The Mothers

by Rod Jones

  ‘I’m not sending Molly to any orphanage,’ Alma said.

  ‘It isn’t only for orphans. They can take a child in for a few weeks or a few months if the mother is ill, or if the family has come into some other misfortune. Milly said they looked after her two little ones very well.’

  On the 6th of October, Alma posted a letter to Mr J. C. Butler, the superintendent of the orphanage, requesting an appointment. She felt uneasy about the whole thing. The place was called the Melbourne Orphan Asylum. Wasn’t an asylum meant for mad people?

  A few days later she received his reply and took the train from Kensington, changing at Flinders Street for Middle Brighton. She walked the short distance through orderly streets that smelled of the sea. It was a calm October evening; the light lingered in the air. It wouldn’t be so bad, she told herself. It’s only for a little while; as soon as I start back at work, I’ll come and get her.

  The superintendent was a kindly man, used to dealing with people in difficult circumstances. A large mahogany desk almost filled his study. He kept his books in a glass cabinet. His manner was gentle yet decisive.

  ‘Mrs Fairweather, I cannot promise anything, because the matter will have to be considered by the board, but I can tell you that I shall be recommending that Molly be taken into care. I consider hers a deserving case.’

  Alma wept, at first out of gratitude, then out of sadness. She couldn’t think how she would explain it to Molly.

  Mr Butler helped Alma fill in the application:

  Applicant: Mrs Alma Fairweather

  Child proposed to be taken into care: Molly Fairweather, age 7 years, born Footscray. Church of England, baptised.

  (Alma had invented this.)

  Present Address: 61 Eastwood Street, Kensington

  Date of Birth: 3 July 1893

  Date of Marriage: 11 August 1909

  Occupation: Folder

  Employer’s Name and Address: Lincoln Mills, Gaffney Street, Coburg.

  Usual income: £2-4/-

  Present Situation: Unemployed.

  Mr Butler screwed the cap back on his fountain pen and placed it on the desk. He then took up a pencil and wrote in the space on the admission form under FATHER:

  Father of above child not married to mother. Mother not receiving any assistance from him, and in the child’s interest desires to sever all connection with the father, so that the child may grow up quite ignorant of her illegitimacy.

  On the 11th of November, 1925, the board passed the application for admission. The approval was signed by Messrs Berry and Peacock on behalf of the committee, and by Mr J. C. Butler himself. On Monday the 16th of November, Molly was admitted to the orphanage.

  Molly

  BRIGHTON, 1925

  THE DAY MUM packed her suitcase and took her on the train to the Melbourne Orphan Asylum, she told Molly not to be frightened, that she had already met both Mr Butler, the Superintendent, and the Matron, Miss Thompson, and that they were both very nice.

  Mum had not called it the Melbourne Orphan Asylum. She had told Molly that she was going to stay at ‘the Children’s Home’, a happy place where lots of children all lived together. She was going to stay there ‘just for a spell’.

  ‘I’ll come and see you every Sunday,’ Mum promised.

  ‘You won’t forget?’

  ‘How could I forget my little lamb? I love my lamb and one day very soon you’ll come home again and everything will be just like it used to be, good as gold.’

  As they walked along Dendy Street, Mum carrying the suitcase, Molly felt excited, as though something good was going to happen, but her stomach felt the way it did when something bad was going to happen.

  The houses in Brighton were bigger than in Kensington. The curious trees lowered their heads and peered at her. Molly pressed in close against Mum.

  ‘You’ll be all right here,’ Mr Butler told her. ‘It’s really just like being on holidays, except you’ll be going to school.’

  ‘What if I want to go home?’

  Mr Butler smiled at her in his friendly way. ‘I’m quite certain that you’ll like living here with us.’ He was a tall man in a three-piece suit with a watch chain across his vest. He had kind, blue eyes and a white moustache, though he didn’t look old. But still Molly didn’t want Mum to go home without her.

  The floor of Mr Butler’s office had black and white squares, which Molly tried to count in an effort to calm herself. Mr Butler asked her to sit down next to him. He asked Molly questions about herself. Which grade she was in at school. The names of her brother and sister. What her favourite colour was.

  Mr Butler showed Molly and Mum to her new Cottage Home. The smell inside was different from any house she had been in. Was it lamb stew mixed with the smell of wet paint? No, not wet paint; it was floor polish. Mrs Field, the Cottage Home Mother, had just finished using an electric polishing machine on the linoleum.

  The first thing Molly noticed about Mrs Field was that she had very broad hips. She was dressed in a brown skirt and a neat white blouse, but on her feet she wore a pair of old bedroom slippers with splits at the sides through which a couple of swollen toes poked out. She was red-faced and her eyes watered.

  Mrs Field was admiring her floor when they came in. ‘There you are,’ she said to Molly. ‘Do you like it here? I suppose you don’t know yet, do you? I can promise you the food is decent. You get exactly the same as Mr Field and me. Come with me and I’ll show you where I keep the treacle tin.’

