Bad Girl Magdalene by Jonathan Gash Read Free Book Online Page B

Mrs Rooney hadn’t yet come to open the kitchen door. Their job, sworn to ‘loyal and holy duty’ (Sister St Paul’s oath they had to take when put on kitchen work) was to leave the baskets of vegetables and other provisions untouched (‘unsullied’ in Sister St Paul’s punishing oath) but bring them under the shelter of the doorway. At six-fifteen Mrs Rooney would open it from inside and stand there with the same bark, ‘Get them in here, then off with you.’
    They would carry the baskets in, and then go back fast as legs could go, back to the toilets, trying to get chapped thighs and bottoms clean before hurrying to the gruel that was breakfast.
    Each Monday and Thursday Magda and Lucy had a hard time telling the girls in whispers only and punishment by smacked legs to make you limp all day if you got caught talking, what they’d carried in when the little hatch by the postern gate was filled with heavy baskets and the delivery man’s engine had taken him, whistling and shouting about racehorses, off up the road to wherever it was.
    The other girls didn’t believe them when they said they hadn’t eaten any of the provisions.
    In vain Lucy and Magda swore they hadn’t stolen a single mouthful, and didn’t even know what was inside the baskets,and in any case there was no chance of looking because the baskets were tacked with heavy canvas all the way round so nothing could go in or out. And Mrs Rooney saw the baskets lifted inside then sent them both off and didn’t even let them stay and see what food had arrived or, to Magda’s burning loss, what they weighed, because Mrs Rooney had a scales with big black weights marked in Imperial Pounds and Imperial Ounces, with crowns over those standy-out letters in the coal-black metal. So the weights were from English times, which meant maybe it was sinful to even want a weight of your own, possibly four stone two pounds if God was specially kind.
    Still the other girls kept on accusing them of stealing. Lucy in particular always hotly denied stealing potatoes, which puzzled Magda because how did Lucy know there were potatoes in any basket? Magda had never even looked inside. She and Lucy had to take the empty baskets out after prayers before they went to sleep, putting them in a stack in the hatch so they could be lifted out by the delivery man next time he came. You had to do it that way or the man might see in and watch the nuns, which was a terrible crime that Sister St Paul said would deserve Hellfire for all eternity.
    Magda asked Lucy, ready for rebuke, if that’s what her question deserved, ‘Lucy. How do you know there were potatoes in them baskets?’
    ‘They smell of them.’
    Magda was astonished at this. Weights, and now smells? Potatoes smelt?
    ‘Do potatoes smell?’ she asked with timidity.
    ‘Course they do, daftie.’
    ‘What of?’
    ‘Potatoes, of course.’
    ‘Does everything have a smell?’
    ‘Course it does. Carrots smell of carrots. Potatoes smell of potatoes, lettuces of themselves.’
    ‘Is it just them old vegetables?’
    ‘No.’
    Lucy looked round so as not to be heard by anyone. They were in the laundry where, having small-girl jobs, they had to drag the empty linen skips into the yard. When they were older they might be allowed to work inside where it was steamy but warm and in out of the cold and the rain. Once you got wet there was no drying you until you dried in class, and like as not got told off there for wetting the benches with your wet clothes. The nuns had a terrible suspicion that the girls who stained the benches with damp had peed in their knickers, and peeing in knickers was the most terrible insult to the Order and thereby to Almighty God, who ‘detested filth in thought, word, and deed,’ as Sister St Paul put it.
    This nun did a lot of hunting for transgressors. Two girls were always at it, peeing their knickers and getting blamed for every drop even of rain that clung to garments and skirts and the thin