Telling tales of Victorian children

Children of Charles Dickens by Daniel Maclise, 1841, DH743 © Charles Dickens Museum. Purchased with support from the Art Fund. 

These stories have been written by Rosa Chalfen and local community groups - Mosaic LGBT Young Person’s Trust and St Luke’s Community Centre. This project has been funded by the University of Hertfordshire Coproduction Award.

Naked I Will Depart

This is what she remembers.

A name and a number that were not hers. Ellen Waters—20438. Even the sound of them was empty of meaning.

She remembers the long dormitory with its winged ceiling and a tumble of identically dressed girl in the icy courtyard, a host of hungry brown sparrows fighting for scraps.

She remembers the journey. The confusion of Dover, the steam ship rising out of the water like a great beast, roaring smoke from its nostrils. She stood on the deck and watched the land slide away, fading into nothing so quickly that she wondered if it was ever real.

They were waiting for her in the wooden house. Doors, windows, thrown open in defiance of the heat. Every structure in Sanremo seemed fragile, and the pastel-coloured buildings could not disguise the fact that the whole town was poised to crumble into the sea at any moment.

The wife too looked breakable, as if she had taken on the strange posture of the place. She was ill—that’s why they’d moved to Italy, he told her, for the clean sea air.

But it was in vain. The disinfected smell of death was already in the house. Within the year the first wife had been replaced by another.

She remembers opening the window in the small attic room and looking out. A clattering of rooves spilled down onto the bay, where the immense mirrored sea glinted back at her. The hills embraced her with their broad shoulders, and she slept in the crook of their arms.

It was the fifth summer she was there, and he was slumped in the armchair by the back doors when she came in. The sun fell through the curtains and caught the whisky in his glass, casting a thousand points of amber light. She could not stop looking at his face, which seemed older suddenly, the tanned skin hanging in strange shapes. He was crying in the way of a person who does not know how cry. Great heaving sobs from the centre of his chest like paper being wrenched in two.

The second wife had died that winter. Perhaps he was crying because he believed what the locals said about him. That the house was cursed. That everything he touched turned to dust.

She remembers that the house was cool but the pressure of the heat was ever present, you could feel it like a ghost at the door, knocking to come in.

His tears on her lips were salty. How can saltwater come from a person, she thought, as if the sea has taken hold inside of them.

That summer, she remembers only fragments. White sheets hanging crookedly from clothes lines. The red mouths of pitted cherries and the scrape of their stones. The far-off sound of bells chiming on the necks of mules.

She wondered then if desire was an illness that was contained in her cells, passed down from mother to daughter.

When she knew she was pregnant, she left in the night, her room stripped and barren as if no one had ever lived there. In a way, no one ever had. Ellen Waters, 20438, had lived there—a name, a number, a person who did not exist.

Later he told her about the day she came back. He was on the terrace, looking out towards the sea. As if he was waiting. Waiting for what? he had thought to himself. But he could not answer.

He told her that he was looking out, tendrils of sun reaching down towards his burnt neck, and contemplating the two-toned colour of the ocean. He must have been thinking of God, about how he had created all this beauty in a casual manner, because he remembered suddenly a line from long ago school masses in a freezing chapel. Something from Leviticus, he thought.

Naked I came from my mother’s womb,

and naked I will depart.

He had a strange sensation then of something in the house clicking into place. He suddenly became aware that there was a wound in a deep part of his body, some vital thing that had been missing for a long time.

Then he heard her on the stairs.

By Rosa Chalfen