Polly by Jeff Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

have been to humiliate me so as to teach me not to make a fuss. Instead of sending me off to the loo she said something to one of the staff who quickly went out through a door and reappeared a couple of moments later with a chamber pot. She put it down in front of me and matron ‘invited’ me to use it! To be honest, I didn’t need any invitation. Normally I would have been terribly embarrassed and nothing would have made me use the loo in the presence of anybody else, but as soon as that pot touched the ground I had my knickers off and was on it. And my bowels just emptied and emptied and emptied. The stink was awful but I didn’t care. At that moment I didn’t have a care in the world, all I wanted to do was sit there and let my belly empty. Slowly the pain went off and my tummy relaxed. When I finally stood up the pot was full almost to the brim. In fact, it was so full they couldn’t trust me to carry it away without spilling it. Instead, one of the staff got a cloth, which was carefully laid across the top of the pot, and it was carried ceremoniously away. The matron kept a very stiff upper lip and continued to look straight across the top of our heads, but I think it must have taken her aback. Especially when she thought how close she had been to disaster.
    I can’t remember much about the holiday. Its most lasting legacy came from having porridge for breakfast every day – I have disliked porridge ever since. Apart from that, I think that most days we used to play games in the grounds. But one day we were going into the town to look at the shops and maybe buy presents for our families. As it happened, every lunchtime from school I usedto go and get half a pint of beer for an old lady who lived up the street and she would give me sixpence a week. She had fallen behind with my ‘pay’ and eventually one of her daughters gave me a postal order for 2 s 6 d just before the holiday so I was really rich. But before I could get any presents I had to cash this postal order, and the matron decided I should go to town with her for the purpose. All the other kids wanted to come with us, but matron refused. That morning we got up and had breakfast as usual but we had to wash ‘especially clean’ and were then lined up to walk into town. Except the matron called me to one side and told me to wait. I kicked up one hell of a fuss, but she wouldn’t change her mind, and I had to stand there as all the others trailed off in a long crocodile towards the town.
    I was decidedly upset and decidedly suspicious. Then things got worse, because matron told me to go and put on my Sunday best. Well, Sunday best was exactly that; you did not dare to wear it at any other time, Mum would have killed you! So again I kicked up merry hell and said how you could not wear Sunday best on any other day, Mum would get ever so cross, it wasn’t right and all the rest, but it didn’t help. In the end I had to go off to get changed into my best mauve and white! I was a reasonably pretty child and in good clothes must have looked quite presentable.
    When I got back downstairs to the hall matron was already there, dressed up to the nines with a very impressive hat on the top. I was getting more and more worried by the minute – after all, I hadn’t wanted to leave my Mum in the first place and now we were getting all dressed up on the wrong day.
    ‘Come on then Mary,’ she said, ‘we are going into town.’ That was exactly what we did, following the steps all the others had taken half an hour earlier. Goodness knows what was wrong with the woman, I guess these days she would be sent for counselling, but everywhere we went she introduced me as her daughter. Whether it was just her fantasy, or whether she had had a husband and daughter who had died, or whatever was going on, I just do not know. I am sure none of the people we met were at all fooled: you couldn’t keep secrets in little places like that. As far as I was concerned, though, it