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i.
sleepless for a weekend
Her sixteenth summer comes around quickly.
"School holidays soon, Val." Flo smiles as the young girl enters the pub, dropping her lanky frame onto a barstool.
"What about 'em?" Val smirks, taking an empty glass, reaching for the ale tap.
In one swift move, Flo takes the glass, batting Val's hand away, pouring her a glass of orange. The drink leaves condensation trickling down the glass it's in.
"You want some pocket money, don't ya?"
"Course I do." Val shrugs, swiping a path into the condensation on her glass.
"That's settled then." Flo replies.
"Let her breathe for five, will ya?"
"Gran!" Val exclaims.
Everyone knew Valerie Dyer was a tearaway.
That she swore like the men down at the docks.
That she snuck alcohol from the back shelf of The Black Sail.
All these facts were merely puzzle pieces, perfectly interlinking to make up the youngest Dyer girl.
Elsie Dyer loved them all, because for all Val's flaws, for all the things she did wrong, she was sweet and soft. Val was her youngest granddaughter, but her tallest by a good few inches, though she never could outgrow her gran.
"Stop bloody growing, will you?" Elsie says, coming to sit beside Val.
"Can't help it." Val says, pulling her gran into a tight hug.
"I know you can't." Elsie smiles. "Neither can your hair, from the looks of it."
Elsie runs thin fingers through the tresses of brunette cascading over her granddaughter's shoulder blades, the ends feathering just short of her hips.
"You know what mum's like." Val shrugs.
"Girls have to look like girls, Val." Flo muses from behind the bar.
School ends with the trilling of an old metal bell and Val is leaving, arms linked with the girls she sits beside in R.S, denying their plans, knowing she won't make it.
"Not even one night?" One asks.
Erin. A bundle of blonde curls, pink cheeks and caramel coloured freckles, topped with the everlasting scent of roses.
"No, sorry. Got work." Val sighs.
She unlinks her arms and walks the rest alone.
ii.
the storms slowly arise
Barmaid Val arrives the next week, serving pints, or pork scratchings, with a smile and a laugh, the same dry humour as the men she poured the pints of bitter for.
Money is money, after all. Anything she could stow away in the old gherkin jar beneath her rickety old bed frame.
"Val, it's all a part of the trade, chicken." Flo coos through the locked stall door.
Val slumps on top of the closed toilet seat, chest heaving, cheeks sticky with tears and a terrified sweat. Fingerprints burn, lingering across her pale flesh, a button missing from her blouse.
"Well then I don't want to be in the trade!" She sobs, stabbing a hairpin through the fabric of her blouse, retaining whatever modesty she can, though her dignity is fleeting.
"You wanna own this place one day, don't you?" Flo asks.
"No bloody men allowed if I do." Val sneers.
"Come on, Val." Is the reply. "He was drunk. Got a bit handsy. You're a pretty little thing, always have been."
With a sense of defeat, Val wipes her eyes with the back of her hand and slides the stall lock.
"I didn't like it, Flo." She pleads. "I don't want them to touch me."
"Alright. We'll keep you behind the bar, yeah?"
Val nods, unknowingly complicit in her own dehumanisation.
Spends June and most of July being an object of plain and simple lust, on the receiving end of whistles and catcalls.
One day, she almost breaks a finger or several as they come brushing towards the breasts she's developed suddenly.
He shouts something terrible and Flo gives Val a complete and utter bollocking, telling her she should let them take what they want, that it'll only take a moment and he'll leave happy.
Val tells her that she's being pathetic, that she refuses to sit down and accept a man's hands all over her.
Flo tells her that one day, she'll be begging for a man to touch her in all the places she hides beneath patterned slacks and crisp, neat blouses.
Val spits that there's a fat chance of that happening, and leaves the pub with her last pay packet.
iii.
running out, through the storms, through the night
Then one day, things change.
Val's desperation for maturity, denying the fear and deep questioning, hit its peak and she finds herself intoxicated, back pressed against cold hard brick, hands wandering across goose pimpled flesh.
