The Baby Laundry for Unmarried Mothers

by Angela Patrick

  Sister Teresa, who would spend much of my first couple of days hovering, had been very clear on one thing when I arrived at the convent, and made a point of restating it now. ‘On no account,’ she said, gesturing to the list in my hand, ‘are you to deviate from the amounts stated on this list, Angela. Not by so much as a drop, you understand? Accuracy is paramount.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. After all, it didn’t look that difficult to measure.

  ‘And you mustn’t listen to anyone who tells you otherwise. Anyone, you understand? You’ll have mothers coming in—’ Here she narrowed her tiny eyes and looked as if she were about to disclose something dreadful. ‘And they’ll be asking for more. Just a drop here and a drop there – but you’re not to give it. No exceptions. Understand?’

  I would soon find out that this was a regular occurrence: mothers furtively slipping down to the milk kitchen to ask if they could have just a little more. And these requests, I would come to learn, weren’t unreasonable. Feeding times were short, and as regimented as everything else was, so it was quite common that not all of the babies finished their feeds in the allotted time. Which made it only fair, their mothers argued, for them to have a bit more to make up for what they’d not had.

  ‘Wait till you have a baby of your own,’ one said crossly to me one day. ‘Then perhaps you’ll understand what it’s like.’

  I didn’t dare deviate from what I’d been told, though – not that first day and not in all my time there. It was made clear to me that there would be serious consequences if I were caught, which I would be, as Sister Teresa was at pains to point out: she would be checking the bottles regularly.

  Work continued without respite till a gong sounded for lunch. A strange and mournful noise that seemed not of its time, it would come to represent the ceaseless toil so relentlessly that eventually I hated the sound.

  The routine in the milk kitchen was straightforward. Consulting the list, I made up the required number of bottles before transferring them to metal jugs filled with hot water, as I’d been shown. Each mother had her own jug, which had her name written on it. Once the feeds were made, I transferred the jugs to a big tray, which I then took into the nursery ready for the next scheduled feed.

  It was unforgettable going into the nursery that very first time. The nursery was another long room, on the ground floor, with the same dingy curtains as elsewhere and about twenty cots in a horseshoe shape around the edge of it. Between each cot, which bore a tag stating ‘baby of ’ and the mother’s name, was a small locker and a chair placed there for feeding. Along half of one wall, before the first cot in the horseshoe, was a waist-height level surface on which mothers could change and clean their babies. I’d never seen one, but if I imagined a Dickensian orphanage, this would have been what sprang to mind.

  Though I didn’t know it on the first day, I quickly realised that specific cots weren’t reserved for the duration of a child’s stay. The opposite was true: the cot at the far end of the line was for the newest baby, and the cot nearest the door was for the oldest child – the infant next due to leave. The babies would move up through the cots until they occupied that final position. It was reminiscent of lambs going to slaughter.

  The babies were crying, and crying lustily, when I entered. The noise was ear-splitting, piercing. A glance around the room soon confirmed why: almost all of them were wailing. I could see only two that weren’t a part of the grim cacophony; they were either too exhausted or too acclimatised to the constant racket to stay awake.

  There were no mothers to tend to them, to soothe their fractious bawling, since mothers, as Mary had already told me, were strictly forbidden from entering the nursery at any time other than feeding and changing times. This rule was so rigidly enforced that few girls ever dreamt of defying it. I thought how hard it must be to be a new mother and know you were forbidden from comforting your own child. I knew I wouldn’t have to wonder what it felt like for very long, though. I put the tray down carefully on the long counter and quickly made my way out with the empties.

  Back in the quiet and solitude of the milk kitchen, I set about the washing and sterilising without delay. It would soon be time to make up the next batch of bottles, as per the instructions on my sheet. It was a long job, hot and smelly, with the scent of the stale milk pricking my nostrils. I noticed a number of the bottles hadn’t been fully drained, and wondered again at those babies’ anguished cries.

