Street Kid: One Child’s Desperate Fight for Survival. Judy Westwater

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СКАЧАТЬ wildcat, so they had to tie my arms to the bars of the cot with bandages so they could dress my sores. Being tied up meant only one thing to me, so I punched and fought to get away, convinced I was going to get a beating.

      Eventually, one of the nurses managed to soothe me. I looked into her soft brown eyes and felt my terror ebbing away.

      The next day they took me into surgery and made cuts in my neck and arms and inserted tubes to help drain the big lump below my ear. One of them was threaded all the way down to my stomach. When I came to, I was back in the steel cot, covered from head to toe with bandages, and my arms tied to the bars again. I must have slept through the rest of that day and the next night, but don’t remember anything.

      On the second night, as I lay in my steel cot, arms tied and face covered, balaclava-like, with bandages, I tried to pierce the darkness with my eyes. I could hear the other children’s breathing and occasionally they would moan or say something in their sleep. But there was also another noise, which sounded sinister, as if something ghostly was roaming the room: swish, swish, swish, pause, then swish, swish, swish again. I felt like a fly trapped in a web waiting for a hairy, black spider to come and eat me. Swish, swish, swish. The noise was very close now, just the other side of my cot. Then I saw a face looking down at me and realized with relief that what I’d heard was simply the nurse’s starched uniform swishing against her legs as she patrolled the ward, pausing to check on her patients as she went.

      When I was well enough to look around, I saw that I was in a big square room with white walls and a brown lino floor. The sun was streaming in through two tall windows, and along one wall was a row of four steel cots. Facing them were four beds for the older children. In the middle of the ward was a blue table and eight small chairs.

      The gentle nurse I remembered from the night they brought me in was talking to me. ‘I know you’ll like being here between Christening and Lemon.’ She pointed at the kids in the cots on either side of me. What daft names, I thought. It was only later when another nurse came along to change my dressings that I realized that the children were in fact called Christine and Leonard. It was hard to hear anything clearly with my right ear.

      Having my dressings changed was horrible. Only the gentle nurse removed them slowly and carefully. The others all assured me in their no-nonsense way that it was much less painful if they ripped them off really fast.

      ‘There, that wasn’t too bad, was it?’ I hated that false chirpiness and the fact that they clearly didn’t want an answer from me.

      My first meal was a bowl of disgusting brown liquid that looked like dirty water. It must have been beef broth, or something similar, but tasted of nothing. The nurse spooned it into my mouth. ‘Come on, just a few more mouthfuls and then you can have jelly and custard.’ The spoon was very painful as my lips had cuts on them, so she brought a straw and I sucked up the lukewarm liquid with that. I really wanted the jelly and custard so I sucked away at the foul stuff until it was finished.

      Four or five times a day a nurse would put each of us little ones on our potties. I’d be lifted out of my cot, still attached to all my tubes. A few days after I’d arrived, the nurse on duty forgot about me half way through her potty rounds. She’d been distracted by one of the other kids, a naughty red-headed boy who was often in trouble, and had forgotten to come back to me. I waited and waited and after an hour or so thought to myself, I’m just going to have to go. I wasn’t used to asking for help so it didn’t occur to me to do so now. I set about trying to get free instead. I wriggled and wriggled my wrists in their bandage ties until one of them came free, then I managed to untie the other. I tried to get out of the cot but my tubes were preventing me, so I took them out of my neck and arms and grabbed hold of the bars to pull myself to my feet. The cot was quite high off the ground, easily taller than me, but that didn’t stop me clambering over the side and dropping to the floor.

      On wobbly legs, I made my way across the ward to the door I’d seen the older kids use when they needed the toilet. I was sitting there when I heard a huge commotion, a high-pitched raised voice and then a loud click-clack of shoes on the floor. A moment later, my door was flung open and the duty nurse stood there, extremely furious.

      ‘What are you doing, you silly, silly girl. Don’t you know you might have died?’

      I stared back at her, feeling shocked. I could have died? It was only at that moment that I realized how severe my injuries had been.

      Later that day, a group of people walked into the ward. As they approached my cot, I realized with a sickening jolt that one of them was my father. He was a head taller than the rest and as our eyes met I felt quite breathless with fear. He fixed me with a look which said, If you so much as utter one word I’ll kill you. Stiffly, he walked over to my bed, accompanied by my doctor, two nurses and a man and woman wearing dark suits. My favourite nurse slid the side of my cot down, untied my hands from the bars and started gently removing the bandages from my head.

      Sensing my alarm, she spoke to me soothingly. ‘Don’t worry, pet. We’re just going to have a little look and see how you’re doing.’

      The other nurse, who was wearing a dark-blue uniform and cap, then spoke. ‘Judy, can you tell us how your head and face got hurt.’ I shot a nervous look at my father and when I saw his cold grey eyes boring into me, I shut my mouth tight.

      Then the man with white hair took a step closer. ‘Do you remember how you hurt your legs, Judy. What happened?’

      I shrank back from him and when I didn’t speak, the man turned to the doctor and said, ‘Can she hear me?’

      The doctor then came closer and bent his head down. ‘Can you remember anything at all, anything about how you got hurt?’ I pressed my lips together and shook my head.

      At that, my father stepped in, looking like he’d had well enough. ‘How many times do I have to tell you?’ he said. ‘She rode her bike down the hill and crashed into the school railings.’

      I couldn’t tell the others what I knew: that the school wasn’t down a hill, and that I didn’t have a bicycle. But I sensed that the people round my bed didn’t believe his story anyway.

      The white-haired man spoke again, this time to my father. ‘Mr Richardson, I’m afraid that during our investigations your daughter will have to stay here in hospital.’ My father stiffened a little but didn’t say anything.

      Then it was over and they turned to go. My favourite nurse stayed with me and gently put my bandages back and tied my hands again. ‘You’ll see, Judy. We’ll have you as good as new in no time,’ she said with a smile.

      Other than my dad, I didn’t have any visitors for a couple of weeks. Every day, after lunch, there was a queue of people waiting to be let into the ward to visit the kids. We could see them through the window that separated our room from the corridor. They stood there making faces and blowing kisses through the glass. I remember Leonard’s family coming to visit him in the second week. When he spied his parents he stood up in his cot, calling out and waving at them with both hands. Then his mum and dad came in and they swooped Leonard up and gave him a big cuddle. Later, when they’d gone, Leonard showed me two oranges they’d given him, holding them through the bars of his cot. I wished I could have had one.

      Although I wasn’t really expecting anybody to come and see me, I still scanned the queue every day to see if I had any visitors. I’d pretty much given up when one day I saw Uncle George and Auntie Gertie smiling and waving at me through the glass. I felt so warm and happy, it was as if the sun had suddenly poked its head out from between the clouds. I beamed back at them from my cot. By then, my bandages had been СКАЧАТЬ