Children Of The Poor Clares (19 page)

‘There were some lovely nuns, like Mother Scholastica and Mother Paschal, God rest her. Mother John was kind—she was an English SRN. We hated the way Mother Carmel said “You orphans.” Mother Dymphna and Mother John always said “The children”, or “Our children.”

‘After the tech I worked in the convent kitchen. That was lovely, quite different. I worked at the presbytery for three months after that. There was no pay until I asked for something, but I did the shopping and could get all the food I wanted to eat. Then I went to Dublin and worked for a family who were very nice. I was a bit lazy, I always had to be told what to do and when to do it because I’d just sit there reading. It was my happiest year. I used to go to Irish dancing places and every Sunday I went to the Metropole for the tea-dances.’

Sally made friends with a girl who had been brought up in the Industrial School at Booterstown, Dublin. ‘She took me out there one day. I couldn’t believe it. It was an entirely different style of life there. It was very happy. She just rolled in with me and made herself a cup of tea, quite at home.’

Then the family she was with went bankrupt. She returned to the convent and Mother John arranged for her to start training as a nurse—’”You’re not going out to scrub floors, girl, with those brains!” she said’. She started in a hospital in Kent where there was a Catholic matron. When Sally arrived at the hospital she found that one of the town girls who had been in the same class at the national school was also training there. ‘I was so appalled I more or less ran. I didn’t want it to be known that I was from the orphanage. I wanted a clean slate. I found another hospital and put down a false home address, but the nursing supervisor somehow guessed and had me in for a talk. She said that in life I would be judged on my own worth, that there was no shame whatsoever in having been brought up in an orphanage, and that her own cousin who had been reared in Dr. Barnardo’s Homes was a fine fellow.

‘I’ve been very fortunate, really. I have good friends and my mother-in-law is like a mother to me. My husband has never let me make excuses for myself because of my childhood. “You are as you are,” he says. My friend Kay—she’s the only one I kept up with from St. Joseph’s—competes with her child for her husband’s attention, but he is very good to her. Her nerves are bad. I asked her if she would talk to you but she said she could not bear to bring it all back again.

‘We went back to Cavan once to see Dymphna. It was in the early ‘60s. They had a TV and I thought things looked better, that they weren’t being hit. Mother Bernadette had gone. I can still see the rosary beads and cane, hanging side by side from her waist as she’d give you a bang on the head with the bell in the morning. But I had Dymphna. I always had Dymphna.’ And the big smile lit up Sally’s face.

Joan, b. 1946.

We had often heard about Joan before we met. The other girls’ stories had portrayed her as tough, the friend of the bully, Sheila Delaney, a girl the nuns were almost afraid of because she did not seem to care what they did to her. We heard that she had a baby by a ‘black man’. We were not sure what our reception would be and half-anticipated some kind of squalid situation.

We found her in a block of council flats in London. Her gleamingly-clean windows were conspicuous by their whiter-than-white net curtains; the doorstep was scrubbed and the row of empty milk bottles shone like polished crystal. She had curly shining hair, a calm manner, cockney accent and a fresh
Woman’s
Own
look about her. Her common-law husband was indeed ‘black’ and an intelligent, supportive man. They had a five-year-old son, a beautifully behaved, bright child. Joan’s only concern in talking to us was that her mother, whom she had recently found, should not be identified. When she could not remember her own age—her husband reminded her that she was twenty-nine.

She said she had been put in the orphanage at the age of two and had few memories of the early years except ‘Mother Bernadette was a lovely nun, but Mother Andrew, she was real cruel. She didn’t care where she hit you. But I got used to being hit. While they were doing it, I’d say to myself “It’s all right, Joan. Tomorrow it’ll be all over”. I think I got more beatings than the rest. Phil O’Brien was like me. She couldn’t care less. The nuns hated her and sent her to the reformatory. She had a baby later.’

