The Stranger House (31 page)

I think if I thought anything I thought I must have done something really terrible to deserve such punishment. Yes, that’s it, I felt guilty. Makes you laugh, doesn’t it? I felt guilty! Makes you cry.

Then one day I read in the paper about this Migrant Trust thing that this English woman had started. It was funny. I’d got so used to trying not to think about it because there was no point that it was real hard to start thinking about it again. Suppose it turned out I was right and I deserved what happened to me? But in the end I had to write to the English lady and I got this reply inviting me to go and see her next time she was in Australia, so I went.

There were a lot of other people there waiting and one of them kept looking at me and finally she came over and said, “Aren’t you Betty?” And then I remembered, we’d been on the boat together, and we started crying. Jesus, we must have cried a whole bucketload of tears, and it was like they started washing stuff away, and the more we cried and the more we talked, the more I remembered …

Not being alone was better and it was worse. When I re alized just how many of us there’d been—not just one boatload but whole convoys over whole decades—for the first time I began to think maybe I wasn’t so specially bad after all. But then you start to ask, if we weren’t so specially bad, what in the name of God were we doing
on those boats? Who decided we should be on them? Where did we all come from?

But you know all about this. There’s been newspaper articles, there’s been books, there’s been commissions of enquiry. You want to know about your gran, the little sick girl. I keep calling her little. She wasn’t all that big but she was two years older than me. I was ten. Can you imagine that? Ten, and they put me on a boat and sent me so far away from home, if we’d gone any further we’d have been coming back! But the girl, Sammy—that’s what we called her because when you asked her about herself, she never spoke but just pulled this piece of paper out of her pocket and when you unfolded it you could just about read this name. Sam Flood. One of the girls thought it must be short for Samantha, which sounded a real fancy name back then. The sick girl didn’t say anything, so we called her Sammy anyway.

There was some kind of address on the paper too, but it had all got so scrunched up it was hard to read. Didn’t seem important, anyway. What did addresses in England have to do with us any more? Names were different. You had to be called something. Everyone needs a name. Once you let the bastards just call you a number, they’ve really won, haven’t they?

What was I saying? Oh yes, her age. That was the first word she ever spoke to me. I kept asking her how old she was, just for the sake of making her think someone was interested in her, I suppose. Really I reckon I was more interested in myself. When you’re heading down, one way to stop yourself hitting bottom is to find someone worse off than yourself and take care of them. I see that now. I’m not saying I wasn’t really sorry for the girl—I was—but I was really sorry for myself too and this helped.

Twelve. She said she was twelve. Two years older than me. But that didn’t stop me thinking of her as some kind of helpless kid sister I had to look after. Maybe they thought we really were sisters or something, because when we got off the boat, me and Sammy got sent off together with three others, none of them girls I knew well. The ones I did know, like Gracie, got sent off somewhere else. There was no time to say goodbye to her or any of the others. Off we were pushed in different directions, like sheep at a market.

The woman who took us away with her was a nun. I knew about nuns. I’d been brought up a Catholic. It was with the nuns in Liverpool my mother left me when she couldn’t manage any more, and when she came back to get me, I was gone … but that’s my story. All of the other kids on that boat were Catholic too from what I remember. I doubt if many of them are now. I lost any faith I had a long time ago, but sometimes I hope I’m wrong and they’re right. I’ll tell you why. Because if they’re right, there’s a whole bunch of them burning in hell this very minute for the way they treated us. Oh yes, this minute, and every minute from now till the end of time if there’s justice in heaven, which there certainly didn’t seem to be down below.

But little Sammy wasn’t a Catholic. I don’t think she’d ever seen a nun. What I think she had seen somewhere was a picture with Death in it, wearing a hood and a cowl, so she thought it was Death was taking us away. Maybe she was right.

When we got to this place, I knew what it was straightaway. It was a kids’ home run by the nuns, like the one I’d been in back in Liverpool. I remember thinking, why have they brought me all these thousands of
miles across the sea to stick me in the same kind of place I’d been in back home? But I soon found I was wrong. There were differences. That one back in Liverpool was a five-star hotel compared with this place.

