A Liverpool Secret

by Geraldine O'Neill, Geraldine O''Neill

Genres: Literary Fiction; Sagas; 20th Century Romance

Synopsis

Can a chance meeting lead to fresh starts for Lillian and Blaise, or will hidden secrets threaten their new beginnings?

Liverpool, 1925. Fourteen-year-old Lillian Taylor has spent her childhood in a loveless orphanage after the death of her mother. When a well-dressed young woman claiming to be her aunt arrives and whisks her away to her large townhouse, Lillian hopes it signals a change in her fortunes. However there's more to Aunt Joan than meets the eye, and when Joan discovers Lillian's budding romance with one of her coworkers she swiftly threatens his family. Events take a tragic turn when Joan becomes ill and reveals the secrets she's been keeping that will change Lillian's life forever.

Ireland, 1954. Best friends Blaise and Clodagh are packing their bags as they prepare for their new life training as nurses in England. Through a chance encounter, Blaise meets Lillian Taylor — a middle-aged woman struggling to look after her seasick grandson. After struggling with her duties at St Thomas' Hospital and feeling down on her luck, Blaise decides to look Lillian up. Starting over in Liverpool, she hopes that being a private nurse for Lillian's grandson will signal the fresh start she's been hoping for. But when a mysterious man appears one day, Blaise realises long-hidden skeletons are about to finally come out of the cupboard and truths revealed after all these years.

Release date: December 13, 2018

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 384

Sample

Chapter One

Liverpool
October 1932

The black-clad, middle-aged nun looked around the classroom of girls, her eyes narrowed. She pointed to a tall, serious-looking girl with long dark hair.

‘Lillian Taylor,’ she said. Then her eyes scoured the room and she pointed to the smallest, thinnest girl in the room. ‘Molly Power. Both of you stay behind and wipe the boards, sweep the floor and leave everything tidy.’

She pursed her lips in a tight line. ‘Sister Agnes is in here first thing in the morning, and I don’t want to give her any cause for complaint.’

The two girls looked at her. ‘Yes, Sister Dominic,’ they said simultaneously.

Sister Dominic gestured with an upward motion of her hands, and everyone stood up. She made an elaborate sign of the cross with her right hand, the girls following suit. She started off the closing prayer, ‘Angel of God’, and they all chimed in, ‘my Guardian dear, to whom God’s love commits me here. Ever this day, be at my side to light and guard, to rule and guide. Amen.’

She led the class in blessing themselves again, then stood silently, her gaze roving around the room. All eyes were cast downwards.

‘It will be a hard day’s work for any guardian angel who has to rule and guide you lot.’ Her lip curled. ‘The apple does not fall far from the tree, and there are few amongst you who knew mothers, far less your fathers. God forbid that we might have the odd legitimate one. And it’s left to the poor nuns here in Gethsemane House to try to make decent human beings of you all.’

Suddenly, a girl in the middle of the classroom gave a half-muffled sneeze, then covered her nose and mouth with her hands. ‘I’m sorry, Sister … I couldn’t help …’

Sister Dominic snatched a long ruler from her desk, then delved quickly between the desks to land several blows on the girl’s shoulder and back. ‘You dirty amadán! Get out – out!’

The girl, crying now, staggered to her feet and half ran towards the door.

‘Get out and wash those germ-ridden hands!’ the nun shrieked. ‘Isn’t it enough to endure being stuck in here with a class of guttersnipes, without being surrounded by all your dirty, filthy germs?’

The others kept their heads bowed, knowing what would happen if she caught a hint of sympathy in anyone’s eyes. She pointed the ruler towards the door. ‘Out!’ she hissed, ‘and not a word between you or you will feel the wrong end of this ruler on the back of your heads.’

Row by row they made their way in single file out of the classroom and into the Victorian, wood-panelled corridor. The two girls remained behind as instructed. Sister Dominic turned when she got to the door.

‘Now Miss Taylor and Miss Power, make sure this place is spotless. If I hear a single complaint from Sister Agnes, you will know all about it. When you’re finished, get upstairs to the dormitory and get changed into your clothes for working in the laundry.’ She went out, banging the door behind her.

They stood in silence until the nun’s footsteps grew fainter as she walked down the corridor, then the small girl turned towards the other and said, ‘Old bitch!’

‘Shhhh …’ Lillian Taylor said. ‘We’ll be murdered if she hears you.’ Unlike most of the other girls, Lillian was well spoken and had a quiet dignity about her.