We had been told a story about Joan which we had doubted: after she left St. Joseph’s, she and Sheila Delaney had gone to the convent where Mother Anne and Mother Catherine then were living, and had shouted abuse at them. In fact Joan remembered the incident quite clearly. ‘We went to see Mother Clare—a nun who looked after us once but had no roughness in her—and we saw the two of them. We giggled and laughed at them and I shouted out “They used to wallop us. We don’t care now. They can’t hit us now, can they Sheila?”

‘I didn’t hate the nuns. I just didn’t care. But now I often think that without them where would we have been?’ We told Joan that the state funded their upkeep. ‘No! Really? We never knew they got money for us.

‘There were some lovely nuns, but there were some wicked ones as well. Mother Benedict—she was a teacher—hated me. I don’t know why. “How many times did you look at yourself in the mirror?” she said to me. “Once or twice to put my hair straight,” I said, and she slapped me across the face. She put two lumps of twine in my hair when the other girls would have a ribbon. Because of her I did look at myself and I said “Not bad, you’re not so bad!” The nun that took us for cookery was cross too. She couldn’t see too well, and we’d take handfuls of the sugar out of the bowl and she’d sing out “Stand up the girl who knows the girl who took the sugar.” We’d take the bacon rind out of the bucket at cookery classes. My child doesn’t eat out of the garbage bin does he?’

Joan remembered the town girls at the national school being snobby. ‘They’d say things like “My mammy says you’re a bastard” but I gave it back to them.’ She said she had never learned to read or write. ‘I wouldn’t concentrate at school and when I was twelve they sent me out to work at a doctor’s house in Dundalk. There were nine children but the family were nice. I got £1 a month. I had to work hard—there wasn’t such a thing as a half-day. But after I’d been there for a couple of months the nuns sent for me. It wasn’t because I had done anything wrong. It was probably because the medical inspector was coming to the school and she would want to know where I was. She used to see the marks on me and she’d ask “Who did that” and I’d tell her and she’d say “Oh, dear, we’ll have to do something about that.” The other girls were so frightened they wouldn’t say anything. I’d tell anyone. I sometimes think it’s funny I’m so normal when I think of all that bashing around the head I got when I was small.

‘I had so many different jobs and I was always so unhappy and lonely that I used to cry. I was still only a child I suppose, and I missed the girls. Work, work, work—that’s all it ever was. But I liked the boys. I liked their company for the excitement, for the kissing and cuddling. There was nothing else till I was twenty-one.’

At one point, the nuns sent Joan to train as a children’s nurse. ‘I love children and I know I was good at the job. I remember the nuns sending me to confession and a priest came and said to me, “What do the boys do to you? Do they pull your knickers down?” Some of those priests were horrible. Then he said “Do you know what I have under my habit?” I replied, in all innocence, “Yes father, your petticoats.” I was ignorant about sex. We all were and that’s why we got into such trouble. If I’d had a baby and it had to be adopted I would have gone out of my mind. Lots of the girls had several babies before they married.’

Joan did not finish her training. She went to work in a factory in England, met Andreas and, when we met, they had been together for the past nine years. She regretted that she never became a children’s nurse: ‘I never seemed to get the right encouragement. I’d love a big family. I don’t believe in smacking children because it doesn’t do a bit of good. I know that from what was done to myself. When I got beaten I almost looked forward to it. And I knew it would be over by tomorrow.’

Before she left Ireland, Joan heard that Elizabeth Bright had found her mother. Joan contacted the same official in the Department of Education and was also successful. ‘My mother’s married now. Her husband was very good about it when she told him. I criticised her a lot at first for what she had done to me, but she explained how she had wanted to tell him and had lain sleepless at night thinking and worrying about me, but she put off telling him from week to week and then months and years. We’re good friends now, though, very close. She lives in Ireland and I wouldn’t want anything in the world to hurt her.’

We asked whether she practiced her religion. ‘Are you joking? The little boy isn’t christened! I don’t believe in it, so why go? I say to Andreas, “If I hit the bucket and you don’t look after Andy I’ll haunt you!” Joan was now working as the cleaner in a children’s nursery, doing without any effort—and one may be sure very competently—her thirty-five hour week in twenty hours. She had taught herself to read from her son’s nursery school books.

