Authors: Noël Browne
These deeply religious men and women, using the word ‘religious’ in its loosest sense, had represented a remarkable phenomenon during the nineteenth century in Ireland, giving up
their lives to promote a most powerful renaissance of Catholicism while at the same time sending hundreds of their numbers throughout the continents of Africa, Asia, the Americas and elsewhere as
missionaries for the Catholic faith. They recognised the simple truth: ‘give us the child, and we will answer for the man’. Those who control education control minds, and thus control
society.
There was no Gregorian chant in Ballinrobe. The general ethos was a powerful sense of angry nationalism and the demand that in all of us there must be inculcated a self-sacrificing patriotism.
Singing classes were occupied with emotive patriotic songs mixed with the sweet laments for Ireland’s wrongs. A militant republicanism replaced the bland Free State ambience of Athlone. We
knew and admired men ‘on the run’; unconsciously we braced ourselves for future sacrifice and struggle, probably even prison or death, ‘for Ireland’s freedom’. We
played exclusively Gaelic games. I never possessed a hurling stick, since my mother could not afford to buy one, so I played Gaelic football.
This driving obsessive hatred for and of the English was systematically inculcated into our consciousness and rationalised for us into an embittered set of convictions. Hatred for Protestants,
because their faith was of English origin, became an unpleasant feature of our young lives. A little jingle summed it all up for us — ‘Proddy, Woddy, ring the bell, when you die, you go
to hell’. The hatred derived not solely from the occupation of our country but, according to the teaching of the Christian Brothers, from the destruction by the English of our Catholic
faith.
Our history taught us to mourn, with intent to revenge, the savage torture by pitchcap and the rack of our patriot martyrs. Cromwell was simply a heartfelt curse word. As if to reinforce our
introverted exclusive Irish nationalism, we had the ‘advantage’ of learning to speak the true Irish of the Gael.
While nearly all of us in the school were of poor English-speaking family background, already class distinctions were evolving. The children of successful business men or gombeens left early on
to enter residential secondary schools. Some found their way into the diocesan colleges, the forcing ground for the Catholic priesthood. These church links between the Irish middle class and the
priesthood help to explain the deeply conservative nature of the Irish Catholic church and of the new Irish state.
The children from the Gaeltacht areas were even more impoverished than ourselves, dressed in ragged misfitting clothes. They walked long distances bare-footed to school, with their hair uncombed
and laden with lice, unwashed and dirty. Their teeth were rotten, their skin pockmarked with flea bites. In spite of the fact that here was the true repository of the cherished native language,
they were not favoured by our militant nationalist Christian Brothers but treated with contempt as members of a lower order as the British had once treated all of us native Irish. I do not recall
that they were shown any patience, concern, or understanding because of their illiteracy in English and their understandable difficulties in keeping up with the rest of us. At least one of them
appeared to be chosen with little reason for the cruelly unbridled beatings which constituted Christian Brother discipline.
The brother who taught me first was a tall white-faced man, with thin bony shoulder blades protruding beneath his black cassock. He coughed violently and convulsively, and held to his mouth a
white handkerchief which came away with fresh red bloodstains, all signs of tuberculosis. In the front row, I was unpleasantly close to the execution ceremony and truly dreaded the shock of it,
though I myself was never a victim. The brother would grip my desk tightly with his hand until his fingers were blanched white in order to give himself support and added power. Then he carefully
took hold of the visibly trembling fingertips of the defenceless victim and opened the dirty hand firmly. He took careful aim, and slashed out without restraint or pity. Each time, increasingly
excited, beads of sweat gathering on his pale forehead, he raised the cane higher over his shoulder like an old-time thrashing flail; down it came again and again, increasing in speed and ferocity
until it seemed to us that the tip of the cane appeared to whistle around in a full circle.
