Sister Evangelina was not just a comedy act for the children’s entertainment. She was a professional nurse and midwife, and her mood changed instantly.
‘We will have to take the baby into another room and scrub up thoroughly. We cannot cut the cord in these conditions. As it is, the soot is not going to harm the baby. But I am not sure what would happen if it got into the bloodstream.’
Disappointed children were shooed away and taken downstairs. The baby, with the placenta still attached, was carried into another bedroom, and with sterile equipment the cord was cut.
The job of cleaning up fell to the grandmother. It took her about four days, and she needed a holiday to recover.
NANCY
The harlot’s curse from street to street Shall weave old England’s winding sheet.
Sister Monica Joan had fascinated me from the first time I met her on a cold November evening in Nonnatus House, when we had devoured an entire cake between us, and she had rambled on about poles diverging and saucers flying and etheric ethers converging and goodness knows what else. She has continued to fascinate me over the years, and I have never been able to resolve the enigma that was she. How could a young woman of beauty, talent, intellect and wealth reject the privileges of the Victorian upper class to work in squalor amongst the poorest of the poor at the end of the nineteenth century? How could she reject offers of love and marriage and children to become a nun? I was never able to answer these questions. A religious-minded woman who has nothing to lose by embracing the monastic life, I could understand. But Sister Monica Joan had everything to lose. Yet she gave it all up. In fact, she had given up her position in society ten years before entering the convent, by becoming a nurse – a lowly and almost despised occupation in the 1890s. She was not, however, a saint! She was wilful, haughty, sarcastic; she could be cruel and unfeeling, arrogant and demanding. All these faults I was aware of – and loved her still.
I liked nothing better than to go to her room when work permitted and listen to her talking. Sometimes her mind wandered through a muddle of various religions – Christian, pagan, oriental philosophies, occultism, theosophy, astrology; she embraced them all with uncritical enthusiasm, whilst still observing the strict monastic disciplines of her order.
One day I asked Sister why she had given up her life of wealth and privilege for the humble life of a nurse, a midwife and a nun.
She winked at me.
‘So you think our life “humble”, do you? Nonsense. Fiddlesticks. Ours is a life of adventure, of daring, of high romance.’
‘I agree with you there,’ I said. ‘Almost every day comes as a surprise. But I started nursing when I was eighteen, because there was no other choice. But why did you? You had plenty of choices.’
‘You are wrong, my dear. The choice of which pretty dresses to wear? Pooh! The choice to spend each afternoon “visiting”, and talking about nothing? Pooh! Pooh! The choice to spend hours embroidering or making lace? Oh, I couldn’t stand it – when nine-tenths of the women of Britain were toiling with their half-starved, stunted broods of children. I could not leave my father’s house and start nursing, or lead any sort of useful life until I was over thirty.’
She was in good form. I was on to a streak of luck, because it was always a lottery talking with Sister Monica Joan. At any moment she might say no more. I said nothing, but waited.
‘When Nancy died, I had an almighty row with my father, who wanted to control me. I hated the shallow, empty life I was leading, and wanted to throw myself into the struggle. I left home to become a nurse. It was the least I could do in her memory.’
‘Who was Nancy?’
‘My maid. She had been surgically raped.’
‘What! Surgically raped? What on earth does that mean?’
‘Exactly what it says. Josephine Butler had rescued the child and she asked me if I could take her on as my lady’s maid. I was eighteen at the time, and my mother permitted me to have a lady’s maid of my choice. Nancy was thirteen.’
‘Who was Josephine Butler?’
‘An unknown saint. You are ignorant, child! I cannot waste my time with such ignorance. Go, fetch my tea, if your mind cannot rise to higher thoughts.’
Sister Monica Joan closed her fine, hooded eyes, and haughtily turned her head on her long neck, to signify that she was offended, and that the conversation was over.
Humiliated by her cruel tongue and furious with her (not for the first or last time), I retreated to the kitchen. But that same evening I asked Sister Julienne about Josephine Butler.
Josephine Butler, born in 1828, was the daughter of a wealthy landowner in Northumberland.[10] The whole family of seven children were highly educated and brought up to think deeply about class inequality and the conditions of the poor. In those days, this was considered to be radical, unconventional and dangerous. Her grandfather had worked with Wilberforce for the abolition of the slave trade, and Josephine had listened to adult discussions about slavery, child labour, factory work and related subjects throughout her childhood. In later life she said, ‘From an early age I mourned about the condition of the oppressed.’ She was particularly drawn to the condition of women whose abject poverty drove them into prostitution, through which they would frequently become pregnant, and then both the woman and child would be destitute.
In 1852, at the age of twenty-four, Josephine married George Butler, an academic and professor at Oxford University. He was ten years older than her and was a reformer and radical thinker, just as her father had been. It proved to be a perfect meeting of minds. After the marriage Josephine moved with her husband to Liverpool. It was not difficult to find poverty in Liverpool in the 1850s. The workhouse alone housed 5,000 souls. She visited and worked in the oakum sheds: ‘vast underground cellars, unfurnished, with damp floors and oozing walls, where women sat on the floor all day picking their allotted portion of oakum. Yet they came voluntarily, driven by hunger and destitution, begging for a few nights’ shelter and a piece of bread.’
In 1864 their little daughter Eva, aged five, fell downstairs and was killed. Josephine was paralysed with grief. She had always been deeply religious, but now she turned in on herself, rejecting all comfort, all consolation.
Unknown to Josephine, and indeed to most people in Britain, 1864 was the year in which the Contagious Diseases (Women) Act was passed in Parliament. When she did learn about it two years later it came as a shock and was the catharsis needed to rouse her from deepening depression.
The Contagious Diseases (Women) Act of 1864, intended ‘for the prevention of contagious diseases at certain naval and military stations’, was profoundly immoral. Venereal disease was spreading rapidly among the armed forces and was thought likely to undermine military strength. It was widely assumed in those days that women spread the diseases, and that to curtail the spread of infection prostitution must be controlled. So far, so good – in theory. But there were not, and never had been, legalised brothels in England. Women touted for their customers in the streets, and so the Act empowered the police to find their victims in the streets.
The Contagious Diseases Act was administered by a special unit of volunteers from the Metropolitan Police who were known as ‘the Spy Police’. These men had the power to arrest on suspicion only any woman found alone in the streets whom they thought might be soliciting, confine her in a cell and call a doctor to examine her vaginally for evidence of venereal disease (Josephine Butler called this ‘surgical rape’). There were no female police officers or doctors in those days so the women were handled entirely by men who had volunteered for the job in the first place, and no witnesses were required. If evidence of venereal disease was found the woman would be confined to a lock hospital[11] for treatment. If no evidence was found, she would be given a certificate saying that she was ‘clean’, but her name would be kept on a special police register and she could be arrested and re-examined at any time. In theory the woman had to give written consent for the first examination, but this was a cynical farce because the Act stated that a woman who refused to sign should be confined indefinitely until she did consent to be examined.
10
For this account of the life of Josephine Butler, I have referred to several sources, all of which are detailed in the Bibliography.
11
A lock hospital was the official term for a hospital treating venereal disease. The infected patients could not leave and were locked in. It was effectively a prison.