It was called St Rumbald’s. We had to learn all about St Rumbald. Seems he got born, said, “I’m a Christian,” got baptized, took Holy Communion, preached a sermon, arranged his own burial, then died, all in three days. We used to joke that the poor little sod knew if he’d lived any longer he’d have been sent to somewhere like St Rumbald’s, so he took the easy way out. Even in hell, you try to joke.

That first day when we arrived, they lined us up to take our details, meaning our names and ages—what else did we have? None of us had any papers or photos or anything. It was like the people who sent us hadn’t wanted us to have anything that could be traced back to them. Only Sammy had her pathetic little scrap of paper. She was in front of me. When the nun at the desk asked her name, she just stood there. Another nun standing beside us started to shake her. I piped up that her name was Samantha and she was twelve and this nun just lashed out with her hand and caught me such a blow across the mouth, I fell over, “Speak when you’re spoken to,” she said. I lay there with my mouth bleeding and watched poor little Sammy pull her piece of paper out. The nun at the desk took it, read it, and said, “Sam Flood. What sort of name is that for a Christian girl? Samantha, is it? I think that’s a kind of Jewish name. We’ll be keeping an eye on you, girl.”

She wrote something down in her ledger, then scrum-pled up the piece of paper and dropped it into a waste basket. I saw little Sammy’s gaze follow it like it was her life
she saw being dumped. Then she was pushed away and I was dragged to my feet and made to give my details through my bleeding mouth.

One thing about them nuns, they kept their promises. They said they’d keep an eye on Sammy and they did. Her not being a Catholic meant she was always drawing attention to herself anyway. All that crossing yourself stuff, and knowing when to stand and when to kneel, and singing the responses, none of it meant anything to her. Jesus, I saw her take blows that would have felled a prize steer. But that wasn’t the worst of it, not by a long way.

I tried to help her, I know I did. But soon it became hard to think of anything but getting myself through to the end of every dreadful day. And, like I said before, each day I got through became part of that stinking pit I was trying to get out of and if you looked back at all, you just saw stuff to make you despair, so I parcelled it up as I went along and left it behind me and willed myself never ever to remember.

But all that changed after I went to that first meeting. Now at last there was a reason for remembering. Now someone was trying to do something about it. That English woman, she’s a saint. At least if I still believed in saints, she’d top my list. After I got in touch with the Trust, nearly every day I recalled something new. And the Trust found things out for me that I thought I’d never know. About my mother. I was one of the lucky ones. She was still alive and I got to know her, and I’ve been able to spend these last few weeks with her. My mother. And the bastards told me she was dead.

But you don’t want to know about that … No, it’s all right, don’t apologize. It’s not selfish, it’s focused. I know what it’s like tracking back this stuff, remember?

So, Sammy, the little sick girl, my kid sister who was two years older. We’ve all got personal, individual horrors that we’ve stored up, but what happened to her is a horror shared by every one of us that saw it. I managed to put a lid on most of what happened to me, but that was something I could never blot out. It was the same for the others, I’ve discovered. We all remember that day …

Like I say, Sammy never looked well. After a while we didn’t pay much heed. None of us were all that well, what with the food we had to eat, the work we had to do, the conditions we had to live in. To us, being unwell was normal. But in the end it was bad enough with Sammy for the nuns to take notice. They got their doctor to take a look at her, not so much out of any sense of care, I’d guess, as to check she wasn’t swinging the lead.

Next thing we know is we’re all called into assembly and there’s little Sammy standing in front of us with the nuns behind her, and Mother Posterior (that’s what we called the boss nun who was a big fat cow) stood up and went into this rant which was all about mortal sin and eternal damnation and such, the kind of stuff we got by the bucketload, so normally we tried to look pious and switched off. But this time we listened ‘cos gradually we realized she was telling us something completely incredible.

She was telling us, though she couldn’t bring herself to say the word, that little Sammy was pregnant!

And when she finished, you know what those bitches did?

They cut off Sammy’s hair.