  By late morning I was done, and ready to prepare the next feeds, my ankles already complaining and pressing hotly against my shoes. As I untied the strings of my apron and tugged the white elasticated protective sleeves from my arms, I surveyed the list and the ranks of upside-down bottles in the steriliser.

  It was shocking, the contrast between the here and now and the recent past. Just a few short months ago I’d been working at a job I loved in the City, and a typical morning would mean a few hours immersed in my work at my desk. I was a code translator, a job I found absorbing and fascinating, as I charted the progress of cargo all over the world. Charting the ships’ movements, deciphering the complex codes that tracked their journeys – it might have been an office job, but it was endlessly stimulating. Knowing there might be a chance to go back to it was a crumb of real comfort. But the gulf between here and there seemed vast now, as if I had been plucked from the modern world and deposited in Edwardian times.

  I wondered what my former colleagues might be doing right now: sharing a companionable lunch, no doubt, catching up on gossip. And here was I, the victim of my own stupid naivety, alone in a tiny room, peeling off a pair of heavy rubber gloves, the all-pervasive smell of Milton fluid around me, in charge of spooning powdered formula into baby bottles.

  The only other thing that gave me even the smallest consolation was the fact that my beloved father, who’d died when I was fourteen, was no longer here to witness his daughter’s fall from grace. Peter might have passed muster on superficial examination, but to my great shame I knew I did not.

  Chapter Four

  My father had met my mother in a restaurant in London in 1928. She’d been working there as a waitress – a real one, on this occasion – after recently moving to England from Ireland with her sisters.

  Both my parents bore the scars of unhappy childhoods. My father’s mother died when he was just three months old, her tragic death attributed to complications at his birth. Following this, and unable to forgive his infant son for his wife’s demise, my grandfather virtually ignored him, and he was entrusted to the care of the housekeeper until his enlistment in the army, aged fourteen.

  My mother’s childhood was similarly full of tragedy. The middle of three sisters, she was born in County Waterford in Ireland, and lost her own mother when she was three years old. She and her sisters were subsequently brought up by their father until his untimely death during the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic. The sisters spent the next five years in an orphanage run by nuns, and eventually came to London when my mother was sixteen.

  My father was a Protestant and my mother, coming from a devout Catholic family, understandably provoked the wrath of her relatives in Ireland for entering into a ‘mixed marriage’. But they were determined and married anyway, in 1929. They set up home in Forest Gate, East London, where, in time, my father converted to Catholicism.

  My earliest recollections of my childhood are always of the overwhelming love I felt for my father. I used to write little poems to him and put them in his slippers. I would wait at the gate every day for him to come home from work, and when I saw him come into sight I would run to him and throw my arms around him, bursting with excitement.

  Born in October 1943, I was the third of their three children. I had two older brothers: Raymond, who was born in 1932, and John, who came along some time after, in 1939. My father’s relationship with my brothers was very different to the one he had with me – particularly with Raymond, as they didn’t always see eye to eye about things, and there was often friction between them. John wa
s much quieter and shyer than Raymond. They were opposites really: John was an introvert and Raymond an extrovert. My mother was always quick to defend them, and I felt she regarded me as the culprit whenever disagreements arose among the three of us.

  Looking back, I wonder if it’s the case that sometimes there’s a closer affinity between mothers and sons during the growing-up years, particularly in family situations such as ours, in which I, the youngest child and a girl, was undoubtedly the apple of my father’s eye. As I got older, it was also obvious that there was a big contrast between my mother’s life as a young woman and the life she perceived I was having at the same point. I wonder, too, if to some extent she wanted to live her life through me, to have me do all the things she hadn’t been able to do and seize all the opportunities she’d missed. At the same time, she came from a religious background and a generation for whom the notion of having ‘boyfriends’ simply didn’t exist. While my brothers were free to do what they wanted, I was constantly reminded that, as a girl, I could not. As she frequently pointed out to me, marrying as a virgin was non-negotiable. She didn’t step out with a man until she was twenty-one.

