The Tin Ticket_ The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women - Deborah J. Swiss [108]
Yard Two
Other than Agnes’s arm draped over her shoulder, the luxury of comfort remained out of Janet’s reach. After a last moment with Agnes and Ludlow at the nursery, the weeping mother was returned to Yard Two’s stone washtubs, where she’d complete her six-month punishment for giving birth to a baby now deceased. As she scrubbed in the half shadows of Yard Two, a deadened Janet felt neither the stone scraping her skinny elbows nor the muddy groundwater seeping over her toes.
Slowly, as summer faded into fall, Janet began to feel again. Numbness wore away and exposed a rage on the edge of eruption. The grieving mother seethed with fury toward a system that forced early weaning and placed baby William in the overcrowded infant ward, where he received insufficient nourishment and little attention. For a time, she dutifully carried out twelve-hour work assignments, collapsing in her low-slung hammock for fitful sleep. Every night at mandatory chapel, the mourning mother faced Holy Willie, the reverend who had successfully lobbied for the punishment she now endured for unwed pregnancy. Janet’s emotions certainly ran full bore as she damned Heaven and the Fates for their cruelty. Above all, she must have detested the Reverend Bedford from the depths of her soul. On his recommendation, Superintendent Hutchinson condemned and punished all pregnant convicts, regardless of the circumstances.12
On March 17, five weeks after she’d buried her son, Janet lashed out against the convict system. Her refusal to leave her hammock and get to work brought six days back in solitary confinement.
The bloody bastards, what more can they take away?
Godfrey Charles Mundy, a colonel in the British army, toured the Female Factory and recorded his observations about solitary confinement in the book Our Antipodes. At first, he applauded “bread-and-water discussed in silence and solitude—things that no woman loveth,” deeming it “merciful” and “discreet” punishment.13 But the colonel would later eat his own words when he asked the turnkey to unlock a series of massive doors in the solitary ward. After inspecting two cells where women sat glumly at work, they pried open a third cell door. Mundy described what he saw:
It looked like the den of a wolf. . . . From the extreme end of the floor I found a pair of bright, flashing eyes fixed on mine. . . . It was a small, slight, and quite young girl—very beautiful in feature and complexion—but it was the fierce beauty of a wild cat! . . . I fear that the pang of pity that shot across my heart when that pretty prisoner was shut again from the light of day, might have found no place there had she been as ugly as the sins that had brought her into trouble. I had no more stomach for solitary cells this day.14
Janet’s solitary chamber held a mildewed mattress on the floor, a stool, and a bucket for waste. But no punishment could be worse than the loss of her child. The despondent mother quietly curled up against the cold stone, drawing herself into the fetal position.
One week after her release from solitary, up to her elbows in dirty washtub water, a despairing Janet heard the whisper of a familiar voice. A cheeky Agnes had simply walked out of the Liverpool Street nursery and represented herself as a free woman when stopped by a suspicious constable. For this, a magistrate escorted her back to Cascades to begin four months once again in Yard Two. Since the passing of William, whom she’d come to adore like a nephew, she’d seen in rapid succession six more children carried from Liverpool Street