Chapter Two

 

The years had past, but grief dose not leave you regardless of what people say that time heals all wounds . . . I sat thinking over my past again as I studied my old face in the window pane and the thunder continued to roar outside. I remembered the pregnancy lark and shook my head. How could a child of eleven give birth to a little baby and how could a little boy of fifteen be able to become a father? It all seemed impossible and yet that was the only way it could have been. I had never had sex with any man and little Aaron was the only male I had slept with and that was for one night only when we were both in fear.

Could I have conceived in that short time?

Aunt Sarah and Uncle Martin had doubts when they found out that I was pregnant and after all this I went through a load of questions as to how I could have become such a mystery, but there were no answers and Sarah and Martin couldn’t suggest any answer to the problem. Could I have been the ‘whore’ they each thought I might be, I wondered as I am sure I heard uncle Martin tell Sarah that I could well have been lying to them just to save my face. They suggested abortion at one stage, but when they took me to the doctor, he was very wary about doing anything like that as he said I was very young to be put through such an aggressive ordeal and it was then suggested that as I was nearly twelve years of age, I would never be able to look after a baby and I should seriously think of adoption. All this thought of so many different things I might be able to do gave me a headache and I know at one time I wished the baby inside me would just die. . . Failing that, I had hoped that Sarah and Martin might ‘adopt’ but neither wanted to have a baby around the house as it would cause such a tremendous ‘uproar’ in their already peaceful home and they had never thought of having a baby themselves until they had been married for much longer than the few years they had enjoyed together.

Little Jonathon, as we called him, was born on the 5th of April, just two months before my birthday in July of that year and Sarah made all the arrangements for adoption, but by this time I had grown to love the little boy. It was like having another little doll in the house, together with the many dolls that daddy had bought for me and this doll could move and cry as well as eat and drink. The nappy changing gave me no trouble and I immediately felt that I had done this all my life and that I was well and truly a ‘little mother’ however, the authorities at that time made all the arrangements with Sarah and in a trice, the little boy was wrenched from my arms and I was told to forget that I had ever been pregnant and to get on with my life as an ‘ordinary little girl’ I was warned NEVER to talk to Aaron about this matter as he was so busy playing football and rugby at school that he never ever noticed that my belly was growing bigger by the day. Aaron was never to be upset, regardless of anything else. .

The adoption was arranged for some family who did not live near us to take the baby and I was never allowed to know where they had taken him. It was several years later when a girl from my school who was seventeen and had given birth to a little girl, had to have her baby adopted as she was unmarried, that I learned that Sarah had been told of the adopting family for my little boy, but she would never tell me where this was and for many years I lived with doubts as to whether my Jonathon had survived the adopting ordeal or even if he was dead or alive. I didn’t even know if he would have had his name changed . .

He could have been called MARMADUKE or FINKLEBOHM for all I knew and names were never mentioned. It was I who gave the little one the name Jonathon. I am not what you might call a ‘religious man’ and by that I mean that I don’t think of God every day, but I do pray regularly for the son I would love to have had and when I think of Aaron who has since got married again for the THIRD time and has more children than I can count, I often wonder if he is the father of my little boy, who by now, if he is still alive would be a young and I am sure, handsome man but you cannot live your life with regrets and Aaron never ever visited me in later life. I knew he was there, SOMEWHERE and I hoped, living happily with the woman he was with at that time. I think he lived in Enfield . . . well that was the last district I was led to understand he was living. Maybe God will have mercy on me some day and let me see my little son again, but my faith is very shallow and perhaps I am asking too much from God when I only speak to him on occasions and even then, I use my own language which is not very holy or angelic. As for me, I had never married and if I did now, the chances of having children would be nil, I would imagine but when I was in hospital as a child with pneumonia I was cared for by an excellent nurse. It was a male nurse and he came from Glasgow in Scotland. I guessed he was from Scotland as I recognised the accent from several of my friends in my school days and I never knew there would be such a person . . . as nurses always seemed to me to be females, however, this nurse, Mr. Coleman was very attentive to anything I needed and he used to read to me in the evenings when I was recovering. The stories he read were definitely for children but I listened intently even if I had heard them before. He would joke with me in his Scottish brogue and say, “It’s a braw bright moonlicht nicht the nicht . . .” and I learned that expression off by heart to his great delight. He also brought me fruit and in a short time I began to realize that this man was someone special in my life and we arranged to meet when I was discharged from the hospital. Now I know that may sound as if Mr. Coleman, whose name was Jack had ‘ulterior motives’ in arranging to meet a little girl when she was free to walk about with him, but I was very soon to learn that his motives were very pure and I began to realize that not only did he love me, but I also loved him.

There were two other men who gave me some attention, but neither of them could compare to Jack. Jack would spend the day and evening with me and then when he took me home around ten o’clock, he would hug me on the doorstep and give me a warm kiss and THEN HE WOULD GO HOME. I was very deeply in love with Jack Coleman and I would have married him had he asked me, but every time I thought of marriage, I could see the little boy that I had lost and I felt he cast a peculiar spell over my life and it would not let me rest. I COULD NEVER HAVE REPLACED THAT LITTLE BOY JONATHAN . . . and I knew it with a thought that I was aware would be with me until I die. Jack Coleman went off to America to do similar nursing with invalid and sick children, not long after we had been going out together and I realized when he had gone that it was all in my imagination that Jack and I could ever have got together as a married couple. Yes, he loved me, but Jack loved everyone who needed his love as he was a brilliant nurse and children with any type of sickness or illness drew his attention to the exclusion of most everything else. This is one of the reasons why he went to America and to do the nursing that he chose to do there . . . again with sick and crippled children.

The most peculiar thing that happened to me at that time was the strange and unusual attention from Martin my uncle, who seemed to regard me in his ‘purity of life and living’ to be nothing more than a prostitute and I could see him looking at me as if I was something he had picked up on the pavement after he had taken his dog for a walk.

When Martin looked at me, I felt I had to go and have a good shower and yet I never ever felt that either he or Sarah were practising Christians . . .I never saw them going to church or to the synagogue, although they were both Jewish just as I was.