The Baby Laundry for Unmarried Mothers

by Angela Patrick

  The room was tiny – no bigger than twelve feet by ten – and furnished very sparsely. It held two hospital-style beds, each of which had a hospital-style locker, in which it was clear we’d need to keep all our possessions. Except for a chipped washbasin under a sash window framed by faded curtains and a wooden chair, there was nothing else in the room.

  Nothing, that is, bar a delicate-looking girl, who had fair hair and slightly protruding front teeth. She’d been sitting on the left-hand bed, writing a letter, but had leapt to her feet, startled, as we entered. Though smiling shyly at me, she looked flustered, which wasn’t surprising: Sister Teresa hadn’t announced our arrival. As I would soon find out, the nuns never knocked.

  ‘Mary, this is Angela Brown,’ Sister Teresa explained. Then, to me, ‘Angela, this is Mary Bourke. You two will be sharing a room until your babies are delivered.’

  What would happen after that, she didn’t say. She moved aside to let me pass her and enter the room properly. I smelt dampness. Mary smiled again and gestured towards the other, empty bed. She was petite, and wore a pinafore-style dress, underneath which was a hand-knitted jumper. In contrast to my intentionally well-disguised bump, hers, to my eye, looked enormous. What a relief it would be, I decided on seeing it, to give my own poor, squashed baby some room to move about. I’d been so fearful for so long about the damage I might be doing that when the baby had first kicked me, as well as a wave of profound relief, I felt it might have been in angry protest.

  ‘Now, Mary,’ Sister Teresa continued, in a voice that, though directed at Mary, was also designed to make it clear to me that I mustn’t assume she was as frail as she appeared. It occurred to me that my new roommate probably knew it already. ‘I’d be grateful if you could kindly show Angela the bathroom, and familiarise her with the timetable of our daily routine here. Once you’re done, and Angela has unpacked her belongings, will you please bring her back down, so I can show her the work she’ll be doing while she’s here.’

  She turned to me then. ‘You’ll find me in the milk kitchen, which is where you’ll be working. Mary will be able to show you where that is.’

  I’d never heard of a milk kitchen before, and immediately an image of a cattle stall, complete with a row of placid Friesians, came to mind. It was an image that in other circumstances might have made me smile. A smile didn’t reach my lips now, though. It didn’t dare.

  Mary nodded and promised we wouldn’t be long. With a short nod in return, Sister Teresa swept out.

  Once we were alone together, the air no longer chilled by the nun’s frosty presence, I felt inexplicably calm and relieved. In anticipation, this place had seemed such a terrifying prospect, yet now I was here it felt as if a weight had lifted. This was the first time, I realised, that I was in the company of someone who was in exactly the same dire straits as I was; someone who could not only sympathise but also empathise with me; someone who knew what I was going through because she was going through it too. It felt such a relief that I could be honest about my situation. At last I had a confidante, and so did Mary.

  She sat down again as I hauled my suitcase onto my bed. I winced. My back hurt from lugging it for so long. ‘Have you come far?’ she asked, putting her pen and pad to one side.

  I shook my head. ‘Not very,’ I replied. ‘Just a few miles on the bus. I’ve been staying with a friend since . . . well, since all this happened.’

  I turned to smile back, as I opened up the case and began sorting out the contents. I’d been given a list of what to pack for the baby. As well as my few maternity clothes, nightwear and toiletries, I’d packed terry nappies, vests and some nighties and booties that, touchingly, my close friends from work had contributed. I also had matinée jackets, knitted by my sister-in-law Emmie, and a cold-weather outfit that I’d seen in a shop in Elm Park and bought in white, as I didn’t know the baby’s sex.

  On the top of the pile was the intricate knitted shawl that Emmie had made for when the baby was to be handed over for adoption. Seeing it again now made me start. Like the baby, it would not be mine for very long. I quickly put all thoughts of what was to come out of my mind, as they reminded me just how soon I’d be giving birth. It felt scarily real now that I was here. I reached to open my locker and began filling the tiny space inside with my possessions.

  ‘How about you?’ I asked Mary, whose accent made me suspect she’d travelled a great deal further than I had.

