Winnie of the Waterfront

by Rosie Harris

  It was penance with a vengeance, she thought angrily. Her rightful place was within the brick walls of the home, where she was held in awe because of her position as Reception Mother. She was used to children being brought to the home and then handed over into her care, not having to go out and fetch them. If Winnie Malloy had been physically fit it would have been different. They could have taken a tram for the return journey, like she had done when she’d been coming to St Francis’s.

  Father Patrick showed no emotion as Sister Hortense grabbed the handle of the wheelchair and prepared to set off with Winnie. His formal blessing on the doorstep was impersonal. He uttered no special words of consolation to Winnie over the loss of her mother. When she begged him to let her dad know what had happened to her if he should ever come home, he merely nodded.

  In her heart, Winnie knew that Father Patrick thought that Trevor Malloy would never return. Some of the hope, which she’d been clinging on to ever since the terrible news had arrived to say that he was missing, ebbed away.

  Chapter Ten

  WINNIE HAD NEVER seen such a grim, forbidding building as the Holy Cross Orphanage. It looked more threatening than any of the courts or alleys off Scotland Road. In the fading light of a late October afternoon, the gaunt four-storey building, with its twin towers at the front, looked like a bleak fortress.

  A flight of stone steps led up to a high, studded oak door, and there were six-foot-high iron railings, with sharp spikes at the top of them, completely surrounding the building. The main windows were tall and narrow and had wooden shutters. The cellar windows were much smaller and had bars across them. Winnie wasn’t sure whether the glass in them was dark green or simply grimed with dirt. Narrow stone steps led down to the cellar and at the rear of the building there were three large wooden doors with chutes in front of them where coal, wood and heavy goods could be unloaded.

  A flagstone yard surrounded the building, but not a single strip of garden. There were no trees, bushes or flowers to relieve the stark harshness of the austere structure.

  Sister Hortense pushed Winnie’s carriage to the foot of the stone steps at the front of the building and wedged it into the railings.

  ‘Wait here. I’ll have to find someone to carry you and your chair inside,’ she told her sharply.

  Left on her own, Winnie studied her new home in dismay. Carswell Court had been dreary and dirty, and in summer the stench from the shared privies was unbearable. There had been hordes of flies that could bite and sting and bring up red weals on people’s face and hands. There were mice, cockroaches, fleas, and even rats scampering amongst the piled-up rubbish in the back jiggers. Even so, the atmosphere there was more welcoming than in this place, she thought uneasily.

  It scared her, and she hadn’t even been inside! She dreaded the thought of having to live here. With its shuttered and barred windows and spiky iron railings all round, it would be like being in prison!

  She’d heard rumours about the Holy Cross Orphanage, but she’d never really taken them seriously. All the teachers were nuns and they were known to be very strict. They strove constantly to keep the inmates of the orphanage free from sin, and talked incessantly about damnation, Purgatory and the fires of Hell.

  It would be far worse than school, Winnie thought unhappily. Not only were there lessons to be done, but she had heard that everyone was expected to work and undertake all sorts of menial duties to help run the place.

  Winnie looked at the twenty wide stone steps that led up to the front entrance. They were scrubbed as white as marble and she wondered whose job it was to do that. She looked at the dozens of windows and thought of all the armaching work that must go into keeping them clean.

  At school the day eventually ended and you were free to go home. This place would not only be a school, but her home as well. There would be no end to the day, no escaping to the solitude of her own home. The regime would be there all day and every day for as long ahead as she could see. She didn’t even know if they’d be allowed to leave their prison to go to church on Sundays, or whether a priest came and held a service there.

  She looked up and down the deserted street in panic. If only she could walk, even a short distance, she thought she would try to escape before Sister Hortense came back.

  The sound of footsteps coming up the stairs from the direction of the front cellar warned her that it was too late to make her escape. Her fate was sealed. Once they took her inside she was in their care until she was fourteen. She shuddered: that meant it would be almost five years before she could leave the building again.

