Elly.
She had returned to London because she hadn’t known where else to go. But on arrival, she realized that she couldn’t go back to anything or anyone she had known here. She couldn’t afford to run into anyone who had known her or the original Eleanor. And there would be no place for her to stay once the swell of her stomach under her A-line dress became obvious to others.
But it must have been obvious already, because a middle-aged woman had thrust this piece of paper at her as she stood at a bus stop. She took a bus to the address listed on the sheet of paper and found herself standing in front of a low brick building in a part of the city that she’d never seen before. Once there, she was given food and a place to sleep and told that she was doing the right thing. What a relief, to be surrounded by other women, even though they slept dormitory-style in a large room, with no choice but to hear one another’s sighs and snores and sobs.
The nuns told her that she couldn’t expect her child to have a decent future with a mother like her. But she’d done nothing wrong, she told them. She’d been forced. It didn’t matter, they said. What mattered was the kind of future she wanted for her child. What mattered was the work that Eleanor would not be able to find or the kinds of things that she would be compelled to do to survive. The labels that her child would have to live with. What mattered was that her child deserved better.
What the sisters meant was, her child deserved something better than Eleanor. Her child deserved something that Eleanor was not.
Eleanor wanted to keep her baby, but she saw that who you knew yourself to be on the inside was not the same as how others saw you. Who you knew yourself to be wasn’t always enough to help you make it in this world. The fact was, Eleanor could not guarantee that she and her baby would be all right.
“So that you will have a better future,” Eleanor said to the swell of her middle. So that her baby would never know the shame, she swore to herself.
Her baby. It all happened so quickly. The pain, the wet, the screams. And then it was done and Eleanor had given birth to a long-fingered creature with a sweet wail, a small birthmark at the top of her pale forehead and a damp head of black hair. Until that moment, she had not known it was possible to love another person that way.
She gave her daughter her mother’s name and nursed her for six weeks, her breasts aching at the sight of her child until the pink barnacle of her baby’s mouth latched on to her nipple. When she wasn’t nursing, she was down on her knees scrubbing floors or doing the washing, lifting the hem of her skirt to wipe the sweat from under her chin.
One day, one of the nuns told Eleanor to put on her good dress. They put her baby in a pram, then in a taxi, and took her into an office with yellow walls and wooden filing cabinets and posters for infant-care products. A woman there had Eleanor sign a piece of paper and took the baby out of her arms.
“No, wait,” Eleanor said. “Could I just…” The baby’s snuffling erupted into a full wail as the woman carried her away down a hallway and Eleanor, too, started to cry.
“Shush, now,” the nun said on the way out. “Hold yourself like a lady.”
Eleanor left the hostel for unwed mothers determined to find her baby one day, to find a way to take her back. Everything she did from then on, she did with the thought of being able to take care of a child on her own. Finding a boardinghouse, finding a secretarial position, walking to work to save money on bus fares, walking the long way around to avoid those streets where the windows, despite the laws, still bore signs that read No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish.
Eleanor lived off tinned fish and fruit, and managed to save a few pounds. After several months, she tried to locate the adoption office that had taken her baby, but it was no longer there. She went back to the hostel and begged the sisters to tell her where her daughter had ended up, but they threatened to call the police, to claim that she was mentally unstable.
After that, none of the good that came Eleanor’s way, not the love of a man, not the joy of giving birth again, not a plunge into the sea, would ever fully calm the undertow that had formed inside Eleanor and kept pulling her down.
On the worst nights, Eleanor dreamed of the empty pram and how, as she returned to the entrance of the home for unwed mothers, she leaned forward to see if, by some miracle, her baby had reappeared.
Mrs. Bennett
Years later, I would learn that there had been other young women like me in various parts of the country, women who had felt coerced into giving up their babies, but at that time, no one knew any of this. I certainly didn’t know, not for many years, until the news reports started coming out.