Sunday cares for the babies in the nursery

Sunday Small’s night caring for the babies in the nursery at Nuneaton Workhouse is the turning point that gives her a vocation. Sent to cover for a sick local worker, she discovers infants neglected behind the workhouse’s orderly routines, then takes responsibility for their immediate care. By dawn, the shift has changed her understanding of what she might make of her own life: she begins to imagine a home where children like these would receive the attention and love denied to them there.

The workhouse and the nursery assignment

The nursery shift takes place within an institution that divides its residents by sex and assigns work according to age and ability. Able-bodied men and stronger boys pick oakum or crush bones; some men and boys work in the gardens. Women and girls sew uniforms, cook, clean, or toil in the laundry. Residents rarely come together except on Sundays, a separation Sunday has seen devastate families. Workhouse life also includes tightly managed routines: after breakfast, Miss Frost reads out the day’s duties, and Sunday is assigned kitchen work.

Sunday likes the kitchen, where hot water makes the work more bearable and local women sometimes talk about their homes and families. She particularly loves the occasional chance to work in the nursery, but keeps that preference from Miss Frost, knowing that the woman might withhold the opportunity out of spite. When a local woman who works there in the evening falls ill, the matron tells Sunday to take her place. Sunday welcomes the assignment, though she keeps her expression controlled, and goes up to the nursery in the attic.

What Sunday finds

An elderly worker opens the door. Inside, eight crude wooden cots stand in a row beneath the sloping eaves, and the room is unnaturally quiet. When Sunday asks whether the babies are asleep, the woman answers that she gives them sloe gin when they cry. Sunday sees the bottle in her hand and understands that the silence has been produced by sedating the children, not by their being settled and well cared for.

Moving along the cots, Sunday sees that the babies range from newborns to a few months old. Their smell is overpowering, and several need their binders changed. The worker points out a cupboard but warns Sunday not to spoil the babies by treating them too kindly. The woman then settles into the room’s only chair and drinks while Sunday collects clean binders and tends to the infants herself.

The work reveals neglect more starkly than the stillness did. The babies’ bottoms are so sore that some are bleeding, and their soiled binders must be put in cold water to soak until they can be boiled in the laundry the next morning. As Sunday changes them, several try to suckle at her hand. She realizes that they are hungry as well as frightened and uncomfortable. Their failure to cry has concealed their needs rather than answered them.

A night of practical care

Sunday asks where the milk is and learns that the worker has left a pan and bottles by a small stove. The woman says she gives the milk cold because the babies are hungry enough not to mind. Sunday ignores this dismissal, strikes a vesta, lights the gas, and warms the milk. She pours it into banana-shaped glass bottles, each fitted with a rubber teat at either end, then lifts a baby from his cot and offers him the bottle.

The child drinks so greedily that he nearly chokes. Sunday rocks him as she feeds him; when he has drained the bottle, she lays him gently back in his cot. She repeats the process along the row. The elderly worker does not help: by the time Sunday has finished, the woman is snoring, and the babies too are asleep. Sunday has not solved the neglect that leaves the infants hungry and sore, but she has made sure that, for the moment, they are fed and more comfortable.

The care continues through the night. Sunday feeds the babies again in the early hours and once more as dawn breaks, working by candlelight before tending to the last infant. The shift exposes the contrast between an institution’s routines and the actual work of attending to people: the worker responsible for the room has silenced the babies and abandoned their care, while Sunday notices their distress and responds to each need with food, clean binders, and gentle handling. Her response is immediate and practical, not an abstract promise of kindness.

Vocation and significance

As the day staff arrives, Sunday looks back at the sleeping infants before going to the washroom. She has had no sleep, and the night promises to make the coming day long, but exhaustion does not erase what she has seen. She decides to volunteer for nursery work as often as she is allowed, because the babies deserve someone’s love. The experience plants a larger possibility: that she might someday open a foundling home and care for unfortunate children herself. The narrative marks the night as a turning point in her life and identifies the work as the discovery of her vocation.

That ambition grows from a particular encounter with vulnerable infants, but it also gives direction to what Sunday has endured in the workhouse. Later, when Lady Lavinia Huntley asks about conditions there, Sunday speaks plainly about poor food and describes punishment in a cellar where she was once confined for three days without food or drink. Her testimony recalls an institution that can punish and neglect its children as well as employ them. Later still, Verity Lockett reports that the meals have improved, the bullying and fear have receded, and the new matron has snapped Miss Frost’s split cane. These changes do not undo Sunday’s nursery discovery; they sharpen its significance. She has learned, through caring for the babies, to recognize neglect as something that can be challenged by sustained attention and responsibility.

The episode also establishes the particular shape of Sunday’s hope. She does not imagine care as a single rescue or as a feeling detached from work. It means noticing hunger beneath silence, warming milk rather than accepting that cold milk will do, changing painful binders, and returning to the cots again before morning. The foundling home she imagines is therefore rooted in the tasks she performs that night: a place where vulnerable children would not have to wait for someone to see their needs.