The following story was written as part of a community project centered around St Mary’s Church in Beddington, South London. I am not religious but I found the old buildings, the beautiful Beddington parkland and the history of this area deeply inspiring. Carew Manor, pictured here next to the Church and now a school, was once the stately home of the Carew family. In its day it was visited by both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.
Between 1866 and 1939 the Royal Female Orphanage (originally named the ‘Asylum or House of Refuge for Orphans and other Deserted Girls of the Poor’) was housed here in this magnificent but, what must have been, extremely uncomfortable old manor house. My story is a work of fiction; Margaret and her sister Jenny are entirely invented characters. But working with the historical material and testimonies presented in an exhibition at the local Honeywood Museum and simply walking in the park and exploring the church and its surroundings brought these two children very much to life for me.
I do hope you enjoy my story.
We Were Not Orphans
The following recollections were recorded by Margaret Cooper, who attended the Royal Female Orphanage from 1917 to 1924.
If you learn one thing from this account, may it be to know that my little sister Jenny and I were not orphans. I was ten-years-old and Jenny was just seven. Our father had died in the war in France. We did have a home, with a mother and an older brother who was doing well at school and wanted to continue in his studies, but we fatherless girls were considered a liability – mouths to feed and a long way off earning our keep. I remember the Vicar coming to our cottage and Mother sending us out into the yard to play, after we’d greeted him politely as we’d been taught. I watched through the window and saw him talking on and on, as across the table our mother nodded and wiped her eyes with her apron. ‘The Asylum,’ Mother called it when she spoke to us at bedtime – a terrible word, worse even than orphanage, that can still send a shudder through me if I dwell on it. A place of safety, she said it meant.
We shivered in our petticoats while the Doctor examined us, poked and prodded and peered right down our throats. Mother had dressed us in matching plaid frocks, as if for a special day out, with ribbons to tie up our long hair, which the Nurse now cut and inspected for lice, combing it to and fro and all the time chatting to the Doctor as if this was any other normal day, which I suppose it was for her. ‘Just to wash it, Poppet,’ she said when she took Jenny’s little rag doll. I should never have believed her. Jenny was so proud of her dolly, with its wool plaits and a pretty dress with tiny collar and gathered skirt, stitched by Mother from a patchwork of rainbow remnants. We were put into scratchy black dresses, heavy and plain after our homemade frocks and almost down to our ankles, and we were led all the way up the many staircases by one of the big girls to make up our beds. It was only then that Jenny began to cry. ‘Who’ll tell me stories?’ she asked. ‘I’m just in the next room,’ I said. ‘We’ll see each other every single day. And the other little girls will be with you at night.’ She looked down the narrow room, with its uniform row of beds and the chamber pots beneath and I knew what she was picturing. We had decorated our tiny attic bedroom at home with scraps from magazines and little drawings of flowers and birds. Feathers and glass beads hung on strings, catching the sunlight and sending streaks of turquoise and pink dancing across the low ceiling. The hedgerow outside twittered with sparrows that sometimes alighted on our sill and the lane was often busy with people coming and going, greeting Mother as they passed our front door that opened directly onto the dusty thoroughfare. I stood at the window in my dormitory and looked out over the parkland of this fine old house, with the trees turning gold and a lake like a piece of blue glass in the distance. It was all so grand and hushed and impressive, but it wasn’t friendly and it wasn’t ours.
Of course Jenny’s dolly never reappeared, but we began to fit into the routine of it all. We rose in the dark to wash in freezing cold water and dress quickly, before prayers and a hymn then a breakfast of porridge and a slice of bread. Mother had said we would be together at least. But I hardly had a chance to speak to Jenny all day, even though we orphanage girls all occupied the long wooden benches of the same cavernous schoolroom and all ate in the panelled hall, hundreds of years old and haunted at night by Sir Nicholas who had lost his head. Or so we told each other in whispers. In truth we had to settle in. We had no choice to do otherwise. In fact we had almost no choices at all; we were always busy. There was always the next thing then the next: bed making and chores; bible readings and hymns; endless copying of poems and worthy sayings; stitching of our samplers as the afternoon light faded in the high windows of the schoolroom. It was as if each minute belonged not to ourselves but to the clock high up on the church tower next door that could be heard sounding out the hours, even in the dead of night, even as we slept when I know I dreamed of precious idle minutes I’d once spent so carelessly, wandering the lanes and letting the day drift by as I dawdled over some errand Mother had sent me on – stroking a passing cat or collecting a bunch of feathered grasses and pretty wildflowers to take home and put in a jam jar.
