The Baby Laundry for Unmarried Mothers

by Angela Patrick

  That night I mostly recall laughing as people jumped in the fountain (back in those days it was de rigueur to climb in and splash around) and then losing a shoe when the crowd surged forwards as Big Ben struck twelve. I had a big job on trying to retrieve my shoe before the Tube ride back to Tricia’s, in Dagenham, where I often stayed the night.

  What a different New Year’s Day I’d woken up to the following morning to the one that lay ahead of me now.

  Now I was concerned about the immediate future, and how I would get through the next days and weeks. During the first week in January, Pauline, the girl from Cromer, left with her baby Alexander – the son she’d named after Alessandro, the Italian student who had abandoned her to her fate all those months ago. It was a horrible day, and one that would stay with me forever, mostly because of the sound of Pauline sobbing.

  I recall sitting in the nursery, doing our morning feed that day, and all we could hear was the anguished sound of her uncontrollable sobbing as she gave him the last bottle of milk she’d ever feed him. I recall the silence, the atmosphere of bleak desperation, and how no one felt able to do or say anything to comfort her – we all knew that no words of comfort were adequate, so it was better to say nothing. And we didn’t need to say anything, not really, because we understood how she felt. Our love and empathy didn’t need to be made vocal.

  But I couldn’t bear it. As she was about to leave the nursery, I hastily put Paul down and followed her out. I wasn’t sure I’d have another chance to see her before she and Alexander left.

  ‘Oh, Angela,’ she cried, turning as I called her name. I spread my arms and she half fell into them, sobbing against my chest.

  ‘Shh,’ I said, stroking her hair.

  ‘I can’t bear it,’ she wept. ‘I just want to run away with him. I just want to pick him up and run and run and run. I can’t bear it!’

  I wanted to comfort her, to say something that would make things better, but there was nothing. Instead, try as I might to stop it happening, my own eyes filled with tears. ‘I’ll write to you’ was all I could promise her. ‘We can be there for each other and meet up when we leave here.’ This just produced a fresh wave of sobs.

  Sister Teresa appeared then, from the Reverend Mother’s office. She didn’t speak; she just glared at the two of us, clinging to each other. And her expression was clear: we had brought this on ourselves. If we wanted sympathy, we had better look elsewhere.

  Mary was next to leave, only a couple of days later. She had cried so much in the days preceding her departure that she was hollow-eyed and exhausted, and my heart ached for her. And then, all too quickly, it was my turn.

  The business of having my baby adopted had been settled a full six months earlier. It had been settled at the time of my relocation to June’s house, when I’d signed on with the local GP’s practice. It was the GP who had put me in touch with the Social Welfare Department. As a Catholic, my details were then transferred to the Chelmsford Diocesan Moral Welfare Association, a part of the Church that – as was obvious from their title – dealt with such morally sensitive matters. It was through this organisation that I was informed that while, yes, I could go to the convent to have my baby away from the world’s disapproving gaze, it was on the understanding that the baby must be adopted.

  I had also been given a long list of things to bring to the convent when my place there was confirmed. It was a list that included all the personal items I would need for myself and my soon-to-be-born baby, together with the stipulation that every item be clearly and indelibly marked with the owner’s initials – in my case, AMB for Angela Margaret Brown.

  The admission letter said nothing about what would happen on adoption day. I knew nothing, therefore, about the logistics of the adoption. I didn’t know when and where it would take place, let alone whether I’d meet the adoptive parents. I didn’t give the details much thought; like almost all the girls once they’d given birth to their babies, the day of the adoption was something I actively tried not to think about. I would find out soon enough, after all.

  It was 11 January when I was called into the offices of the Reverend Mother. I had been in them only once since I’d arrived at the convent, to sign papers confirming that now Paul had been born, I was still going to go ahead with the adoption. At that time it had felt a bit of a blur, but today it couldn’t have felt more real or more imminent. As the date of my leaving loomed, I had a knot in my stomach that wouldn’t go away, and the sensation of a clock ticking furiously in my head. I seemed to spend half my time praying and the rest dreaming for a miracle, which would mean I wouldn’t have to take that fateful journey.