We could not understand how any of us could have fomented such an irrational anger or deserve such punishment. Yet I never saw any one of the beaten boys make any response, certainly no visible
protest. The beaten mutilated hands were simply pushed up underneath the armpits, the sole concession to this savage and insensitive public assault on their bodies and on their self-esteem. Surely
there was some private pain which the brother thereby tried to exorcise within himself. My greatest sympathy lay with the Irish speakers who could not have understood why they were so often chosen
for punishment. For them there was an added isolation, the rest of us being unable to sympathise because of our inability to speak with them.
Even more scandalous was the Christian Brothers’ behaviour to a young boy named Paddy Power, who lived with his mother, a widow since the first world war. They were a respected, quiet
family, the eldest boy building up his own hairdressing business in the town. Perhaps because the father had fought and died for the British, the young son was chosen as a safe whipping boy,
particularly by one of the senior brothers, a fearsome-looking redfaced bull of a man with a closecut convict haircut, who would take Power out to the garden shed at what appeared to be regular
intervals. We could hear the screams of the helpless captive child, yells and cries for pity and release from his vicious tormentor.
One winter’s day in the school yard, snowball fights began among the boys. This harmless fun suddenly changed with the appearance of one of the brothers, who normally made full use of the
cane. An onlooker would have seen a gradual but concerted disintegration of the multiplicity of fights around the school yard. With a strange spontaneity, like a flight of starlings as they turn
together, all the boys flew around the brother, cornering him against a school wall. The snowball fight took on a vicious intensity and seriousness as they sought to pound him with their snowball
weapons, all of them against one. It was then that I acted independently of the mass of those around me. I went in beside the brother to help him fight back.
This was a completely spontaneous action on my part, as I had no need to fear him myself, or to look for his favour. Instinctively I disliked the idea of the hopeless odds against him, and at
the same time wondered and worried about the uncontrolled futile ferocity of the children. Clearly they hated the brother, whom they now believed they had cornered and helpless. Of course they were
wrong. He was unhurt and would still bully them individually.
A brother in one of the higher classes was even more intimidating. He was a powerfully built blond man, feared by all of us, who not only used the cane frequently and freely, but was a
practising pederast as well. No young boy in his class was safe from his attentions. It was his practice to sit down at the desk and purport to be anxious to help whatever child he chose to
sexually assault. What could the terrified child do, so young that he hardly knew what was happening to him? What mother or father in the Ballinrobe of those times would listen, or understand, or
dare to take action, even if the child were to report the incident to them? Happily for myself, I left Ballinrobe before being admitted to that class.
I had come across this sort of thing before. Once, in the school in Athlone, Brother John had asked me to guide a visiting member of the order who was inspecting classes in the school. I
collected him from downstairs, where he had been talking to a class, and brought him upstairs to Brother John. The two of us had just arrived on the landing outside the classroom when he indicated
that we should pause. The next thing I knew, the brother had convulsively thrown his arms around me and was kissing me passionately on the mouth. I was astonished and overwhelmed by a mixture of
shame and shock that this assault should have been inflicted on me by a cleric. My mother had inculcated in all of us a sense of devout reverence for the ‘cloth’. We were taught to tip
our forelock when we passed a priest in the street. It was my first experience of this kind with man or woman, since my mother never kissed or fondled me. The brother then moved away from me and
with complete self-assurance and aplomb, opened the door to Brother John’s class, marched in with all the syrupy unction of his kind and proceeded to behave as if nothing had happened between
us. My innocence was such that I simply accepted his behaviour as another adult aberration, surprising, peculiar and unpleasant.
I stayed a time with my uncle Jack in Hollypark, near Craughwell, when I was about ten years of age. One day, my aunt Isabelle sent me with my young cousin to visit a curate friend of hers who
lived some miles away from my uncle’s home. Shortly after our arrival at the curate’s residence I felt that there was something strange about him. Though I knew little of these things
except what I had unexpectedly learned from the Marist Brother in Athlone, it was not long before I gathered that this middle-aged priest also had an affection for young boys. There was no bus
until the following morning. Effectively, we were at the mercy of this middle-aged curate. I was deeply disturbed, and very upset at the prospect of having to stay the night. It was a small house
with only two bedrooms, the curate sleeping in one and his housekeeper in the other.
