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First published in the United States of America by Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. 1980
This edition published in Great Britain by Puffin Books 2014
Copyright © Thomas Meehan, 1980
Lyrics from ‘Tomorrow’, © 1977 by Martin Charnin and Charles Strouse, appear by permission of the composer and lyricist.
ANNIE, ANNIE: THE MUSICAL, & LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE ®, ™, & © 2013
Tribune Content Agency, LLC. All rights reserved.
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author and illustrator has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-141-36054-6
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
This book is for my children, Kate and Joe, now all grown up, as well as for a pair of little girls, Emma Van Brocklin and Sasha Berman
LONG ago. The still and dark early hours of the morning of the first of January 1933. A light snow was falling in the chill, deserted streets of downtown New York. Time slowly passed, and then the wintry quiet was broken by the clanging of the bells, tolling four a.m., in the steeple of St Mark’s in the Bowery.
A couple of blocks from the church, on St Mark’s Place, in the second-floor dormitory of the New York City Municipal Orphanage, Girls’ Annex, an eleven-year-old girl stood alone at a frosty window. Shivering in a thin white cotton nightgown, she listened to the tolling of the bells as she watched the snow swirling downward in the light of a streetlamp. From time to time, she looked yearningly one way up the street and then the other way down. She was waiting for someone to come for her. To take her away from the orphanage. But no one came. Thin, somewhat short for her age, the girl had a slightly upturned nose and an unruly mop of straightish, short-cut red hair. But her most striking features were shining blue-gray eyes that seemed strangely to reflect at the same time a deep sadness, irrepressible joy, and a sharp intelligence. Her name was Annie.
In the cold, drafty dormitory, the other girls – seventeen of them – had long been asleep, mumbling and occasionally crying out in their dreams as they turned restlessly in narrow beds under scratchy, drab army blankets. But Annie had been awake all night. Earlier, trying to fall asleep, she’d been kept awake by the street sounds of New Year’s Eve revellers – shouting voices, drunken singing, the honking of car horns, and the raucous blowing of noisemakers. Long after midnight, though, when all had grown quiet on St Mark’s Place and the snow had begun to fall, Annie still hadn’t been able to sleep. And at last she’d got up from her bed to stand at the window, to keep a silent vigil through the snowy night, to wait.
For as long as she could remember, Annie hadn’t been able to sleep on New Year’s Eve. Because New Year’s Eve marked the anniversary of the night eleven years earlier, when she’d been left as a two-month-old baby in a tan wicker basket on the front steps of the orphanage. Someone had rung the doorbell and then run off into the night. Annie had been wrapped in a faded pink woolen blanket and had been wearing a broken half of a silver locket around her neck. And there had been an unsigned note pinned to the blanket. ‘Please take good care of our little darling,’ the note had read. ‘Her name is Annie and we love her very much. She was born on October 28th. We will be back to get her soon. We have left half of a locket around her neck and kept the other half so that when we come back for her you will know that she’s our baby.’
Because she’d been left at the orphanage on a New Year’s Eve, Annie had got it into her head that somehow her mother and father would come back to get her on another New Year’s Eve. So, each year, while other children counted the days until Christmas, Annie instead counted the days until New Year’s Eve. But year after year, she’d been disappointed. Her father and mother hadn’t come for her. And now it seemed pretty certain that they weren’t coming for her this year, either. As the snow began to fall more heavily now, Annie sighed and rubbed her eyes to keep from crying. ‘They said they loved me and were comin’ back for me – it’s in my note,’ whispered Annie to herself in the dark. ‘Where are they? Why haven’t they come for me?’ Annie clasped the broken silver locket that hung around her neck, always, night and day, and squeezed it tightly to her breast.
‘Mama, Mama, Mommy!’ The littlest of the orphans in the orphanage, six-year-old Molly, had wakened from a nightmare and was crying out for her mother. But Molly’s mother had died two years before, in a car accident, and her father had been killed in the same crash. So although she was an extraordinarily beautiful child, Molly was an orphan whom nobody wanted to adopt. An orphan like all of the other girls in the orphanage. Except Annie. Annie was different because she had a father and a mother. Somewhere. ‘Mama, Mommy!’ cried Molly again, waking up the girls in the beds around her.