‘It’s the truth, she’s a cruel bitch,’ Molly said in a wheezy voice. ‘Her and Sister Agnes are the worst.’

‘I don’t want to get into trouble,’ Lillian whispered. She moved towards the teacher’s desk. ‘I’ll clean the board,’ she said, ‘I can reach the top of it easier. You better get started before someone comes in or we’ll both be in trouble.’

‘Stop worrying, there’s nobody around.’ Molly grinned at her. ‘They don’t care about us as much now. They get more pleasure frightening the younger girls.’ She lifted a brush and started sweeping up.

They worked away in silence, then, after Lillian had wiped the teacher’s desk, she stopped to examine a map of the world on the wall behind. She pressed her right forefinger onto Liverpool, then traced her way across the Irish Sea and over the Atlantic Ocean. She went halfway across Canada, then stopped.

‘That,’ she whispered to Molly who had come to sweep by the desk, ‘is where Alice and her brother were taken to last year. A place called Ontario. I was supposed to go too, but only a few days before, the nuns told the priest who organises things that I had a bad cough, and he wouldn’t take me in case I spread it.’

Molly moved closer to examine the map. ‘They never even put me on the list because of me bad chest,’ she said. ‘They don’t take anybody that’s not in the whole of their health because they wouldn’t be fit for the journey.’

She was used to Lillian talking about Canada and the other girls who had gone. Molly was rake-thin and tiny, more like a girl of ten or eleven than a fifteen-year-old. The only redeeming feature in her pinched face was her big, blue eyes. She had been one of identical triplets, born to an unmarried mother. One triplet had died at birth and the other little girl wasn’t right, physically or mentally, and had been in a home for disabled children since she was a baby. Molly also had a fourteen-year-old brother, Daniel, who was in the boys’ orphanage, and who she was allowed to see for a short while on Saturday afternoons.

Daniel Power, a quiet, brooding sort of boy, also stood out from the other children. Unlike Molly, it wasn’t his size that made him different – he was above average height for his age – it was his dark skin.

Lillian knew that Molly had something wrong with her. Some nights, when she had been coughing for ages, the small girl would be taken out of the dormitory and brought down to sick bay by one of the nuns. Lillian had also heard one of the elderly nuns telling Maggie, the local woman who worked in the laundry, that Molly was ‘neither use nor ornament’, and that women like her mother were a scourge for bringing sickly children into the world.

‘It might not have been because of your health they didn’t take you to Canada,’ Lillian said now, trying to be kind. ‘It might be because they can’t send you abroad when your mother is still alive …’

‘Me ma might as well be dead, for all the good she is. She’s never been any use to me or Daniel. When me granny was alive, she was in and out of the mental hospital or gone off with some fella. I haven’t a clue where she went after me granny died, but she’s never bothered to come back and get me or our kid.’

Lillian looked back at the map. ‘Imagine if we’d gone to Canada. Maybe some rich family would have fostered us.’

‘Norra chance,’ Molly said. ‘Maggie down in the laundry said that the nuns were only sending boys and girls to work out there to make money for the church. When they were old enough some of them were sent to work for farmers out in the country, miles from anywhere. That’s as bad as being here, if not worse.’ Maggie, who supervised the girls with washing and ironing, was kinder to the girls than the nuns were, but she could be moody.

‘I was a bit frightened of the boat journey over, but sometimes I think it might have been worth it to get away from here …’

‘What if yer had been put in the same place as Delia Sweeney?’

Lillian felt her chest tighten at the mention of the bully, a hefty girl with long, curly blonde hair. ‘Sister Ignatius had said we would be kept apart. They were sending her to somewhere called Quebec, and I was to go to Ontario with Alice.’ There was a silence as Lillian thought of her best friend, whom she guessed she would never see again. ‘It doesn’t matter now,’ she sighed.

‘Well, I’m glad yer didn’t go. I don’t know how I would stick this place if it wasn’t for yer. I’d rather be dead.’

‘Ah, don’t say that …’ Lillian turned to put her arms around her sparrow-like friend. ‘You don’t need to worry, I’m not going anywhere. You’re my best friend now, and we’ll look out for each other until we get out of this place.’

The small girl nestled into her as a young child would to its mother, seeking reassurance and comfort. ‘It’s not as bad here now Delia’s gone … is it?’

‘No, it’s not,’ Lillian smiled at her friend, then pulled away. ‘We need to be careful. If any of them thought we were friends, they’d separate us. Even Sister Ignatius. Me and Alice were moved into different dormitories a few years ago when they thought we were friends.’

