The Orphans of Halfpenny Street

Mark saw the colour leave her face and wished he hadn’t spoken, because it was obvious that her grief lay hidden just beneath the surface, but he also knew from experience that grief had to be brought out and dealt with.

‘Do you think it sounds like something you want to tackle?’

‘Do you think they will give me an interview?’ she countered, and her stricken look had gone. ‘It’s just what I need, Mark.’

‘You’re sure you feel able to cope with an area like Halfpenny Street? Local legend has it that the street earned its name from the ragged orphans that would do any job, not matter how demeaning, just to earn a halfpence or two. It is part of the Spitalfields, Stepney and Bethnal Green area, at the heart of the East End, once a prosperous area when the rich silk merchants lived there. However, when the richer people moved out, the area went into a slow decline and was taken over by less well-off immigrants, Used as a fever hospital, the building was damaged inside but the shell survived and is the only one that has managed to do so in this particular area. We took it over in a neglected state and made it habitable again. However, it is a dingy area, teeming with all kinds of people, all nationalities these days. The Huguenots were there from the start, of course, but then it became very much a Jewish centre; you will see evidence of that in the old synagogues and shops. Many of the synagogues are now used as factories or storehouses. There are lots of little manufacturers and craftsmen working in the lanes and streets around the home, and most look grimy and neglected.’

‘What does any of that matter if I can be of use?’

‘You are prepared to do whatever they ask at St Saviour’s?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘You are quite sure it’s what you want?’

‘I’m absolutely certain. I need to feel useful, Mark – to do something other than sit around and try not to be bored stiff by Mother’s friends.’

Mark wanted to please her, to see that quick smile he found so attractive. ‘I shall speak to the Board tomorrow; it’s our monthly meeting and if I recommend you … I can’t promise you, because Sister Beatrice is going to resist, but I think I know how to bring her round.’

‘Thank you so very much,’ Angela said, her face lighting up. ‘You are wonderful, Mark. So much to do but you always make time for me. I almost didn’t ask because you are so busy …’

‘As I’ve told you before, I am your friend and always here for you.’ He wanted to tell her that he cared about John’s cruel death too but she wouldn’t want to hear that just yet. Mark had served overseas with the Army Medical Corps for a while; he and John had both been at the horror of the nightmare that had been Dunkirk and survived it, but then Mark had been transferred to the Military Hospital in Aldershot. John had served out in Egypt for some months. He’d been home for a short visit, which was when he’d met and married Angela, returning to his unit for another tour of duty overseas, before his last leave. John’s unit had been one of those that stormed Normandy in the D-Day assault and it was there that he’d been so horrifically wounded that his CO had hardly recognised him.

Sent out to France in the vanguard of the advancing troops, Mark had worked with the other medics as part of a team, because this time round there was an understanding that it wasn’t just physical injuries the men suffered from, but deep psychological harm too. When John’s body was brought into the makeshift hospital, Mark was working with one of the surgeons on the burns cases, trying to prepare men for the ordeal they faced when they returned home, and he was there when John was carried into the ward, his injuries so severe that he was not expected to survive the night. Indeed, it had been a mercy that he’d never regained consciousness, but the memory was one that Mark could never share with his friend’s wife, because it was too shocking and painful.

‘Well, I must not take any more of your time.’ Angela rose to her feet. His gaze took in the grace of her movement as she uncrossed her legs, the smooth whisper-thin nylon stockings and sensible Cuban-heeled black shoes. Mark stood too and they shook hands.

‘Good luck. I imagine you will get a letter quite soon asking you to go up for an interview.’

‘I can’t wait,’ she said and went out.

Mark turned to stare out of the window at his very beautiful and extensive gardens. He was comfortably off, able to live much as he pleased these days. Indeed, he had no need to work all the time, and certainly the unpaid work he did at St Saviour’s was unnecessary to his career, but he too had known the urge to do something useful, to give back a little of what hard graft and Fortune had brought him. Perhaps it was merely a salve to his conscience, because he knew that many of the middle-class and rich women who patronised his clinics were not truly ill – at least their symptoms were real enough, but the mischief lay in the idleness of their comfortable lives. If more of them had Angela’s strength he would soon be out of a job, he thought with a wry smile.