‘Shut up,’ shouted Pepper from the next bed.
‘Yeah, can’t nobody get any sleep around here,’ grumbled Duffy.
‘Mama, Mommy!’ screamed Molly again.
‘I said, shut your little trap, Molly,’ said Pepper, getting angrily out of bed, picking Molly up, and shoving her down on the floor. At fourteen, Pepper was the oldest and the biggest of the orphans, a pug-nosed rapscallion with a face full of freckles and long, tousled hair that was even redder than Annie’s.
‘Ahhh, stop pushin’ the poor little kid around,’ said July. ‘She ain’t done nothin’ to you.’ Twelve years old, the sweetest of the orphans – if not exactly the prettiest – July had received her name because, simply enough, she’d been abandoned as a baby at the orphanage on the Fourth of July.
‘She’s keepin’ me awake, ain’t she,’ Pepper snapped back at July.
‘No, you are keepin’ us awake,’ said July.
‘You wanna make somethin’ out of it?’ said Pepper, walking over to July’s bed.
‘Oh, the Jack Dempsey of the orphanage,’ said July, and in a moment she and Pepper were rolling on the floor in a shrieking, punching, hair-pulling fight that woke up eight-year-old Tessie in her bed at the far end of the dormitory.
‘Oh, my goodness, oh, my goodness, they’re fightin’ and I won’t get no sleep all night,’ whined Tessie, a pale, frightened girl with blonde pigtails, a thin beaked nose, and scarcely any chin at all. ‘Oh, my goodness, oh, my goodness!’
Annie had been silently watching from the window. But now she stepped forward and broke up the fight between Pepper and July. ‘C’mon, you two, cut it out and go back to bed,’ commanded Annie, pulling the fighting girls apart.
‘Aw, nuts to you, Annie,’ muttered Pepper, glowering as she stomped back to her bed. But Pepper didn’t try to pick a fight with Annie. Although she was a good deal smaller than Pepper, Annie was recognized by all the orphans as the toughest among them. Even Pepper was afraid of her. The smartest of the orphans, too, and their acknowledged leader, especially in their never-ending battles with the headmistress of the orphanage, Miss Agatha Hannigan.
‘Pepper started it, Annie,’ said July, ‘pushin’ Molly down.’
‘I know,’ said Annie, patting July on the shoulder. ‘But you gotta go back to sleep, all of you.’
‘Okay, Annie,’ said July, climbing back into her bed as Annie went to comfort Molly, who was still crouched on the floor. Kneeling beside Molly, Annie pulled the child into her arms.
‘It’s all right, Molly, Annie’s here,’ said Annie, gently stroking Molly’s long, black hair.
‘It was my mama, Annie,’ said Molly, tears streaming down her flushed cheeks. ‘We was ridin’ on the ferryboat and she was holdin’ me up to see all the big ships. And then she was walkin’ away, wavin’, and I couldn’t find her no more. Anywhere.’
‘It was only a dream, honey,’ said Annie, drying Molly’s eyes with the sleeve of her nightgown. ‘Now, you gotta get back to sleep. It’s after four o’clock.’
‘Annie,’ said Molly, ‘read me your note.’
‘Again?’ said Annie.
‘Please,’ said Molly.
‘Okay, Molly,’ said Annie, and from the battered wicker basket under her bed – the same basket in which she’d been left at the orphanage and in which she kept her few belongings – Annie took out the note and started to read it aloud by the pale light that slanted in from the streetlamp outside. Annie had folded and unfolded the note so many times that it was nearly falling apart. It was written in a round, feminine hand on a square of pale-blue cardboard. ‘Please take good care of our little darling,’ Annie began. ‘Her name is –’
‘Oh, no, here it comes again,’ groaned Pepper. In the years that they’d been together in the orphanage, Annie had read her note aloud to the orphans an average of perhaps two or three times a week. ‘Her name is Annie,’ said Duffy in a mocking, singsong voice. A tubby thirteen-year-old with a pudding face and scraggly blonde hair, Duffy was Pepper’s best friend. ‘She was born on October twenty-eighth,’ Duffy went on. ‘We will be back to get her soon.’ And now all the orphans began laughing at Duffy’s rendition of the note. All, that is, but Molly and Tessie. ‘Oh, my goodness, now they’re laughin’ and I won’t get no sleep at night,’ whined Tessie. ‘Oh, my goodness, oh, my goodness.’