  Winnie’s premonition of what the future held in store began to come true right from that moment. The three big girls who came up from the cellar stared at her as if she was a freak in a sideshow.

  They were dressed alike in long, grey calico dresses covered by starched white aprons. Their hair was cut very short to about an inch above their ears. They stood in a huddle, looking at her speculatively for a long time before they spoke to her.

  ‘What’s your name, kiddo?’ the biggest of the three asked.

  ‘Winnie. Winnie Malloy.’

  ‘I’m Gladys, and these two are Maisie and Babs. What’s wrong with your legs?’

  ‘I was ill a long time ago and since then I can’t walk.’

  ‘Not at all?’

  Winnie shook her head. ‘Not properly. I can get around a bit, but only if I’m holding on to furniture or to someone’s arm.’

  ‘So do people push you around in this thing all the time?’ Gladys asked, tapping her hand on the carriage.

  When Winnie bit her lip and nodded the three girls stared even harder.

  ‘Come on, then, or Sister Hortense will be on our backs,’ Gladys ordered. ‘You two grab the front and I’ll take the handle and we’ll bump it down the steps. Ready?’

  The next minute Winnie found herself subjected to bone-shaking movements as the three girls struggled with her chair.

  ‘Why don’t we get her out of it, Gladys, and then Maisie and me can take it down the stairs while you stay here with her,’ one of the girls suggested.

  ‘If you do that, how am I going to get down there?’ Winnie asked.

  The three girls looked at her blankly. ‘You said you could walk a bit,’ Babs reminded her

  ‘Only if I have something to hold on to, like a handrail or a banister.’

  ‘There’s nothing like that,’ Maisie said.

  ‘We could carry her!’ Gladys suggested.

  They tried to pick her up, but she cried out as they twisted her crippled legs in their crude attempts to do so.

  ‘No, we’d better leave her where she is and try and lug her and the chair down the steps,’ Gladys affirmed.

  Winnie felt scared out of her wits, and was almost as exhausted as they were by the time they reached the bottom step. Every movement had jarred her through and through. Several times, as her carriage tipped at a dangerous angle or swayed dangerously, she’d thought she was going to be tipped right out if it.

  The trauma of being carried down the stone steps was wiped from Winnie’s mind a few minutes later by the reception she received from the crowd of curious children waiting to see the newcomer. They were all dressed exactly alike, the same long, grey calico dresses and starched white aprons as the three girls who had been sent to collect her from the roadside. They even had their hair cut in the same regulation style. It made their scrubbed, expressionless faces all look so much alike that Winnie wondered if she would ever be able to tell one from the other.

  They clustered round her, not so much intrigued by her crippled legs as by her luxurious black ringlets. They fingered them enviously, stroking them and rearranging them around her face until Sister Hortense arrived and put a stop to what she termed ‘such wicked behaviour’.

  ‘That means an Act of Contrition for all of you tonight,’ she scolded. ‘I shall decide what it is to be later,’ she added, her mouth tight with displeasure. ‘You, come with me!’ She stret
ched out a hand and took hold of Winnie’s arm as if she intended to pull her out of the chair.

  ‘She can’t walk, Sister! Look at her legs!’ one of the girls shrieked.

  ‘That will do! One more word from any of you and it will be detention for a week.’

  ‘Now,’ she looked from one worried face to another then jabbed a finger into the chest of three of them, ‘you three carry the child to the ablution room.’

  ‘Yes, Sister Hortense.’

  The three selected girls grabbed hold of Winnie and struggled to pull her from the chair.

  ‘Hold on, you’re hurting me,’ Winnie protested. ‘The best way is if one of you takes hold of my legs and lifts them over the side of the chair, and then you stand on either side of me so that I can lean on you both.’

  The girls looked at each other, then nodded in agreement and did as she asked.

  When they reached the ablution room they found Sister Hortense already there and that several other girls were filling the tin bath from large jugs.

  ‘Remove her clothes and help her get those irons off her legs, then put her in the bath,’ Sister Hortense ordered.

