The Mothers

by Rod Jones

  It had been a long time since anyone had asked Molly, ‘When are we going to hear the patter of little feet?’

  Anna

  NORTH FITZROY, 1952

  IT WAS LATE, late, in the wobble of the night. Her brother Robert had driven his car around to the lane earlier and left it parked there so they could go out through the back without being seen by the neighbours. She was awake but it felt like she was dreaming. Her heart was pumping in a slow, squelchy way. Mum said it was just a tablet to help her feel calm, like a sleeping tablet. ‘You’re going away to a home for girls for a spell, Anna,’ Mum said. ‘It’s all for the best.’

  She looked out the car window. It had been raining and the night was still slippery. They drove along Melville Road, past all the innocent houses with their lights on inside.

  Dad sat in the front next to Robert. Mum and Anna sat in the back. The inside of the car smelled like new shoes. When they turned into Brunswick Road, Robert made the tyres squeal, deliberately, as if he were angry. ‘Now, Robert,’ Dad said mildly. Robert wasn’t saying anything, just driving. They came to a stop beside the Edinburgh Gardens. It was windy and Anna could see the big trees thrashing around, laughing and rolling. Oh, the trees were having a great time!

  ‘Is this the place?’ Robert asked, though he already knew. His voice sounded different from the way he usually talked.

  ‘This is the place, son,’ Dad said. Mum and Dad had already been here to make the arrangements.

  ‘This is the Haven, Anna,’ Mum said, and her voice choked. Anna had seen that she’d been crying without making a sound all the time they were in the car.

  ‘What haven?’

  ‘The home for girls in your situation.’

  It was a big stately house of two storeys set in a large garden, with a high fence. The front windows were dark. A single bulb above the front door leaked weak yellow light.

  Mum took Anna’s hand and squeezed it. They opened the heavy iron gate and walked up the path. Dad carried the suitcase. The front door opened straightaway; they were expected. The woman standing there in a white uniform was so short, she might have been a dwarf.

  Mum and Dad were not allowed inside. Anna said goodbye to them in tears on the front step—she was certain she would never see them again. The nurse carried her case up the stairs into the upper regions of the house. Anna followed her with difficulty, climbing the stairs one at a time. It was the first time in months she had left her family’s home. She wasn’t used to walking. She felt that she had come apart in the middle. Her legs were obediently following the dwarf through the entrails of this strange hotel, while the rest of her body was still at home in West Brunswick.

  The woman went ahead down a narrow hallway. There was the faint smell of cigarettes. They passed an open door; the light was on, the globe dim, a row of beds, a girl’s body lying on a bed, a pair of eyes meeting hers.

  At last they came to her room. Eight beds were lined up against the walls. The nurse placed her case next to the window, beside a bed with a cream-painted iron bedstead. Anna thought there were bodies in most of the beds. The nurse withdrew without a word and she was left alone with strangers.

  The girls were lying quietly. None of them spoke to her. Their quietness made Anna fearful. She knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep. From hour to hour a clock chimed somewhere in the night: the house was reminding her that she was still awake. She felt her body floating above the bed, escaping the Haven, floating above the sleeping trees in the Edinburgh Gardens. In these uneasy, wakeful hours she was free of her body, free of her situation…she was primitive, unattached, a vagabond of the spirit. It was the way she used to feel at Cockatoo, with Neil. She had been a lively, happy, solid girl with brown hair and blue eyes; her mouth had been relaxed and smiling back then, not this compressed line of worry she’d seen in the mirror these past few months.

  The Haven at night was full of stifled weeping; she did not hear anyone crying out loud. Anna had been brought to a place where the girls were like shadows, wounded. Even when it was quiet, it was never entirely quiet. The girl in the next bed was breathing harshly in her sleep. Every breath carried the force of emotion—not tearfulness, but a deep shuddering that seemed to touch the limits of existence. Her shallow, helpless snores filled Anna with pity for her. The whole of the Haven was grieving in the night, the girls part of some vast exhalation going on deep in the building. She felt as if the old house was weeping from all the terrible things it had seen.

  The bedroom smelled of disinfectant. She remembered the time she had had her tonsils out in hospital. There had been the same smell, the ether mask coming down over her face, and her thoughts stretching into other thoughts that moved with the steady percussion of a steamboat making its way along a green river. Now, in the night, the sound came to her again, the putt-putt of Bogart’s dirty little steamer in The African Queen, which she had seen with Neil earlier that year.

  Next thing she heard was birdsong just before dawn. She must have slept for a while. Then another sound: the tramping of boots, the opening of doors, and someone shouting ‘Good morning!’ Their door opened and a hand switched on the sick yellow light.

  It was six o’clock. None of the other girls said anything or made any sign of moving, so Anna just lay there, too. The boots marched on.

  The weak light seeped into her.

