The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames

by Justine Cowan

  One night a bomb was dropped that to this day, the tremendous thud it made remains the loudest sound I have ever heard. We were in the shelter and I was sure that the school had been hit, but it turned out that the bomb had fallen just across a lane from the school. I have no doubt that our school was the target, large and prominent as our school grounds were.

  Eight-year-old Dorothy was justified in her fear, as was Lena; schools were particularly vulnerable to destruction, providing a large target for the Germans flying overhead. Once hit, a school was vulnerable to fire, its wood floors and walls serving as kindling, with large assembly halls providing a draft to fan the flames. One of Britain’s worst civilian wartime tragedies took place when a school on the outskirts of London took a direct hit and the building collapsed, the rubble falling into the basement and killing close to six hundred people sheltered there.

  Another night, no bombs fell, but the school was shaken, the glass in windows along the boys’ side of the school shattered. The children emerged the next day to find that a German plane had been shot down on the playing field. There was no sign of a pilot, and the children were told nothing except to stay away, which, of course, they did not. They could see the plane from the playroom window, and when their keepers weren’t looking, the girls would take turns dashing out a side door to look for small pieces of shrapnel for souvenirs. When it was Dorothy’s turn, the only thing she could find was a piece of glass. She stashed it in one of her gym shoes (plimsolls, as they called them) in her locker. Later, forgetting it was there, she cut her foot on it and wound up in the infirmary.

  The raids were constant, planes passing overhead and bombs exploding nightly. When the bombing subsided, the children would be marched back to the dormitories, only to return if another raid occurred. No matter how frequent the raids, the dormitory supervisors would line the children up to use the lavatory each time.

  As the battle over Britain’s skies intensified, the children and staff began to remain in the shelter throughout the night. Sleep didn’t come easily for anyone, and in an uncharacteristic departure from the rules that prohibited entry into the dormitories during the day, children were allowed to take daytime naps.

  One of the few stories my mother told me as a child maps back to this wartime period. I’d come down with chicken pox, and we were on the way home from the doctor, stopping at a neighborhood store for a Popsicle, our sick-day routine. As we passed the corner where the air raid siren had malfunctioned several months before, she said, “I was sick once, like you, when I was a little girl.”

  My mother rarely spoke of her childhood, and although I was still young, I knew that I should listen intently. She had been away, she told me, at a boarding school of sorts. An isolated anecdote with no context, it was a rare glimpse of my mother’s upbringing, a brief retrospection that would happen from time to time and only added to the mystery of her past.

  “It was during the war, the war against the Germans. If you were sick, you had to stay in the infirmary away from everyone else. When the sirens went off, everyone went to the shelter—except me. They left me there, in the infirmary, all alone.”

  Her eyes didn’t stray from the road as she told me her story, and we drove the rest of the way home in silence.

  As a young girl, I hadn’t understood the full meaning of her words, but as I pored over the pages of my mother’s manuscript and studied the hospital’s wartime history, they came back to me with a vivid intensity. I recalled the history of medical treatment during the early years of the Foundling Hospital, how policies were put in place to isolate sick children no matter the cost. I’d visited the site of the former infirmary at Berkhamsted, walked the long hallways, past classrooms and dormitories, down some stairs to the kitchen just above the area where bomb shelters were once located. If something had happened during my mother’s stay at the infirmary, no one would have been able to help her. Had she screamed, her voice would have echoed down empty hallways with no one to hear.

  The secretary had told Lena that “all possible precautions” would be taken to protect Dorothy, and that she “need have no anxiety as to her care.” But they were wrong. They didn’t take care of her or keep her safe.

  My mother would have nightmares decades later, when an air raid siren piercing through the night transported her back to a terrifying time in her life.

  I had nightmares of my own to contend with.

  When I was a child, they were always the same—a feeling of falling, my body sinking into the bed, my head heavy on the pillow. Then the bottom would give way, and I would careen into a deep abyss. Over the years, the falling sensation was replaced with something more sinister. I would see only black, a consuming darkness. I would scream, but no one could hear me.

