Sunday’s aspiration to establish a home for abandoned children

Sunday’s aspiration to establish a home for abandoned children begins with a night in the nursery at Nuneaton Union Workhouse, where neglected babies are left hungry, sore, and frightened. Faced with their immediate need, she changes their binders and warms their milk; by morning, care has become more than an impulse. She has found a vocation, and imagines a future home that would offer children the love the institution has failed to provide.

The Workhouse as Background

The aspiration takes shape against the daily organization of Nuneaton Union Workhouse. Its residents are separated into sections for women, boys, girls, and men, and their labor is divided accordingly. Some men and stronger boys pick oakum, teasing fibres from old hemp ropes; others crush bones delivered from the local slaughterhouse. The bones are sold as fertilizer, while the luckier residents work in the gardens. Women and girls sew uniforms, make or repair clothing, cook, clean, or labor in the laundry. Inmates rarely come together except on Sundays, when they may attend church. Sunday has seen how such separation can devastate families: the institution’s routine does not merely allocate work but restricts the ties through which people might care for one another.

Food and discipline reinforce the residents’ limited circumstances. The children receive tasteless porridge, grey bread, and watered-down milk, while staff eat bacon and eggs at the top table. Sunday eats what she is given because hunger is worse than disappointment. After breakfast, Miss Frost assigns the day’s duties; Sunday’s sore hands, already chapped from scrubbing floors, are sent to the kitchen, where hot water makes the work more bearable than outdoor labor. Kind local women who help with cooking talk about their families and homes. Their conversations give Sunday glimpses of family life and renew her wish that her own parents had kept her. She especially loves working among the babies, but conceals this preference from Miss Frost, knowing that the woman might deny her access out of spite.

The disparity between the institution’s stated provision and children’s experience becomes explicit after Sunday has left. When Lady Lavinia Huntley asks whether residents were well fed, Sunday describes meals of dry grey bread, greasy porridge, and usually thin soup; meat, when served, is gristly and infrequent. She also recounts being held for three days in a cellar with only a bucket for necessities, no bed or blanket, and no food or drink. Two little girls locked there were later said by Miss Frost to have died of influenza, and Sunday remembers no proper funeral. This testimony concerns the wider regime rather than the moment her vocation forms, but it clarifies the world from which her alternative vision emerges: deprivation and neglect are embedded in institutional practices, not confined to one bad meal or one inattentive worker.

The Nursery Night

The decisive encounter is with the babies themselves. When Sunday finds the nursery attendant drinking sloe gin, the woman displays the bottle and explains that she gives the infants some to stop them crying. Sunday walks along the cots and sees babies staring up at her. Their smell is overpowering; when she begins changing them, she finds their bottoms so sore that they are bleeding. The dirty binders are left to soak in cold water until they can be boiled the next morning. The infants range from newborns to a few months old, and many are too frightened even to whimper. Their condition makes neglect visible in their bodies: stale urine, untreated soreness, silence, and hunger.

Sunday asks for milk and learns that the attendant has no intention of feeding the babies properly. The woman says she gives it cold, though a stove and matches are available. Sunday lights the gas with a match, warms the milk, and feeds the infants from banana-shaped glass bottles with rubber teats at both ends. The first baby she lifts slurps so greedily that he nearly chokes. This small act of feeding answers a need the official routine has left unmet. Sunday does not merely pity the children; she attends to each immediate task, moving along the row with clean binders and then warm milk while the attendant sits drinking and offers no help.

From Response to Vocation

At the end of the shift, Sunday looks back at the sleeping infants and cannot stop thinking about them. She resolves to volunteer in the nursery as often as she is allowed, although she has had no sleep and faces a long day ahead. More important, she begins to imagine making a difference not only for these babies but for others like them. Perhaps, she thinks, she might one day open a foundling home of her own, where she could love and care for unfortunate children. The idea takes root and grows; the night is identified as a turning point in her life, when she finds her vocation.

The change is from private longing to an outward purpose. Earlier, Sunday’s daydream of a mother returning for her offers a way to endure her own abandonment. In the nursery, she meets infants whose need for love is as immediate as their need to be clean and fed. Her imagined future home answers both forms of deprivation. It would be a place where care is not left to an indifferent attendant or reduced to keeping children quiet, but offered through attention to their bodies and continued responsibility for their welfare. The aspiration grows out of the very care she has just performed, rather than from an abstract plan.

Institutional Failure and the Alternative She Imagines

The contrast between Sunday’s response and the nursery attendant’s conduct gives the aspiration its ethical force. The attendant has access to clean binders, milk, and the means to warm it, yet leaves the babies soiled and hungry and uses gin to silence them. Sunday uses the same available resources differently: she changes the infants, lights the stove, and feeds them. The scene locates the difference not in a lack of supplies but in whether anyone accepts responsibility for using them to meet the children’s needs. Her imagined foundling home is therefore a response to abandonment as lived experience, not simply a wish for a kinder building.

The later improvement in conditions at the workhouse offers a limited contrast to the neglect Sunday witnessed. Verity Lockett reports that meals and the atmosphere have improved, that fear and bullying have receded, and that the new matron has snapped Miss Frost’s split cane and thrown it away. She and Lady Lavinia Huntley also discuss replacing inadequate bedding. These changes show that institutional conditions can be challenged, but they do not erase the nursery night or the vulnerability of children dependent on adults for food and care. Sunday’s aspiration reaches beyond reform of punishment and meals toward a lasting home organized around the affection and practical attention the babies lacked.