Nobody Came

Title Page
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Publisher

O
nce the initial shock of hearing the words ‘Haut de la Garenne’ had faded I tried to make my mind travel back in time and revisit the past. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to leave my childhood memories buried any longer. The relentless surge of interest in Jersey’s secrets would make sure of that. But I’d kept my thoughts so carefully concealed for so long that they refused to obey me. I couldn’t think about either the granite building that dominated the news or the orphanage, run by the nuns, which I had been sent to first. ‘Not yet,’ they said to me, ‘not yet.’ Instead they bypassed that time and went straight back to that last summer I spent with my family. The summer before they took us away.

Six of us – my mother, Stanley (her current man), my two brothers, me, and the latest addition to our family, a baby sister – lived in Devonshire Place in St Helier, the capital of Jersey. It was an unremarkable area made up of terraced houses, a couple of pubs and a few corner shops. A place where families lived, children played and women stood on their doorsteps, cigarette smoke swirling around their heads, swapping gossip with the neighbours. A street like many others; certainly there was nothing unusual about it, but in summer, when the sun shone on the pastel-painted houses, I thought it was pretty. And it was my home.

We all lived in three rooms on the top floor of one of those houses. Directly beneath the uninsulated roof, they were cold and draughty in winter but stuffy and airless in summer.

I was the middle boy. My elder brother John, with his spiky blond hair that refused to obey his brush however much he dampened it, his wide impish grin and his infectious laugh, was eight, three years older than me.

Davie, the youngest, with his round little stomach and chubby legs and indentations on either side of his mouth, was all curves and dimples. He had just learnt to talk in partial sentences and with a wide grin on his pink-cheeked face claimed our attention by chattering to us as fast as he could. He followed John and me around our rooms, stumbling in his haste, his legs slightly bowed, for at three he was still in bulky towelling nappies; not so much because he couldn’t tell one of us when he wanted a wee but because our mother didn’t want to climb down three flights of stairs to the outside lavatory with him. Even sitting him on a potty regularly appeared to take too much effort. Davie often remained all day in his damp nappy until his eight-year-old brother came home from school and changed it.

I looked like neither of them. I had a slight frame, fine dark hair and grey eyes that peered myopically at the world.

John told me that he knew Stanley wasn’t his father because he dimly remembered the time when he first came to live with Gloria. We always called her Gloria – never mum.

‘You arrived soon after,’ he told me. ‘So I guess Stanley’s your dad but he’s not Davie’s.’

‘How do you know?’ I asked in a puzzled voice, but John didn’t answer me then.

Years later he told me that he’d overheard Stanley shouting at Gloria, asking her who the baby’s father was, when he found out that she was pregnant with Davie. Certainly with his light brown hair and round face, he bore no resemblance to the dark-haired, olive-skinned Stanley, but Gloria insisted he could only be his. Denise was dark like Stanley but it was hard to tell what her baby features would be like when she grew up.

Another reason I always believed that Stanley was my father was that although he was mild-mannered and never said an unpleasant word to my brothers, it was me he seemed to single out for attention. Sometimes it was just a warm smile and a hand brushed lightly across my head. Occasionally, when Gloria was out of hearing range, he would fumble in his pocket, draw out a few coins and place them quickly in my hand.

‘Buy yourself some sweets, lad,’ he would whisper to me and I knew to hide the money away from Gloria’s sharp gaze. He even on rare occasions took me down to the pier on the small wooden cart attached to his bicycle and treated me to an ice-cream. But apart from those few encounters he was rarely seen, nor did he involve himself with any of us.

Stanley was a landscape gardener who left for work early each morning, seven days a week, dressed smartly in caramel corduroy trousers and a brown tweed jacket, and returned late at night after we were in bed. The early start was no doubt because of the wish to get to work but the lateness of his return was, I would now guess, due to his reluctance to be in my mother’s company.

On the other hand, Gloria left the rooms infrequently, apart from her visits to the hairdressers to have a perm or get her colour touched up. Her days were spent sipping gin mixed with lemonade, which she poured into a glass almost the moment she woke, while flicking through magazines like
Woman’s Weekly
and
Woman’s Realm
, painting her nails, plucking her eyebrows and winding her hair onto large pink plastic curlers.

