The Baby Laundry for Unmarried Mothers (7 page)

It seemed incredible to me too, once I gave it some thought, but it was true, and as I went into the nursery to give Louise the first of her two feeds, I felt wholly inadequate for the task.

I picked her up – she was crying, of course; they all either slept or cried – and gingerly eased my hand under her tiny skull. This seemed to calm her immediately, which helped my
confidence a lot, but then she started to cry again. It wasn’t her mother picking her up, and I sensed she knew that. As I lowered us both onto the nursing chair beside the cot, I felt the
weight of the world in the shape of this tiny little human. Where would she end up? What would her future be like when she left the convent? How could Ann, now she’d given birth to her, bear
to part with her?

Tentatively I pushed the teat of the bottle into her tiny open mouth, and almost immediately the crying stopped and was replaced by urgent sucking. She seemed so strong, her little lips really
tugging on the bottle. As she fed, her expression became dreamy and faraway, softening her angry features as if by magic.

I was all at sea again once the bottle was empty. Louise had fallen into what looked like a deep and dreamy slumber, but I would have to wake her up to change her nappy. She protested loudly as
I got up and took her over to the changing mat, and even more as I tried gently to remove her clothes. How horrible it must be, I thought, to be a baby in this place. It was so cheerless and cold
– all hard surfaces and draughts. I knew I was making things worse with my ineptitude. The nappies were so big. There was so much cloth, so many corners, so much stiff, scratchy towelling
– and I had so little sense of what to do with it. All the while Louise was looking up at me, fractious and bewildered and uncomfortable, as the chill air of the cavernous nursery began to
turn her little legs blue.

‘Here, let me help,’ said one of the other mothers, who’d joined me at the counter. I’d been taking so long over everything, she was the only other girl left in the
nursery. ‘It’s almost too painful to watch you!’ she said, smiling warmly. Once again, I could only stand and marvel as she showed me the correct way to fold the nappy, how to lay
it beneath the baby and how to deal with both the fabric and the scary nappy pins.

‘There,’ she said proudly, before returning to her own baby. ‘That’ll give you a head start when your own little one comes along.’

She looked about eighteen, and could have been even younger, but she seemed so efficient, so calm, so untroubled by her baby’s angry kicking. ‘How old is he?’ I asked her, as
she redressed her little boy. ‘Close on six weeks now,’ she said. ‘He’s just gorgeous, isn’t he?’

I agreed that he was, as she picked him up again. She held him to her face, just as Ann had done. It was almost like she was trying to drink in the scent of him. ‘Not long now,’ she
said, giving me a wry half-smile. ‘Less than two weeks.’ She kissed him again. ‘It’s all gone too fast – much too fast.’

The light caught her face and despite her cheerful demeanour I could see tears shining in her eyes. ‘How can you bear it?’ I asked, because I genuinely wanted to know. I just
couldn’t see myself there, having to
be
her, having to be so brave.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’m not even sure I can yet. But I’m going to have to bear it, aren’t I? What else is to be done?’

As she relinquished her baby to the jaws of his cot and hurried from the nursery to resume her chores, I wished I knew her story. Where had she come from? What was she going back to when she
left? But then, I thought, I already knew her story, didn’t I? It was the same as mine – wretched. And she was right: there was nothing to be done about it.

What a horrible, unfeeling world we both lived in, I thought, as I picked Louise up to return her to her cot. She was wide awake now, and once again crying loudly, and I hated the thought of
having to dump her onto the hard, unyielding mattress, knowing she’d have to cry herself to sleep. To make matters worse, just at the moment when I was about to lay her down, she was
violently sick, vomiting up what looked like half the bottle’s worth of baby milk in one great rush of liquid that spewed all down her front.

Having ejected the milk, she immediately looked happier, but she was now soaking. The front of her nightie was drenched. I’d have to change it. I couldn’t leave her like that.
She’d get hungry again, and there was nothing I could do about that, but she’d also get chilled to the bone lying in wet clothing. I carefully placed her in her cot and went to look in
her locker; Ann had shown me where I could find a change of clothing.

I knew that I had to be quick, but I wasn’t quick enough. I’d just gathered up Louise and a dry nightie when I heard Sister Teresa’s voice rasping behind me.

