In Her Mothers' Shoes (10 page)

‘Come on, back to work girls,’ Jessie called, clambering off the bench-seat. She looked across at Lizzie. ‘You too, Lizzie. It’s time for you to find out what you’re in for.’

‘Yes, to be inducted into the mysteries of the Laundry for Wayward Girls.’ Meg sniggered and took her arm, leading her behind Jessie through a maze of corridors to the far end of the building.

‘All the girls here call it Bleak House.’ Jessie pulled a face. ‘It is too.’

‘Do we do all the washing for this place?’ Lizzie asked innocently as they walked.

‘Yes, and the rest.’

‘The rest?’

‘Fitzgibbon House’s laundry is just the beginning,’ Meg said. ‘Most of the work is the laundry from the maternity home and hospital over there.’ Meg pointed out the window.

‘That’s where the good mothers go,’ Jessie said on her way to the door. ‘The ones with husbands.’

‘The father of the baby – we don’t want any of those around,’ Pearl said.

‘Not likely to see them either,’ Jessie said, putting her arm round Pearl.

They trailed behind Jessie and Pearl on the way out.

‘Do you know about Essex Hospital, Lizzie?’ Meg asked.

‘Yes. It’s where we go to have our babies.’ It had been a morning of unpleasant revelations, but her mother had at least told her that much.

‘Well, it’s over there, behind the washing lines and through the back fence.’

Lizzie looked out the window where Meg was indicating. Behind a line of trees she could just make out another white building, smaller than the one she was in, equally plain and functional. ‘Not far to go then when your time comes.’ Lizzie smiled. It seemed a magical time way in the distance.

‘No.’ Meg laughed drily. ‘Nice and handy. Meanwhile, we get to do all their washing. It’s enough to put you off having a baby for ever – all that blood! Ugh!’

‘Really?’ Lizzie didn’t want to show her new friends how squeamish she felt. She hadn’t been warned about blood. She’d imagined having a baby would be a joyous experience, the arrival of a new life, your very own creation. That was certainly the picture painted in the few books she’d managed to find at the library about babies – a rosy glow hovered around the mother’s head as she held the newly delivered baby wrapped tightly and smiling beatifically at her. There hadn’t been any mention of blood. She shuddered. She didn’t like blood.

Mind you, there had also been a doting father in all the pictures and she knew there wouldn’t be one of those at the birth. What other unpleasant realities were in store?

‘It’s a bit late to be put off now.’ Meg said, laughing at her own joke.

‘I suppose so.’ Lizzie didn’t think it at all funny.

Meg’s laugh turned bitter. ‘In here,’ she said, entering a room that was much warmer than the cool chill of the rest of the building.

She soon saw why. Through the steam she could make out, lined up against the outside wall, a row of laundry coppers, just like the one at home that Mrs Mullen presided over every Monday and Thursday morning. Each one was steaming away furiously, and a short, stout girl was running between them, stirring the contents with a long wooden pole.

‘Here you are, Christine, I got you a biscuit.’ Jessie handed over the tea-stained biscuit she’d saved from morning tea. It’s got raisins in it.’ She gave Pearl a taunting glance.

Pearl ignored her.

Christine ate it at once, continuing the incessant stirring with her other hand. ‘I’ll take that over now, you have a break.’ Christine smiled gratefully and retreated to a corner near the door where she lowered herself, with some difficulty, onto a small, three-legged stool.

‘Come on, Lizzie, I’ll show you what to do.’

Lizzie, being the newcomer, was put in charge of stoking the fire under each copper, adding small pieces of wood through the firebox door, making sure the fire was drawing properly and the smoke was all going up the chimneys inserted into the side wall and not blowing back into the laundry. She was told not to let the fire get too fierce, nor was it to die down too low, so the water would continue to boil in the big vat above. Fetching and carrying the wood from outside, carefully opening each firebox with a thick cloth and feeding the flames took up the rest of the morning. It was hot work down by the fireboxes and she had to wipe her forehead all the time to keep the sweat from trickling in her eyes. 

If the next month or so was going to be like this, she doubted she could cope. Were these the wages of sin the vicar used to talk about in his Sunday sermons? You committed a sin – like sex out of wedlock, she realised – and you paid for it stoking the fires of hell for all eternity. Or at least it seemed like eternity stretching out before her on day one. How would she make it to day thirty-one? A whole month of this before they got moved onto gardening.

She’d never been as relieved as when Jessie said she could let the fires go out it was time for the final cold-water rinse.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever been so hot in my life,’ Lizzie said.

‘You get used to that,’ Jessie said.

‘And not caring two figs for how you look,’ Meg said, wiping her brow with her wet hands.

‘My hair must look a fright,’ Lizzie said, quickly rubbing a hand across it. ‘It goes frizzy just at the sight of water.’