She had this lovely red hair, just like yours. That’s how I knew you soon as I saw you. On the boat it had been almost as long as yours. At St Rum’s we all had our hair cut shorter, but Sammy’s was still a sight worth
seeing. Now they set about her, two or three of them with garden shears, and they hacked and hacked till you could see the white skin among the stubble, only in places it wasn’t white but red ‘cos they’d stabbed right through and drawn blood.

Sammy just stood there, tears and blood streaming down her face, but she didn’t utter a sound, till finally they were done. Then they marched her out and that was the last any of us saw or heard of Sammy.

So what happened to her? She didn’t look in any state to make it through to the next day, but you being here means she must have done. I still see her in my nightmares after all these years, standing there quietly weeping while her red locks drifted to the floor like autumn leaves around her.

What happened to her, Sam? What happened?

Betty McKillop had chain-smoked as she talked, lighting one cigarette from another and throwing the butts into the grate. Now she threw the last one, followed by the empty packet, and leaned forward to look Sam right in the face.

“I don’t know,” said Sam, “I don’t know what happened, except she died having my father. He got adopted, grew up, got married, had me.”

She spoke quickly, plainly. That was her story, that was all she had to tell. She looked at the older woman and saw her eyes were brimming with tears. Then her arms reached out offering to embrace her, but fell back as Sam sat stiff and upright, her face stony. There would be a time for grief, for anger. But for the moment she needed to keep her wits about her. There were things here that didn’t add up. What she wanted was information not consolation.

“How long did all this take?” she said, “I mean, how long had you been at St Rumbald’s before they assaulted my grandmother?”

“I can’t be exact. Time didn’t mean much there. Sometimes an hour could seem like a week.”

“You must have some idea,” said Sam impatiently, “A year? Longer? It had to be a year at least, didn’t it?”

Betty looked at her in surprise.

“Hell no,” she said, “Nothing like that. This all happened in the first few months we were there.”

The statement was so self-evidently wrong that for a shocked second it brought everything else Betty had told her into doubt. But why invent a story like that? No, this had to be a simple misunderstanding.

“But that doesn’t compute,” said Sam, shaking her head, “My pa was born in September the year after you arrived. Why should those bastard nuns lie about that? So Sammy got pregnant a few months after she arrived. Pa reckons it was a priest. I bet those nuns didn’t let any other men get close to you. I bet they kept you closer than a duck’s arse.”

“You’re right there, dear,” said the woman, drying her eyes and blowing her nose, “Getting knocked up at St Rum’s, you’d have had to do it on the wing, like a swallow. Some of the nuns had roving hands and some of the priests too, from what I heard. But I never heard of anyone going the full hog. Anyway, I’m sorry, but you’ve got things mixed up. Like I said, we’d only been there a few months when they savaged little Sammy’s head, may they spend hell with red-hot skewers up their backsides. No, she must have been pregnant already when I met her on the boat. That’s why she was so sick, I see that now.”

Sam shook her head again, this time as much in desperation as denial.

“No, it’s you who’s getting mixed up,” she insisted, “Pa was born in September 1961, I’ve seen the certificate. And your ship sailed from Liverpool in the spring of 1960—”

“Spring 1960?” Betty McKillop laughed, “Who told you that? Gracie, was it? I bet it was Gracie!”

“Yes. And she was so positive about it. Elvis was top of the charts with ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?,’ and Kennedy became president that year. She remembers seeing it on television, and that was definitely 1960, I checked it out.”

“Now just hold on there,” interrupted Betty, “This is my life you’re trying to tell me about, remember …”

Then she paused, let out an exasperated laugh and said, “Hang about, I think I see what’s happened. Kennedy, you say? Yeah, it was 1960 when he got elected. November 1960. But what Gracie would have seen was his inauguration in January 1961. We all did, at the orphanage in Liverpool. Generally those nuns kept the telly to themselves but this was special, a good Roman Catholic taking the oath as president, next best thing to getting a new Pope. So we were all wheeled in to watch and give thanks. As for Elvis, I bet if you check that song, it came out in ‘61, not ‘60.”