  The girls got dressed for morning prayers. Anna had to change from her own warm nightgown into a coarse tunic made from thick cotton that felt stiff and uncomfortable against her skin. The tunics were shapeless coveralls, and although they were allowed to wear their own dresses underneath, if they had one that still fitted, the tunics felt damp in the unheated building. Matron and the nurses in their starched white uniforms also attended prayers: they were part of the Salvation Army, not just employees. It was something more than the usual strictness of nursing routine. They had to say a prayer to the Redeemer, and sing hymns.

  After prayers, there was breakfast, porridge. They were allowed to pour on their own treacle and milk. When it got light, there was mist in the trees, and the grass in the Edinburgh Gardens was white. Anna stared out the window at this ghostly world she had been delivered into.

  The dwarfish nurse who had admitted Anna now gave her a perfunctory tour of the place. Apart from the main building, with its imposing facade and its cast-iron balcony, there was a separate laundry and a maternity wing off the asphalt courtyard at the back. As they came down the side path and returned to the front door, Anna noticed the emblem, which she had missed in the dark on the previous night. There was a large ‘S’ snaking around a crucifix, two crossed swords, and the motto, BLOOD AND FIRE.

  The girls had to work hard at the Haven. Anna was put on the roster and told to scrub the wooden floors. There was supposed to be a wage, but she never saw any money. She cleaned the wards where the mothers and their babies were kept. She also worked in the laundry. The loads of linen never stopped coming.

  ‘Who’s this?’ asked the cook, that first morning, when Anna appeared in the kitchen with her tin bucket and scrubbing brush. Anna was too afraid to reply.

  ‘Speak up! What’s your name, girl?’ The cook, a big woman whose name was Margaret, had a gruff manner, but kind eyes.

  ‘I’m Anna. They told me to do the floor.’

  ‘A
nna? Is that the name Matron gave you?’

  ‘It’s my name. I haven’t seen Matron.’

  ‘Oh.’ Margaret nodded. ‘You girls are not allowed to use your real names here.’ Anna was too nervous to ask what she meant.

  She lowered herself carefully onto her knees and dipped the scrubbing brush in the soapy water, with its strong smell of pine disinfectant. Margaret watched her, smiling. ‘Don’t worry,’ she told Anna. ‘You’ll soon get used to it.’

  It was October, she was nearly six months pregnant, and getting down on her hands and knees was difficult, with her belly in the way. Anna kept trying to get up a scrubbing motion, but it was hopeless. Margaret put down the stainless steel bowl in which she was beating flour and water, went to the broom cupboard and brought out a mop.

  ‘Here,’ she said, offering it to Anna. ‘Use this, if you can’t manage the brush. But you’d better start next door in the dining room. I don’t want that Pine O Cleen smell getting into my dumpling batter. You can come and do in here when I’m finished making the dinners.’

  The dining room would have been the grandest room in the house when it was built, perhaps even a ballroom, Anna imagined. As she was mopping, she saw, in a crack between the wooden parquetry, a tiny gold pin, almost hidden by the grime. It might have been dropped there and forgotten at a party or ball during the Haven’s former life as some rich man’s mansion.

  She had almost finished when Matron appeared, and immediately went to the kitchen door and said to the cook, ‘What’s she doing with a mop? I want to see her on her hands and knees.’

  Margaret did not say anything. She looked down into her bowl and beat the batter for her dumplings more resolutely. The physical effort pulled her mouth tight. Matron took the mop out of Anna’s hands and returned it to the broom cupboard. She waited only long enough to see Anna begin to lower herself.

  Matron came back half an hour later to check on her. When she saw Anna scrubbing, she said to Margaret, ‘That’s better. Down where she belongs. She’s a sinner and she needs to beg Our Lord for forgiveness.’

  Anna had been raised in the Church of England and, since her sixteenth birthday, she had taught at Sunday school. She sang with the children, ‘Gentle Jesus Meek and Mild’, and she taught them about forgiveness. On the postcards she handed out to the children, Jesus looked kindly, too. These Salvation Army people, Anna soon realised, were made of sterner stuff, with their military uniforms, their brass bands.

  Where was the forgiveness in that? They were yelled at, called names, told they were ‘street girls’, not decent girls, not ‘good girls’. It seemed to Anna that the Salvation Army was a punishment machine, and even those among the staff, like Margaret, who were kind to the girls were afraid of being caught out by Matron.

  You had to do what you were told. You went to chapel on Sunday morning, you went to the altar and got down on your knees and admitted you were a sinner and begged the Lord for forgiveness. Then you were free for the rest of the day to receive your visitors in the downstairs sitting room with its dark wood-panelled walls and mismatched furniture. Occasionally, the girls were allowed to take the tram into the city on Saturday mornings, before the shops closed at midday, to purchase personal items. These privileges, it was made clear to the girls, could be withdrawn at any time.

  Those who were lucky, like Anna, had parents who stuck by them, and promised to visit each week. Many of the girls from the country, and those from other states, had been sent to the Haven precisely because it was far away and the family could avoid embarrassment. Those girls had no one.

