Sunday Small’s foundling status and workhouse upbringing

Sunday Small’s foundling status is the defining condition of her childhood: she is discovered on the steps of Nuneaton Union Workhouse as a newborn and grows up without knowing who her parents are or why they left her. The institution supplies her with a name, shelter, and an education, but also subjects her to hunger, harsh discipline, and a system that separates families. Her upbringing makes her both a witness to its failures and, in later life, a voice able to describe them.

Origins and Naming

Miss Beau tells Sunday that she was found on the workhouse steps and was the only baby in the nursery who cried. In Miss Beau’s account, the other infants soon learned that crying brought no response: staff came only occasionally to feed and change them, and most of the babies did not live to their first birthdays. Sunday survived, and even as a small child she protested against the carelessness shown to the infants. The contrast between her survival and the nursery’s neglect gives her beginnings a double significance: she is not only a child abandoned at the institution, but also one who reacts early to the abandonment of others within it.

Sunday asks who gave her a name. Miss Beau explains that Sunday was chosen for an obvious reason, while Small referred to how tiny she was. The name records the circumstances of her discovery without revealing her parentage. Sunday remains uncertain about who her parents were, and that unanswered question follows her through childhood.

Life inside the Workhouse

The workhouse divides its residents into separate quarters for women, boys, girls, and men. Its daily life is organized around labor as well as separation. Able-bodied men and stronger boys pick oakum, pulling fibres from old hemp ropes for use by shipbuilders, or crush bones delivered from the local slaughterhouse for fertilizer. Others work in the gardens. Women and girls sew uniforms, make or mend clothes, cook, clean, or toil in the laundry. Residents rarely come together except for Sunday church, and Sunday sees how this division can deepen the pain of families already living under the same roof.

Her own duties vary. Miss Frost assigns her kitchen work, where her hands are already sore from scrubbing but the hot water makes the task warmer than outdoor labor. Sunday particularly loves working with the babies in the nursery, though she keeps that preference from Miss Frost for fear that the matron would prevent her from going there. In the dining room, the children receive grey bread, porridge, and watered-down milk, while staff eat bacon and eggs at the top table. Sunday eats what she is given because hunger leaves her with little room to expect better. The visible difference between the children’s meal and the staff’s breakfast sharpens her hope that one day she will eat well, too.

Punishment and neglect reach beyond poor food and exhausting work. Sunday later tells Lady Huntley that the punishment room is a cellar with only a bucket, no bed or blanket, and no light; it is cold and damp, with mice, rats, and spiders. Her longest confinement lasts three days without food or drink, and she is so weak when Mrs Lockett finds her that she must spend the night in the sick bay. Sunday also remembers two little girls who were locked in the cellar and never seen again. Miss Frost says they died of influenza, but Sunday recalls no proper funeral. These experiences leave her with direct knowledge of how institutional authority can make children vulnerable and how little explanation is offered when they disappear.

Attachment, Hope, and Care

Miss Beau is the one adult Sunday remembers as showing her affection. She teaches the girls, reads Bible stories with them, and helps in both the nursery and the sick wing. Sunday learns to read the story of baby Moses in the bulrushes and takes pride in being able to read it herself. She is eager for books and learning, and Miss Beau also tells her about Nuneaton’s history: its former ribbon-weaving industry, whose products travelled as far as London, and the town’s later dependence on brickworks and pits. In Sunday’s childhood, education offers a rare source of attention and a means of looking beyond the institution.

Her attachment to Miss Beau is especially meaningful because Sunday has so little experience of tenderness elsewhere. Miss Beau describes her as a baby who protested loudly when the nursery children were neglected, and Sunday grows into a girl who instinctively tries to soothe distressed infants. When Miss Frost quiets Susan with a rag pressed across the child’s nose and mouth, Sunday waits until the housemother has left, then checks that Susan is still breathing. She remembers another girl who did not wake after similar treatment. Her efforts cannot always prevent harm, but caring for the younger children becomes one way she answers the neglect she herself has known.

Sunday also sustains herself with a private hope: that her mother will come for her. She imagines a splendid house with flowers, green grass, birdsong, sunshine, and plentiful food, where she will be treated like a princess and never be hungry again. She persuades herself that her mother wanted to keep her but was prevented by illness or some other circumstance. This imagined future does not resolve the facts of her abandonment; it helps her endure their uncertainty.

Witness, Testimony, and Later Echoes

The workhouse’s treatment of Cissie gives Sunday another lasting memory of institutional power. When the asylum carriage arrives to take Cissie away, Sunday hears her identify it and protest that she had been promised a place where she could care for her baby. Cissie says that Pinnegar forced her, but Miss Frost rejects her accusation, blames her, and shakes her until the bundle of her possessions falls to the ground. Sunday later recounts the episode to Lady Huntley, including Cissie’s fear of being confined and her desperate appeal for Pinnegar to be fetched. The testimony brings together what Sunday has witnessed: an accusation against a powerful man, the punishment of the girl who makes it, and the removal of a vulnerable mother from her child.

After leaving the workhouse, Sunday describes its conditions to Lady Huntley and Mrs Spooner. She speaks plainly about the food and the cellar punishment, explaining that she has little to lose by telling the truth now that she no longer lives there. Her memories become evidence in an effort to improve conditions for those still inside. Later, Verity Beau reports that meals have improved, fear and bullying have receded, and a new matron has snapped Miss Frost’s split cane and thrown it away. Verity and Lady Huntley also discuss providing better bedding. The contrast between these changes and Sunday’s account makes clear that the hardships she endured were not inevitable features of childhood, but conditions that could be challenged.

Sunday’s later encounters with prejudice echo her own experience of being treated as an outsider, though they arise in different circumstances. At a cattle market, she sees people recoil from Mickey and one man spit at his feet. She links the man to Pinnegar’s circle, puts her arm through Mickey’s, and urges him to hold his head up and stare back. At a later arrival in a new household, the woman there looks at Mickey with contempt, and Sunday immediately bristles and identifies him as her good friend. Across these scenes, the child once left without a family becomes someone who publicly stands beside another person facing rejection. Her foundling upbringing remains more than a history of deprivation: it helps explain her alertness to cruelty, her instinct to protect the vulnerable, and her willingness to make her own ties of belonging.