Mark was thirty-eight, and had an unhappy marriage behind him. It had ended because his wife died in a diabetic coma, brought on by her total lack of discipline. She had disregarded her diet, eaten foods that were too sugary, and forgotten her insulin, often leading to an emergency dash to the hospital. He suspected that these frequent crises were cries for help, which had sometimes been ignored because he was working too hard to think about her unhappiness. In fact he suspected that she had deliberately taken her own life, because she’d known what her reckless behaviour would lead to, and it was her way of paying him back for neglecting her. He blamed himself for not recognising the signs of depression that ought to have been plain; his only excuse was that the pressure of work with men who were suffering terrible trauma had led him to imagine that Edine was happy enough in her comfortable home.

Mark knew that he had neglected her. It hadn’t been his fault that their son was born deformed, but he knew that in some peculiar way his wife felt it was. Unable to accept what had happened, she accused him of paying more attention to his patients, as if that had somehow caused the child’s death. He blamed himself on both counts, though he knew it was ridiculous. Had Edine’s misery and depression contributed to his son’s tragic condition? Or was it partly her illness that had starved the boy of the oxygen he’d needed at birth?

The child had died only a few days later in the hospital. Mark had been told the hole in little Michael’s heart had never closed and by the time the doctors realised what was wrong, it was too late. Considering his other deformities, it was perhaps a merciful release. The pity of it was that Edine could never have another child, because the boy’s birth had damaged her inside.

It had all gone wrong after that.

Nursing his own disappointment and grief, Mark had buried himself in his work and neglected his wife without realising what he was doing. She’d turned away from him and he’d believed she blamed him for what had gone wrong, but he should have tried harder to reach her. Edine’s miserable death would lie forever on his conscience. He did not deserve another chance. Why should he be alive and able to love again when both his wife and their child were buried in their graves? It must have been his fault somehow. Because he’d been too selfish or too busy to realise how unhappy Edine was, to take more care of her, something had gone wrong inside her. He did not deserve to be happy again or to be loved by Angela. Besides, he was not even sure she saw him as a man, but rather as a friend of the man she still adored.

Angela’s perfume still lingered, haunting him, making him wish for something he knew was beyond his reach, for the moment anyway.

Sighing, Mark went back to his desk and pulled out the folder he’d been dealing with earlier. In this case the woman was suffering from a mental condition that might result in her having to be shut away for the sake of her family and her own safety. He was reminded of Edine and the way she’d brooded towards the end and the guilt was hard to bear. Sometimes he could see her resentful, sullen face, blaming him for her unhappiness. Why hadn’t he realised that her frequent illnesses were a cry for help? Yet this was a different case, and he must not allow personal feelings to come into it. It was rather a sad matter, and he didn’t want to make the decision himself. Mark would ask a trusted colleague to examine his patient and give him his thoughts.

Walking back to her parents’ house, a modern red-brick building set some distance from the village, Angela was feeling more cheerful than she had for weeks. Of course Mark Adderbury couldn’t promise that St Saviour’s would take her on, but he obviously had some influence with the Board, having been a member since it was opened just four years earlier to deal with an influx of orphans created by the war. So many lives had been lost in the terrible bombings, both during the Blitz and from the terrifying V2 rockets in the last year of the war. Sometimes whole families had been killed, but at others children lost mothers, aunts, and grandmothers. In the worst cases their fathers were also killed while away fighting for King and Country and they had no one to take them in. Angela knew from something that her father had once told her in confidence, that the first matron employed to run the children’s home had been sacked after two years for various misdemeanours, including embezzling the funds. Mark had been very angry at the time and they had been more careful in their choice of the nursing sister who replaced her.

Her father had told her that Mark had been the one who pushed for Sister Beatrice and therefore if he recommended Angela for the post of Administrator, surely his word would carry some weight? Her mother would be horrified at the idea of her daughter working at a place like St Saviour’s, but her father would understand.

Angela had never doubted that her parents loved her. Daddy was wonderful, always trying to understand yet doing everything wrong, petting her as though she was still his little girl. What no one understood was that she’d lost her soul mate, the only man she’d ever loved.

For a moment the pain of her grief caught her off guard and she had to fight to get her breath. She must not let her grief overpower her. She must face what had happened to her, face the fact that the man she’d adored was never coming back to her … face the knowledge that his body had been so badly mutilated that it was only his identity tags that convinced his CO it actually was John. Of course Angela should never have known the truth of his death. Her official letter had been brief, merely telling her that he had died in action and was a brave soldier.

