Rock Me Gently

by Judith Kelly

  We looked at each other. We knew what it meant.

  My insides would have done somersaults, if they hadn’t been weighed down by the prospect of what I had to tell Mum once I saw her. Half of me was excited at the idea of leaving the convent, the other half wanted to cling to Frances and tell her I couldn’t leave her and the other girls. All the times we had helped each other flashed in front of my eyes.

  But now my life was about to change utterly. I felt sadness, dread, and a more awful hope. Frances looked at me in a different way for the rest of the morning. She smiled anxiously, as if she was already expecting me to evaporate in a puff of smoke. Once I told Ruth the news, I could almost see green exit signs glowing in her eyes.

  I held my face still to hide the guilty anticipation that swirled through me. It was like looking at someone else’s life - hand-me-down clothes, all sepia and faded; snatches of Latin prayers I’d never known the meaning of; someone gently rocking my bed. My fingers touched the precious letter in my tunic pocket. The tight feeling of excitement that made my throat ache brought me back to the present and the kneeling girls around me in the boot-room.

  Frances concentrated on the boot she was polishing as she said, ‘We’ll never hear from you again if you leave the convent.’

  ‘I’ll write to you,’ I said.

  She snorted, not looking up. ‘It’ll be impossible. You know the nuns won’t give me your letters, and they won’t send mine to you.’

  I stopped mid-swish of my shoe brush. I hadn’t thought of that. Little shivers ran across my skin as I remembered something else: I wouldn’t be allowed to live with Mum in her bedsit.

  She’d have to place me in another boarding school, and who could say what that would be like? I suddenly had visions of children with greasy matted hair, grimy faces and blackened teeth who might spit and claw at me. Teachers who killed children in their care. I told Frances my fears.

  ‘Or maybe they’ll be posh with snooty smiles and speak like they’ve got plums in their mouths,’ she said with a muffled giggle.

  ‘And long glossy hair like American film stars,’ I added in a horrified whisper. ‘They’ll jeer at me when they discover I’ve been to an orphanage.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have to tell them.’

  ‘They’d guess it somehow. And then no one would be my friend.’

  ‘And what if your mum can’t find a boarding school right away? You might have to come back here meanwhile. Sister Mary would blow her lid once she heard that you had told your mum about what she did to you,’ she warned. ‘Remember what happened to Betty O’Dowd?’

  ‘Oh, cripes, yes!’ I said feeling as though my stomach was doing somersaults.

  Betty’s story was pathetic, and perhaps not uncommon within the convent, but I was still unscathed enough to be shocked by it. Betty never said much and when she did, she stammered. She had a round face on which she wore a timid shy expression, always a little questioning, even bewildered. Her dark hair had once been thick, but eventually fell out in clumps because more than once Sister Columba grabbed her by the hair and flung her to the other side of the room. Her bald patches were so noticeable that her Mum complained to Father Holland. Sister Columba had then beaten Betty for telling tales.

  In an attempt to make her hair grow again, the nuns had smeared her head with Vaseline and wrapped newspaper around it. But it didn’t work. She suffered a rapid decline in health, culminating in the occasional hysterical outburst of crying. She had great difficulty in eating, hid her food and got thinner. She began to talk of strange visions, that God wanted her to die, to go to Him, that it was His will that she should be freed from this life. After that she began to mope, talking to no one and wandering around on her own. One night she disappeared and the nuns couldn’t find her anywhere. They looked high and low for her. Father Holland found her naked in the confession box. She was whisked away to a sister house of the convent in Hampshire and we never saw her again.

  Frances and I looked at each other in the dim light of the boot-room, the same memory in both of our eyes. ‘It was her own stupid fault,’ she said, ‘she shouldn’t have told her mum. Just be careful, Judith.’

  My misery gradually returned like an old friend. The storm within me buffeted against my ribs all the rest of that day. As night crept over the convent, I hugged the covers around myself and thought of Mum. The future wavered between being brilliantly bright to dreadfully dark. Yet a secret sun shone under my skin at the prospect of seeing her.

