the nuns, the roses and voices raised on christmas eve
It was 1978, my family at the beach was caught in a time warp with Mum sat in the middle of it. Like an elegant spinning spider, propped up in bed wrapped in her shawl, fighting The Cancer ...
1978; Christmas Eve in the home for WayWard Girls.
When my mother discovered that her teenage daughter was pregnant she spoke to the parish priest, who spoke to the Bishop, who spoke to the nuns and I was sent away to a Home for Wayward Girls, run by Catholic Sisters who wore white habits and white veils and had a monstrous laundry, way up the coast, in Auckland, New Zealand.
It was 1978, my family at the beach was caught in a time warp with Mum sat in the middle of it. Like an elegant spinning spider, propped up in bed wrapped in her shawl, fighting The Cancer, ruling the roost. All of us facing an uneasy future. Her illness paused us. Created a vacuum of waiting. It goes to show the sheer determination of the woman that she was still mighty in her declarations. While actively dying in reluctant stages.
She had declared in her whispery voice that if I kept my baby, I would no longer be welcome at home. I was to be sent away when I started to show. I would go to the convent where girls like me belonged and adopt baby to a good Catholic family. The nuns would organise this. I recieved the news with horror. It had not been a pleasant conception—a detail I did not share with Mum, and she never asked. So, to be told that I had to leave the beach and all my brothers and sisters, and leave her care to others as well, (I had been managing the house since I was 14 when she first became ill) plus leave my baby up there with an unknown family. I was reeling. But I was a good girl. I did as I was told. Mum was dying, there was no discussing it with her.
After a time I stopped arguing with her - in fact, I stopped talking altogether. I stopped eating anything except marmite on toast and went quite silent. There was nothing further to say. Silence was easy. In retrospect I am ashamed of my retreat into silence but it is a habit that has followed me all my life. I have always dived deep.
The day I left for the convent, I wore a knee-length white woollen dress with pleats across the breast and long slim sleeves, a green woollen cardigan, a long brown floor length gabardine coat of my father's (which my mother disapproved of me having, so I did not wear it into her bedroom to kiss her on the cheek goodbye), a moss-green scarf tied at my neck, and sheer stockings with my good pair of heels. My hair was short now and dark, wild like a storm, sticking out all over like a protest. The previous night in a fit of fury I had cut my hair off with my Mum's sewing scissors. I left the hair and the scissors wrapped in a towel, in a drawer under my bed. I felt bereft. Lost. In between.
My crochet shoulder bag held a marmite sandwich, a handkerchief, a coin purse I had taken from the kids dress-up box and a ten-dollar note my maternal grandfather had sent me for incidentals.
In the envelope that arrived in the mail with Pa’s gift of cash was one of my grandmother's engagement rings. Being unmarried and pregnant was a terrible shame, having the ring would be a good cover Grandma had decided. Years before, Pa had bought the engagement ring off a down-and-out fella a little worse for drink, whose girlfriend had said no. Evidently the two men had met on the street outside a pub, in Timaru - my grandfather was not a drinker, so I always found that particular fact dubious in the retelling. He bought the engagement ring for three shillings, so the story goes; Grandma had never felt especially attached to it. Whether it was the drunk or the street she took offence to I don’t know. God knows why Pa even told her the story - it was not much of one. But Grandma seemed happy enough to pass it on.
So, the ring (wrapped in a torn scrap of writing paper) and the ten-dollar note arrived in an envelope with a stamp, sent from their island to mine the week before. "Don’t tell your mother," wrote Grandma - “she’s always had her eye on my rings.”
It was a nice touch, I thought, as I walked through the beach side airport, after Dad had dropped me off. In my white dress, carrying my suitcase packed with green hip-hugging jeans and thin linen gypsy tops, for 'after’, and not much for ‘now’ the ring sparkling on my finger, I hoped I gave the impression of being someone. Someone. Anyone. Someone that someone cared about.
Nonchalance. I thought of this word. Dad had taught me to say this to myself when I had no idea what I was really doing. Act nonchalant. My heel caught on a crack, in the airport floor, I tipped then righted like a small tacking yacht. Nonchalance, I said to myself.
I gave my suitcase and my paper ticket Dad had bought in town at the travel agents to the lady at the check-in counter who weighed the suitcase then weighed me and with my crochet bag on my shoulder, I walked out into the tarmac and boarded the plane alone - the plane that would take me up to Auckland and away from home. I was still silent. I had been silent for days. I thought about my mother in her bed with a cap of unruly hair just like mine - arguing had been pointless. She had the might of the church behind her. Dad would never argue. My brothers and sisters were never even told. Plus Mum had the cancer plus she had only a croak of a voice left to her after the car crash. You could not argue with her. No one raised their voice in our house - it was not a fair fight. Though I am not promising things weren’t thrown or doors slammed. But we did not shout. Every fight was an unfair one - the odds so clearly stacked against my mothers survival.
