The Scarlet Sisters

by Helen Batten

  On its first outing, Dianne and John had to take a trip across town to see their grandparents. As they walked along the road, Dianne could see a gang of rough boys waiting at the bus stop, and she could see by John’s face that he had seen them too, and they were both thinking the same thing.

  They might have crossed the road but they had already been spotted.

  ‘Oi! Look at this poofter!’

  ‘The sun has got his hat on, eh?’

  ‘Oi! Can you hear me? Nice hat, mate.’

  ‘Yeah, give us a twirl, darlin’!’

  ‘Oooooo, right little Fauntenroy, ain’t ya?’

  The children walked faster but the boys started following them. A stone whistled past Dianne’s ear and then John jumped as one hit him in the back. They were trying to knock John’s hat off his head. Luckily, just then the bus turned the corner and the boys ran back to the stop, otherwise who knows where the large, orange, flat cap might have ended up?

  Entertainment opportunities also carried on as before. Being a Swain, Bertha loved to get dressed up and take a trip into town to the theatre. Just as the Blitz was really getting under way, William managed to get tickets to see Noël Coward’s new play, Blithe Spirit, which had just opened at the Savoy Theatre on the Strand.

  At the start of the war the government had closed the West End theatres, but such was the distress of the population that the government changed its mind, and decided that bombed theatres were a risk worth taking. Bertha agreed with this policy of refusing to let the Germans get the better of them, and gleefully got dressed up in her old fur, left John and Dianne with her neighbour, Pat, and went off on the train into London.

  Which would have been fine, except there was an all-out Blitz that evening – not only in central London, which interrupted the performance, but also over Grays. And Pat the neighbour had no air raid shelter.

  Mum remembers a long night spent crouching under next door’s kitchen table with herself, John, Pat and her two children, and their crazy sheepdog, which insisted on howling all the way through and had to be constantly wrestled down to stop it dashing out into the street. As the house shook and plaster rained down, they could work out from the planes going over that central London was being bombed too, and Dianne prayed for her mum to walk back through the door all in one piece. But she didn’t, and the bombing went on and the dog kept howling.

  Eventually, hours after they were expected, Bertha and William came running in, grabbed John and Dianne and then ran out again. The bombs were still dropping, so William picked up Dianne and ran with one arm over her head to protect her from the red-hot shrapnel that was raining down.

  Poor John was already too big to be carried so Bertha was shouting, ‘Quick, John! Run, run! Quick, quick!’

  Luckily they made it to their air raid shelter with no harm done, except a few frayed nerves.

  ‘But still, Mum,’ I said. ‘What was she thinking of, leaving you in the middle of the Blitz in a house with no air raid shelter and then going right off into the thick of it?’

  ‘Well, dear, times were different, then.’

  ‘You’re telling me. Was the play worth it?’

  ‘She didn’t say. I don’t think they managed to get to the end of it. I think she was a bit cheesed off about that.’

  We giggled.

  ‘Oh, well, it puts my own rather exciting childcare arrangements into perspective.’

  ‘Yes, dear. I suppose it does.’

  And we gave each other a rueful smile. I know she thinks I’m a bit cavalier with my arrangements and she knows I know.

  And then the time came when things did change. A letter arrived out of the blue, summoning William. It happened so fast. Within a couple of days a heavy uniform had arrived and then the order to report for duty early the next morning.

  Dianne was woken up in the early hours to say goodbye to her father. He was dressed in his uniform. William was a small, wiry man and his army clothes were far too big. Underneath his black beret, he looked at Dianne with terribly sad eyes and then he was gone. They watched as he marched off down the side passage and into the street in boots that were far too big.

  Dianne would not see her father again for nearly five years.

  Dianne cried, but her tears were eclipsed by Bertha’s utter desolation. Mum remembers my nanna with her head in her hands on the kitchen table, sobbing uncontrollably for hours, her children standing by, helpless.

