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”
Oh gulp – didn’t see that one coming. So many emotions, I am sure it was a tough, hard and emotionally difficult time despite you putting a happy spin on it for us. Although I am sure there were a few moments of sunshine there too (at least, I hope so). Thanks for sharing, sending you a big hug x
Breaks my heart. But you persevered and look at the strong and caring and kind and loving woman you are.
It seems positively Dickensian! The conditions in that rinsing room were as stupid and unnecessary as they were inhumane. The simplest of implements would have saved the hands from such abuse.
My aunt used to have a small home laundry in her basement when I was a child. It always smelled of Clorox bleach. There was a large mangle like you describe and I was allowed to do the handkerchiefs on it (with my cousin’s supervision). The thing was at least as long as a bed sheet because that is what they used to iron on it. Acres of sheets blowing and drying in the sun on miles of clotheslines. Haven’t thought about that in years. What a hard time for you, Celi. What prompted you to tell it now? You have shown us another window into your life. My mother used to save slivers of soap and put them in a little sieve-like thingie and swish it around in the dishpan to make bubbles for dishes, Poor Ton….. What an expression!
Soap. Handmade soap was the prompt. My Grandma had one of the sieve like thingies, wish i had one!.. c
I’d love to have a private conversation about some things we have in common, but I can’t find an email for you!
celima.g.7@gmail.com .. anytime… c
Thanks 🙂
Sending you LOVE and Hugs today your story could have been mine but after telling the father I told no one 🙂
I love that you are making soap and enjoying some of the nicer memories that are coming back and keeping you whole.
XO
Your life sounds likes a novel. Thank you sharing your colourful past with us. I would like to know where in NZ the convent was? I love the idea of saving up every last morsel. Waste not.
Auckland.. c
I went to an all girls school in Auckland with a convent. Was yours on a lake?
No, no lake. Not a school, just the convent. But your school sounds lovely on a lake like that.
I love you Dear Friend! You are the best of all worlds!
Linda
http://coloradofarmlife.wordpress.com
Each time you share something of your life with us, the feeling resonates with so much of our own memories and experiences. There is much imagery and pleasantness in this post… I felt I was there. And, if I had been, maybe neither one of us would have been so sad. I love you Celi.
You would have had us all tip toeing through the pines looking for rabbits and holes in the fences.. so you would have.. c
Your story broke my heart Celi… I knew about that place, and always thought the laundry was an abomination. the girl I knew had to wake everyone up at five, and since they didn’t give her an alarum clock she kept waking all night to make sure she didn’t oversleep..
Nuns and their habits indeed….XXX
I have always been an early riser, Though our nuns did not glide on skates in the middle of the night, there were some wonderful women in those habits, they taught us that women could be independent and were fierce about education. Some were very old school. Mostly I wished the nurses at the hospital had used their sluice room more often, c
I smiled with a small tear flowing down my cheek! Knew most of the beautifully told story from previous posts . . . knew more. I did my obstetrics training at Crown St Women’s in Sydney. Most of the ‘bad’ girls ended up there. We had to ‘sign off’ on 22 individual births for the duration and be present at 200+. I ended up birthing about 200 myself [did not sleep really for the month 🙂 !] . . . most of them ‘bad’ girls who were the ‘good’ girls who had been caught!! We had to put a cushion over their faces at the moment of the birth and could not tell them the sex of their babe. I had been brought up to do the ‘correct’ thing ~ oh no, I could not . . . the girls did want to know – I did tell them and they were much more in peace: I sat with them for hours of my own ‘free’ time . . . phoned them and encouraged them later . . . I was actually still a virgin myself , but I so understood how they muct have felt . . . that for a crazy moment of carelessness it could have been me . . . you remember the birth of your first son, I remember a glorious time of doing the wrong thing which was so right!!!
Ah, poor girls, we were told and in fact our sisters came and took the babies and us back to the convent, where they had a nursery, it was not so cruel, much of it was, some even intentionally, but mostly they were kind.. c
Celi ~ I am talking of a generation a decade before you . . . and the almost purposeful ‘uppityness’ of mostly unmarried and lemon-sour head sisfters!! I had just become engaged ~ my beloved would sneak in at night and I would sneak him the one floor downstairs to see the babies not yet taken away!! 🙂 🙂 🙂 We got caught by the delightful night sister more than once ~ she would just look, hand both of us the proper sterilized garments, pass over half-a-dozen warm baby bottles and say ‘Since you are here, feed ’em or I’ll tell’!!!!!! It was a giggly time . . . courting over babbies who always were as good as gold 🙂 !!!!!
that is just the sweetest story, what a lovely image.. ni ni eha mama.. c
ni-ni Milady 🙂 !
Celi, I’ve just re=read your story aloud to my husband…As I read it I realised again, what a brilliant writer you are. a magnificent piece of writing, as well as an amazing story…XXX
Congratulations… you turned a terrible experience in to an important story that needed to be told…
I will write this one as a book one day, in fact i have begun it many times. The months i lived there are etched into my memory quite visually for some reason. Thank you for the encouragement, Valerie. c
Scent awakens so many memories. Your words put a beautiful image in my mind although it was a difficult time for you. Thank you for sharing such an intimate part of your past.
May I email you occasionally, too, Celi? I have many soap making resources you might be interested in.
of course emily, do you use lard? I have been experimenting with cleaning the lard to whiten it and i wonder if there is a simpler way. Plus i really need to learn about milk soap. i will be milking again in two months.. look forward to your email.. c
thank you