When I was a teenager I was sent to live with the Nuns. Well, it was the 70’s, NZ, and I was a pregnant convent girl from a big Catholic family with a sick mum. This is where bad girls ended up, they said.
The Convent I was sent to was beautiful, old, fragrant, with wide corridors and huge sash windows, high ceilings, airy rooms and verandahs, enormous flower and vegetable gardens and was run by thrifty Nuns with jangling keys at their waists, who, as well as Bad Girls who they shuffled down the Adoption Path, took in washing from local private hospitals.
The laundry was the hub of the Convent. It was huge, with enormous tables for folding, huge wicker laundry baskets on wheels, entire rooms for stacking folded linen, big industrial washing machines, a drying room and an enormous mangle. Busy with silent rabbit like girls at work. The mangle was so wide it could iron a full length girl from side to side. Flat as a paua fritter. But that was the warm part of the laundry, you kind of worked up to that side as your pregnancy advanced. The side where the laundry was received, sorted and rinsed was where we began, it was cold, right there where the trucks pulled in and out. Always cold. And sorting the linen in the sluice room was the worst of the jobs. Some of it should have been rinsed in the hospitals. We never hardened to it.
The rinsing girls on the cold side had cracks in their hands that never healed from the cold water, nails always waterlogged, ripped and bleeding, infected cuts that never gave up and to this day they go white and numb at the threat of chilly weather. If it is terribly cold I am left using my hands like paddles. Our shoulders were always in pain. Don’t feel bad though, due to my .. um.. high spirits I was often sent out to work with Sister Delphina in the gardens. Sometimes I was sent to the library, where the girls did their correspondence school work in the evenings – to think about my sins! Well that WAS a hardship. However I am wandering off the subject.
At of the outdoor end of laundry, near where the vans brought in their loads of bloody linen, leaking hideousness through the canvas bags which we rinsed and washed as well, was a small alcove. This is where the girls who were living at the Convent came to wash their own clothes on Saturday afternoon. Saturday afternoon and Sunday were our days off you see. The big laundry was silent. The nuns at prayer. And if you wanted your washing to be dry for ironing by Sunday afternoon you washed on Saturday.
In this alcove with its cold concrete floor, and high iron crossed windows with jasmine creeping in from the nun’s garden, divided by a short bevilled glass wall from the laundry rinsing rooms were two big spotless concrete tubs and a long stone bench. Above one tub were two taps, one copper and one steel. One hot and one cold. Hot. The joy of it. I still love to hold my hands in a tub of hot water. Above the other tub was one cold tap. Between them was a small mangle. We washed our clothes by hand. It was Saturday. We were still in one piece, our babies bobbing gently in our bellies. And we chattered a mile a minute. As disconnected as any teenagers. Hauling our fat pregnant selves up onto the benches, dropping our slippers and swinging our bare feet, helping with each others washing, pushing them all through the mini mangle between the tubs, trying to jam each others fingers between the rollers,(watch out for your hair, watch out !) babies having babies. Dragging our heavy baskets of wrung out dresses and nighties and aprons across to the long empty clothes lines surrounded in heady lavender hedges, and we hid amongst the washing, giggling teenage giggles, hanging our scented colourful clothes out to dry with little wooden pegs, letting our faces drift into the wet soapy smells. The colour of them an afront to the white weekday sheets. Young and strong, steeped in a sadness we never discussed. A sadness that demanded silliness. And one of my strongest scented memories of this period was the laundry soap.
The soap was soap.
Now let me tell you about the soap.
We will digress shortly for a moment. All the housework was done by the girls as well. Only our ‘side’ mind you. The Nuns cleaned their own. We had a long wing of our own, with many bedrooms. My job was to clean and polish the endless wide beautiful corridors, the visitors parlours and the dining hall, all wide planked native wood and brass at the doors. One of my friends who I never saw again, this often being the way of these friendships forged in hardship, had the job of cleaning the two big bathrooms. Doling out clean towels and soap (carefully counted out by the nun with the keys) as she went. Each bathroom had 6 toilets, 6 hand basins and 3 showers. And in the hand-basins and showers there was home-made soap. Made by a Sister no-one ever saw. And when the soap was a slither left abandoned in a soap saucer, my friend’s job was to collect all the slithers, rinse them, pop them into a big battered tin pot, fill the pot with water, boil it for a wee while, then take the pot with its old worn ladle, down the path and across to the Laundry and set it in the Girl’s Wash House ready for Saturday afternoon. This is what we washed our clothes with. Good soap. And our clothes smelt lovely.