‘That was Delia Sweeney’s fault. She was always telling tales.’

‘We won’t give them anything to say,’ Lillian told her. When she first saw Molly, she had thought her a crabby, wizened little thing. Although they were in the same class, she had little to do with her, as she and Alice were always together. But she had never been unkind to Molly or mocked her because of her size or made any reference to Daniel’s dark skin, like some of the other girls or the nastier nuns did.

Then an incident occurred that showed Molly in a different light. One morning Lillian had climbed the dark wooden staircase to clean the toilets in the corridor where the girls’ sleeping quarters were. As she passed the dormitory, she glimpsed a white-faced Molly sitting on the edge of the bed.

‘What are you doing here?’ Lillian asked in a heated whisper. ‘Sister Agnes is on her rounds, and she’ll be up soon to check the dormitories and toilets. You’ll be in trouble if she catches you up here.’

Molly had looked at Lillian with anguished eyes. ‘I don’t know what to do …’ Her head drooped. ‘I’ve wet me bed, and Sister Agnes said if I did it again, she would wrap the sheet around me and make me walk around the yard so everybody can see it. She did it to me before.’

‘Oh God …’ Lillian said.

‘I don’t do it often,’ Molly said, ‘it’s only when I have a pain in me kidneys, and me back’s been sore for days. She won’t believe me, she never does …’

Lillian’s eyes narrowed. ‘Pull the sheet off and give it to me. I’ll hide it with all the dirty towels and take it down to the laundry, and hopefully they won’t notice.’

Molly pulled back the thin, frayed old blankets and then stripped the patched sheet from the bed and deftly folded it into a square. ‘Just make the bed up to look as though it’s fine, then get downstairs quick before you’re seen.’

Both girls suddenly froze as they heard Sister Agnes’s voice screeching in the corridor below.

‘Quick!’ Lillian whispered, lifting her cleaning stuff. ‘Tidy the bed and get down the stairs.’ Holding the wet sheet she went rushing out into the corridor and along to the toilets.

A minute later Molly came to hover by the toilet door.

‘What are you waiting for?’ Lillian hissed.

‘I wanted …’ Molly hesitated. ‘I just wanted … to say ta for helping me. Ta for being nice to me.’

Lillian stared at her in surprise, then her face softened in pity. Something told her that Molly had led a darker and more painful life than most of the other girls in Gethsemane House. Everyone in the orphanage had a sorry tale, but she instinctively felt that Molly’s story was worse than anyone could imagine.

‘We all need to help each other when we can.’

‘The others don’t care, and they’ll always get yer into trouble to save themselves. But I don’t forget them that have done me down, and the few that have been good.’

Later, Lillian was glad she hadn’t done Molly down. When Delia Sweeney had tried to pick on her – ridiculing her for being small and calling Molly’s mother a prostitute – Lillian discovered that Molly’s size didn’t hold her back but belied her strength and determination. When Delia had grabbed Molly and swung her around as you would a toddler, Lillian saw the bully’s shins being kicked so hard that they bled, and later they turned black and blue. When she dropped Molly to the ground, Delia was then yanked so hard by her long, curly hair that she fell over, dizzy and crying, while her tiny opponent triumphantly held up a handful of her hair.

The mortified Delia had given Molly a wide berth after that, telling everyone that she was a ‘little lunatic’ who had inherited the same mental illness as her mother. To divert attention from her humiliation at the hands of Molly Power, Delia quickly moved on to the quiet and reserved Lillian Taylor. Lillian, she told everyone, was a snob with a posh voice, who sucked up to the nuns, carrying tales to Sister Ignatius.

When two girls were beaten for scorching a pillow case with an iron, Delia reported that she had seen Lillian talking to Sister Ignatius shortly afterwards. Later in the dining hall, a note was slipped under the table and passed along to Lillian, saying that the two girls would ‘get her’ in the dormitory after lights out.

Lillian’s stomach had churned when she read the note, and although she wanted to rush to the toilet to hide, she had to sit and finish her greasy soup. Life was bad enough with the nuns without having to battle with the other girls.

Molly must have seen Lillian lagging behind in the line-up after lunch, with tears in her eyes, and guessed something was going on. Later, in the geography class – taken by the elderly and hard-of-hearing Sister Martha – she confronted the pair and warned them not to lay a finger on her, and they told her Delia had set it all up.

‘Well, yer can tell Delia Sweeney that I’ll tear every hair out of her head if anyone lays a finger on Lillian Taylor. And yer can tell Lillian the note was a mistake.’

