At the tender age of five, Madeleine was living a daily nightmare. In a dark, grey building on Jersey, she was just another orphan, defenceless and alone. She was also an easy target.
Unbeknownst to the outside world, the care home manager was abusing her, using her like she was his toy. “Say nothing, no one will believe a nasty little kid like you,” he’d whisper. Terrified, Madeleine would keep quiet. And, worse still, the home was selling the children to men who would inflict on them the worst possible abuse. No one cared.
This is Madeleine’s heart-breaking story and her fight to survive.
Madeleine Vibert was taken into care when she was just a baby. She spent her early years in a crèche and her memories from that time are good ones. But that soon changed. At the tender age of five, Madeleine was transferred to Haut de La Garenne, the institution that made headlines just a few years ago. Madeleine was regularly abused under the home’s care. When she was finally able to escape, she overcame her demons and married the love of her life and had two children.
There are reasons why my memories are jumbled, why when I try to put them in order it is the bad ones that come to me first. So, in what follows, a date may not be correct or the sequence of events may be the wrong way round. But everything happened as I say it did.
My name is Madeleine. This is my story. A story I believed would never be told. For years I buried it deep, for it is not mine alone. There are others, who were part of the horrors that haunt me still, left on the island. But, by unspoken consent, we had all agreed that the truth of what happened was never to be revealed.
Some, in their desire to eradicate their memories, have lost themselves. Alcohol, tranquillisers or whatever it took to see the past through a misty haze. And finally, when nothing proved enough, suicide has not been unknown. Of course, a lucky few have shut the door on that dark room where their memories are stored and left – but I am not one of them.
For years, half a lifetime, I believed I was safe, that what was buried would remain so. Then the police found us. One by one we were questioned. They asked for names and dates. They wanted the truth, they said.
I could start my story when I was three months old and taken into care. I could begin with my earliest memories of those happy times in my childhood when there were two women I called Mummy, or when I was five and went to live in the huge, bleak, grey building named Haut de la Garenne. Maybe it should start on the day Colin Tilbrook sent for me and fear entered my life, or when I first met the men who saw Haut de la Garenne as their private playground.
But my story really began before I was born, when a young woman left Ireland to seek a better life and, in another small Irish town, a man bade farewell to his family and travelled to Jersey.
My mother told me, years later, that she was listening to the new Doris Day song, ‘Que Sera Sera’ that day. Swaying to the music, she carefully placed her few clothes in a battered brown case, as she dreamt of the rosy future she was convinced would be her destiny. She smiled as she listened to the words of the hit record. Without having to ask her mother, she already knew that, with her generous curves, shoulder-length hair, black as a raven’s wing, and those thickly fringed blue eyes, she was more than just pretty. But, like the song, she also wanted to know whether she would, one day, be rich. Would she live in a big house and dress like the women she had seen in glossy magazines? Not if she remained in Ireland, she thought. It was Jersey she was going to, where she had been told that a young Irish girl’s dreams could come true.
Of course she would miss her family. The day before, her aunts, uncles and cousins had squeezed themselves into the house to say their goodbyes. Her mother had cooked her favourite meal – a huge rabbit stew that had fed everyone. Its mouth-watering aroma, mixed with the tang of last night’s peat fire, still lingered in the room. It was nights like that she would miss most. But if she wanted a bright future, then leave she must.
She was only too aware of what the future would hold, should she stay. She had known too many pretty girls who, seeing no deeper than the charm that made them feel special, ignored their mother’s advice and married good-looking rogues. Within a year they, like their mothers before them, had turned into pale-faced drudges who, except for attending church or fetching the groceries, barely left the house.
No more dancing in the white marquees, erected in local farmers’ fields, on a Saturday night. Once a ring was on her finger, a woman’s life consisted of producing a squalling baby each year, washing stinking nappies from the never-empty bucket and working from dawn to dusk, cooking and cleaning. Then she no longer felt special. She was just a housewife with chapped hands, lank hair and a thickening waist.