A businessman sat next to me on the plane, absorbed in a newspaper. In those days, we all read newspapers. Our house received two separate newspapers — morning and evening. Dad insisted that reading the newspaper daily provided endless conversation topics. Being shy, I thought this advice useful. I thought I'd use it when dating when I grew up, but my first date had not shown much interest in world affairs. And I was still not much grown up. Hence, my current predicament.
In those days, newspapers were large, both in width and breadth. They were black and white, and you had to be careful, as the ink could transfer onto your hands then to your face. To fully open a paper, one had to stretch ones arms wide, shake the paper into place, then bend the page back to front and fold it in, all in a grandiose wooshing motion.
The planes had two seats on either side of the aisle. I had the window seat, the man with the newspaper had the aisle. As we flew, he was reading his newspaper front to back. Engrossed in it. Examining every inch of it. A pedantic news reader. Opening and closing his paper, he pulled his arms out and in, and out and in. Wide. His paper, his hand and forearm almost grazing my face each time. He had tiny little blond hairs on his arm as he wooshed his arm back and forth in front of me. I could see ink on his fingertips.
As we flew I inched further and further away as his arm invaded my space again and again repeatedly wrestling his paper into submission. Soon I was pinned to the window like a fish in a net trying to dodge him as he blithely perused the news. Opening the paper. Shaking it. Closing it. His eyes reading side to side. One arm into my face his other arm ranged into the aisle of the plane. "Oops, I am sorry," said the air hostess with her little hat and scarf as he thumped her on her way past. She raised her eyebrows to me with my cheek against the window glass. I opened my eyes wide back. Not seeing either of us, he rustled and folded his paper again - so importantly. Then repeated the whole process all over again. I said not a word, of course, until one last time he brought his arm just once too often right to the front of my face. I drew back into my seat. I examined the freckles and those golden hairs on his arm. The watch.
And I bit it. The arm. Not the watch.
Well, not exactly bit it, I never meant to bite him, I just opened my mouth and leaning forward an inch closed my teeth onto his arm, just above the watch. I let him feel my teeth. My lips pulled back. My teeth held there for a moment too long as my eyes flicked across to his. He was startled and froze. Quite still. As though suddenly realising there was a big blue eyed feral cat of a girl sitting next to him on the plane.With teeth.
I opened my mouth slightly, releasing him, pulled my head back, and closed my mouth, still watching him.
I swallowed. Tasting salt. “Oops, I am sorry”, I said.
The man very, very slowly retrieved his arm, brought both elbows in tight into his body, shook the newspaper in a very small way, leaned far into his seat away from me, folded the newspaper very carefully into the smallest square, took a pen from his plastic-lined shirt pocket, and very studiously began to do the crossword. He stayed quite still for the rest of the flight. Behaving himself quite nicely.
The Home for Wayward girls was a mission style mansion painted white with a terracotta tiled roof and the tops of big trees showing above tall white stucco walls. The property sat mid city above the beach. The taxi pulled up at the wall and Taxi driver rang the bell. I was met by a quiet sister in white, who thanked the taxi driver as she took my bag from him and handed it back to me. I entered the convent through a tiny wooden door in a vast wooden gate. Another nun shut the door behind us as we walked through a winter rose garden to tall double doors in the main building. I stepped through the doors looking up at the great wooden staircase then glanced back fast to the doors behind me as they shut. The door closed behind me with a well oiled clunk, leaving the bright winter light outside. The corridors running out to either side of us were long and wide with highly polished timber floors and shining brass plates and polished handles and fittings on the doors. All the doors along both corridors were closed. The staircase in front of me was quiet. I was told to wait so I quietly set my brown suitcase beside my foot, removed my brown coat, laid it over my arm and waited.
I was given a room with two tall sash windows, on the ground floor, looking out into the cold rose garden. The walls were painted a faded cream. Green tired looking curtains framed the windows and a spring based bed with a saggy mattress with crisp white linen folded at the foot, waited against the wall. I learned later that unlike many of the other girls I had a room to myself. After positioning my small suitcase on the floor at the end of the bed and changing into my old school shoes, Sr Brenda, who had met me at the door and brought me to my room, told me briskly to follow her down the corridor for a tour. As we walked, I saw how the light from the high windows lining the hallway dappled across the floor boards. It was mid winter - and late afternoon, and the trees were bare of leaves but did not seem to realise it as their shadows swayed and danced across the glossy floor boards.
I had gone so far away into my own silent head that even my thoughts had gone quiet, I was moving by rote. I followed the nun. Followed her directions. Followed her feet. Turn right, turn left, follow me, we are going this way. I just trotted along like a well behaved pup.
The sounds of our footsteps on the polished boards followed like a slow clap.
