St monicas

[cavan]

Hi
Does anyone have any recollections of St Monica's mother & baby home. This was in Kendall Cumbria. My wife was a resident there in the 1960s and has fairly bad memories of it. She would like to hear if anyone else had bad memories of the place. Then she can reconcile herself to the future.

[Geminidawn63]

hi Cavan
I hope this reply reaches you as I see the original question was now 8 years ago. I was born in St Monica's in 1963. It is only recently that my mother has been able to tell me what it was like, after watching the Magdalen Girls. She told me that they had to work really hard. Mine was the only pregnancy with which she suffered high blood pressure! She hated the matron who was a martinet, although the midwife who helped deliver me was apparently lovely. She describes how the girls whose babies were being adopted had six weeks with them before they were taken away. They had to provide a layette in which to dress the aby before leaving it in a room where the adoptive parents would come to take it away. The mother then had about half an hour to leave the home. I just picture my mother as a scared 15 year old girl being left there by her parents and watching them drive away. I went in search of my birth place and found it a quite forbidding Victorian mansion of grey stone. Many girls found themselves there, often through ignorance and no fault of their own. It is something my mother blotted from her memory for years and it has taken her a long time to come to terms with it. Thank goodness things have changed. I can understand how being sent there would have life-long effects after hearing what my mother endured. Us children who were born there do not blame the unhappy girls who found themselves in the 'care' of these homes. I hope your wife finds peace within herself.

Dawn