  ‘Oh, a long way,’ she confirmed. ‘I’ve come from Ireland. Wexford. Do you know it, by any chance?’

  I nodded. ‘I’ve not been there, but I have family in County Waterford. My mother comes from there. You’re right; it is a long way,’ I said.

  She nodded glumly. ‘It feels like it, to be sure. No one at home knows I’m here. I told them I was coming to London to find work.’ This wouldn’t have been an unusual scenario: the economic situation in Ireland was pretty grim in the sixties, and lots of young Irish girls came to England to get work. ‘So now I’m a waitress,’ she told me, smiling ruefully, lifting the pages of carefully written untruths from beside her on the bedcover. ‘I’ve been telling them all about it – what a grand job it is.’ The smile was still there, but it was a bleak one.

  ‘So you’ve not told anyone?’ I asked her. ‘Is there no one you’ve confided to at all?’ I couldn’t imagine how isolating and horrible that must be. Thank goodness I had Emmie and a couple of dear work friends to support me.

  ‘Not a soul. I dared not. Can you imagine the consequences?’

  I nodded. I could. To be pregnant and unmarried in England was bad enough, but for a young Irish Catholic girl it was unthinkable. She would be shunned, unmarriageable, thought the lowest of the low. The level of hatred and vitriol against young unmarried mothers there was well known. It was something that could disgrace a girl for life.

  ‘Except the father,’ she added, her expression darkening further. ‘He knows, all right. But he’s married. And he already has two children to support. So what can he do to help me?’ She sounded like she was reciting the very words he’d said to her.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘That’s awful . . .’

  ‘Not so awful as getting pregnant, let me tell you, and only then finding out he’d got a family.’ She sounded and looked distraught now, her eyes filling with tears. I wasn’t sure if I should stop what I was doing and go and comfort her; I nearly did, but something about her body language told me not to. She pulled a piece of tissue from the sleeve of her jumper and dabbed angrily with it.

  ‘I’m a fool, is what I am,’ she said. ‘Blind. Just plain blind.’ She pushed the tissue away back out of sight and spread her hands. ‘But aren’t we all sometimes? I loved him. I still love him – much good it’ll do me. But mostly I’m just so homesick.’

  ‘I’m sure you are.’

  ‘And terrified, of course. Can you imagine if someone finds out where I really am?’ she asked again. There was a look of real fear on her face.

  ‘But no one can,’ I reassured her. ‘I mean, I don’t know that, obviously, but I don’t see how anyone could, not if you don’t tell them.’ I squashed all my things I could into the locker. The rest – the baby things, which I wouldn’t need for a while yet – could stay in the case.

  ‘I know. I’m probably worrying too much. It just gets to you, this, doesn’t it? But what about you?’ she asked. ‘What about your baby’s father?’

  Peter, I thought. I didn’t even think of him in those terms. And why would I? My baby and I were in this on our own. ‘I took a risk,’ I told her. ‘I was silly. I just never thought . . .’ I didn’t need to finish the sentence. She was already nodding.

  ‘And has he supported you? Are you with him still?’

  I shook my head. ‘He doesn’t even know,’ I said. ‘We’re not together. It wasn’t serious. By the time I found out I was pregnant, we’d already split up. So I suppose I don’t have all that to deal with.’

  ‘Oh, you’ve more than enough to
deal with. We all have,’ she said. ‘But we must hurry.’ She jumped up. ‘There’s room for your case underneath your bed – just, I think. Here, let me help you. There you go. Sister Teresa will be waiting, and she doesn’t like to be kept waiting. I can show you the bathroom as we go.’

  ‘How long have you been here?’ I asked, as we left the little room – my new home – and retraced our steps along the corridor.

  ‘A week,’ she said. ‘A very long week.’

  ‘And what job have they given you?’

  ‘Cleaning,’ she said. And then she grinned at me. ‘So whatever the state of our souls, at least the floors shine.’

  ‘How is it? I mean, generally. Is it as bad here as it seems?’

  We’d turned a corner now. Mary put her hand on an adjacent doorknob. ‘You’ve experience of nuns?’

