The Banker's Niece 13: Jane's secret

1968

Jane switched on her bedside light and checked her clock. One a.m. Her parents should be asleep by now. She would be safe.

    She climbed out of bed and knelt in front of her bedside cabinet. She’d undone the catch before she went to bed so that it wouldn’t make a noise. All she had to do now was swing the door open.

    As she did so the smell rushed out, even though she’d wrapped everything as well as she could in newspaper and then put the newspaper packages inside a giant brown-paper bag. She squashed the package and tucked it into the waistband of her pyjama trousers then wrapped herself in her dressing-gown. With any luck that would disguise both the shape and the smell and then, if her parents did catch her, all she had to do was pretend she was wandering around because she couldn’t sleep.

    Although it was February and she knew that the job would take some time, she didn’t put her slippers on. It was difficult to walk quietly in slippers. Bare feet would be much better.

    After turning out her bedside light and giving her eyes a few seconds to get used to the dark, she made her way across her bedroom and out on to the landing.

    She crept across the landing, using the furniture to help her find her way – the curved chest-of-drawers that had belonged to her mother’s mother, the velvet-covered chairs, the bookshelf, the banister around the stairwell. Every time a floorboard creaked she stopped, hoping that if her parents were awake they would think it was just the house making its usual noises.

    She inched her way downstairs, hanging on to the banister and feeling her way with her feet. She had a horrible vision of falling and crashing to the bottom and the contents of her parcel scattering and her mother shooting out and saying in her scary way, 'What on earth do you think you're doing?' 

    Downstairs, she tiptoed across the hall, trying not to slip on the rugs scattered over the wooden floor. Past the door to the dining-room, past the cloakroom and the door to the cellar, and then at last she reached the kitchen.

    Squeezing the door shut behind her, she leant against it for a few seconds, waiting for her heart to get back to normal. The kitchen was at the opposite end of the house from her parents’ room. She could probably relax now.

    As always the kitchen smelt of clean washing and apples. She could hear the tick of the little clock her mother kept on the shelf next to the fridge. She fumbled for the light switch and clicked it on, screwing her eyes up against the sudden brightness.

    The kitchen’s familiar clutter welcomed her. The basket of clothes waiting to be ironed. The plates piled on the dresser waiting to be put away. Shopping bags and her mother’s handbag hanging off the dresser’s drawer handles. Breakfast half-laid on the table.

    Apart from the attic, the kitchen was her favourite room in the house. You didn’t have to be on your best behaviour in here. You didn’t have to worry about knocking over a family heirloom or treading mud on to the pale blue carpet. You weren’t likely to meet some stranger who would eye you up like an exhibit.

    Because of the Aga it was always warm and when she was seven and the water in the cattle troughs froze solid for months and she and Ollie used to race outside every morning and slide on them, the family had more or less lived in the kitchen. They had central heating now of course. After that winter, her mother had insisted on it.

    It was a shame to have to do something so horrible in the kitchen, but at the same time the place made it better. Carefully, she hauled the parcel out of her pyjama bottoms and laid it on the floor in front of the Aga.

It wasn’t easy being younger than everyone else in her class at school as half the time she didn’t understand what the other girls were talking about, especially things about ‘boyfriends’.

    On her first day at senior school, she saw a sign in the lavatories that she didn’t understand.

     ‘Please do not put sanitary towels down the toilets,’ it said. ‘Use the bins provided.’

    ‘What are sanitary towels?’ she asked Anthea who’d been at junior school with her.

    ‘Don’t you know?’ giggled her friend.

    Why for that matter was the school using a word like ‘toilet’? Her mother would have had a fit if she'd known. It was one of those words like 'pardon' and serviette' that made her look as if the cat had been sick. It was all so confusing. Perhaps it was because her new school was a grammar school, not the private girls’ boarding school where her mother had gone and for which Jane had been ‘put down’ at birth.
    Her parents had made the decision about the school.

    ‘It’ll be so nice having you at home where we can keep an eye on you,’ said her mother.

    ‘And we’ll save so much money,’ said her father.

    Later in the year, the girls in her class were summoned in small groups to the study of the Religious Education teacher and shown diagrams of the reproductive organs of rabbits. In spite of this, things slowly started to make sense. Nevertheless, it was horrible changing for games and being the only girl not yet wearing a bra, even if she was at least as tall as all the others.

    So, when she first discovered blood on her knickers (the white ones which she wore underneath the regulation brown ones), she was thrilled. Now she too could pick at spots in the cloakroom mirrors and complain about it being ‘that time of the month’. She too could walk around clutching her stomach and avoid swimming.

    She rushed into her parents’ rooms where her mother was putting away clothes to tell her the good news. Her mother had tried to tell her the ‘facts of life’ one day but both of them had been so embarrassed that Jane had hurriedly said that she’d learnt all about them at school, even though there were lots of questions she would have liked to ask.

     Her mother said nothing, instead rummaging in a cupboard and bringing out some pieces of greying elastic with buttons on them and a packet of big white pads.

    ‘You fix your STs –’ she waved the packet - ‘to this -’ she waved the elastic contraption.

    Jane went back to her room and put them on. It was like wearing a nappy. She couldn’t walk properly and she couldn’t put her trousers on over them.

    After a while the pad became damp as if she’d peed herself. She wondered how often you changed the pads. When the blood came through the other side, she decided.

    Because of the notice at school she knew not to put the used pads – the ‘STs’ as her mother called them - down the lavatory so instead she wrapped them in newspaper and put them in the wastepaper basket in her bedroom.

    A few days later her mother beckoned her. She was holding the newspaper-wrapped packages. Some of the blood had seeped through and Jane could smell it from where she stood.

    ‘Mrs Greenaway found these when she was cleaning your room,’ she said.

    Mrs Greenaway lived in the flat above the stables with her husband the gardener. She was always going through Jane’s things and complaining about her.

    ‘It was very unpleasant for her,’ continued her mother. ‘Don’t put your STs in the wastepaper basket. Burn them in the Aga.’

As this was her second time, Jane knew more or less what to do. It had been much worse the first time as all she had to go on was her memory of what her mother did every morning when she cleared the Aga of ash and filled it with fresh ‘coke’.

    So she set to straight away. First she lifted the cover of the hot plate and propped it open against the back wall. It was heavy and she had to stand on tiptoes to reach and she was terrified of it crashing back down again on to her arm. The heat from the plate made the hair on her arms stand on end.

    Next she took the metal hook from its rack. It was longer than her arm and she struggled to manipulate it into the handle of the hefty stone bung in the centre of the hotplate. Finally it caught and she started levering out the bung. It came out with a rush, flames shot out of the hole, the Aga roared like a volcano and Jane jerked backwards, dropping both bung and metal hook. They rolled over the quarry-tiled floor with a clang that seemed never to end.

   She stopped breathing. Her palms broke out in sweat. She strained her ears for any sound of movement upstairs.

    At last the ringing stopped. No one came.

    One by one she picked the bloody packages off the floor and threw them into the flaming hole. She couldn’t wait to be rid of them but there were too many so they bulged out of the top. She’d have to let the bottom ones burn down so that she could poke the rest in properly. Then she’d have to stay and make sure they all caught fire and turned to ash. She couldn’t bear to leave any evidence for her mother to find in the morning.

    She pulled up the kitchen stool and sat down to wait.

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