Ribbons in Her Hair

by Colette McCormick

  Mick moved to stand in front of me though I don’t know why because Dad would never have hit me. I thought for a second that he might hit Mick. Thank God he didn’t because I don’t think Mick would have taken it without hitting back.

  Dad looked at Mick for a minute. Then he looked at me and all I could see was his disappointment.

  Mick didn’t stay long, half an hour at the most. In that time he had promised to do the right thing and make an honest woman of me. My shame would be covered up just as soon as possible, hopefully before I started to show. Personally I didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. I mean, I knew that I would have to get married, but it wasn’t like I was the first lass to fall wrong for God’s sake – and I wouldn’t be the last.

  It wasn’t the start to married life that I’d hoped for but I’d made my bed so I had to lie in it.

  We were married in the local church a few weeks later. Mam bought me a white dress on the market. It wasn’t what most people would have thought of as a wedding dress but there wasn’t the time or the money for a traditional one. What I wore didn’t matter though, I was getting married and that was the main thing. The dress was a bit tight but Mam made sure that I didn’t show. How could I when I was wearing the girdle she’d bought me? I could barely breathe for God’s sake and I held a little posy of flowers in front of me all the time. We had to hide my shame from the neighbours.

  The wedding was a small family affair, just a few members of our immediate families at the church and then a reception in the back room of The Swan, the pub that my dad and brothers drank in. Mam had arranged for sandwiches and salad to be laid on and we even had a cake. It had to look like a regular wedding. The only thing missing was a fight, though it was touch and go for a while.

  From the reception Mick and I made our way to his mam’s house. Things being the way they were we couldn’t get a place of our own. The wedding had been arranged so quickly that there hadn’t been time to find anywhere and to be honest, we couldn’t really afford it.

  I felt a bit awkward going upstairs with Mick. It wasn’t so much that I was in Mick’s bedroom with its new double bed and the sheets that his mam had starched, it was more the fact that his parents and younger sister were sitting in the room below.

  Mick didn’t seem to mind though. He didn’t seem to care who heard him.

  ***

  It was hard being a wife to Mick while we were living in his mam’s house. I never made my husband’s tea and I never even ironed him a shirt. His mother still had her only son at home to look after and all she had to do to keep him there was put up with me, the tart that had trapped her son into marriage. I never felt comfortable around her.

  I once tried to talk to my own mother about it but she wasn’t interested. She said that I should be grateful. But I wasn’t grateful; I was miserable.

  My mother-in-law’s name was Eileen but I never called her that. She was always ‘Mick’s mam’. Sometimes I would get up early in the hope that I would be able to make my husband his breakfast. But no matter what time I arrived in the kitchen Mick’s mam was always there before me with a pot of tea brewing.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she would say with a smile – no, a smirk – on her face, ‘I’ll take care of our Mick. I know how he likes things.’

  Our Mick. Wasn’t he my Mick…? It was a small price to pay, I suppose, considering the alternative. If Mick hadn’t married me I would have been ruined, and he could have walked away from it – from me. That had happened to more than one of the girls I went to school with. They had been left alone with their babies and not much hope of another man wanting them.

  I just wished that Mick wouldn’t leave me on my own with his mam so much. He knew that she didn’t like me yet he still left me on my own with her. I know that he had to during the day when he was at work but why did he have to go to the pub every night? It was probably because his dad did and Mick was his father’s son, or at least he wanted to be. I always felt he wanted to prove something to his dad; proving he was a man to his father was part of the reason behind a lot of things that Mick did.

  They’d both come home from work and have their tea then, after a wash and a shave, they’d be off down the pub leaving me and my mother-in-law listening to the radio and knitting baby clothes.

  I didn’t like being pregnant and I wished I wasn’t. If I hadn’t been pregnant I wouldn’t have been sitting, night after night, opposite a woman who hated me, working the needles to make clothes for a baby that I didn’t want.