  ‘You’re booked in for the sixteenth of January,’ the Reverend Mother told me crisply, her voice echoing in the high-ceilinged room. ‘We’ll be arranging for a car to pick you up around two o’clock.’

  I listened silently as she consulted some papers in front of her. ‘The car will take you to the Crusade of Rescue in London,’ she continued, ‘where your baby will meet his new adoptive parents. And you’ll be leaving us, too, of course.’ She looked up from her paperwork and glanced at me at this point. ‘So you’ll need to pack your things the night before. Is that understood?’

  I nodded, unable to think of anything to say to her. It felt like I was standing before a gallows.

  ‘Oh, and take this,’ she said, handing me an envelope, in which I presumed would be the letter that had sealed my fate. ‘Hand it in to the Adoption Officer when you arrive.’

  I felt numb as I crossed the echoing space back to the door. But at least I remembered to thank her as I left.

  My bag wasn’t too heavy in the end, as I’d given away a lot of what I’d brought with me. I left my maternity clothes – I knew a few of the pregnant girls could do with them – as well as my bed sheets, and quite a few of Paul’s baby clothes. After being washed at high temperature in the convent laundry, many of his things were rough and in poor condition. But the nappies and nighties, and the nicer items – the clothes and shawl Emmie had made, certainly – I had put to one side to go with him to his new home. I didn’t know whether they would use them – perhaps not – but it was important to me that they should know that the baby they were adopting had been loved and much cherished. If only in a small way, these things were evidence of that love.

  I had already given my duster coat to John and Emmie when they’d come to visit, swapping it for something heavier and more suited to the winter, so I left the convent that morning looking ostensibly like my old self, stylish in a black and white check coat with a fur-trimmed collar. Inside, however, I was a shell of my former self.

  Every second of that day, till the allotted hour, had been a form of torture, a series of unbearable trials that caused waves of panic to wash over me. I had risen at 5.30, on 16 January, as I normally did, for the first of the day’s feeds, my breath clouding in front of me as I left the icy dormitory and gusting in waves over little Paul as I struggled to change his nappy with numb fingers, trying hard not to let my cold hands touch the warm skin of his pink tummy.

  I fed him, almost on autopilot, then stumbled back up to bed, where I slept heavily after an understandably turbulent and wakeful night. I had been awake for most of it, praying relentlessly. My prayers had become more desperate as all I could think to pray for was that somehow the adoption wouldn’t happen. I kept thinking that now I’d atoned for my sins surely God must have felt I’d been punished enough, surely He didn’t mean for me to give up my baby? Surely something was going to happen between now and the appointed hour that would change the course of events so I could keep Paul. It didn’t matter how irrational this was. I didn’t care. I kept praying over and over and over: please don’t take him from me . . . please let me keep him . . . I’ll be a good mother . . . he needs me, he needs me . . . Over and over and over until I slept. And then I’d wake once more, and repeat it all again.

  I woke up groggy and thick-headed for my first stint in the milk kitchen – whi
ch today, of course, would also be my second to last. Those tasks performed, it was time for me to give Paul another feed, and to bathe him for the very last time. It would be the last chance for me to feel his tiny naked body against my skin, to clean him, to talc him, to gently rub zinc and castor oil cream into his bottom. I lingered over every aspect of this familiar ritual, fighting back the tears that were blurring my vision, conscious of the other mothers’ silent understanding and support.

  I tried to commit every detail of him to my memory, knowing that by the time the images began to blur, he would have grown and changed almost beyond recognition. I soothed the redness of his bottom that was the result of having to lie too long in rough towelling, urine-soaked nappies, and fretted anxiously about his unique little foibles and ways. How could anyone but me properly care for him and love him? How could anyone else know him like I did?

