All Saints Church is a recurring place of worship and human connection in Sunday Small’s life. For children confined by the workhouse’s routines, the weekly journey there offers a rare change of air and scenery; for Sunday, it becomes a place where friendship, practical help, mourning, and finally reconciliation gather around the rituals of churchgoing. The church’s significance is not only religious: its pews, churchyard, and Mothering Sunday service mark a movement from enforced separation toward chosen belonging.

Setting and the workhouse journey

The children’s visit to All Saints Church follows a strict routine. On Sunday afternoons, after lunch and the washing up, the girls are inspected by Miss Frost. Those who have not brushed their hair or changed into their Sunday-best clothes are sent back to their room; a second offence in the same month can bring a whipping. Those who pass muster are marched down the Bull Ring to the church and left for an hour with Miss Beau. The formality of the inspection and the forced march contrast with what Sunday values about the outing: the fresh air, the familiar route, and a temporary escape from workhouse life.

That route is described through small, particular pleasures. Sunday remembers passing a florist’s shop whose smell delighted her, crossing the canal bridge, and going beneath the great Coton Arches viaduct. In March 1884, she and Daisy Branning walk in file toward the morning service, noticing spring flowers beneath the hedgerows and birds in the trees. Daisy appreciates the open air; Sunday envies the birds their freedom. The church visit offers release only in a limited sense: the girls remain under supervision and are assigned pews for workhouse inmates. Yet the repeated walk gives the setting a place in Sunday’s imaginative life beyond the institution’s walls.

Worship, learning, and encounters

The church is also linked to Sunday’s education. Miss Beau, who later becomes Mrs Lockett, reads Bible stories to the children. Sunday’s favourite is the story of the infant Moses found among the bulrushes, and she takes pride in being able to read it herself. The association is telling without erasing the limits of her circumstances: the workhouse guardians require children to learn reading and writing, but Sunday’s eagerness to read turns that instruction into a source of personal delight.

At church, the children meet Mrs Lockett, whose warmth contrasts with Miss Frost’s severity. In March 1884, Mrs Lockett greets Sunday and Daisy in the pews reserved for workhouse inmates. More than two years earlier she had become the vicar’s wife, and she is now expecting her first child. When the workhouse children arrive on a later Sunday, she waits at the entrance holding her baby. Ignoring Miss Frost’s forbidding expression, she draws Sunday aside to tell her that Lady Lavinia Huntley has arranged for her to begin work at Mrs Spooner’s home the next day. She expresses her happiness for Sunday and promises that she can come to her if she ever needs help. The church thus serves not merely as a place Sunday revisits, but as a setting where news, reassurance, and a possible route out of the workhouse reach her.

Churchyard, grief, and the Mothering Sunday service

The churchyard gives the location a more solemn role. On the morning when Sunday and Tom Branning intend to ask Reverend Lockett to marry them, they arrive at All Saints Church in Chilvers Coton and pause to buy violets from the flower-seller at the gate. Before entering, Tom lays his flowers on his sister Daisy’s grave and tells her the news about his relationship with Sunday. The gesture brings private bereavement into the day’s public hopes: their future is announced beside the resting place of the sister Tom has lost.

Inside, the Mothering Sunday service is crowded with children carrying posies for their mothers. Sunday sees Cissie Burns and George wave, and she waves back. Lady Lavinia Huntley sits at the front beside Zillah, while Sunday, Tom, and Mrs Spooner take seats farther back. Reverend Lockett’s sermon describes maternal love as beginning before birth and lasting throughout a mother’s life. The children then offer their flowers. The gifts have little monetary value, but the mothers’ delighted faces show the emotional weight the service gives them.

Reconciliation and narrative significance

Tom squeezes Sunday’s fingers and encourages her to rise. She walks down the aisle with a posy of violets and offers it to Lady Huntley as her mother. Lavinia is overcome and embraces her daughter; Sunday, who has not truly cried for years, cries in her mother’s arms. The church’s ceremonial giving of flowers becomes the occasion for a private recognition made public through gesture: a daughter approaches, a mother receives her, and their estrangement gives way to reunion.

As they leave, mother and daughter walk arm in arm, speaking eagerly and absorbed in one another. Sunday also accepts Lavinia’s offer to use Treetops Manor as a home for foundling children, on the condition that Lavinia live there and advise her and Tom. All Saints Church therefore connects several stages of Sunday’s story: childhood worship under institutional rules, friendship and assistance, Tom’s continuing bond with Daisy, and the reconciliation that makes a new household possible. Its importance rests in this recurrence. A place first reached on a supervised walk becomes the setting where Sunday can claim both a mother and a future shaped by care for children who, like her, need a home.