  Despite her struggles and protests Winnie found herself immersed in the bath of hot water, to which Sister Hortense had added so much Condy’s Fluid that it had turned the water a bright pink.

  Sister Hortense stood with her arms folded and kept well away from the water as one of the bigger girls rubbed at Winnie’s scrawny body with a harsh brush and a swab of rough flannel that felt like sandpaper on her tender skin. Then she pushed Winnie’s head under the water to rinse the soap out of her hair.

  ‘Right. Take her out of the bath, wrap her in a towel and sit her on the stool over there, and then leave,’ Sister Hortense ordered.

  ‘She can’t walk, not a step, we had to carry her all the way,’ Gladys Wells said, wide-eyed with concern.

  ‘You heard my orders! One more word and you’ll be punished. Now go!’

  The girls slipped away like mice, closing the door gingerly behind them, but not before they’d peeped over their shoulders and stared in fascination at Winnie’s wasted legs.

  As soon as they were alone in the room, Sister Hortense walked slowly round Winnie, then without a word produced a large pair of scissors from an inside pocket in the skirt of her black habit. With a brisk, swift movement she seized a handful of Winnie’s dripping wet hair. There was a sharp rasping noise and a bunch of black ringlets dropped down onto the floor at Sister Hortense’s feet.

  Winnie’s scream was like that of a tortured animal.

  ‘Quiet!’ Sister Hortense hissed. ‘One more sound and you’ll be severely punished.’

  Winnie stared at her in horror. ‘My hair! What are you doing?’

  ‘Cutting it, my child,’ Sister Hortense told her calmly. ‘Haven’t you noticed that all the girls here have their hair short?’

  ‘I don’t want mine short,’ Winnie protested. ‘I like my curls.’

  ‘Then it is time you realised that such vanity is sinful. All the more reason to have those ringlets removed. Being vain is one of the most grievous sins of all, and unless it is curbed you will be condemned to Hell’s fiercest fires.’

  ‘That’s stupid! If God gave me curls then he’s not going to punish me for liking them!’

  ‘How dare you answer me back!’ The hard edge of Sister Hortense’s hand caught Winnie across the face.

  Winnie’s lips clamped together to stop herself from screaming. She was shaking with a mixture of fear and humiliation as the scissors completed their savage attack.

  ‘That brings you into line with the other girls here, so I hope we’ll have no further tantrums, Winnie Malloy. Understand? You’ve sinned enough with your blasphemy already. You will be punished, make no mistake about that. It merits at least one Act of Contrition.’

  Silent tears streaming down her cheeks, her entire body trembling, Winnie said nothing. She heard the door shut behind Sister Hortense and sat shivering as she waited for someone to bring her some clothes and help her from the ablution room.

  The minutes dragged endlessly, and by the time Gladys came back Winnie was shivering with the cold and starving hungry. As Gladys helped her into the standard uniform worn by them all, Winnie ran a hand over her head and then recoiled as she felt the harsh stubble that was all that remained of her long black ringlets.

  ‘She’s cut your hair off so short that there’s nothing at all left of it,’ Gladys sympathised. ‘Even your scalp shows through!’

  Winnie chewed on her lower lip. ‘I know, she’s a right cow, the old witch.’

  ‘Ssh! Don’t say that! The walls have ears around here,’ Gladys cautioned uneasily. ‘If she hears you say one word about her you’ll be in terrible trouble.’

  ‘She’s already threatened me with damnation because I screamed when she chopped at my hair, but I don’t believe her. I told her that if God has given me lovely hair then he’ll expect me to like it and to look after it.’

  Gladys stared at her, goggle-eyed. ‘What did she do when you said that?’

  ‘Told me I’d be punished. Talked about making me do an Act of Contrition.’

  Gladys shuddered. ‘You’ll have to do that before you go to bed tonight. We all have to be in the dormitory with lights out in ten minutes so you’d better hurry along and get it over with or you’ll be in even more trouble.’

  ‘I don’t know where to go or what to do,’ Winnie told her. ‘Anyway, what about my meal? I’ve had nothing to eat since this morning.’