No-one else was in the corridor. I followed Sister Brenda’s straight back down the hallway to look for the girl who was to show me around. I was still in my white wool dress and flagging after a day of travel, hungry. Apprehensive. Obedient. Biddable. A fallen girl but a good girl. A tired teenager.
To fund the home for wayward girls, Sister Brenda told me as I hid a yawn, there was a laundry. A big laundry where they and soon we meaning me, washed hospital linen. The girls all worked in the laundry. We all did our part. Pulled our weight. Sister Brenda was tall and thin under her white ankle skimming robes, her shiny leather shoes brown and worn, her voice slightly bored but pert, her head turning to look into each doorway, like a cat, jingling keys attached to her waist. Hands folded before her as she walked. Leading with her chin. Making sure I knew my role in the scheme of things.
As we passed another set of wide doors she paused and showed me into the girls dining room explaining at speed the times for meals. I wasn’t listening. It was a large room full of white sun from three huge floor to ceiling sash windows. Later the girls would show me how you could open these windows and walk right through them into our own garden. There were six red and six green formica tables edged in shiny metal with six chairs at each table. The chairs and tables were arranged neatly and the golden wooden floors shone with polish beneath them. The room had a long kitchen bench but later I was to learn that nothing was in the cupboards or drawers anymore, with so few girls in the home now, every meal was delivered from the convent kitchen and all the plates and cutlery returned there for washing.
Sister waved at the doors adjoining the dining room. The girls lounge, I could see an assortment of furniture scattered about. The scratchy echo of the television. Someone else would show we around there I was told.
When I arrived at The Home that day there were fifteen other girls, Sister Brenda told me, all in varying stages of pregnancy. As we continued our walk I saw that the home could have probably housed fifty more but the feeling was of the demise of something, the beginning of the end, the loosening of strings, the past had yawned and was closing her mouth, a great silence filled the spotless corridors.
After seeing the girls public rooms, the laundry and the orphanage and the hospital wing and the parlours and the two enormous kitchens then the kitchens gardens, Sister Brenda passed me to one of the other girls; her name was Michaela, call me Mike, and she showed me the girls dorm wing, the bathrooms and toilets and the room with a deep bath for the girls to have a salt bath after delivery. Not for now, she said solemnly and we both looked at the deep old fashioned clawed bath in the room with green walls, the shelves lined with jars of salt. There was a dull curtain over the tiny window that was opened a crack. Cold air blowing through.
She told me that we worked five days a week. Then linen would be placed outside my room every Friday afternoon so I could change my bed on the weekends. Soap was in the bathrooms already and we should have brought our own toothpaste. I couldn’t remember what I had packed. We were to shower every other day in the evening and wash our hair once a week on the weekends.
It was winter so I had two blankets to lay on my sagging wire-wove and the radiator in the bedroom was turned on from two in the afternoon until six pm so she hoped I had brought a good wooly jersey with me and some winter nighties. Pajamas won’t fit for long.
Mike wore fluffy slippers that skimmed the floor like scruffy pink animals, she barely lifted her feet when she walked and wore a huge shapeless cardigan over her dress hiding her hands in its deep pockets. She was golden with green eyes and long dark hair and like me did not look very pregnant. She was kind. She would be my friend. I saw this and was profoundly grateful.
It was near the end of the work day and dinner was soon, she said, but we had time to hang up my clothes and she draped my coat on the bed. She decided I should place the ring into my little silver clasp purse with the ten dollar note; the ring will be ripped off in the machines, she explained, telling an awful story of a girl losing all the skin off her finger as a laundry machine tore off her ring. I swallowed. Where is your bag, she said. I pointed to the little brown cardboard bag beside my shoes. Oh, she said. You know we are here for months right? She shuffled out into the corridor to find Sister Brenda to see if I could put my ‘valuables’ in the safe and if I could use the phone.
I turned and looked out the windows, I slowly pulled the curtains across the view of pruned stick -like winter rose bushes and made my bed.
Mum’s friend had a daughter who lived in the same city as I had been banished to - she was about ten years older than me and I had been given her phone number. Mike had negotiated a call for me (though we only got one call a week and only after a two week settling in period) but my lack of belongings was a concern so it was allowed, I hesitantly asked the woman for extra blankets and if someone could send me a dressing gown and maybe some slippers. Within a few days my mothers friends daughter sent along a big parcel of things plus some long flouncy hippie dresses - summer is coming and I won’t need these again for a while, she wrote. I gave Mike one of the blankets and wore my new dressing gown to bed with Dad’s long coat on top of the covers. Baby was due in January. Summer. Surely he would have come for me by then.