I can hardly bear to recall what happened next. We had come through the bitter cold of our first winter. The fat buds on the trees were starting to unfurl and the mornings were lighter. My sweet Jenny had made new friends and regained her smile and altogether I had begun to worry less about her, when she fell ill. Several girls and even some of the teachers suffered the fever that spring, so now I think of it I believe I took it too lightly and was not prepared for the dreadful outcome. Three girls died that year. In the blank shock of my grief I was allowed home for Jenny’s funeral and Mother was even told that if she wanted to keep me back she could. I should have been happy, but strangely I asked to return to the orphanage. Perhaps with all that reciting and copying of words of goodness I’d become a true Christian girl, but I don’t think it was that that made me decide to return. Somehow it didn’t feel right at home, although of course I never said so. The little attic bedroom was too quiet without Jenny’s made-up songs and her pleas for ‘one more story’. At the same time the village seemed busier and the children out playing in the lane more wild than I’d remembered.
I had always loved Sundays at the orphanage, not only for the precious afternoons when we girls could walk together arm-in-arm in the park after the church service and the little ones could skip and play, but also for the church itself with its lovely windows of red and blue light and the golden angels with their serious faces that adorned the painted ceiling. I liked to watch the people too in their Sunday best, the ladies with ruffles and bows and the gentlemen in their fine waistcoats and when I should have been listening I’d daydream instead, imagining the elaborate Sunday feasts that would have been prepared for after church. I never told anyone, but after Jenny died I hated Sundays. The church became a place to remind me of sadness and loss. Sir Nicholas had never scared me, but the many memorials to rich menfolk and their departed wives and children made me think of dust and old bones.
The time after Jenny’s death is woven together like many strands of grey wool to make one dull piece of cloth, with no single day or week or month standing out from the others. I was serious and studious – some said I was bright and others that I was lucky. It’s true I was quick at my lessons and nimble with my needle, but even so the work was monotonous, without colour or variation. That is until I became a monitor in Miss Weatherhead’s classroom. Miss Weatherhead arrived in the spring when I was fourteen years old. From the start it was clear that she was different from the other teachers – younger and gentler, but with a streak of something lively and bright beneath the surface. She moved the little girls in her class to a cosier schoolroom of their own and hung pictures on the walls. One of my first jobs as a monitor was to arrange the sticks of pussy willow and catkins amongst the daffodils on the nature table.
I wouldn’t say Miss Weatherhead and I became friends and she did not replace my mother. Perhaps an aunt describes it best, or the big sister I never had. She was the only person who noticed my sadness on Sundays, though I had tried to hide it away. Most girls, she knew, loved Sundays. The babies by then had even been allowed some toys to pass the hours – skipping ropes and balls outside and a dolls’ house inside – and we older girls were given more freedom to stroll in the park or sit and sew inside in little circles. So I plucked up the courage to tell her about my dear sister Jenny and how the church reminded me not of her fun and spirit, but of the coldness of death. We wandered together under the trees and she told me she had lost her own sweetheart in the war, as I had lost my father and then my sister, and that she took comfort not inside the church but out here in the world in all its beauty and in the deeds that she could do. I listened to her words and they chimed within me with hope and truth. From then on every Sunday I walked alone to a part of the park I loved the best, around the lake to an old oak tree, whose branches spread as if to reach down and wrap me in strong limbs and comfort me.
Miss Weatherhead’s arrival was a little miracle that disrupted the routine of my life, like a shaft of morning sunlight that woke me to the world again when I hadn’t realised I was sleep walking, but the real miracle came shortly before I left the orphanage forever. One Sunday when I walked to church beside Miss Weatherhead, at the head of the line of the smallest girls, she asked me where I would like to go, what I would like to do, if I could choose. I was due to depart soon, in six months’ time, after my sixteenth birthday, but I had assumed I would be found a position in service in one of the big houses nearby. I had never thought to have any choice in this matter. Somehow though I knew the answer straight away, as sometimes we do in life with the most important things. I recalled a dressmaker’s shop I’d once seen on a rare shopping trip with Mother years ago, with the big window lit up against the winter twilight as we’d hurried by. The dressmaker had stood at her table unrolling a bolt of cloth like a blue river, whilst behind her the coloured bobbins that stretched in rows almost to the ceiling seemed to glow with their many colours. This brief image was as beautiful as any Christmas card to me and now, as I described it to Miss Weatherhead, I also recalled to mind my mother sewing under the lamp at the big kitchen table, cutting and stitching our many times altered dresses. Of course I also remembered the little lost rag doll that Jenny had so loved. Miss Weatherhead had nodded as if she too saw these scenes, or at least understood. I knew then it might be possible to work out a way for me to train as a dressmaker and that I would be able to go out into the world, taking with me the sadness of all that had happened, but also joy and the longing to find a place in life for myself.
Miranda Lewis 2023
With thanks to St Mary’s Church, Sutton Writers and the National Lottery Heritage Fund. Below, the memorial stone that recorded the names of girls and staff members who died whilst residents of the Orphanage at Carew Manor. Sadly it is now impossible to decipher any of the names.
MJL Stories 