Angela should have accepted that but in her despair she’d cajoled her father into discovering more. He hadn’t wanted to tell her the truth, believing it would make her grief worse, but she’d wanted to know even though it had caused her unbearable pain. For some time she’d felt numb, and that had helped her to carry on at work as if nothing had happened. Perhaps she would have gone on like that if she hadn’t come home after the war ended, but her father had telephoned her, telling her that her mother had flu and was very depressed. She’d come home on a short visit and stayed on because her mother cried and begged her not to go back, and since the war was over there had seemed no reason to return. Angela had promised to stay for a while, and at first it hadn’t been too bad, but now that her mother had recovered she wouldn’t stop plotting and planning to get her married again.

Mrs Hendry was determined that her daughter was going to enter the circles she had only ever watched from the edge. John’s family was landed gentry, and Mrs Hendry thought that Angela should use his parents to launch herself into society and make a second marriage. She would have had a brilliant social life if John had returned from the war, of course, because he was set to enter politics. They would have lived in London most of the time, enjoying a full life of children, a loving relationship, and entertaining their friends, but his death had left her with nothing and she felt so empty – and the one thing she didn’t want was the kind of marriage her mother craved for her.

Angela might have stayed with John’s family had she wished, but they were busy people and though they tried to make her welcome she knew she didn’t fit into their world of hunting and shooting, high society. Had there not been a war on, Angela doubted that she and John would ever have met. He was home on leave from the Army some three years or so after the war had started, and would not normally have been in the district. Like Angela, he’d been invited to a dance by a friend and because he was at a loose end tagged along for something to do. The truth was, their worlds were far apart and only love had brought them together. She was just a well-educated, middle-class girl with faintly socialist ideas, pink rather than red, her father teased, and without John she was a fish out of water in his world.

Mark had been the person who got through to her after she came home, becoming a frequent visitor. He’d taken her out to dinner a few times, telling her about some of the work he did with damaged and vulnerable children in a London clinic; he’d woken something in her with his stories of suffering. She’d never had cause to think of poverty, of people living on the edge, dying of terrible illnesses that were the result of dirty living conditions and poor diet. His words had made her aware of a desire to do something in return for all that she’d been given, all that she’d taken for granted until a cruel fate swept away the only thing that truly mattered. The feeling of numbness had left her, but that made her more conscious of what she’d lost – of the emptiness of her life. The kind of position Mark had outlined was perfect for her, almost as if it had been engineered for her sake.

He wouldn’t do that, would he? She decided it was unlikely.

Feeling a flicker of excitement at the prospect of a new job and a new life, Angela knew she had to keep it to herself. Mother wasn’t going to like it when she discovered that she was going to live in London and work in a slum area. Daddy would support her, of course; he was such a darling, but he didn’t like arguments in the house. Once Angela was sure of her ground she would fight her own battles. She wasn’t a child any longer.

Walking into the highly polished hall of her parents’ house, Angela saw that her mother was just setting a bowl of the most beautiful roses on the half-moon table. An antique handed down through her father’s family, it was just one of the beautiful things in a house that was furnished in the best of taste, because Phyllis Hendry did everything well. Having set down the roses, she turned and saw her daughter enter, her brow furrowing in slight annoyance.

‘Where have you been all morning? Mrs Finch called to invite us to a dinner she is giving next week. Did you not promise that you would give her a cutting from our garden?’

‘Yes, I had forgotten. She wanted a piece of the white lilac, because she has the blue but particularly admired our white blossoms in the spring. I’ll take a few cuttings to her this afternoon. There are some other bits and pieces she might like …’

‘We have tea at the Robinsons’ this afternoon,’ her mother reminded her. ‘Really, Angela, can you not even remember our social engagements from one day to the next?’

‘I’m sorry, it had slipped my mind. Do I have to go? I have nothing in common with Mrs Robinson.’

‘You accepted her invitation. It would be rude to cry off now. Besides, you may take those cuttings to Mrs Finch in the morning, unless you have engagements of your own?’