Annie angrily stood up, put her hands on her hips, and faced the laughing girls. ‘All right,’ said Annie, ‘do you wanna sleep with your teeth inside your mouth or out?’ Silence. Everyone, including Pepper, lay quietly back down in bed. Annie finished reading the note and then, folding it with great care, put it back in her basket. Now Annie picked Molly up and carried her to bed. She tucked the little girl in under the covers and kissed her lightly on the forehead.
‘Good night, Molly,’ whispered Annie.
‘Good night, Annie,’ said Molly. ‘You’re lucky, Annie, I dream about havin’ a mother and father. But you really got ’em.’
‘I know,’ said Annie softly. ‘Somewhere. Somewhere.’ In a few minutes, Molly and the other orphans had fallen back to sleep. But Annie still couldn’t sleep. And she went again to the window to look out on the falling snow. At the window, she drifted into a waking dream about her father and mother. They were maybe real nearby, she thought, or maybe far away. Her father, she knew, was a big, strapping man who laughed and smiled all the time, and who’d pick her up in his arms, give her a big bear hug, and whirl her about the room. He was a lawyer, or maybe even a doctor, who helped poor people. And her mother was a kind, gentle woman with golden-blonde hair who played songs on the piano and sewed even better than a professional dressmaker. She’d made dozens of beautiful dresses for Annie. The dresses, all the colours of the rainbow, were hanging in a closet, waiting for the day when Annie came home. Annie and her parents lived in the country, in a vine-covered house on a hill. There was a broad front lawn, and from the porch, you could see for miles across green meadows to a distant winding river. On summer afternoons, Annie, her mother, and her father, the three of them together, would walk across the meadows to the river and have a picnic of deviled eggs and lemonade while they watched swans gliding by. In her room in the house, Annie had a canopy bed and a three-story dollhouse and a red-and-white hobbyhorse and … A horse-drawn milk wagon came clattering around the corner of St Mark’s Place, waking Annie with a start from her reverie. She’d heard the sound of the milk wagon outside the window in the early morning ever since she could remember. Annie began thinking back now on all of her long years in the orphanage. And almost none of her memories of those years were happy ones.
ANNIE’S earliest memory, from a time when she was perhaps two or three years old, was of the shadowy figure of Miss Hannigan looming menacingly above her as she played with a tattered rag doll on the floor of the dormitory. ‘Get up from there, you wretched little orphan – you’ve got that clean dress all filthy,’ shrieked Miss Hannigan, a skinny, hatchet-faced woman with short, jet-black hair. She reminded the orphans of a particularly unpleasant-looking – and all too real – Halloween witch. Miss Hannigan had yanked Annie to her feet and given her a dozen whacks across the backside with a heavy oaken paddle. But Annie hadn’t cried. Even as a tiny tot, Annie had never cried when Miss Hannigan beat her, a show of spirit that infuriated Miss Hannigan.
Because Annie was at once the spunkiest and the most intelligent of the girls in the orphanage, Miss Hannigan hated her more than any child she’d had under her charge in all her twenty-three years as headmistress of the orphanage. ‘I’ll break that little brat yet,’ muttered Miss Hannigan to herself, and she constantly gave Annie extra chores to do – greasy pots and pans to wash in the orphanage’s steamy basement kitchen, grimy windows to wash, floors to scrub on her hands and knees. But Annie never let her spirits flag and made Miss Hannigan all the angrier by taking on each new task with a cheery smile – the worse the chore, the broader Annie’s smile. ‘You see, it’s me against Miss Hannigan, like a war,’ Annie told the other orphans, ‘and I’m not gonna give in to her, ever.’
