Belonging and a safe home for abandoned children

Belonging and a safe home for abandoned children becomes the practical answer to the deprivation Sunday Small has known since her own childhood. At Treetops Manor, Sunday and Tom Branning turn shelter into a continuing form of care: children receive a place to live, people responsible for their daily needs, and the prospect of growing up as members of a household rather than as unwanted burdens. The home’s importance lies not only in rescuing individual babies, but in making security and affection part of their ordinary lives.

Origins in abandonment and institutional failure

Sunday’s commitment is rooted in the contrast between a home of her own making and the Nuneaton Workhouse where she grew up. There, residents were separated into quarters for women, boys, girls, and men, and the workhouse’s daily routines organized their lives around labor and control. Men and stronger boys picked apart old hemp ropes for oakum or crushed bones delivered from the slaughterhouse; women and girls made uniforms, cooked, cleaned, or worked in the laundry. Inmates rarely came together except for Sunday church. Sunday had seen how devastating that separation could be for families, and her own experience makes the promise of a home that keeps children safe and together more than an abstract ideal.

The workhouse’s provision also failed to match its public assurance. When Lady Lavinia Huntley asked whether the guardians’ money meant that inmates were fed well, Sunday described dry grey bread, greasy porridge, and soup with floating vegetables; meat appeared only about twice a week, or three times in a fortunate week, and was often too gristly to chew. She also recalled the punishment cellar: a bucket for necessities, no bed or blanket, darkness, cold, damp, and rats and mice. Sunday had once spent three days there without food or drink and emerged so weak that she needed the sickbay. Two little girls who had been locked inside were never seen again; Miss Frost said they had died of influenza, but Sunday could not remember anyone saying they had received a proper funeral. Such experiences give the later refuge a clear standard: safety must mean protection from deprivation and cruelty, not merely a roof administered by an institution.

Cissie Burns’s fate shows how abandonment could be imposed even when a child and mother were together. After Cissie became pregnant by Mr Pinnegar, Miss Frost promised that she and her baby would be sent somewhere kind where Cissie could care for him. Instead, an asylum carriage arrived. Cissie recognized it, understood that she was being taken to Hatter’s Hall, and pleaded for the promised arrangement; Miss Frost seized her, her bundle fell to the ground, and the staff discredited her accusation against Pinnegar. Lady Lavinia later heard Sunday describe the episode, including Cissie’s fear that she would never be released and would lose her baby. The promised home for foundlings stands against this coercive pattern: care is not care if it depends on concealing abuse or removing a mother without regard for her wishes.

From an aspiration to a home

The plan acquires a place and material support through Lady Lavinia’s offer. She tells Sunday that Treetops Manor and a sizeable sum of money will be hers to establish a foundling school, recalling Sunday’s wish to give orphaned and abandoned children a happy childhood. Sunday initially refuses the inheritance, believing it to be conscience money from the mother she thinks abandoned her. Zillah explains that Lady Lavinia wants to do right by her, then begins to tell Sunday what happened on the night of her birth. After mother and daughter are reconciled, Sunday accepts the offer on the condition that Lady Lavinia will stay at Treetops and advise the young couple. The house is therefore offered as more than property: its future depends on a continuing relationship of care and counsel.

At the Mothering Sunday service, Sunday and Lady Lavinia leave the church arm in arm, talking animatedly. Sunday tells her that she and Tom will take up the offer when they marry, provided Lady Lavinia remains to help them. Tom is to do the practical odd jobs, while Sunday takes on the work of caring for the children. His emotion at the prospect makes the project a shared undertaking rather than Sunday’s private dream. The closing image draws on the Reverend Lockett’s first candle, described as “a light in our darkness, a symbol of love”: for two people who grew up in the workhouse, that light becomes an image of the home they intend to build for children who might otherwise feel unwanted.

The home as daily practice

The story later shows what that undertaking means in daily life. A letter asks Sunday and Tom to take in a baby girl named Katherine, born the previous day. The writer says the household provides a safe and wholesome refuge for children unable to live with their families, encloses money for the baby’s immediate needs, and promises further support at regular intervals. Sunday agrees that they cannot turn the child away and decides to call her Kitty. The episode makes the home’s purpose tangible: a newly arrived child is welcomed by name, and practical provision accompanies the appeal to compassion.

By then, Treetops has developed into a household with distinct spaces and dependable care. The entire second storey is given over to the children: one room for babies, separate bedrooms for older boys and girls, and a schoolroom. Eight foundlings already live there; Kitty makes nine. The first three arrivals, Benjamin, Edwina, and Marianne, came at intervals during the home’s first year, and five more babies found homes there over the following six years. The children range from two to seven. Verity Lockett teaches the younger ones in the schoolroom for three hours each weekday afternoon; older children attend the local board school and Sunday School. This arrangement offers more than immediate rescue, joining shelter to education and a structured childhood.

Care depends on people as well as rooms. Zillah and Cissie Burns settle the babies into their cots, with the nursery running so smoothly that Sunday knows she could not manage without them. When Sunday asks after Kitty, she learns that the baby has been bathed, has taken every drop of her bottle, and is asleep beside Margaret, the previous youngest foundling. Sunday longs to lift Kitty but does not wake her, respecting the work of the women who have settled the nursery for the night. Her love for the baby joins an attentive, shared routine rather than replacing it. Sunday is protective of all the children and would keep them at Treetops forever if she could; the home’s warmth is made credible through this attention to individual needs and the labor that sustains it.

Belonging beyond blood

Sunday recognizes the children’s vulnerability in her own history. Each has been deprived of a natural mother for one reason or another, as she was in her formative years, and her yearning for a child of her own makes those entrusted to her especially precious. The narrative does not make blood relation a condition of belonging: Sunday’s responsibility to the foundlings grows from the care she gives them, while the household is assembled through friendship, shared work, and deliberate welcome.

The contrast with the workhouse is also shown as change rather than an unalterable condition. Verity reports that meals there have improved, the atmosphere is better, and the fear and bullying have ended. The new matron has snapped Miss Frost’s split cane in two and thrown it away; Verity proposes new bedding because the existing blankets are inadequate. These improvements matter, but they do not erase the reason Treetops exists. The home’s larger promise is that children will have a place where protection is organized around their needs, where education and affection accompany shelter, and where each child can belong. When Kitty arrives, Sunday feels that the baby may be especially important to her; her response brings the story’s recurring hope into focus without diminishing the other children already loved there.