  Molly looked at Mum, who pressed her lips together and nodded.

  Mrs Field took her upstairs to show her the dormitories, each with a row of six beds. She showed Molly which bed was hers. ‘I’ll be here every day to help you, Molly. I can already see that you are a very good girl, and I’m quite certain that you’ll be happy, living here with us.’

  Molly was quiet. What troubled her was the thought of not having Olive in her room. If Molly woke from a bad dream in the night, she would be in a room of strangers.

  The orphanage had six main buildings. The administration building was the biggest, with its tower. It was where Mr Butler lived with his wife and also had his office. There were four other two-storey Cottage Homes where the children lived, as well as the hospital block. Every cottage had a married couple who were Cottage Mothers and Fathers.

  In the dining room in Molly’s cottage, there were lots of tables, each set for six children, pretty crockery, instead of the old enamel plates and mugs they had at home, and each girl had her own serviette, and a wooden serviette ring with a carving of a different animal. There was a serving hatch to the kitchen and beside it was the cupboard where Mrs Field showed her, as promised, the big five-pound tin of treacle.

  ‘We have twelve acres of farmland and gardens here,’ Mrs Field told her. ‘We have a dairy herd so we get our own fresh milk. You can join in the milking, if you like! We grow our own vegetables. There are two gardeners, Mr Burrows and Mr Williams. When your mother comes to visit you on Sundays, you can have picnics in the garden.’ Molly was already anxious about remembering all the new names.

  When she came downstairs again, Mum and Mr Butler were gone.

  When Molly turned to a
sk where Mum was, Mrs Field said, ‘Your mother must have been called away.’ She smiled down at Molly. But her mouth was wrong, her clothes were wrong, and those old slippers were wrong. Mrs Field was not her mother and everything felt new and wrong. Molly began to sob.

  ‘What’s this?’ Mrs Field asked, and for the first time Molly detected a hint of tiredness and irritation in her voice.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Little girls don’t cry for no reason. You can tell me,’ Mrs Field patted Molly’s hair. ‘You can talk to me about anything.’

  But Molly could not tell Mrs Field why she was crying because she herself didn’t really understand it. An immense feeling of grief and dread began welling up inside her. The hard part about being sent here was that there seemed no end in sight. No one had told her when she would be going home. Even the word ‘home’ hurt her now, because Molly no longer knew where her home was supposed to be.

  The first night in her new home, Molly learned the golden rule: ‘No talking after lights out!’

  She lay awake for a long time in her new bed. It felt strangely quiet. At home in Kensington, the last thing she heard before she fell asleep and the first thing she heard in the morning was the clatter of the trains going past.

  The moon cast half-shadows across the room. She looked around at the girls in their beds. Doris was asleep. Vera stirred and said something Molly couldn’t understand. Perhaps in her sleep she was still on the other side of the world, in England, where the King lived.

  The edges of the curtain fluttered in the breeze. Molly climbed out of bed and walked over to the window. She stood there and shared in the secret business of the night. She stared up at the sky: the stars didn’t seem to have any interest in her. The children in the other Cottage Homes were probably all asleep in their beds.

  She could see across the garden to where a lone light bulb glowed in one of the windows. She could not see anyone awake in the room, or anything inside the room.

  A voice from behind startled her. ‘What are you doing?’

  It was Cheryl, her big bossy body sitting up in bed, looking at her, demanding an answer.

  ‘I think someone is awake in the cottage over there.’

  ‘That’s the hospital block. That’s where they put you when you’re going to die.’

  Molly said nothing.

  ‘And another thing. You must lie very still in bed and pretend you are asleep, even if you are not. Matron makes calls in here during the night to see if any children are awake, because only wicked children can’t go to sleep, she says. When you don’t go to sleep or if you wake up in the night, Matron takes you to a room all by yourself and you have to sleep in a box with a lid on top.’

  ‘I would scream for help,’ Molly said. ‘Mr Butler would come and rescue me.’

  Molly thought she would be so frightened in that dark box that she wouldn’t be able to stop screaming.

  ‘If you scream, two men come and they hammer on the lid with lots of nails so that even if you do scream, no one can hear you.’

  Cheryl was whispering, but Molly recognised a kind of delight in her voice, as she watched the effect of her words in Molly’s face in the half-light.

  ‘Bessie Tobias was taken to the hospital block last week,’ Cheryl said.

  ‘Did she wake up in the night?’

  ‘No. She was sick.’

  ‘Maybe they keep the light on all night to keep her awake, so she won’t die.’

  One of the girls behind them groaned in her sleep.

  Molly tried to learn the names of the other children—not all of them, of course, because there were more than a hundred children living in the orphanage—but the names of the girls in her Cottage Home. She got to know the Sisson kids, whose mum had died. There was Charlotte, Frances and Violet. Doris and Elizabeth Connell were nice to her. Doris was a year older than Molly, Elizabeth a year younger. There was Dianne, who wore the same mustard-coloured pinafore every day. And there was Vera Wood, an English girl, who talked with an accent. Molly tried to keep out of Cheryl’s way.

