Read Online Shadows of the Workhouse by Jennifer Worth - Free Book Online

of nothing else. There was a fever pitch of excitement. The day for departure arrived.
    The girls were standing in the dining hall after breakfast and everything was ready.
    The Mistress entered. “Right, now. Form a line and march out quietly. We will proceed to the station.”
    The girls stepped forward.
    “Not you. Stay where you are.”
    The Mistress pointed at Jane. The other girls marched out.
    Sick disappointment took possession of Jane. She saw the last girl leave, as she stood in her place. She heard footsteps echo down the corridors and doors banging. Then silence.
    Now it was that Jane’s heart finally broke. Hitherto her suffering had been physical. Now the torture was mental, emotional, and spiritual. The utter desolation of rejection was hers to savour. Her daddy was not going to take her away. Her daddy did not love her, or want her. That was why she was there in the workhouse. He had put her there because he did not want her and she would never see him again. She knew it in her heart.
    Throughout the long weeks, alone but for the porter’s wife who brought her food twice a day, Jane lived with this bitter knowledge. She had nothing to do, day after day; no books, no toys, no pencils and paper. She cried herself to sleep alone in the dormitory; ate alone in the huge refectory; went out alone in the yard (euphemistically called a playground) and walked around the walls. She spoke to no one except the porter’s wife, twice a day.
    The other girls returned, sun-browned and happy. Jane heard stories of the seaside and paddling and catching crabs and building sandcastles. She didn’t say a word.
    The knowledge of rejection, of being unwanted, is more terrible to live with than anything else, and a rejected child will usually never get over it. A physical pain entered Jane’s body, somewhere in the region of the solar plexus, which ached all the time and from which she would never be free.
    Unknown to Jane, Sir Ian and Lady Lavinia had visited the children’s holiday camp. They had played with the children by the sea, organised races for them across the sands, hired a man with a donkey to give them rides and read stories to them in the evening. They were very happy with their work.
    At the end of the day, Sir Ian asked the Master: “I have not seen that pretty child who came up to thank me when I first met you. Where is she?”
    The Master was nonplussed, but his resourceful wife stepped forward with a curtsey. “The child has an aunt, sir, who always takes her on holiday each year. I assure you, sir, that at this very moment the child is playing happily on a beach somewhere in Devon.” She curtsied again.
    “I am glad to hear it,” said Lady Lavinia, “but for my part, I am sorry not to see the child. My husband spoke most highly of her.”
    After they had left, the Master said. “What a blessing we did not bring that wretched child. If she had gone running up to that man in front of his wife, and clung to him and called him Daddy, heaven knows what trouble it would have stirred up.”
    And on this occasion – who can tell? – the Master may have been right.

FRANK

    Give me a boy for the first five years
of his life, and I will make the man.
    Rousseau

    Frank had but a dim recollection of his father. He remembered a tall, strong man, whom he held in awe. He remembered his big voice and huge, rough hands. He could remember once tracing the veins on the back of this vast hand with his little fingers, and looking at his own smooth white skin and wondering if he would ever have hands like that. To be like his father was his only ambition and he worshipped him. In the later, sadder years of his childhood he tried desperately to remember what his father had been like, but a phantom that comes and goes could not have been more elusive and only the dimmest memory remained.
    He remembered his mother much more clearly; his sweet, gentle mother who was never strong because she was always coughing. He