Invisible Child
Page 1
Invisible Child
Invisible Child
by
Mary Hayward
Mary Hayward BOOKS
All Rights Reserved. Copyright © 2010, 2017 Mary Hayward
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Epigraph
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve long after you are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
Rudyard Kipling
Table of Contents
1 Funeral
2 Losing Les
3 My Wooden Leg
4 Hospital
5 Convalescence
6 Drowning
7 The Wedding: School Concert
8 Birthday
9 Senior School
10 TB
11 Hunger
12 Desperate Times
13 Winter Chill
14 Starving: Final Struggle
15 Coming Home
16 Books and Orphans
17 Clacton
18 Meeting Joyce
19 The Milk Run
20 Best Friends
21 Last Year at School
22 Rape
23 Elsey’s Sports
24 Leaving Home: Just 17
25 Married Life
26 The Good Life
27 The Bacon Factory
28 Coming back from Brandon
29 The Shooting
30 The Samaritans
31 Leaving the Marriage with Colin
32 Boat People
33 Beating Up
34 Living with Billy
35 New Home, New Baby
36 The Final Blow
37 Bugging
38 Back on Track
39 College: Meeting Mike
40 Marriage No.3
41 Final Journey
1
Funeral
T EN MINUTES WOULD HAVE MADE A DIFFERENCE. I was talking to her—she was sitting up, and we were laughing. I wanted to tell her about our plans. When I looked down, I was alone.
Joyce, my best friend, was rushed to Harold Wood Hospital in the early hours of Monday morning, 30th October 1978. She was fighting for her life, shot by a rifle in the chest, and with the bullet lodged in her spine.
The Romford Recorder reported the news: ‘Shot Divorcee Inquest Opens.’
They called her a divorcee. Her life didn’t matter. The column was crammed tightly between Pete Murray’s DIY kitchen equipment and a complaint about the National Front outside the Town Hall. I felt an overwhelming sense of anger—I could have prevented it! Of course, if I had known, I would have done things differently. I am not sure what, exactly—but, for one thing, I wouldn’t have let her steal the gun. And she had shot herself on my thirtieth birthday! It was as if she were trying to tell me something, although I tried to convince myself it was nothing more than chance.
I dreamt about her coming into my home and knocking on the door. As I opened it, she stood there as large as life, and so real, dressed in her favourite fur-collared purple coat, her white boots, and short skirt. Bursting in, shouting with her broad Scottish accent, she suddenly sucked out the silence. Her big brown eyes, like her dress, were vibrant and sparkling, her nose twitching with mischief.
I convinced myself it couldn’t be a dream. It was so vivid.
“Joyce, you’re not dead?”
“Of course not, Mary, I’m here.”
She brushed past me while I put the kettle on, and slipped into the living room. We chatted away over coffee and then, unexpectedly she got up, danced down the long flight of stairs, and disappeared out into the snow. I called after her.
“Joyce, you’ll catch your death of cold—your coat!”
Running back to the living room I could see that her coat was no longer there. I searched through the large bay windows in the vain hope of catching a glimpse, then, in disbelief, I fell back and realised she had vanished.
Doubt crept across my mind—was she ever there? Yet it was so real! I could still see the coffee cups, lonely and abandoned on the little table, their rims kissed with her pink lipstick. It felt as if part of me had died and yet was still attached, as if my mind hadn’t realised she had gone.
Terry, my husband, drove me to Enfield Crematorium, but as I walked the gravel-popping path, the dream, like the wind, continued to ravage my thoughts. I reluctantly entered the little chapel, stood quietly next to Terry, and scanned the room. Joyce’s parents and siblings stood there like sculptures silhouetted against the grey stone walls. I saw their faces pale with grief, their solemn tears frozen, and their eyes lowered in a nervous black silence that echoed around the room. I heard a thin cry rising from the gathered crowd as the sudden taste of her familiar perfume, ‘Joy’, struck me a glancing blow, scattering the emotions of those around me like leaves in the autumn wind.
Her coffin, so close, yet seemingly transparent, drew me like a powerful magnet, yet despite my best efforts to think of something else, it would still be there. Insidiously, its solemn presence insinuated every compartment of my mind, filling me up, spilling over, and pouring out like some giant sprinkler onto everyone around me. No hanky could wipe away my tears, no comfort was enough, no words, and there was nothing that could reach me. I was utterly alone in my grief.
We had plans, she and I. She was getting better, or so I thought. She was sitting up and chatting about going on holiday. The build up to recovery, the hope, the dreams; and then the empty bed, the deathly silence, the sad looks, followed by the crushing news; and the shattering bitter blow leaving me, open, raw, bereft of emotions, as if the warmth that Joyce brought to me was in an instant drained away.