  Dianne never stopped missing her father. He had a soft spot for her which manifested itself in constant teasing. Dianne was tiny: ‘If you step into the road your bottom will hit the kerb,’ he used to say.

  One day Dianne was crying because she had fallen over: ‘Come on, snooky nose, be brave. I tell you what, I’ll show you what being brave is.’ William carried Dianne to his shed, put her down outside the door and said, ‘Stay there.’ He went inside, shut the door and there was the sound of clattering, and hammering and groaning. He emerged a few minutes later with a mouth empty of teeth, waving his dentures in his hands.

  Dianne, knowing nothing of false teeth, ran inside and hid behind her mother’s skirt.

  Dianne treasured his letters. He made little drawings for her. I still have a cartoon he sent after he went to Egypt. It’s of a distant pyramid and a dog in the desert with a look of anguish, scampering across the sand with a sign next to him: ‘Next tree 100 miles’.

  But letters weren’t enough to fill the gap – which actually sometimes felt like a real, physical gap right in her stomach.

  At night, Dianne would lie in the dark in her twin bed next to her big brother’s and keep him awake with her questions.

  ‘Don’t you miss him?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Aren’t you scared?’

  ‘No. Are you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. It feels wrong. Like something awful is going to happen without him here.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know. That’s the point.’

  ‘Well, we’ve got Mum.’

  ‘But don’t you feel as if we’re looking after her?’

  ‘No.’

  Dianne sighed. Boys seemed to have much less complicated lives. And John seemed to have an easier relationship with Bertha. He was the boy. Dianne always felt as if she was not quite what Bertha had expected.

  ‘Am I pretty?’ she asked Bertha one day.

  ‘Well, dear, you’re quaint,’ was the reply, which made her feel like a thatched cottage in a Devonshire village.

  Dianne’s feelings of unease weren’t helped by the way the war was going. Every night they were woken by the wail of the sirens. They would dash to the kitchen and pick up their protective head gear: Bertha the big saucepan, Dianne the little saucepan, and John the frying pan because his head was too big for anything else, and then they would run across the lawn to William’s shelter. Mum still remembers clearly the feel of the wet grass between her feet and the sound of the sirens in her ears. Inside the shelter it was freezing cold and dark, whatever the time of year, but nobody complained – it felt safe.

  Increasingly, as Britain fought off the German invasion in the skies above their heads, the family didn’t even bother to go to bed in the bungalow, but went straight to the shelter every night. And their shelterless neighbour, Pat, and her two daughters, and the crazy dog, joined them too.

  It was during one of those nights that Bertha found herself confiding in Pat: ‘I’ve found myself a job.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. You know I used to be a shorthand typist? Well, I’ve got a position in the office at the munitions factory.’

  ‘Oh. I’d have thought you’d want to stay home with the children.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ she said, pointing at the ceiling where the noise of dog-fighting planes could be heard over their heads. ‘I feel I ought to be doing something.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Pat wasn’t convinced.
And she was right to be suspicious. Bertha was perfectly happy at home, but the moment William had been called up, building had stopped and his business had folded. Bertha now found herself trying to keep up appearances on an ordinary soldier’s wages, and she couldn’t do it. The house was expensive to maintain; in fact, their whole lifestyle was expensive to maintain. She thought ruefully of the beautiful white Lancaster car that languished in the garage for want of expensive petrol.

  They could have sold the bungalow, downsized and lived off the capital until William got home, but Bertha was not ready to do that yet. Not at all. She was going to fight her own battle and hang on for as long as possible.

  ‘Of course, John is at school. It’s just Dianne,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, Mummy, who’s going to look after me?’ piped up Dianne from her bunk. She had been listening to the conversation very carefully.

  ‘You know,’ Pat said, ‘I can think of someone who might well be happy to look after Dianne … for something in return, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ Bertha nodded.