Marriage agreed with those men who wiled away time and the housekeeping money in Seamus’s bar. There, while their wives spent their evenings patching and darning, the men downed the pints of Guinness called, by my grandmother, ‘the curse of Ireland’. My mother could see why they were contented. No one told them what to do – for weren’t they the masters of their homes? Meals were always ready for them, their clothes washed and ironed, and their children never dared answer them back. Nothing more than men’s slaves: that was how my mother saw those women.
It was not a life she wished for herself and, once away from her parents, who knew what might happen? Look at Marilyn Monroe. She had come from nothing, and hadn’t my mother been told by more than one boy that she was just as sexy as Marilyn, even though it was Elizabeth Taylor she resembled? Or so Patrick O’Malley had told her when he had taken her to see I Remember Paris at the Globe.
No, she was going to the right place, a sunny island where there was plenty of work and people lived in nice houses with indoor bathrooms. Not like her parents’ small stone house, with its outside lavatory and tin bath. How she hated the weekly ritual of the family bathtime, when she helped her mother to lift pan after steaming pan to fill the tub. Never again would she have to immerse herself in water made grimy by several bodies before her. Soon she would have a hot bath every day, be able to buy nice clothes, and when eventually she did marry, it would be to a man of means, who would look after her every desire.
Oh, yes, my mother was happy that day. I think it was the last time she was.
When she left, her mother stood in the doorway, kissed her goodbye and, like all Irish mothers whose daughters were leaving the nest, told her to write every week, to be good, and ‘not to be going with any boys’.
Her father carried her case to the bus stop. As the single decker came into view he said gruffly that she was to remember she always had a home there, should she ever want to come back. Then, with a lump in her throat, she was on the bus, staring out of the window as the village where she had been born grew smaller and smaller.
It was the time of year when the winter months’ endless rain had cleared, leaving lush green hedgerows, the leaves gilded by sunlight, almost hiding the clumps of wild flowers that had pushed small yellow and pink faces through the soil. As the bus trundled along the windy road, she saw a group of freckle-faced boys, their shirts hanging out of their short trousers, fishing. They looked up as the bus passed and waved. My mother waved back. Then they, too, were out of sight.
It was a warm summer morning when my mother, with seven other women, arrived in Jersey. The sky was a milky blue. The sun, already high in the sky, shone on the rocky islet where the grey stone castle stands and turned the sparkling sea into a carpet of diamonds. The queasiness she had felt on the journey left her, to be replaced by a shivery excitement. Everything was too bright, too vivid to be real, but oh-so-beautiful.
One of the women grabbed her arm. ‘Look, Maureen, look over there! Can you not see it? It’s France!’ One by one the rest of the women turned, shielded their eyes with their hands and, as they squinted against the sun’s brightness, their murmurs of excitement rose in the air.
‘Why, we could go to Paris on our day off!’ said my mother, not knowing that Paris was a very long way from the Normandy coastline.
Then, with a final bump, the ship was moored and the ramp lowered. Carrying their cases, the women walked down it and, for the first time, stepped onto Jersey soil.
Looking around, they searched for the people they had been told would meet them. They knew that their lodgings had been arranged for them and all they wanted was to be taken there. Once they arrived they could have hot baths and then, they had agreed, meet up and explore the town.
Not only did they feel that this was a new beginning but, for the first time in their lives, they were free, for Ireland was strict with its daughters. No hard liquor and only a loose woman would venture into that male domain, the pub. Even the dances the girls were allowed to go to served only soft drinks. On those nights, one or both parents would be waiting up to ensure that their daughter had come straight home and that her breath was untainted by the men’s smuggled-in alcohol. Now they were free of those restrictions. No curfew, no parents watching the clock. It was, my mother had told me, an exhilarating feeling.
