‘Worried about what?’ I said, confused by both her words and her anxious tone. ‘Who didn’t tell you anything?’
‘The hospital! I mean we drove all that way, and then—’
‘Drove where? To the hospital? When was this?’
‘When you were in labour yesterday, of course.’ There was a pause. ‘Didn’t you know?’
I told her I didn’t. I was reeling. Emmie had actually been at the hospital? How could I not have remembered that?
‘I have no memory of that at all,’ I told her. ‘How can that be? I mean, I know I was in a lot of pain, but I hadn’t been given any drugs or anything . . .’
‘But you wouldn’t,’ she said. ‘Because we didn’t actually see you.’
I was very confused now. ‘But why were you there anyway? You didn’t know when I was going in, did you?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not till your mum rang.’
‘Mum rang?’
‘Yes, she called John when the hospital called her. She needed to be driven there—’
‘To the hospital? While I was in labour?’
‘Yes. God, how did you not know this?’
‘I knew nothing about it, Emmie. Nothing at all.’
‘Well, you were in a pretty bad way, by all accounts. That’s why they asked her to go there.’
‘They were that worried?’ I was finding this difficult to take in. ‘I had no idea.’
‘Apparently so. That’s what your mum told us, anyway. So we picked her up and drove her there, but by the time we arrived they told us that everything was okay again. That the baby had been born and you were both safe and well.’
‘And they wouldn’t let you see me?’
‘They said you were having stitches.’ She paused again. ‘And, well, to be honest, your mum felt . . . well, that maybe you would need to sleep after that, and . . . well, it was difficult for her, obviously. So we brought her home again.’ She paused. ‘Sweetheart, you know how it is . . .’
I did know how it was only too well. If my mother had come to see me, then everyone would know she was my mother. ‘I know,’ I said. ‘But, even so, you would have thought, under the circumstances . . .’
‘I know, sweetie, I know.’ Emmie paused again. She probably didn’t know what to say to me. And I understood. What could she say? ‘Anyway,’ she went on finally. ‘I’ve been keeping up to date – I don’t have the number there, and I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to call, which is why I’m so glad to hear from you . . . oh, it’s so good to hear from you, I can’t tell you, Angela. So, tell me all about your lovely boy. I’ve been dying to hear. What does he look like? Is he gorgeous? What have you called him?’
Going back to the lying-in room after speaking to Emmie, I wasn’t sure what to feel. I had given birth only once – I had nothing with which to compare it – but to find out that the hospital had deemed it necessary to summon my mother, as next of kin, was a lot to take in. How bad had things been? No one had said a word to me about it – not a word. And I doubted anyone would now it was all over. Unless I demanded to see my medical records, I realised it was unlikely I’d ever know what had really happened.
Far more shocking was the realisation that my mother had been there at the hospital, only a couple of walls away from me perhaps. She had been there, and even then couldn’t bring herself to come and see me, to check on me and reassure herself I was okay, to offer a crumb of comfort when I had so badly craved one. She’d been content to be told that all was well and then leave. I felt stunned, tearful, angry. How could shame be a more powerful emotion than maternal love?
Perhaps because of this – or maybe it would have happened anyway – I retreated into my own little world of maternal love instead. I would not have Paul for long, but for as long as I did have him I would love him and care for him with every fibre of my being. I wanted nothing more than to stay in my cocoon with him, because every thought of leaving it was accompanied by fear of a world that disapproved of me, judged me and wouldn’t accept my right to motherhood, and of a future that wouldn’t include my baby. The convent stopped feeling like a place of punishment or atonement, but instead became a place of safety, where my baby could be acknowledged and was cared for. As unlikely as it was, it had become a home.
It was so intense, that brief time we had together, my baby and I. It was a time in which the hours blurred into days almost without me noticing, a paradoxical mixture of intense emotion and love and the endurance of equally intense pain.