  And that’s how Dianne found herself with … let’s call them the Barratts. First thing in the morning, Bertha strapped Dianne into the seat on the back of her bike and tore off – always slightly late – to the Barratts. Dianne would then be left there for the day until Bertha arrived around 5 p.m., strapped Dianne back into the bicycle seat and tore home again in time for tea.

  The Barratts should have been the perfect solution to Bertha’s childcare issue: they were middle-aged neighbours, recommended by friends, they had a teenage daughter, they had the time and they needed the money. But appearances can be deceptive.

  Dianne doesn’t know how long she went to the Barratts’ house, but guesses it was between one and two years. One weekend, she had built a camp with Pat’s daughters in the wood at the bottom of the garden. They were playing ‘Secrets’ and Dianne’s big brother, John, was spying on them. Dianne told a secret about what was happening to her at the Barratts’ house.

  John ran straight to his mum and told her what Dianne had said. He was sent back to fetch her.

  Bertha demanded: ‘Right, stand here and tell me what you told them.’

  Dianne must have been only about four and a half years old, but she knew there was something wrong about what had been happening to her at the Barratts’, something wrong about telling Pat’s children, and now something even worse about telling her mother. But somehow she stammered a little of what had been happening: something about being taken to the lavatory and touched by Mr Barratt in private places and him making her touch him.

  Bertha lost it. She flung a rolling pin across the kitchen at Dianne. ‘If you ever, ever, speak of this again to anyone, I will kill you,’ she said.

  There was more shouting and screaming, but Dianne was frozen. The fact that she could cause so much distress and anger to her mother, who, with their father away, had become everything to Dianne, was horrific. She had never seen her mother so upset, and she had caused it. And that’s when the guilt started.

  In the psychotherapy world there is a distinction made between actual abuse, and then secondary abuse, where further damage is caused by the world’s reaction to the abuse. Once a child is made to feel that what has happened is not to be spoken of, that it is shameful, then they start to feel ashamed, and then guilty. They take on the perpetrator’s guilt as their own.

  Mum did what Bertha said, and never spoke of it again – not until over forty years later. She and I were sitting watching the launch of the charity for victims of childhood abuse, ChildLine, in 1986. It’s easy to forget how the sexual abuse of children was something that was rarely publicly debated or spoken of, although clearly it was very much happening. But this launch started a revolution in talking about abuse and protecting children.

  As we watched the presenter, Esther Rantzen, make her appeal for funds, and films of people’s stories, I realised Mum was crying. ‘That happened to me,’ she said.

  I was dumbfounded.

  ‘When I was a child. A neighbour,’ was all she said.

  I was horrified. I didn’t ask any more; I didn’t want to know any more. I was young and this was way out of my comfort zone. But despite my own reluctance to engage with my mum’s experience, it started her on a journey, which began as a correspondence with Esther Rantzen, and from there going to seek counselling, and then training to become a counsellor herself.

  If anyone criticises Esther Rantzen in my mum’s presence, they will get an immediate counter of: ‘She saved my life.’

  It was only much later, when I started on this journey into the sisters’ past, that I felt ready to know more, and that somehow it was important to know. So I asked Mum to tell me what happened.

  She described how, when she arrived at the Barratts’ house every morning, she was seated at the kitchen table and given a breakfast of bread and butter. She sat by herself, eating in silence. She was then moved to the front room, where she had to sit on a chair by the fire and not move or speak, all day, every day, day after day.

  ‘Didn’t you even have a book to read?’ I asked Mum.

  ‘Nope. Nothing.’

  ‘But you were three? Four? You must have been so bored.’

  ‘Yes. But I was more scared than bored. They had a huge dog which used to sit and guard me, and if I so much as moved, he would growl and bark and show his teeth, and you know how much I’m scared of dogs.’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’

  ‘Yes. You know the scar on my forehead?’ She pointed to a thin, white, horizontal line across the top of her forehead, which was usually covered by her fringe. ‘That’s where that dog bit me.’

  ‘Mum! I had no idea. You never told me.’

