Hetty Feather Read online

  I was right to be so cautious. Once I had my pinafore and dress and drawers off, standing shivering in my shift and stockings, the matron darted at me, snatched my rag baby and threw her in the basket too.

  'She's not clothes! She's my baby!' I protested, though it was hard to talk distinctly with the sixpence wedged in my cheek.

  'It's nasty and dirty. And you're not allowed dollies here.'

  'But I can't sleep without her!'

  'Then you will have to stay awake,' said the matron.

  She pulled the shift over my head, plucked my stockings from my feet, lifted me up and plunged me into the bath. Then she took a cake of red carbolic soap and started scrubbing me viciously. I wriggled and squirmed at the indignity, especially when she started washing my long hair, digging her fat fingers into my scalp and kneading it as if my head was a ball of dough. I put my hands up, trying to protect my poor head. My fingers scratched her wrists and she dug harder, furious.

  'Keep still, you fiery little imp,' she said, lathering me into a foam. She fetched another jug to rinse the suds away. 'This will quench that fire!' she said, pouring icy cold water over me.

  I gasped in shock and would have screamed at her, but I had to keep my mouth stoppered because of the sixpence. Then she hauled me out onto the cold floor and wrapped a thin towel round me.

  'Well, dry yourself, child, hurry up, hurry up!'

  When I was halfway dry she sat me on a stool and picked up a pair of scissors. I started trembling. What did she intend to do now? Cut off my fingernails? Cut off my fingers?

  She attacked my head with a hairbrush, smoothing out all the tangles so that my hair fell in a silky curtain past my shoulders – and then she started snip-snip-snipping, cutting my hair off right up to my ears.

  'Oh, please don't cut my hair!' I begged, but she paid no heed. She snipped until my hair was shorter than a boy's and I was covered in damp red tendrils. She brushed them off me with the towel and then fetched another basket, the clothes inside this one neatly folded.

  'This will be your clothes basket, Hetty Feather. You are to keep your clothes in it at night, and woe betide you if you rumple them.'

  She pulled out boots and stockings and bade me put them on. The stockings were stiff and bunched at the toes with repeated darning, and the boots were much too big for my small feet. I told Matron, but she didn't appear to care.

  'Put your dress on now – the right way round, you silly child. I will tie your apron for you.'

  I hesitated. Where were my new undergarments? I saw something white in my basket, but it was simply a strange old-fashioned cap. There was no shift, no drawers, nothing!

  I sidled over to my old clothes.

  'Leave them alone! They're going to be disposed of straight away.'

  'But, miss – Matron – I have no drawers!' I said, agonized.

  The matron's pig face went even pinker. 'You do not wear such garments here,' she said. 'Now put that dress on at once.'

  I stuck my poor shorn head through the stiff brown serge. It felt hard and scratchy against my scrubbed skin. She did up my buttons at the back for me, tied on the apron, and then stuck the cap upon me.

  'There!' Matron marched me over to a speckled mirror above the stone slab sinks. 'Respectable at last!'

  I stared at the forlorn figure in the mirror. Was that weird little creature in the cap really me? I shook my head violently, but the girl in the mirror shook her head back at me.

  'Now you will join the other infant girls. Come with me.'

  I hung back, fidgeting. 'Please, miss – Matron – I need the privy,' I blurted.

  She consulted the watch pinned to her chest. 'The infant relief break is not for another hour. You will have to wait.'

  'But I need to go now! Please, I'm nearly wetting myself!'

  She sighed impatiently. 'The privies are outside in the yard. I'm not trailing you all the way there. You will have to use a chamber pot. Go in that little room and be quick about it. You must learn to control your bladder as well as your temper, Hetty Feather.'

  I ran into the room, selected an ugly pot and sat on it, trembling. What sort of a madhouse was this? I put my fingers up under my cap and felt the shorn ends of my hair. I gave a little sob. Even if I managed to run away back to Jem, maybe he wouldn't love me any more because I looked such a fright.

  'Hurry up, child!' Pigface grunted outside.

  Safe behind the door, I took the sixpence out of my mouth, stuck out my tongue and waggled it at her. Then I hid the sixpence in my new tight cuff and jumped up from the pot.

  'Now wash your hands!' she said as I came out of the little room. 'Dear goodness, do you know nothing of hygiene?'

  I didn't think it at all hygienic to run around without underwear. I wondered if the matron wore drawers herself. I imagined her big piggy-pink bare bottom.

  'What are you smirking at?' she said suspiciously.

  I lowered my eyes and shook my head. 'Nothing, Matron.'

  'Then come along with me. You will join your class at their afternoon tasks.'

  She took hold of me by the wrist. I looked back at the little basket of my Sunday clothes, so lovingly washed and pressed by Mother. They were all in a muddy jumble now, my poor rag baby sprawling on top, arms and legs akimbo.

  'Come on! You've no need of those nasty old clothes any more, I've told you that already,' said Matron Pigface.

  'Mayn't I just kiss my baby goodbye?' I begged.

  'I've never heard such nonsense. It's only a bundle of rags!' she said, and she would not let me.

  I pictured my poor baby so forlorn without her mother. I heard her wailing, abandoned in the basket. I wished she was little enough to hide about my person, like the sixpence. But there was nothing I could do. I had to leave her there, tumbled about in my clothes. I never saw her again.

  As Matron Pigface marched me along to my class, I thought at least I would meet up with Gideon again – but there was no sign of him. I was thrust into a room of some forty or fifty girls of five or six or seven, but there was not a single little boy. The girls were sitting at small wooden desks, all startlingly similar in their white caps and mud-hued dresses. They all stared hard at me and then whispered. I shifted from one sorely-shod foot to the other, feeling so shy and strange.

  'This is Hetty Feather,' said Pigface.

  Several of the little girls giggled. My hands clenched into fists.

  'Thank you, Matron Peters,' said a starch- aproned nurse at the front of the class. She wasn't pink and pig-faced, she wasn't grim and pale. This nurse had rosy cheeks and dimples and wisps of curly hair escaping from her cap. She was as sweet and fresh-faced as Rosie or Eliza or any of the village girls. She smiled at me.

  'I would watch this one. She's got a very contrary way with her. Redheads are always little vixens,' said Matron Pigface Peters. 'She needs that temper quelled. Spare the rod and spoil the child, remember!' She shorted, and then waddled out of the room, her stays creaking loudly.

  'Hello, Hetty dear,' said this new nurse, beckoning to me.

  I crept up to her desk. I saw a leather strap lying across it. Oh Lordy, was she about to punish me already?

  No, she leaned towards me and said gently, 'Do not look so fearful, child. It must seem very strange your first day here, but I promise you will soon get used to life at the hospital. You seem very small. Are you turned five yet?'

  'I am almost six,' I said.

  'Excellent! Then I think you are old enough to learn how to darn, Hetty.' She brought out a stocking and a needle and wool from her desk. 'Did your foster mother teach you how to sew, Hetty?' she asked.

  The word Mother made my eyes well up. I shook my head wordlessly.

  'Then I will show you.'

  She threaded the big needle, squeezing the end of the wool over with practised skill, and then put her hand inside the stocking. She started looping the wool across the hole in neat lines.

  'There, do you see?'

  Then she started