  I had always assumed that the screaming sensation was only in my mind, but after Patrick and I married, I found out otherwise. “Sweetie, you’re having a nightmare,” Patrick would say, shaking me gently. I had been crying out, but through closed lips. He described the sounds I made as something straight from a horror film, bloodcurdling screams squeezed through a mouth that had been stapled shut.

  In the course of my research into my mother’s past, I came across an article in a psychiatry journal about a man whose Holocaust nightmares would wake him screaming in the night. But the thing was, he had never been in the Holocaust. Instead, he was the child of a Holocaust survivor. I was fascinated by the phenomenon, clinically known as the “epigenetic transmission of trauma.” The article reported research suggesting that trauma might create a chemical coating on a person’s chromosomes, a biological memory that could be passed down to the next generation. The theory is controversial, and the evidence circumstantial at best. But the same researcher had another theory, an interpretation that resonated with me—Holocaust survivors project trauma-related feelings and anxieties, and the child becomes a “reservoir” for the repressed grief of the older generation.

  Either way, whether the transmission of trauma had occurred via an altered chromosome or within my troubled childhood home, my readings on the subject reinforced my early feelings that what ailed our family wasn’t so easily described. Whatever lurked in the shadows, not conveniently identified like a bruise or an open wound, was real enough to cause my horror-movie screams.

  Something else came to mind as I pondered the abuse my mother suffered, a sentence from her manuscript:

  It was in my third year that the canes and leather straps came out and the angry words and detentions began, massively augmented by the reign of terror of the gym mistress, Miss Woodward.

  I hadn’t put the pieces together before this moment.

  While the treatment Dorothy received throughout her childhood was cruel, the true terror she experienced had not started until her third year at the Foundling Hospital. According to my timeline, that would have been after the war had begun—after Lena Weston asked for her daughter back.

  When Lena wrote that letter, my mother had not yet been beaten so viciously that the bruises lingered for weeks. She hadn’t been locked in dark closets, left alone for hours, or thrown into a pool and savagely shoved underwater with a stick. She hadn’t been left in a deserted infirmary during the Blitz, one of the worst bombing campaigns the world had ever seen. Year after year, they’d told Lena that her little girl was “quite well.” But she wasn’t. And the little girl who was in fact far from safe, or fine, or loved, or cared for grew up to be my mother.

  Perhaps there might still have been time for Dorothy at that critical juncture when Lena Weston sent her pleading letters. The damage of early childhood separation might have been irreparable, but I wondered whether the course of our shared destiny would have been altered if the pleas in those letters hadn’t fallen on deaf ears. I remembered an article I’d come across during my research on Operation Pied Piper, about a boy who had been evacuated to the countryside during the war—“Happy Memories of a Shropshire Wartime Evacuee.” When he was five years old, the boy had left the city f
or a farm outside Shrewsbury, just a few miles from Lena’s farm. He’d been enrolled in the local school and spent his free time on the farm, collecting eggs or milking cows. For him, in the bucolic setting of Shropshire, far from the relentless bombing raids that terrorized London, the war was distant, something he only rarely heard about on the battery-powered radio.

  What if they had given Lena her daughter back? Like that boy, Dorothy could have traveled to Shropshire, escaped the horrors of war and of the Foundling Hospital, and experienced the care of a loving mother.

  Of course, that’s not what happened. But fate sometimes offers surprises, and the war would bring Dorothy hope in the most unexpected of ways—in the smiles and generosity of strangers.

