The Baby Laundry for Unmarried Mothers

by Angela Patrick

  The Baby Laundry for Unmarried Mothers

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2012

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © Angela Patrick with Lynne Barrett-Lee, 2012

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Angela Patrick and Lynne Barrett-Lee to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  1st Floor

  222 Gray’s Inn Road

  London WC1X 8HB

  www.simonandschuster.co.uk

  Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney

  Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-1-84983-490-2

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-84983-491-9

  Typeset in Fournier by M Rules

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  While this book endeavours to give a faithful account of the author’s experiences, some names, places and dates have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved and in order to best represent the story.

  For my son

  Contents

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  PART TWO

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  PART THREE

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Epilogue

  To My Son

  Acknowledgements

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  The Swinging Sixties. It’s funny people still call them that and like to hang on to the rose-tinted notion that it was the decade to end all decades – the ‘sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll’ one. It was the decade of which it was famously said that if you could remember anything about it, you weren’t really there. But for me, and many like me, that notion didn’t hold true: I was there, and I remember it all too well.

  February 1963

  His name was Peter and for a time I was captivated by him.

  He wasn’t especially tall – around five foot ten, no more than that; not much taller than me, in fact, and I liked to wear high heels – but he was solidly built, powerful. He looked like he could take care of himself. And I could imagine him taking care of me, too.

  ‘Susan Maughan,’ he was saying to me now. ‘That’s who I’ve just realised you remind me of – Susan Maughan.’

  I was bending down, trying to wriggle my feet out of my black patent high heels, while he held my drink for me. ‘Who?’ I said, rising.

  ‘Susan Maughan,’ he said again. ‘And do you ever last a whole evening without taking off your shoes?’

  I considered his question: not very often was the answer. I liked the extra height but I also liked dancing, and you couldn’t dance in winkle-pickers with high stiletto heels – not without suffering the consequences. I knew that well, because the night I’d met Peter at the Ilford Palais, a favourite haunt of mine, I’d danced the night away and definitely suffered the next morning.

  We were having a terrible, bitter winter in both temperature and duration – it was already being flagged up as the worst since just after the war. The trudge back home through the snow from Rayleigh station in Essex hadn’t helped my aching feet. Numb with cold in my just-to-the-knee skirt, my legs and feet blue and mottled, I hadn’t realised just how bad my blisters were. I hobbled around painfully for days afterwards.

  It was still freezing a fortnight later. Though much of the snow had gone, there were still dirty piles of it on the pavements. With ice now lying in treacherous sheets everywhere the snow had been, going out for the evening was something of an endurance test – not that I cared. I was nineteen and having the best time imaginable: I had my job in the City, I’d got a great bunch of friends and now I had a new boyfriend too.

  ‘I’m taking them off so we can dance, silly,’ I told him, as he passed me back my drink. I took a sip from it and grimaced. It tasted horrible. It was a snowball, haphazardly mixed, and much too strong for me. I couldn’t drink it, but I didn’t need it and wouldn’t finish it, I decided. I put it down again, with exaggerated care, on a low corner table. I had to nudge an overflowing glass ashtray out of the way to make room for it.

  ‘Susan Maughan?’ I said incredulously. ‘I don’t look anything like Susan Maughan!’ Susan Maughan sang ‘Bobby’s Girl’, and seemed to be everywhere. She wore her eyeliner a bit like I did, but that, to my mind, was where our similarities ended.

  Someone had put ‘Losing You’, by Brenda Lee, on the record player. ‘Anyway,’ I said, looking up at him, if only slightly. ‘Are we dancing or aren’t we?’

  He slipped an arm around my waist and kicked my shoes under the table for me. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, reeling me in to him. ‘We are.’

  The party was at the house of a friend of a friend of Peter’s. I didn’t know which friend or which friend of that friend it was, but it was in Loughton, in Essex, in an unremarkable suburban semi. As was almost invariably the case with house parties, the parents of the friend of the friend were away. Almost all of us would be staying until the morning. Few boys had cars back then, girls almost never drove, and there was practically nothing in the way of public transport late at night. So I’d be staying over, even though officially (as far as my mother was concerned, anyway) I was staying at my friend Sandra’s.

  It had been a busy night. After work, we’d gone to another favourite haunt, a new mocha bar in Leicester Square, which Sandra and I loved. It was run by a family of ebullient Italians, who made amazing cakes and gateaux to go with their frothy coffee. They had a jukebox, too, which made the place something of a draw. We’d stayed for an hour, waiting for Peter and his mates to arrive, chatting and listening to the music: Cliff Richard and the Shadows, the Beach Boys, Frank Ifield, as well as a brilliant new band everyone was talking about called The Beatles, who’d just brought out their first record. And then Peter had arrived and told us about the house party. You never turned down a chance to go to a house party.