  With Paul now heavy-lidded and clearly ready for another sleep, I had to put him back in his cot and return to the milk kitchen, going through that other ritual – washing bottles, sterilising them, changing the solution, cleaning the steriliser, wiping down the surfaces, washing the floor – in the same foggy daze as I had prepared the bottles earlier, till the gong for lunch sounded, out in the hallway, at 1 p.m.

  ‘You should eat something,’ advised Carol, the sweet girl who’d looked after Paul on Boxing Day, gently placing a hand on my forearm as I joined the short lunch queue. ‘You don’t know when you’ll get another chance to eat, after all.’

  ‘I know. And I will,’ I remember answering to reassure her, placing a selection of items on my tray. To this day I have no memory of what they were or what I ate of them, though I do remember pouring myself water from the big Duralit jug, glancing up at the dining-room clock, which read 1.45, and realising I had mere minutes left.

  Because the car was due at 2, I had to leave the dining room early, so I made the journey back to the nursery alone. I dressed Paul in the clothes I had brought specially for the purpose, all of them marked, as was everything else, with that carefully inked AMB. I allowed myself to fantasise about the adoptive parents finding out my identity through them, and getting in touch with me to tell me how my son was getting on. It was a faint hope to cling to. How could anything like that possibly happen? It would be the last thing they’d want, surely? But I clung to the idea anyway, because it helped.

  Paul was almost fully dressed when Linda joined me in the nursery. As she’d promised, she was clutching her black and white Polaroid camera. The Polaroid, back then, was a very newfangled thing, which actually took photos and developed them all at once. She had kindly offered to take his picture for me, as she had for Mary. While I untied the blue weight chart from the bars of his cot and slipped it into my bag, she took the photograph and pulled it out of the front of the camera.

  We huddled close as the image started to develop out of the blackness. ‘Take good care of it, mind,’ she said as she handed it to me. ‘Or it’ll scratch. And don’t put it in your bag until it’s completely dry, or it might stick itself to something and be ruined. Here,’ she said, tears welling in her eyes, ‘let me take it. You’ve little Paul to hold, haven’t you?’

  She carried my bag too, and together we made our way out into the hallway. I could see from a small window that the car had already arrived. At almost that exact moment, Sister Teresa appeared from the dining room and called to me to hurry up.

  Linda helped me, carrying my holdall out to the car, with me following behind, Paul in my arms. Our goodbye was tearful but hurried; even as we embraced, I could hear Sister Teresa telling her to go back inside.

  I got in the car then, still carefully clutching my baby and my damp photo. My last view of Loreto Convent was a glimpse of Sister Teresa’s swishing habit as the heavy wooden door closed behind her. I hugged Paul tight to my chest as the car crunched over the gravel and away. The time for prayers was finally over.

  My precious photo of Paul as a baby.

  Chapter Ten

  The offices of the Crusade of Rescue, the charity that had organised Paul’s adoption and were today going to carry it out, were based at 73 St Charles Square, in Ladbroke Grove, West London, and the journey, the driver told me, would take around an hour and a half. The full name of the organisation was even more emotive: written properly, as it had been on the papers I’d signed for the Reverend Mother, it read ‘The Crusade of Rescue and Homes for Destitute Catholic Children’ – which said it all, really. I had needed rescuing from mortal sin, and they were now about to do that, and my baby, nestled in my arms and sleeping peacefully, would surely have been destined to become destitute were it not for their kind and timely intervention.

  They meant well, I was sure, and had only the best of intentions. They were, after all, operating in a very different world to the one in which we live now: a world in which the contraceptive pill wasn’t yet generally available and countless women risked their lives – and sometimes lost them – having crude backstreet abortions; anything was preferable to being pregnant and unmarried, or married but pregnant by another man. For those girls for whom illegal abortion was not an option – girls like me, practising Catholics – the only alternative was to give the baby up. And if that was your only option, which it mostly was, then it was important to be sure that the new parents would be people you could trust to do right by your child and bring up him or her according to your faith.