He smells of lager and cheap aftershave, the one wafting from a stall on Chrisp Street Market, and his hands are freezing as they mark their territory across Val's skin.
It's over before it begins.
Not with a crescendo, or a grand display of fireworks like the ones over the Thames at New Years.
Simply a concoction of heavy breaths and a lack of pressure once he leaves her, still against the wall.
Shame rolls over her like darkened rainclouds, vast, foreboding. It neither answers, nor stops the questions she asks about herself.
Flo was wrong. She wasn't begging for it.
Val simply decides to ignore it, forcing it down, to vehemently deny both the event and the complications it poses.
Until she can't.
Her head spins out of control, limbs heavy, shivering as she curls into herself on the tile of the bathroom.
Allergies. Illness. Ate something wrong.
She even tells June she's been drinking at one point, because then the nausea and the cold sweats make sense.
"Valerie Dyer, I really can't believe you sometimes." Her mother berates as Val slumps against the toilet bowl. Val just nods. "What was it?"
"Don't know." Val shrugs. "We all had it."
"Well was it strong, or was it-"
"Mum! Please."
"Little Val's first hangover!" A voice comes from outside the open door.
"Piss off, Flora." Val groans, holding her head.
"We've all done it." Flora laughs.
Val's oldest sister. Mature, petite, brunette and carved out in all the places that have the boys falling at her feet. Much the same as Val, come to think of it, though Flora's eyes are much darker than Val's.
Figures she isn't the blue-eyed girl. Val is.
Not if they knew the truth.
iv.
the light turns
"Your mother's going to-"
"I know, Gran."
Val shivers, curled in Elsie's armchair, bundled in one of her gran's home knitted cardigans, one which smells like her, like home.
She had dragged herself out of bed that morning, with a week and a little bit left until the summer ended.
The nausea subsiding, she began to wonder if she'd dreamt it all, if she actually had just felt the burden of a summer flu.
But there was no blood, no pain, not since the last time, all the way back before she gave herself up in the back alleyway, to some boy she barely knew.
And so she ran to her gran's. The only place she knew she'd be accepted.
Sobbed into Elsie's shoulder, left a damp patch in the old woman's cardigan, before the weeping subsided into hiccuped breaths and she could finally admit the truth.
"Do you know for definite?" Elsie asks. She knows berating Val gets her nowhere. She stays logical and kind.
"Not yet. Those nurses can tell you, can't they?"
"I think your mum needs to know before you tell some nurse, lovie."
"It could be a secret. I could move in with you, say it's easier for school, or you need help with shopping, or-"
"No, Val." Elsie cuts her off, soft still. "You need to do this properly. Own up to what you've done."
And Val will be damned before she feels like a criminal ever again.
She leaves it a month.
Then another.
Mid-October brings a chill to the air. It kills the leaves and the bright summer aura starts to fade.
Val's managing, actually. The fading sunshine means she can button up her cardigans and cover the obvious development of her midriff.
That is, until June decides to be helpful for once, delivering a fresh batch of laundry to Val's room while she's halfway done in the morning.
"Val, for the love of God, what do you do with-"
And there it is. Plain as day, not yet concealed by a cable knit.
"Mum-"
"Oh my God."
The laundry hits the floor with a dull thud.
"It's-"
"What the fuck have you done?" June asks, anger bubbling beneath the surface already.
Val's scrambling to pull a sweater over the tiny, yet visible, bump that lies at the centre of her lanky frame.
Flora's in the doorway.
The button of Val's slacks barely slides closed now.
"What? Mum, what's-"
June's shaking her head and that alone hurts more than the cold brick pressing into the discs of Val's spine all that time ago, hurts more than- than that.
"I can't even look at you." June hisses as she leaves the doorway. Flora's eyes hit Val's body, brow furrowed in confusion.
"What have you done now?" Flora asks.
Val ignores her, eyes brimming with hot salt, pushing past.
She curls up in Elsie's armchair, wrapped in her cardigan for the millionth time.