We shared everything together, our clothes, our worries, just about everything girlfriends shared. Yes, she could be unreliable at times. But I accepted that in her; that was Joyce.
Joyce, I keep imagining I see you lying there, sleeping in the coffin, and I want to wake you. There are so many questions you have not answered. You have to throw me into this world of chaos! If I tell you now, will you listen from wherever you are? I look upward and ask why you had to die. I never thought your life would end this way. It should have been me, good God! I had reason enough. But you, Joyce, you didn’t have a good enough reason to do it! How can you do this to me? You told me I did everything perfect.
Joyce, if only you knew!
2
Losing Les
TO UNDERSTAND THE EVENTS that led up to the shooting, and why I was so lucky to have a friend like Joyce, I need to go back to when my story began.
My father James stumbled into the poverty stricken world of East End London, in April 1923, the youngest of ten children with all the prospects of fighting World War Two as a young shaver in the Catering Corp. But slicing spuds wasn’t his strong point, and after he was demobbed his prospects never amounted to anything; he was a natural born loser. He was a tall dashing man in uniform, dark hair, with spectacles like panda eyes. Perhaps that was the appealing feature that attracted Nellie, a small mousy women born in 1916 to a well off family of bakers who lived in Chiswick. But later I realised it was more to do with funding the child she already had by a married man. That child was my half brother, Les.
I was just nine years old in 1957 when we moved, with my Mum, Dad and older brother Les, aged fifteen, to a new Council Maisonette in Edmonton, North London. Of the four blocks ours was a ground floor unit in the centre nearest to the railway. It was okay as long as I held my cup firmly when the train went by. A single bare electric light bulb sucked its power through a thin cable from the outside lamp of the house above. It competed for light against the musty curtains that imprisoned me with a faint glow. It was like living in a vomit-stained refuge of a mangrove swamp.
In winter, the bone-chilling cold would suck the black damp from the air as I laid the open fire. Mum could use the gas pipe that ran into the side of the grate. But it was too frightening for me to use; instead, I would lay the fire with rolled up newspaper, and then make squares of toilet paper from the fragments that remained.
My home was a minefield littered with constant fights, latent arguments and simmering rows that festered between my parents, James and Nellie, and my fifteen-year-old brother Les. I guess the upside was it blocked out the sound of the trains. But I lost count of how many times I heard them going at it hammer and tongs, screaming and shouting at each other. Not surprisingly, I suppose, the neighbours listened into our lives.
“Well Lill, did you hear that last night?” they would say.
It was better than listening to the Archers for them because the characters were real; they had genuine black eyes, no make-up to cover it up. No, not for us: real blood and pain!
Reality for me consisted of scampering off upstairs, hiding out of the way in case they suddenly turned on me. But, of course, I couldn’t stop it and the fighting continued, day after day. Eventually it got to me—the expectation, waiting for it to happen, trying to pretend it wasn’t happening when it was, and then banging my head into the pillow trying to make it stop.
I was trapped. There was nothing I could have done, except pray that somehow they would see sense and resolve their differences; but it never seemed to happen, and every day was just like Groundhog Day, grinding me down until it was a relief to go to school.
At school I appeared to be happy, popular and carefree. I never spoke about my life at home and to everyone around me. I was a joyful little child without a care in the world. I enjoyed nothing better than listening to the other children telling me about their problems, trying to think up different ways in which they might adapt themselves, and to pass on some of the solutions that had worked for me.
What was so frightening for me was the constant threat of the family torn apart, promising to catapult me into what Mum called ‘Care’. It was all right for Dad as he disappeared into a bottle most nights away from it all, down the pub or betting shop or both, but I had no such escape; I had to stay there in the thick of it.
‘Care’? I didn’t really understand what she meant when she said ‘taken into Care’. But it seemed to scare her. One day she told me if I were taken into ‘Care’, then all the family would be punished and split up. Apparently it was a cross between a holiday camp and a prison, and I would be sent away never to see my Mum again. I didn’t know what a holiday camp was, but the prison bit scared me. But really, I just wanted the fighting to stop!
Then one day I came home from school, and everything was to change. After months of fighting with Les all the time, I discovered Mum sitting in the kitchen by the old Formica table. It stood on an old off-cut of Linoleum that attempted to cover the floor like some discarded rag. Our fridge was a cold stone slab sat at the bottom of the larder. It was designed to keep food fresh, although my Mum never used it either because she didn’t understand its purpose, or because we never had food long enough for it to go off.
Puffing away on one of her fags, muttering to herself, she was drawing so deeply on the cigarette, I thought she was going to swallow the bloody thing. She continued to puff out great smelly clouds of blue smoke, one after another, until the kitchen stank of it all. I hadn’t seen her like this before.
“Fucking sod!” She spat venom and hate with her spiteful words. “Les slapped me, he did!” She coughed and continued: “Stormed off out of the house! Don’t know where he is.”