  It had been a good one, too, so far. It was around eleven by now and we were both a bit tipsy. Though I was swaying along with the music, I might have been swaying anyway. I’d barely eaten since the cake earlier, my stomach too full of impossible-to-quell butterflies to make room for the Scotch eggs and sandwiches and bowls of peanuts that someone had laid out in the kitchen.

  I’d been seeing Peter for just over a fortnight. We’d met several times before, but now we were officially a couple, and I was still slightly reeling from the knowledge that someone I liked so much seemed keen on me too. I’d been in love just once, the previous year, and the boy had been the one to end it. I’d been inconsolable, so broken-hearted that I thought I’d never get over it. I’d felt unlovable for so long.

  But no more, it seemed. Peter and I had been for a drink and to the pictures – to see the recently released and brilliant Summer Holiday, starring Cliff Richard �
� and, last weekend, had gone back together to the Ilford Palais, where hanging off the arm of such a good-looking guy had been the most thrilling thing I’d felt in a long time.

  My late father, who was ex-army and a real stickler for detail, would have approved of Peter. He was so smart, such a stylish dresser, and always beautifully turned out. It may be superficial, but one thing I seemed to have inherited from my father was a sense that such details did matter in a man. ‘You can tell a lot about the inside,’ he would say, ‘from what’s outside.’ I knew Peter would definitely have passed muster.

  Even without my father there to approve of him, I really liked him, and felt a delicious shiver run through me every time our eyes met. We’d come to the party as a group, but now the group had disappeared, and what might happen next, I didn’t know.

  ‘It’s your hair,’ he whispered as we made repeated slow rotations in time to the music, the view of the wallpaper, violently hued and patterned (presumably to compete with the carpet), forcing me to close my eyes to escape the glare.

  ‘What about it?’ I said, opening them again, dimly aware that except for one other smooching couple and Brenda Lee we were alone.

  ‘You wear yours just like she does. You know – all big and flicky.’

  ‘Not intentionally,’ I answered. Even though I sort of did sometimes, but not quite: mine was longer and that detail seemed to matter. How had he not noticed?

  He must have sensed that there was something a bit indignant in the way I said this, because he pulled back then and pretended to frown. His eyes were dark and mesmerising. They were the most attractive thing about him – that and his Mediterranean good looks and his smile. ‘Sorry,’ he said, turning the frown into a smile for me now. ‘I’ll rephrase that: I meant that she tries to wear hers a bit like yours. Though she’s obviously not as pretty . . .’

  He came close again, grinning boyishly at his unsubtle attempt at flattery. Then he kissed me, and kept kissing me till the record ended. No one came and replaced it with Susan Maughan or anyone else. It just crackled on, round and round the turntable, the stylus quietly talking to itself. More time passed. More revolutions of the little living room. More kissing. Then his mouth was at my ear again. ‘Shall we go upstairs?’

  I wasn’t drunk. I wasn’t gripped by a fierce, irresistible longing, but I did feel attracted to him. I was sweet on him. I enjoyed being his girlfriend. I adored that he seemed to be so taken with me. He was a ‘catch’, to use the parlance: desirable, charming. He was extremely charming, and I knew I was being charmed by him tonight. As a consequence, I was a little out of my depth, and aware of it – though not in a frightened way – but it didn’t seem to matter. The voice telling me to keep my head was present, but I was comfortable ignoring it – for the moment, at least. It wasn’t as if I was going to go all the way with him, however hard he might try to charm me, was it? Even though it seemed everyone else did it these days.

  Glancing around the living room, its gloomy lighting making a blur of all the hard edges of my thinking, I realised the other couple, whom I didn’t know, had disappeared. There was a low throb of voices coming from the kitchen, but they were male. I also realised I hadn’t seen Sandra in a while, but that didn’t surprise me: I vaguely remembered she’d seemed to be getting on well with a boy she’d confessed to having her eye on for some time.

  It was as if the party had ground to a halt without us noticing. Or, rather, it had imperceptibly become another sort of party – one in which everyone seemed to have something other than dancing on their minds.

  ‘Hmm?’ said Peter, nuzzling my neck. ‘C’mon. Let’s go up, yeah?’

  I left my shoes where they were and let him lead me up the stairs.

  Chapter Two

  September 1963

  ‘This is your stop, love,’ the woman sitting on the bench seat beside me whispered. ‘And that’s the place,’ she added, pointing. ‘See it? That’s the convent, that is. That big place over there.’

  It was mid-afternoon on a warm autumnal weekday, and I was struggling with two things as I alighted from the bus: the first was my battered suitcase, which resisted me as I struggled to wrench it from under the stairwell, and the second was the knowledge that my travelling companion was able not only to point out which bus stop I needed, but also knew where I was going and why. I was seven months pregnant.

  I was probably pink from the shame – how had she known that was where I was going? – but also hot, much too hot, in my heavy duster coat. It was burnt orange in colour and the height of current fashion, as it was in a style Doris Day often wore in her films. It had a boat neck and was fastened by two oversized buttons; A-line in shape, it flared to the knee. But for all its fashionable styling, it was a cruel irony that it had been bought for one purpose: to hide the evidence of my terrible secret.