  Though sometimes uncertain of my mother’s affection for me, as she was never demonstrative, I did feel loved and cared for growing up. If she couldn’t show her love physically, she showed it in practical ways, and would give generously to us all, even if it meant going without herself.

  But I cherished my relationship with my father. When I received the news that he had cancer and had less than a year to live, I felt my world collapse around me. The months that followed are indelibly etched in my memory: palliative care in the 1950s was pitifully basic and the pain and suffering he endured as he was dying was shocking. To see this kind and lovely man reduced to the physical condition of a Belsen victim was heartbreaking for us all. He died at home, aged fifty-three, in April 1958, with my mother, my brothers and me by his side. I was fourteen years old and I was devastated.

  It’s telling, as I looked back during those first days I spent in Loreto Convent, that my overwhelming feeling was a sense of shame about how badly I’d let my mother down. I might have railed against her; perhaps, if I’d been born two decades later, I would have. But for all the pity I felt for my own situation, I worried far more about the effect all this was having on her. It would take me a long time to understand it, because our relationship was complex, but after my father died – making her a widow at fifty-one – I’d taken on the emotional burden, either wittingly or not, of being the strong one for her.

  I had had to grow up extremely quickly. Within a year of my father’s death, my mother and I were alone. My brothers, both of whom were engaged when he died, had left to start new lives elsewhere: John to begin two years’ national service, and Raymond and his wife to sail for a new life in South Africa.

  My mother struggled to cope, emotionally, physically and financially. We were now penniless. Apart from a small insurance policy, which barely paid for his funeral, my poor father had been unable to leave us anything. For me, personally, the cruellest blow after his death was leaving my school, the Ursuline High School in Ilford, where I was enjoying a good education. My mother could simply no longer afford to pay the fees, and the whole thing was humiliating and distressing.

  I’d been about to embark on my GCEs that summer, but when I had to leave school, aged only 14, it seemed a bleak future lay ahead. Subsequently, I was enrolled in a secretarial college and a new course was set for my life.

  I’d brought a wedding ring with me to Loreto Convent, a cheap thing I’d bought when I moved to June’s house. During most of my pregnancy I had no need to lie about my marital status. I went to work in my new job as an audio typist at a firm of wood preservative manufacturers in Dagenham, called Solignum, only after squeezing myself, increasingly painfully, into torturous foundation garments. Like Mary, I had to fashion a story: I told them that June’s house was my real home and that I lived there with my parents. But at least no one knew I was pregnant.

  Now at the convent and hugely pregnant, it was impossible to hide, so the ring was to cover my shame and embarrassment when I went to my antenatal appointments. To go without it – for people to know the truth – would be unimaginable.

  It was a Friday afternoon, several days after my arrival. A few of us had finished our duties for the day (though mine would continue later, when I made up the last feed of the evening), when Mary explained that we were allowed out to the shops in the afternoons, if we asked permission and were back by 5 p.m. sharp.

  ‘Really?’ I said. It had never occurred to me that we’d be able to do that. Everything about the convent was so reminiscent of a prison that the idea that it wasn’t came as a shock.

  She nodded. ‘To buy anything personal we need – toiletries and so on. Plus you can get eggs for breakfast there, too, if you want to. And we tend to club together to buy treats: now you’ve seen the food on offer here, you know why. We get biscuits mostly, crisps and cakes – things like that.’ She touched my arm and pulled a face. ‘Though obviously you mustn’t let the nuns see.’

  So I’d slipped the ring on my finger and walked down to the village, enjoying the feeling of fresh air on my face after so many days spent entirely indoors.

  The convent grounds were extensive, so it was curious, looking back, that apart from cleaning windows, washing the paintwork or sweeping up leaves, the girls never seemed to go outside. Perhaps it was because we had so little free time; perhaps it was also because strolling around a large swathe of garden seemed to be the very opposite of what we should be doing in our currently shameful state of mortal sin.

