Mother first tried to kill me when I was thirteen months old. ‘You learned to walk so fast,’ she told me later. ‘I thought I might as well stop you while I could.’
She had throttled me with white edging tape stolen from the dressmaker’s, but in the end the tape was not of the necessary length to do the job, so she desisted.
She tried again when I was three. An illegitimate child, I was handed over to a foster mother so Mother would not lose her post at a fancy house in London’s Harley Street. The foster mother charged five shillings a week for my care. She was partial to velvet shawls trimmed with ermine.
The lodgings were bare and smelt sharply of sour milk, even though there was no milk, merely sugared water. Thick black scratches marked the filthy wooden floors, etched from the heavy furniture the foster mother pushed around in order to loosen the floorboards.
I was spending my days in the bleary stupor of laudanum, which the foster mother spoon-fed us to keep us quiet, when I first witnessed the woman strangle a baby. Rigid in my cot next to my fellow charges, I watched as the baby’s thin legs kicked lightly, a blue vein pulsing across the foster mother’s forehead.
She would make her daily rounds and inspect the infants on the cots, shaking our legs, snapping her fingers in our faces, moistening our lips with drops of laudanum. One by one, we would droop and die on her like distressed flowers.
I do not know why I lasted longer than the others. Possibly mine was one of the few mothers who was regular with the payments, and certainly the only one who, undeterred by the foster mother’s letters assuring her I was well, visited when she was able. She would arrive with broken toys that once belonged to her employer’s sons. Even in infancy, I found no use or joy in playthings. The other tots would lurch towards the toys, barely mustering the strength to outstretch their arms, their limbs too weak and brains too clouded to communicate in any way except through incoherent moaning. Mother would avoid making eye contact with them when she visited.
On one fateful visit, I stared through a haze as the two women bickered, the foster mother attempting to dig coins from Mother’s pockets with her bony, callused fingers. The foster mother wanted more money. Only reasonable, she explained, for a steadfastly growing child – the eldest and hungriest of all her charges. Tensions erupted when the foster mother threw an empty bottle of laudanum at Mother which crashed to the floor in a hail of glass. They screamed at one another amidst a cluster of bawling bastard babies until the foster mother pushed Mother out and told her to take her big, strange baby with her.
That night a desperate Mother smuggled me into the servants’ quarters of the house she was employed at and stabbed me with a bread knife, plunging the blade into my shoulder. I made nary a sound, looking down at the handle of the knife with moderate interest.
The blade rested in the fat of my shoulder as Mother debated whether or not to pull it out. ‘It isn’t your fault, Winifred, that yours is an evil soul, wrapped in darkness,’ she said with a sigh. ‘And it isn’t my fault that I wish to rid the world of the evil I have borne.’ Her face was crumpled, folding into itself. ‘But I cannot do it,’ she said. ‘So help me, I cannot.’ And with that, she pulled the knife out.
Over the years, I assumed my impassive disposition was a result of the vast quantities of laudanum I ingested as a babe. I believe, now, that I assumed wrong.