‘It looked lovely when you came in. You’ve got nice hair. Nice and thick. Not like my thin, stringy strands.’ Jessie said.

‘I’d rather that than a frizz.’

‘I wouldn’t worry now,’ Meg said. ‘It’s plastered to your head. That’s what happens to you in the laundry. You end up looking like a wrung-out tea towel.’

‘I certainly feel like one.’

‘Then you can get to work on the wringer and see for yourself.’ Lizzie’s job now, Jessie told her, was to operate one of two mangles beside the rinsing tub. Anahira, the next most recent arrival, was on the other one.

The mangle wasn’t quite as bad as stoking the fires, but it had frequent moments of terror when, turning the handle to feed the sheets and towels through, she almost got her fingers caught between the two fearsome rollers.

In her head, as she fed and turned, fed and turned, she wrote a letter to her mother telling her how it was, every awful detail of the laundry. But she knew she’d never send it. There was no point. What would her mother say? ‘Sorry, all is forgiven, come home now?’ Not a chance. She was stuck here at Bleak House for the next five months and there was no other alternative – she had nowhere else to go.

Chapter 5.

Christchurch.  Christmas Eve, 1950.

The smoggy, misty Christchurch dawn cast a grey pall over the windows outside Bleak House, sending a lingering chill through the dormitories and shower blocks inside. But Lizzie scarcely noticed the cold – she’d become so used to it at this hour it was hardly worth a mention. In a few hours, the place would be hot and stuffy in the summer heat and she’d be looking forward to the cooler evening.

She raced with the others to the shower – the quicker you got there, the less you felt the cold – set down her spongebag, threw off her nightdress, turned on the taps and waited until the temperature was just right before jumping in.

‘Your nipples have gone all brown, Lizzie.’ Meg said across the chest-height dividing wall between the showers. ‘Mine haven’t yet.’

Lizzie unselfconsciously looked down at hers and, sure enough, the areola was a smooth chocolaty brown while each nipple seemed to be larger than before and almost hard.

‘So they have.’ she said. ‘Pearl’s and Anahira’s went like that ages ago.’

‘Isn’t it funny how they seem to get so much bigger?’

‘What, your nipples?’

‘Yes. They never warn you it’s going to happen.’

‘That’s what’s so good about being in this together,’ Lizzie said. ‘You get to know what to look for.’

‘And it saves you getting in a stitch about it. You just ask each other.’

‘And if we don’t know, you can ask the lot ahead of us.’

Jessie stuck her head over the wall on the other side of Lizzie. ‘Like when Pearl’s tummy button started to stick out,’ she said.

The three of them laughed at this.

‘You could see it through her dress at the dinner table, like she had a little bumpy knot on top of her belly,’ Meg said. ‘Pass me the shampoo please, Lizzie, I’ve run out.’

‘It’ll happen to all of us soon,’ Anahira called from the next cubicle.

Lizzie squirted out a dab of shampoo and passed the bottle to Meg. ‘Thanks.’ She lathered her hair.

‘Isn’t it funny how we can talk so easily about such things?’ Meg said, passing the bottle back.

‘I’d never have believed it a couple of months ago,’ Lizzie said. ‘I’d never have dreamed of showing my breasts to anyone.’

‘Not even to your boyfriend?’ Jessie popped her head out from under the flow of water to speak then popped it back again to rinse her hair.

‘Especially not to him.’

‘Me neither.’ Meg was still lathering. ‘What about you Pearl?’

‘I don’t have a boyfriend,’ Pearl snapped. ‘I’ve told you before.’

‘Oops, sorry. I’d forgotten how tetchy you were about him.’

‘He’s not my boyfriend.’ Pearl shut off her shower taps, picked up her soap and stalked over to the bench where her clothes were waiting in a neat pile. Of all of them, Pearl was the tidiest and the most reserved, preferring to hide in the corner when getting dressed.

‘Well there must have been a boy somewhere in the picture, or you wouldn’t be here,’ Jessie called after her.

Pearl plucked her towel off its hook and wrapped it tightly around herself before turning back to Jessie and giving her a withering look. ‘It’s none of your business.’ She took a few steps towards the showers. ‘That goes for all of you. Just leave me alone.’ She was shouting now, her eyes narrowed in anger. ‘If my father was here, he’d put an end to your prying questions.’

‘Your father?’ Jessie snorted as she lathered her arms with soap. ‘The way you talk about him, you’d think
he
was your boyfriend.’

‘How dare you!’ Pearl screamed. Clutching her towel with one hand and grabbing her pile of clothes with the other, she stormed out, dropping her soap without stopping to pick it up.

‘Now you’ve upset her,’ Lizzie called to Jessie.

‘Must have touched a sensitive nerve,’ Meg said.