Father Unknown

by Lesley Pearse

  Ellen didn’t have to go, not now, before Christmas, but she wanted to, Josie felt. She was prepared for Ellen going in January, she wouldn’t have been angry then. She was going to Uncle Brian’s anyway on Boxing Day and staying for the rest of the holidays. But thanks to Ellen, everything was messed up. Mum had suddenly changed her mind, and now she was refusing to let Josie go.

  It wasn’t fair. She wanted to be at the big family party on New Year’s Eve, to have some fun with her cousins, to go to the pantomime and do all the other things Uncle Brian had organized, and most of all she wanted to see Dave again.

  Josie thought he was a dream, with his jet-black hair, chocolate-drop eyes and the longest eye-lashes she’d ever seen on anyone. She loved his college-boy hairstyle, his scooter and that Parka coat with wolf fur round the hood. He had taken her out for a ride on the scooter during the summer and next to being kissed by him it was the most exciting thing she’d ever done.

  Josie wasn’t fooled one bit by Mum saying she couldn’t go now because it wasn’t right for their father to be left without either of his daughters at a time that was for families. As if she cared about his feelings! The real reason Mum wouldn’t let her go was because she was afraid to be left on her own with Dad.

  Over the past months Josie had heard them arguing many times at night. Mum would say that as he didn’t love her, why wouldn’t he give her some money so she could go and start a new life elsewhere. Dad would say there was no money for that, then Mum would bring up selling the farm again. It always ended the same way. Dad would yell that the farm had been in his family for three generations and he wasn’t selling it at any price, ever.

  Sometimes there were slaps, china was smashed and pots thrown, and Josie knew that if she and Ellen hadn’t been in the house, the fights would have been much more serious. So that’s why Mum wanted Josie around, not because she couldn’t bear to be separated from her, but so she wouldn’t get hurt when she pushed Dad too far.

  Josie heard the truck clunking on up the lane and Mum coming back into the kitchen to finish icing the Christmas cake. It was so tempting to go down and tell her that Ellen was only going to Bristol to hide that she was having a baby, but much as she hated her sister at this moment, she couldn’t do that to her.

  Going away to Helston had given Josie a taste of what life was like in a normal family. They talked to one another, sat around and watched TV together, they had family days out, teased one another, and showed affection openly. When she got back here, all at once she understood why she’d always felt her parents were weird and different from other people. It wasn’t as she had supposed just because they farmed and lived in isolation. It was because there was no love between them, not even friendship or shared interests. She felt the hatred flowing between them, and as time had gone by she’d come to despise them for forcing her to live with it.

  She lay back on the bed, looking contemptuously around her. Her mother had moved her out of the room she’d shared with Ellen and into this one which hadn’t been used for years. She’d painted the walls pink, made new curtains and a frill for a wobbly, scarred old dressing table. She expected Josie to be thrilled and grateful. But she wasn’t, she liked sharing the old big room with Ellen, they could chat at night and get into bed with each other when they were cold. But then Josie wasn’t stupid, she knew that was exactly why her mother had moved her. The new room felt like a prison cell, and every moment she spent in it she thought only of how lovely it was in Helston.

  Nothing had worked out since September. Josie’s plan to ignore Ellen in front of their parents had backfired, the only person it made miserable was herself. Ellen didn’t even seem to notice, let alone care, so the only person it hurt was herself. As for Dad, he was hardly ever in the house, so it all washed over him. Josie missed the board-games she and Ellen used to play in the evenings, sharing magazines, doing each other’s hair, and just chatting. Then, once Mum moved the bedrooms round, they got no chance to be alone together.

  The last time they had really talked was when they met in Falmouth after school one day back in November, and Ellen told her about the job she wanted in Bristol as a mother’s help. She said she’d got it from a magazine advertisement, and she was going to tell their parents about it that night, saying she wanted to spend a year in a big city before deciding what she was going to do as a career. She made Josie promise she wouldn’t tell them about the baby, because she was going to a mother-and-baby home around the end of March and she would almost certainly have it adopted once it was born.