  There. I’ve said it and it was true. I didn’t want the baby that was growing in my belly. It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to be pregnant, I didn’t want the heartburn or to be tired all the time either. I didn’t want to be fat, and I certainly didn’t want my tits to feel like balloons. I didn’t want any of those things, but most of all, I didn’t want my baby.

  My baby was tying me to Mick and I didn’t think I wanted that either. I was certain that Mick felt the same way. He didn’t love me. He’d only married me because he’d not been careful enough. Everyone knew that we were going together so everyone would also know that my belly was his doing. He’d had to marry me, really. He’d had no choice. All that either of us could do was accept that things were the way they were. This was our life and we had to get on with it.

  One day, when I was about eight months gone, I was in the town buying a few bits that Mick’s mam wanted for tea. I was in the queue at the greengrocer’s waiting to buy potatoes when I heard someone say my name. I turned around and saw Margaret Dobbs who I’d gone to school with. Except she wasn’t called Dobbs any more; she’d married Bill Preston six months before her baby was born.

  ‘Hello Margaret,’ I said shifting my weight from leg to leg. I leaned over and looked into the pram that she was pushing. ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘Billy,’ she said, pushing the blanket that had been covering the baby down so that I could get a better look.

  I stroked his cheek. ‘Hello Billy,’ I said. He was a cute enough little lad. We chatted for a minute or two and then I told her I had to get back with the shopping.

  The potatoes were heavy and I walked slowly along the street, huffing and puffing with effort. It took me a long time to get back to the house.

  ‘At last,’ Mick’s mam said when I walked through the door. ‘I thought I was going to have to send out a search party.’

  I didn’t bother to answer her, I was too tired. I just went upstairs and lay on the bed.

  Half an hour later my waters broke. I had to call for Mick’s mam four times before she appeared at the bedroom door with an annoyed look on her face. Mick and his dad would be back from work in an hour and she was making their tea. She said as much when she opened the door, but when she saw what had happened she told me to put a nightgown on, climb into bed and relax while she went to fetch the nurse.

  I lay in the bed alone and terrified. I watched the clock and waited for the nurse to arrive and wondered what was taking her so long. She arrived just as I was thinking that I might be going to die.

  When Mick got home I wanted him with me but when I asked for him his mam said, ‘What do you want him for? He’s done his bit; it’s your turn now.’

  The nurse came close to me and put something cold on my forehead. Her face was close to mine and she stroked my hair. ‘You’re better off without him love,’ she whispered. ‘This is no place for a man – useless buggers,’ and she smiled at me.

  I wanted to smile back but another contraction came and I had to fight the pain that came with it.

  Sometime during the night my baby was born. I lay in the bed and sobbed. I was so happy that it was over and that I had lived through it. I could hear my baby crying and just wanted it to shut up so that I could go to sleep, I was so tired.

  I saw the nurse bringing it over to me. ‘Your baby needs feeding,’ she said.

  I wanted to tell her to feed it herself then, but I knew that wasn’t going to happen so I pushed myself up again
st the pillows and unbuttoned my nightgown. The nurse put my baby in my arms and showed me how to get it to take the breast. I looked down at the baby suckling on me and felt nothing. I started to cry and I know that the other women probably thought that it was with love for my newborn child, but really it was because I didn’t know what was wrong with me. How could I not feel anything for this tiny creature in my arms that I had carried around inside me for all those months? I wanted to love it but I just didn’t feel a thing.

  The nurse must have sensed something because she came and sat on the edge of the bed and stroked my arm. ‘Don’t force it, Jean love,’ she said. ‘It’ll come.’

  I wanted to believe that she was right. I didn’t want to hate the child that was the reason I was married to a man that I didn’t love.

  At last the baby was fed and had fallen asleep. The nurse took it from me and put it down in a cot that had somehow appeared by the side of the bed and then I fell asleep too.