As the chattering group waited, they saw two men walking towards them. One, somewhere in his thirties, was of stocky build, with a flushed, weather-beaten face and greasy dark hair. My mother hardly gave him a glance – she kept that for the second: taller than his friend by several inches, with the floppy light brown hair that gives even a thirty-year-old a boyish look, and a wide white smile. If Nature had been kind in giving him regular features, a cleft chin and warm brown eyes, the sun had been equally so. Instead of the ruddy skin of his friend, it had turned the visible parts of him – face, neck and forearms – a dark golden brown. He was, my mother told me many years later, simply the most handsome man she had ever seen.
‘You’ll be the ones from Ireland, then?’ he asked, and at their enthusiastic nods, the white smile flashed again. ‘Call me Jim,’ he said and, jerking his finger towards his more taciturn friend, he introduced him as Bob. Neither of the two men asked the women for their names.
‘Well, girls, it’s our job to take you to where you’re staying. I expect you’re all in a hurry to get there, so just follow us.’ And, with long strides, he led them to an open truck with a couple of wooden benches running along each side.
‘In you hop,’ he told them, then climbed in beside the older man who, still without speaking, started the engine. The last stage of their journey had started.
I only have my mother’s memories as to how Jersey looked then, but I can picture that day almost as clearly as if I had been there. The harbour, very much a working one then, was very different from how it is now. I know it today, with its sleek yachts where, in the daytime, men in clean white jeans and T-shirts busy themselves coiling rope and greasing thick chains. The town of St Helier, too, must be very different, with its pavement cafés, brightly lit restaurants, designer boutiques and imposing hotels, from what it was when my mother arrived.
Behind my eyes, I can see the blue of the sea reflected in the sky and the group of girls, wearing now rather creased clothes, hair blowing in the summer-scented breeze, faces alight with anticipation for what lay ahead. In the middle of them stands my mother who, with her gurgling laugh and sparkling eyes, was the brightest of them all.
I can imagine those girls, for they were little more than that, throwing their cases into the truck, then giggling and joking as they clambered in. On the drive, inhaling diesel fumes and salt sea air, they would have seen, instead of the large pale houses with manicured lawns, tennis courts and swimming-pools that stand there now, green fields with fawn cows grazing on one side and long stretches of golden beaches on the other.
The truck reached country lanes, and at the end of one, a large farmhouse came into view.
‘Nearly there,’ said the driver.
‘Nearly where?’ Marie muttered. ‘Sure, we can’t all be working in that house.’ She turned to my mother. ‘What did they tell you, Maureen? The people who got you the job?’
‘That I would start off working in the farmhouse and then, after a while, once my fare is paid back, I would be free to look for other work. As soon as I had a bit saved up for my own place, that is.’
The driver, overhearing them, laughed. ‘My God, the stories they tell you girls,’ he said, over his shoulder.
My mother chose to ignore him, for she was more concerned with where they were. ‘We wanted to look round the town once we’re settled,’ she said. ‘How far is it?’
‘There’s no distance too far to walk in Jersey,’ Jim said. ‘Why, the whole length of the island is only a few miles.’
‘And,’ his friend added. ‘Are you not all used to walking in Ireland? Anyhow, first you have to see your new homes, don’t you?’
There was something in the men’s voices that made my mother feel uneasy. They had started talking to each other in a language she didn’t understand, but she sensed by the bursts of laughter and the glances over their shoulders that it was the women who were the source of their merriment. The others also seemed to suspect that they were being mocked and fell silent.
Their uneasiness lifted when, with that smile, Jim turned and winked. ‘Now don’t start looking down, girls. Not on your first day here. We’re only teasing you. If you all cheer up, come the weekend, I might just be talked into giving you all a lift into town. I could show you St Helier’s sights.’
A chorus of thanks greeted him, and a few minutes later the truck pulled up in front of a row of oblong huts. ‘Here you are, ladies, your new homes,’ said Bob, unsmiling, as he climbed out of the truck.
My mother caught a sardonic gleam in his eyes when he noticed their expressions.