  I nodded. ‘Oh, yes. I went to a convent school.’

  ‘So think that, only more so, since we’re all in a state of mortal sin now and must atone. Anyway, voilà. Grand, don’t you think?’

  I peered in. As with everything here, the bathroom was basic. A large basin, a toilet and a chipped enamelled cast-iron bath sat on a black and white tiled floor, surrounded by plain grey-white walls. You could feel the cold coming off them. I touched one. It was icy. The bathroom was shared, Mary told me, by about twenty of us.

  ‘So it’s a bit of a scrum in the mornings,’ she said. ‘Not that anyone wants to linger, as you can imagine.’

  We then returned down a back staircase to the ground floor. Here we took a route through another maze of passages until we came to the milk kitchen and, as promised, Sister Teresa. She was standing by a long Formica worktop, filling baby feeding bottles with formula milk, wearing a large apron and starched cotton over-sleeves to protect her habit from splashes.

  ‘Now then,’ she said to me, once Mary had been dismissed and had returned to our room. ‘As Mary’s probably told you, all the girls who come here have duties assigned to them, and you will be working here in the milk kitchen. Starting tomorrow.’

  Sister Teresa then went on to describe, in dizzying detail, the nature of the duties I’d be expected to carry out, which sounded like they would dominate most of the waking hours of every day. Pregnant mothers, who did not yet have babies to care for, could be under no illusions. ‘Here in the convent,’ Sister Teresa explained, ‘you will be expected to work just as hard as we do; to rise early and use the day productively just as we do; to attend mass and to ask the Lord’s forgiveness.’ I noticed she didn’t tag ‘just as we do’ on the end of that last one.

  Apart from the endless standing, which was tiring because my legs and ankles became increasingly sore and swollen, I soon learned I had got off reasonably lightly. Some girls had been assigned much more punishing duties, such as working in the laundry, where vast quantities of dirty terry nappies were laundered each day. The nappies had to be transferred, steaming and soaking, from the huge washing vats to be rinsed and then spun in the enormous dryer. For anyone this would be hard physical work, but for girls at such an advanced stage of pregnancy it was exhausting.

  ‘Your day begins directly after breakfast,’ Sister Teresa explained now, as she showed me the various items of paraphernalia that would become my only companions for much of the day. ‘You’ll come in here, and first wash the previous night’s bottles and teats, then put them in the steriliser, here. After that, you’ll make up the three feeds for the daytime and, that done, you’ll wash down the worktops and floor.’

  ‘How many babies are here?’ I ventured to ask her, as there seemed to be so many bottles.

  ‘Around ten,’ she said crisply. ‘More or less. It varies. And cleanliness is key,’ she reminded me. ‘You have sole responsibility for the milk kitchen, Angela, and cleanliness is paramount at all times. That is why proper sterilisation is vital. This is a job that requires great attention to hygiene. Do you understand that?’

  She sounded like she assumed I’d know nothing about hygiene, having not known how to resist the evils of the flesh. I assured her I did and that I would take the greatest of care.

  ‘You then have further duties after supper,’ she added, ‘when you’ll return here to make up a second batch of bottles: those for the night-time and early morning feeds.’

  As I stood there, trying hard to take everything in so as not to attract even more of her disapproval, I imagined filling one of those neatly ranked bottles and feeding my own baby from it. I felt completely out of my depth. This was a world I hadn’t any experience of and it frightened me. Everything about it felt alien. Yet, at the same time, the idea made me feel unexpectedly maternal. I was trying so hard to put it all out of my mind, but I had a baby growing inside me, kicking me and squirming, and making its presence felt – my own child. I didn’t want to think about the baby, because it was going to be taken away from me. But seeing the little bottles triggered something inside me, and I couldn’t seem to shake off the thought of that future parting.

  That first evening at Loreto Convent is a blur now. I recall a supper, at around 5.30, of watery scrambled eggs, and meeting lots of other girls, all pink cheeked and lumbering and anxious of expression, all in the same desperate plight. Though I met new mothers, too, and could hear regular mewling cries, I remember being shocked that I hadn’t seen any babies. Where were they? Why weren’t they there?

