Whispers in the Dark Read Online Free PDF

protests, Annabel was torn from me and tossed with everything else into the smelly chest.
    A cold bath with carbolic soap followed. Then we were made to sit on hard stools while our hair was cropped. Does this seem harsh? It was harsh. You must remember that the workhouse was not the forerunner of our modern welfare state. It had not been set up to ease the misfortunes of the impoverished or save them from starvation. Its purpose was to force the idle poor to seek outwork, however mean or hard or dangerous or ill paid. Fear of the workhouse was the goad. And a very effective goad it was.
    I had always had the most beautiful copper hair, hair that fell below my shoulders, almost to my waist. It had been washed and brushed every day by Hannah, and I had been promised that when I was older, I might wear it up as a sign that I had become a lady. Now I felt cold shears slicing it from my head, and I wept bitterly to see it fallen on the ground, no longer part of me.
    I remember the expression on my mother’s face while all this was going on, a look of infinite despair, infinite hopelessness. None of this made the least impression on Mrs. Moss, not my tears, not my mother’s despair. She had seen all that before, all that and worse. What were a few more tears, a few more looks of anguish to her? From the day I entered that terrible place to the day I left, I never heard her address a kind or cheering word to me or to anyone else.
    We were given coarse woolen frocks to wear, and hobnailed boots with iron tips in which I found it hard to walk. You could always tell a workhouse child by the way she walked, they said, because of the boots. The frocks were dingy white in color, with long blue stripes running from top to bottom. They were waistless, shapeless bags that came down to our ankles, and looked as though they had been cut and sewn by the handless victim of some terrible accident.
    Nothing was bright or pretty or soft in that place, there was nothing to lift a fallen heart. No pictures on the bare, whitewashed walls, no flowers on the high windowsills, no smells but those of boiled cabbage, carbolic, and disinfectant. And our hearts had fallen so far, so very far, we could not imagine them ever being raised again. I have been married, I have had children and grandchildren, I have lived a life of reasonable comfort; but my heart has never really lifted since that moment. That moment and what followed.
    I thought of my brother Arthur, all alone in the men’s wing, my gentle brother with his fair hair shorn. The thought chilled and wounded me. If his terrible dreams should come, I thought—and what other dreams could a child hope to have in a place like this?—where would he go, who would he turn to? Even now I shudder to think of it, what dreams he may have had in that place. The awful thing. . . The awful thing is that I think I know.
    My mother and I were parted for the rest of that day. I learned later that they took her directly to a large, cold room full of other women in the same drab dresses, all sitting on hard benches picking oakum. That was still a common occupation in many workhouses, and one that went on in a few, I think, until they shut the places down for good in 1930. Later I spent some time in that room myself, though I was spared at first on account of my age.
    She told me afterward how hard it had been and showed me her hands, what had become of them, all callused, raw, and bleeding. They made no allowances for those who were unaccustomed to physical labor or whose hands had not already been hardened by what it pleased them to call honest toil. They gave my mother a bundle of old ropes cut into lengths, most of them hardened with tar. Her quota for that day was a full three pounds, and even by supper she had not half finished. The idea was to unpick the ropes, turning them back into loose fibers that would then be used for jobs like caulking ships. What work it was. What mind-numbing, senseless, unending