Elsie lets her cry, hot tea and bourbons promised for when she's done.
June's still seething the next morning when Elsie arrives with Val, fresh off the number eight.
They spit venom while Val curls up beneath her duvet, still wrapped in Elsie's cardigan.
Elsie argues that Val is still her daughter.
"Not anymore." June hisses.
"Have you even asked her how?"
"I've got three daughters, Mum, I know bleedin' how!"
"I didn't mean it like that, and you know it. " Elsie responds. "Our Val, she's always been a bit wild, but-"
"Oh, right. You go ahead, keep coddling her!" June scoffs.
"She's a good girl, June."
"She's got you fooled, ain't she?"
"She-"
"Good girls don't come home knocked up at sixteen!" June shouts back. "She ain't keeping it."
"Look after her, at least. It was hard enough when we were married and loved, wasn't it?" Elsie pleads.
Val's eyes are too heavy to hear the rest.
v.
slowly fall into the dark
Months pass still.
Val grew too big to go out anymore.
At grave risk of exposing the shameful truth, the midwives are instructed to only visit Val at home, a big check mark next to her name advising them she won't attend the clinic.
And even then, June's old wedding ring leaves it's safe place, nestled in her jewellery box, slid onto Val's finger, so she appears respectable.
"Where's the lucky man, then?" Asks a kind hearted nurse as she tightens the cuff around Val's arm.
"Out at the docks. Hard working, isn't he, Val?" June hisses slightly as she places two cups of tea down, taking one and nudging one over to the woman who writes Val's blood pressure into her notes.
"I'm sure he'd rather be there than here when the big day arrives soon, hey?" The nurse smiles, digging herself a deeper hole.
Val smiles and nods.
Little by little, Valerie Dyer simply disappears.
No trips out unless she's wrapped in the thickest coat the house contains.
Her gran barely sees her, actually.
That's the bit that hurts most. Sure, it's boring, but at least she's always warm, and she still has a home, which was the worst case scenario she dreamt up all those months ago.
But she wishes Elsie was around more than she is. Her gran's cardigan is starting to smell more like Val than it does Elsie, and that hurts, because the less it holds the smell of talc and Elsie's perfume, the less Val feels loved, the less she feels safe.
One warm May bank holiday, as the sun begins to rear its head once again, Val is awoken to needles in her spine.
Her hips ache and her heart thuds away behind her ribs.
The day passes in a drawl of agony that grows deeper with each hour passing.
It becomes unbearable just after four, and the midwife arrives at a quarter past.
June and Flora head to The Black Sail at twenty past.
Val's alone, save for the midwife, and that deep burning shame returns; shame she hasn't felt since she was readjusting the hem of her skirt and pulling her waistband back to where it belonged.
Val grips the wooden frame of her rickety old bed, knuckles white, grimacing against the pain.
The nurse's hand is soft and warm as it smooths along Val's spine, though the bones beneath her touch are on fire.
This is it.
She's dying.
"Come on, Val." The midwife coaxes from the bottom of the bed. "There's a girl. You're doing wonderfully."
"I'm not." Val winces, gripping the sheets as agony ripples through her tiny frame. "I'm- what if I do something wrong?"
"You won't." The midwife reassures.
But Val's already starting to panic. The pain is growing abundantly the more she cries out and she can't breathe, the oxygen turning to treacle in her lungs, stopping up her air flow, and then-
"Come on, chicken. I'm here."
In her panic, Val has missed the front door bursting open, shopping bags dropped on the Welcome mat as Elsie hurries to her side, taking her hand in her own.
"Gran." Val sobs.
"Yes, yes, I'm here now." Elsie smooths a hand over Val's hair. "Now, come on. No more tears. Let's have this little one."
Cries permeate the air at just past eight.
"A little girl. Healthy and perfect." The midwife announces. A screaming bundle is placed onto Val's heaving chest, slowly settling as both link into each other. "Well done, sweetheart."
"Gran, look at her." Val says, tears falling still, a shaking hand cupping the baby's back.
