Sisters of the East End

by Helen Batten

  ‘It was terrible! I was in the delivery room. And you know Mrs Coleman, from down March Street?’

  ‘Oh, no! Don’t tell me something has happened to her baby?’

  She nodded, and started to sob.

  ‘Dear Lord, no!’ I said and crossed myself. Poor Margery Coleman had been trying to have a baby for years. She had had many miscarriages and an ectopic pregnancy. Infertility is a tragedy today, but in those days it held even more stigma. There was a huge premium for married women to have a family. It was still seen by most as the primary purpose for a woman if she hadn’t given up on marriage in favour of a career like teaching or nursing. But now Margery finally seemed to be carrying a baby to term. It was an occasion of great joy to the whole Community and we had said prayers of thanks. Marie-Louise continued.

  ‘Stupid junior doctor! Rubbish, totally rubbish! He was doing it all wrong. I knew he was doing it wrong, I just couldn’t bring myself to say anything. I failed and now the poor baby is dead.’

  ‘Oh, I am so sorry.’

  I went over and put my arms round her. Both of us were crying now.

  ‘He was breech and the doctor just wasn’t doing anything. He botched the whole thing and I knew it. I could see what was going to happen. I said so, but he just wouldn’t listen. I should have taken control.’

  ‘How could you, though? How could you? It’s not your fault; it isn’t. You’re only training. He’s the doctor, it’s his responsibility. Please don’t blame yourself. I would have been the same.’

  ‘You wouldn’t! You would have said something. I know what you’re like – you have courage.’

  ‘No, not at your stage. That only comes with experience and you did speak.’

  ‘Not loud enough.’

  We cried together for a time and then I said, ‘We can never know why some little souls are sent for such a short time on earth, but we know that God suffers with us in every tragedy we face in life.’

  ‘You really believe that?’

  I had to think for a moment. Then I said, ‘I have to. Otherwise I couldn’t do this job and witness the tragedies I have witnessed.’

  Marie-Louise sat silently thinking and then she started crying again.

  ‘Oh, it was dreadful – the scream that Margery made from every fibre of her being.’

  I nodded. I remembered the Cyclops baby. There is a special terrible cry that mothers can make when they have lost their child and it haunts me.

  ‘I had to take the baby to the mortuary. I wrapped him up, and you know the mortuary?’

  I nodded. It was a short walk from the hospital, but it meant you had to go outside.

  ‘It was pouring with rain and when I got there it was closed. I was stood outside, holding this dead baby in my arms. I knocked on the door and no one answered. So I just stood there in the rain and the baby was getting wet, and I was thinking, “This poor mite is getting soaked,” and then I thought, “But he’s dead, it doesn’t matter,” but it did. It was so disrespectful. Everything felt wrong. I stood there wondering what on earth God was playing at, may He forgive me.’

  ‘He forgives you, Marie-Louise. He does. He understands our anger. We are allowed to be angry with Him and it is right to tell Him our anger. Put it in front of Him, tell Him everything you feel. You will find peace. It may take a long time but as long as you keep telling Him how you feel and laying it before Him, He will send you peace. You will be reconciled.’

  ‘I hope you’re right. At the moment it feels impossible. I feel like I can’t go on.’

  I held her some more, and then she drew back from me.

  ‘And then, you know what? I kept banging on the door and eventually the mortician answered and said, “We’re closed”, and I was stood there with a dead baby in my arms.’

  ‘Oh, no!’

  ‘Yes. I said, “Look, I’ve got a dead baby here. What am I supposed to do? Are you just going to leave us out in the rain?” I shouted, I was so angry.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Well, he let us in, but he was so rude. Unbelievable! I kept seeing poor Margery lying there and what she would think if she could see how her baby was being treated. The lack of humanity.’

  I nodded.

  I suggested we say a prayer together, for Margery and her baby boy, and also for Marie-Louise (and for the junior doctor and the mortician), and then I took Marie-Louise down to Sister Ruth.