  When I woke up it was daylight and Mick was standing by the window with the baby in his arms. He was rocking it and talking to it. He looked happy.

  I’d watched them for a couple of minutes before Mick sensed that I was awake. He turned around and looked at me in a way that he had never looked at me before. Maybe he did feel something for me after all.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, coming towards me with the baby in his arms. ‘You all right?’

  I nodded and maybe even smiled myself.

  He sat on the bed close to my head. ‘She’s beautiful.’

  And that’s when it hit me that until that moment I hadn’t known if I had a son or a daughter. I’d not even asked what I’d had. What sort of mother was I?

  ‘What are we going to call her?’ he asked without taking his eyes off his precious bundle.

  I didn’t know; I hadn’t given it any thought.

  ‘What about Helen?’

  Why not, it was as good as anything. So I had a daughter called Helen.

  And I tried to love her.

  ***

  I have to say in my defence that I didn’t neglect Helen. I fed her when she needed feeding and I cleaned up after her when she was dirty. I just didn’t fuss over her twenty-four hours a day. Mick did enough of that for both of us anyway.

  He didn’t spend so long at the pub after Helen was born. He always made sure that he was home to spend at least a little time with his ‘princess’ before she went to bed. Mick loved being a father. He loved it so much that when Helen was only six months old he suggested, ‘Let’s have another one.’

  Over my dead body, but Helen was less than eighteen months old when I knew that I was pregnant again. I still hadn’t come round to wanting the baby that I already had and now I was having another. At least it meant that we would have to move out of Mick’s mam’s house. When we had two babies we would have to have our own place.

  Thankfully we came to the top of the council list not long after I found out that I was expecting again and we were offered a two bedroom house on the same estate that our parents lived on. I snapped their hands off accepting it; I would be able to get the house just the way I wanted it before the baby came.

  I loved that house. It was just a two up, two down, but it was mine. Well, it wasn’t mine because it belonged to the council, but that didn’t matter. Luckily for us, the people that had lived there before had been clean so we were able to move straight in without having to do much. I mean, I still scrubbed it from top to bottom but we didn’t have to decorate it or anything. I had it looking like a palace by the time I was done.

  I gave Mick another daughter and we called her Julie. I had hoped that this baby would be a boy: men always wanted a son, my mam always said that, and I’d only given my husband daughters. Which meant Mick might want me to go through it again…

  Helen and Julie weren’t bad girls. They had their moments, like any kids, but they weren’t a bother really. And Mick seemed happy enough. He idolised his daughters and he was a good father. To be fair to him he was a good husband as well. He didn’t knock me about, which is more than some of the lasses I knew could say. He worked hard and always provided for us. I didn’t hate Mick but I didn’t really love him either.

  My mam always said that the reason you got married was to have children. I didn’t want any more children. I knew that I would have to be careful about how I went about preventing another pregnancy – Mick could never know what I was doing.

  I made sure that I never refused Mick though. I mean, I couldn’t risk him looking elsewhere, could I? I didn’t fancy being left on my own with two kids. I’d seen that happen often enough to other people and I didn’t like what I saw.

  After a year or so, he started to get suspicious. He said that it was odd that I hadn’t got pregnant again. ‘We try often enough,’ he laughed. Mick was very keen on that side of our marriage though, to be honest, I could have done without the bother.

  I forced a smile and said that it would happen when it was meant to.

  His mother mentioned it once at a family christening.

  ‘Thought we’d have been having another one of these for you by now.’

  ‘All in good time, Mam,’ Mick said, ‘all in good time.’

  I fussed over the girls and hoped that no one could see the terror that I was feeling.

  As the years went by without any additions to our family I started to believe that I wasn’t meant to have any more children, but I didn’t want to take any chances and was careful all of the time. There were some things that just couldn’t be left to fate.

  When the girls had both started school I started to think about getting a job. I’d enjoyed working before I was married. I’d liked having a job to go to and God knows that the extra money would come in handy, so I thought that it might be a good idea. Mick didn’t see it that way.

