The Step Child (6 page)

The noise was constant. The smell of bus fumes and never-ending life was overwhelming. There was usually a fight going on somewhere – and not just at chucking-out time. There was always a group of women with prams having a gossip. There was always somebody’s husband staggering up the street at some time of day, facing a chicken run of shouts and laughter. Of course, I had lived there before, but I had left when I was little more than 18 months old. Returning to the flat my Dad now shared with his new wife, Helen, I was the grand old age of five and ready to take it all in.

At that stage of childhood, there are things that always stay with you. Everyone remembers a favourite story, toy or pet. Most people recall where they lived or what their room was like, or whether they were scared of ghosts as they snuggled down for the night. I’m no different – my memories of Easter Road are etched on my brain. It’s only when I look at what I remember – and why – that the childhood visions start to turn into horrors.

I woke up on the morning of 8 July 1964 and knew it was a special day. I had spent the past three-and-a-half years at Haldane House, but today I was going home. My Daddy was coming for me, and when I left that day, I’d never be back. Having a Daddy and a home miles away in Edinburgh meant that I never felt I belonged at Barnardo’s. I wasn’t waiting to be adopted; I was just waiting to be ‘restored’, to go back to where I belonged.

It hadn’t been easy. Don Ford was my father – but definitely not the father of my half-brother and half-sister. At this stage he was not trying to have all three of us to stay with him and his new wife and baby. As he described himself as their ‘guardian’, and had looked after them in the immediate period after my mother left, he had proven himself to a degree, but, as the Barnardo’s records show:

this … has … raised all sorts of legal points and we have been striving to contact the children’s mother without success. The maternal grandmother has not heard from her since the children were admitted … we propose, therefore, to restore Donna to her father in the meantime, leaving both Frances and Simon at Haldane House until we have cleared up any legal points and seen as many people as we can who are involved with these children
.

It does seem as if Barnardo’s were being very careful, at least on the legal side. There is a handwritten note attached to the document quoted above in which someone has obviously jotted down the pertinent questions regarding this tricky situation:

1 Who? can claim legal custody of

a Frances Cummings

b Simon Robertson

c Donna Ford

any trace of RH Cummings
–

what efforts must be made to trace M?

on what grounds, if any, can F’s claim be resisted?

What legal right has putative father?

So many questions – and none of them really answered in the intervening years. My mother was being traced. No one knew whether the fathers of Frances and Simon were around or wanted their children. The legal rights seemed to be more and more confusing. Only one thing was clear – I was to be restored.

I was dressed and ready long before he arrived for me. I had a little bag packed with my few things, and I sat by the window, full of anticipation. This was where my life started; this was where I would become the little girl I wanted to be. I knew that Helen would be at Easter Road when we got there. I had already
been told that she wouldn’t come with my Dad, but my five-year-old mind couldn’t help thinking that this was because she would be getting things ready for me. I would be the homecoming princess. Maybe my new Mummy was decorating my bedroom. Maybe she was setting out my new toys and dollies on my bed. Maybe she was baking a cake with pink icing and sugar flowers and little silver balls for my first teatime at home. I thought about how she used to sit baby Gordon on her lap, always cuddling him, always loving him. She looked so happy with her baby; she loved him so much – imagine how delighted she would be to get a little girl to love as well!

I don’t remember much about my Dad actually arriving to pick me up. The parts I do recall are similar to his previous visits with Helen. He was waiting in the ‘big room’ where all family meetings took place. He was dressed in his grey herringbone overcoat with shiny black shoes and a white shirt and dark tie. My Dad never went out of the house in those days without a shirt and tie. He always wanted to be presentable. His jet black hair was slicked back with Brylcreem, and his glasses looked too big on his too-small face. I walked up to him and he seemed huge – even although he was only five foot seven – because he was My Daddy and he was taking me HOME!

My father signed a sheet of paper saying that he had received all my personal belongings. While he was doing this, I waited, as I had been for some time.

I don’t remember too much about the train journey home and then the bus ride in Edinburgh. It was just an assortment of transport from Haldane House onwards. I was both sad and happy – I was leaving my older sister and brother behind, the only real family I’d ever known, but I was reassured that they would be with me soon. I wasn’t to know that this was the longest amount of time I would ever spend alone with my Dad for the rest of my childhood – and I would certainly never feel so carefree again.

I was looking forward to going home so much – I was sure I was going to the same sort of home I had visited when I went to stay with other families at weekends. I was sure I would be greeted by the smell of home cooking and the feeling of love. It would all be lovely. I knew that Simon and Frances would be joining us at some point in the future, and I looked forward to that – but, that day, it was just me and him. It felt perfect.

If I’d known what was in store for me, I’d have turned on my heels and ran away as fast as my skinny little legs could carry me.