  The next day I boarded a train to the Mother House. All the way I was thinking about Marie-Louise and Margery Coleman; the horrific waste and the sheer agony. And somehow it put my own struggles with Father Ian into perspective. They seemed trivial, superficial and shabby, and most of all, selfish. I wondered whether this journey was necessary at all but as the buildings got smaller and sparser and suddenly the train was speeding through fields, I felt my spirits lighten. It was good to get out of London, to get some space.

  I realised how much I needed a break. It was the beginning of March, and just at the cusp of spring, when some days it is definitely still winter and the next day it is definitely spring. As soon as I got to the Mother House I went for a walk. The bright spring sunshine was calling me out and to stay inside would feel like a reproach. Anyway, I needed to blow away my cobwebs, spring-clean and hang the freshly laundered white linen of my soul on the washing line and let it blow dry in the sun. As I walked along a footpath by the side of the fields the land was grey and barren, but when I looked closely at the trees they were full of buds just waiting to burst into life. There were catkins, an empty nest, bunny rabbits hopping with white tails bobbing, I saw crocuses and daffodils.

  I felt the power of the turn of the earth. We get caught up in human stuff in the city, but out here all I could see was the overwhelming power of Nature and God’s creation. Whatever we human beings were up to, summer was coming. Like ants, we scurry away oblivious to the fact that something much bigger is at work. A row of beautiful trees caught my eye, but then I noticed each one had a tremendous amount of ivy climbing up the trunks. While the branches were bare, the only thing that appeared to be living was the fecund ivy – lush green, thriving. I stopped and pondered it. It was beautiful, but wasn’t it actually getting in the way? Didn’t it need to be chopped back in order for the tree to thrive or even to survive? It was a parasite, a seductive one, but it was taking the goodness and shutting out the light. I spent a long time looking at this line of trees. ‘Father Ian is my ivy,’ I thought and I snapped off a piece of ivy to take back to my room and ponder further.

  Sat in front of Mother Sarah Grace, I poured out my story; I held nothing back. I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know of anyone else whose chastity had been challenged during my time with the Community (or at least as far as I knew!). But Mother Sarah Grace sat impassive throughout, only raising an eyebrow when I confessed to being distracted by the back of Father Ian’s neck during the Ecumenical Service. When I had finished she sat silently and closed her eyes. The clock ticked loudly in the corner. Time stretched. I could hear every sound: the birds in the garden, the distant clatter of plates, a door being slammed. After about five minutes she opened her eyes and started shuffling in the drawer of her desk.

  ‘Sister Catherine Mary, thank you for coming to me with this. You did the right thing. I want to give you something.’

  After a bit of rummaging she found what she wanted. She passed me a postcard of a painting. It was a depiction of Christ in the early dawn, standing at an overgrown door, about to knock. In his hand was a bright lamp.

  ‘Do you know what this is?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, Mother. It’s “The Light of the World” by Holman Hunt. I saw it recently in St Paul’s Cathedral – I found it rather powerful.’

  ‘Indeed. And do you know what passage of scripture it was inspired by?’

  ‘Yes. Some verse from Revelations, I think,

  Behold, I stand at the door, and knock:

  If anyone hear my voice, and open the door,

  I will come
in to him and sill sup with him, and he with me

  ‘Well done, Sister. Exactly.’

  ‘Exactly?’

  ‘Christ is knocking at your door. You need to let him in.’

  I was surprised and a little cross.

  ‘But Mother, I have let him in! I couldn’t have let him in further – I’m a nun!’

  ‘It’s not the habit you wear on the outside, Sister, it’s what’s going on inside that I’m concerned with.’

  ‘But …’ I tried to interrupt but she carried on.

  ‘In our consecration to Christ we are always being called to a deeper understanding of ourselves, to deeper commitment and transformation. There will be temptations but it is what you do with them that matters. Now what you have to do in this case is to do exactly what any spouse should do when tempted to break their vows, and that is step away from the temptation and fill the gap by spending more time getting closer and more intimate with the person they married – which, in your case, is God.’ She made a nod in the direction of my wedding ring.