When Lillian heard what happened, she was amazed that Molly had taken such a bold stance on her part. She remembered the bed-wetting incident, but had not expected anything in return. When she got Molly on her own, she had quietly thanked her.

‘Yer were a friend to me and I hate that Delia Sweeney,’ Molly told her.

Lillian had felt a little uneasy at being described as Molly’s friend as they had little in common and she was wary of the smaller girl’s temper, and afterwards she kept the same distance between them. Then things had changed after Alice and the other girls departed for Canada. There were only a few of the older ones left and she and Molly were put working together more often. Molly seemed more settled since Delia had gone, and not quite so defensive all the time.



Now they worked on in companionable silence. Lillian felt any time away from the nuns was a good day, and was grateful for small mercies. They were just finishing off the classroom when footsteps sounded along the corridor. They both froze. The door was thrown open and Sister Dominic came in.

The nun stared around the classroom. ‘I hope you haven’t missed anything.’

‘We were just checking the floor again in case there was anything the brush didn’t catch.’

The nun turned towards Molly. ‘You’re very quiet, Miss Power. Have you checked everything is all right?’

Lillian glanced at her, terrified that if Molly didn’t answer quickly or respectfully enough, it would trigger one of the nun’s rages.

‘Yes, Sister,’ Molly said, ‘I think the floor and everything is clean.’

‘Well, we all know what your thinking is like, don’t we? Your brain is like the rest of you – far too small to be of any use. And we know how easy it is for you to make mistakes, don’t we?’

Lillian’s stomach churned. Why did the nun have to be so cruel? She seemed to get pleasure out of making the girls suffer by saying the most horrible things, like sticking a knife in and then slowly twisting it around.

Molly’s shoulders drooped. ‘Yes, Sister,’ Molly said quietly. ‘I’ve done me best.’

‘Good,’ Sister Dominic said, ‘because you’re going to have to do your best from now on. There’s no hope of you going home now, wherever home was, to that useless mother of yours. This is the only place you have left, and you’d better make the best of it.’

Molly’s brow wrinkled in confusion.

‘We received a message from Father Sutcliffe to say your mother has been found dead.’

Lillian’s hand flew to her mouth. She turned and could see that Molly’s blue eyes were wide open, and her face as white as the chalk dust she had rubbed from the board. She watched as Molly’s right eyelid came down like the top of a heavy box, while the other eye remained as normal. It stayed like that for a few seconds, before Molly managed to blink it open again, but it wasn’t as wide as her left eye.

‘Come on,’ Sister Dominic commanded, pointing towards the door, ‘the priest is on his way to speak to you. Arrangements will have to be made for a funeral.’

‘I don’t want to go!’ Molly suddenly screeched, and stumbled across the desks to Lillian, to grasp her tightly around the waist. ‘Don’t let her take me …’ Then she buried her face in her friend’s pinafore, sobbing loudly.

Lillian’s heart was racing, as she worked out what to do for the best for Molly. There was not an ounce of compassion in the nun, and she was likely to lash out with her hands or a ruler to try and silence the girl, rather than comfort her. ‘Will I bring her, Sister? Would it help you?’

Sister Dominic gave a loud sigh. ‘I can’t waste any more time on this nonsense – I have another class to attend to. Finish what you have to do here, and then get her along to Mother Superior’s office.’

When the nun left, Lillian tightened her arms around Molly. ‘I know what’s happened to your mother is terrible, but you’re going to have to be brave …’



Later that evening when Molly was returned to the dormitory, Lillian took the first chance she could to check she was all right.

‘The priest was nice,’ Molly said, in a dull voice, her eyes downcast. ‘He took me over to the boys’ orphanage to get our Daniel, and then he took us out for fish and chips. He said he’ll come back in a few days to take us to the funeral.’

‘I’m really sorry,’ Lillian said. ‘It must have been a terrible shock for you both.’

‘It was,’ Molly said, ‘but it doesn’t matter. When I was crying earlier, it was because I didn’t want to go on me own with Sister Dominic, not because of me mam. Like I told yer before, she wasn’t much of a ma to us.’

When she looked up, Lillian noticed the eyelid fluttering shut every so often as it had done earlier in the day. She hoped it was just a temporary thing because when it came to looks, the only thing that poor Molly had going for her was her lovely eyes.

Chapter Two

On Friday – the morning of Molly’s mother’s funeral – Lillian also received news she could never have imagined. With a pounding heart, she accompanied the quiet Sister Ignatius along the corridor from the laundry to see Mother Superior, who informed her that she would have her first-ever visitor on Sunday afternoon.