  Josie knew then that nothing was ever going to be the same again between them. It was as though Ellen was a different person, so serious and grown-up. But although Josie cried that day about her sister going so far away, and felt as if she was losing her best friend, there was a part of her which was glad, because she thought it would make her mother happier, and that in turn would make things better for her.

  But she couldn’t see any hope of that now. Christmas was never exciting here, but this year it would be horrible without Ellen. January and February were always long, miserable months, the farmhouse was freezing, she would have to battle through ice, snow and rain to school and this time she’d have to do it alone without Ellen.

  She thought too that Dad would blame her for making Ellen go. He had been so sad when Ellen told him she was leaving. He went straight out afterwards, and Josie got the idea he might be crying about it. He wouldn’t cry if she left!

  ‘Come down here, Josie!’

  Josie sighed at the tone of her mother’s voice and reluctantly got off the bed. She couldn’t win, Mum had told her to encourage Ellen to leave, but now she’d finally gone Josie doubted Violet would show any gratitude. She expected she’d have to do twice as many chores now too.

  ‘Why didn’t you go out and say goodbye to Ellen?’ Mum yelled as Josie got to the bottom of the stairs.

  Josie didn’t reply for a moment, looking at her mother critically. Violet had smartened herself up while they were in Helston, but she’d let herself go again. Her perm was growing out now and her hair was so dry it looked like one of those wire-wool pads for cleaning pans. The apron over her dress was filthy, and her feet were bulging over her slippers, the flesh puffy and grey. Yet it was her face that repelled Josie most.

  The bitterness inside Violet showed. Her mouth was pinched and constant frowning had created deep lines around her mouth and on her forehead. It didn’t help that her teeth were crooked and stained brown, or that her skin was so sallow. She looked nearer sixty than her real age of forty-one.

  ‘What’s it to you whether I said goodbye or not?’ Josie replied insolently. Each time she looked at her mother these days she got a stab of fear that she might end up looking the way she did. ‘You’re glad she’s gone, aren’t you?’

  ‘That’s not the point. I don’t want your father thinking we drove her away.’

  ‘I didn’t drive her away, you did that.’

  Her mother lunged at her and hit her hard across the face. ‘Don’t you get lippy with me,’ she roared. ‘I know why you want to go to Helston, and it isn’t to see your relatives, it’s to see that thug with the scooter you were always necking with, you little slut.’

  ‘I’m not a slut,’ Josie held her stinging face and began to cry. ‘Just because you are doesn’t mean I am too.’

  ‘And what do you mean by that?’ Her mother seemed to swell up all over with indignation.

  ‘You got into Dad’s bed before his wife was even cold in the ground,’ Josie yelled back at her. ‘Only a slut would do that.’

  That juicy bit of information had been given to Josie by her grandmother just a week before she died. Of course she was an evil old woman, prone to saying all kinds of nasty things, many of them completely untrue, according to Uncle Brian. But Josie didn’t care whether it was true or not, she just wanted to hurt her mother as she’d hurt her.

  Anticipating another slap, she turned to run back upstairs, but she was halted
at the door by a hard wallop on her shoulder. It knocked her right over, down on to the floor, and when she saw her mother was holding a rolling-pin, her face purple with rage, she tried to scramble away.

  But she wasn’t fast enough. Mum grabbed her by the hair with one hand and hit her again and again with the rolling-pin. ‘You little bitch!’ she screamed. ‘Everything I’ve ever done was for you and you repay me like this!’

  It seemed to Josie that Mum had gone mad. She showered blows on Josie’s head, neck, back and arms, all the time screaming out abuse, so loudly she was drowning Josie’s screams of terror.

  The front door burst open and Dad came rushing in. ‘Stop it, Violet!’ he shouted, pulling her away from Josie.

  Josie had never been so glad to see anyone, but she was so badly hurt that as her mother let go of her hair, she slumped down on to the floor. As if through a mist she saw Dad restraining Mum, pushing her on to a chair, and slapping her face to stop her hysterical screaming.