She was someone who preferred to entertain her friends at home – mainly men, all of whom we were told to call uncle. They only came when Stanley was out at work.

I always knew by her languid preparations when these visitors were expected. Her long red hair was brushed into smooth waves, powder fluffed over her face, a small brush spat on then dipped in some sort of black goo before being applied to her eyelashes, and lastly red lipstick was smeared on a mouth she turned in then pushed out into a pout. Checking her teeth in the mirror for lipstick marks she would smile at herself knowingly. She was ready.

Watching these preparations, my little brother and I waited for what always came next. She turned to look at us as if she was seeing us for the first time, or as though she had forgotten our existence. When she noticed Davie and me gazing at her, the smile faded from her lips to be replaced by a look of irritation at our presence.

‘Robbie,’ she said to me each time, ‘when my visitor arrives, say hello then take Davie into your room and keep him quiet. When John comes back from school I’ll send him out for our supper. Trotters and chips, all right?’

Pigs’ trotters, fried in bubbling fat until the skin was so crisp it looked like batter, was our favourite supper. Content with my bribe, I smiled, nodded and accepted the terms.

Often when the uncles arrived they would bring Davie and me a paper bag containing sticky toffees and sometimes even old copies of
Beano
or
Dandy
comics, clearly already read by other children.

‘Thank you, sir,’ I would say, for my mother had instilled in all of us the need for good manners towards the uncles, and clutching the booty I would push my baby brother into our room. We greedily stuffed the sweets into our mouths the moment the bedroom door was shut and then with bulging cheeks settled down to play. I couldn’t read the comics so I put them on one side for John. He would either read them or invent stories to make the illustrations come alive later when we had finished our supper.

Making the appropriate ‘woom, woom’ sounds, we ran battered Dinky cars across the thin carpet, piled up painted wooden bricks, which Davie knocked down, then played with our wax crayons. I’d draw him pictures and he would chortle with laughter at my attempts. Matchstick figures of people appeared on paper, then I dressed and coloured them in, gave them a square house and finally drew in flowers and a tree.

But however much I concentrated on the games and my drawings, the walls were so thin that I could hear every sound coming from the sitting room. The gurgle of beer being poured, lemonade splashing into gin, the small screech of the gramophone needle when it was placed carelessly, with a drunk’s lack of precision, onto the record on the turntable and the scrape of furniture being moved. Johnnie Ray’s melodious voice would be singing a love song, laughter, my mother’s voice, giggles, a man’s groans, voices, and finally the door closing; the uncle’s visit had ended.

The one thing those visits taught me were the words to the latest songs. Before I started school I didn’t know who ‘Jack and Jill’ were and I hadn’t felt fingers climbing my arm to the words of ‘Itsy bitsy spider’; in fact, I didn’t know one line from a nursery rhyme, but I could sing every verse of Johnnie Ray’s ‘Walking My Baby Back Home’.

When I finally left our room I entered one that reeked of cigarettes, cigars, beer and another fishy type of smell, which always lingered in the air after an uncle’s visit. I didn’t know what it was, just that my nose wrinkled with distaste as soon as I smelled it.

I have one vivid memory of my mother. It is of the last afternoon that I was home when an uncle visited and, after hearing the door shut, I had ventured into the sitting room. Gloria was lying on the settee showing a large expanse of white dimpled thigh above laddered stockings. Her eyes were shut and puffs of breath pushed themselves out of her lipstick-smeared mouth, along with a trickle of spit that was clinging to the corner of her lips. Her face, which had looked so pretty earlier with its powder-pale skin and red lips, now appeared flushed and flaccid as though the gin had soaked into her skin, loosening it from the framework of her bones.

In the ashtray was something that looked like a balloon that had lost its air. A pair of black lacy panties lay tossed on the floor. Her bottle of gin was almost empty so I knew two things: left alone she would sleep for some time, but if forced awake her temper would explode.

Looking at her, I hoped my baby sister Denise wouldn’t waken, for if her wails and cries penetrated Gloria’s slumbers then our bedroom would become my only retreat. I had learnt that Gloria’s hand would lash out when she was annoyed, and I got the brunt of it when John was at school.

But my sister never seemed to wake on the days the uncles called. John told me later it was because of the medicine Gloria gave her.