Unknown Babies. Unknown Mothers.

There are some stories that will stay with me forever. Sarah's testimony is one.

“It’s sad that you don’t know your mother’s side of the story. I was at Saint Monica’s in Kendal too. I didn’t know her, but I think I know why she found it impossible to see you.”

It’s a private message, sent directly to me. There’s an email address, and a phone number too.

“If you’d like to chat, I am here. Sarah.”

My heart starts racing - she thinks she knows why it was impossible for her to see me? What could make it impossible for a mother to want to be reunited with her child? I flick through the rolodex of potential reasons in my mind. All I come up with is Rosemary’s Baby or  – my body runs cold at the thought – that she’d been the victim of sexual abuse. I replay the images of Walney. If ever there was a perfect filming location for a harrowing Scandi noir thriller, that would definitely be the place. 

But this isn’t the story I’ve been told by mum and dad. My mother was artistic, they’d said. She’d come from a good home. She’d just turned 17. A summer fling. “I now know that my baby would have a better start in life in a loving home,” she’d written, two months after my birth, on the adoption consent form. The ‘now’ bit of that sentence always tugged at me. It felt, to me, like a submission prised out of a clenched fist. 

I call the number, and start pacing around the living room. 

“Hello Sarah, this is David,” I say.

“Hello David,” she says. The voice is measured, but warm. “It’s lovely to hear from you. I’m so sorry. I know how hard this must be for you.”

Sarah tells me that she lives in Berwick-Upon-Tweed. Once Scottish, now English, it’s a border town that’s as unsure of its place in the world as I am.

I tell Sarah about my sleuthing, and of how I’d planned on walking up to my birth mother’s door when I’d discovered her current address. I hear her gasp. 

“Oh David,” she says.

Eventually, we discuss the message I’d posted on the forum.

“I had to get in touch,” Sarah says. “I just need for you to understand…” she pauses for so long that I begin to think we’ve lost connection. But then says: “Saint Monica’s wasn’t really a hospital.”

“It’s not a hospital?” I repeat, reverting to the present tense. “What is it?”

“It’s gone now,” Sarah says. “It was shut down a couple of years after you’d have been born. It was what they called a mother and baby home.”

“It was run by nuns,” Sarah continues. “It…” another long, agonising silence. “It wasn’t a very happy place.”

I take a moment to catch my breath. I’d seen The Magdalene Sisters. I’d read about the mistreatment, the abuse, the cruel nuns. But that was a film, and probably a little overblown, the way these things tend to be. And, anyway, that was Ireland. What’s that got to do with me?

“Why don’t you come up?” Sarah says. “These conversations are always better over a nice cup of tea.”

I’d thought searching for my mother was like snapping the pieces into place on a jigsaw. I’d allowed myself to feel a sense of accomplishment;  of a job well done. With my partner, we’d combed through public records, snooped on her family’s social media and – Voila! –  a figure emerged from the shadows. I suppose I’d thought, too, that with that final piece – my cheery letter and the photo of a Scandinavian buffet – our quarry would be coaxed out of its hiding place. Hugs and lattes at the Pumpkin Cafe in Preston Central. Roll credits. 

But I hadn’t found my mother at all. To do that, I had to stop trying to neatly stage manage a happy ending. Instead, I had to start from the very beginning. 

___

Sarah doesn’t say anything as she opens her door. Instead, she throws her arms open wide to welcome me. I clumsily hug her, passing my bunch of service station chrysanthemums, wordlessly, to her husband behind me.

Her face is soft – almost cherubic – and her bright blue eyes dance and sparkle as she holds me at arms’ length to take me in: “You’re the first baby from that place I’ve ever seen,” she whispers into my ear.

“Come in,” her husband mouths, so as not to steal away the moment. “Tea or coffee?”

We walk to the back room of their neat terraced house, Sarah grasping my arm in hers while wiping her eyes with a tissue. The house smells of home baking and lavender Glade plug-ins. There are gleaming pottery figurines arrayed on embroidered doilies, a mantlepiece busy with nick-nacks and the soporific chock-chocking of a wall clock’s pendulum.

I’m directed to an invitingly plush armchair by the fireplace. The electric coils of the fire glow red and the low autumn sunlight bathes everything – every Victorian lady and leaping salmon –  with a golden halo. After the chaos of the pre-Christmas traffic outside, there is an almost-disarming stillness to the scene. 

Sarah settles into a straight-backed dining chair alongside a sliver of a dining table, its leaves neatly folded away. She places her left palm down, flat, on the polished teak and clears her throat. It looks like she’s taking her place in the dock.

A woman skips downstairs to join us. She’s 40ish, her dress splashed with a pattern of blue and yellow roses, and a chunky, craft fair necklace of pink and green resin nuggets. “Hi, I’m Fiona, really lovely to meet you,” she beams.

