I.1 - Memories of Sister Caroline Mary

Summary

I have been told I ought to write records of our Community of All Saints Sisters of the Poor, being one of the very oldest Sisters left on Earth. I do not know how to begin, but think it best, at first, to record all I personally have known and been and done as belonging to the Community for nearly 60 years - that is from 1859 when I was made an Outer Sister, till I could obtain my mother's consent to receive the Habit. I was 18 or 19 years old when my dear father died early in 1857. He knew of my vocation and had spoken of it to our Father Upton Richards, when I was only 15. But when my mother became a widow, she felt she could not give me up altogether. She wished me to lead a life ‘out of the world and devoted to the poor’ in her home. Our Lord had called me, as a child of 12, to give up ‘father and mother etc. and take up the Cross and follow HIM’. This could not have been in any other way, but by becoming a Religious, and entering a Religious Community. The Lent after my father's death, I was allowed to spend at the House of Charity, then in Rose Street, Soho - a very bare, ascetic place; under the care of a devout woman, who was then Matron (before the Clewer Sisters took charge of the House). Mr J. C. Chambers of St. Mary's Crown St. was their Chaplain.

I was able to have Devotional times and to take classes and prepare some of the inmates for Confirmation etc. and I was taken to the services at All Saints, Margaret Street Temporary Chapel - then in Titchfield Street, when the All Saints Clergy and Choir boys had a house, and also the Schools; for All Saints Church, and Clergy House were not then finished building. In the temporary Chapel, I was greatly impressed and helped by the intense, deep devotion of the congregation, and deep reverence of Choir and Clergy and Father Upton Richards' most beautiful, helpful teaching on the Passion.

I once called at 82 Margaret St., the All Saints Home, with the House of Charity Matron, to take some flowers for a Sister, who was to be ‘Clothed’.