Shadows of the Workhouse

if it’s not too much trouble.” Mrs B, fairly bursting with happiness, ran downstairs for the umpteenth time that day.
    Sister Monica Joan fascinated me as she did most people. But she never treated me as a lady’s maid. No doubt her instinct told her that it just would not work. We understood each other as equals and found endless pleasure in each other’s company. During the uncertain weeks of waiting we had many conversations in her pretty room just after lunch, or before Compline. We talked for hours. Her short-term memory was faulty – often she did not know what day or month it was – but her long-term memory was excellent. She could clearly recall facts, incidents and impressions from her Victorian childhood and her working life in the Edwardian era and the First World War. She was highly intelligent and articulate and could express herself vividly, often in beautiful language that seemed to come naturally to her. As I wanted to learn more about old Poplar, I tried questioning her. But this did not work. She was not easy to pin down, and often took no notice of what I had said or asked. She had a habit of making statements unrelated to anything that had been said beforehand, like: “That rapacious old mongrel!” And then no more! The old mongrel had obviously come into her mind unbidden and then slunk away, his tail between his legs.
    Sometimes she developed her thoughts and her words flowed easily. She would make a dramatic statement: “Women are the cohesive force in society.” She picked up a pencil and balanced it delicately between her two fingertips, those astonishing fingers that she could bend at the first joint. Would she continue? To say a word might break her thoughts.
    “And ‘woman’ in the slums is capable of taking on almost superhuman responsibility, from a very young age, that would crush most of us. Today they live in luxury – look at all the giddy young girls around us – they have no memory of how their mothers and grandmothers lived and died. They have no understanding of what it took to raise a family twenty or thirty years ago.”
    She glanced at the pencil and twisted it round with her thumbs. Privately I questioned the “luxury” in the tenements, but said nothing for fear of chasing away her memories. She continued.
    “There was no work, no food, no shoes for the children. If the rent was not paid the family would be evicted. Thrown onto the streets by the law of the land.”
    She paused, and a memory flashed through my mind of something that I had seen only a few weeks earlier, when I was cycling back from a night delivery.
    It had been about three o’clock in the morning, and I saw a group of people, a man and woman and several children, coming towards me, keeping close to the wall. The woman was carrying a baby and a suitcase. The man was carrying a mattress on his head, a rucksack and several bags. Each of the children, none of them over ten, was carrying a bag. They saw the headlights of my bike and turned their faces to the wall. The man said, his voice quite distinct in the darkness: “Don’ chew worry. It’s only a nurse,” and I cycled past, not realising at the time that a dramatic and tragic event was taking place; an event that used to be referred to light-heartedly as a “moonlight flit”. The family were anticipating eviction and fleeing unpaid debts. God only knows where they ended up.
    Sister Monica Joan was staring at me, hard, and then she narrowed her eyes. “You remind me of Queenie – turn your head.”
    I did so.
    “Yes, you look just like her. I was so fond of Queenie. I delivered her three children and I was with her when she died. She was no more than your age, but she died trying to avoid eviction.”
    “What happened?” I whispered.
    “She went into the Bryant and May factory that made matches. They were a lovely family, and I knew them well. No fights in that family. Her husband was no more than a boy when he was killed in a riverboat accident. What could Queenie do with three little children? The Parish would have taken them from her, but she wouldn’t have it. She went into the match factory because they offered higher pay than anywhere else. Danger money, they called it, and wriggled out of any responsibility by saying the women accepted the danger when they accepted the pay. Wicked it was. Wicked. Death money it should have been called. Queenie worked there for three years and kept a roof over their heads and just