She was telling us, though she couldn’t bring herself to say the word, that little Sammy was pregnant!

And when she finished, you know what those bitches did?

They cut off Sammy’s hair.

She had this lovely red hair, just like yours. That’s how I knew you soon as I saw you. On the boat it had been almost as long as yours. At St. Rum’s we all had our hair cut shorter, but Sammy’s was still a sight worth seeing. Now they set about her, two or three of them with garden shears, and they hacked and hacked till you could see the white skin among the stubble, only in places it wasn’t white but red ’cos they’d stabbed right through and drawn blood.

Sammy just stood there, tears and blood streaming down her face, but she didn’t utter a sound, till finally they were done. Then they marched her out and that was the last any of us saw or heard of Sammy.

So what happened to her? She didn’t look in any state to make it through to the next day, but you being here means she must have done. I still see her in my nightmares after all these years, standing there quietly weeping while her red locks drifted to the floor like autumn leaves around her.

What happened to her, Sam? What happened?

Betty McKillop had chain-smoked as she talked, lighting one cigarette from another and throwing the butts into the grate. Now she threw the last one, followed by the empty packet, and leaned forward to look Sam right in the face.

“I don’t know,” said Sam. “I don’t know what happened, except she died having my father. He got adopted, grew up, got married, had me.”

She spoke quickly, plainly. That was her story, that was all she had to tell. She looked at the older woman and saw her eyes were brimming with tears. Then her arms reached out offering to embrace her, but fell back as Sam sat stiff and upright, her face stony. There would be a time for grief, for anger. But for the moment she needed to keep her wits about her. There were things here that didn’t add up. What she wanted was information not consolation.

“How long did all this take?” she said. “I mean, how long had you been at St. Rumbald’s before they assaulted my grandmother?”

“I can’t be exact. Time didn’t mean much there. Sometimes an hour could seem like a week.”

“You must have some idea,” said Sam impatiently. “A year? Longer? It had to be a year at least, didn’t it?”

Betty looked at her in surprise.

“Hell no,” she said. “Nothing like that. This all happened in the first few months we were there.”

The statement was so self-evidently wrong that for a shocked second it brought everything else Betty had told her into doubt. But why invent a story like that? No, this had to be a simple misunderstanding.

“But that doesn’t compute,” said Sam, shaking her head. “My pa was born in September the year after you arrived. Why should those bastard nuns lie about that? So Sammy got pregnant a few months after she arrived. Pa reckons it was a priest. I bet those nuns didn’t let any other men get close to you. I bet they kept you closer than a duck’s arse.”

“You’re right there, dear,” said the woman, drying her eyes and blowing her nose. “Getting knocked up at St. Rum’s, you’d have had to do it on the wing, like a swallow. Some of the nuns had roving hands and some of the priests too, from what I heard. But I never heard of anyone going the full hog. Anyway, I’m sorry, but you’ve got things mixed up. Like I said, we’d only been there a few months when they savaged little Sammy’s head, may they spend hell with redhot skewers up their backsides. No, she must have been pregnant already when I met her on the boat. That’s why she was so sick, I see that now.”

Sam shook her head again, this time as much in desperation as denial.

“No, it’s you who’s getting mixed up,” she insisted. “Pa was born in September 1961, I’ve seen the certificate. And your ship sailed from Liverpool in the spring of 1960 – ”

“Spring 1960?” Betty McKillop laughed. “Who told you that? Gracie, was it? I bet it was Gracie!”

“Yes. And she was so positive about it. Elvis was top of the charts with ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’, and Kennedy became president that year. She remembers seeing it on television, and that was definitely 1960, I checked it out.”

“Now just hold on there,” interrupted Betty. “This is my life you’re trying to tell me about, remember…”

Then she paused, let out an exasperated laugh and said, “Hang about, I think I see what’s happened. Kennedy, you say? Yeah, it was 1960 when he got elected. November 1960. But what Gracie would have seen was his inauguration in January 1961. We all did, at the orphanage in Liverpool. Generally those nuns kept the telly to themselves but this was special, a good Roman Catholic taking the oath as president, next best thing to getting a new Pope. So we were all wheeled in to watch and give thanks. As for Elvis, I bet if you check that song, it came out in ’61, not ’60.”

“But she was so sure,” said Sam, thoroughly bewildered. “She said she was born in 1950 and she was ten when she came to Australia.”

“She was ten when she got on the boat, all right,” said Betty. “But she’d turned eleven by the time we landed. Not that we had birthday parties, anything like that. No, it was hard for any of us to keep track, even if you had a mind for it. We lost a whole summer on that trip. But it was definitely 1961. Poor Gracie. Don’t be too hard on her. We all need to find our own way to deal with things, and from the sound of it Gracie’s way was just to get even vaguer about things than she was when I knew her.”

“She wasn’t so vague she didn’t remember about Sammy,” protested Sam, still reluctant to accept this radical rearrangement of all her timings.

“No, but then the combination of your hair and your name is a pretty strong nudge! Look, dear, I don’t know if it matters, but one thing you can be sure of is that poor little Sammy was definitely already knocked up when she got on the boat. Them nuns at St. Rum’s didn’t do a lot for us, but they certainly kept us virtuous.”

Sam’s face registered shock and bewilderment as she tried to take in this new information. Betty regarded her with shrewd compassion and leaned forward to pat her knee.

“Don’t take it so hard, dear,” she said. “Does it really matter? It was a long time ago and little Sammy’s dead. At least it means your grandfather wasn’t one of them bastard priests. As to who the bastard really was, some things you’re better off not knowing. What my mum told me about my father didn’t make me want to rush off and find the rotten bugger even if he is still alive, which don’t seem likely.”

She watched Sam as she spoke and she could see her words were falling on deaf ears.

She leaned forward again and said, “Listen, Sam, if you’re really determined to find out more about her, you should talk to the people at the Trust. They know the ropes. They’ll keep you straight. And even if they can’t help you find out any more, they understand how important it is to help you let go.”

With a great effort Sam got herself together. Now it was more important than ever that she asked the right questions, set out the right equations.

“Yes, thank you very much. I’ll remember that,” she said. “Just one thing more, Betty. That bit of paper with her name on it – Gracie thought there was an address on it too. She tried to remember but all she could come up with was that the town name ended in thwaite, and she wasn’t too sure about that.”

“No?” Betty laughed. “Well, for once, Gracie got it right. Nowhere I’d ever heard of. Illthwaite, that was it. In Cumberland.”

“ Cumberland? That’s the same as Cumbria, right? Was that on the paper too?”

“I don’t recollect. I don’t think so. Sam Flood, the Vicarage, Illthwaite, is what I remember.”