Farewell To The East End

the other three fingers arched fan-like. She was watching the changing light in the bowl of the spoon and the reflections of those around her. She giggled.
    ‘Now you are upside down. Now the right way up, but your face is all fat … hee, hee, hee! Now it’s thin. This is such fun. You should have a look.’
    She appeared to be completely absorbed in the spoon and her own thoughts, and I doubted whether she had taken in a word of the previous conversation. How wrong one can be.
    Sister Monica Joan had the instincts of an actress, and her timing was impeccable. She dropped the spoon onto the table with a clatter. Everyone jumped and looked at her. She was now the focus of attention, which she relished. She looked coolly around the table at each of us, and said unhurriedly: ‘I have seen several cases of smothered babies, or perhaps I should say, where I have strongly suspected smothering, but could not prove it.’
    She looked around to judge the effect of her words.
    ‘We had a young maid at the convent – not this House, the one that was bombed out – she was a sweet girl from a respectable family. After a few months, it became clear that she was pregnant.
    She was only a girl of fourteen. We were quite shocked, but kept her on, with her mother’s approval, until her time. Then we delivered her baby in their little house. One of our Sisters delivered it, and everything appeared to be satisfactory, if an illegitimate baby in a respectable family can be described as satisfactory. At any rate, mother and baby were alive and well when the Sister left them. A few hours later a note was brought to the convent saying that the baby had passed away. The Sister went to the house and found the baby dead, and the child-mother deeply asleep. She could not be roused. It looked like a sleep induced by laudanum. An inquest was held, but nothing was proved.’
    Sister Monica Joan picked up the spoon again and turned it in the light, gazing intently at the changing shapes.
    ‘Everything looks so different from varying angles, doesn’t it? We see things one way and assume it is correct. But then, move the light just a fraction …’, she turned the spoon slightly, ‘and you see it quite differently. Very often the death of a baby was seen as a blessing, not as a tragedy.’
    ‘Very true,’ grunted Sister Evangelina, ‘if a family already had half a dozen mouths to feed, and no food and no work, it would be a blessing.’
    ‘Poverty. Grinding, abject poverty with no end.’ Sister Monica Joan turned the spoon again, gazing at it. ‘We were the greatest empire the world had ever seen. We were the richest nation in the world. Yet turn the light just a little and you see destitution so terrible that men and women were driven to kill their own babies.’
    ‘Surely you exaggerate, Sister?’ said Sister Julienne in a shocked voice.
    Sister Monica Joan turned her elegant head and raised an eyebrow. No one could have looked less like a champion of the poor!
    ‘I do not say it happened all the time, nor that every family was guilty. But it happened. You are too young to have seen the conditions in which working people lived. A thousand people crowded into a slum street of decaying buildings with no lavatories, no furniture, no heating, no blankets, no water except the rainwater that seeped through the rotten roofs and walls and basements. And above all, never enough to eat. In this I do not exaggerate. I have seen it. And not just one street, but hundreds of them. An endless warren of slums, housing hundreds of thousands of people. Read General Booth or Henry Mayhew, if you don’t believe me! Of course babies died all the time, and of course some were helped on their way by a desperate parent. What else would you expect?’
    Trixie, Chummy and I could not speak. Her words and her appearance were so compelling that nothing further could be said. But Sister Julienne spoke.
    ‘Let us thank God that those days are past. Such poverty will never be seen again in this country, though it exists in many parts of the world, especially since the last war, and we must pray for those people.’
    At that moment Mrs B came in with pudding, which she took over to Sister Julienne. Mrs B was Queen of the Kitchen – an excellent and valued cook.
    ‘I’ve made a nice junket ’ere for Sister Monica Joan. A strawberry one. I knows as ’ow she likes strawberry best.’
    ‘Junket! Ooh yummy. And strawberry too!’
    In an instant Sister