Everything seemed fine: her mother found; a good man; a lovely child—and another, to her delight, on the way; a nice flat and a satisfactory job. She did not seem to have any friends: ‘I keep myself to myself,’ she said. One got the feeling that no matter what went wrong she would survive it, just as she had in the orphanage, by saying to herself, ‘It’ll all be over tomorrow.’

Ann-Marie, b. 1947

Other girls had told us ‘Ann-Marie Hanley had no tears. She couldn’t cry.’ She thinks she must have been at least four years old when she was taken into the orphanage by her mother. ‘The first thing I saw, and I can see it now, was all the children huddling in the yard where the heat comes out of the laundry in the pipe. I let go my mother’s hand and I ran over to see what they were doing. When I turned around to look for her she was gone. The next thing I remember is sitting in the refectory and knowing it was these nuns who were going to be looking after me, and the most terrible feeling came over me.

‘I used to cry myself to sleep every night, and I was slapped for it, so I had to stop—you do, after you get a hiding. The others had been there since they were babies. It was worse for me because I remembered my mother. She’d always send me a birthday present. She never forgot. And I always had something at Christmas. Until I was nine. Then she came and stayed in the town for a week. She had lovely auburn hair. I went for a walk with her and I was holding her hand. One of the town girls shot over to me and she said ‘Is that your Mammy’?” because I used to tell them at school that my Mammy was coming to take me away. She told me she was going away but she didn’t say where. I never believed I wouldn’t see her again but I never did and she didn’t write. I have this feeling that she did care for me and that maybe she was driven away from me. Or maybe she was getting married. I still remember the last card she sent me. It had a little train on it, and you could put your finger inside and move the train around. A priest from Cavan told me that some of the mothers were ordered not to come again by the nuns, because they were bad women and they did not want them influencing the children.

‘My worst years were after that, when I was around nine or ten. As I got older I wanted to know where my mother was living. Mother Scholastica must have known but she was gone so old that she couldn’t remember. I tried to find out from the other nuns but I couldn’t. Once you were there they forgot about your parents. You were in their care.

‘We used to go and look at where our relatives’ addresses were locked away in a room. I can still see the writing and the address. I’d just enjoy looking at it, and at my mother’s name. When I got married and our photograph was in the
Evening
Press
I had this feeling that she was looking at it, though when she saw the address she probably said to herself “No, she doesn’t belong to me” because a friend had let me use her address.

‘Wait till I tell you an awful sad thing that happened when I was twelve. They were always mixing me up with another girl whose mother worked in the town and used to come and visit her. Well, this day one of the nuns said that Ann-Marie Hanley was to come, that her mother in to see her. When they called me I was in the chapel—I used to go in there a lot to pray that she’d come back—and I ran down the yard, and when I got there… they’d made a mistake. I’ll never forget it. Never forget it.

‘When I was about eight they gave me a pair of boys’ boots, with tabs at the back. I hated them so and cried because I didn’t want to wear them. Mother Andrew tore a piece off a box they used to keep soap in and beat me across the leg and tore bits from the top of my thigh. She was a wicked woman. But the nuns had their good points too. Mother Anne made us all slips with lace at the bottom and I remember turning up my skirt so the lace would be seen. And she got rid of our long bloomers and got us proper panties.

‘But one night—I would have been about fourteen—one of the girls was burning something in the workroom fire and I was so cold I was standing over the fire and another girl said, “Look, a bird has fallen down the chimney!”, and, like any child, I got the poker at it, and it wasn’t a bird, but a bloody thing. It was a sanitary towel but I didn’t know that then. The girl that put it in the fire went and told the nun I was poking at this thing and they got me out and murdered me. They all took turns at hitting me on the bed, two of them holding me down, one by the head and one by the feet, and I got the strap left, right and centre—yes, without clothes—when they beat you your clothes were pulled off and your pants pulled down. When I got up off the bed I was in desperate pain all over, but mostly in my stomach. I went to the toilet and you can imagine the fright I got when I saw all the blood. It was the first time I got my period, though I didn’t get one again for some time. They beat it out of me.
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