With walls made of concrete and corrugated-iron roofs, they did not resemble any home my mother had seen. They were more like the outhouses where, in Ireland, the deep-litter chickens were kept.
‘Ach, they’re not so bad, girls,’ said Jim, seeing their dismay. ‘Come on, have a look inside. You’ll see they can be made right cosy. There’s food been got in for you, so you can make yourselves something to eat and rest a bit. Remember, you have to be up early.’
‘How early?’ asked Marie.
‘Six thirty sharp.’ Before he could hear the groans, Jim swung himself back into the truck and, with a roar, it was off.
Inside, contrary to Jim’s reassurance, it was little better. The door opened straight into a gloomy room, painted what my mother called a ‘dull, dirty beige’. It was furnished sparsely with a dark wood table, four chairs and a sagging two-seater settee. Under the only window, which was hung with thin floral curtains, there was a cooker and sink. Two bedrooms led off it, so small that there was little space between the narrow single beds.
The first of my mother’s dreams vanished, that of having her own room, as did the second, the one of luxuriating in a deep bath, when she saw what was under the ledge by the sink: a tin tub.
The next morning they found out what they had left the poverty of Ireland for. They were all to work on the farm, not in the house. Depending on the season, they were either to plant potatoes, pick potatoes, scrub potatoes or pack potatoes. When winter came, bringing with it frozen pipes and frost that crackled beneath their feet, they dressed in as many clothes as they could find to work in unheated barns. Their cold-stiffened fingers packed potatoes into wooden boxes ready for planting when spring arrived.
‘Why,’ my mother had said, when she’d told me how it was then, ‘we’d left Ireland to get away from that. We were so gullible, believing we would be getting jobs in fancy shops and learning office work. But it wasn’t all our fault – we had been asked what skills we had and most of us had some. But, no, every one of us who came across that day was put to work from dawn to dusk tending their so-called ‘superior’ spuds.
‘The only thing we had to look forward to was going into town on payday. And that, Madeleine, was when we found out just what the locals thought of us. Scum, that’s what we were, dirty Irish scum. They pointed at us in the street, you know, all of us immigrant workers who dirtied our hands doing work they were too stuck up to do.’ Her eyes held a far-away dreamy look, as they always did when she talked about those early days.
‘So, she continued, ‘if they didn’t want to mix with us, we didn’t want to mix with them. We made a part of St Helier ours by turning small pubs into Irish ones. The French took over another area – it was called French Lane. It was to those places that the farm workers went on payday. Not just Irish, but the French and, later, the Portuguese as well. A right babble of different tongues, it was, in there. The locals gave those places a wide berth, I can tell you. Us girls thought we were so sophisticated, sitting in the bars with our shandy in one hand and a French Gauloise in the other.’
‘Was that where you had your first drink?’ I asked.
‘Yes, darlin’, it was,’ she replied. ‘The first, but not the last, more’s the pity.’
The first time the police invited me to help with their enquiries, I was not asked to come to the Jersey police station, but to some premises they used at Broadcasting House. They said that, for an informal meeting such as ours, ‘It’ll be more relaxing.’
On my arrival I was led into what seemed, with its couch, armchairs and coffee-table, a small, cosy sitting room. That was until I saw the tape recorder.
Two people were going to interview me, a man and a woman, who sat in the armchairs while I took my place on the settee. I remember it being uncomfortable, lower than the chairs, with a sloping seat that made it difficult to sit upright. Thick mugs of tea appeared and, wanting to delay the questions as long as possible, I stirred in the sugar slowly, then sipped it.
With some relief I noticed an ashtray on the table and, without asking, lit up. I sucked hard at my cigarette, letting its acrid tang soothe my frayed nerves, blew out a cloud of smoke and steeled myself for the first question.
I heard the click of the tape recorder being switched on, then I was asked by the woman police officer, whether I was ready. I glanced towards her, but not able to meet her eyes, lowered my gaze. A hot flush of embarrassment suffused my face as I saw what my nervousness had made me miss; the non-smoking sign.