  Theydon Bois was a small place, which had just a few shops that sat together in the middle of a residential area down the hill. There was a sweet shop, a chemist and a small grocer’s. I’d come armed with a list of things for a few of the other girls and, when I saw the bakery, a plan to buy a cake for myself and Mary, as I’d been told the ones they sold were lovely. I also had a passion for peaches then, so I intended to get some, though they were very expensive at that time of year and would have to be just an occasional treat.

  The world now took a generally dim view of me and straight away I had my first proper experience of how I was perceived. I entered the bakery and waited patiently while the lady behind the counter served the person before me, chatting in a very friendly fashion all the while, exchanging pleasantries about the late September weather. But when she turned to serve me, it seemed she took one look at my bump, and her manner changed abruptly and completely.

  ‘Yes?’ she said sharply. ‘Can I help you?’

  Her tone seemed to suggest she’d rather do anything but.

  I pointed to the cakes – white iced buns – that I wanted. ‘Yes,’ I said politely. ‘Two of those, please.’

  She pulled a box from a stack and assembled it deftly, then picked up tongs and placed the cakes in it, side by side. ‘Anything else?’ she barked, placing the box on the counter.

  I shook my head, handed over the money to pay and thanked her once, then again when she gave me my change.

  There was another customer behind me now and, even as I spoke, the woman’s eyes slid past me, her sour expression suddenly transformed. ‘Ah, good afternoon!’ she began cheerfully. ‘What can I get for you today?’ I slunk from the shop, my cheeks burning.

  It was the same in the next shop I went into, the grocer’s: no overt hostility, exactly, just this overwhelming sense that I was someone no one much cared to associate with. I left the shops and toiled back up the hill on heavy legs, aware of my baby squirming inside and my bags biting into my fingers.

  But what else had I expected? I thought, as I walked the last few yards of the gravelled drive. The convent was imposing, both architecturally and symbolically. Everyone locally must have known, or figured out, what kind of occupation the nuns of the ironically named ‘Franciscan Missionary of Divine Motherhood’ were engaged in – at least in this branch of their missionar
y. There would be a steady stream of pregnant young ‘wives’ shopping here, of course. I was naive to suppose my ring would fool anyone.

  With my experience of the quiet but chilly reception of some of the local businesses fresh in my mind, I resolved to learn to accept my situation. I was incarcerated in the convent – if not physically, at least emotionally – until my baby was born and I’d given it away. Then I would be allowed to slip quietly back into the life I’d led before, reintegrating into ‘polite’ society without anyone knowing why I’d been away.

  That there was no alternative available to me was clear. I had come to accept that keeping my baby – always a dream – was something that wasn’t going to happen. In fact, nothing could have been made more clear to me by my mother. As a good Catholic girl, I must do the good Catholic thing: accept the kindness of the nuns who deigned to care for us both and leave them to sort out the mess I had got myself into. Then – another thing for which I knew I must be grateful – I must give my poor child to a good Catholic family, who could care for it and bring it up properly.

  Like many a girl in my situation at that time, I didn’t dare question this. How could I? To mention keeping the baby as an option would have been unthinkable. As an unmarried mother I would be shunned and unable to find employment; I would therefore compound my sin by committing an innocent child to life as a destitute bastard.

  So I accepted it, but it made communication with my mother difficult, because while, on the outside, I did accept that this was best option for my unborn infant, every fibre of my being was opposed to it. I’d spoken to my mother on the phone only sporadically since I’d gone to stay with June, and I continued to have strained and pointless conversations with her from the convent’s phone at the end of the hallway.

  If I was sad to be having bland conversations with a mother who knew all too well where I was, other girls had much harder circumstances to bear. Like Mary, several of the girls were living even more of a lie than I was. These were girls who’d fled situations in which no one in their families had found out what had happened, and who’d had to construct big complicated lies for their loved ones about the reason for their often sudden departure. Like Mary, they would have to write letters home, chattily talking about jobs they weren’t doing, people they weren’t meeting and a social life that couldn’t have been further from the truth.