The first meal I had in the dining room with all the girls felt like the first day of boarding school. The food was pushed in by one of the kitchen girls in a great bain-marie. Plates and cutlery and cloth napkins and pudding and milk for hot chocolate later arrived on another trolley pushed by the second kitchen girl. A bain-marie is like a huge hot shiny stainless steel water bath on wheels with cylindrical bowls full of dinner slotted in to the boiling water to keep the food hot when the bain-marie was unplugged for travel. I guess there was meat of some kind in a gravy of some kind. Then mashed potatoes and there must have been vegetables.
For the life of me I cannot really tell you much about the food. I can describe every corner of every room but I cannot remember what we ate. Isn’t that weird. Except for Christmas Day - I can tell you what I ate that day. But the general humdrum of daily meals, I can’t remember - breakfast must have been cereal and toast. Probably hot porridge. Big pots of tea. I don’t know - I would be making it up if I told you I knew for sure.
I must have eaten during all those months because at the end of all this I gave birth to an 8 pound baby boy but I was back in my green jeans the next week. Maybe my ‘trouble with food’ had followed me. But what I ate is gone from my memory. I even worked sometimes with Sister Bernadette who ran the kitchens but I can’t remember the food.
That first day and my first dinner, the senior girls set to and pulled tables together, so we could all sit together and pointed me to a chair. I was welcomed. This was startling to me. I was the shy one, that was my role in my bog family. I managed my little brothers and sisters and was ot one to have lots of friends due to my shyness I was told. As I sat to eat with all these other pregnant girls I was hit with the sudden notion that I could be anyone I wanted to be here. No-one knew me. No-one knew my family. I did not need to stay quiet or make all the meals or look after my Mum or count the kids up and down from the beach or collect the groceries on my bike. I could just be me. It took a while, but soon I found my voice again, then I started to use it. I found that I was a great mimic and I would entertain the others with parodies of the nuns and the priests who came to visit us. I would regale the other girls with renditions of the talk an old priest gave us about how to sit and how to behave around young priests, he admonished us to keep our knees together in front of these men. This was our favorite talk. We would howl with laughter all over again.
I would call girls out of their rooms or meetings using Sister Brenda’s voice. They would come out hesitantly then see me and we would giggle as we ran off down the corridor.
The days found a rhythm. Even though I started early on the floors then hours in the laundry we had two hours after lunch to rest. The siesta time. We worked hard but had the weekends free. I think what I am trying to say is that it was not all bad. Even though I had been sent away. Even though I missed my little brothers like mad. And the work was heavy and hard. I did not mind the hard work. Not all of it was drudgery. I still had time to write during siesta. And I felt a blossoming there. My baby and I both grew. That feeling of acceptance and safety, that is what I look back on.
My first job in the morning was to clean and polish (in rotation) the endless wide beautiful corridors, the visitors parlour floors and the dining hall, all wide planked native wood and brass. I got to know all the secret doors and if they were unlocked I crept in to have a nosey. Sister always had her keys on a ring at her hip, so I always had warning of her approach.
I invented a memory game where I placed each room and all its details into another box in my mind so I could describe these hidden rooms to the other girls at dinner.
We made friends fast there. Maybe because we knew we would only be with each other for a short time. A time out of time. A girl who I worked with for a month or so before she had her baby and disappeared overnight, had the job of cleaning the two girls bathrooms. They were unheated and very rudimentary. The floors damp and the paint flaking in the showers. We worked in tandem sharing the big string mop and cleaners cart. While I swept and mopped and polished she would dole out clean towels and soap (carefully counted out by Sister Brenda). There were two bathrooms, with tired yellow cream walls and each bathroom had 6 toilets, 6 hand basins and 3 showers with heavy fabric curtains that we took down every two weeks to wash. And in a saucer by the hand-basins and in the showers there was home-made soap. Made by a Sister no-one ever saw. And when the soap was a slither left abandoned in a soap saucer, my friend’s job was to collect all those slithers, rinse them, pop them into a big battered tin pot, fill the pot with boiling water, stir it for a wee while with a special spoon, then take the pot and spoon down the path adding lavender flowers into the pot as she walked and across to the Laundry and set it in the Girl’s Wash House ready for Saturday afternoon when we washed our own clothes.
Mike worked in the laundry full time with a group of other pregnant girls. The laundry was the hub of the Convent. It was huge, and warm, with enormous tables for folding, huge wicker laundry baskets on wheels, entire rooms heated with copper pipes from the radiators, full of white stacked folded linen, big industrial washing machines, a drying room where sheets hung if it was raining and we could not use the lines, no dryers, an enormous mangle. The linen closets were warm from the boilers and contained shelves and shelves of piles of perfectly tidy and exactly folded sheets and hospital linen.
The mangle was a roller with an iron shaped like the roller folded around it, moved back and forth with a lever. We fed the sheets through to starch and iron them. The mangle was wide and hot. I loved the mangle. And I loved folding the hot sheets with another girl, stretching them out and shaking them straight and folding them long ways, then short ways, then long ways again then short to create a perfect parcel of a sheet, all exactly the same for stacking, folding like the man and his newspaper on the plane.