  ‘Because they spend every moment of their lives in the nursery,’ Mary told me once we were back up in our room again, getting ready for bed. ‘On their own.’

  ‘That’s awful,’ I said, genuinely surprised. ‘Aren’t the mothers allowed to bring them out?’

  ‘Heavens, no!’

  I was shocked again. I’d had a picture, insofar as I’d had a picture of anything, of the new mothers sitting together, feeding their infants and chatting, helping one another, comparing notes. ‘So do they go to them, then? In the nursery?’I asked her.

  Mary’s expression made it clear that even after a week she was already much more clued up than I was. ‘They are allowed in only to feed them and change them,’ she said. ‘Though no breastfeeding; breastfeeding isn’t allowed here. And it’s forbidden to go into the nursery at any other time. Oh, and they’re not to be taken out of the nursery, either. One of the girls did that last week. Well, I think that’s what she intended. She got no further than the doorway, and she got such a vicious dressing down, you wouldn’t believe. No, they’re never allowed out – not till they leave here.’

  ‘What, never?’ I gasped, as the picture in my head dissolved away. However little I’d allowed myself to wonder how things might be before my baby was adopted, spending time with it, nursing it, cuddling it, being with it were all things I’d taken as given – but I was wrong.

  Mary was shaking her head.

  Once again it struck me: I hadn’t seen a single baby. ‘But why would that be?’

  ‘Oh, they’ll have you think it’s so we don’t get too attached to them – or them to us, for that matter. But I’m thinking having to listen to them crying themselves to sleep all the time is another a part of the punishment.’

  ‘That’s awful,’ I said again. ‘And so cruel. It’s not the babies’ fault, is it? Why are they being punished? They didn’t ask to be born into these circumstances, did they?’

  But as soon as I thought that, the guilt just weighed heavier. Whose fault was it that my baby was going to be born in this grim place? All mine.

  Mary looked so frightened that night. So frightened and so lonely, kneeling beside her little bed, so far from home and loved ones, saying prayers to a God she must have felt had abandoned her.

  The lights went out moments after – 9 p.m. was the curfew – and I felt shattered, as world-weary as it was possible to be. But there was also the cruel irony of feeling so young at the same time, of lying in the blackness, the old building groaning and creaking around me, and feeling like a naughty girl back in my convent school being snapped at for some minor misdemeanour or other
, feeling powerless and insignificant and vulnerable and ill thought of by cold, distant nuns.

  My last thoughts were of my unborn baby’s father, of my exciting life in London, of the burgeoning career I’d had to flee from and of the night I’d spent with Peter, having foolishly fallen for charms so fleeting that they’d soon melted away. Nothing could have been in starker contrast to the position in which I now found myself. What had I been thinking? I felt a deepening despair and a sense that I had ruined everything.

  I pulled my knees up towards my tummy and tried not to cry. My nose inches from the cold wall, I clasped my arms around my body and felt the warm bulk of my baby, gently stirring inside me, blissfully ignorant of what was to come. An unbearable loneliness descended and engulfed me. I’d never felt so wretched.

  I’d made the most terrible mistake of my life. And now I was going to have to pay for it.

  Chapter Three

  ‘Mary! Angela!’

  Sister Teresa’s voice was so shrill it would slice through the heaviest of slumbers, but when she rapped on the bedroom door at seven o’clock sharp the next morning, I’d already been awake for some time. I’d listened to the small sounds of sleep Mary was making in the other bed, but for me the fitful slumber that had finally claimed me had been interrupted at intervals all night. By the movement of my baby? By some sudden noise? By the sound of crying? I didn’t know. But lying in the blackness in that unfamiliar bed, the dark hours before dawn had seemed endless.

  Unsurprisingly, since we always shy away from awful truths, it had taken a while for me to accept that I really was pregnant. I’d started my periods at the age of eleven, and was given just one sex education lecture by my mother. It consisted of six words: ‘never let a man touch you’. This had naturally conjured up all sorts of astonishing visions, none of which was remotely relevant to the situation I was in now.