Because I’d had so many stitches, both internally and externally, even the simplest things, such as walking and sitting, were excruciatingly painful, and would be, I realised, for many days. I also had a new problem to contend with: my milk had come in, an agony that soon became equally excruciating. But the pain could not, under any circumstances, be alleviated as nature intended, because breastfeeding was strictly forbidden at the convent. I don’t know if this was because the nuns had decided it would make the coming separation harder for both mother and baby or because it was the prevailing fashion of the day – at that time, formula milk was marketed as a form of liberation, and young mothers were taking to it in droves. Perhaps it was another form of atonement that was designed to punish the mother but also punished the baby. I still don’t know. Like every other mother further up the line, I simply accepted that breastfeeding was not an option. It hurt to have a part of my body trying to do one thing, but being made to do another, despite the pills I was given to dry up my milk. In the meantime, I just had to endure it.
Despite all the pain and discomfort, not to mention my complete ignorance of how to hold him and what to do for him, my little son and I enjoyed moments of pure bliss. Sister Teresa had taken over my milk kitchen duties and I left the room only for meals during those first four days. I even received my mother and stepfather there when they came to see us on the second day.
That visit was incredibly difficult. It would have been naive of me, I suppose, to expect it to be any different, even if I hadn’t known about her coming to the hospital. My mother was now coming to visit the daughter she’d felt she had no choice but to abandon to her fate all those months back; the daughter who was caring for a newborn grandchild that she would never see again.
‘How are you, Angela?’ she said stiffly as she entered.
‘I’m fine,’ I told her, following up her platitude with my own.
I had decided that I would only mention her visit to the hospital if she did, and I suspected she would not. And she didn’t – not in words. Nevertheless, on that day, she did express real emotions about what had happened to me, emotions other than disappointment and anger at my folly and shame.
‘May I see him?’ she asked, gesturing towards the cot beyond the bed. So formal. So not like a grandmother.
I nodded, and she went around to peer in at my sleeping child. ‘He’s beautiful,’ she said, her voice cracking as she spoke. Though I could only see her face in profile, I knew she was struggling not to cry.
It hit me then, hard: I really was going to have to give up my baby. Up until the moment my mother broke down on seeing her little grandson, I had nursed a hope – albeit one that was deeply buried and never, ever voiced – that she would have a change of heart about him being adopted and admit she was wrong about what was best for both of us; that somehow we’d find a way for me to keep him; that she’d support me and help me and the nightmare could end.
But it was clear to me, watching her sniffing and dabbing at her wet eyes with a hankie, that there was no change of heart now nor would there ever be. She didn’t want to be his grandmother. It was a role that she’d relinquished. She was crying because the reality of things had hit home for her too. She was crying in anticipation of my loss.
My stepfather spoke little and was only a stiff, sombre presence in the corner that day. I think he had long ago settled into his position that none of this was anything to do with him – with either one of them, in fact.
When Pa
ul was five days old Sister Teresa removed my stitches, snipping them and slipping them all out, one by one, as she did for all the new mothers. It was probably just as well that I couldn’t see what she was doing, because she had very shaky fingers and extremely poor eyesight. I shut my eyes and tried not to visualise what was happening too much. I hated the thought of her seeing such an intimate part of me. And I suspect, given her calling, she found the task odious too.
This milestone marked the day when my safe little bubble burst and the sound of the ticking clock grew louder. Once my stitches had been removed and my wounds were declared healed, I was moved up to the big attic room to sleep with the other mothers.
Paul was baptised in the convent chapel by the visiting priest, and immediately afterwards transferred to the nursery full time. Affixed to the cot was a blue cardboard tag, one of a batch provided by Cow and Gate, who made the baby formula we used at the convent, and on it was written ‘Paul Brown’; beneath that his birth weight was recorded: ‘8 lb 12 oz’.
My tiny son had been by my side, except for a part of the night, since I’d returned. Now we would begin the new daily routine that would see us through until the day we both left.