  On Sunday mornings, the children were collected and taken to different churches. Molly attended St Peter’s Sunday school because Mum had told Mr Butler she had been baptised in the Church of England. The lady there gave her a postcard with a picture of God in the sky.

  When Molly got back, Mum was waiting for her on the seats outside the administration building. She was wearing her old woollen overcoat, and it was the familiarity of her coat, more than seeing Mum herself, that made Molly burst into tears. Mum was so happy to see her. She wrapped her arms around Molly, squeezing her, and taking in deep breaths. Molly knew she was trying not to cry, too.

  ‘Where’s Teddy and Olive?’

  ‘They’re at home,’ Mum said.

  ‘Didn’t they want to come?’

  ‘They wanted very much to come and see you.’

  ‘So why didn’t you let them?’

  Mum took the handkerchief from her pocket, dabbed at her eyes, then laughed at herself. ‘Look at me. Aren’t I a silly old thing?’

  ‘You’re not silly.’

  ‘Yes, I am. I didn’t want Teddy and Olive to come. I feel ashamed I had to send you here. I wish I was back at the knitting mills. Then I’d have enough money for you to come home.’

  ‘I want to come home, too.’

  ‘Are you very homesick, love?’

  ‘What’s homesick?’ Visions of being alone in the hospital block suddenly rose in Molly’s mind.

  Mum just laughed, and gave her a cuddle. ‘Come on. Let’s have our lunch.’

  She had brought egg sandwiches, some oranges and a brown paper bag of Milk Arrowroot biscuits. They had their picnic in the orphanage garden.

  The garden was laid out in a formal design: a circular lawn with a round pond in the middle, and a fountain. On four sides of the lawn, curving paths cut in and formed their own circles, with hedges on their periphery and garden beds in the centre, so that the whole design was like a circle with intersecting rings. On the edges of the garden there were more paths leading to stands of fruit trees. Between the garden and the administration building stood three huge cypress trees.

  Other groups of children and visitors were seated here and there on rugs. Mum kept asking questions—what school was like, whether her teacher was strict, what dinners they had at the Cottage Home. Molly could see that Mum was talking so much to hide the fact that she felt sad.

  After lunch, Mum took her for a walk to the beach. The wind was cold. It was the first time Molly had seen the ocean, the shimmering light on the surface of all that endless blue water. The lines of waves rode in and broke on the sand. Mum called them white horses, though they were not horses at all.

  When Mum was leaving she told Molly she would be back to see her next Sunday. Seven whole days! The week stretched ahead, the long days to be got through before she saw Mum again.

  Teddy and Olive usually came with Mum on Sundays after that.

  Molly attended Brighton Beach State School No. 2048, which was situated within the grounds of the orphanage. Her classroom, with its rostrum, blackboard with the alphabet written across the top, the lines of wooden desks, looked just like her old one in Kensington. Outside children mixed with the orphanage kids. All the children wore the same uniforms and boots, s
o it was difficult to tell them apart, except that at twelve o’clock the orphanage kids went back to their Cottage Homes to have their dinner.

  Her teacher was Mr Hammer, who wore brightly coloured waistcoats—the only item of his dress that changed from day to day. Sometimes there were fights between the boys, but not often. If Mr Hammer caught them fighting, he pulled the culprits away by their ears and took them to get the strap. Mr Hammer marked the roll, wrote on the blackboard in a very neat hand, and spent hours doing splendid drawings in coloured chalks. As long as the children were quiet, he took little interest in their progress. He walked slowly down the aisles of desks, his hands in his pockets, glancing over their shoulders to inspect their penmanship, pausing from time to time to smack a boy across the back of the head. This didn’t count as punishment to Mr Hammer; he said it was just to wake them up.

  Mr Hammer was watchful, even when you thought he wasn’t. When he was writing on the blackboard, without turning his head, he could name any boy or girl who dared to talk. His talent for this was uncanny. In the dead of afternoon, when a band of sunshine stretched into their room, Mr Hammer would fold his hands behind his head and sway back on the rear legs of his chair, and at that moment he had on his face the look of a lizard sunning himself.

  Sometimes, groups of boys stood along the painted white line that marked the limit of their section of the yard. They called out things to the girls, but not even the bravest boy dared step into the girls’ yard. If the girls told on them, the boys would get the strap.

  One Saturday morning, Molly felt sick. Mrs Field said she could lie on her bed until she felt better. She heard the noise of the other children playing outside, the whoops and cries of the boys playing their ball games, the repetitive singsong voices of the girls skipping rope and playing hopscotch.

  Shortly before midday, she heard the girls coming in.

  ‘Did you see the new girl?’ asked Vera, who had come up the stairs with Doris and Elizabeth Connell.