Queen of Thieves Page 11

  ‘Yes,’ was all that I could manage. My breasts were heavy with milk and every fibre of my being was crying out to cling to him. I longed to feed him again but all she saw of my son was his little pink face, peering out of a blanket as he was carried away in Ma Doherty’s arms.

  The chilblains my feet stung like hell as I tried to warm my toes by the meagre heap of coals smoking in the grate.

  More than twelve inches of snow had settled on the ground outside over the past few weeks and the ice on the inside of the windows of the hospital wing, was so thick that the Governor had finally relented, allowing fires to be lit.

  But all that was left at the bottom of the coal scuttle by the time the screws had taken what they needed to heat their rooms were a few lumps of coke and slag which barely burned when you held a match to them.

  Days spent with water sloshing over my feet on the stone floors of the laundry combined with the freezing temperatures in the rest of the prison meant I was hobbling around in a permanent state of frostbite. And when things started to thaw that made the chilblains started to burn and itch, which was an agony all of its own.

  Only seeing little Joseph took my mind off it. The evenings after chores were what I lived for and the thought of holding him again saw me through the backbreaking days washing and mangling sheets. Sometimes I was glad to hide my face among the steam rising from the copper vats of boiling water in the basement, so I could forget the hell I was living in.

  Baby Joseph was the one joy in my world. I clung to him, smelling his babyish head, revelling in his perfectness, for every moment I was allowed. When I came into the nursery and peered into his cot, he was smiling up at me.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Ma Doherty. ‘It’s probably just wind.’

  But it wasn’t. The way he clasped my hand as he stared deep into my eyes, meant Joseph recognized me as his mother. I was so careful with him, humming softly to him as I bathed and changed him, cradling him the right way, just as Ma Doherty had showed me.

  That evening, after I’d bathed him and was settling down with him in my arms, Ma Doherty bustled up with a bottle full of baby milk.

  ‘You must use this from now on,’ she said.

  ‘But I need to feed him, I always do before bed,’ I said, unbuttoning my blouse.

  ‘No,’ said Ma Doherty, firmly. ‘The baby is two weeks’ old now and so we must start to wean him off you and on to the bottle only.’

  She produced a set of bandages from her pocket.

  ‘These are to bind yourself with, to stop your milk from coming in anymore.’

  I took the glass bottle, fighting the urge to throw it on the floor and smash it into little pieces.

  Joseph started to cry and turned his head away when it was offered it to him.

  ‘He can smell you,’ said Ma Doherty, crossly. ‘Here, let me do it and you go and sort yourself out.’

  She lifted the crying infant from my grasp and walked away towards the window, where snowflakes were coming down so thickly that the exercise yard and the grounds of the prison were no longer visible.

  I did as I was told. I took off my blouse and brassiere and began winding the bandages around my chest, wincing with pain as I did so. Milk seeped through the cloth as I tied it, tightly.

  ‘How long will I have to do this for?’ I whispered. It just seemed so cruel to deny him my milk.

  ‘A week perhaps,’ said Ma Doherty, turning to face me. Joseph was clasping the glass bottle now, rather than onto me, as he always did in the morning. There was a stab of longing inside me, to feed him, to hold him once more.

  ‘You mustn’t dwell on this because it won’t do you any good,’ said Ma Doherty, reading the look of sorrow in my eyes. We both knew what she meant. ‘You have played your part in feeding him, in giving him the best start, but now we must all begin to think of his future. Do you see?’

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the chief screw, Miss Fanshawe, creep into the nursery.

  ‘The Governor wants to see you now,’ she said, smugly.

  ‘Yes, Miss,’ I said, wondering what on earth I had done wrong.

  The Governor sat at her desk, smiling sweetly. It was an unnatural look and one which made me feel sick to the pit of my stomach, especially when I when realized it was not for me, but as a show for the couple sitting opposite her, on a pair of high-backed chairs.

  ‘Yes, come in, Nell,’ she said. ‘I’d like you to meet Mr and Mrs Carter.’