  The next thing Josie knew, Dad was lifting her up in his arms and holding her protectively to his chest.

  ‘Isn’t it enough that one of our girls has gone today, without beating the other one too?’ she heard him say.

  ‘She asked for it,’ Violet retorted. ‘You should have heard the filth she came out with.’

  Josie clung tightly to her father’s neck, frightened her mother would lay into her again. Perhaps her father sensed this for he ordered Mum out of the kitchen and told her she wasn’t to come back until she’d calmed down.

  It was the first time in many years that Josie had received such tender care from her father. He lifted her up on to the kitchen table, ran his hands gently over her as if checking for broken bones, then bathed her face and neck with a wet, cold flannel.

  ‘Speak to me, Josie,’ he insisted, holding her face in his two hands and looking right into her eyes. ‘Do you know who I am?’

  It was tempting to say nothing, to make believe she was so badly hurt she’d lost the power of speech, so that she could hang on a little longer to this attention and care. But she found she couldn’t do that, she’d never seen such anxiety and fright in his brown eyes.

  ‘Yes, Daddy,’ she said. ‘Mum was like a mad thing.’

  He sighed, and clasped her to his chest in relief. ‘I don’t think anything’s broken,’ he said. ‘But you’ll have some very nasty bruises by tomorrow. What was it all about, my lover?’

  The warmth and comfort of his embrace made her cry. ‘Because I didn’t say goodbye to Ellen,’ she sobbed. ‘I couldn’t say goodbye, I was too upset she was going.’

  He held her silently for a few more moments, then got a bowl of cold water, wetted the flannel again and held it against her cheek and then her temple.

  ‘You go and lie down,’ he said after a little while. ‘I’ll bring you up a hot drink.’

  Josie felt she had to use this opportunity. ‘Send me to Helston to live, Daddy, please! I won’t be able to bear it here any more now Ellen’s gone. Please, Daddy, I thought Mum was going to kill me.’

  ‘If they was my folk maybe I’d think about it,’ he said. ‘But they aren’t, and you are my daughter, so I have to take care of you. You belong here, Josie, with me.’

  ‘But what if she hits me again?’ she asked, fresh tears flooding out.

  ‘She won’t do it again, I promise you that,’ he said. ‘If she lays one finger on you, it’s her who’ll be slung out of here.’

  As Josie made her way upstairs she felt completely bewildered. Although she knew from what Dad had said that she wouldn’t even get another holiday in Helston, let alone move there to live, it didn’t seem to matter quite so much any more. For he had shown her he cared about her.

  January, February and March of 1964 were as miserable as Josie had expected. It was bitterly cold, with endless days of driving sleet which was far worse than snow and she missed Ellen even more than she had thought she would. It was all the little things, Ellen rinsing the shampoo out of her hair over the bath, the chats on the way to catch the school bus, and bringing wood in for the fire together, that caught her unawares.

  Mum was nicer though. She never said anything about that day before Christmas when she attacked Josie, offering no apology or explanation, but she was warmer and kinder. She made little treats for tea, warmed Josie’s school coat by the fire in the mornings, and didn’t keep making her do chores.

  Dad must have laid into her about it, because she even gave Josie the letters Ellen sent, unopened. Not that it would have mattered if she had read them first, Ellen never said anything about the baby. She described Bristol with enthusiasm, spoke of Mr and Mrs Sanderson, her employers, and their two little boys with affection, and it certainly didn’t sound as if she was worried about anything.

  Josie wrote and said Mum wasn’t reading the letters, so she could write whatever she liked, and she wouldn’t leave them about to be found. But that didn’t make any difference, Ellen still only wrote about everyday matters, not even an oblique word or two about getting fat, or going on to the mother-and-baby home.