That first night, the first when I was up in the attic room while he was in the nursery, was incredibly difficult to bear. It was bad enough being separated from him for so long, but being able to hear him crying for me, specifically, amid the general cacophony – something I hadn’t anticipated – made it nigh on impossible to sleep. All I wanted was to do what any mother would do: go to him, pick him up, comfort and cuddle him. I wished so hard that things could be different. But apart from what was necessary for feeding and changing, all contact with my baby was now forbidden.
At least I was back with the other girls again and could benefit from their empathy and support. The room for the mothers was a very large one on the top floor, which ran the length of the convent, with ceilings that sloped at either end. It resembled a soldiers’ billet: a dozen beds, with a row of six down either side, each with its own bedside locker and a big empty space in between. The comparisons didn’t end there. Given the diversity of occupants, some would be neat and tidy, others very messy, and the room would be inspected regularly by Sister Teresa or, occasionally, the Reverend Mother. Equally regularly, girls would be singled out and publicly berated for their slovenly ways and their generally poor characters.
‘You dirty, dirty girl,’ the Reverend Mother would snap at whoever was the object of her disgust that day. ‘All airs and graces and la-di-da ways you might have, but you’re no better than a common hussy!’ The nastiness, the tone, the implication were all so clear. In our exhausted and emotional state, whichever of us had incurred her wrath would often be reduced to floods of tears. Again and again, it hit me: how could they be so cruel to us, these women of God? It sometimes seemed like sport to them.
The room was freezing; it was December now and ice would regularly form on the insides of the windows. Most of us, now decimated physically by the punishing routine, preferred to sleep in our clothes not just because of the cold but because there was such an early start after nights that were routinely wakeful. I would rise at 5.30, feed and change my poor hungry, screaming baby, wash and dress myself, and have my own breakfast. Then I’d make up all the bottles in the milk kitchen, do Paul’s 10 a.m. feed, return to the milk kitchen and work until lunchtime, do Paul’s 2 p.m. feed, then work again till 4, have an hour’s break, eat supper and do the 6 p.m. feed. I would have some free time in the common room before the 10 p.m. feed, the last of the day, then I’d fall into bed, exhausted, around 11.
Sleep didn’t come easily – how could it? – as I could always hear Paul’s pitiful cries as I lay rigid in my bed. This would go on and on and on and was torture. My head was already filled with so many troubling images – his little hands turned almost blue by the cold in the nursery, the scary dents in his head made by the unforgiving cot bars – I could hardly bear the pain of knowing how distressed he must have been, and I slept very fitfully the whole time I was there.
There was no night feed, so the babies were starving after having to go so many hours between feeds. It would be unthinkable – bordering on child cruelty – today, but I couldn’t go to him. None of us could go to our babies, unless the baby was very sick, in which case Sister Teresa would come for the mother. The nursery was completely out of bounds.
Even in the daytime the nursery was not a nice place, as the nuns were so zealous about us not doing anything for our babies beyond the bare minimum necessary for their survival. We were not allowed to interact lovingly with them, much less sit and play with them. If you so much as kissed a tiny head and were spotted doing so, the nuns would rebuke you, as I found out for myself when Paul was just two weeks old. I had already fed him and removed his sodden nappy. As he was awake and alert, I thought I’d give him a moment to kick his little legs a bit, free of that huge hunk of towelling. And as I did so, I tickled the dome of his tiny tummy, revelling in the feel of his perfectly smooth skin. Had I left it at that, perhaps no one would have noticed. But I stooped to kiss it just as Sister Roc was passing. I didn’t know why she was there – she rarely went near the nursery, as it was Sister Teresa’s territory – but she was in the doorway even so.
‘What on earth do you think you’re doing, Angela?’ she wanted to know. She had made me jump and, colouring, I straightened up and snatched up his clean nappy. It felt as if I’d been caught kissing a boy behind the bike sheds. The distaste on her face certainly seemed to suggest I was overstepping the mark, as did her words. ‘If you’d wanted to have a baby of your own,’ she continued, ‘you should have got married before having one, shouldn’t you? Now hurry up and get that child dressed and back in his cot!’