‘It’s a relative, an aunt, who has come forward and said she would like to meet you.’

‘An aunt?’ Lillian echoed.

The elderly nun had raised her grey eyebrows and nodded slowly. ‘Yes, it seems she has been living away from Liverpool, and has only just discovered where you are. Apparently she knows one of our benefactors, who had someone search you out. She seems a woman of decent background, and she says she would like to come and meet you.’

Lillian knew to ask no further questions of Mother Superior, but as she walked back to the laundry, she whispered to Sister Ignatius, ‘Do you know anything about my aunt?’

‘Nothing,’ Sister Ignatius whispered back. ‘I don’t get to hear much. From the way she talked about your aunt, Mother Superior seemed to approve of her.’ She gave a little smile. ‘It will be nice for you to have a visitor, won’t it?’

There was a pause, then Lillian said, ‘I don’t know …’ After all the years of envying other girls whispering excitedly about visitors, now it came to it, she wasn’t sure how she felt about a complete stranger visiting her out of the blue.

Saturday dawned cold, but with a bright blue sky. Lillian was put to work in the garden with some of the other older girls. Molly’s chest had been bad the night after the funeral, so she was assigned indoor work, washing the marble stairs and polishing the mahogany banisters. As she passed her friend on the way downstairs, Lillian stopped to whisper her news about her forthcoming visit.

‘I hope yer aunty is nice,’ Molly said. ‘Maybe she’ll take yer out for the day. She might take yer to the zoo or someplace exciting like that.’

Lillian shook her head. ‘It’s just for tea in the visitors’ room.’

Molly’s eyes widened. ‘They give you a biscuit with the tea.’ She halted. ‘The priest and Sister Ignatius took me and our Daniel to a hotel after the funeral. We got soup and sandwiches.’

Lillian wondered how Molly could think about biscuits so soon after losing her mother. Although it was ten years since Lillian’s own mother had died, she could remember not wanting to eat at all when she came to Gethsemane House. At times now she couldn’t even remember what her mother’s face looked like. She knew she had been older than the other mothers in the street, but she always dressed nicely, smelled of soap and wore her dark hair in a tidy bun. She wished she could remember her mother’s face as clearly as Mother Superior’s face the day she strode into the dining hall, not long after five-year-old Lillian had arrived in the orphanage, and marched over to her table.

The head nun had grabbed her by the hair, pulling her backwards in her chair so Lillian was looking up into her blazing eyes. ‘No more of this crying and not eating nonsense!’ she had said in a low hiss. ‘Your mother is dead and gone and you’ll have no special treatment here because of it. Why do you think the other girls are here? If they had worthwhile mothers, they would all be at home.’

She had stood over her while she finished a bowl of horrible, cold stew. After Mother Superior had left, Lillian had sat in shock for ten minutes, then silently vomited all of it back up. She had been lucky that Sister Ignatius was the nun in charge of the dining hall that afternoon. Lillian would later discover that the young nun had arrived at the convent only a few days before Lillian, and was feeling homesick for her family in Newcastle, and in many ways, was as disorientated as the girls now in her care. She quietly got two of the older girls to help clean up Lillian and the floor.

She had bent down and put her hand on Lillian’s shoulder. ‘Lillian, you must eat or Mother Superior will get very angry with you. And you must eat for your own sake or you will become very sick.’ She had squeezed Lillian’s hand. ‘Do you remember in class that we were talking about how we had to give plants water, and give animals food, or they would die? People are the same. We need food and water or we will get very sick and die. Do you understand?’

There was a few moments’ silence, then the little girl nodded. Lillian was beginning to understand that her life had changed forever. Her quiet mother, who had loved and protected her, and dressed her nicely and taught her to always speak properly, was gone. She had no other relatives, her father having died before she was old enough to remember him, and she was now in a place where she had to learn to survive on her own. And surviving meant eating and not drawing attention to herself.

And so gradually, over the weeks and months, Lillian changed and adapted to the harsh environment that was now her new home. The years in between had dimmed most of the memories about her mother, but she had never forgotten the kindness of Sister Ignatius.

As Lillian swept up the piles of brown and yellow leaves, she felt a sense of peace descending over her. Every so often she paused to look up into the clear blue sky, enjoying the feel of the autumn sun on her face. She loved the freedom of working outdoors, even when it was cold and damp. She gave no hint of it to the nuns, as she had learned that it was a sure way for something good to be stopped. She moved around quickly to keep warm, pulling out small clumps of grass or stray weeds on the stony path.

