While writing about the notorious laundries for ‘fallen women’, novelist Esther Freud was chilled to discover how close her own mother came to ending up in one
My mother’s relationship with her parents was uneasy. Born into a strict Irish Catholic family, she’d been evacuated as a baby, sent to a convent boarding school at seven, and when, at 18, she found herself pregnant, she was so fearful of their condemnation that she kept the news a secret. It was some years later that a relative saw her in London at a bus stop with two small girls and wrote to her parents: I didn’t know your daughter was married!
But my mother wasn’t married. At 17, soon after her family had moved back to Ireland after a lifetime running pubs in London, she’d fallen in love with my father, the painter Lucian Freud, and the bohemian world that he frequented. It was the early 60s, and, as innocent as a Catholic girl was raised to be, it wasn’t long before she was pregnant. At first she was delighted – there’d be someone of her own to love – but her euphoria was soon tinged with worry. She’d heard rumours of what could happen to a girl like her, made to work in laundries, locked away in homes (she’d spent the last year of her education at a convent outside Cork), and she was seized with fear that this could be her fate. She risked one last trip to Ireland, disguising her five-month bump, and didn’t go again.
The girls were warned never to speak of their misfortune, to keep the shame of it to themselves
It was God’s punishment, they were told, and none of this would have come about if they’d kept their legs together
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