Of course I still cannot bear to throw away the last slithers of soap. And now that I am making my own soap, not only do we have the slithers but I also have the endy bits and cuttings off the soap cakes. And wasting it would be dreadful. 
It all gets tossed into my soap pot and cooked up. I often add a few extra drops of lavender as a treat. If you want a formula, maybe a pound of soap to a gallon of water. But it is an excellent laundry liquid, especially for woolens. Best in a jar with a lid, using the ladle to dole it out. It does not pour well!
And when it comes to dirty dogs after a day in the fields with the mud and melting snow, soap is a wonderful thing.
Both dogs are trained to stand in the shower and be hosed down, then toweled off before they can sit in front of the fire at night. They do it. But with studied ill grace.
You all have a wonderful day.
Your friend on the farmy,
celi
The Kitchen's Garden 
85 responses to “Laundry Soap for Bad Girls”
i love the expression on your doggie’s face….
[i, too, lived with the nuns (“ursuline”) in a convent, in ’69-’70….and i know all about the lye soap the nuns manufactured themselves, the soap that immediately turned my pretty green towels snow white in the first month i lived there….]
That soap was nasty! Our hands will never forget it!
Hi Celi,
I love your blog and today’s brought tears to my eyes. It must have been such a difficult time for you yet your descriptions are beautiful. I recently saw a movie about that exact situation, only about girls in Ireland, and it was exactly what you describe in the washing rooms.
I adore your pictures of Boo and Marmalade cat, always make me smile. The picture of the dog in the shower is so funny, you can see the humiliation. I guess it is worth it to sit in front of the fire.
Have a great day,
Lori
I thought I would answer all the comments from this old post to catch up with everyone. You have been in The Fellowship for a long long time ! Thank you! Has your spring come yet?
Isn’t it wonderful that there are good memories even from difficult times?!
I went to an elementary school directly across the street from a Catholic school. We would pick on those girls about having to wear uniforms and eat fish on Friday while we had whatever we wanted to eat. But when the nuns came out we scattered! They scared us! Public school pregnant girls in the 70’s were sent to school somewhere but most of us never knew where. They were at school then gone then back again with a lot of gossiping about where they went. Morning miss c….t
Yup, nuns here too. I was very lucky, though. No baby tummy, and a loving home. Our nuns were Franciscan missionaries, and rather relaxed, having seen the seamier side of life in Africa, India and the Far East. Things that would have made the domestic variety blanch, they took in their stride. I was fortunate to emerge without too many hangups, too much Catholic guilt or too much body-shame. And it was my mother who taught us to collect soap ends, grate them finely and make a soap liquid for all sorts of uses. Frugal skills that are becoming lost.
Kate! I am sending messages out from this old post to see where they land – can you let me know if you get this? AND – do you still collect soap ends!! Arent we funnY! c
Hello! Yes I got this, and yes, I still collect soap ends… I know liquid hand soap is very easy and economical, but it doesn’t get your hands as clean, to my mind. Just got a beautiful block of shea butter soap, dark green and scented with frankincense and myrrh. Good soap is one of my tiny luxuries and I don’t waste a scrap.
Great! Checking the systems! Thank you! Your new soap sounds divine!
I loved this post-your story slowed me down and I really felt I could feel and smell the laundry. Beautiful post, Thank you!
I love beautiful cakes of handmade Lavender soap. At the moment I’ve got handmade lemongrass soap on the edge of my bathroom basin. it’s heavenly. Wish I had the facility to make it myself, but I buy it from a stall in the local market.
When we children still lived in the family home, my Mother would grate all the soap slithers and ends into the washing machine to launder our clothes. I only vaguely remember the mangle to wring out the wet washing as a small child, but as I turn 60 in a couple of weeks, that sort of….. makes me feel very old to think of it. That and being born when television was introduced to Australia in 1956.