As we arrived at the stair door of the tenement flat, I looked up at the huge building. This was it. This was home. My Dad looked down at me. ‘You alright, hen?’ he asked. ‘Nothing to worry about,’ he said, looking at my big, wide, brown eyes. ‘This is where we’ll all live – this is where you stay. Now, Helen might be a wee bit busy with the baby, but she’s looking forward to you being here. None of us could wait to have you back. And we’ll get your brother and your sister as soon as we can. You’ll be fine. Just fine.’ He squeezed my hand – I’d been holding on to him since we left Haldane House – and put his other hand into a pocket to take out a big latchkey. He slid it into the hole in the big door as I stared up at the number 31 etched on glass above. As soon as the door closed behind us, I could smell the people who lived there. The stink of a dozen meals being cooked at once, of people living too close to each other, of bins needing emptying, all swept up and hit me. There were echoing sounds coming from behind closed doors – behind each one was a different world to mine. I looked up at the immense stone staircase which led to each front door and seemed to stop only when it reached the sky – which entrance would be ours?

My Dad pulled me gently along the cold concrete corridor with its two-tone walls. The top half had a splattered paint effect, as if someone at some point had decided this would make all the difference to a communal stairwell. We turned past a pile of prams stacked neatly at the bottom of the staircase – how many babies lived here? I would be very grown up in a place like this, I thought. I looked up and could see the clouds through the glazed cupola – it all seemed so bright and summery that even the smells and the noises didn’t matter. My excitement was building. When would we start climbing up to the sky? When would I find out which magic door led to my kingdom?

I was thrown off balance as we headed down some steps which twisted around to the left. Why were we going this way? As we went down, about four steps up from the ground, I saw a door in the wall. ‘What’s that, Daddy?’ I asked. ‘Oh, just the coal cellar,’ he answered distractedly. ‘Nothing important.’

Just the coal cellar.

Nothing important.

I’d remember those words – sooner rather than later.

The descent would symbolise more than the first disappointment I was to face – I was being taken into the very depths of despair.

‘Why are we going down here, Daddy?’ I persisted. ‘Are we going to visit someone before we go up to our house?’ My Dad laughed. ‘This is where you live now, Donna. We live down these stairs. The basement. We all live in the basement.’ I wasn’t going to the stars, I wasn’t heading up to the sky after all.

Once we reached the communal passageway, there was a door to the back garden – or the ‘back green’ as we always called it. On the right-hand side was our door, our house. My Dad opened the front door and I looked down a long corridor, or lobby, with doors along the left-hand side. The first tiny door on the left was I was told, the ‘kids’ bedroom’ – I wasn’t getting a pink hideaway to myself; I was being shoehorned into a tiny
room with whichever half-siblings were going to be around. Next door was the bathroom, and straight ahead the living room. On the right-hand side of the lobby there were no doors, just a recess which was being turned into something. There was no flooring in there, just rubble, and the smell of damp and plaster permeated the entire flat.

The flat was so small that every inch of space in every room felt squeezed. In ‘my’ tiny room, there was one window and a fireplace, above which there was a picture of Jesus. His eyes seemed to follow me around the room, and never once did I feel He wasn’t watching me. It was just a shame He never did anything to help. The bedroom was incredibly cramped as bunk beds had been crammed in alongside a cot.

A representative from Barnardo’s had already been to visit and commented on the size of the flat.

The flat is tiny and consists of a living-room, bedroom and bathroom. Mr Ford has worked very hard altering the house to make it more manageable, i.e. putting in swing doors on the children’s room because of the situation of the bunk beds; boxing in the bath and he and his brother are rewiring the house and re-decorating
.

The bedroom has new bunk beds and it was originally arranged to have two bunk-beds, but they just could not get the second one into the room. As a result the room has the top bunk for Simon and the bottom bunk for Frances and Donna meantime. Gordon’s cot is also in the room, plus a dressing table and chest of drawers
.

My Dad introduced me to this minuscule, cramped environment. ‘What do you think, then?’ he asked, squatting down beside me. ‘What do you think of your new home?’ I hated it. I hated it straight away. It just wasn’t what I had dreamed of, but I tried to focus on what really mattered. It wasn’t a children’s home, and I
had my Dad and stepmother here, my new half-brother whom I hardly knew, and my other half-siblings coming to join me soon. There were places to play, and surely there would be other children in the stair to make friends with.

‘It’s lovely, Dad,’ I answered. ‘Just lovely.’

He took my hand and walked towards the living room. Again, in such a small place, one room had many functions. There was a small kitchen, or scullery, looking out on to the back green, in line with the bathroom and my bedroom. There was a fireplace in the living room which had been converted from its original Victorian splendour into a bog-standard, ugly, grey-tiled box. And the room was also Don and Helen’s bedroom. A recess later housed a sofa bed, which they swapped for a double bed when Helen had her next baby. I looked around the room – I had been born there, and already it was giving me the creeps.