At one point she paused to look towards the high stone wall that ran all the way around the garden. The wall blocked any view into the world outside, apart from two large wrought-iron gates, through which the girls could catch glimpses of the street on which Gethsemane House stood. Glimpses of the real world, where horses and carts and the occasional car went by, and where ordinary people walked freely. But those glimpses were rare, and the girls knew that it was a cardinal sin if they were caught too close to the gates. The girls were rarely allowed outside the walls, as the nuns told them everything they needed was within the orphanage. They didn’t even have to go outside for Mass, as the priests brought the Holy Sacrament to them.

She thought again about this aunt who was coming to visit her. One half of her felt frightened, but the other half wondered if things worked out, her aunt might someday take her on a tram into Liverpool city, as she had heard that occasionally other girls had been taken out by relatives.

Lillian slept little that night, going over all the things her aunt might say, and trying to think of all the things she might say herself. She felt she had barely closed her eyes and drifted off when Sister Dominic was in the dormitory, shouting and hitting the bottom of each bed with a pointer as she marched along.

She stopped in the middle of the room and waited until each girl had their bare feet on the cold wooden floor and their hands joined together. She went along the beds again, checking for wet nightdresses, then, satisfied, she blessed herself and called out the Morning Offering, with the half-awake girls joining in. Prayers over, there was the usual military line-up for the toilet and the washrooms.

Lillian was sent to work in the kitchen after breakfast. Bleary-eyed, she went around collecting the piles of plates, which were wiped cleaner than usual. Every morsel of the toast – barely smeared with jam in honour of it being a Sunday – was devoured.

Afterwards, she joined three other girls, including Molly, and went to a room beside the laundry to clean and polish the nun’s shoes. They worked in silence as Sister Agnes was prowling around, in a particularly bad mood. When Lillian got a chance to look over at her friend, she noticed her eye was still closing again.

‘Is your eye okay?’ she asked. ‘One of them keeps closing …’

Molly shrugged. ‘I dunno, it just started doing it by itself.’

She pressed her finger on the eyelid for a few seconds, and then she looked up at Lillian. ‘Mother Superior noticed it too.’ She pulled a face. ‘She told me to keep it open as it made me look more stupid than usual. Does it look dead funny?’

Lillian shook her head. ‘It’s probably just a little nerve in your eye, and will stop as quick as it started.’

When they finished they were sent to the kitchen to peel potatoes and carrots, which would accompany a scrap of meat, followed by a spoonful of rice pudding for the Sunday lunch. After they had eaten, Lillian felt the afternoon crawling along as she washed and dried more dishes, and went for the usual after-lunch walk around the gardens saying the Rosary.

Later, the girls were split into two groups, the larger of which went off to the hall for craft classes where they unravelled old knitted jumpers and cardigans and then wound the crinkled wool into perfect balls. Later, they would re-knit them into squares for blankets. They also had piles of socks which had to be darned. Afterwards, the smaller group went back to the cold dormitory to get changed into their Sunday clothes for the visitors.

Lillian’s stomach churned as she washed her face and brushed her long dark hair out before tying it up again in a ponytail.

The girls were led by Sister Agnes into the dining hall where the usual scrubbed wooden tables were now covered with plain white tablecloths. There was a flowery jug and matching sugar bowl on each table. It was no surprise to her as Lillian had often helped to set the places with some of the other older girls. Even so, the difference made by those small adornments was startling, and made the place they ate three times a day strangely unfamiliar. The children stood in silence while the nun read their names from a list and then pointed to the table they were to sit at.

When her name was called, Lillian felt her long, thin legs suddenly shaky as she walked across the tiled floor to a table by the tall, sashed window. She sat down, her hands folded in her lap. When all the children were seated, Mother Superior came in to stand in the middle of the room, her gaze sweeping across all the tables.

‘I will remind you all again – you are to be on your best behaviour. If you are asked by your visitors how you are treated here, make sure you tell them you are very well looked after. You have clean, warm beds, three good meals a day, and you are being well educated in school. I don’t want any complaints about food or the small chores you are asked to do. Girls who complain will be dealt with severely. Very severely.’ She paused, her eyes narrowing. ‘Is that understood?’

‘Yes, Mother Superior,’ the girls replied.

‘I said,’ she repeated in a louder voice, ‘Is … that … understood?’

Every eye turned towards her now and they all c