Chapter
One
Journey
I have always wanted to live in the South
of England. In my dreams I imagined one
day I would live near the sea. Water is transient yet eternal. Sometimes I
think my existence at Thornton Hall was just a mirage, an excuse to visit the
ocean.
The day my aunt handed me over to Social
Services, I suspected life was not meant to be easy. I was only eight.
Afterwards, I endured a series of foster homes and finally an expensive school
paid for by my unknown benefactor. I ended up flung out onto a busy street at
eighteen, wearing last year’s jeans and carrying every possession I owned on my
back. I knew I had to get out of London: the city; the congested streets; the
strangers moving past me as if I was air; the sheer bustle, scope and majesty
of the place would swamp me if I didn’t.
I need to go somewhere solitary, I thought,
somewhere safe.
I’d started searching the internet a few
weeks before my final exams and just after I’d completed my university
interviews. If I got in (and my final marks suggested I would), I’d still have
more than three months (and nowhere to live) before classes started. I’d
applied to at least six different employment agencies for a job but I had few
practical skills. My benefactor had paid for me to have a proper education at
an exclusive school in South Kensington. Lockwood was filled with rich,
abandoned girls - girls who rated you on looks and pulling power and girls who committed various minor classroom
crimes, then pointed at you for the blame. The students in their checked
uniforms were rich girls from good families, girls who hated povvies (short for poverty stricken
ones). Girls like me. Let’s just say, I did not fit in, but I made the most of
the experience. My expensive education and ability to speak French were what
led me to Thornton Hall and the job of caring for six-year-old Sophie
Varens.
Now that I’m eighteen and officially an
adult, solid work is hard to find. I see endless advertisements for Girls Wanted and Dance Clubs. It makes my stomach churn when I realize that no
matter how hard I study, the only opportunities for me to earn a full salary
without a university degree can be found in the final classified pages of a
free newspaper.
I feel older than my years. You may wonder
how that is possible, but let’s face it, after the kind of life I’ve led
already, it is. I’m finished with Lockwood School and grateful for my thorough
knowledge of English, French, History, Music and Mathematics. I got very high
marks in all my subjects but I’ve learnt already that finishing school in the
middle of a recession was not the wisest choice – as if I had one. Every
advertisement screams experience. Which kind would they like?
Would they like the experience of being
abandoned by my birth mother on my aunt’s doorstep, aged two? Being fostered
out six years later because my aunt disliked me? Realizing I’d never be adopted
and have a real family because my mother wouldn’t sign the release forms? I was
too old by then to be anyone’s first choice. This led me to eight different
foster homes in as many years.
Yes, I’ve had quite an education. And yet, I have no contact with my birth
parents but I’m not bitter. I have raised myself, in many ways, and I do not
believe I have done a bad job. It is true, my expectations for happiness are
not high but for the first time, I feel free and that is a joy in and of
itself.
A few days after I’d finished school I
found work. The job was with an older
couple who worked in the City, in banking. The father, a dour accountant, had taken
the morning off to show me his three-year-old’s routine. He was fighting with
his wife and she had stormed out. This should have been my warning. During nap
time, the father tried to kiss me and when I pulled away, he rang my agency and
said I couldn’t cope with the demands of the position. He was a valuable
client, so they didn’t want to hear my side of the story.
As I grabbed my coat and left, I mentally put
a line through that agency on my list. The experience made me wary of taking
agency jobs again. I thought I might do better seeking work independently.
A week later, I was very low on funds and
my room was only paid up for another night. I was beginning to wonder if
sleeping rough in central London would suit me (obviously, it wouldn’t) when I
saw an advertisement in a women’s magazine: Governess
wanted for remote stately home in Devon. I searched the old-fashioned word
and realized a governess was like a nanny but she wasn’t expected to do domestic
tasks, just to tutor the child in schoolwork.
The contact details for a Mrs Fairfax at Thornton Hall in Cornwall, a
seaside town in the South of England, were displayed. I immediately found
enough money to use my pay phone and dialled Thornton Hall. I spoke to the
woman on the telephone, Mrs Edwina Fairfax, and I assumed the child who might
be in my care, was her daughter.
Mrs Fairfax was polite and well-spoken on
the phone. Just her voice was like a balm to me. Street thugs and wayward teenagers
ditching school loitered around my depressing borough. I emailed Mrs Fairfax my
school results and references almost immediately. A day later, I had the job.
It was a huge relief to me. I’d been
approaching the summer holidays with little money and no prospects. I took what
was left of my savings to go to an enormous department store on Oxford Street to
choose a new summer jacket and shoes. I chose a cobalt blue coat and red Mary
Jane style flats to go with my black opaque stockings. I would look the part;
even if I wasn’t sure I felt it. Cornwall would not be cold this time of year,
but Thornton Hall was an ancient property situated alongside the coastline, so
it would likely be breezy; English weather was always changeable. I packed my
few unwanted belongings into a garbage bag and left them on the street outside
my flat, after I’d returned my keys to my dodgy landlord. He looked me up and
down and smirked as I announced I would be leaving. I walked out the door with
my new bag declaring I would not be coming back.
I was excited, anticipating the start of a
new adventure, a new life. Who wouldn’t be after the one I’d already had? I’d
been warned that there was a weak internet signal at Thornton, but this almost
pleased me. There was no one I wanted to keep in touch with. My so-called
friends had all gone off on summer holidays bankrolled by their parents. I
couldn’t join them even if I had been invited. I didn’t mind solitude that much,
not really. I’d learnt to create worlds inside my head, the ones of my own
learning.