As the years passed, Annie grew accustomed to the routine of life in the orphanage. Each morning, at six a.m., the piercing whistle woke the slumbering orphans. ‘All right, get up, get up, all of you, you rotten orphans!’ shouted Miss Hannigan. A cold shower, and then the girls dressed themselves in hand-me-downs that came twice a year in large bundles from the Salvation Army. Their beds made and the dormitory swept, the orphans were marched downstairs to the first-floor dining room for breakfast ‘No talking!’ snapped Miss Hannigan. The girls sat silently on hard wooden benches at a long trestle table as Miss Hannigan served up breakfast. For as far back as Annie could remember, breakfast in the orphanage had always been the same – a glass of bluish skim milk and a bowl of hot mush. The mush, which was prepared by Miss Hannigan herself, was mouse-gray in colour and lumpy in texture, and it tasted the way that white school paste smelled. When they’d first come to the orphanage, many of the girls had gagged on Miss Hannigan’s mush and hadn’t been able to swallow so much as a spoonful. But, after a time, they’d grown used to it. Because for breakfast, in the orphanage, it was mush or nothing.
After breakfast, the schedule in the orphanage varied according to whether or not it was a school day. If there was school, Miss Hannigan marched the orphans down the block to P.S. 62, a turreted Victorian redbrick public school at the corner of St Mark’s Place and Third Avenue. The orphans stayed in school until four o’clock, when Miss Hannigan picked them up and herded them back to the orphanage. If there was no school, the orphans went downstairs immediately after breakfast to their basement workroom, where they sat at rows of sewing machines making little girls’ dresses. On their working days, the orphans sewed for eight hours, with twenty minutes out for lunch (another glass of skim milk and a sandwich of fatty ham or bologna). Each girl was expected by the end of the day to have finished at least one dress. Or else she got the paddle from Miss Hannigan. The dresses that they made – frilly party frocks of organdy and chiffon in bright colours, like canary yellow and magenta – were in marked contrast to the drab and patched hand-me-downs that they wore. Miss Hannigan had arranged for a children’s clothing manufacturer in Brooklyn to provide the sewing machines and the raw fabrics in exchange for being able to buy the finished dresses at fifty cents apiece. Most weeks Miss Hannigan made as much as thirty dollars for herself from the orphans’ labors. The orphans weren’t supposed to work, of course, and if the director of the New York City Board of Orphans, Mr Joseph Donatelli, had known what Miss Hannigan was up to, he would quickly have fired her. But no one had come from the Board of Orphans to inspect the girls’ annex on St Mark’s Place for more than a dozen years. And Miss Hannigan justified what she was doing by telling herself that she was teaching the orphans a useful trade. ‘You oughta be grateful to me, you little brats – you’ll be able to get a job sewin’ when you grow up and gotta leave here,’ Miss Hannigan told the orphans as they bent hour after hour over their sewing machines in the dank basement workshop.
Miss Hannigan spent most of the money she made from selling the dresses on bottles of bootleg whiskey. For Miss Hannigan was a heavy drinker who was slightly drunk from morning until night. While the orphans were either working at their sewing machines or off at school, Miss Hannigan idled away most of her days in her high-ceilinged office sipping rye whiskey, smoking Lucky Strike cigarettes, and listening to soap operas like Ma Perkins and The Romance of Helen Trent on her table-model Philco radio.
At six o’clock each evening, the orphans filed into the dining room for supper, a meal that most often consisted of boiled chicken wings, grayish boiled potatoes, and some such soggy vegetable as boiled cabbage or broccoli. There was spongy white bread and margarine to fill up on, but dessert was served only on special occasions like Thanksgiving or Christmas, when each orphan got a bowl of gummy rice pudding. After supper, the orphans were sent upstairs to their dormitory for a period of study until bedtime. Lights out at eight o’clock, and another day in the orphanage was done.
