Free No One Wants You by Celine Roberts

an apartment that half the population of London could see into.
    Cookery was another skill that I was to acquire as part of my orphanage training. Again, in reality, this meant acting as a servant, a skivvy, peeling carrots and potatoes in the kitchens attached to the orphanage. I was being trained for a career as a housemaid. In comparison to sewing, cookery at the orphanage was hard work. It required long hours and physical fitness. Breakfast for the following day had to be prepared on the previous evening, before going to bed. Two huge pots of oatmeal porridge had to be brought to the boil and then simmered for about 45 minutes. The pots were so large and contained such a large volume of water, they took hours to boil. The stove was heated by solid fuel, mostly turf. It was part of my duties to keep this cooker alive and burning.
    One perk of working in the kitchens was that I always had something to eat. While living with my foster-parents I was always starving. Even though the nuns kept a strict control on the stock of food and waste was not tolerated in the kitchens, there were always bits and pieces to eat. There were never any leftovers but some children might not eat their allotted food on any particular day, for a variety of reasons. The one reason that never applied was that they were given too much to eat. The food was always stews and the cheapest type of potatoes. We used to get a pudding on Sunday that was slimy and a dirty-pink colour. It always made me think of my past life and I never ate it. I used it give it to one of my friends on the sly. At least working in the kitchens, I could always steal a choice piece of meat or hide a piece of prepared food in a safe place. I would eat this at a later time, to replace a less appetising meal. Everyone in the orphanage stole food at one time or another. They had to or they would have starved.
    This was not gourmet cooking for a small number of people. This was catering on a large scale. Around 220 mouths had to be fed, three times a day. The refectory tables had to be set with plates, cups and cutlery each time. All the plates, drinking cups and mugs were made from metal. This was to prevent breakages. All the eating and cooking utensils had to be washed after use.
    The orphans, overseen by a nun, did all this manually. The nun’s role was entirely supervisory. She did not do any of the cooking or washing up. Neither did the nuns ever eat with us in our refectory. They had their own dining room. We were never invited or allowed to visit this area of the nuns’ community. It was in a separate building, on the opposite side of the compound.
    But after I had been there a few months I did get an inkling of how the system worked. The supplier, in the same van, often delivered the food for both eating areas. Bread deliveries were always eagerly awaited. The orphans had to help carry in all the loaves of bread and the other girls told me how to hide food under our long knickers. We only got two deliveries per week and our bread was what the bread man called ‘returns’. This was bread that was returned from shops that had bought it from the bakery. If it was unsold or still in the shop when the next delivery of fresh bread arrived, the bakery took it back. It was always hard and mostly covered with blue mould. When it arrived at the orphanage kitchen, we had to cut off the mould before serving it at mealtime.
    The nuns’ dining section got a fresh bread delivery every day which included a delivery of fresh pastries and confectionery. We called them buns.
    Our delivery days were Tuesday and Friday and were eagerly awaited by whichever two orphans were on kitchen duty. The delivery man would nearly always manage to give the two girls a bun each for themselves to eat. What a treat that was. Sometimes he had whipped cream on pastry, sometimes jam and cream doughnuts, and sometimes buns with icing on them for us. They tasted so sweet.
    We had to swallow them down as fast as