Her daughter's back.
"You did wonderfully, chicken." Elsie says, tears threatening in her own eyes as she smooths a washcloth over the now calmed infant.
Her great granddaughter.
"She's so tiny." Val says, in a quiet state of shock.
"She is, but she's absolutely fine." The midwife says gently. "With a brilliant set of lungs. Does the little one have a name?"
Val thinks for a minute. Looks around the room, at the glaring absence of bodies.
Her eyes dart between the bundle now sleeping against her heartbeat, and the woman still stroking her fingers through her hair.
"Elsie." Val says, adamant, though tired.
"Oh, chicken, no-"
"Elsie. After you. I'm not changing it." Val insists.
June and Flora emerge again at half past.
No more nurses bike outside the house, Val lies tucked up, content, the tiny version of herself bundled up besides her.
Little Elsie is wrapped in the cosiest, safest thing Val can think of; the chunky knitted cardigan of her much older namesake.
"You had it then?" June folds her arms at the doorway.
"Her." Val sighs, trailing a fingertip along her daughter's arm. "I had her."
"Val-"
"Don't." Val spits. Her voice is quiet, completely exhausted, but she's bitterly angry and it shows. "You left me."
"I know. Your gran's already had it out, so please, just-"
"Don't be like that. You don't get to be like that."
"What have you called her?" June asks, tone shifting suddenly.
"Elsie. After the person who actually gave a toss about me, enough to be here." Val says, eyes never leaving the newborn bundled beside her.
"Right." June nods, sniffing. Val can smell the alcohol from her bed. "That's- yeah."
She leaves. Val brings the bundle into the crook of her arm and stares at her until her eyes are weary.
vi.
the cold terms arise
The bank holiday brings sun.
The end of it takes it away.
She blinks awake, stretching an arm out to the bassinet where little Elsie sleeps.
Her fingertips brush cotton.
Cotton sheets.
Cold cotton.
In an instant, she's down the stairs in her nightdress, back stiff, fire suddenly coursing through weary muscles.
June stands in the living room, the missing bundle nestled in her arms.
Little Elsie won't settle.
Val's eyes dart to a woman sitting upright in a three piece suit and suddenly it hits, right in her chest, what's happening.
Bile rises in her throat.
"No! No, please! You can't!" Val screams, surprising even herself with the outburst.
"Valerie-"
"No! She's mine! That's- that's my baby!" She approaches June, who takes a preemptive step backwards.
"The papers are signed, Miss Dyer." The stern woman says.
"No, God, please- she needs her feed. She's hungry; what if she thinks I've just abandoned her?" Val's head spins, firing at a mile a minute as panic bubbles in her chest.
"She's going to a family who love her, Val."
" I love her. " Val pleads.
Her hands dip underneath the baby's body before June can react and at once, Val holds her daughter again.
For the final time.
Little Elsie settles into Val's neck.
"Please, Mum. I need- she needs me. I can- I'll look after her." Val begs, through hot tears.
"Sorry, Val. It's for the best." June says, tears oddly threatening in her own eyes, despite the cold hard demeanour she's settled upon.
The woman in the suit stands, holding an ugly wicker Moses' basket.
"Come on. It's time."
"I'm sorry, chick." Val whispers into the mass of brown hair that nestles into the crook of her neck. "Please forget all this. Just not me."
The car leaves the driveway in a cloud of dust.
Val drops to her knees and howls.
vii.
it is hard to let it all go
For all her flaws, Val had never been angry. Never bitter.
Those things left with baby Elsie.
She never looked her mother in the eyes again.
Once she scooped herself from the floorboards, she stormed upstairs, stuffing her worldly possessions into a bag before wrapping her gran's cardigan around her shivering frame, sliding her bare feet into her boots, and leaving without a word to any of the houses' inhabitants.
On the driveway, a single bootie. Pink wool, a pair lovingly stitched by the original Elsie and slipped into a Christmas card, so that June's prying eyes didn't see such a kindness towards the life within Val's own.