She shook her head from side to side, and rocked back and forth in the chair.
I didn’t think she really cared; she seemed preoccupied about how she was going to punish him.
“Serves him right, that’ll show him. Yeah, that’s it,” she muttered under her breath. “Fucking sod!”
The door swung open, and before Dad could get in the kitchen, she was ranting.
“Les, the little sod, he’s hit me! Slapped me round the face he did, little fucker.” She pointed to the side of her face trying to justify her anger.
“What yer on about?” Dad lurched to one side. “Yer face always looks like that.”
“Yeah, see, look at it! Les, the little bastard, belted me one.” Turning her face to one side, she pulled her hair back as if to expose some marks, but there was nothing there I could see.
Dad snatched a glance at her through his misty thick-rimmed glasses, leaned a little and tried to steady himself on the handle of the kitchen door. But it swung away from him and smacked him in the face. As he lurched forward trying to regain his balance, he flung me a puzzled gaze before slumping down onto the nearby kitchen chair in a drunken stupor.
She knew she wouldn’t get any sense out of him until he had sobered up a bit. She snatched his dinner from the oven, spat in it and thumped it down in front of him, slopping the gravy onto his shirt.
“Oh, shit,” he squirmed as hot liquid burned his flesh.
I made myself scarce and escaped up to my room. I knew better than to get too close when they were going to have a row. My room had a bed and an old wooden chair that served to stop what clothes I had from falling on the bare floorboards. By means of a single candle stuck to the windowsill, I was able to keep my hands warm from time to time.
Mum started first. “I’m not having it! No, I’m not going to put up with it any more. You mark my words, and as for Les—well, he’ll have to go, and that’s it!”
The next thing I heard was someone knocking on the door. Bang, bang, bang! I didn’t know if Les had lost his key, but it was enough to make me jump.
It was Dad who first broke the silence and started whispering again, arguing with Mum in the kitchen until finally I heard Mum’s voice booming out: “I’m not having ’im here and that’s final!”
I heard heavy footsteps on the stairs. It must have been Dad rummaging around in Les’ room. He was gathering all his stuff, wrapping it up.
Bang! The letterbox snapped back. Les was clearly getting impatient at the door.
By this time Mum had disappeared into the living room, hiding behind the door. It gave her a clear view down the hall. Not that she appeared to be frightened, as I might have imagined, but to ensure Dad did as he was told.
“Go on then—tell him!”
She was standing back like a referee at a wrestling match, and no doubt she figured that if someone was going to get hurt, it wasn’t going to be her.
I watched as Dad picked up a brown paper parcel all wrapped up with string. He stood there like a refugee in some sort of paralysed indecision. Like a fox in the headlights, he turned round and round, until, eventually he turned away, as if to make a run for it into the living room.
She reached out and grabbed his arm. “Go on then, tell him!” Mother shouted again, attempting to drag his arm back along the hall.
Stepping back from her, he broke free, hesitated, and I sensed he didn’t want to do it. His whole character was like the drink: pathetic. He flung his ar
m round to hit her, missed and almost fell over, then, recovering his composure, lurched in the direction of the front door, muttering. It was as if he were rehearsing what to say in his mind.
I tottered downstairs, my head between the balustrades as though I were in the front row of the cinema waiting for the start. I was ready for the entertainment for the night, and although I fully expected Dad to give Les a good belting, I wasn’t really ready for what happened next.
All Les’ things, bundled and tied with string, lay behind the front door.
“I’ve had enough of your arguments,” Dad said. “Mum has had enough of yer, and she doesn’t want you here anymore! So you’re not coming in!” He calmly turned and picked up the parcel.
I didn’t hear what Les said to him, and maybe Les didn’t say anything at all; perhaps he had already anticipated this, I didn’t know.
“I’ve got all yer stuff wrapped up: now you’d better go and live with your Aunt Glad and Grandma in Chiswick.” He shoved the parcel at Les and pushed him away.
Les shrugged his shoulders and accepted it, and I wondered later if he was as happy to go as they were to get rid of him. They used him to claim overcrowding with the impending arrival of a new baby, and now they had their new house, it seems they didn’t need him anymore.
The door quietly shut and I heard the sound of someone walking back up the path that I assumed was Les. Rushing up into the bedroom at the front of the house, I pinned my nose to the window trying to catch a glimpse of Les as he left. I tried to wave but he never saw me. I banged on the window trying to get his attention. But he didn’t look up. I strained to catch sight of him as he reached the end of the block, and I remember desperately trying to open the window, and then falling back onto the bed shocked and saddened that he had left. I sat at the window for ages looking for him, searching as I sobbed into the night. But as the hours ticked by, my heart sank and the disappointment took hold.