The Baby Laundry for Unmarried Mothers

by Angela Patrick

  It was opened again, only a few moments later, by another woman, this time younger – perhaps only in her twenties – and much more welcoming. ‘Hello. I’m Miss Whiteley, the Adoption Officer. And you’re Miss Brown, yes?’ She approached now, looking smart and businesslike. ‘And this will be Paul?’

  I nodded. I was beginning to feel numb. ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘And how was your journey here?’ she asked, as she peered at Paul. ‘Did he sleep all the way?’

  I nodded again, touched at her interest. ‘Yes. Yes, he did.’

  ‘Right,’ she said, waving an arm towards the chairs along the wall. ‘Sit down. Make yourself comfortable. I’ll be back with you in a few minutes.’

  I put my bag down beside one of the chairs, and settled Paul and myself on it. He was still fast asleep and I was torn between my natural desire to leave him settled and peaceful and my need to spend some last precious time gazing into his eyes. His lashes, so dark, brushed his cheeks as he slept, and I contented myself with gently smoothing his velvet-soft skin with the side of my little finger, feeling his warmth and drinking in the smell of him.

  I had been sitting there for about fifteen minutes before Miss Whiteley returned. It felt like longer, which for some reason made me feel anxious – what was happening? At the same time, it meant cherished extra moments together. She entered the room again, leaving the door open this time, her mouth forming a smile as she approached. ‘I’m just going to take him to show him to the couple,’ she said, proffering her arms to take Paul from mine.

  The couple. It made my heart thump. ‘Okay,’ I said, rising and handing him to her trustingly. His eyes flicked open at the movement and looked straight into mine, but soon closed again, as he sank almost immediately back into sleep, as young babies do.

  Miss Whiteley smiled again. ‘I’ll be back in just a minute,’ she said.

  More time passed, only this time I imagined it would be shorter. Remembering the little bag of baby clothes I’d brought with me, I bent down and opened my holdall to retrieve it, ready to hand it over on their return. It was then that I made the decision to keep Paul’s rosary for myself, so I removed it from the package and slipped it into a side pocket in my handbag.

  I was curious to know what the couple’s reaction would be on seeing my beautiful baby. Then I heard an exclamation – clearly one of delight – in a female voice, so I assumed it was the adoptive mother’s. Good, I remember thinking proudly, despite the lump that had lodged in my throat. They must have really liked him. I sat back down on the chair and continued to wait.

  But then the door, which had been ajar, opened again fully to reveal Miss Whiteley, now empty-handed. ‘They think he’s lovely,’ she told me, once again approaching my chair. I stood up then, as if to attention. Where was Paul? ‘And he’s got such a lot of hair, hasn’t he!’ she said. ‘Are these his things?’ She gestured towards the bag of clothes beside my holdall.

  I had no words. I couldn’t answer. I had completely lost the power of speech. Was that it? Wasn’t she bringing him back to me to say goodbye first? ‘Thank you. I’ll pass these on,’ she said, answering my unspoken question. So it was true. They had taken him. She wasn’t bringing him back. I felt tears flood my eyes. Why hadn’t I realised she would do that? Why hadn’t someone told me this was how it would happen? She’d said she’d be back in a minute, hadn’t she? She’d said, ‘I’ll show him to them’, not ‘I’ll give him to them’, hadn’t she?

  I felt all hope drain from me. Was that really it? My stomach turned into a cold, cavernous pit in that instant, and it felt as if my heart had dropped into it. That was it. I’d been denied saying goodbye to my baby, denied that last chance to stroke his cheek and feel his fingers grip mine, to kiss his tiny mouth in loving farewell. Why hadn’t she told me I was never going to see him again?Why hadn’t she told me it was time to say goodbye to him? I’d thought she was just going to show them, not let them take him. Why hadn’t she said? Oh, why hadn’t she said?

  Miss Whiteley smiled at me again, but it was a much smaller smile this time, one that seemed to say that this was how it worked, this was what was best for me. ‘Thank you,’ she said again, coldly, as she bent to pick up the carrier bag. ‘I’ll make sure they get these right away. And, well, please do sit for a moment if you need to. You can go when you’re ready.’