  The woman was immaculately made up, with an expensive-looking coat, which she kept buttoned to the neck. Her handbag was perched precariously on her knee. Mr Carter was balding and had a very well-fed look about him, with a paunch barely contained in his pinstripe suit.

  ‘How do you do?’ I said, remembering my manners, but wondering what the bloody hell a respectable couple like them were doing in a place like this.

  The woman beamed at me, and the man adjusted his tie.

  ‘They are interested in offering Joseph a permanent home. I have the adoption papers here,’ said the Governor.

  She pushed a sheaf of paper towards me. A pot of ink and a fountain pen were ready and waiting beside it.

  My legs almost buckled, and I clung to the edge of the desk to steady myself. It was all happening so fast.

  I stared at the floor, as the blood started to rush in my head, making me dizzy. Joseph was my baby. How had these people even met him without me knowing?

  ‘I’m a bank manager,’ said Mr Carter, with such kindness in his eyes. ‘We can’t have children, but we have the very best of everything ready for him at home and I can promise you, he will be loved and cared for. Joseph will have the best life we can afford to give him.’

  I bit my lip and stared at the floor. My boy would be raised by properly posh people. They’d give him so much more than I ever could, I knew it made sense, but it didn’t make it any easier for me.

  He was almost pleading with me as he went on: ‘We tried for so many years, but the good lord never blessed us with children. Holding Joseph showed us that we can be parents but to a child who needs the security we can offer.’

  Mrs Carter stood up, putting her handbag on the coffee table beside her, smiling with genuine warmth: ‘We can be sure to send you pictures of him on every birthday. I promise you I will love him as my own. We know that this is a difficult decision, but Ma Doherty knows us through our church, and she has explained that you won’t be able to go home to your family with Joseph. We want to help you to get on with your life and to offer him all our love. I promise you he will be loved and cherished.’

  ‘Well?’ said the Governor, with a note of irritation in her voice. ‘Come along, now.’

  To her, it all made perfect sense. What life could I give him, an unmarried mother from a London slum? This was just the way things worked. I picked up the fountain pen and dipped the nib into the ink pot but then I hesitated. Something just would not let me do it. The Governor’s face softened: ‘Nell, I realise this is a very difficult choice, possibly the most difficult a mother could ever make, but if you think things through, you will see that we here at Holloway are trying to help you and little Joseph. This way, you can return to your community without the shame of a child out of wedlock.’

  She lowered her voice: ‘As well as a criminal record.’

  It was true, I was just a low-life hoister with a baby out of wedlock, but what life would there be without the cuddles, the curling fingers?

  Those snatched moments were all I lived for.

  I thought of the look on my dad’s face when he found out I was pregnant, how he’d turned his back on me and forced Mum to do the same for what I’d done. My boy would never know the cobbles of Waterloo. He’d play in a big back garden somewhere posh and go on to have a good job and a nice life.

  It was the best gift I could give him as a mother, even if it broke my heart.

  But if I was playing by their rules, they were going to give me something back. I’d had enough of being pu
shed around by everyone. Holloway Jail had showed me the only way to get to the top was by fighting for it, tooth and nail.

  ‘If I do this, I want you to sign an order now for me to be moved out of the laundry, to the library, to get extra privileges, and Rose is coming with me,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve never heard such a thing!’ said the Governor, recoiling in horror. ‘Who on earth do you think you are to bargain with me?’

  Rose had all but stopped eating in the last week and was completely broken by Joan and Fanshawe. I had to do something for her.

  ‘It’s not really helping me, it’s for this lovely couple,’ I said, coldly. ‘To help me give them what they want. And what they want is my baby. Ain’t that right?’

  These people hadn’t the first clue what really went on behind closed doors at this prison. They just wanted to leave with a lovely plump baby – my baby – to make their perfect lives even more perfect.

  Miss Fanshawe had been lurking in the corner, drinking it all in, and she moved towards me with menace, slapping her little ebony truncheon against the palm of her hand: ‘I can deal with this, Governor…’

  Mrs Carter shot up from her chair and blocked her path.