  My new temporary home rose to greet me as I walked wearily from the bus stop, my great size, coupled with the heat, sapping what little energy I had. I’d been given directions and the address of my destination, and the paper on which I’d scribbled them was crumpled in my free hand. I felt a crumb of comfort on arriving at last. At least here, or so I thought, I would be free of the subterfuge of the past few months. At least here I would no longer have to hide or lie. At least here I would no longer have to force my body into a tight rubber corset so the growing bulge of my baby didn’t give me away.

  But as I dragged my case awkwardly up the furrows of the thickly gravelled drive, those feelings were soon replaced with a sense of anxiety and foreboding. With its ugly buildings, precisely manicured lawns and towering conifers, the Loreto Convent Mother and Baby Home for Unmarried Mothers didn’t look like a place in which comfort would be found. In fact, it looked every bit as grim and forbidding as its name; its imposing brick façade and Victorian sash windows suggesting that nothing but unhappiness lay within.

  My ears were already straining for sounds of life beyond the heavy front door, for routine everyday sounds that might set my fears to rest, but the silence was complete. I felt light headed and frightened. I wanted nothing more passionately than to run away, but there was nowhere to run. I could see a distortion of my own anguished face in the shiny brass knocker. As I stood there, the only sound that of incongruous birdsong, I knew exactly what sort of welcome to expect. I had brought shame on myself, on my family and on the Catholic Church; the nuns who were to care for me therefore had another, more important job: to see to it that I atoned for my sins.

  Ignoring the knocker in favour of the brass bell set into the doorframe, I pushed the button with my finger and waited, my heart in my mouth. It seemed a long time before I could hear the muffled sound of approaching footsteps, followed by a latch being turned. The door opened to reveal a large entrance hall with a polished wooden floor, in the middle of which rose a staircase. Beyond that, the increasingly dim vista revealed several panelled doors, which presumably led to other parts of the house.

  Directly before me stood a nun: she was tall, though slightly stooped, and dressed in a full-length black habit. A perfect oval of wizened face, shielded by metal-rimmed glasses, sat encircled by a pristine white wimple. There was no smile of greeting, no gesture of welcome, just a scowl of displeasure and irritation.

  ‘Yes?’ she said. She looked as if she’d lived for about seventy years, and had the demeanour of someone who’d found little to smile about during any of them. There was nothing remotely grandmotherly about her.

  I slipped my piece of paper, now damp and limp, back into my coat pocket. ‘I’m Angela Brown,’ I explained. ‘I believe you’re expecting me?’

  The nun glanced towards my stomach, and then nodded without smiling. ‘I’m Sister Teresa,’ she said shortly. ‘Come inside.’ The frost in her voice was almost palpable, a sharp and chilly tremor cutting through the still September air. I lowered my eyes as I pulled my suitcase over the threshold, acutely aware of her penetrating and disapproving gaze.

  The door shut, and a sepulchr
al gloominess descended as she had me follow her through one of the panelled doors off the hallway into a high-ceilinged room. It was sparsely furnished, with a large oak desk and chair in the centre and a cabinet containing books and several statues. I couldn’t make out any of the titles, but I imagined the books would be religious. I certainly recognised the statues, good Catholic girl that I was: they were of the Child of Prague and St Anthony.

  Her habit swishing audibly, Sister Teresa strode over to the desk, where a stern-faced nun sat; the wall behind her held a picture of the Sacred Heart. As with everything else in the room – human or otherwise – it seemed to be there specifically to judge me.

  ‘Reverend Mother, this is Angela Brown,’ Sister Teresa announced respectfully. Reverend Mother began reading from a collection of papers while I stood silently, my case parked beside me, on the edge of a worn patterned rug. I had spent my entire school life in the company of nuns, and I felt like I was back at school now – only this was so much worse.

  Finally she raised her head and addressed me. ‘Can you confirm your name?’ she asked crisply. ‘And your baby’s due date?’

  I did, and was surprised to find my voice had all but disappeared on the long bus journey. I cleared my throat. She glared.

  ‘And I also need to know the name of the person we should contact in case of emergency,’ she continued. ‘Will that be your mother, Mrs Phillips?’

  ‘Yes,’ I confirmed, my voice still small. ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘Right,’ she said, closing the file and fixing me with another disapproving look. ‘Now that’s done, Sister Teresa will take you straight up to your room. You’ll be sharing with Mary, another expectant mother.’ She stood up now. ‘She has a due date close to yours,’ she finished. ‘Now come along.’

  I followed her along a passage to another, smaller staircase, struggling now with my heavy case. I didn’t need to worry about keeping up: Sister Teresa, for all her presence, was actually quite frail and was finding the stairs as challenging as I was. After climbing two flights and walking single file along a thin upstairs passage to the very end, we reached the door to the room in question.