  From then on, each day I tore a page off a small calendar I made, screwing it into a tiny ball so that the days were truly destroyed until I saw her again. Time dragged by as the distant idea of her visit grew from a stationary speck to a looming reality. At last, from counting the weeks and then the days and then the day after tomorrow, I could say tomorrow. And then a feeling of calm, almost of hope, washed over me.

  I imagined myself running down the corridor to the visitors’ parlour to see Mum. She’d be lounging there like a film star in her white jacket, with her Katharine Hepburn look-alike face. Was she still in love with Gregory Peck? Would she speak to me in an American accent like they did in the cinema? When I saw her, I would tremble, I would cry. She would sweep me up into her arms and take me away from the carbolic smell of the corridors, the daily pins and needles in my housemaid’s knees and the skittering of terrified girls.

  On the morning of her visit, I awoke early and watched the black iron bedsteads grow clearer as daylight seeped into the vast dormitory. Sister Mary’s cell was attached to the dormitory, and every morning she slammed shut her cell door to awaken us. It made a booming, hollow noise that all of us hated - but today I loved this explosive sound.

  I almost skipped past the sleepy girls trudging to the washroom. There was the sound of water being splashed into the washbasins, there was the sound of rising and dressing in the dormitory, and the sound of clapping hands as Sister Mary went up and down telling the girls to be quick. A pale light showed the seniors’ cubicle curtains turned back, the tossed beds. Never again would I have to rise in fear at five and scrub the kitchen and polish the refectory floors. As I looked around the dormitory at the tired faces, again there was some stop in the flow to my happiness. I didn’t want to think about it. I heard the junior girls whisper among themselves about me as they dressed for Mass. She’s leaving today, they were saying. Ruth gave me a sidelong glance as she cat-licked her hands and face, and then grabbed a gap-toothed comb to whisk through her thick hair.

  Sidling up to me she said, ‘You’re dead lucky, you are. You never really knew what it was like to be dumped here like the rest of us. To be buried a-bloody-live.’

  ‘I know I’ve not suffered like you, Ruth,’ I tried soothing, ‘but I do have some idea.’

  Ruth stood stiffly holding her comb and scowling at me with fierce dark eyes as if some terrible pressure was being put upon her. She held her comb as if it were a gun; she looked strangely like some tough delinquent, brimming over with anger.

  ‘You don’t know anything,’ she hissed. ‘I’ve been stuck in this shithouse for six years. Can you imagine what that’s like? No, you can’t, and you don’t even try to. All you care about is getting back to the bloody outside world.’

  I shook my head. ‘I’m really sorry, Ruth, but I do have some idea what it must be like for you.’ Life, the convent, the whole damned circus was so unfair. ‘I know, Ruth, I know.’

  ‘No!’ she virtually spat in my face. ‘You bleeding well don’t. You’ve no fucking idea at all really!’

  Mum arrived early, just as we were waiting to leave the refectory after breakfast to begin our daily chores. I stopped in my tracks when I saw her. It was really her.

  Smiling, she hurried over and we hugged. I clung to her.

  ‘What on earth is this you’re wearing?’ she laughingly asked, tugging at my work-stained, faded, navy-blue tunic.

  ‘My work tunic,’ I muttered shyly, afraid that someone might hear her.


  ‘You mean it’s what you wear for schoolwork? It’s very scruffy,’ she said in the same loud ringing voice.

  I felt myself turning red. All the girls who were lined up waiting to leave the refectory were staring. I knew from the nuns’ teachings that vanity was the most shameful of all sins. I nodded and avoided Mum’s eyes as they shone down on me like distant stars.

  I wanted to tell her so many things, but suddenly, unexpectedly, I felt ashamed. I didn’t want her to know what was being done to me. I didn’t want anybody to know, I didn’t want it to be true - I just wanted to be her little girl again. And at the same time, I knew I had to tell her.

  ‘Would you like to spend the weekend with me?’ she said, ‘My landlady says it would be all right for you to stay a couple of days.’

  I nodded vigorously, lost for words at the pleasure and relief I felt. I wouldn’t have to decide about telling her for the time being.

  Sister Mary came bustling up the corridor smiling at Mum stiffly; she couldn’t use those muscles with any naturalness. ‘Mrs Kelly, please would you wait in the visitors’ parlour while Judith changes her clothes?’