  Perhaps, my addled brain kept suggesting, they wouldn’t like him. Perhaps they would take against him, for some reason or other, and what was surely going to happen wouldn’t happen after all.

  But still we journeyed on, getting closer to our destination. I had no idea where in London we were going, what route we were taking, or what was going to happen when we got there. I felt as I had during the latter stages of my pregnancy: unable to focus on the reality of what was happening, and drifting off and creating ridiculous scenarios in which my fate would be different.

  I had prayed so hard, as I had never prayed before, to God and the Virgin Mary, to Jesus, St Anthony and St Teresa, pleading with all of them to show me some mercy and find another way for me to pay for what I’d done. I didn’t care what. Nothing could hurt me more than separation from my son. Any fate, any punishment would have been preferable to this one. To have this baby, my baby, taken away from me would be an enduring punishment. I couldn’t see a future in which I would be healed of the pain. But my prayers had not been answered, so today I had to give him up, and all I could do was try to bear it.

  As we made our way from the wintry rural solitude of They -don Bois towards the teeming and brightly lit bulk of my beloved city, I tried to think about what the parents chosen for Paul might be like. Though it was almost impossible to think of another woman holding him, mothering him, taking ownership of him, there was a part of me desperate to be reassured about her, too. What would she look like? Would she be gentle? Would she be warm and responsive? I didn’t even know if I would get to see her, let alone speak to her. But if I did, what would she think of me?

  We arrived at around 3.30 in the afternoon and I finally put away the Polaroid picture, slipping it into the envelope in which I’d put the cot card. I’d had almost no conversation with the driver, a taciturn middle-aged man from the local taxi firm, who had probably made this journey many times before and from whom I’d sensed a kind of grim-faced but unspoken acceptance that this wasn’t the time or place for chatty small talk. I wondered what he thought of all the girls and babies he ferried here. Did he judge us as harshly as we judged ourselves?

  He let me out onto the wide residential road, came round to open the rear door of the car and nodded silently. The buildings opposite were imposing four-storey Victorian terraces, their frontages almost all identical. Each had steps, whitewashed walls, big bay windows and an air of opulence; they seemed to look down on me, in every sense. In front of me huddled a group of low-level, modern buildings, which looked incongruous in this elegant place, and were mainly hid
den behind a high brick wall. The street was tree-lined on both sides, and the bare winter branches formed a spindly canopy above us.

  Clutching Paul in the crook of my right arm and my big holdall with my left hand, I followed the driver through the gateway to the buildings,where he pushed open a door to let us through. He seemed to know exactly where he was going, confirming my thought that he had done this many times before.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ said a lady, who was standing behind a big reception desk. ‘You have a letter?’ She looked at me enquiringly.

  I put down my holdall – the driver had disappeared back through the door – and pulled the letter from where I’d stowed it in my coat pocket. Paul stirred very slightly but didn’t fully wake as I did this. The woman at the desk barely gave him a glance. I wondered what it must be like to be her. To spend much of your working day dealing with ashen-faced young women, like me, clutching babies, and then watching them leave empty-handed. To spend the rest of the day in the company of new adoptive parents, taking those same babies off to new lives. Had she become immune to the extremes of emotion she must encounter? Did she feel anything?

  She took the letter and read it,and I decided from her expression that what she probably felt most was that she was doing the right thing. She then turned back to me. There was no hostility in her features, but there was no smile of sympathy either. ‘Come with me,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you up.’ I picked up my bag and followed her.

  The room she showed me into was high-ceilinged and bare of adornments. It was clearly a waiting room, as it contained a low table on which an array of dog-eared magazines was scattered, and a number of assorted wooden chairs. ‘Just wait there,’ she said, closing the door behind her.