‘Angela!’ she snapped. ‘There you are! Why are you still in here? Why aren’t you attending to your duties?’

I felt a rush of defiance flood my cheeks. She knew full well that I’d agreed to look after Ann’s baby, so where did she think I was?

‘I’m changing Louise,’ I explained. ‘She’s—’

‘
Still
?’ she interrupted, looking genuinely incredulous. ‘You’ve been in here for ages. What on earth have you been doing all this time? Is she fed?’

‘Yes, she’s fed.’

‘And have you changed her yet?’ She looked from me to the baby.

I nodded. ‘Yes, yes, I’ve changed her nappy, but—’

‘So why are you still here? Put her back in her cot, for pity’s sake!’ She glanced around her. ‘All this noise! You’re disturbing the other babies!’

Not as much, I thought crossly, as you are. I kept my own voice pointedly low. ‘It’s just that she’s been sick all down her front,’ I persisted. ‘I wanted to put
her in a dry nightie, so that—’

‘For goodness’
sake
!’ Sister Teresa barked, marching towards me now. ‘Fuss, fuss, fuss. Give her to me . . .’ She held her hands out and irritably flapped
her bony fingers towards me. ‘Come on,’ she said, taking Louise from me. I thought for a moment that she was going to change Louise for me, but I was instantly disabused of such a
fanciful notion. ‘Now put that nightie back where you found it and get back to the milk kitchen. There’s work to be done. For goodness’ sake,’ she rasped, heading back to
Louise’s place in the line, ‘a little posset down her front isn’t going to
kill
her, Angela!’ Then, as I watched, she deposited the now howling baby on the mattress.
‘Go on,’ she said, turning, and making shooing motions in my direction. ‘Why are you still here? There’s work that needs to be done. Get back to your duties.’

As I made my way back to the milk kitchen, feeling I’d let Ann down badly, I couldn’t help but be incredulous. This was a
nun
. Someone I’d been taught was a person with
a vocation to do God’s work on earth – wasn’t that the idea? If Sister Teresa was supposed to typify such a person, then the world had gone mad, I decided.

It was a world that, for me, had seen major upheavals. My father’s death had brought about many changes in our family, not least of which was that my mother, always the
disciplinarian, became doubly strict, feeling the need to take on the roles of both mother
and
father. My whereabouts and my companions had to be known to her at all times. Boyfriends were
vetted – embarrassingly. Whenever they called for me, she would confront them on the doorstep, explaining that she was my voice for the present and I was most definitely unavailable. It
wasn’t surprising that hardly any boys passed muster, as she reasoned that my father would never have approved of them.

Some relief from this maternal pressure came with the arrival of my stepfather, Sam, into our lives in the summer of 1961. My mother had been introduced to him by a family friend and
they’d soon struck up a friendship.

When I first met my future stepfather, I’d immediately felt apprehensive. He was a 53-year-old bachelor who had lived with his mother until her death a couple of years earlier. What on
earth did he know of family life? His values were frankly Victorian. It was clear that he took a lofty moral stance in all things, and had a pretty dim view of what he perceived as a laxity in the
way I was disciplined. I was, as he and my mother kept repeating, his concern now too, at least until I reached the age of twenty-one.

It was a decidedly quick courtship. They were married in March of 1962, and we all moved into his bungalow in another part of Essex. My mother was given free rein to transform his home –
now also ours – and enjoyed freedom from constant financial anxiety. There was more freedom for me too. Though providing something else for my mother to focus on besides me, the move to
Sam’s bungalow created logistical problems, as it was miles away from where we’d lived before. But I didn’t mind. I was eighteen – almost an adult. My friends now being
somewhat distant geographically, I could at last enjoy some respite from questions and curfews, as whenever we socialised together, it was much more practical for me to stay overnight with them.
Just as my mother relished having a man in her life, I relished her being less present in mine.

It seemed a guardian angel was looking out for me professionally as well. Since my father’s death and the end of my educational aspirations, I’d resigned myself to not having any
sort of career; I fully expected that I would see out my days in the typing pool of some large conglomerate. Quite by chance, however, a neighbour approached my mother and asked her when I would be
leaving secretarial college. It seemed her sister was retiring from her job very shortly, and was on the lookout for a new young replacement to train.