But that was the warm part of the laundry, you kind of worked up to that side as your pregnancy advanced. The side where the laundry was received, sorted and rinsed was where we began, it was an outside lean to, on the wrong side of the building, it was cold - frigid really, right there where the trucks pulled in and out. Always cold.
And the rinsing water was so cold it stung your hands. I remember thinking the cold water felt like boiling hot water.
Sorting the linen for the sluice room was the worst of the jobs. You were never quite sure what you would find. Rinsing it the second worst and the heaviest. Actually I am not sure what was worse. But winter and summer it was cold. The water and the work was in the coldest room just in from the loading bay.
I began as a sorter. Dragging linen from huge canvas bags delivered by white vans and sorting the linen into clean and dirty baskets. Dirty meant bloody. All kinds of bodily mess. Anything bloody or stained with faeces was rinsed to clean off solid matter in icy cold water in concrete basins in the outside lean to. A lot of it was bloody and worse. A girl found a dead tiny foetus in a sheet once and we all cried for days. It was heavy cold, cold, cold work.
After a few months of sorting I graduated to rinsing in the sluice room. The rinsing was done by hand. The rinsing girls had cracks in our hands that never healed from the cold water, nails always waterlogged, ripped and bleeding, infected cuts that stayed open for weeks and only scarred up after you left to go home. Closing your hand onto a fist broke everything open again. The nuns left pots of lanolin in our sitting room for our hands. To this day from the knuckles to the fingertips my hands go white and numb in cold weather. Our shoulders were always in pain. I still carry that pain in my left shoulder when the cold comes in here.
But it was not all awful. Sometimes I was sent out to work with Sister Delphina in the gardens and in her glasshouse. She would give me thin ladies cotton gloves to wear under my gardening gloves to keep the soil out of the cracks in my fingers. I learnt almost everything I know about growing and seed saving and striking cuttings from the days spent with Sister Delphina.
On Saturdays we did our own laundry. With the soap my friend had infused with lavender just for us. The girls washing nook was a small area set aside just for us. It was around the corner from the loading bay, near where the vans brought in their loads of bloody, shitty, stinking linen, but like a different world. A weekend world. Down a little concrete path onto the sunny side was that small alcove just for us girls to wash our own clothes. This is where the girls who were living at the Convent gathered on a Saturday afternoon. Saturday afternoons and Sundays were our days off you see. The big laundry was silent. The nuns at prayer. There was no cleaning - except our own rooms. And if you wanted your washing to be dry for ironing by Sunday afternoon you washed on Saturday.
The alcove had no door and a concrete floor. Jasmine crept over the wall from the nun’s garden. It was divided by a short glass brick wall from the laundry rinsing stations. On our side were two big spotless concrete tubs and a long stone bench. Above one tub were two taps, one copper and one steel. One hot and one cold. Hot. The joy of it. I still love to hold my hands in a tub of hot water. Above the second tub was one lone cold tap. Between them was a small mangle for squeezing out the water.
It was Saturday. We filled the first tub with hot water and poured in a little of the hand made laundry soap and jammed all our summer dresses and bras and knickers in there. Our babies bobbing gently in our bellies, we chattered a mile a minute. As disconnected as any teenagers. Hauling our fat pregnant selves up onto the benches, dropping our slippers and swinging our bare feet, helping with each others washing, pushing them all through the mini mangle between the tubs into the cold clean rinsing water, trying to jam each others fingers between the rollers, (watch out for your hair, watch out!). We would laugh. Babies having babies. We would carry our heavy baskets of wrung out dresses and nighties and aprons, and cross to the long empty clothes lines surrounded in heady lavender hedges, and we hid amongst the washing, giggling teenage giggles, hanging our scented colourful clothes out to dry with long wooden pegs, letting our faces drift into the wet soapy smells. No white weekday sheets now, just an irreverent assortment of bright cotton dresses and smalls. We would lay our own white napkins onto the grass to bleach, turning them over across the course of the day. Young and strong we were steeped in a sadness we never discussed. A sadness that demanded silliness.
You would think that this would put me off laundry for the rest of my life, right? But it didn’t. I still love to lay white rags out on the grass to bleach in the sun as they dry. I still love the smell of home made laundry soap. I still love to drape warm sun dried sheets over my head and watch the sun through them. I still collect all the slithers of soap and melt them down to make the liquid soap. I still love long shiny corridors, the sound of my footsteps following me like a noisy shadow. And linen closets. The home for wayward girls still weaves in and out of my dreams.
I lived at the convent for going on six months.
As my own baby blossomed in my belly so did myself. I blossomed. I stood straighter and walked taller and explored and sauntered down the corridors and I sang. I sang all day to keep from crying out loud. The baby I carried in my belly already spoken for. Sent away by my family. An embarrassment. Having to hide from the father of baby. All that sadness and anger and powerlessness went into song. I got stronger like a growing animal. And louder. And bolder. Prowling.
