It was no real secret where these children came from: most were the casualties of streets like Grimshaw Street, or the notorious area called The Bent. From the 1850s most of Oldham’s Irish population lived here, a small webbing of streets occupied by low pubs, brothels and boarding houses where the hopeless ended up. If you found your way into The Bent, the chances were you wouldn’t get out again.
For a child born there the future was bleak. If a girl had a struggling, but respectable family, she might end up in one of the mills; a boy in the pit. But those were the fortunate ones. All too often the children of The Bent became ensnared in thievery or prostitution. Of these, the lucky ones – if you could call them lucky – were the ones abandoned at Netherlands Orphanage.
Their future was harsh, but secure – set to the rule of order and religion. If they survived a sickly start they would be fed and clothed, even taught a trade in time. Behind the soot-darkened, red-brick walls, a fierce little army of poorly paid staff sucked children with no name and no past into their regimented system. A few of the staff were tyrants, getting their revenge on the world by bullying their charges, but some – a few – were kindly.
The orphanage was run by Miss Clare Lees, a tall, prematurely stooped woman in her fifties, who had risen from being an orphan at the home, to its principal. Not that anyone would ever refer to her past to her face. To all intents and purposes, she behaved as though she despised the children under her care and had nothing in common with them. But it was a front. She was as much a slum child as the ones under her care.
Clare Lees had never married, never had children, and had seldom ventured far from the high walls of the home. This was her kingdom, here she was ruler. The terrified child who had been abandoned fifty years earlier had metamorphosed into an unfeeling martinet. It was not her nature to be cruel, but kindness eluded her. She could not feel – or show – what she had never experienced.
The kindness was left to others, who had come in from the outside. Like Ethel Cummings.
‘Alice, come here!’ she hissed under her breath.
A little girl obediently got to her feet and walked towards her. She was small for her age and dark-haired, her eyes black-fringed. She had a very mature face for a child, looking almost like a tiny, exotic woman.
‘Alice, what’s that in your hand?’ Ethel asked kindly, leaning down, her bulk making the movement awkward.
‘Nothing.’
The matron looked at her. ‘Alice, show me.’
Reluctantly, the little girl opened her hand. There was a pebble in her palm.
‘Why, it’s just a stone –’
‘It’s a jewel!’ Alice said defiantly, closing her fingers over it. ‘And it’s mine.’
Ethel sighed, then glanced over her shoulder as a bell rang. The sound echoed emptily down the corridor. One ring, two rings. Ethel breathed out and relaxed. Thank God it wasn’t for her, she had had enough of Miss Lees for one day.
Hurriedly she moved Alice down the narrow corridor towards the nearest dormitory. It was empty, as most of the children were in the yard taking their daily exercise. More like prisoners than children, Ethel had said to her husband, the little things pushed out in all weathers, walking round and round in circles. They should be playing, running on grass and climbing trees …
‘Give over, Ethel,’ he had replied. ‘You’ll lose your job if you keep trying to change things.’
‘But it’s not good for them!’ she had answered hotly. ‘When I think how our boys were brought up –’
‘They weren’t orphans,’ Gilbert had retorted, his tone sharp. ‘Oh listen, luv,’ he’d said more kindly, ‘you do what you can for them. Don’t make waves or that cow Lees will fire you and then what good will you be to any of them?’
Ethel had known he was right. So she bit her tongue repeatedly, and bent under the myriad tyrannies of Netherlands. It seemed to her that many of the children were cowed by the sheer size of the home, and the fact that they had nothing they could call their own. Nothing to cling on to for comfort. Every piece of clothing had been handed down many times over: when a child grew out of it, it was patched and passed on to another. Likewise with shoes. Even underwear, faded with use, was boiled and handed on.
Every child had short hair too, in order to make sure that there was no outbreak of nits – and to make it easier for the staff to comb and wash on Monday nights, when queues of little bodies waited silently for their turn at the tap. None of the children complained, in fact they spoke little and in whispers to avoid drawing attention to themselves. There was no individuality and any high spirits were soon dampened by the crushing indifference of the system.
Naturally the boys and girls were separated and housed in different wings. The doors spelled it out for them – ‘BOYS’ over the entrance to one side of the home, and ‘GIRLS’ over the entrance of the other. They exercised at different times too and could – for all they knew – have been in a single-sex institution. Clare Lees was very firm about there being no fraternising. After all, wasn’t that how these children had come about? Boys and girls getting together …? She shuddered at the thought. Oh no, she would have none of that behaviour.
Punishment was harsh if anyone ever broke her rules. Several years earlier one girl had somehow formed a friendship with one of the boys. Notes had been exchanged, secrets, longings, written in Poor Home script. It had been innocent and silly, but when it was discovered the girl was made an example of in front of the school. Her hair had been cut to her scalp, and round her neck was hung a board with the word ‘WHORE’ in red letters. She wore the board for a month.
Now Ethel looked down at the little girl in front of her and then impulsively gathered Alice into her arms. She knew she shouldn’t – it was frowned upon to show affection – but this little one was so different from the others.
Immediately Alice responded and nestled against her, her eyes closing. If the truth be known, Ethel was afraid for Alice Rimmer. She was too pretty, for a start, too full of spirit which even years in the orphanage hadn’t dampened. Where her spirit came from, God only knew. Her background was a mystery, the only information sketchy. Apparently she had come to the home when she was nearly a year old. Some council man had delivered her early one November morning. Her parents were dead, he told the principal; Alice Rimmer was just another poor child of the parish, destined to live off charity.
Ethel remembered first seeing Alice when she came to work at Netherlands a few months later. She’d been more outspoken then, and had showed her surprise at Alice’s appearance.
‘Oh, what a beautiful child! This one will be adopted all right.’
Irritated, Clare Lees had shaken her head. ‘No, she’s to stay here. No one’s to adopt her.’
Ethel’s mouth had fallen open. ‘But she’d find a home, no trouble.’
Miss Lees’ tone was impatient. ‘No one is to adopt this child. Alice Rimmer is to stay here until she is old enough to leave and find her own way in the world.’
Still sitting on the edge of the dormitory bed, the matron stroked the top of Alice’s head and frowned at the old memory. It wasn’t right, she thought. Alice could easily have found a new family, new siblings … She looked down at the four-year-old sitting on her lap. Oh luv, where did you come from? She had the look of breeding, that was for sure. Such a stunning child wasn’t from farm or factory workers. Ethel had seen the usual depressing run of poor children: the whey complexions, the undernourished limbs, the flat expression in the eyes.
But there was a gloss about Alice which she had to have inherited from money and position … Ethel rocked the child absent-mindedly.