  ‘Didn’t I?’ She looked surprised. ‘Well, anyway, one day I was sitting there and I needed to go to the loo so badly, I thought I was going to wet myself. I had to go, so I plucked up courage and stood up, and he leapt at me and bit me.’

  ‘Oh, Mum.’

  ‘And it was so hot in that room! They kept the fire on full blast, whatever the weather – I used to roast. It was so strange. Everything about that house and that family was strange. They had a big garden but I was never allowed out to play. I was never given anything – pencils, paper, nothing. They had a daughter who was at school, but when she came home, she never came in to see me. I don’t even remember her ever speaking to me. She just went straight out into the garden and never came in.’

  ‘Maybe she didn’t want to bump into her father.’

  ‘Exactly, dear. Looking back, it’s hardly surprising. They were such an odd couple. She was hard, there was no love lost between them. I actually felt sorry for him. And I had this feeling, although it was based on nothing but a feeling, that the reason he did what he did was something to do with her.’

  The only person who would come into the room was Mr Barratt, on the pretext of taking Dianne to the toilet.

  ‘He used to pick me up and it was quite confusing, because it reminded me of being picked up by Dad. And you know how much I missed him. There’s something special about being picked up by your daddy, isn’t there? Those big, strong arms … you feel protected. I just trusted him … And I couldn’t understand when he started to do things my dad never did.’ She paused and then went on, ‘The house was dark – dark wood panelling. Horrible. And the toilet was at the end of a dark corridor. It was basic, just a loo. A room with no window, under the stairs. A cupboard, really. I can see it so clearly. All brown. He used to take me in there and lock the door behind and it was that sound, the heavy lock being drawn. That feeling of not being able to escape, there was nothing I could do. You know how much I hate small spaces to this day.’

  Oh, yes. Mum’s claustrophobia. Suddenly, her unwillingness to use public lavatories, her refusal to ever turn locks on doors in public places, a certain ride in an aquarium where we were sealed in a submarine and Mum had a panic attack, rifling through her handbag for Valium … yes, it made sense. Al
ways, always that need to keep a light on. Her obsession with being broken into in the middle of the night which meant she locked her bedroom door and placed a chair under the handle for good measure – which I always forgot about, and would try and crash in, in the mornings and have to wait for her to unlock the door; the sound of desperate rattling on the other side.

  In the loo Mr Barratt had free rein with Mum, to do what he wanted to do, all the time whispering to her, ‘Isn’t this nice? Doesn’t this feel nice?’

  And Mum couldn’t speak, frozen.

  ‘Even then, I didn’t know why, but I knew whatever he was doing, it was very wrong.’ She paused and then she said, ‘What I don’t understand is why I never went to Mum to tell her myself.’

  ‘Well, I don’t think that’s unusual. I think even very young children can sense that something is wrong and want to pretend it’s not happening and protect the people they love,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I think that’s right. Anyway, I didn’t. But of course it came out anyway, and yes, I was right to be scared of telling her.’

  Mum told me how Mrs Barratt was summoned to speak to Bertha. Mrs Barratt stood in the kitchen and Bertha pulled up a chair and, in a confusing contradiction to the rolling pin moment, said: ‘Dianne, stand on the chair and tell Mrs Barratt what you told me.’

  Mum stood on the chair and opened her mouth and nothing came out. She could not speak – it was as if her mother’s command that if she ever spoke she would kill her had sunk right through to her bones.

  ‘Right. If Dianne’s not going to tell you, I will.’ Bertha had then proceeded to relay to Mrs Barratt what Dianne had told her.

  Mrs Barratt had screamed and put her hands over her ears. ‘No! She’s lying. Liar, liar, liar!’ she screamed, pointing at Dianne, who was still standing on the chair. And then she ran out of the house in hysterics.

  Dianne got off the chair and it was never spoken of in the family again.

  ‘Your Nanna never did say that she believed me.’

  ‘Oh. So what happened next?’