  By March Josie was convinced she’d been led up the garden path, and Ellen wasn’t having a baby at all. Maybe she did think she was pregnant at first, and that’s why she’d found this job. But then the pregnancy must have turned out to be a false alarm. Josie couldn’t understand why Ellen hadn’t told her that, they could have had a secret celebration. Even if Ellen was still set on leaving home, she would have understood, and backed her up.

  Once they had shared everything, from their dreams and hopes to their socks and knickers. To Josie, letting her go on believing in a lie was the worst kind of betrayal. It was as though she was nothing, someone who couldn’t be trusted.

  It hurt so much to think Ellen cared so little about her feelings. So when her mother made sarcastic comments like ‘A lot of good all those “O” levels did Ellen! Any fool could be a mother’s help,’ she didn’t snap back at her and sometimes she even agreed.

  Yet Ellen’s absence made it easier to convince her parents there was no point in her staying on at school another year to do exams. She would be fifteen in July, and the local paper was full of jobs for office juniors and sales assistants in both Falmouth and Truro. Not that Josie had any intention of staying in Cornwall for any longer than it took to buy some new clothes. She was set on going to London.

  At night in her bedroom, Josie escaped from the loneliness by imagining herself as a world-famous model. She would brush her hair till it stood out like a wild halo around her head, then pose in front of the mirror, draped in a sheet. She had studied lots of pictures of Jean Shrimpton, and it seemed to Josie that she was actually far prettier than ‘the shrimp’, and had a better figure than the model everyone was talking about. All she needed to do was find a photographer like David Bailey and she’d have the world at her feet.

  This dream kept her going when the atmosphere was oppressive at home. It comforted her when she was bottom of the class in tests, and when July and the end of school seemed such a long way away. She barely noticed that Ellen’s letters were becoming shorter and further apart during May, for spring had come at last. Josie had never liked any kind of farm work, even feeding the chickens revolted her, but she went out of her way to please her father by offering to help him plant seedlings, hoe down the weeds and clean out the cow shed. She sensed he missed Ellen badly, though he never said as much, and it felt good when he transferred some of the affection he’d once shown his older daughter to her.

  There was only one thing that really worried her, and that was her mother. Although Josie despised Violet for her slatternly appearance and her embittered approach to everything, she was still her mother. What was going to happen to her when Josie left home?

  It was blatantly obvious that Dad was never going to sell the farm and give Violet money to set up in a home of her own. The most likely thing to happen was that they would fall out so badly once they were alone that he’d throw her out. Young as she was,
Josie knew women fared badly under the legal system, especially when they no longer had any small children. She knew too that her family in Helston didn’t want her mother over there. That left only Josie for her to cling on to.

  Josie was always reading magazines about life in London, and she desperately wanted to enter that world of swinging discothèques, boutiques, pubs and non-stop parties. But she couldn’t be part of all that with her mother hanging on her coat-tails.

  It seemed to her that the only answer was for her to disappear without trace, leaving her mother to find her own solution to her problems. She felt a bit guilty about this, yet it wasn’t her fault her parents hated each other, they weren’t her responsibility. In truth she didn’t feel she owed any of her family anything. Dad had always favoured Ellen. Ellen could hardly be bothered to write to her now, and if her mother hadn’t been so nasty to all her own family she wouldn’t have been cast off by them. Yet disappearing was frightening. What if she didn’t become successful in London, what would she do then?

  ‘But you will be successful,’ she whispered to herself over and over again like a mantra. ‘You are not going to be a failure like Mum.’

  Josie’s fifteenth birthday in early July turned out to be an unexpected turning-point in her life. It fell on a Friday, and for once her mother had agreed that she could spend the whole weekend with her schoolfriend Rosemary Parks at Rosemary’s home in Falmouth.

  Josie opened her presents and cards in the morning before catching the bus to school and was thrilled to find her parents had bought her the black and white mini-dress she had been drooling over for weeks in a shop in Falmouth.

  ‘It’s way too short,’ Dad said, shaking his head not exactly in disapproval but rather in bewilderment when she tried it on. ‘But I suppose I’m old-fashioned.’