  The nun then hauled me into the washroom, where she handed me a clean, newer tunic. She closed the door and twisted the taps until the water filled an enamelled basin fitted into the sink. The noise almost drowned out the sound of her words. Her gaze never left my face.

  ‘Now I want you to tell your mother that the nuns are doing their utmost to raise you and the other children as good Catholics.’

  It took a few seconds for her words to sink in. She grabbed a flannel and inflicted a merciless but brief scrub of my face, hands and neck and rooted into the folds of my ears. Handing me a coarse towel, she said, ‘Dry yourself and hurry up. Now I’m warning you - no lies or tall stories, not if you know what’s good for you and your friends. All right?’

  That’s what she said. Those were her exact words. I wrote them down afterwards so I wouldn’t get them mixed up.

  Her cheek twitched as she looked down at me. Our eyes met, I nodded, silently, my head boiling.

  She watched me for a moment, and then nodded. ‘Off you go then.’

  She unlocked the door and I could feel the heavy sensation of the palm of her hand upon my shoulder.

  As I made my way to the parlour with Sister Mary’s words still sounding in my ears, I passed the refectory where my classmates were polishing the floor by shuffling along with dusters under their feet. Frances rushed out when she saw me and threw her arms around my neck. ‘Good luck, Judith. Come and say goodbye when you leave. I’ve written a poem for you and put it under your mattress with your diary.’ Then kissing the tips of her fingers in farewell, she gave me a little shove in the direction of the front parlour and, before I could say anything, turned her back and bolted away down the corridor.

  As I entered the visitors’ parlour I caught sight of Mum sitting in the window seat at the far end, looking out at the sweeping gardens that we weren’t allowed to play in. I could smell her face powder as I stood silently for a moment, watching her. I found it very difficult to believe that it was more than a year since I had seen her. I felt so immensely older, so much unpicked and resewn and made over to a different rougher pattern, that I wondered if Mum would find I had changed.

  Mum’s bedsit appeared to have shrunk. The wallpaper looked like it had come to the end of its life and the brown lino was sole-weary. There were a single bed and a washstand. A yellow­ checked cloth covered a small table with a jug of roses on it.

  A small window overlooked the street. I peered out. You could see the tops of people’s heads hurrying past. I sat on her bed and bounced up and down, but stopped when I thought my dark tunic would leave an imprint on her pale counterpane. In Mum’s long mirror in the corner of her room, I stared fascinated at my head looming above the thin stalk of my neck and my twig-like legs protruding beneath my tunic. It was the first time I’d seen my reflection in a long while. My throat suddenly was no longer tight. I stopped clenching my teeth and biting my nails. I also didn’t have to lower my voice. I said things for no reason, just to hear my voice booming out.

  On the first morning, Mum noticed the dark rings under my eyes. ‘Your eyes look like two burnt holes in a blanket. Are you sure you’re getting enough sleep?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said untruthfully.

  She tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. ‘And you’ve lost some weight. What’s the food like at school?’

  ‘It’s all right.’ I lowered my eyes, rubbing my nose with my hand.

  ‘You must stop doing that to your nose. You do it so often, you’ll make it grow crooked.’ I searched her face, scrutinising it for signs of what was running through her mind. Would she guess? I didn’t know if I wanted her to or not. For a long time now, I had felt squiffy and sour inside whenever I harboured fantasies of this moment.

  She was still looking at my nose, frowning. ‘Did you hurt your nose? It does look a bit crooked.’

  My hand flew to my face. ‘I - I fell down the stairs,’ I muttered. I flushed as I felt the hot, suffocating shame of St Joseph’s cupboard again.

  Her face beetled in concern. ‘Oh dear, poor you. Was a doctor called?’

  I nodded.

  She rose and puffed up my pillows. ‘You seem a bit under the weather. Perhaps you’re getting a cold and should have breakfast in bed in this morning. Would you like that? If you feel like it later, we can go to Church Street market.’

  She wasn’t going to ask. Frustrated, I took a deep breath and pushed it out of my mind.