  ‘I would suggest you spend the day here in prayer then go back refreshed and renewed to face the situation. I would also suggest that you pray about your future, asking for discernment for your way forward in the religious life and the development of your ministry as a midwife.’

  I sat in silence and then I had a small epiphany: a picture of Marie-Louise came into my head.

  ‘Mother, I think I would like to train to be a midwife tutor. I would like to teach.’

  Mother Sarah Grace paused and looked at me.

  ‘I think that is an excellent idea, Sister. While you are here I shall start making enquiries and see what can be done. In the meantime, keep the postcard and meditate on it. Listen for Christ knocking; let him come further into your life.’

  I left her study and felt an enormous, tearful sense of relief and gratitude. Everything suddenly made sense and I felt like I had come home. In my room I went down on my knees in front of the postcard with the ivy laid at its feet and thanked God for this moment of insight. I didn’t want any midwife to go through what Marie-Louise had just been through and if I could prevent just one baby from losing its life in the way that Margery Coleman’s baby had lost his life, then any personal sacrifice would be worth it. I had been working in midwifery for five years and now I wanted to teach everything I knew about being a midwife, to make sure midwives had the confidence to speak up; that women were not ‘done unto’ but empowered to bring their babies safely into the world. It all made sense. I also took another long look at the ivy and realised that the ivy was not so much Father Ian as the loneliness I had felt since Cecilia had gone. My relationship with Father Ian was a symptom, not a cause.

  A few weeks later back in Poplar, I was summoned to the telephone and Mother Sarah Grace informed me that a place had been found for me to return to the London Lying-In Hospital in preparation for applying to train as a midwife tutor at the Midwifery Training School in Kingston. This all felt right and I was excited; whatever madness I had been seized with had disappeared in a puff of smoke, the daft fog had cleared and the whole landscape looked different. Indeed, the very thought of seeing Father Ian made me feel slightly sick.

  When I think of life as a journey, as lots of people do, I often wonder whether it is a maze or a labyrinth. The difference between a maze and a labyrinth is that mazes have dead ends and false paths whereas labyrinths only have one path and as long as you put one foot in front of the other you will reach the centre, even if sometimes, geographically, you have to go further away first. Sometimes my life has seemed like a maze – my infatuation with Father Ian could, in some ways, be seen as a classic false path to a dead end. And yet if it hadn’t been for Father Ian, I doubt that I would ever have become a midwife tutor.

  For the next 18 months I found myself back as a student, training. I enjoyed it immensely and felt that I really was in the right place, doing the right thing. However, towards the end of 1969 when I had only three months still to do and I was really looking forward to qualifying and starting teaching, I was suddenly faced with a change of direction that felt as if I had been wrenched out of the maze by a bulldozer or suddenly had a Minotaur blocking the path of the labyrinth.

  Alarm bells started to ring as soon as the letter arrived from Mother Sarah Grace, asking me to go to Hastings to attend a meeting with the Bishop of Malawi. Now what would he be wanting? My instincts told me nothing good. So I took myself off at the weekend up to London to visit the Nursing and Midwifery Show at Earls Court. Not that I particularly wanted to go, but I knew Sister Alice would be there. I scoured the busy arena and it wasn’t long before I said to myself, ‘Hyacinth, darling’. In the distance was the happy bright blue of a habit from the Community of St John the Divine. I pushed my way through the crowds and tapped the shoulder of my old teacher and mentor, Sister Alice. She turned round, her face broke into a broad grin and she gave me a warm hug as I said, ‘Sister Alice, I’m so glad I have found you! You are just the person I need to see.’

  ‘Well, Sister Catherine Mary, this is an unexpected and blessed pleasure!’

  ‘Come and have a cup of tea with me straight away. There’s something I want to show you.’

  As we each sat with a cup of strong tea and a rock cake, I produced Mother Sarah Grace’s request for attendance at a meeting with the Bishop of Malawi.