The woman was a codes translator in a large City of London firm of importers and exporters called Guthrie and Co. It was a job that involved making sense of and compiling instructions in the
vast array of complex codes that were used as a means of secure communication in the global shipping industry. And so it was that I was given the chance of a lifetime, and began what would turn out
to be some of the happiest years of my life. I worked with two wonderful women, who remain lifelong friends; I had a wise and warm boss, who taught me so many new skills, and I couldn’t quite
believe my good fortune. To be earning good money doing something I loved so much was icing on an already delicious cake.

Yes, I was an innocent, but emerging into adulthood at the start of the 1960s, it seemed that the possibilities were endless. I had embarked on a career, I had my whole life ahead of me and I
was determined that one day I would look like the glamorous and sophisticated women that I passed on the City streets each day.

But look at me now, I thought, as I finished my second milk round and headed to the dining room for tea that afternoon. I still felt terrible about poor Louise, who’d
been so cold and wet and ravenous when I’d done her second feed. I looked around for Ann, but it seemed she hadn’t returned yet; instead it was the usual sea of hollow-eyed girls. There
were no sophisticated followers of fashion round the dining table in the Loreto Convent Mother and Baby Home, for sure – just a group of desperate young women who were paying the painful
price of what, in every single case I heard, was not so much sinful as tragic, however much the nuns kept telling us otherwise.

‘So what’s your story?’ asked Linda, as we took our places at the table. Linda was one of the girls I’d recently befriended, who’d arrived at the convent the
previous week. She was from Bradford, and was a ray of sunshine in the gloom, with a relentlessly positive and infectious personality.

Our different duties were very isolating, as we tended to perform them alone, so I was glad of the chance to sit down and have a proper chat with her. I told her the bare bones of what had
happened with Peter.

‘Bastard,’ was her considered reply.

‘And you?’ I asked, expecting something less terrible, somehow. That was silly though. She was here as well, wasn’t she?

‘Another bastard,’ she said. Then she leaned in towards me. ‘In fact, on balance, an even bigger one.’

‘What happened?’

‘What’s happened is that he’s married,’ she said.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I began. This was a depressingly common story.

‘Trust me, not half as sorry as I am,’ she finished. ‘I only found out two days ago!’

I was shocked, and said so.

‘Me too,’ she went on. ‘Me too! I had no idea – not even an inkling. But, of course, now everything’s falling into place. I mean, I’m nineteen, he’s not
much older, and we weren’t ready for marriage, or so
I
thought, so when he wanted me to have an abortion – and let me tell you, he
really
wanted me to have an abortion
– it didn’t seem like anything unusual. I wasn’t going to have one, though. No way. I mean, you hear the stories, don’t you?’ She shuddered and pulled a face.
‘So I got everything organised, so I could, you know, get down here and have the baby. Got a job in London, so my mam wouldn’t find out anything about it. Jesus! The lies I tell her,
God save my soul . . .’

‘So what happened?’ I asked her. ‘How did you find out he was married?’

‘When I called him on Wednesday,’ she told me. ‘Just this last Wednesday! Can you believe it? Anyway, you know, I called him just to have a chat, as you do. We’ve been
speaking on the phone regularly. All the time, you know? All the way through this. And I thought – well, as you do – that however horrible this is, at least I had him to support me, to
go back to. At least we could pick up where we left off, you know? But when I called on Wednesday . . . ’ I could sense the tone of her voice changing. ‘This woman answered, because he
wasn’t there; he was out of the office or something. And she was like, “Oh, is that his wife?”’

‘Oh, that’s awful!’ I said, reaching instinctively to put an arm around her. But she flapped her hand.

‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Please don’t. No sympathy allowed. I’m okay so long as no one tries to give me a hug or anything. I’ll be okay . . .’ She gave
me a wobbly smile. ‘I’m fine now. I’ll get over it. No bloody choice, have I? So,’ she said, picking up her cutlery with a clatter, ‘this looks delicious,
doesn’t it?’ And she began eating.