“My daughter,” Sarah says. “She’s not heard this story either.” 

“Do you take sugar?” Her husband, Len, shouts from the kitchen. 

We chat about the journey. I say Berwick looks like a handsome town, and of how I love the Border country, but I can sense a fidgety impatience building. Sarah’s nervous energy is palpable. Small talk can wait. 

Tea and slices of ginger cake arrive. Len settles on the sofa next to Fiona. They glance at each other and clasp hands. 

I’d previously mentioned that I might, someday, like to write about all of this, and whether I could record our chat. “Absolutely,” Sarah had replied. “People need to know about what happened.”

The room seems to draw its breath in. “You can turn it on now,” Sarah says, pointing to my little recording device. “I’m ready.”

___

“When we arrived at the home our personal belongings were taken from us,” Sarah begins, looking me straight in the eye. I have a sense that these words have been fine tuned and rehearsed. 

“We were given a new name –  a Saint’s name – so, immediately, we lost our identity.”

Sarah closes her eyes as she tells us how the nuns who ran Saint Monica’s stripped her, watched over her as she showered, and handed her a coarse tabard to wear. 

“I can still remember how it itched,” she says, forcing a smile. 

“We all looked exactly the same. We were all just inmates, really.”

Sarah glances over at the sofa. Len casts his eyes downwards and flicks away imaginary crumbs from his lap. FIona smiles back at her and mouths “I love you mum.”

“We were aged from 15 to….” Sarah whispers, before starting to cry.

“You don’t have to do this,” I say. “It’s OK…”

“No,” Sarah interrupts me firmly, and straightens her back. I suddenly get it  – we are not here for a conversation. Sarah needs to give her testimony, and we have to bear witness. 

Saint Monica’s, I learn, was a church-run institution for unmarried mothers, staffed by nuns. There were no trained midwives; no professional, medical supervision of any kind. Before it was forced to close in 1970, around 45 children died here. No one really knows the true number, so poor were the home’s records.  There is a mass grave, in Kendal, of unknown babies. This is not some medieval relic. It’s a touchstone to something terrible, something unutterable, in our recent past.

Some women from Saint Monica’s, Sarah tells me, took their own lives after failing to come to terms with the trauma they experienced here. Many others, she says, are living with profound psychological scars that have shadowed their entire lives – wounds that manifest in depression, anxiety, and a deep sense of shame. 

“You were one of the lucky ones,” Sarah smiles at me. She pauses. “But, maybe, your mother wasn’t.” 

Sarah tells us that girls were sent to Saint Monica’s before their pregnancy started to show, usually at around four months, and stayed for a couple of months after they’d given birth. “The aim was to keep us out of sight, and for our sentence to be as long, and as horrid, as possible.”

Sarah says Saint Monica’s took in girls from the south of England, Wales and Ireland. That my mother’s journey of just over 50 miles was relatively short. “We were sent far away from where we lived. The further the better,” she says. “No family wanted to risk anyone finding out.” 

One family, Sarah says, paid a hotel in the south of France to send postcards home, telling their other children that they were from their sister, happily working a summer job in the sun. “We were a shameful, dirty secret. And Saint Monicas was our punishment,” she says. “And it really was a punishment.” 

The girls, Sarah says, were forced to work long, arduous days – even when they were close to full term. Typically, that meant cleaning laundry, scrubbing floors and working in the kitchen before retiring, exhausted, to their bed in the home’s cramped and freezing dormitory. 

“It was Dickensian,” she says. “We worked from first thing in the morning until late at night. We’d be lifting huge, heavy pans of scalding water up and down the stairs all day, when we were eight months pregnant. I was there in the winter, and there was no heating. To this day, I can still remember the bone-numbing cold of the place.” 

The work, Sarah says, was intended to be the punishment – a path towards atoning for their sins. “But what about the fathers?” she says, suddenly animated. “They just carried on with their lives, scot-free, of course.”

“We had nothing to do with the registration of our babies,” Sarah tells us. “If there was anything medically wrong, we weren’t told. We had to fight for everything. I remember one girl screaming that her premature daughter needed to go to hospital, but they never listened. Our babies were not our property.” 

I catch my eyes starting to water. I slide my hands under my thighs and pinch them hard. I have to listen to this. I need to be shaken from my complacency. This isn’t the happy ending I was blithely hurtling towards. How could I have been so ignorant?

Sarah tells us that the cruellest punishment was reserved for feeding time. “They knew that this is when mothers and babies naturally develop a deep bond with each other,” Sarah says, looking over at Fiona who nods, almost imperceptibly, back at her. “They call it nurturing these days, don’t they?” Sarah says. “How could you nurture something that you were told, over and over again, you didn’t deserve, and wasn’t yours?”