  Ready? I thought. Ready? How could a person ever be ready to do something like this? How could you ever be ready to give up your baby?

  Miss Whiteley left the room then, and returned to the adoptive parents. I knew because I could hear them talking together, only now in low voices, tempering their obvious delight as if being mindful of the occasion, almost as if they were peripheral guests at a funeral who must take care to show respect to the bereaved.

  As I stood there my body became animate again, twitching back to life, and with the life came the pain building and building, like a great rush of pressure, till I became racked with unstoppable, shuddering sobs. My baby was no longer mine. He was theirs. It was over. And I knew I’d never feel whole again.

  I looked up at the clock on the wall as I left. It was 3.50 on 16 January 1964. It was a date and time I’d never forget.

  I left the offices of the Crusade of Rescue in the same sort of daze I’d been in on the long journey there. The day was clear, growing dark now, but I was only dimly aware of it, because I seemed to have lost my mind. For some time I just wandered from street to street blindly. I didn’t know where I was, much less where the nearest Tube station was. I kept ploughing on, though, under tree after tree, crossing roads randomly, not even looking. All I knew for certain was that I had lost my beloved child and I was never going to see him again.

  Eventually, after something like an hour or so had passed – I recall seeing a clock – I recognised the lights of an Underground station, and wandered in, my holdall now a dead weight on the end of my arm. I then got on a Tube train, though I didn’t know where it was going and I didn’t care. The train was really crowded, with everyone strap-hanging and jostling. As I looked at the mostly expressionless faces, I thought, ‘You have absolutely no idea what I have just had to do.’ Eventually, the train reached some stations I recognised, and I stayed on it till it pulled into Liverpool Street, my connection to the mainline and home.

  Home, I thought, as I now shrank into a seat on the packed commuter train, hoping desperately that I wouldn’t chance upon any previous work colleagues and holding my holdall tight against my chest. Home. The concept of ‘home’ felt very alien. Apart from the visit on Boxing Day, I hadn’t returned ‘home’ since June of the previous year, and it didn’t feel like home any more. So much had happened to me. I’d had to cope with so many monumental, life-changing events all alone that I felt detached and disconnected from my mother and stepfather.

  It was dark by the time the train reached Rayleigh, the sky inky and star-spattered and the temperature bitingly cold. I walked for five minutes along the familiar route to the bungalow, and was soon staring, sightless, into the curtained front rooms that sat beyond the empty flowerbeds. I stood and stared for some minutes, unable to find the strength to go in. How could I come back here? How had my legs brought me here? It felt as if everything that had happened had been leading to this moment, this moment when I must mentally let go of my baby and slip quietly back into my old life. Except how could I? I wanted to scream. I was in agony.

  I opened the gate, walked up the path and pressed my finger against the doorbell, my breath making loose skeins of mist in the night air. My thoughts centred on the sickening apprehension I felt about what kind of reception I might get after all these months away. But even in my traumatised, distressed state, I could not have anticipated the response I did get.

  ‘Oh,’ said my mother, opening the door to greet me. ‘You’re here. Would you like some dinner?’

  I lay on my bed for an hour. Having told my mother ‘no’, I went straight to my room and lay down on the bed, exhausted, fully
clothed and prostrate with grief. But the oblivion I so badly craved eluded me. It felt so strange to be lying here alone, with nowhere else to go and nothing to distract me. There were no bottles to sterilise, no jugs to be collected, no interminable wait on a musty thin mattress for the next time I’d be allowed to go down to the nursery and drink in the scent of my crying infant – nothing. I badly missed the comfort and solace of the other girls. How would I get used to this? How would I bear it? Compared to the pain of childbirth, which had been intense and considerable, the pain of my heart shattering was as physical an agony as I’d ever felt before, and I didn’t have a clue how to ease it.

  I knew then that I would never find peace. I would never find a way to be reconciled to my loss. The pain would never diminish. It would be there for all time, like a stain I would have to live with – one that never washes away and colours everything.