“Oh God,” I said, my fingers trembling as I ground the cigarette out on the top of my packet. “I’m sorry, so very sorry, I didn’t notice,” and with every stuttered word, my little spurt of nicotine-induced confidence evaporated. She made no comment to ease my discomfort. She simply asked again if I was ready.
They wanted to know about Colin Tilbrook and those rich businessmen who had visited the home, I thought.
The silence, while I waited for the first question, was loud in my ears. I could hear my heart beating, feel the moisture on my hands, and suddenly the room was unbearably hot. I wished I had asked for water. I would have been able to press a cold glass to my cheek, which felt aflame.
The first question came – not from the woman, as I had expected, but from the man.
‘Tell us about the Jordans, Madeleine,’ he said.
The Jordans had arrived at the home during Tilbrook’s reign. That name conjured up the sound of screams, the half-lives of damaged children, broken bones no bigger than a bird’s, and the helpless sobbing of those who knew nobody cared.
But I still didn’t understand, at least not then, why it was them they were asking about. The Jordans had arrived in my life much later than the people I’d thought they wanted to expose. And, bad as they were, surely they were not the most important of those who had inflicted so much pain and suffering.
‘We want to see if there’s enough evidence against them to bring them in for questioning,’ the woman said. Perhaps she’d seen my confusion on my face.
‘What – just them?’ I asked, in disbelief. But I didn’t need to wait for the answer. I felt a burning anger in my stomach. It was not those two I had come to be questioned about. If we had been listened to, if any action had been taken, I would never have met them. I’d said as much before I could stop myself.
‘Madeleine, you were placed in the crèche for your own safety.’
This time it was the woman speaking. In my head, I heard the words, ‘Your mother was an unfit one; a woman who loved the bottle more than you.’ And, believing that was what she was thinking, I glared at her.
That was when I realised that neither she nor the man in his dark blue suit and sparkling white shirt would be satisfied until they had cracked open the shell that, over the years, I had managed to build and dug out every last one of my secrets. Then they, not I, would decide what to do with them.
The man’s voice broke into my thoughts. ‘You were placed back with your mother more than once, weren’t you Madeleine? But it just did not work out.’
And I knew what he meant was that my parents were criminals because they had done time.
‘No,’ I said emphatically. ‘My mother was not a criminal.’
‘So what was she, then?’
‘She was sad,’ I replied.
The memories of my mother, when first I came to know her, were mine and mine alone, and I was not ready to share them. The sense ones, sound and smell, still remain vivid and undimmed by time.
By the time she had tried to explain to me why she had lost us, Marilyn Monroe was dead and she was no longer compared to Elizabeth Taylor. Gone was the firm body of her youth and, in middle age, she was bordering on scrawny. The high cheekbones, once so admired, were hardly discernible under the soft puffiness of her face.
Drink, the men who had entered her life, then left, and four pregnancies had taken their toll, but her eyes were still a deep blue and her hair, although no longer falling in glossy waves, remained defiantly black. She no longer smelt of soap and Yardley’s Lily of the Valley perfume, as I remembered so vividly from my early childhood. Those scents belonged to that younger mother, the one with the bright smile and the never-ending promises. An aroma of gin and tobacco — the scent of grief and disillusionment – clung to the mother I grew to know.
My childhood mother might still have harboured the fantasy of meeting a man rich enough to look after her, but the older one was only too aware that a blend of naïvety and avarice had led her to catch Tragedy’s wandering eye. Only alcohol, which she convinced herself was a temporary measure, allowed her to dream once more of a rosy future, until her ‘best friend’ became her worst enemy and mocked her for her dependence.
I had asked her, with some degree of self-interest, why she had never returned to Ireland. If she had, how different my life would have been. The other question I wanted answered was why, when she had escaped a world she saw as narrow, she had married the first man she had met. Surely there must have been more to it than that he was simply the best-looking fellow she had ever seen.
