‘Finish that now. Get ready and be quick about it.’
I threw clean straw around all my clucky hens, feeling sick. Was she coming here? Obviously not, as we were going somewhere. Why was she coming? Was she going to be alone or with my father? Chickens done, I raced upstairs and threw on my one and only ‘best’ dress, which was a horrible brown flowery affair, a Barbara cut-down. I put on my only Clarks bar shoes, brown ones with grubby white socks with my big toe poking out of a hole. I pulled a comb through my pageboy haircut. Looking in the mirror I could see that my eyebrows had been plucked to non-existence on the right side of my face and that my eyelashes were almost gone. I had blue eyes and a button nose and a very serious expression.
I had recently started my periods, and I had little bumps growing tightly under my dress, which I felt very self-conscious about. I hadn’t got a bra although all the girls at school were sporting cute little Berlei ones with pink roses and white bows. My little breasts were hovering under a frayed white vest. In fact the coming of my periods had brought with it even more humiliation from Barbara, who would openly discuss me being ‘on’, or would say, ‘It’s Louise’s time of the month,’ in front of Ian and Kevin.
There was no privacy or sensitivity coming my way. She also gave me a hideous contraption, a big piece of elastic that went around my waist, which had a huge sanitary towel clipped onto it, back and front. This was bulky, awkward and smelly. As washing and soap was still rationed as far as I was concerned, I often had spills of blood on my underpants and clothes, which then required soaking in soda and scrubbing with a brush (which I did, of course). Barbara would sniff at my garments and mumble ‘filthy little bitch’ when I produced them for the wash. It wasn’t my fault. The other girls at school had nice pads or even Tampax, but I wasn’t allowed any of that – ‘waste of money’ – so I had these huge old lady pads and had to deal with the embarrassing fallout (literally).
Luckily, on this day I was to meet my mother, I didn’t have my period. But I did have a migraine. I had started having killer headaches about a year earlier and now they came at regular intervals. It felt as if half my head had been chopped at with an axe. I was nauseous with black and white vision and swirling lights in my eyes. I often got the headaches around the time of my period, but also when Barbara was in a particularly shouty mood. I clenched my teeth, tensed up and would curl up in a ball and wait for the sickness and headache to go away. Now, today, I was going to meet my mother with my temples pounding and my stomach swirling with nausea. I knew better than to ask Barbara for anything, so I snuck to the bathroom cupboard and swallowed a couple of green pills, knowing they might make my head feel a bit more like cotton wool.
We drove for hours. Barbara had a new dog now, Mimi, a white poodle who was thrown in the back. I sat in the front feeling sick most of the way, and in fact I had to jump out the car and throw up outside of Oxford, before we got on the motorway.
‘Hurry up about it,’ snapped Barbara. ‘She won’t wait all day for you.’ And then she added, as a sweetener, ‘She really wants to meet you.’
How did she know that? Had my mother said anything? Did Barbara know her? All the way I stared fixedly out of the window. All my life I had wondered who my birth mother might be: was she a famous ballerina? Or had she been a glamorous pop singer and not allowed to keep her baby? I imagined someone like my old friend Maisie’s mum, who was warm and kind and wore long, floaty clothes.
There were many ‘hippy’ mums at my school, wearing gypsy print blouses and long swishing skirts. They always wore beads, bracelets and earrings and put henna on their hair. The thing I noticed was how much they loved colour. They were ‘rainbow’ mums, so different from the steely grey Barbara, who wore clothes like a prison warder: black or grey polyester skirt, grey jumper, grey anorak, sensible grey, black or brown shoes. She looked old, grizzled, plain.
I imagined my real mum to have flowing black hair, like mine, especially if she was Jewish, like me. Maybe she was like Mary in Peter, Paul and Mary, the singers, with nice long hair and a sweet face. Maybe she was like Joni Mitchell, singing ‘Both Sides Now’ with blonde locks and high cheekbones.
As the houses gave way to fields, then to endless roads, then to more houses, now mostly built in grey stone, I realised we had driven for nearly two hours. We were in a place called Swindon, which looked somewhat nondescript. I had heard the name, but had never been there. We drove through the town and out the other side.
The whole journey Barbara and I were silent. I just needed to keep myself quiet, with my thumping headache, looking out at the trees, the passing houses, the clouds, the other cars. Occasionally I would feel sick or nervous and I would put my dipper finger along my eyelid, find a little bit of stubble and pull. It hurt, but it was somehow satisfying. Then I would do it again, and again. And then I’d tell myself to stop – I didn’t want my real mother to think I had no eyelashes.
We eventually drew up to a house that had fields all around it. It was quite a flashy big house with a gravel drive in front, and two shiny new cars. Barbara got out and pulled poor Mimi roughly off the back seat.
‘Get out,’ she snapped at me.
I opened the door and unfolded myself on the gravel. I stood there feeling completely dazed. Barbara was already crunching up the drive, so I followed. She rang the doorbell and we stood for ages, my heart thumping. I was about to meet my real mother for the first time! Would she sweep me into her arms and give me the biggest hug ever? Would she kneel down and weep and say how sorry she was for abandoning me? What would she look like? Would she show me to my new bedroom and ask me to live with her for ever?
Then the door opened to reveal a small, round woman with platinum blonde hair.
‘Oh,’ she said in a high-pitched voice like a cartoon character, looking extremely uncomfortable. ‘Oh, it’s you!’
‘Hello,’ said Barbara, trying to be charming. ‘Yes, we got here in the end.’
‘Oh… oh, yes,’ the woman said awkwardly. Barbara turned to me and pushed me forward.
‘This is Louise,’ she said, as if handing over a parcel on the doorstep.
I saw a plump woman with a slightly blurred face and shocking pink lipstick. She went red and became flustered.
‘Oh dear, oh yes, well, oh, um, er, you’d better come in.’
We followed the woman round the side of the house and into a back garden. There was a long lawn surrounded by plants with big trees at the end. In front of the lawn, just at the back of the house, was a stone patio and on it a table around which sat many people eating, drinking and chatting loudly. When we came in they all stopped and looked up. I wanted to disappear.
My ‘real mother’ was very panicky. She clearly didn’t know what to say or how to introduce us and was flapping her arms in the air.
‘This is… er… this is… er… Louise,’ she said to the gathering, pointing to me. No mention of ‘daughter’. ‘And this is Barbara, her, her… mother.’
Barbara stood there looking grim, keeping a firm grip on Mimi. The people round the table looked confused, then nodded. Some said ‘Hello’, and then they all went back to eating and talking. I stood between the two women, looking up, feeling completely overwhelmed.
‘I’ll be back later then,’ Barbara was saying to thi
s strange woman, and I suddenly panicked. Was she going to dump me? Do one of her driving off and leaving me tricks that she had done so many times?
I felt panic rising. As much as I hated living with Barbara, it was all I knew. It was ‘home’ after all, even if it was horrible. Was I going to be dropped here and left with these complete strangers who clearly didn’t want me? And whom I didn’t know?
Barbara said nothing to me and just whisked Mimi up the steps and through the house and out. I stood on the patio and wanted to cry. I bit my lip. The strange, over-made-up woman stood next to me in her pink trousers and flouncy top with ruffles and loads of beads and looked very awkward. She then bent towards me.