  My mother, perhaps wisely, stayed away from me. I could hear the normal house sounds but felt removed from them, separated by an invisible barrier. I wasn’t sure I would ever feel ‘at home’ here again – not without my little boy. I was no longer the same person who had left all those months ago. I was a mother now. But unlike my own mother, who had known the joy of raising her children, I was a mother without a baby.

  After a while, I realised that there was an answer. If I could die, then I wouldn’t be in pain any more. I got up and quietly crept into the bathroom. I had hoped for a bottle of pills of some sort, but all I could find were half a dozen paracetamol. I took four of them anyway, but then hesitated. What on earth was I thinking? I mustn’t die. To die would only make certain what was at present only probable. If I died, I would definitely never see Paul again; if I lived, there was a chance, albeit infinitesimal, that I might. That thought allowed a seed of hope to grow. There might be a very small chance of somehow seeing my son again; although it was improbable, the possibility was there. And that possibility wasn’t important just for me: if I died, he would never be able to see me again, either. I was his mother. If he ever needed me, then it was my job to be there.

  I slept then, still in the clothes I had dressed in back at the convent, and I didn’t stir until the next morning. When I did, one thing was clear: I wasn’t ready to face the day, much less the rest of my life, but equally I couldn’t stay in that bungalow.

  Chapter Eleven

  My mother was finding it as difficult to cope with things as I was. I didn’t blame her. It didn’t matter how much hurt I had inside me or how much I wished she had felt better able to support me: the ‘sin’ was mine, so the consequences were mine to bear also. But I felt so alienated from her. I knew she wouldn’t understand the pain I was in – how could she? – but she seemed not to be making any effort to, either. I had to pretend nothing had happened; I wasn’t able to acknowledge it, talk about it or explain quite how much I was hurting and missing Paul. My head was teeming with a cacophony of thoughts and feelings, none of which I was able to share with her. I couldn’t bear the atmosphere this created between us, and I craved the supportive company of the girls in the convent, who had been through the same experience and understood.

  I was also awkward around my stepfather, and he around me. We’d never been close, Sam and I, initially because he hadn’t understood teenagers; now he didn’t have a clue what to say to me.

  It was John and Emmie who came to my rescue. Just a week before I’d left the convent they’d moved house. Since John had finished his national service, they’d been living with Emmie’s widowed mother in Dagenham, but now they’d bought their own place in Eastwood, just outside Southend-on-Sea.

  ‘Okay if I come in?’ Emmie asked, a few days after my return. She and John had popped over for a while, and she’d come to my bedroom, where I was now spending most of my time. I was feeling paralysed by grief and increasingly disinclined to leave the room, even though I knew the isolation was probably the last thing I needed. Tormented by my loss, my room was the only place where I felt I could just be me, and I would spend hour after hour staring sightlessly at the posters on my wall. They were prints of modern art mostly – stylish, quite sophisticated, but now they seemed to belong to another life.

  I tried to read: The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe. But even though I felt a kinship for Jaffe’s heroine, Caroline Bender (her mother’s sage advice was similar to that of my own – ‘don’t let boys touch you’), her life and world now felt very distant from mine. The outside world, generally, felt hostile and alien. No one knew what I’d been through and, even if they had, they wouldn’t have cared.

  I nodded. If there was one person I could talk to, it was Emmie. She gestured to the bed, where I was lying, listlessly trying to read my book, and sat down beside me.

  ‘Your mum’s worried about you,’ she said. ‘I know it might not seem that way, but she is.’

  My expression must have suggested that I wasn’t convinced, but she wasn’t having that. ‘She doesn’t really know what to say to you,’ she continued. ‘That’s the problem. And how can she, after everything you’ve been through?’ She lowered her voice. ‘And let’s face it, she has no idea what you’ve been through. None of us do, do we? But, well, you know your mum. It’s especially hard for her, because she feels . . . well, it’s difficult for her to talk about, isn’t it? Sooo,’ she said, her tone changing now, ‘we’ve hatched a plan between the two of us. How about you come to me and John for a bit?’