It was Jim with whom she walked into the register office just three months after arriving in Jersey. ‘He was a local lad,’ she had said, in a voice grown deep and raspy, ‘not Irish. I didn’t want one of them, you see. If you go out with an Irish man, you end up talking to other women while they play darts or snooker with their friends. Now Jim, he knew how to treat a lady. And that’s what he called me, a lady!’ When his name was mentioned, her eyes would take on that faraway misty look and her mouth lifted in a smile, as she delved through the layers of her memories to when she was nineteen.
‘I was too good to work in the fields, he told me,’ she said proudly. ‘And I still wanted to better myself. Oh, Madeleine, you should have seen him the way he was then, opening doors for me, bringing flowers – why, he said that the first moment he clapped eyes on me he was simply besotted. Yes, he promised me the earth, all right. Said he was going places, that his boss thought the world of him. And once I was his wife, no one would dare call me “Irish scum” again.’
‘And you believed everything he told you?’
‘Yes, I did. Maybe I should have asked why a register office, but he was not a Catholic, I was young and he was so very handsome.’
So my mother had done what she had left Ireland to escape from: she had seen no deeper than the charm of a good-looking rogue, who made her feel special.
Her parents were not there for the wedding, and neither were his. That should have told her something, but any misgivings were pushed firmly aside.
Less than a year after the marriage she was washing nappies, cooking and cleaning from dusk to dawn. The romance faded and, with each of her two pregnancies, grew even fainter. My mother no longer went dancing down French Lane on a Saturday night. Instead she darned and sewed, while her husband spent his money on beer and whisky.
Less than five years after she had said, ‘I do,’ the man who had promised her the earth left the island in search of pastures new. Pastures where there was clearly no room for a wife and two sons.
Without him, she was, once again, just an Irish immigrant.
There were no relatives, no one to lend her money for food or rent and, most importantly, no one to give her moral support. Her mother, aunts, cousins and siblings were in Ireland and, however homesick she might have been, however lonely, however desperate, she could not return there. In the late fifties her register office marriage was not recognised in Ireland by the Catholic Church. As far as the Church was concerned, she had been living in sin and borne two bastards. No amount of Hail Marys would gain her forgiveness for that in the village she came from.
So my mother had few choices. She had to remain in Jersey and, if she wanted to eat, she had to return to work. Her two children, with the help of their paternal grandparents, were placed in care. As the sons of a Jersey man, they were not sent to Haut de la Garenne, which was for problem children and the sons and daughters of immigrant families. That was the one thing their father given them: his name.
My mother returned to the back-breaking work at the farm. The only way out was, she knew, to find another husband. She was also aware that a Jersey man was out of the question. She needed to find someone who had just arrived from Ireland. Someone who knew little about her history.
After a spring of planting Jersey royals, my mother knew she looked good. Hard work had toned her body and the sun had put a glow into her cheeks. Unlike the other girls who worked alongside her, she had not allowed her face to become weather-beaten or her hands to be ingrained with soil. She scrubbed her grimy nails with soap and lemon juice, and smothered every part of her that the sun touched with liberal amounts of Pond’s cold cream.
She looked as good as new, she decided, when she took herself to a dance at the Irish centre. On the night that she described to me, she was wearing a red and blue tartan dress, with a low, square neckline and, over layers of stiff petticoats, a wide, swirling skirt. Laughing, she had drawn another girl up to dance. ‘After all, Madeleine,’ she had told me, ‘sitting demurely on a wooden chair, waiting to be asked, was never going to get me noticed!’
It worked. When a hand tapped on her shoulder, she turned and looked into the green eyes of the man who became my father. Under the silvery light of the sparkling glitter ball, she smiled, pouted and swung her hips to the beat. Then the lights dimmed as the band changed to a slow number: Paul Anka’s latest song. She smiled at the green-eyed man, rested her head on his shoulder and nestled closer.
