JANE

JANE Chapter One: Journey

JANE

Chapter One

Journey

     I have always wanted to visit the South of England.  In my dreams I imagined one day I would live near the sea. Water is transient yet eternal. Sometimes I think my existence at Thornton Hall was just a mirage, an excuse to visit the ocean. 

     The day my aunt handed me over to Social Services, I suspected life was not meant to be easy. I was only eight. Afterwards, I endured a series of foster homes and finally an expensive school paid for by my unknown benefactor. I ended up flung out onto a busy street at eighteen, wearing last year's jeans and carrying every possession I owned on my back. I knew I had to get out of London: the city; the congested streets; the strangers moving past me as if I was air; the sheer bustle, scope and majesty of the place would swamp me if I didn't. 

    I need to go somewhere solitary, I thought, somewhere safe. 

    I'd started searching the internet a few weeks before my final exams and just after *

I'd completed my university interviews. If I got in (and my final marks suggested I would), I'd still have more than three months (and nowhere to live) before classes started. I'd applied to at least six different employment agencies for a job but I had few practical skills. My benefactor had paid for me to have a proper education at an exclusive school in South Kensington. Lockwood was filled with rich, abandoned girls - girls who rated you on looks and pulling power and girls who committed various minor classroom crimes, then pointed at you for the blame. The students in their checked uniforms were rich girls from good families, girls who hated povvies (short for poverty stricken ones). Girls like me. Let's just say, I did not fit in, but I made the most of the experience. My expensive education and ability to speak French were what led me to Thornton Hall and the job of caring for six-year-old Sophie Varens.  

    Now that I'm eighteen and officially an adult, solid work is hard to find. I see endless advertisements for Girls Wanted and Dance Clubs. It makes my stomach churn when I realize that no matter how hard I study, the only opportunities for me to earn a full salary without a university degree can be found in the final classified pages of a free newspaper.  

     I feel older than my years. You may wonder how that is possible, but let's face it, after the kind of life I've led already, it is. I'm finished with Lockwood School and grateful for my thorough knowledge of English, French, History, Music and

Mathematics. I got very high marks in all my subjects but I've learnt already that finishing school in the middle of a recession was not the wisest choice – as if I had one. Every advertisement screams experience. Which kind would they like? 

   Would they like the experience of being abandoned by my birth mother on my aunt's doorstep, aged two? Being fostered out six years later because my aunt disliked me? Realizing I'd never be adopted and have a real family because my mother wouldn't sign the release forms? I was too old by then to be anyone's first choice. This led me to eight different foster homes in as many years. 

     Yes, I've had quite an education.  And yet, I have no contact with my birth parents but I'm not bitter. I have raised myself, in many ways, and I do not believe I have done a bad job. It is true, my expectations for happiness are not high but for the first time, I feel free and that is a joy in and of itself. 

     A few days after I'd finished school I found work.  The job was with an older couple who worked in the City, in banking. The father, a dour accountant, had taken the morning off to show me his three-year-old's routine. He was fighting with his wife and she had stormed out. This should have been my warning. During nap time, the father tried to kiss me and when I pulled away, he rang my agency and said I couldn't cope with the demands of the position. He was a valuable client, so they didn't want to hear my side of the story.