  ‘Well, what do you think?’ I asked Sister Alice.

  ‘What is there to think?’

  ‘Well, don’t you think it’s suspicious?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘Well, what’s behind it? What does he want? I don’t like the sound of it.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous! There’s nothing behind it. He just wants to visit the Community. Honestly, Sister Catherine Mary, you always did have an overactive imagination and a tendency to the dramatic.’ She rolled her eyes, tutted in mock disgust and then changed the subject to discuss the arrival of the new curate at All Saints Church.

  So I sat on my suspicions, went back to college and then on the allotted day took the train to Hastings to meet the Bishop. On arrival, I found all the Sisters had been summoned. I looked around and tried to make some sort of sense of what we were all doing there. Sister Alice had come after all and with her was Marie-Louise. Interesting. Marie-Louise had overcome the trauma of Mrs Coleman’s baby’s death and been persuaded by Sister Ruth to go back and complete her training at the hospital, and then Part Two in the district, and now she was a fully qualified midwife. In fact, she had taken my place working in Poplar. I could understand Sister Alice’s presence as a senior midwife and member of the Community, but why would Marie-Louise have been brought all the way down here? All the nerves in my body started to jangle.

  The Bishop of Malawi was a loud, jolly, charismatic man. For three hours he talked to us and kept us enthralled (in a rather horrified way). He described a desperate situation. In Malawi, in 1969 there were hardly any trained midwives or hospitals with dedicated maternity units. Proper antenatal and post-natal care were limited. Death rates for both mothers and babies were equivalent to mid-Victorian England. So many of these deaths, and the poverty and heartbreak they brought, could have been avoided with just some basic medical care. There was a little hospital called St Anne’s in a place called Nkhotakota, which had been run by Christian missionaries for many decades. Now the Bishop had come to England to ask if the Community of St John’s could take it over, and expand it. He wanted us to set up a proper maternity unit and start a midwifery training school, which could eventually be taken over by the government and set the template for an expansion of maternity services across the whole of Malawi. It would ensure proper care would be available to women not just in the towns, but also in the more rural areas of the country. He thought that this would take five years.

  At the end of his speech Mother Sarah Grace thanked him, and said that the Community would think and pray about his request and get back to him. I knew it – I had known it all al
ong.

  In the following weeks the Sisters prayed and consulted, and I was summoned back to speak to Mother Sarah Grace.

  ‘Sister Catherine Mary, you know we have been asked to take over the hospital of St Anne’s in Malawi. After much prayer we have decided to answer this call. This means we need to send three Sisters over to Malawi and we would like one of those to be you. Indeed, we would like you to be in charge of the hospital.’

  I knew it. But every nerve in my body didn’t just jangle, it screamed ‘No!’ I tried to keep calm.

  ‘Mother, I am just about to complete my training to be a midwife tutor. Everything has led me here; everything I have ever done. This is my path and this is my calling; I am sure of this. Everything is telling me I am not supposed to leave this path. Not at this time. Not when I am so close to reaching my God-given destination.’

  ‘Sister Catherine Mary, none of us should ever presume to know our destination. God has called you for whatever reason to a greater purpose.’

  ‘No. I’m not disagreeing with the purpose. It’s a good and noble purpose but it’s not mine. Why don’t you send someone else?’

  ‘There is no one else. Everyone else is committed, you are relatively free. You will have finished your studies in a few months and then you will be at liberty. You can resume your vocation as a midwife tutor when you get back. This is a much greater responsibility and opportunity for you. You will be in charge not just of setting up a school for midwives, but developing the whole maternity hospital.’

  My head ached, I felt sick; it was too much.

  ‘I don’t want to do it. I want to be a midwife tutor here and sending me there – well, it’s too much responsibility.’

  ‘Well, you may not want to but you are being called. Go away and pray about it. Ask the Lord’s opinion. You might be surprised by the answer. You have three weeks and then you will have to give the Chapter your decision.’