So here I am, dreaming along in your memories, thinking, “How like Our Celi, to take the Best of what must have been a hard time in her life and share it with us…” scrolling down, smelling the jasmine….then Ton’s “No! PLEASE not the SOAP!” face pops up…
Belly laugh.
Have a great day, Hon. You got mine off to a good start!
Just love reading stories from your past Celi! You can bring them to life as if we were there! Thank you! And I just love that precious Ton Ton! Please give him a hug from me!
well I’ll be jiggered! I am not sure what idea I had about your early life but it certainly wasn’t that…It sounds as though it was not easy but then it seemed to be comfortable and clean.
I have always shredded my bits of old soap or else stuck them on to the new bar, never wated the odd bits.
have a lovely day yourself Celi , lots of love
Wow, Celi, I felt like I was right there with you in the convent the entire time. What a wonderfully written story of a time in your life that you remember so vividly. I am sure the sounds and smells of that time linger on years later—they tend to do that. Thanks for a lovely start to the day today, as always.
Whilst I wasn’t in any kind of insinuation close to yours, I do remember the ‘soap’! Mondays was always laundry day in our house growing up. As my grandparents also lived with us, whilst my Mum and Dad worked, my nan did the daily chores around the house. My other vivid memory is the heavy ‘bucket’ on the stove boiling the whites! All the windows in the house wide open, even in the winter, to get the steam out!
Raining here again, and when I went to tend to the chickens I slipped and slid all the way. Then an old song hit my brain and I sang out loud: “Mud, mud, glorious Mud. There’s nothing quite like it for cooling the blood. So come with me follow, down to the hollow, and there we will wallow in glorious MUD”! Now I can’t get the stupid song out of my head!!
Hugs, Lyn
Love your mud ditty! 🙂
It must have been a very difficult time for you. I had my son when I was young and also had a difficult time in a different way. I has made us strong, I think.
Celi you broke my heart this morning. When I was younger I had a townhouse that was part of an old convent. The numbers were down and the convent was sold. My townhouse was the laundry converted into a lovely home. One night I had a dream that a young girl was trying to escape through the big heavy wood front door. I watched from the top of the stairs. It was so real. I will never forget it. A young man was on the other side calling to her and there was such a ruckus. The nuns were holding her back and wouldn’t let her go. I woke up so very upset. Ghosts? Yes…I believe in ghosts.
The windows were beautiful and opened out! There were many wonderful cabinets along the walls that held the laundry in my large bedroom upstairs. It was upstairs and down. The exterior walls were made of stone. There was lots of beautiful wood! I could visualize (after the dream) that poor young girl calling to her lover locked up on the second floor. Like a princess in a tower. Let down your golden hair.
I lived in a hearing impaired community and the school’s classrooms of the convent were converted to small apartments for my neighbors. My signing is very weak now. I haven’t used it in many years. But I remember these amazing young people and had them for dinner many a night!
I used to do behavior modification with dual diagnoses children and young adults. Now I farm! 🙂
My step-dad’s sister was put in a convent when she was a very young girl. His brother was slated for the priesthood. He refused and joined the Navy. But poor Auntie….she had no choice but to go and she became a teacher. She left in her 40s. She met a wonderful man and she lives a happy life finally. She spoke of the harshness of life and lack of personal possessions. My Mom bought her a guitar and a lovely handbag which she couldn’t keep. So very sad. I am glad she is happy now. She missed out on such a big part of her life . In the old French catholic families it was an honor and obligation to have one family member serve the church. Because Uncle refused…Auntie was elected. I should say forced. There was no choice. She was the youngest. She couldn’t even keep her name. It was changed to Sister Clair.
I am so sorry you had to endure such hardship. This is who you are today and ultimately why your are who you are today. I think you are so very beautiful. Inside and out! There was something that drew me to you. Now I know. So much to know, admire, and love!
Thank you for sharing a difficult time in your life. I sensed a story. I was right.
We all have a story. Love you!
Always, Mere xxxxxoooooo
I do love a young Celi story. You never cease to amaze me. Good morning!