The other girls soon joined my songs, our voices rising high into those ceilings. We sang hard and strong. Like battle. And they were not hymns. The songs we sang were the BeeGees and Abba and Blondie and Billy Joel.
Until the laundry nuns came back in and hushed us.
I took to climbing out my bedroom window and walking into the blooming perfumed rose garden during siesta time, when no-one was about. Soon I found an old wooden gate right at the bottom of the garden (where we girls were not meant to be) down behind some huge magnolia trees and I managed to open the old gate by working at the rusty hinges for a few days with lanolin Sr gave us for our hands. For a while I just let myself out into the street to see how far I could go. Soon I shared my secret with Mike and then a few others and soon we were all piling out through my window and through the garden and out the gate and began to roam in our afternoon siesta time. We were all due around January and by then we were all large with child and thrilled at surprising motorists by half crossing the road and standing on the white line - our big bellies thrust out. We all wore dresses of various colours and shapes and lengths. We drifted like colourful bedouins through the streets. Shrieking at inside jokes. We would go to the shop and buy ice-creams and carrying our shoes we would walk down to the beach and dig holes to lay our bellies in, then chat up boys only to stand up and present our huge bellies, doubling up in laughter as the boys hid their shock in hurried retreat.
There was one day when eight of us escaped and strolled through the old suburb with its dairies and fish and chip shops and butchers and bakeries with doughnuts filled with fresh cream and custard squares and sally lunns that none of us ate for fear of getting fat. We never had much money anyway - my grandfathers ten dollars long gone. We just walked and walked making up stories and entertaining each other. On one long hot summer day on the way back to The Home we were late and walking at an almost jog, holding our bellies up with our hands as we shuffled at speed, and laughing so hard that every now and then we had to stop and cross our legs to keep from peeing and then the skies opened and it just poured down. Hot tropical rain. A deluge. I remember I was wearing this long green and white flouncy cotton full length dress over nothing but knickers and a maternity bra and the dress was so old and thin and well washed that immediately it stuck to me like a second skin. My belly button sticking out proudly. I kicked off my sandals, stepped into the sudden rush of water in the gutter and embraced the rain, jumping in circles, splashing, my arms rose up to meet the lowering clouds. The raindrops kissed my face, then pelted it like wet stones, I closed my eyes and the water washed through my hands and down my neck and over my naked sunburned arms, and belly, warm and wet. Mike called out to me to hurry up and I wrestled my dripping dress up above my knees and ran to catch up with the others. We all dived back through our secret gate, held open a crack with a brick. We laughed and laughed, shushing each other as we raced through the rose garden, manoevering our bellies and heads and legs and arms back through the window of my room, pulling our wet clothes off looking for towels. I never forgot the utter freedom of that moment, caught in the rain, baby safe inside, warm water on my skin like a blessing. The dance of it.
At Christmas time all the other girls went home for the weekend. All but me. My mother’s cancer had gone into remission, my mother’s friend’s daughter told me that my family still did not want anyone to know about me. So I had to stay put. I was the bad one. I don’t know. It’s so long ago now. Why were they like that. Though as I remember it I did not particularly mind being alone at Christmas. The nuns and I got on well enough so spending a few days puttering about or reading or writing or in the kitchens or the gardens was almost a relief. This was when I began to lose my feeling for home as a place, I think.
On that Christmas Eve morning, Sister Delphina found me in the rose gardens doing lazy cartwheels on the grass. Cartwheels were my favorite thing. Doing cartwheels nine months pregnant was a skill I had honed out there on the grass in the girls garden. My body was still as straight and slim as ever with a great baby belly poking out in front. I was told that from behind you would not even know I was pregnant. To be fair I tried to not even think about being pregnant because then I would have to think about giving birth and giving baby up. So I did cartwheels and worked and polished and hauled wet laundry and walked the streets and sung thinking nothing of the future - nothing at all.
There had been no work that day, of course. It was Christmas Eve. Everyone was gone but me. All the girls picked up by their families. The only sister I had seen was Sister Bernadette who wheeled in the bread and milk and eggs and a small pot of tea for my breakfast. I had sat alone at the table. Pushed my breakfast around until I felt it had been long enough. Then scraped the food into the pig bin. Stacked my dish and my knife and fork and wheeled the trolley back to the kitchen where I did some dishes for her for a while.
Mother Superior has asked to see you this morning, said Sister Delphina. I seldom saw Mother so I swallowed and looked at Sister Delphina in the shimmering heat and asked her did she know why. Come with me, she said. She smiled, her glasses rising with her nose and her eyes crinkling shut under the wide brimmed straw hat set on top of her veil. The lines on her face relaxed and gentled.