When she was granted a divorce, the green-eyed man proposed and she happily accepted. Her priest, knowing my mother’s wishes, sought permission for her to be married in church. His request was granted: the Catholic Church hadn’t recognised her first marriage as it had taken place in a register office. Her new husband, like Jim, promised her a future; vowing that he was not going to be a labourer for ever and that, one day, he would provide her with a decent home. All they had to do was save a little.
They started married life in what was called a ‘flatlet’. It was up two flights of stairs in a building permeated with the smell of boiled cabbage and fried onions from the kitchens of the Irish immigrants. Later, when the Portuguese came, roasting garlic, olive oil and espresso coffee scented her home. Grubby, cracked lino covered the floor of the entrance hall, while the pattern on the worn stair carpet was undetectable. On one side of the first landing was the shared phone, with scribbled numbers decorating the walls, on the other the communal bathroom, with its shilling-devouring meter.
On the next landing a door led into their flat. An oblong room, with scratched wooden furniture and a sagging settee. Behind a curtain there was a double bed, and under the window, a Baby Belling cooker and a sink.
It did not take my mother long to realise that, once again, she had married a wastrel. One who expected a meal on the table and no questions asked as to his whereabouts when he staggered home long after dark. That, she decided, was not the life for her and she refused to give up either work or her pay packet. Come payday the bars called to him, and this time my mother was not going to be left in that small, cheerless flat. The nicely brought-up young girl, who never touched hard liquor, had been left in Ireland, along with her dreams. She, like her husband, went to the places where drinks were cheap and the company raucous.
It was on one of those drunken nights that I was conceived. I believe my mother loved me the moment I was placed in her arms, for that is what she told me. Sadly, though, the strain of caring for a baby in a home that was almost too small for a couple, and the constant shortage of money, proved too much for my parents. They drank, they fought, they screamed and cursed until a neighbour, fearing for the safety of the three-month-old baby, called the police. Confronted by two drunken adults and the wailing child, lying in a makeshift cot, they arrested my parents and charged them with drunk and disorderly behaviour.
One month inside was the magistrate’s sentence, with scant thought to my welfare. I was taken into care.
On her release, my mother begged for my return. ‘Not until you have a proper home,’ said the state, without telling her how, on their low income, she and my father could achieve that. Social housing was given only to those who had been resident for ten years and flats were out of my parents’ price range. So I remained in care at the Westaway Crèche.
‘Well, Madeleine, if the state didn’t see your mother as a criminal, it certainly saw her as an unfit mother. Every one of her children was taken away. Now, you seem to think it was somehow the fault of the welfare system, that what happened to you was caused by the state. But let us just recap on what really happened.
‘You went to Westaway Crèche when you were just three months old. Do you know why that was, Madeleine? It was not because Jim had left her, was it? After all, he was not your father. That might have been the reason her sons were taken from her, but not you. She had married again and your parents were still together when you were born.’
It was the policewoman who was talking, and although she was only calmly reciting facts, to me her words felt like barbed weapons. And each one found its mark and hurt. Tears prickled behind my closed eyelids. I swallowed them, determined that those people were not going to see me cry.
‘But why did you put me in Haut de la Garenne?’ I wanted to ask. I hadn’t done anything wrong. I was only five.
‘Now, Madeleine, I believe you were well looked after in Westaway, were you not?’
She was right. The memories of my early years might be indistinct, buried under the layers of what came later, but her questions brought images of that time back into my mind. The young nursery nurses who came and went and were kind to us, read stories out of large picture books, played games, built sandcastles on the beach, hung daisy chains around our necks, bandaged cut knees, wiped tears, blew small noses and tucked us up in bed before bestowing goodnight kisses on rosy cheeks.
The one constant in our lives was Mrs Peacock, or Mummy Peacock, as I called her. She was the one who was strict. She was also the one who let us play with her dogs and looked away when we were given a sweet too many by a younger member of staff. There was never any shortage of toys either: many were donated to the home, as were clothes and books. With thirty children in the crèche there was a birthday party nearly every week. Jellies, cakes and ice cream were set out, and tiny children were asked to blow out candles, though there were never more than five.