The sun has slipped behind a row of conifers outside the window. Its glare subsided, I’m able to process more of the room. I notice, on a side table, a silver framed photo of Fiona cradling a baby swaddled in a pink and yellow patchwork quilt. 

“Breastfeeding wasn’t allowed,” Sarah says. “We all had our breasts bandaged up.”

“We sat around in a semicircle, perched awkwardly on small, hard stools, feeding our babies,” Sarah says. “We were told not to make eye contact with the baby. Instead, we had to recite prayers. Everything was carefully arranged to make the experience as uncomfortable and unnatural as possible,” Sarah pauses.

“It worked,” she says. “We just wanted it to end.”

I become aware of a strange sense of dislocation. A realization is starting to coalesce. I’m listening to Sarah’s story, and it slowly starts to register: this is not some abstract history. This is my story too.

For a moment, I picture my mother. I see the gentle curve of her arm. I hear the monotonous drone of prayers for salvation and forgiveness. The hard stool, the cold floors. I see all of it. But I don’t picture myself. Or, maybe, I won’t. 

And then I recall my mother’s email, and it’s like I’m reading it for the first time: “I know this may not be the response you’re looking for, but please never contact me again. I’m sorry.”

For, maybe, half a minute, a silence settles over us.  Len, sensing that Sarah’s revelations are starting to weigh us all down a little, breaks in: “Shall we have a little break?” he says. “David, would you like a sandwich? I’ve baked a loaf.”

Sarah seems grateful for the respite. She sits back in her chair and smiles warmly at me. “Are you OK?” she asks.

“Yes, yes…” I say. “Thanks. It’s just…” I try to find a way to neatly parcel up what I’m feeling, without it sounding like I’m the one that’s being brave. “It’s just a lot.”

“You’re doing brilliantly, mum,” Fiona says, and turns towards me. “This must be so difficult for you to hear, David. I’m so sorry.”

After a while, Len shuffles in with a tray of cheese and ham sandwiches and a bowl of salad: “I don’t know whether you like rabbit food, so I’ve put it on the side,” he chuckles. 

Sarah’s gathered her thoughts again, and is keen to continue. 

“People gave their babies names they knew they wouldn't ever use later,” she says. “I remember one – she was a teacher – who hoped she’d never have to teach anyone with that name.”

“Well, my mother must have hated the name ‘Martin’,” I attempt a joke, “because that’s what she called me.”

“She wouldn’t have hated it,” Sarah interrupts me quickly. “Please don’t think your mother was hard and cold, and indifferent,” she says. “She was 17. She was a baby herself. And in those days, 17 was a lot younger than it is now. If you were to get through this, you had to be strong. Once you started to hang your head you were lost.”

Sarah says that one of her worst experiences was helping a young girl to dress her baby before it was given away. “She’d saved up what she could and tucked little bracelets and charms into her blanket, hoping that when the baby was adopted these things would be kept with them. That, somehow, there would be a connection between them.” 

“The older girls knew better,” Sarah says. “The nuns always fereted them out and threw them in the bin.” 

Sarah recalls how she’d stood by an upstairs window with the girl when, at six weeks, the baby was handed over to a couple who’d parked up outside the front door and the woman in the passenger seat wound down her window, to be handed her baby. 

“Apparently they were doctors from down south,” Sarah says. “They didn’t want anyone to see them in their local adoption agency’s office, so the home arranged for them to drive up and pick up the baby, like it was a take-away they’d ordered.”

“We never even saw their faces,” Sarah says. “The car just drove off, and that was it. The girl was told her baby would have a better life going to a more deserving married couple with proper jobs. She wept all night long.”

“The cruellest thing was they said it was going to somewhere it was wanted,” Sarah says. “But this girl wanted to keep this baby more than anything in the world.”

The next morning, Sarah says, the girl, too, was gone. 

“I think about her to this day,” Sarah says. “I think about the cruelty, the chores, the cold. But mostly, when I think about Saint Monica’s, all I can hear are the screams from the birthing room. It sounded like a torture chamber.”

I’ve done that thing again. I always do it. I’ve charged in, thinking I’m the boy with the power to fix things. Only now, way too late, am I beginning to understand the need for these mothers – my mother – to cut off the raw emotional pain of their experience for fear of drowning in it; of being annihilated by it.

What I’m not able to comprehend, just yet, is how this same experience manifested itself in the babies. And of how it shapes their lives, still.

(Author’s note: This is the last piece I’ll be posting to SevenStreets. You didn’t sign up for this, I know. If you’re interested in more of this story I may start a new Substack. Let me know in the comments)