Abandoned: The true story of a little girl who didn’t belong

Mummy rang our ‘uncle’ Brendan and asked him to go down to her mother and monitor the situation. She arranged for him to call her every night at the same time, on the red telephone box outside the pub where she bought her ‘Irish’ cigarettes. The reports that came back can’t have been good.

Kathy stayed with me as long as she could. I was hastily christened, keeping her surname rather than taking Mummy’s married name, the name all the other children in the family had. After all, if Kathy was going to be coming back for me there was no reason for me to have any name but hers. Ten days after I was born she flew home to Ireland to take care of her mother. There was no other option.

I can’t imagine what it must have taken for her to do that. What pain she must have been in, before she shut her emotions down, taking care of her mother in that sealed-off world, without a telephone to contact her sister to find out how her baby was doing. Maybe wondering how angry my uncle was at my still being there week after week, and having no one but her married lover to tell her secrets to. Not wanting her mother to die, but knowing too that that was the only way she could go back to get her baby. As her mother’s illness worsened – her mind slipping away into dementia, her behaviour more and more childlike by the day – maybe Kathy saw it as some kind of divine retribution, left there washing, dressing and feeding her, nursing her mother instead of the baby she had left behind in England.

As a little girl I heard various versions of what Kathy had planned to do as soon as her mother died or was well enough to leave. In them all she was going to come back to get me. But my grandmother didn’t die, though she didn’t recover either. Her condition deteriorated and Kathy stayed there looking after her at home for another nine years.

Meanwhile, I grew up in London with my aunt and uncle. And from then on my aunt was the only mother I knew or wanted. And the only one I ever called ‘Mummy’. I called my uncle ‘Daddy’ too, just like my four elder brothers and sisters, and ‘the girls’ Stella and Jennifer, who came along a few years after I arrived. There were seven of us children in all.

‘Don’t worry,’ Mummy would always whisper after their drunken – often violent – rows, when my uncle would threaten that he wanted me gone by the time he got back from work, ‘I won’t ever let him send you away, or let anyone come to take you from me.’

‘Cross your heart and hope to die?’

‘Cross my heart and hope to die.’

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.