Free No One Wants You by Celine Roberts Page A

we could. If we were caught eating buns, both the delivery man and ourselves would have been in severe trouble. He never asked for, or expected, anything in return, or payment of any kind. I will always remember him as a special person who did not discriminate against us orphans, at a time when most people saw us as human detritus.
    Working in the kitchens also included working in the nursery where milk was the staple diet. Every second day a man with a horse and cart delivered the milk to the orphanage, in huge metal milk churns. They were stored in the pantry. There were no refrigerators in those days, so the milk was stored in the coolest part of the pantry. It used to turn sour very quickly, particularly during the warm summer months. It also contributed to the persistent smell of sour milk throughout the entire orphanage buildings. Of course we never noticed the smell, but visitors often commented on it.
    Looking back, the bad condition of the milk was probably why there were so many cases of enteritis suffered by the younger babies and children in the nursery area. The smell of diarrhoea was often overpowering, but was drowned out by the incessant crying of the suffering children, possibly infected by contaminated milk.
    Another life-skill that I inherited from my time in the orphanage was lace making. The older orphans had to learn lace making. If you were found to be proficient at it, you were encouraged to do it all the time. The nuns sold it as decorative Limerick lace on the lucrative American market. I became quite proficient at it. However, once I left the orphanage, I never did it again. But I did collect decorative pieces of lace, done by others, as a hobby and have quite a few pieces of antique lace in my collection to this day. I suppose it serves to remind me of days spent safely absorbed in lace making.
    When I had been at the orphanage for about four months, the sister-in-charge called me in to her office one Saturday morning. She told me to expect a visit from a nun from a different convent. She said that a Sister Bernadette would arrive the following day.
    The mystery nun arrived as promised, on Sunday afternoon. I was waiting in the assembly area. She introduced herself to me as Sister Bernadette. She told me that I was her ‘case’ and that she was going to be a special friend to me. If there was anything that was bothering me, I was to contact her. If there was anything that I felt that she should know about, I was to contact her even faster. She promised that she would look after me. Even after I left the orphanage, I was to regard her as my confidante or special friend. She would leave her address with the sister-in-charge of the orphanage. It was a pleasant sunny day, so she suggested that we should take a walk around the convent grounds.
    She started asking me some questions, like how I was settling in at the orphanage. As we walked through the rose garden, she sneezed and said that she might be getting a cold. The comment meant nothing to me but she used it to introduce the topic of changes to my body. She described to me how I would begin to get a cold every month from now on. She said that all girls of my age get a cold every month.
    I told her I had often had a cold before.
    ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘You have never had a cold like this.’
    She told me that I would bleed every month. She did not tell me which part of me would bleed. I assumed that I would bleed from the nose if I were going to have a lot of colds. As I had had colds and nose bleeds for as long as I could remember, I was not in the least bit concerned. When I talked this interview over with some of my friends at the orphanage during the following week, I was to learn that Sister Bernadette had being trying to tell me that I would soon start getting my period. In the orphanage when girls had their periods, they had to queue up to get sanitary towels. The first time I saw them I thought they were getting white socks. I was