  ‘Please,’ said Mrs Carter, ‘Surely there is a way to reward this girl for being so generous and thoughtful? It can’t hurt to give her some kind of privileges for what she is doing, can it?’

  I smirked at Fanshawe and then turned to smile sweetly at the Governor.

  The Governor pursed her lips for a moment and then relented. She pulled a piece of paper from her desk drawer and began to write the order, which she handed to Miss Fanshawe, who looked a bit disappointed as she tucked her truncheon back into the belt straining around her fat middle.

  My calloused hands were shaking as I scrawled my name on the adoption papers. I was bargaining on my baby’s life. I couldn’t believe that I had sunk so low but that is what Holloway Jail had done to me. I wasn’t about to forget it. It was just another notch on the wall, for the revenge I was going to take on Alice Diamond for putting me in here in the first place. This one would be a deeper cut than the others that I’d scratched over the past six months; much deeper.

  I was marched back through the prison, with Fanshawe breathing down my neck, muttering under her breath: ‘You’ve got a bloody cheek talking to the Governor like that. You’d better watch your step, my girl.’

  But I let all her threats wash over me as she took me back to the hospital wing and locked the door behind her. There was only one place I wanted to be and that was by Joseph’s side. He was sleeping soundly, like a little angel, in the clothes I had made for him. Now another woman would get to dress him and love him.

  I picked him up, clutching him to me. Then I unbuttoned my blouse, yanking the bandages from my swollen breasts.

  It only took a split second before he sleepily found his way to me. I began to feed him one last time, stroking his cheek, rocking him gently, trying to pour all the love I would ever feel for him, for his whole life, into that one precious moment together.

  When I went to find Joseph in his cot the next morning, he was gone, along with the baby box full of clothes I had so lovingly made for him.

  I pressed my hand to the sheet where he had lain but it was cold. They must have taken him in the night.

  I sank to my knees sobbing: ‘Oh, Joseph, what have I done?’

  Ma Doherty appeared by my side and pulled me to my feet: ‘Come on, love,’ she said, pulling me into a hug. ‘You have made the right choice, there’s no point dwelling on it.

  ‘Soon you will be free to get on with the rest of your life and put all this behind you.’

  But I knew then, gazing at the place where my baby had slept, that I never would.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ALICE

  Elephant and Castle, February 1947

  The weather’s been properly filthy these last few weeks but every day I watch the girls from Queen’s Buildings go off at the crack of dawn to the factory gates, like clockwork.

  Some of them have taken to wrapping blankets over their thin coats, like shawls, to keep out the bitter cold. The courtyard is more like a skating rink and it’s a right old game of ninepins if one of them slips, bumping into the other and sending them all flying. Makes me laugh at them, for the fools that they are, going to work for somebody else. What a way to waste your life; skidding on your backside round the Elephant and Castle in the freezing cold just to earn a crust.

  It’s fair to say, I didn’t always think that way.

  When I was young and foolish, I believed in gainful employment; being paid by someone else.

  I’ll never forget it. I was high as a blooming kite with excitement because Lim had told me he’d found me a job, a really good one, that would me get out of the Seven Dials. It was a straight position an’ all, nothing crooked this time, he swore blind. It was a once in a lifetime chance for a proper job that just didn’t happen to girls like me, so I practically skipped my way through the warren of streets which lead us to Islington.

  Now, this terraced street was a step up from ours because women were out on their hands and knees donkeystoning their front steps and the sheets drying in neat rows between the houses weren’t full of holes neither and the windows had glass in them, instead of boards where they’d had a brick or a bottle chucked through.

  We rapped on a front door, which was smartly painted in shiny black and a woman answered, with her hair up in a bun, and her skirt reaching to the floor and a white starched apron over it.

  ‘Hello, Alice,’ she said, bustling me down the hallway, to the scullery, which was filled with the smell of baking bread. ‘I’m Mrs Tibbs, but you can call me Ma.’