Perhaps I had an over-active imagination,
but it would stand me in good stead where I was going. I assumed there would be
few people and little else to do apart from looking after Sophie.
I’d seen a picture of the child and had
spoken a few words to her over the telephone – in French. Sophie had squealed
with delight when I described to her some of the places I’d seen on the school
trip I’d taken to Paris – one of the most exciting moments of my life so far.
The entire senior French class had been packed into a bus and herded across the
English Channel via ferry only to arrive in another country, another world, one
with fresh bread and cakes and a whole new exotic language.
At the station, I bought an extra mobile
phone card with what remained of my savings. Taking on board the isolation I
might be facing at Thornton, it seemed a smart idea to arrive prepared. In the
photograph I’d been emailed, Thornton Hall was situated at the end of a long
windy road on the edge of a cliff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. I could
almost hear the waves crashing against the rocks.
I clutched my phone card as I boarded the
carriage. I’d need it, I thought; although I wondered if so far out in the
country, there would even be a reception. On the train, I read through my
formal letter of employment, emailed to me and signed by the housekeeper, Mrs
Fairfax. Prior to this, she had been sent references from two of my teachers at
school and another from the head mistress. I suppose the school felt it was
their duty to say some good things about me. I’d always had remarkable academic
results, considering my troublesome
attitude, one teacher had told me.
I stood at the changeover station after a
few hours’ journey wearing my new coat and carrying every item I possessed in
the world. There wasn’t much. I didn’t want to keep too many things, as I said:
just a spare cardigan, some jeans, new underwear, socks (lots of socks), and an
extra scarf. I was raised in England and though it was summer, I doubted even a
hint of fine weather.
I read during the second part of my
journey: first, a magazine, then the news on my smart phone; I listened to some
music, the latest band that I’d liked; house music; it reminded me of my best
friend from school, Irma.
Irma had taken me under her wing when I’d
arrived at Lockwood. She had gone out of her way to befriend me when I was at
my loneliest and for that, and so much more, I will never forget her.
Irma also disliked authority and we crept out
one night to go clubbing in Soho. It was the one demerit of our school careers
but the ramifications had been far reaching. The noisy club in central London was
packed with people when we arrived and we felt safe in the cover of darkness
and anonymity. The band was loud, louder than my ears could stand but Irma and
I loved it. We rocked out all night, lost in the noise and energy of the place.
In the early hours of the morning, we took
a mini-cab back to school hoping against hope that none of the boarding
supervisors would have noticed our absence. Unbeknown to us, someone had
slipped an illegal substance into Irma’s drink, too much, and Irma collapsed.
Later, she was expelled. I was kept on out of charity because I had nowhere
else to go and the school authorities couldn’t prove I’d taken anything of my
own volition. Irma’s parents have refused to allow us to speak to each other
since the incident.
The experience left me friendless in my
senior year. It could have happened to anyone but, of course, we never should
have been in that club in the first place. Though we hadn’t been drinking
alcohol and the whole escape had been Irma’s idea, I felt responsible. I was
responsible. It was the one moment, the one lack of clarity in my teenage life;
a huge mistake and Irma paid for it. I owed it to her now that I was out of
that school, to live the best life possible. I posted a card of apology to her
from the post office in Devon, and wished her well. I’d heard she’d finished
off her final year elsewhere and was doing fine. Irma’s parents couldn’t stop
us from communicating now that we were legally adults but I didn’t expect a
response.
It was near the end of the year when this
happened and somehow, the scandal was hushed up. Irma had sisters at the school
and the other parents thought getting the press involved would only be
detrimental. Perhaps they were right. An air of hostility surrounded me though
Irma had texted that she held no grudge and wished me all the best. That was
before her mobile was disconnected. The police even caught the guy who spiked
her drink on CCTV; the drink could’ve just as easily been mine. If it was mine,
apart from Irma, let’s face it, who’d have cared? Her sister and the other students left at
school had told me as much. I couldn’t blame them. In some ways it was unfair
that I’d been allowed to stay; nothing was ever the same at Lockwood after that
and I was glad when the school year ended.
Every night, since I was little, after
saying the Lord’s Prayer that I was taught, I prayed to turn eighteen, as if
that could somehow happen overnight. But it made the time go faster. Our father who art in heaven… please make me
turn eighteen.
Irma knew all about this. She had prayed
for our escape too, prayed for our freedom. At eighteen we could do everything
legally: vote, drink, and get married (a ridiculous notion to me since I’d
barely been allowed to speak to anyone male who wasn’t a teacher in all my
teenage years at Lockwood).
And now, here I was, truly on my own for
the first time. I felt the rush of excitement as the train moved out from the
station near Devon and the conductor came to check my ticket. I imagined I was
on some glamorous train, like the Orient Express, a train I used to watch leave
Victoria Station – packed with tourists heading to Europe. That was when I
lived near Brixton, and Victoria Station was my nearest changeover. That was Foster
Family Six.
I had planned to make a stop at a little
town called Lyme Regis, but to do that I would need a car and I would need to
learn to drive. All things come in time; isn’t that what I was taught? I could
hardly wait for my life to begin. My real life had been all too real already.