  ‘What, now? You’ve come for supper, haven’t you?’

  Emmie shook her head. ‘No, we’re off soon, I think,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t mean for supper; I meant to stay with us.’

  I pulled myself up onto my elbows. ‘To stay?’

  ‘Yes, to stay.’ She smiled. ‘Don’t look so surprised. It’s not going to be the Ritz, I know, and, no, it doesn’t have a sea view. But we’re still close enough to smell the ozone.’

  ‘Oh, Emmie, I’d love to. Thank you so much.’

  ‘Okay, steady on. Don’t get carried away. You’ve not seen the “to do” list I’ve drawn up for you yet. You’ll have to earn your keep, you know. I’ve got a lot of boxes that still need unpacking. So there’ll be no time for lying around feeling sorry for yourself.’

  I couldn’t have been more grateful. I could sense the cloud lifting already: I could get away to somewhere entirely new, where I’d able to talk to someone who was happy to let me talk. ‘Leave them all for me,’ I said, sitting up and putting my arms around her neck. ‘Anything you need doing, really, I’m happy to do it. Oh, this is so kind of you, Emmie, I can’t tell you.’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ she said. ‘It’s all a ruse to get some work done around the house. I just booked two weeks off work, and want some company that’s a little more entertaining than an emulsion brush.’ She stood up. ‘Plus the sea air will do you a world of good. You’re so pale, you look like you’ve been living in a cave with a load of trolls.’

  I swung my legs around and stood up too. ‘So when can I come?’

  ‘How soon can you get packed?’ she replied.

  I was never party to their conversation, but I found out later that my mother had been very worried about me, traumatised and depressed as I so clearly was. So she had confided in Emmie, and they had indeed hatched a plan. So for all my upset at her inability to give me the emotional support I needed, at least I knew my mother cared.

  It was such a comfort to get right away from home and spend time with Emmie. She was so kind, and having taken two weeks off work just to be with me – something I only found out later – she looked after me in every way possible. Though the January winds bit and the sky remained as dark and gloomy as I felt, we spent many, many hours sitting on the promenade at Southend and walking along the local seafront, stopping for endless lunches and cups of tea and coffee.

  ‘So tell me more about that dreadful convent,’ she’d demand. ‘Such a grim and gloomy place! I nearly died at the thought of you locked up in there with all those ghastly nuns!’


  And off I’d go, telling her about the milk kitchen and Sister Teresa, and how we’d shiver in our dormitory and swap our tragic tales. It was so therapeutic to tell someone. I showed her my little Polaroid of Paul – up till then not a single soul besides Linda and I had seen it. I described every detail of his foibles and little ways: how he’d been, the things he did, the way he’d looked so lovely in all her outfits. And I recounted every detail of the day I’d travelled into London and handed him over to Frances Whiteley, which was still so raw and painfully clear in my mind.

  Sometimes we didn’t talk much at all. We’d just walk along the prom, arm in arm, saying nothing, because sometimes it was too difficult for me to speak. Other times we talked about my elder brother, Ray, wondering about the changes in his life since he’d returned from South Africa, and about his and Jean’s children, Sean and Lynne, now both gorgeous toddlers. He had a business set up here now, which was already doing well, and we agreed how nice it was to have the family together again.

  It was good to be able to talk about the future, because I needed to accept and embrace that there was one, for Paul with his new family and for me. I couldn’t hide away and nurse my broken heart forever.

  I left Emmie and John’s feeling so much stronger, and determined to get back to work. I needed occupation for both my mind and my body. I knew it was important that I try not to dwell endlessly on my loss. So I called Bunty, my former boss, and to my great relief she urged me to return right away.

  But it wasn’t simply a case of returning and slipping quietly into my old life. I’d been gone for eight months and it felt like a lifetime. And, more importantly, in terms of the welcome I received, they were eight months during which I’d ostensibly been having the time of my life.

  ‘Ah, the wanderer returns!’ was the first greeting I was met with when I entered the office. ‘So,’ everyone seemed to want to know, ‘was it fun?’