  The whole place was sparkling clean, with the red tiled floor polished so much you could have eaten off it and neatly pressed sheets and towels piled on her kitchen table next to a Moses basket with a baby sleeping soundly inside.

  Lim smiled at Mrs Tibbs and they wandered back out to the hallway to exchange a few words while I had a bit of a nosey around. She had a nice carriage clock on the mantlepiece over the range – that must have cost a few quid – and some lovely lacework napkins.

  Lim came back in and whispered in my ear: ‘For Gawd’s sake don’t nick anything.’ And that made me giggle.

  I whispered back: ‘I won’t, I promise!’

  He gave me a quick peck on the cheek: ‘I’ll see you later, Alice.’

  With that he was gone, but I scarcely had time to draw breath before Mrs Tibbs was talking nine to the dozen.

  ‘Now, you will be meeting the captain, who is a very nice gentleman, but his life has been struck by the most terrible tragedy. He came back from the trenches only to lose his beautiful wife to the Spanish flu, leaving their poor darling daughter an orphan in this world.’

  Well, that would have drawn tears from a glass eye, wouldn’t it? I found myself feeling pity for the poor fella losing his missus like that after surviving the horrors of the Great War. Life really wasn’t fair.

  ‘He needs a maid and someone kind as a companion to his daughter, who is just a little younger than yourself. What do you think of that?’

  ‘It’s like a dream come true!’ I clapped my hands together. ‘But do you really think he will like me?’

  ‘Well, from what your brother’s told me, you are a good worker, kind and caring too. So, I can’t see why not. But he’ll be here soon so you’d better get ready.

  ‘Tell me, dear, and don’t be shy, when did you last have a bath?’

  I blushed beetroot. My flannelette chemise stank to high heaven and although my face was no stranger to the dishcloth in our grubby sink, I hadn’t bathed in weeks, maybe months actually. Laundry wasn’t high on the list of my priorities in the Seven Dials either and there were so many stains on my dress I didn’t know where to start getting it clean.

  She was already helping me out of my filthy clothes.

  ‘Why don’t you have a nice wash, dear?’


  Mrs Tibbs poured a lovely copper full of hot water into the tin bath by the range and it looked so inviting. I was shy – my Ma was the only person who’d seen me in my birthday suit – but Mrs Tibbs didn’t turn away for a minute as I stripped off. In fact, as I eased myself into the bath, she had a good look at me and gave an approving nod.

  ‘That’s right, don’t be embarrassed. Get yourself nice and clean, there’s soap on the side.’

  The baby in the Moses basket on the table began to cry and the look of kindness melted away as she chided it: ‘Oh stop your bellyaching, for God’s sake, you little bleeder!’

  She took a glass phial down from the mantlepiece and poured a few drops on to her fingers before sticking them into the baby’s mouth. The little one sucked and then his eyes fell closed and he was quiet again.

  ‘Ma’s magic drops, just to help the teething pain,’ she said, screwing the lid back on the phial. ‘Works wonders.’

  She bustled off and returned with some new clothes for me. This was like heaven and I had to pinch myself to be sure I wasn’t dreaming. I put on the crisp, white bloomers and a new chemise of broderie anglaise cotton. It was so beautiful, I couldn’t believe it, nor the smart new pinafore she gave me. I’d never had clothes like this. Mine were bought second hand at Berwick Street market. Sometimes they were fashioned from my Ma’s castoffs and were more like patchwork than a skirt.

  ‘You need to make the right impression for this job,’ said Mrs Tibbs. ‘Smart girls make good money, don’t they? The captain is a very fine man and he wants a girl of quality, so dirty old clothes just won’t do.’

  She put my cracked leather boots in the corner and presented me with a pair of soft velvet ballet shoes to wear.

  ‘So why are you helping us?’ I said, as I pulled them on and admired my feet in them. ‘I mean, Lim’s never mentioned you until now.’

  ‘I act as a sort of go-between, to help girls find places in good families and I take my commission but that will be all sorted between me and your brother and the captain, don’t worry your pretty head about that.’

  She helped me button up my pinafore and then shooed me towards the staircase in the hall.