The Baby Laundry for Unmarried Mothers (11 page)

‘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.

I had to beg and plead, but eventually Sister Teresa permitted them a short visit to the nursery to see him. We were escorted to the nursery door where, under Sister Teresa’s beady eye,
they were allowed to gaze upon my tiny sleeping infant – no touching, no holding, no cuddling, just a brief look – and, as was the way at Loreto, only from a distance.

O
n Boxing Day I was allowed out. Being permitted to escape the confines of the convent for more than a brief trip to the shops was probably only
marginally less difficult than escaping from a high security prison. Although there were no physical barriers to prevent girls going out, such was the power of the nuns that no one dared put their
authority to the test. In order to secure my day release, my brother John had to make an application for me to be granted permission by telephone, and then had to wait while the nuns gave it
consideration.

On the whole, visits were discouraged, and would be granted only if the nuns couldn’t find a reason not to allow them, as when Ann had been allowed to attend a family funeral. Since it was
Christmas, however, my visit would be sanctioned if I could find a girl willing to attend to Paul’s feeds during the few hours I would be away.

Though I knew my family – well, John and Emmie, certainly – were keen on me making the visit home, privately I had mixed emotions. Yes, I’d felt homesick on Christmas Day
without family members around me, but now I had a new familial bond to consider. The one highlight of the day had been spending a small part of it with my baby. Now I felt terribly anxious about
leaving him.

I was also all too aware, given the contact we’d had thus far, that I would be expected not to talk about Paul and, while I was there, to behave as if he didn’t exist, as if none of
what had happened to me had taken place. The reality, of course, was that he was my whole world and I was his; I was the only thing he
had
in the world.

Christmas Day had been relatively low key at the convent, though we were determined to celebrate our babies’ first Christmases as best we could. We knew it would be our last Christmas with
them. For a couple of the girls, it would also be their last precious days together.

I had been down to the village and bought Paul a couple of Christmas presents, withdrawing a little money from my Post Office account. I’d bought him a teething ring, and a little soft toy
– a white fluffy dog that now sat at the bottom of his cot. I’d also given him a rosary from the Catholic Repository – every Catholic child was given one – which I intended
would go with him once he was adopted.

A rosary is an important Catholic artefact and very personal; though I still have my mother’s, they are often put in a person’s coffin with them. I made a conscious decision to keep
Paul’s in the end – almost as if I was retaining a little piece of him. Whenever I said prayers on his rosary, those prayers would be for him and would bring us together, if not in
body, at least in spirit.

For most of the girls, normal chores were suspended on Christmas Day, but as my job in the milk kitchen still needed to be done, I dealt with all the bottles as usual. I didn’t mind. My
frequent visits to the nursery meant that even if I couldn’t hold my dear baby while I was doing my duties, I could see him.

The nuns softened towards us slightly on Christmas morning. There was no Christmas tree, as it would have been considered superficial on a day that was supposed to be celebrating Christ’s
birth, but they provided crackers for our Christmas lunch of turkey and plum pudding, and they’d allowed us to make and put up some paper chains.

The trappings of Christmas didn’t really matter. What mattered most was that we were lucky enough to share this Christmas with our babies – an accident of timing, but a precious one.
It felt as if we were living in a cocoon, with the outside world, for this brief time, non-existent.

Boxing Day, in contrast, drew me back to the real world. John and Emmie arrived in John’s maroon Ford Anglia at 11.00 in the morning to drive me to Sam’s bungalow – my former
home – where the family, including my childless Aunt Ellen and Uncle Jack, traditionally spent the day.

I had asked one of the pregnant girls to look after Paul. She was a shy teenager called Carol; she was keen to be helpful, and I’d given her a list of all the things she needed to
know.

By now Paul and I had developed quite a routine together. Carol must give him half his feed first – that was important, as he’d always be screaming for his bottle when I got to him
– wind him halfway through, then change his nappy. She must remember to put on a little zinc and castor oil cream, then give him the remainder of his feed, before swaddling him securely and
laying him back in his cot on his side.

Despite knowing he could come to no harm in my absence, it was disturbing to be putting physical distance between us voluntarily. As I put my warm coat on and went into the hall to wait for
Emmie and John’s arrival, it felt as if I’d left a part of myself behind.

It was a bitterly cold day that had begun with a deep frost, which never really looked like it would thaw. As I stepped out to greet them, I could feel the icy air catch in my nostrils; it was
such a contrast to the air within the convent walls. I realised I had barely ventured into the outside world since the birth.

‘Goodness!’ said Emmie, leaping out of the car and rushing up to hug me. ‘You don’t look at
all
as if you’ve just had a baby! I can’t believe you got
your figure back so quickly!’ She let me go and led me back to the waiting car and my brother. ‘Look at her, John,’ she said as she opened the door for me. ‘Already back in
her normal clothes!’

‘What I have of them,’ I said, as I got into the warm car. ‘That’s one of the things I really have to do today: bring some more clothes back with me. But you’re
right. It’s amazed me. My bump must have been all baby!’ That, I reflected, plus a subsistence diet, a heavy physical work schedule, many, many sleepless nights and a great deal of
appetite-suppressing heartache. But it was so nice to see my brother and sister-in-law that I didn’t want to gripe. At least with them I could be myself. At least with them I didn’t
have to hang my head in shame.