‘That child’, ‘baby of your own’: it was remembering those words that convinced me the nuns forbade closeness not to spare us the anguish of bonding with and then losing our children; no, it seemed to me they forbade closeness because they felt we had no right. We had given birth to the babies, yes – He’s my baby! I’d wanted to scream at her. I created him! – but we’d already relinquished them. We were simply a part of the production process, delivering up babies to people who did deserve them. What did God, I wonder, think about this cold, unfeeling place?
Perhaps it was a blessing that our babies were so exhausted all the time. In that state a bottle of warm milk acted almost like a drug. Our main struggle was to keep them awake long enough so that they finished their feeds, but at least asleep they gave the impression of contentment.
Despite everything – the tiredness, the cold and hunger, the dread of the future – that time with my baby was so special and so precious. I loved the tiny person in my care. As the bond between us grew, I treasured the moments we spent together. I loved that he instinctively knew I was his mother. How, if he was crying and then heard my voice, he would listen and stop, calming immediately as I picked him up and held him close to me. I couldn’t imagine someone other than me taking care of him – it seemed too cruel, too unthinkable, too unbearable.
It was indicative of our increasingly gallows-type humour that the line of cots in the nursery was referred to as ‘death row’. The business of moving up it, and taking your place at the head, was something I’d observed early on. In the dormitory we tried not to speak about it. Instead we worked hard at pretending the future didn’t exist, messing about, as any group of girls in a dormitory would, and getting chastised by an irritable Reverend Mother. But for all the external lightness we had very heavy hearts. The thought of leaving was constantly on our minds, as other mothers and babies packed up their things and left and were never seen or heard of again. It was as if they had dropped off a cliff into an abyss, or had tumbled through some trapdoor into another world.
Thankfully, there were chinks of light in the gloom. John and Emmie came to visit. They would later admit to being horrified by what they saw – a heavily pregnant girl on her knees, scrubbing a
doorstep, in a scene reminiscent of a Victorian workhouse – and to being terribly upset for me, but it gave me such a boost to see their warm, smiling faces and to receive the tuck box they’d prepared for me full of lovely goodies. Though it was a painful reminder of what lay just around the corner, I was touched at how hard Emmie had been toiling away for me, knitting another whole array of baby clothes for Paul – matinée jackets, booties and mittens, as well as a hat and shawl – so I would have some beautiful things in which to dress him.
Emmie and John weren’t allowed to see Paul. Having been turned away once already at the hospital, they were again denied the chance to meet him at the convent. Though they had been able to spend an hour with me, and I’d been so sure they’d be able to see Paul in the nursery, it was made clear that this was not an option.
‘I’m sorry,’ the Reverend Mother said, when we approached her to ask. ‘But we don’t allow visitors into the nursery. It’s too disruptive.’
‘We’ll be quiet as mice,’ Emmie tried boldly, ‘I promise. We just want to look at him. We won’t wake him up.’
‘It’s not a question of waking the babies,’ the Reverend Mother replied firmly. ‘It’s a question of propriety.’
I knew very well what she meant by propriety, even if she stopped short of spelling it out to Emmie. In the eyes of the nuns, these babies shouldn’t be seen and cooed over by biological relatives, who mustn’t be regarded as family; these babies didn’t have their family yet. They were just, temporarily, in a kind of baby laundry, biding their time until all concerned could wash their hands of them.
A couple of weeks later, thankfully, Sister Teresa did relent in this regard, when my older brother Ray and his wife Jean came one Sunday afternoon. The visit had started badly, as they’d had the temerity to turn up without having first received permission from the Reverend Mother, but they’d travelled a long distance and my brother had been somewhat stunned, to put it mildly, to have come so far only to be told by a nun that they could see me but not my baby.
The Baby Laundry for Unmarried Mothers Page 8