  Gladys clamped a hand over her mouth. ‘We’ve had supper! I was told to have mine before I came to get you. I thought you were being given yours separately. Everything will have been cleared away by now.’

  Winnie looked at her in disbelief. ‘You mean I won’t be getting any?’

  Gladys shook her head. ‘Doesn’t look like it!’ Her face brightened a little. ‘You haven’t missed much. We only had a slice of bread and dripping and a mug of tea, and the milk in that was off.’

  Chapter Eleven

  OVER THE NEXT few days, Winnie suffered one humiliation after another and was shocked to find that they were mostly from the nuns. They seemed to regard her as some sort of demon who had been dropped into their midst, and resolutely tried to oust the evil spirit inside her.

  She bore their comments and actions as stoically as she could, determined not to let them see how much they upset her. She refused to let Sister Hortense or any of the other nuns know how much they frightened her with their threats of Hellfire and damnation. She tried not to look upset when they levied Acts of Contrition as punishment for things they said she’d done, or as atonement for sins she knew she hadn’t committed.

  The thing she cared about most was losing her hair, and no matter what they said or did that was always uppermost in her mind. Her dad had been so proud of her black ringlets and every time she brushed or combed her hair she’d thought of him and the way he had stroked them and told her how lovely they were.

  Now, her bristly scalp was like a badge of shame. She also felt that by cutting off her hair, Sister Hortense had confirmed in some way that her dad was gone and she’d never see him again.

  Her first night sleeping in a dormitory with over twenty other girls was quite an ordeal because they were all so curious about her deformed legs.

  She wished she could hide her affliction from them, but it was impossible. She’d been told she would have to leave her invalid chair downstairs which meant that she needed help to get up the stairs. She found that most of the girls were willing to assist her. If they weren’t strong enough to support her weight then they would fetch things for her, or find someone else who could hold her up.

  The hard bed and thin blanket were not very much different from what she had been used to at home, so in spite of the strangeness of her surroundings Winnie found she slept soundly. On the first morning, the early morning bell had startled her and for a minute she couldn’t make out where she was o
r what was happening. There was so much activity going on all around her as all the girls hurriedly dressed and tidied their beds.

  ‘You’d better stay where you are. None of us have got time to see to you,’ Gladys told her. ‘I’ll tell Sister Theresa that I told you to do that so you won’t be in any trouble.’

  Sister Theresa was small and fat. She came bustling into the dormitory full of authority, then began tutting, muttering and crossing herself, invoking the mercy of the Holy Mother, when she saw Winnie’s legs for the first time. ‘Can you try and dress yourself and I’ll find someone to help you get downstairs,’ she said as she hurried away.

  When she was eventually helped downstairs, Winnie was shocked to find that her chair had been moved and that no one seemed to know where it was.

  ‘Sister Hortense said it was to be thrown out as rubbish,’ Babs whispered.

  ‘As rubbish!’ Winnie exclaimed, her eyes filling up with tears. ‘She can’t do that, I won’t let her! My dad made that for me, I want it back!’

  ‘You can stop your tantrum right away,’ Sister Hortense told her, overhearing. ‘It’s crude and ungainly and takes up far too much space. From now on you will use one of the orphanage’s wheelchairs, and you can think yourself very blessed indeed to be allowed to do so.’

  When she saw it, Winnie had to admit that it was a great improvement on her old chair. It was a proper wheelchair with two very big wheels that made it possible for her to move herself around. There was also a little shelf in front to put her feet on so that they weren’t sticking out like they’d done in her old chair.

  Getting into it wasn’t easy, though, because unless it was wedged against something solid it moved, but once she was in it she found it was comfortable.

  In the weeks that followed, as she slowly settled into the orphanage routine, Winnie found that at first there were one or two who shunned her because they couldn’t stand the sight of her deformity. There were even a couple of girls who pushed or shoved her out of the way and took things from her, knowing she couldn’t chase after them to get them back. Gradually, however, she became accepted; the bullying stopped and she was no longer considered a freak.