  Every day as she struggled to get her work done, one idea kept floating back into Anna’s thoughts—a hope, a dream—that Neil would come and take her away from here, and they would be married, and they would have their baby together. He would be her knight in shining armour, like he used to be. They would have their baby. There, she had said it. This new life that was swelling inside her was at once the most beautiful and the most terrifying prospect.

  Sometimes she heard the sound of a baby crying in the maternity wing. A piercing scream, the baby hungry or in pain, calling for his mother. And if his mother did not come? I would not let my baby scream. I would always come to him, Anna thought. Her baby was always a boy in her mind. Even though the little thing has brought me all this trouble, how could I not love it? Yes, I am beginning to love him already, she thought. And when he—or she—is born, when I see him and hold him in my arms, that love I feel now will be ever so much stronger.

  When she thought of the difficult months and years ahead, however—finding money to keep her baby, living as an unmarried mother—she wasn’t able to see anything clearly. She was frozen with apprehension, sick with self-pity. The baby was no longer something new and delightful coming into her life. It was something that made her disgusted for letting herself end up here at the Haven, a victim.

  Everything could be fixed, if only Neil would come for her. A ring on her finger—that’s all it would take. The daydream returned to her, day after day, and she knew that these hopeful feelings came because they were the only way she would be able to survive in this place.

  Outside, it was springtime. Morning sunshine shone through the stained-glass panels at the sides of the windows and doors. For precious minutes, those colours were for Anna the only living things in this dead world. The dust motes floating in the shafts of sunlight made her nostalgic. She remembered how much she loved the golden wattle coming out in spring at Cockatoo. On Sundays she used to like to go to Station Pier to watch the ocean liners pull out, all the friends and relatives throwing streamers. But now those happy memories felt like old sorrows.

  One day during her first week at the Haven, after their midday dinner, she was sent to work in the laundry with a girl called Leanne. She was further along than Anna, about eight months, by the look of her. She told Anna that her real name was Jennifer, not Leanne—that was just the name Matron had assigned her on admission. She explained what Margaret had hinted at: that all the girls were given false names.

  She looked like a Leanne, though, with her dark brown, almond-shaped eyes, a mop of coarse black hair cropped straight across in a fringe. A farm girl, a childhood spent in the sun. She told Anna that she came from Leongatha; Anna wondered if ‘Leanne’ was just the first name that had come into Matron’s mind.

  The work in the laundry was demanding: lifting the wet sheets, hanging them out on the lines that crossed the building’s internal courtyard, taking them down again and folding them. And they had to wash, dry and iron all the laundry from the hospital wing.

  ‘Do you think it would kill them to let us have an orange sometimes?’ Leanne asked.

  ‘I can ask my mum to bring in a bag. I’ll ask her on Sunday.’

  Leanne was quiet. Her people, she’d told Anna, had sent her away and disowned her.

  Anna looked down into the trough and watched the way the bag of Reckitt’s Blue leaked out into the clear water, faint membranes of stain spreading like a cloud, or a jellyfish.

  The pregnant girls did most of the work at the Haven, under orders from Matron and the other Salvation Army women. The Salvation Army men never came in here. It was a women’s world, this house of shame.

  The family had to pay board each fortnight and the girls had to work hard right up until the day they went into labour. Anna still hoped that she would be gone from here by then.

  Matron
’s office was in a low brick building off the courtyard at the back, between the old house and the maternity wing. As Anna was crossing the courtyard one afternoon that first week, the flap in the shiny green door opened and Matron looked out. She gestured for Anna to come into her office.

  Matron had returned to her desk and was reading a file. It was a small windowless room, the only light coming from a lamp. Matron’s desk was against the wall, and there was hardly room for the wooden cabinets and shelves of files. The desk was piled high with documents. On the wall there were two pictures: a framed coloured print of Jesus on the cross, and an old black and white photo of a hulking Gothic building with turrets, and the legend beneath it, THE CITADEL.

  ‘You’re Anna Ross, aren’t you?’ Matron asked, without looking at her. Then she slowly swivelled in her old wooden chair and faced Anna. She had a brooch where her uniform buttoned at the top, and there were black flashes with a large ‘S’ on both collars. She was a Brigadier in the Salvation Army.

  ‘You’re going to be needing another name,’ she said.

  Anna had been expecting this. She said calmly, ‘I have a name already and I don’t see why I should change it.’

  ‘Oh,’ Matron said, and looked at her hard. ‘I’m not used to girls talking back to me.’

  Anna stood in silence, Matron’s words hanging in the air.

  ‘We have our reasons for getting the girls to use different names.’

  ‘What reasons?’

  ‘Privacy reasons. In case one day you should come across a fellow inmate and recognise her. It should be as though your time here never happened.’ Matron looked at her brightly. ‘I’ll tell you what—you can be Violet or Daisy. The name of a flower. There—I’ll give you a choice, which is more than I do for most girls.’

  ‘I don’t want another name.’