Apart from Christmas, when generous local residents arrived with individual parcels, all toys had to be shared and at the end of each day were deposited in the large toy box that sat in a corner of the playroom. Small children, who had yet to learn the concept of sharing, snatched and pushed and cried when told to wait their turn.
Even worse were the howls of protest when they wanted to ride on the rocking horse that a smiling benefactor had brought. I had loved it, and smiled now as I remembered my small self, screaming when told to give another child her turn. A nursery nurse had firmly lifted me off. I think that, by the end of the horse’s first day at the crèche, she was finding it more than taxing to try to instill some degree of generosity into tiny pre-school children. Certainly that horse was responsible for a lot of tears and quarrels.
‘No,’ I said, uttering the words they wanted to hear. ‘We never wanted for anything. I was happy there.’
There had been one thing I had wished for, though, but it was not something I would share with the police. I had wanted a home, one with a mother and a father, where I would have a room of my own, where my own rocking horse waited for me to ride it, and I had toys I wouldn’t have to share. I knew other children went to such places. That was when they were adopted. I knew what that word meant. All of the children of about my age did. It was when a well-dressed couple came, looked at us, gave us sweets and picked up small children to cuddle. A few weeks later, a child, if old enough to understand, would be told they were going to live with their new mummy and daddy. There they would have everything I dreamt of: someone who loved just them and whose attention did not have to be shared with thirty other demanding little souls.
Even Mrs Peacock’s dogs, two rather plump Labradors that I loved, would let any small pair of hands stroke them. So when those smiling couples came, I would will them to choose me. But they never did. What was wrong? I asked myself. Why did no one want me?
A woman came every week to visit me. She had dark hair, red lipstick and always wanted to hug me. She told me she was my real mummy and that soon I was going to live with her, but first she had to find a home that was big enough for both of us. I didn’t believe her: there were no new clothes and Mrs Peacock hadn’t told me that I was going to live with a new mummy and daddy.
I found out many years later that my mother had refused to sign the necessary release forms for adoption: she wanted her children back, according to the social workers.
‘So,’ said the policeman, ‘you admit you were happy there. While the state was ensuring you were cared for, your mother had five years to get her life back together. Do you want me to read what the social workers said?’
I shook my head. I already knew what was in the report sitting in front of him and what was not. Unsuitable accommodation, drinking problems and an abusive marriage were the reasons given for the state’s refusal to return me to her. It did not say that soon after their arrest my father had left, that with no one to turn to my mother was almost destitute. After all, it was not she who was their concern. They had removed her last child.
My mother had lost everyone she loved. But the people who removed me were not interested in that. Their concern was for the baby I was then.
2008 was the year my nightmares returned.
Night after night I wake, my body soaked in perspiration, my mouth still open from the last scream, the sheets tangled around me — the past and present have collided.
‘What is it, Madeleine?’ my husband asks.
‘What is it, Mother?’ asks my son.
‘What’s happening to you?’ asks my bewildered thirteen-year-old daughter.
I tell them little bits at a time.
The anger they express at what happened is mixed with disillusion at my having excluded them from my secrets. I understand that, behind their rage, there is a sorrow so enervating it saps the concern from my husband and the love from my daughter.
It is my son who holds my hand and takes me to the police station. My son, who has to hear every word that leaves my lips. The questions fired at me, not just from the police but from those who feel betrayed by my years of silence, hammer in my head. Now I cannot remember who asked which one.
* * *
The police asked enough to bring back the past but, even worse, they – as others had many years earlier – expressed doubt as to the accuracy of what I told them. They all demanded to know what had happened to me in Haut de la Garenne. I looked at my tormenters one by one until they faded away and the past became more vivid than the present.
What none of them could visualise was what it was like for me on the day when I was taken to that terrible place.
But I could.