Angela shook her head, heading towards the stairs. Her mother took it for granted that she would resume the life she’d led before she married John, but she couldn’t. Angela found the whole idea tiresome. Endless tea parties, mindless chatter about unimportant matters, and women who thought that social position and money were everything, bored her. What her mother found shocking she often thought vaguely amusing, and when the last vicar’s wife had run away with her lover Angela had silently cheered her on, while all her mother’s friends tore her character to shreds. In fact she no longer fitted into the snug and comfortable world her mother had made for her family. She wasn’t the same person that had frittered her time away before her marriage, and she could only pray that soon she would have a chance to do something worthwhile with her life …

THREE (#ubb64e586-485e-5342-b9ed-1e963d768eb1)

Sister Beatrice pushed the clutter of paper, pins, elastic bands and pens on her desk to one side with a sigh. She had never expected there to be quite so much accounting to do when she’d accepted the post as Warden of St Saviour’s. She felt it to be such a waste of time when the children and staff needed her. The home was understaffed as it was and she could not spare the time to write endless reports and keep the accounts, which, as a devout nun, she found distasteful. Having made her point clear at the last meeting of the Board, which she was forced to attend each month – another waste of time – she hoped that they would accept the admittedly skimpy report she’d written up in the early hours of that morning.

She’d set aside the evening to do it, but three new inmates had been admitted; suddenly orphaned by the loss of their mother to some kind of violent poisoning, probably from food contaminated by flies or worse, the children had nowhere else to go. Had Nan been on duty she might have stuck to her plan, but the woman she trusted most in the world had gone down with a bout of influenza the previous day and was at home in bed. Sister Beatrice did not consider any of her nursing staff competent to admit three terrified children late at night. Sally, a dedicated young carer but with no nursing training, had washed them and put them to bed, but they had first to be examined to make certain they did not have any symptoms. If the illness that had taken their mother was not food poisoning, as she’d been informed by Constable Barker, but an infectious disease, it could have wreaked havoc amongst the other inmates. However, since the woman was a known prostitute and drank too much, it seemed likely that a nasty bout of food poisoning would be enough to kill her.

Sister Beatrice had examined them all herself, and apart from some bruises to their arms and legs, a couple of untreated sores on the eldest boy’s leg, which needed bathing with antiseptic and the application of a soothing salve, and the fact that they all looked emaciated, she passed them as fit. No sign of disease, thank goodness; no lice either, which was quite often the case with children from the slums around Halfpenny Street. She’d asked if they were hungry, or if they’d eaten anything that made them feel sick, and the elder boy had piped up.

‘We ain’t had nuffin’ but a crust fer two days, miss. Ma said she had no money to buy food, but then she and her fancy man went out drinking and they ate jellied eels from the stall near the pub. Ma said it was that as made her bad … and she ate two dishes of it, greedy pig. Didn’t bring so much as a chip home fer us.’

Assuming that the jellied eels were quite possibly the cause of the food poisoning – she’d always thought them nasty things – Sister Beatrice mentally thanked Providence that the selfish mother had not brought any of her treats back for the children. The evidence of the children’s near starvation and the bruises told her that they were victims of neglect and brutality, which was rife in the lanes about St Saviour’s. It was more than likely that the mother had had a succession of men and probable that the children had suffered at their hands; she didn’t think from looking at them that they all had the same father, since their colouring was quite different. However, she thought a decent meal and some loving care would put right the most obvious symptoms of their distress, though in cases of abuse the mental trauma often didn’t come out immediately.

After two years of running the home, and years of experience in the Abbey of All Saints’ Infirmary, she ought to be used to cases like these, but the sight of obvious abuse never failed to rouse her to fury. Hers was a nursing order, and though Beatrice had given up all thought of having a family of her own when she entered the convent, she had a deep need to help those unfortunates she thought of as the forgotten ones: the lost children, abused by those who should love them and abandoned by society.

She must be careful not to be side-tracked by her indignation. Her order forbade her from speaking out in a public way, but inwardly she burned with resentment at the way unfortunate children had been treated in the past. It was not so long ago that they had been sent down the mines at a tender age and used shamefully. Even as recently as the beginning of the terrible war they had all endured, when children had been sent off to the country, to people they did not know and sometimes against their parents’ wishes.

Beatrice had been reading an article about the distress this had caused to some unfortunate children, who had been put to work rather than being cared for, and it was that which had aroused her anger, because it seemed that there were either no proper records or they had been lost in the war. And then there were the misplaced children in Europe, homeless and orphaned, what chance had they of finding a safe haven?