I looked closely at her. This strong old woman. By now Sister Delphina and I had worked often together in her potting shed and out in her vegetable garden and when we were on our knees, weeding through the greens, one day in the early summer, she had told me that she had been dropped off at the convent when she was thirteen. Dropped off were her words. I imagined her family putting her out of the car like a package. I wondered if she had entered through the same gates I had. Probably, I thought. They said I would never marry, she had told me. My feet are too big. Ugly, she said. We had both looked back at her feet. They were indeed very large. Like snow shoes. Useful though, I said. She had smiled.
On the Christmas Eve morning that Sister Delphina found me doing cartwheels in the garden, she was carrying a small metal bucket with tea leaves and chopped banana peels and crushed egg shells for the roses, she had two trowels in her gloved hand, so I helped her dig the scraps in around the bushes then we headed inside and along the corridors and up the wooden staircase that was totally out of bounds to the girls (not that that had ever stopped me) and along another corridor lined in dark wood and pictures of Bishops with fancy necklaces and rings on their fingers. There was a very austere picture of the founder of the order with no rings or necklaces. Our footsteps followed us, syncopated, parts of a beat behind. Mine small and sandalled. Sr Delphina’s like slaps of reed on stone.
In her office Mother asked me if I would like to sing that night - at midnight mass. In the nun’s chapel. Sister Delphina stood quietly behind me.
I had been to the nuns chapel on my wanders. The chapel was a perfectly appointed cathedral in miniature. It had felt intimate, like a secret. Stained glass windows allowed curated shafts of light through multi computed panes. It was totally lined in old tongue and groove native timbers. I had visited a few times, by sneaking down the nuns corridors in my bare feet, and entering through a vestry door.
In my explorations I had discovered a small perfect circular staircase of gleaming timbers. Each tread slotted into a central pole. It rose as though held up by angels. I had climbed it very carefully once, and found myself in a tiny loft - a choir loft. There was the organ and two rows of wooden pews with kneelers and three music stands standing like kids at a lolly counter. The kauri timbers that lined the chapel reached up and into and over this hidden enclave.
My mother had taught me how to check a building for acoustics - she had been a singer once - before she lost her voice in the accident - so I had leaned forward and clocked my tongue. Then made the sound of an owl. Then a pop, pop in high C. Each sound held in the air like a live thing, like a sparkling bubble before wafting into the silence. The acoustics were rich.
No, thank you. I said to Mother. Taking a step back.
Sister Delphina tells me that you sing. She said. You sung to the girls in the laundry. She said. I darted my eyes to Sister Delphina who had moved in beside me so we both stood together facing Mother across her desk like naughty children. It was true. I had sung to the girls. We had all come to the end of one song, and I began to sing Leaving On A Jet Plane because everyone was leaving the next day. Everyone but me. This made me feel sad, I think. Though I behaved like I cared less. I had moved to a chair and stood up on it, my second hand green dress flowing over my feet and I launched into the song, fully expecting the other girls to join me. But they all stood still, sheets half folded, the mangle purring alone, and listened, the nuns came to the door and I suppose Sister Delphina heard me in the garden through the open windows. My voice had strengthened with all the laundry singing to be the best it had ever been and in fact the best it would ever be. When I finished this song, they all roared their delight, and clapped and we cried a little and they hugged me and each other. A whole bunch of pregnant girls hugging each other. Bellies bumping. Imagine.
We felt our imminent departure from each other and cried as we hugged.
Back to work, said Sister Brenda. That’s quite enough.
I thought about that song. And leaving. No. I said. Thank you. I added.
You could sing a Christmas Carol. She said.
I had decided never to attend Mass again after my mother had sent me away. A God who made babies a sin and made mothers sick and turned them mean was not my kind of God. I was reaching down to the end of my tether. That leaving song had made me cry. I was lost again. There had been no talk of where I went after this. No talk of how I would deliver this baby. What happened then. Who would I be when I was no longer my babies mother. When he came out. I did not want to think about it.
I was huge with child by then. My swelling feet in sandals. My hair had grown and was long on my neck, dark, curly, tangled and unruly. I had freckles and dirty nails from days in the garden and wrecked hands from washing the shit out of other peoples sheets. I worked ten hour days and felt every one of them.
Look at me. I said. What if someone sees me. I brought my worn red scabbed hands towards my hard belly.
But Sr Delphina was nodding beside me, she understood about being afraid. No-one will see you, she said. You will be with me. We will be in the choir loft.
I searched for a view of the garden though the windows but only saw the tops of trees with the sea beyond.
OK, I said.