  13

  Sustenance

  Like the cross-section of an old oak tree, my childhood can be measured by the food my mother prepared. The early years betrayed no hint of what was to come, and my stomach was regularly filled with a generous array of British fare—thick slices of toast slathered with marmalade for breakfast, its tartness making my mouth pucker; or bangers, crispy brown from sizzling in a cast iron pan, served with a soft-boiled egg in a cup, still in its shell and perched on an ornately carved stand. “Gentle now, just a tap tap tap,” my mother would remind me as I carefully removed the top of the egg to reveal the creamy yolk inside. Lunch was simple but nutritious: soups or canned sardines served with mayonnaise on bread, my mouth watering at the saltiness of the fish. Dinner was savory and substantial, thinly sliced steaks with sautéed onions or hearty stews with chunks of tender beef that melted in my mouth.

  I was around six or seven when the British cuisine disappeared from our table, replaced by American foods made entirely from scratch. Baked macaroni and cheese, browned on top with soft, moist pasta underneath; scalloped potatoes dripping with butter; turkey with chunky cranberry sauce and herbed stuffing. To this day, these are the foods that I turn to for comfort when I’m feeling low.

  Then, in the 1970s, my mother’s views on food began to change. The health food craze was just gaining momentum, and my mother, as always, was ahead of the curve. Eggs and sausages were replaced with dry, tasteless puffed wheat served with unpasteurized milk. I detested the milk, the cream layer on top so thick it formed clumps over my cereal. Each day my mother now handed me a seaweed pill so large that it had to be broken in two, the sharp ends where the pill had been severed scratching my throat as I gulped it down. Gone too was anything that made food palatable—salt, sugar, spices, butter—her once aromatic cooking replaced by bland and flavorless fare.

  I must have complained, perhaps refused to eat. In response, my mother instituted “Junk Food Day.” Once a year, my father would take me and my sister to the grocery store, and each of us would be allowed to pick out any six items that we wanted. I would wander the aisles, looking for anything that would satiate my desire for sweetness and flavor: Cap’n Crunch cereal, pink-and-white frosted animal cookies, a tub of vanilla ice cream with nuts and swirls of chocolate. It was my favorite day of the year. Back home, I would eat it up greedily until my trove was gone. I was never asked to share, although I had learned at an early age that if you left sweets unattended, they would soon be gone, the wrappers in my mother’s bedroom trash bin the only proof of their existence.

  Her health food kick continued through my high school years, until it was replaced by a phase that came and went without explanation. I only discovered it when I came home from college for an unexpected weekend visit and, looking for a snack, found the gleaming white refrigerator empty except for a sturdy cobalt-blue enameled Dutch pot. My mouth instantly began to water as I recognized the stew pot that used to sit for hours on a burner, the low flames tenderizing beef, infusing carrots and potatoes with flavor. I opened it, expecting to see thick brown gravy and instead finding only pale gray globs of cold oatmeal. Later, my father admitted that the thick gruel was all my mother would eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

  Her crazes became more extreme over time, food becoming a salve for whatever ailed her, her newfound fervor akin to religiosity. The big blue pot filled with porridge was joined by a giant juicer the width of our kitchen counter with the look of an arcane medical contraption. Eventually she upped the ante, paying thousands of dollars to attend a “fasting institute” in Oregon in order to cure an inner-ear infection and cleanse her body of toxins. Fasting became a regular part of her regimen, and she would sometimes spend more than a week at a time without food, becoming so feeble she could barely speak.

  Then, after years of jumping from diet to diet, she settled on the most harmful of them all, an extreme set of food beliefs she followed until shortly before her death—vegan raw foodism. This “living food” diet dated back to the 1800s, and was based on a belief that cooking made food toxic and, conversely, raw food staved off illness. Following its rigid doctrine, my mother refused to eat animal products, or any foods that had been processed or cooked. It sounds healthy enough—eating fruits and vegetables supplemented with a few nuts. But the danger of the diet is not what is consumed, but what is not. Following the dietary strictures, my mother refused to eat legumes, dairy, eggs, fish, or tofu, all of which contain proteins or other essential nutrients: calcium, vitamin B12, and more. The press published reports warning of the dangers of extreme raw foodism, but my mother only became more dogmatic, so much so that near the end of her life, when our family was finally able to convince her to see a doctor, she was diagnosed with malnutrition.

