Free Rosa's Child by Jeremy Josephs

of America, struggling with a hectic schedule, but the Reverend still found time to write a series of letters to Grace. In these he reverted to his original tactic, repeatedly renewing his plea to his daughter to end her relationship with David. Steadfastly she refused. The letters were put aside and ignored. Finally, it seemed, Grace was breaking free.
    One day soon after her father's return from his preaching tour, Grace arrived home from the Girl Crusaders Union to find her mother looking extremely pale and shaken. Had something happened to Eunice, she wondered. It had seemed likely for some time now.
    'Daddy is very ill,' Irene explained, her tone indicating the gravity of the situation. Here was the Reverend's final card. And as it turned out, he had played it rather shrewdly. Daddy's illness was, in fact, self-inflicted. The Reverend had attempted suicide - still an indictable offence in the 1950s -by taking an overdose of drugs. Having failed, he was admitted to a clinic in Sussex, where he was diagnosed as suffering from a nervous breakdown. He had returned from America exhausted.
    When Grace walked into her father's room at the clinic on a hot summer's day, wearing a favourite turquoise dress, she saw a man who looked vacant and unexpressive, utterly stripped of his usual charisma and air of authority. Somehow he managed to summon up the energy to utter a few words. Manipulative to the end, he grasped Grace's hand and whispered a plea she had heard many times before.
    'You won't leave me, will you?'
    'Of course not, Daddy,' she replied without hesitation.
    Here, at last, were the words the Reverend had been waiting to hear. They proved to be far more healing than the electroconvulsive therapy that the clinic was beginning to administer to the preacher. Not so ill that he could not decipher a coded message, he knew that Grace was telling him, in her own way, that she was prepared to end the relationship that had caused him so much pain. For her part, Grace had decided that this was the least she could do, for was it not pitiful to see her father suffering so?
    Edward Mann had got his own way once again. But the stakes had been high: it had been essential for his very survival to see that young man off. And now, at last, his sabotage had worked. Within six weeks of Grace's visit he had discharged himself from the clinic. The medical staff expressed dismay at his departure, which they considered premature, for he had not completed the course of treatment prescribed for him. They had no way of knowing that he had already received his cure.
    This dramatic turn of events convinced David of what he had long suspected: his pursuit of Grace was futile. Always strange towards him, the Reverend's behaviour had now made it impossible for David to have a normal relationship with his daughter. For her part, Grace, wrenched away from her first love, knew that the time had come to leave home. She had made up her mind to embark on a career in nursing, and enrolled on a three-year training course at the Oldchurch Hospital in Romford, Essex. The decision astounded her parents, who were not slow to point out that there had been little evidence of Grace's caring instincts in her dealings with Eunice. Surely, they argued, if she was genuinely interested in nursing, then who better to care for than her twin sister. In any case, Irene pleaded, she needed Grace to help her care for her sister. It was true that Eunice, still clinging doggedly to life, remained in desperate need of full-time care. Yet, anguished as she was by Eunice's plight, Grace felt that if she did not leave home and start to live her own life she would die too - in mind if not in body. It felt like a life for a life.
    Clearly the Manns had failed to grasp Grace's real motivation, and she was not about to spell it out for them. What she wanted above all else was to get away from their suffocating grip, particularly that of her father. She had thought that a nursing career