  ‘What do you want to get a job for?’ he asked between the mouthfuls of food that he’d shovelled into his mouth.

  ‘I just thought that it would be good.’

  But Mick didn’t agree, not just yet anyway – maybe when the girls were older.

  I left it at that. For then. But I was determined that once Julie went to secondary school I was going to get a job. Or that was the plan until the day my world fell apart.

  I discovered I was pregnant again. Mick was over the moon, the girls were excited, I was devastated. I didn’t understand how it could have happened. Where had my plan gone wrong?

  As Mick held his third daughter in his arms he looked as pleased as Punch. Even after eleven years of marriage I still didn’t know if he loved me but I knew that he loved the girls. He loved them all, but as I watched him cradle his newest creation I knew that he would love this one the most.

  Mick didn’t mention it – why would he? It was women’s stuff – but I think that he realised that, come what may, there would be no more children. His youngest daughter was all the more precious for that reason.

  We decided to call her Susan. She was a good baby. She rarely cried and I have to admit that sometimes I used to forget she was there.

  To an outsider looking in I was the perfect mother. My baby was always clean and looked content as she slept for hours at a time. People thought that I was the perfect wife too. Mick never went out without a clean shirt, there was always a crease in his trousers and his tea was always on the table when he got in from work. The girls were just the same; their dresses were always washed and ironed and they went to school every day.

  Once, when Helen was about nine, I was at the gates waiting for the girls to come out of school when I saw Helen coming across the yard holding her teacher’s hand. What the hell has she done now? I thought, and I knew that all the other mothers standing there were thinking the same.

  ‘Mrs Thompson,’ the teacher said, ‘I wonder if I might have a word with you.’ She was new to the school and I wasn’t even sure what she was called. I’d never spoken to the woman before and from just the few words she’d said I could tell that she wasn’t lo
cal.

  ‘Is there something wrong?’ I asked, trying to keep my voice down and hoping that she would do the same. But she didn’t.

  ‘I’m sure that you know that we have a spelling test every week, Mrs Thompson,’ she said. ‘I just wanted you to know that Helen is the only pupil that has got all of her spellings right every week this term. I wasn’t sure if Helen would tell you herself and I thought that you should know. You should be very proud of her.’

  I felt the eyes of the other mothers on me – and their disappointment that Helen wasn’t in trouble. ‘Well done, Helen love,’ I said giving her a hug. I even gave her a kiss on the cheek. Later on I heard Helen tell Julie that, ‘Mam hugged me.’

  Mick was chuffed to bits when I told him. ‘It’s the grammar school for you,’ he said as he ruffled her hair. ‘That’ll be a first for this family.’

  She’d also be the first in the street, I thought. Now there would be something worth aiming for. It would really mean something if Helen could get into the grammar school. She would be special and, through her, the rest of us would be special too. The uniform would be a bit pricy but it’d be worth it to see the look on the faces of our neighbours. I could just imagine all the net curtains twitching as my daughter went past in her bottle-green uniform. Some of them might have to wipe the muck off their windows though, before they could see out of them.

  That was one thing that you’d never hear me accused of. My house was always clean. The windows were washed inside and out every week, the beds were changed every week and I dusted and did the floors every day.

  I once heard her, that one from the bottom of the street, saying that she didn’t care what people thought about her. How could she not care what people thought about her? How could she not care what they said about the state of her curtains? People’s opinions mattered. What they thought about you was everything. It didn’t matter what was actually going on; you didn’t let other people see your troubles. You could let them see the good stuff like your daughter in her grammar school uniform, but not the black eye that your husband had given you. Not that Mick ever gave me a black eye; he’s never raised a finger to me in all the years I’ve known him, even though he could have a rotten temper. I might never have had a black eye, but if I’d had, no one would ever have seen it. Not the girls, not my mother and certainly not the neighbours.