  My mother’s obsession was certainly fueled by food crazes common in California, and could perhaps be explained away as an idiosyncratic behavior that was a sign of the times. Maybe she also used food as a form of control, the way I dug a fingernail into the palm of my hand to distract myself when my troubles consumed me. But as I delved into the history of the Foundling Hospital, I wondered if, just as a generous serving of macaroni and cheese had a comforting association with early childhood for me, my mother had found solace in an aching belly, the sharp pangs of hunger providing her with some familiar comfort I would never understand.

  AS THE FOUNDLING Hospital got under way in the mid-1700s, eminent physicians were developing a diet meant to produce strong and healthy children who could withstand a life of service. Sir Hans Sloane, one of the doctors who oversaw care of the foundlings, believed that two out of three infants would die if they were not breastfed, and that those who survived might suffer from gripes (colic), green stools, or an irritated gut. Another one of the hospital’s physicians agreed, rejecting practices of the day such as feeding an infant butter, sugar, or a “little roast Pig.”51 Although one of the governors lodged concerns that the nurses’ “mental and bodily maladies would be communicated to their sucklings,”52 in the end the advocates of breastfeeding prevailed. An elaborate system for hiring and overseeing wet nurses was instituted. If an infant would not suckle, Sir Sloane recommended that the infants be given breast milk by spoon.

  The physicians also suggested that the children consume broths made of the “Flesh of full grown Animals, because their Juices are more elaborate”; that food not be sweetened as was the custom “with Sugar, Spice and sometimes a Drop of Wine”; and that foundlings be given good bread and cow’s milk, but never boiled, as it makes it “thicker, heavier, and less fit to mix and assimilate with the Blood.”53 While the advice was wide-ranging, the central philosophy of providing nourishment to foundlings was summed up by Dr. Cadogan: a foundling “bred in a very plain, simple Manner . . . will therefore infallibly have the more Health, Beauty, Strength, and Spirits.”54 The doctor believed every child was born healthy and strong, but that such an advantage was lost due to nurses, aunts, and grandmothers, who had “been in the wrong, [and done] Mischief to Children . . . cramming them with Cakes, Sweetmeats, etc. till they foul their Blood, cloak their Vessels, pall the Appetite, and ruin every Faculty of their Bodies; as by cockering and indulging them, to the utter Perversion of their naturally good temper, till they become quite froward an
d indocile.”55

  And so the Foundling Hospital served small and plain meals. Breakfast might be bread and butter, gruel, or milk porridge. Dinner (the term used for lunch) would be rice pudding, or mutton and greens. The day would end with a light supper of broth, or just some bread and cheese. While foundlings following this diet in the eighteenth century were likely to have been malnourished by modern standards, they were well fed compared to other poor children of the time.

  In the 1930s, the Foundling Hospital diet remained repetitive and bland. Dinners during my mother’s time there might have consisted of mutton with white beans or steamed or boiled fish, its pungent odor filling the dining hall where the foundlings ate in silence. The food was largely unappetizing—boiled cabbage, lumpy rice, meat encased in yellow fat and gristle, and white margarine more useful for slathering on tiny hands to lessen the sting of a cane than for food. While early records of hospital practices make no mention of tea, likely due to Governor Hanway’s strong objections to its consumption, by the twentieth century afternoon tea was commonplace, though simple, served with bread and treacle (molasses) or jam.

  The staff dined on more appetizing fare: bacon, roasted meat, coffee, butter, and occasionally rich desserts. The adults’ food was also more plentiful, and the children would take any opportunity to steal leftovers from uncleared trays left in a hallway. Always hungry, Dorothy clamored to be chosen when the kitchen requested volunteers to help shell peas or chop vegetables, popping a fair share in her mouth when the cooks weren’t looking. Sometimes the kitchen would even reward volunteers with a dessert from the tastier menus offered in the staff dining room.