  That morning I sat in bed playing with Mum’s box of buttons and beads, listening voluptuously to the sound of her movements: the rattle of the frying-pan on the gas ring, the crack of the eggshell, the hiss of the frying oil. She placed a tray in front of me laden with more food than I’d seen in a month. Fried eggs and bacon! I lowered my head and ate hungrily, cramming my mouth with food and scraping my plate like I’d find the answer to my troubles painted on the bottom.

  Afterwards, I lay in bed gazing out the window. The sheets were cool and soft as flowers. It seemed like I had been running for years, and had reached a place where I could rest for a while. Tired, so tired. All the weariness of months of rising at five for Mass, the drudge of scrubbing and polishing floors, living in perpetual fear of the long yellow canes hidden in the folds of the nuns’ habits ...

  Now the real world, from which I had been banished for so long, had returned. I felt my breath coming with deep slow movements, and closed my eyes, savouring them. And still I floated on waves of uncertainty. Should I tell Mum tomorrow about how the nuns treated me and the other children? I remembered Sister Mary’s words: ‘I’m warning you ... If you know what’s good for you ...’

  My resolve weakened and strengthened, ebbed and flowed. The thing that worried me went on as steadily as my pulse. The nuns’ faces grew dim. I felt like an escaped criminal. For now at least, I had tricked and outwitted them, and they couldn’t touch me.

  If my mind now and again picked some faces out of the greyness, they were Frances’s and Ruth’s. Theirs were the only ones I allowed to disturb my thoughts.

  Mum stood beside the bed, smiling down at me. She still looked like a film star to me, with her olive-golden complexion that was like a permanent suntan, and her curly hair, dark rich ochre brown.

  ‘How are you? Would you like me to read to you for a bit?’

  I nodded. She sat down on the bed and began reading aloud to me from Reader’s Digest, while I hovered around the edges of sleep. The rhythm of her voice sounded like a prayer - a nice prayer, not the sort that we had drummed into us at the convent. A prayer that put me into a relaxed trance, and brought dreams of Frances, Ruth and myself in a nice school full of toys, with polished desks and inkwells and rooms that smelt of plasticine and new books, and loads of mashed potato for Ruth.

  You needed a hammer and nails to pin such fuzzy pictures down. When I tried to re-run them on waking, they slipped a
way like quicksilver.

  Later, propped up on pillows, I listened to the far-away sounds of Mum murmuring in a low purr to her neighbour, and to music from the wireless. Summer sunlight slanted through the window. I stared out at the sky, my mind empty, as if rocked on long waves inside a peaceful reef, beyond which crashed the roaring sea.

  The distant wireless crackled a warning: ‘Attention all shipping. Here is a gale warning.’ I thought then about the sailors in their tossing ships on the dark enormous sea who were listening to these warnings, lifeboat men sitting in kitchens awaiting their emergency calls in the stormy coastal towns.

  ‘Fastnet, Hebrides, Fair Isle, Faroes, south east gale force nine, increasing force ten. Imminent, imminent.’

  The news that followed meant it was midday. Time was ticking by. In the pause between programmes, the space of heartbeats, the future was taking shape.

  I pressed my hands to my ears. I didn’t want any part of it.

  That afternoon, Mum and I walked to Church Street open market, where ‘Buy-buy-buy!’ was the staccato advice of the stallholders. Their lingo held a great fascination for Mum, but I couldn’t understand it. I caught the odd words, like ‘tuppence-a-pahnd-Coxes’, yet most of it was meaningless to me. My eyes passed over the glazed apples on the stall: shiny peels; the stallholder must have polished them with a rag or handkerchief.

  ‘What do you think happens to the apples if none get sold?’ I asked Mum as we passed a stall covered with fruit. ‘Do the stallholders just eat them all themselves?’

  Mum burst out laughing, which made me feel light-headed.

  My mouth was open, gasping at all the things to see. The noisy bustle and thrill of the place soon had me laughing as well. We passed stalls and second-hand shops that ran the length of the street, swarming with summery-looking people.

  A sweet stall had jars of brightly coloured sugary cubes and circles. One stallholder, who wore a striped suit, a bowler hat and had two gold teeth showing in the front, like a well-off rabbit, was shouting in a high-faluting voice: ‘Everything a lady needs for sewing, I have.’