Free Father Unknown by Lesley Pearse

new baby was born she found even more to grumble about. Violet was a plain child with lank, mousy hair, crooked teeth and a slight cast in one eye, and it was she who took the brunt of her mother’s misery, unable even to go to school regularly as she was kept at home to help with the younger children. As a result she was labelled ‘slow’ because she could barely read or write.
    At fourteen she was packed off to Plymouth to work as a live-in kitchen maid in a hotel. The work was hard, but she was well fed for the first time in her life, didn’t have to share a bed with anyone and no longer had to listen to her mother’s complaints. Plymouth, with its naval dockyard, big shops and cinemas, was a great deal more exciting than Helston, so despite feeling she’d been cast off from her family, overall she felt she’d got a good deal.
    For three years, however, she could only view the city’s attractions from a distance, like a child looking into a toy-shop window, for she had no friends to explore it with. The other girls she worked with were all older, quicker, prettier, and had more personality than she did, and she was too timid even to try to make friends with any of them.
    Everything changed though when she was seventeen and war broke out. The more sophisticated older girls left the hotel for more promising war work, and other young country girls more like Violet took their places. Emboldened by suddenly finding herself one or two rungs ahead of them up the ladder of experience, she was able to overcome her timidity and before long she was joining them in going to dances on her evenings off.
    Violet felt as though she’d come out of a cocoon to find herself putting on a pretty frock and makeup and being swirled around in a man’s arms under glittering lights. Even though she hadn’t metamorphosed into anything approaching a beauty, she appeared to have something special because she was always in demand with the sailors. It never occurred to her that this popularity was purely due to the shortage of available girls, or that the men might be telling her they loved her in order to get her into bed. She believed it when they said they’d write and come back for her, and when no letter arrived she comforted herself with a new man, always convinced that this time it would end in marriage.
    By the time the war ended in 1945 she was twenty-three and disillusioned. Dozens of girls she’d worked with over the years had left to get married, or were engaged. The few that weren’t had moved on to better jobs, but Violet still worked in the kitchen, and she was growing fat now as well as being plain. Yet the real horror was finally to realize she had spent the war being used by men. She had a reputation for being easy, and they laughed at her behind her back.
    Times had been hard during the war with the bombing, the food rationing and the shortages of everything, though the hotel had always been bustling with the service wives, officers and businessmen who came to stay there. But by the New Year of ‘46 it was growing alarmingly quiet – it was apparent that few people had any desire to stay in a city-centre hotel, especially one which had grown very shabby.
    Violet was one of the first of the staff to be given notice, despite her being one of the most long-standing and reliable girls. Hurt and unable to go home to Helston, she took a series of badly paid jobs in cafés and restaurants. After six months of utter misery, working like a slave by day and going home to a lonely room at night, she decided Plymouth had nothing to offer her, and took the train to Falmouth to try her luck there.
    She felt better back in Cornwall. There weren’t the flocks of attractive and lively single girls there had been in Plymouth to remind her of her shortcomings, and her easy reputation had been left behind there too. After the madness of war, families wanted holidays somewhere pretty and quaint, so the hotels and pubs were thriving and