Sunday was the only day of rest for the orphans. But, in a way, Sunday was the worst day of all for them. Miss Hannigan led the girls to St Mark’s in the Bowery each Sunday morning at eight o’clock, and they sat for more than an hour in the musty church listening to long-winded sermons about the ultimate fate of all who sinned – the eternal fires of hell. And, of course, as Miss Hannigan explained to them, an orphaned girl was by nature a sinner. Or why else would her mother and father have died on her? Racked by confused feelings of guilt, fear, and boredom, the orphans were paraded from the church back to the orphanage, where Miss Hannigan made them spend the day praying and reflecting on the evil they had done in the past week. ‘Cleanse your filthy souls with remorse and beg God for forgiveness for your multitude of sins!’ thundered Miss Hannigan at the frightened orphans. No talking. No reading. Only sitting silently with bowed heads and folded hands for endless hours at the trestle table in the airless dining room. There were Sunday afternoons in the orphanage, Annie remembered now as she stood at the window looking out on the falling snow, that had seemed to last forever.
School days were happier for Annie than the days spent at her sewing machine. But not much happier. Still, at school she had a chance to read, which was her favorite pastime. Annie eagerly read her way through scores of books each year. The books she loved best, like the Five Little Peppers series, were about poor but happy children and cheerful families. And she also loved adventure books that were set in romantic, faraway places, like the South Sea islands. Annie did well in school, getting good marks in every subject and ranking near the top of her class. But the orphans, including Annie, were constantly teased and ridiculed by the other schoolchildren, because of their raggedy clothes and because they didn’t have mothers, fathers, or homes of their own. As they were herded to and from school by Miss Hannigan, the orphans were mocked by the other children, who taunted them with a crude rhyme they’d invented:
Orphan, orphan, ha, ha, ha,
Ain’t got a mama, ain’t got a pa,
Orphan, orphan, dumb, dumb, dumb,
Lookin’ like a pig, dressed like a bum!
In winter, the other children sometimes made a game out of seeing how many orphans they could hit with snowballs. And Miss Hannigan didn’t allow the orphans to step out of line to throw snowballs back. Teeth clenched, eyes forward, the orphans trudged two by two along the slushy city sidewalk through a gauntlet of cruelly laughing children and flying snowballs.
The teachers at P.S. 62 weren’t at all kind to the orphans, either. In each class, the orphans were assigned to a special section of desks at the back of the room and treated by their teachers as pesky nuisances who didn’t really belong in school. Annie remembered having overheard her fifth-grade teacher, Mrs Conklin, talking one day to another teacher. ‘Damn orphans, cluttering up our classrooms,’ Mrs Conklin had complained. ‘Without them this job would be easy.’
At lunchtime, as though they had some terrible disease that the other children might catch, the orphans were put in a special corner section of the school cafeteria. They ate some such sodden glop as baked macaroni and cheese that was provided free to needy students by the New York City Board of Education, while the rest of the children, who’d brought their lunches in shiny metal lunchboxes, had meals that their mothers had fixed for them – mysterious and wonderful things that the orphans yearningly dreamed of tasting, like peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, bananas, chocolate brownies, and hot cocoa poured from thermos bottles.
During the half-hour morning and afternoon recess periods, on the fenced-in concrete playground behind the school, the orphans, left out of the other children’s games, banded together to play games of their own. And to protect themselves against the playground bullies, who from time to time decided that it would be fun to beat up an orphan. Against these bullies, the orphans, led by Annie and Pepper, put up a united front. ‘You touch any one of us,’ said Annie fiercely, ‘and all of us will jump you!’ At home, in the orphanage, the orphans often fought and bickered with one another, but at school they stuck loyally together. And the bullies at P.S. 62 soon learned that it didn’t pay to take on the orphans, unless they were looking for a couple of black eyes. They particularly learned not to get mixed up in a fight with Annie, who could flatten even the biggest and the toughest-looking of the boys with a single punch. So, after a while, the orphans were left alone during recess to play their own games of tag or hopscotch.
After reading, Annie’s favorite subject was geography. She loved learning about parts of the world that were as totally different and as far distant as possible from P.S. 62, the orphanage, and St Mark’s Place. The country that she loved studying about most of all was Switzerland, with its sparkling-clear lakes and green meadows, and towering snow-capped mountains. She often daydreamed that her father and mother would turn out to be living in Switzerland, and that she’d soon be going to stay with them, forever, in a mountainside Swiss chalet, like a little girl named Heidi whom she’d read about in a book. But as she thought now at the window about geography, Annie remembered something that had happened the previous year at school, when she’d been in the fifth grade. It was one of the most painful memories of her life.