Pauline Prescott - Smile Though Your Heart Is Breaking

Sister Joan Augustine told me then that she’d given the pram to someone else: a tall girl called Mary who’d given birth a day after me but who’d come back to St Bridget’s earlier. ‘Hers was the first baby back from hospital,’ she said. Instead she presented me with a shabby little second-hand pram with wobbly wheels and dodgy brakes. I wept buckets over her decision. I immediately hated the horrid pram I was given; I loathed it even more when I came out to where I’d parked Timothy Paul in it one afternoon only to find the wind had blown it down a slope in the garden. One more inch and my precious baby boy might have been tipped over a verge.

My happiest times in those first few months were those spent with my son. As was the routine, all new mothers would wash our babies together and then sit in a row to feed them. Timothy Paul, dressed in the clothes my mother bought for him, clearly loved that moment best because he’d be so contented at my breast that he’d fall asleep and take longer to finish than the rest.

‘Tilly, you’re always the last,’ Sister Joan Augustine would complain. I certainly made a fuss of my baby, and my fussing seemed to upset her routine, but I didn’t care. I was growing increasingly attached to Timothy Paul and was determined to squeeze in every extra minute with him that I could. My stubborn streak cut in and I’d insist that he be allowed to finish at his own pace.

Every week I’d be summoned to Mother Superior’s office to discuss the future of my baby. ‘Now, Pauline, have you decided for adoption or will you be taking your baby home?’ she’d ask, peering at me over her spectacles.

Mrs Cotter, my social worker, would often be there, along with Sister Joan Augustine. ‘Your mother says neither of you can look after the baby,’ my social worker would remind me. ‘There are plenty of childless couples who’d give him a better life.’

Sister Joan Augustine would add, ‘You must make the decision now before he gets too old.’

I’d sit on my hands and shake my head. ‘I just need more time,’ I’d tell them. ‘You said I’d have three months. After that, we can look at other options. He can go into a nursery somewhere close by maybe? I could visit him every day until I’ve worked out what to do.’

They were clearly frustrated with me and did their best to persuade me otherwise but I stuck to my guns. Every time my mother came to visit it was the same story. I’d plead with her to help me find a solution but she’d just repeat that it would be cruel to Timothy Paul to try to keep him. ‘Adoption is the only option,’ she’d say firmly. There seemed to be no way to make her change her mind.

I was dreading the day when our three months would be up. I kept trying to put the date to the back of my mind. I hoped beyond hope that something would happen or that someone would save us. There was still no word from Jim. My mother was sick of me asking if there had been a letter or a call. ‘You have to forget about him, Pauline,’ she told me testily. ‘He’ll never send for you now.’

I had Timothy Paul christened in the chapel at St Bridget’s, with my mother at my side. ‘I name this child…’ the vicar said, marking his forehead with the sign of the cross. Bless my tiny son, he didn’t even cry. He just lay in my arms looking up at me with that placid expression of his, the one that said he trusted me to take care of him. I could have wept.

Three weeks before my deadline was up, Sister Joan Augustine suddenly announced that I had to stop breastfeeding and wean my baby on to bottles of formula milk. I looked at her in shock. ‘B-but he’s too little!’ I protested.

‘He’ll be just as happy with a bottle, Tilly. Now, don’t make a fuss.’

I wept as I fed him that bottle for the first time. It was a horrible day. This was one step closer to the time when I knew I wouldn’t be able to see him every day, to change him and wash him, to cuddle him and feed him myself. He took to the bottle quite well but I never did. The next three weeks were a living agony.

As the date approached when I was due to leave St Bridget’s and Timothy Paul would be sent to a nursery, I became increasingly anxious. Mrs Cotter came to see me one morning to tell me what arrangements had been made. ‘The state will help you pay the nursery fees but the rest will have to come out of your wages, I’m afraid. We’ve found him a place. I’ll come with you to settle him in tomorrow. We’ll have to leave early to make the journey.’

‘Journey? Why, where are you sending him?’

‘The Ernest Bailey Residential Nursery for Boys. It’s in Matlock.’

‘Matlock?’ I asked, my panic rising. ‘Where’s that?’

‘Derbyshire.’

‘But how far away is that?’

‘About eighty miles.’ Registering the look of shock on my face she added, more softly, ‘It was the only place that could take him.’

‘E-eighty miles?’ I could hardly get my words out. ‘That’s too far! It’ll take me a day to get there and how much will it cost each time?’

Her expression was as stiff as her resolve. This was her job: to figure out what was best for babies like Timothy Paul. He couldn’t stay at St Bridget’s. He couldn’t come home with me. What else could she do? Shattered, I realized that I had no say in the matter. To this day, I don’t know if that nursery really was the only one that would take Timothy Paul or whether the authorities chose to make it as difficult as possible for me to keep him. At the time, I must say, the decision felt unnecessarily harsh.

The following morning, I washed and dressed my son, fed him and wrapped him in a shawl. Walking to the railway station with Mrs Cotter, I realized that this was the first time I’d been outside the home with him since I’d brought him back from the hospital three months earlier. If it wasn’t for the circumstances I would have been wildly happy: the proud young mum showing off her gorgeous baby boy to anyone who cared to notice. I wanted people to coo and sigh over him as I did. I’d look at other young girls and think they didn’t yet know the joys of motherhood: the smell of him, the softness of his skin, the little gurgling noises he made in his mouth, the look of sleepy contentment in his eyes as he suckled at my breast. Then I remembered where I was and why. Sitting in the carriage, cradling him in my arms as I soothed him above the clickety-clack of the train, I stared at a dozing Mrs Cotter in the opposite seat and contemplated jumping off at the next station and running away.

But I was seventeen years old. I had no money; no home of my own. Where would I go? I was a good girl from a warm, loving family. How could I contemplate a life on the run? Tempting as it might seem, it wasn’t an option. Instead, I did the only thing I could think of to let my son know how much I wanted him close to me. I told Mrs Cotter that from now on, I would like Timothy Paul to be known simply as ‘Paul’.

‘Why?’ she asked.

‘It will make him more personal to me – to my name,’ I replied, pushing my forefinger into my son’s open palm so that he clamped his own tiny fingers around it.

All the way to Matlock, I had been trying to convince myself that my son would be safe and warm there, fed and well cared for until I could figure out what to do next. When we walked into the imposing stone building, though, I recoiled against the idea of him being there at all. He wasn’t a waif or stray. He was mine and he was dearly, besottedly loved.

Shivering, I laid him in a high-sided cot in a room full of similar cots and stepped back. Even though the staff seemed very nice and everybody was ready to welcome him, Paul took one look at my face and screwed his own into a tight ball. Somehow he knew that I was leaving him. I listened to his first howl and watched as he geared himself up for his second. Unable to bear the wrench of our impending separation a moment longer, I fled. I could hear his cries all the way down the street, my little-girl heart jolting with each step that took me further and further away from my son.