Noonday by Barker Pat

Author:Barker, Pat [Barker, Pat]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Canada
Published: 2016-03-08T08:00:00+00:00

So she trudged from bed to bed, basin to basin, ward to ward. All the time, floating in front of her eyes, was the memory of the purple, howling dwarf they’d torn out of her all them years ago. She’d never seen a newborn baby before. Little babies, yes, a few days old, but not newborn. And my God it come as a shock, she’d no idea they looked like that.

She’d gone into the home the minute she started showing. For a long time you could cover it up with cardigans and jumpers, but not forever—and you weren’t allowed to work in the munitions factory if you were pregnant, something to do with the chemicals, so she more or less had to go in the home. Where was she going to find another job with a belly on her like that? No, it was the home, or starve.

They put her to work in the laundry—laughable, really—lifting buckets, twelve-hour shifts, wonder they didn’t all lose their babies—and probably better if they had. But at least the work tired you out. She was asleep the minute her head touched the pillow. And what a lumpy pillow it was. The pillowcase was always spotless—matron saw to that—but the pillow smelled of other people’s hair, all the girls who’d slept on it before her. But there it was, lumps or not, she’d drop off to sleep like falling over a cliff, only she didn’t stay asleep, not properly asleep. She was aware all the time of the ward: the iron bedsteads, humped bodies under pale green coverlets, gray light seeping through threadbare curtains—and then it all faded, and she was somewhere else.

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