They were clearly frustrated with me and did their best to persuade me otherwise but I stuck to my guns. Every time my mother came to visit it was the same story. I’d plead with her to help me find a solution but she’d just repeat that it would be cruel to Timothy Paul to try to keep him. ‘Adoption is the only option,’ she’d say firmly. There seemed to be no way to make her change her mind.
I was dreading the day when our three months would be up. I kept trying to put the date to the back of my mind. I hoped beyond hope that something would happen or that someone would save us. There was still no word from Jim. My mother was sick of me asking if there had been a letter or a call. ‘You have to forget about him, Pauline,’ she told me testily. ‘He’ll never send for you now.’
I had Timothy Paul christened in the chapel at St Bridget’s, with my mother at my side. ‘I name this child…’ the vicar said, marking his forehead with the sign of the cross. Bless my tiny son, he didn’t even cry. He just lay in my arms looking up at me with that placid expression of his, the one that said he trusted me to take care of him. I could have wept.
Three weeks before my deadline was up, Sister Joan Augustine suddenly announced that I had to stop breastfeeding and wean my baby on to bottles of formula milk. I looked at her in shock. ‘B-but he’s too little!’ I protested.
‘He’ll be just as happy with a bottle, Tilly. Now, don’t make a fuss.’
I wept as I fed him that bottle for the first time. It was a horrible day. This was one step closer to the time when I knew I wouldn’t be able to see him every day, to change him and wash him, to cuddle him and feed him myself. He took to the bottle quite well but I never did. The next three weeks were a living agony.
As the date approached when I was due to leave St Bridget’s and Timothy Paul would be sent to a nursery, I became increasingly anxious. Mrs Cotter came to see me one morning to tell me what arrangements had been made. ‘The state will help you pay the nursery fees but the rest will have to come out of your wages, I’m afraid. We’ve found him a place. I’ll come with you to settle him in tomorrow. We’ll have to leave early to make the journey.’
‘Journey? Why, where are you sending him?’
‘The Ernest Bailey Residential Nursery for Boys. It’s in Matlock.’
‘Matlock?’ I asked, my panic rising. ‘Where’s that?’
‘Derbyshire.’
‘But how far away is that?’
‘About eighty miles.’ Registering the look of shock on my face she added, more softly, ‘It was the only place that could take him.’
‘E-eighty miles?’ I could hardly get my words out. ‘That’s too far! It’ll take me a day to get there and how much will it cost each time?’
Her expression was as stiff as her resolve. This was her job: to figure out what was best for babies like Timothy Paul. He couldn’t stay at St Bridget’s. He couldn’t come home with me. What else could she do? Shattered, I realized that I had no say in the matter. To this day, I don’t know if that nursery really was the only one that would take Timothy Paul or whether the authorities chose to make it as difficult as possible for me to keep him. At the time, I must say, the decision felt unnecessarily harsh.
The following morning, I washed and dressed my son, fed him and wrapped him in a shawl. Walking to the railway station with Mrs Cotter, I realized that this was the first time I’d been outside the home with him since I’d brought him back from the hospital three months earlier. If it wasn’t for the circumstances I would have been wildly happy: the proud young mum showing off her gorgeous baby boy to anyone who cared to notice. I wanted people to coo and sigh over him as I did. I’d look at other young girls and think they didn’t yet know the joys of motherhood: the smell of him, the softness of his skin, the little gurgling noises he made in his mouth, the look of sleepy contentment in his eyes as he suckled at my breast. Then I remembered where I was and why. Sitting in the carriage, cradling him in my arms as I soothed him above the clickety-clack of the train, I stared at a dozing Mrs Cotter in the opposite seat and contemplated jumping off at the next station and running away.
But I was seventeen years old. I had no money; no home of my own. Where would I go? I was a good girl from a warm, loving family. How could I contemplate a life on the run? Tempting as it might seem, it wasn’t an option. Instead, I did the only thing I could think of to let my son know how much I wanted him close to me. I told Mrs Cotter that from now on, I would like Timothy Paul to be known simply as ‘Paul’.
‘Why?’ she asked.
‘It will make him more personal to me – to my name,’ I replied, pushing my forefinger into my son’s open palm so that he clamped his own tiny fingers around it.
All the way to Matlock, I had been trying to convince myself that my son would be safe and warm there, fed and well cared for until I could figure out what to do next. When we walked into the imposing stone building, though, I recoiled against the idea of him being there at all. He wasn’t a waif or stray. He was mine and he was dearly, besottedly loved.
Shivering, I laid him in a high-sided cot in a room full of similar cots and stepped back. Even though the staff seemed very nice and everybody was ready to welcome him, Paul took one look at my face and screwed his own into a tight ball. Somehow he knew that I was leaving him. I listened to his first howl and watched as he geared himself up for his second. Unable to bear the wrench of our impending separation a moment longer, I fled. I could hear his cries all the way down the street, my little-girl heart jolting with each step that took me further and further away from my son.
Paul was to remain in that nursery for the next two and a half years. As Mrs Cotter had assured me he would, he settled in well and the staff continued to be kind and understanding. I visited him whenever I could but the realities of my situation meant that was only every few months at best. His nursery fees were debited directly from my wages, leaving me with little spare. The train fare was expensive and near impossible on a Sunday. I had to take a day off work each time. The journey left me emotionally drained.
Each time I saw my son I couldn’t get over how much he’d grown. He, meanwhile, seemed to be less and less aware of whom I was. After a while, he began to favour one of his young nursery nurses, which cut me to the quick. My mother, who came with me when she could, would walk alongside as I pushed Paul’s pram through a local park, clearly loving every minute of being with her grandson. I always hoped that she’d come up with a plan on those visits; that she’d tell me she’d thought of something and we could take him home with us after all, but she never did. She just told me, time and again, that my visits were doing no good. ‘You have to let him go, Pauline,’ she’d say as I sobbed in her arms all the way home. ‘This isn’t fair on either of you.’
It was true that leaving him each time was a new wrench, but I just couldn’t bring myself to give up my son. Foolishly perhaps, I was still hoping for something to come along and save us. Was it really too much to wish for?
I WAS STANDING AT THE BUS STOP UNDER THE FAMOUS EASTGATE CLOCK IN Chester waiting to go home after a long day working at Quaintways. Having progressed to an improver in the salon by then, I’d been on my feet all day cutting and setting hair.
It was a fine evening and I checked my watch. The bus was late and so was I. Mum expected me home for supper at six. It was shepherd’s pie. I was always amazed how she could eke out a pound of mince until the end of each week.
A voice at my elbow startled me. ‘Hi there. It’s Pauline, isn’t it?’
I turned and found myself face to face with a man I knew only as the ex-boyfriend of a girl I worked with at