Before midnight Mass began I was whisked up the circular stairs and into the choir loft. I sat in the back while the small choir of nuns streamed in and the church below us filled with lay people and priests, and nuns and their neighbours. They all nodded and smiled to me. Sr Delphina patted my knee from beside me. That night in the choir loft, in my clean red polka dot dress, (the only decent one that still fit), wearing my grandmothers diamond ring retrieved from the safe in Mother’s office, my hair bound on top of my head with a black ribbon from Sr Delphina, a little cardigan over my bare shoulders, because we don’t have bare sunburnt arms at Mass, I waited. Gone in my head, again. Detached. Fingers folded. But strangely present. Listening to the Mass being read below us.
Sister Delphina gently tapped my arm and said, almost time. I began to hum softly like Mum had taught me. Warming up my vocal chords.
The organist went to move to the organ but Sister Delphina motioned her to stop.
With a nod from Sister I moved to the edge of the loft and leaned my hands onto the well worn rail. I looked over the backs of the congregation as they obeyed the celebrant and sat into the long wooden pews. I heard the choir sisters behind me settle into their hard seats and fold their hands together - a whisper of hands. The shift of fabrics and shuffle of feet stilled. I felt a breath of wind and the rustle of a small birds body in the night outside the small dormer window in the choir loft wall. I felt my baby stir as though settling deep into my body. My hands settled on the rail. I swallowed. Nonchalance, I thought.
I would sing acapella.
I whispered to Sr Delphina. A forgotton word. She nodded. I felt all the ghosts of all the girls who had gone before me. All those babies. All those sorrows and suddenly I was wide awake and my heart woke and thumped back down into my body above my baby.
I lifted my head, closed my eyes, breathed deep into the well of sadness I carried, reached for my voice, lifted my hand, opened my throat, took a deep rich ancient breath and sung. I sung Silent Night. I took my time, allowing the song to float out into the rafters. The volume to grow. Positioning each note like a bird that I set free from my hands. Each word was whole.
My voice rang high and strong and true. The notes soaring and drifting in the perfect acoustics of that little chapel in the home for wayward girls. The song lifting and beckoning to the rafters then softening into the last long held note.
I forgot my bone deep aloneness. My weariness. I forgot the pain in my swollen feet and my scabbed ruined hands. I forgot they had already given my baby away even before I bore him. I forgot the night I had to forget to be able to go on. I forgot that I had to leave. I forgot my mother was dying.
All was breath. All was sound. I became my voice and it over-ruled the silence. I took flight.
The total stillness of the congregation as the last note drifted away like smoke to a window was heavy with poignancy. The tilts of heads and the softening necks. Hands in laps. Hankies to faces. Then shuffles. Hesitant profiles. Whispers as they began to turn. I stepped away from the searching eyes.
Sr Delphina, that old, old soul, took my hands and gave them a squeeze as she placed her back to the faces looking up, shielding me. She kissed my cracked knuckles and shook our enfolded hands together. Her smile was wide and stunned. I knew it. She said. I knew you could do it. Then, she turned me back into the deep of the loft and led me down the circular staircase. We paused in the dark on the bottom step until we heard the congregation rise, the drone of the priest. Hidden by the shuffle of a hundred feet, we slipped out the back door, through the dark shadows of a secret corridor, and out into her cool, scented rose garden.
The next morning, in the empty girls dining room, the walls clean and cold, in the early, early morning, one small night light shone above the bench. I shuffled through the door towards the light, dressed in my blue dressing gown and socks. I found a tray on the bench with a covered pitcher of milk and some sliced ham under a napkin and a small loaf of fresh baked bread wrapped in a tea towel with a tiny bowl of butter from Sister Bernadette. A cup and saucer with roses on it. The tiny teapot with a generous pinch of tea leaves and lid beside it; ready to be filled with boiling water from the zip. Next to the bread on the tray was a small cut-crystal vase holding a perfect, scented, newly opened white rose in clear fresh water - that would have been from Sr Delphina I thought - she knows I love the white ones. I could imagine her and Sister Bernadette preparing my morning tray in the quiet early light of the sisters kitchen, working together in their time worn morning routine, while I slept.
I was the only live soul in this girls wing that morning. It was Christmas morning. I heaved all three of the floor to ceiling sash windows wide open to the growing dawn, I filled the tea pot with boiling water, then carried the laden tray through the floor to ceiling windows and out into the warm morning.
In the girls courtyard garden I ate my breakfast and drunk my tea. I could imagine all the lost souls and gone ones before me - pulling up their imaginary seats to eat with me.
Sitting in our comfortable silence.
The picture above is of my eldest son (on the far left) with his brothers his sister and his mum (me).
Good morning! Have a gorgeous day whether with family or without - either works as we know.
Join the chat. As always we are talking food and gardens!
Cecilia
Oh my goodness. What a beautifully rendered portrait of those times … I feel like I have just walked out of a darkened theatre where I have been lost to all but the story. Thank you for sharing the portrait of you with your children. And pointing out your eldest. Somehow you found each other?
Such a well-written, heartfelt autobiography of your young, teenage years. Thank you, Cecilia!!