I told Dad about the voices one time and he seemed very concerned about it. ‘You should tell them to go away,’ he advised.
‘Why do the voices always talk to me when Mummy’s going to be cruel?’ I asked in all innocence.
‘What do you mean?’ he asked sharply, and I remembered that it had been a huge mistake to tell tales on Mum in the past.
I said, ‘Sometimes Mummy’s not very nice to me when you’re not there. Can’t you stay at home? Please, Daddy.’
He frowned and explained that he had to go to work to pay the bills. ‘But I’m sure Mummy’s only cross when you’ve been naughty. You just have to try harder to be a good girl, Lady Jane.’
Mum hated it if I mentioned the voices in my head to her. One night before I went to bed she took some small pieces of cotton wool and forced them inside my ears as far as they would go. ‘That should stop your stupid voices,’ she snapped. She claimed that sometimes I got a distant, glazed look on my face as though I was seeing something or listening to someone far far away, and it drove her to distraction.
When I told Nan Casey about the voices, I got quite a different response.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ she told me. ‘There is nothing to fear.’ Then she said something that to me at the time seemed very strange. ‘Your biggest threat is the people who are on this earth, not those who aren’t. They can’t hurt you.’
It was the first inkling I got that the voices came from real people who weren’t on this earth, but the idea didn’t scare me as much as it might have because I knew that, nine times out of ten, they were on my side, trying to protect me. Most were kind and caring, but they usually all had different opinions so it could be hard to decide which ones to trust.
* * *
It was Nan Casey who noticed that my hearing was deteriorating, to the extent that I sometimes couldn’t hear someone who was speaking across the room from me. At school I often failed to understand the teacher’s instructions and I was too shy to put my hand up to ask for them to be repeated, so I’d get into trouble for not doing the work correctly.
I hadn’t been to a doctor before that I could remember, although I suppose I must have seen one when my leg was broken at eighteen months. Nan Casey nagged and nagged Mum to get my hearing checked until at last she agreed. We went to a GP first, who shone a light in my ears and tutted. Using a pair of tweezers he reached in and extracted a small, hardened wad of cotton wool.
‘Really, Mrs Casey,’ he said. ‘She shouldn’t be putting things in her ears. It can cause a lot of damage.’
‘Honestly,’ Mum remonstrated with me. ‘How many times have I told you not to do that?’
‘But …’ I began, but her glare warned me to shut up.
The doctor looked at my throat next and remarked that my tonsils were very inflamed and that he would refer me to an ear, nose and throat specialist. Mum was not best pleased but there was nothing she could do about it. They’d have been suspicious if she hadn’t taken me for the ENT appointment. The specialist I saw decided straight away that I needed an operation to remove my tonsils and adenoids, and that this would improve my hearing.
When the day came Mum took me into hospital, and I remember walking down the long, dim corridors that smelled of antiseptic. I had no idea what we were doing there and felt very intimidated. In the ward there were rows of narrow iron beds covered in starched white cotton sheets. A nurse in a pristine blue and white uniform and a big cap that was pinned at the back showed us to the bed I would occupy for the next three or four days. Mum watched over me as I got undressed and pulled on a hospital gown then clambered between the sheets. The ward seemed very noisy, with clanking trolleys and metal instruments over the buzz of voices. I could smell boiled cabbage, my least favourite food, which must have been served at lunch that day. It seemed like a bad omen.
I looked up at Mum in terror, desperately seeking reassurance, but instead she folded my clothes into the locker and said ‘I’ll be off, then.’ She left without giving me a kiss, a hug or a kind word. I thought I was being left there for good, that she would never come back, and part of me wished this were the case. Other children had their parents sitting by their bedsides, telling them stories, playing cards, or letting them colour in with crayons. I felt very alone. The nurses were perfectly kind but they were always in a hurry with too much to do.
I have vivid memories of being wheeled down a corridor to the operating theatre and being lifted from the trolley on to a bed. A man in a white coat put a black rubber mask over my nose and mouth and told me to count backwards from ten to one. The sweet smell of gas got stronger and I think I only made it to eight before I conked out.
When I opened my eyes, the light was very bright. I felt thirsty and my throat felt as though it was full of broken glass. I asked a passing nurse if I could have a drink and she said no, that I was to go back to sleep again, but she would bring me something nice later on.
At teatime, when they brought the meals round, I was given jelly and ice cream – a huge treat. Mum never served puddings at home. I’d only had jelly and ice cream a couple of times before at Nan Casey’s house. It hurt to swallow but I could let the ice cream melt in my mouth and trickle down my inflamed throat in a cool stream.
Evening visiting time came and I could see that every other child on the ward had a visitor except me. During my entire stay, neither Mum nor Dad came to visit me. I guessed that Dad must be too busy with work but I still scanned the groups of parents entering the ward as visiting hour began, hoping against hope that he might be there. I didn’t have any books or toys with me but the nurses brought me some picture books to look at.
A few nurses asked where my parents were. Did they live very far away? And I felt embarrassed saying, ‘No, Bentley Heath’, as though I should be apologizing for their non-appearance.
On the day I was discharged I was told to dress myself. Mum and Dad couldn’t pick me up, they’d told the hospital, so I was sent home in an ambulance, which was quite exciting – although I was disappointed they didn’t turn on the siren. Back home, the ambulance man walked me to the front door, which was opened by Mrs Plant, the cleaner.
‘Oh you poor dear,’ she said, throwing her arms around me. ‘What a rough time you’ve had. Come on in and you can lie on the sofa and tell me all about it.’
She was so sweet to me that morning that it almost upset me more, because the contrast was so great between her and my mother. If the hospital stay did nothing else, it gave me a glimpse into how other families lived, and the fact that mine was quite different from other people. This was something I would continue to ponder in the coming years, without having the power to do anything about it.
In my head, the voices were murmuring and I could make out what some of them were saying. They were wondering where my father was and when my mother would be home. I lay and listened to them and wondered what it all meant.
During the school holidays, we were under Mum’s feet again and I could tell she was irked by this. She’d got used to having a bit of freedom from us kids but it had been taken away from her for the next few weeks. She was still working as a dressmaker and often had to travel into Birmingham by train to buy fabric or haberdashery, so over the holidays she would have to take us with her. Usually she left Nigel and me to play at Dad’s office in the electroplating business, where Granddad Casey, Uncle Graham and Dad all made a fuss of us. I remember the sulphurous, rotten-egg smell of the place, which must have been a by-product of one of the processes there. Among other things, they electro-plated nibs for old-fashioned pens and Dad used to give me lots of extra ones to keep. Granddad kept a spinning top there as well as at home and we would play with that, or they gave us pens and paper to do drawings, or we were allowed to make long chains