Val snatches it and buries it in the pocket of her cardigan.
Elsie's cardigan.
Elsie shakes with anger as Val recalls waking to an empty bassinet, running downstairs and having to take the baby, her baby, from her mother's arms.
As she recalls whispering into her sleeping daughter's hair, placing her into the clutches of someone whose sole purpose was to send her away.
Val's outstretched palm holds the single pink bootie she found lying discarded in the drive as she cries, body wracked with grief.
Elsie places a kiss on her hair and promises her she won't have to go home.
Home seems to be a sticking point.
May leaves, followed in it's exit by June and then July, the yearly anniversary of Val's exploration making itself known, her grief only growing exponentially.
One day in mid July, she returns to her gran's flat, hair resting just above her shoulders, and Elsie knows she could comment; running her fingers through her granddaughter's long brown waves, brushing it until it shined, no longer neglected by the shell of the girl who it belonged to.
Val returns home fresher, lighter, newly chopped hair bouncing as she heads to give her gran a hug.
A hug, and a brochure procured from the stand in town.
A brochure for the army.
Elsie's heart drops in much the same way it did the day Val arrived at her door, sobbing in her nightdress, a hole in her heart, but she knows Val is trying so desperately to escape.
Little Val had outgrown Poplar before she could walk, yet the grief for her daughter had left her pinned. Now, her wings had sprouted again, and Elsie found she couldn't argue.
So January arrives, and Val is freshly eighteen, standing aboard a ship in pressed khaki.
Elsie saves her tears for home.
Because Val hasn't looked this free, this safe, this certain, since the previous May, with a sleeping bundle lying on her chest, hope filling her heart.
In the end, Val opted not to become a fighter in any description. Instead, she decided to pursue medicine.
Healing her heart by healing people in dire need. The perfect route for a girl on the edge of it all.
Her insistence sparked a passion within Elsie, too.
Seeing her youngest granddaughter in such a desperate state, forced to carry and eventually give away a child in such a cruel, unfeeling manner, struck chords in Elsie's heart which had never before been struck.
So she trekked to the library on the other side of town.
Sought out all the books around biology and midwifery she could.
Gained a textbook knowledge of the female anatomy.
Visited the haberdasher's, sourcing a crochet hook and a packet of knitting needles at half a crown a piece.
And vowed that she would never allow another girl to go through the crippling agony that Val had gone through.
viii.
try to untie from an old life,
but it always drags me down
"So she learnt it all for you?"
Lucille tilts her head, eyes trailing over Val's jawline as it is illuminated in the orange glow of lamp light.
With Trixie out on call, and the mounting pressure of her gran's trial creating a heavy atmosphere for Val, the tall brunette has decided to let Lucille in on the intricate patchwork of her former self.
"I assume so." Val shudders, blowing away smoke from what must be the seventh cigarette she's lit since starting her story.
"Do you think that if she was able to do that- for you, I mean, do you-" Lucille trails off, never sure of her words.
"Maybe. Maybe not." Val replies. "I'd never have met my little girl. Never have been able to wonder about where she ended up, or what she looks like. Never would have went into medicine, or been here. So I never would have met you."
"Everything happens for a reason, I think." Lucille replies. Val nods.
"Definitely."
"Do you still wonder about her?"
"Every day." Val sniffs, ashing the end of her cigarette. "She'd be- God, ten or eleven now. A grown up girl, with the world at her fingertips."
"One day your paths may cross." Lucille smiles, taking Val's hand in her own and squeezing lightly.
"One day they might." Val nods. She reaches under her pillow with the hand that isn't laced with Lucille's, producing a little knitted pink boot. "The other half to my pair."
Lucille leans her head on Val's shoulder and holds her hand tighter.
Outside, under the rapidly darkening sky, a girl rests on the steps of Nonnatus.
Brief, fleeting, simply to tie her straying shoelace again.
She sweeps untameable, dark brown waves from piercing blue eyes, before skipping back off down the road.
fin.