27. The Tragic Girl

THE POETESS, Part 27

Nothing could have surprised me more than when Annie and I became good friends. True, we worked in the same department store, which put us in regular contact with each other, but after work we often spent time at a cafe or coffee bar before going our separate ways home.

It was then, when the pressures of work were put to rest for the remainder of the day, that I discovered something about Annie that made any shallow thing like thinking of her in terms of her pregnancy that ended in tragedy seem what it was: an irrelevance, and it foretold a bigger tragedy I couldn’t have imagined.

She explained all about her fall from grace.

She had met the man she soon learned to call Ant when she joined the church choir and he was enthusiastically helping the choirmaster. She had been well aware that he looked on her as an adult rather than the child she really was, and she shamelessly told me that she encouraged him to deceive himself. But when the reality of that deceit had grown into a pregnancy that she either expected or wanted, she found herself ‘growing up’, as she put it, in double quick time.

Annie looked at Rosie over a cooling cup of coffee and smiled. “once i was over the shock of finding myself pregnant it slowly dawned on me that I wanted that baby more than I’d ever wanted anything in my life,” she confessed, “but when I told my folks they went ballistic! Talk about fury and anger! And when I told them who had brought about my disgrace they swore they’d get back on him any way they could.

“I was bringing shame on them, they told me in no uncertain terms, and I had no alternative than to leave the home I had been brought up in. I turned to the man who I’d almost deceived into fathering my child, and nobody could have been kinder or more gentle to me. Even after my parents had reported him to the police because I was obviously under-age and he found himself arrested and eventually sent to prison for it, he wrote to me and expressed a wonderful affection for me. And, you know, it was his fault, of course it was, but it was mine as well. I know that I led him on and he’s really too much of a child himself to see beyond the pretences that a teenage girl can create in order to deceive. I wanted to be grown up and grown ups have lovers, don’t they? So I wanted to have a lover.

“The Reverend Sinjun was good, though. I think he took on a share of the responsibility, because it had happened in his vicarage and even though he had no idea what we were up to he believed he should have seen that his curate had an eye for the new girl in the choir and quashed any misbehaviour he suspected.”

“And you’re still there?” asked Rosie.

“Well, there’s plenty of room and now I’m at Woollies I can pay my way,” Annie told her, “and he doesn’t try to force his God stuff down my throat because I don’t believe a word of it. If there was a God, I ask myself, why did my baby have to be born disfigured and dead? Was it to punish me for my wrong-doing because the only person truly punished was that baby, and it’s a most cruel punishment if the only point of it was meant to make me think!”

I listened to Annie and got to like her. She was no flibbertigibbet but a lovely teenage girl with a shadow on her life. How dark that shadow was I had yet to find out. Back home, though, I had Ant, as he liked to be called, to contend with, but not for long.

After a few weeks he found himself employment with the borough council, dealing with housing and the maintenance of council properties.

He swore black was white that he would stick by Annie and everything seemed positive in that direction … for a while. But he had his own weaknesses and he lacked the will to suppress them. After a while he found himself weakening to the charms of another young woman, this time old enough to know her own mind, and it was a tearful Annie that arrived, red faced and blotchy, at Woolworth’s only to collapse in my arms and unroll a tale of heartache and despair. Her one true love, it turned out, had eyes for another.

Being in the housing department he had no trouble finding alternative accommodation when I raised the matter of poor Annie with him. He was honest enough to tell me he had become besotted by another, and this time there were no restrictions to him being with her. At the same time, she seemed keen on him. I was beginning to see that beyond the sweet innocent charm he was a bit of a rogue. Likeable, maybe, but a breaker of hearts when it suited him. Anyway, he left Millers Cottage at about the same time as I bought my first car…

“That’s it, then,” Rosie said as she piled his few possessions into the boot of her car. “You’ll have to hold on tight because I only passed my test last week!”

“I would like to have left you on better terms,” he said.

“You know I don’t like the way you treated Annie,” Rosie told him frankly, “she’s a sweet young thing who deserves better.”

“She’ll get over me.”

“It’s more than you,” she reminded him, “it’s the baby she bore with your blood in its veins.”

“But that’s in the past and I’m for the future,” he grinned, but I could see a guilty understanding behind his smiling eyes.

Rosie drove him to the council flat he’d somehow jumped the housing list by claiming for himself and found herself unable to say anything because he had turned out to be anything but the young man she had first met on her back lawn by the flower bed that marked the last resting place of Harry’s bones. And back then he had been a man of the church and still retained an aura of invincible morality that such people seem to clad themselves in. Now he was what some like to call a loveable rogue.

When she arrived back at Miller’s cottage it was to find the Reverend Sinjun Boniface waiting for her.

“I’ve got bad news,” he said, “I don’t know how to put it, but Annie, the poor child, is dead.”

© Peter Rogerson, 02.04.21

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