it was Christmas, the nuns had decorated a small tree in the room where we’d be permitted to greet family and friends later that afternoon. Its sparsely decorated branches were a bittersweet reminder of happier festivities beyond the former convent’s walls. There would be no traditional gatherings by the family hearth for any of us that year. No pile of presents. No oranges or cute baby dolls. Instead, we’d quietly eat our breakfast cereal in the refectory, each lost in memories of Christmases past. Then we’d fall in for normal duties: peeling potatoes in the kitchen, working in the laundry or scrubbing the cloisters’ floor. We were young, some the victims of sexual abuse, others (like me) too innocent to understand the consequences of what we’d done. All of us were waiting for babies we were expected to take home or hand over uncomplainingly for adoption.

      In a few days’ time, my turn would come. Excited and terrified in equal measure, I dreaded the birth but fervently hoped my baby would arrive before those of two other girls in my dorm whose babies were due imminently. Sister Joan Augustine had promised the first child a beautiful Silver Cross pram that had been donated to the home by a well-wisher. That pram was gorgeous, with its cream enamel paintwork with a silver flash and its grey cloth hood. Not since I’d spotted the doll in the toy-shop window had I wanted anything quite so badly.

      What I longed for even more, though, was to gaze into the eyes of the infant whose steady heartbeat matched mine. I ached to hold its tiny fingers. I wanted to kiss its cherub face. I was convinced that one look at those innocent features would change my mother’s mind. Setting eyes on her first grandchild, she would announce (I felt sure) that we couldn’t possibly give it up and that somehow – even though we both worked full time and couldn’t afford help – we’d manage.

      Kneeling in the chapel that cold December morning, my swollen tummy pressed against the pew, I bowed my head. ‘Please God, let me keep my baby,’ I whispered, my knuckles white through the skin of my hands. ‘Don’t let them take it away.’

      If my prayers could only be answered, that would be a million times better than any doll or any pram. It would be the best Christmas present ever…

       One

      I DON’T KNOW WHAT MY MOTHER’S CHRISTMASES WERE LIKE WHEN SHE WAS a little girl, but I don’t suppose they were much fun. Christened Minnie Irene Clegg but known to all as ‘Rene’, she rarely spoke of her childhood except to tell me that her father Joseph had died of war wounds when she was three, leaving her mother Ada to raise four small children.

      From a devout Salvation Army background, Ada met another man and had six more children by him, making ten in all, although some died along the way. Sadly, the man Ada ended up with was a violent and abusive drunk, so my mother, her younger sister Ivy and her two brothers were sent into a children’s home and then into service. Auntie Ivy, who was known as ‘Little Titch’, was much taller than my mother who stood at just over five feet. Despite her diminutive height and the fact that there was only a year between them, Mum was ‘the boss’. The two women were so in tune with each other that they could sense if the other was unwell or in trouble. If one had an accident, the other seemed to a few days later. We named them ‘the Golden Girls’.

      When Ivy moved to Southampton to take up a position in a country mansion owned by a lord, Mum had no choice but to remain in Chester where she had a job as a maid in one of the old houses owned by the Welsby family of wine merchants. She missed her sister terribly, even more so after Ivy married Len, a bus conductor and later had a daughter, my cousin Anne. In the privacy of her attic bedroom, my mum would shed tears for the sister from whom she’d never before been separated. Looking mournfully out over the rooftops, she’d wonder where Ivy was and what she was doing. On one such day, her eyes fell upon a good-looking young man clambering about on the roof of a hotel across the street. Spotting my mother in the window, he smiled and waved.

      From that moment on, my mother’s mood lifted. Every chance she’d get, she’d run up to her room, heart pounding, to see if the handsome bricklayer was still working on the roof. Each time she saw him, she’d wave happily and he’d wave back. Eventually, he waited for her by her employer’s back door to ask her name. His was Ernest Tilston, and within a year they were wed.

      Ernie was the youngest СКАЧАТЬ