Bedtime arrived. While my cousin without demur agreed to stay the night with the curate and sleep in his bed, I blankly refused to join them. The night ended for me with a comic opera solution:
I agreed that I would sleep in the bed of the priest’s house-keeper. I have distinct memories of some arrangement of a blanket partition between myself and the housekeeper. She need not have
been worried, even if I had known of the possibilities and wished to avail myself of them. I fell asleep at once, totally exhausted by the struggle to keep away from the curate’s bed.
Our home life in Ballinrobe was a mixture of happiness such as is found where the mother is especially gentle and loving, and of deadly fear. It had become apparent that our mother was very
seriously ill. As the days went by, though she never complained to us, her discomfort and distress forced unavoidable cries from the intensity of her pain. She lay on the small sofa in the corner
of our kitchen and moaned quietly between spasms. She never looked for medical care since she knew she could not afford it, or else, I suspect, she was unable to bring herself to take the charity
of Poor Law medical services, even if she in fact knew of their existence. My mother may well have been the original source of the family infection; she had always suffered from an incessant,
productive cough, and was a delicate woman.
She now became the child, to be nursed, protected and cared for. It was our delight to be permitted to look after her. We would ‘gladly put our hands under her feet’. There were five
of us at home all under twelve years of age. We did all the work in the house, washing dishes and making the fire. (I was severely burnt on the face with the explosion of the paraffin oil which I
had unwisely used to light it — there was no call to the doctor on that occasion either). I carried in the turf, went down to the River Robe with a small home-made four-wheeled contraption
for the water, and dug the garden to plant potatoes as I had seen my father do in Athlone. We kept the house bright, clean and shiny.
My eldest brother, crippled Jody, got a job as a messenger boy in a local grocery shop. It was a truly shaming sight to watch this pitifully small hunchbacked figure, with his heavily laden
messenger-boy’s bicycle, pushing through the hilly streets of Ballinrobe delivering groceries to the big houses. He was paid a pittance each week-end, together with a white paper bag full of
the torn bacon slices which had fallen beneath the bacon-slicing machine.
Neither in Athlone nor in Ballinrobe were we at any time visited by any public official or person of substance other than the rent collector. No member of a religious order, nun, priest, or
brother, came near the house to see if we needed help. Life in Ireland then was completely unconcerned with and uncaring for the poor. It was in Ballinrobe that a very hurtful remark was made to me
by one of the children with whom I was playing. My young friend had simply repeated what he had heard at home from his parents. Angry about something I had said or done to him, he jeered,
‘you had to come to Ballinrobe to be fed’. When I told my mother, she cried.
My mother had found that she was unwelcome in Ballinrobe. She must also have concluded that she was suffering from an illness from which she would shortly die. As orphans and paupers we could be
sent to a workhouse or an industrial school. As a boy, I would be sent to either Artane in Dublin or Letterfrack in Co. Galway, each of which had a justifiably grim reputation. In desperation, she
decided to take us to our eldest sister, Eileen, who had emigrated to London in 1926, aged sixteen. Unable to pay for medical treatment or care, she would not leave us to go to a sanatorium.
Because she had no money with which she could pay our fares to London, she must first sell all that she had.
In the way of children, I did not know of the impending tragedy. School was tolerable, the pleasures of boys in rural Ireland were enjoyable: football, fishing, street games, and the competitive
Sunday sports in nearby villages. One day I was shocked to see the blank walls of the town covered with the local auctioneer’s small yellow posters, telling those who cared to read them that
everything the Brownes had in their small terraced house was up for sale by auction. My mother was forced to sell everything, the few personal possessions which she had chosen and bought with my
father for use in their hoped-for years of married life together.