I soon discovered Sister Ignatius never smiled, or perhaps it was just that I’d never had the pleasure of seeing her smile. That stern scowl on her face seemed permanent, as if it had been frozen in time – perhaps because of the sudden shock of seeing her reflection in the mirror for the first time. She was always suspicious of me and had a habit of staring straight into my eyes for the slightest sign of a guilty secret that I might be hiding from her. This only caused me to feel even guiltier, which in turn made me look guilty.
I was never able to understand the wisdom behind the scale of corporal punishment she’d dish out to us daily. Two strokes of the cane for minor indiscretions, such as being out of bounds or back-chatting the nuns. Three strokes if heard (or snitched on) for using foul language or being caught fighting or stealing. Four or five strokes for being caught playing with yourself or another boy. And six of the best for taking the Lord’s name in vain. As for me, I always got six of the best, regardless of whether I deserved four or five or less.
“Pants down! And those underpants, too. Lord in heaven’s name! When was the last time yah changed them dirty things?”
I recall the very first time I’d been sent to her for calling Johnny Johnson a bastard, after he came back to school from being a page boy at his parents’ wedding, and how she’d recoiled in horror when she caught sight of my soiled underwear.
“Yesterday, Sister Ignatius,” I lied.
“Yesterday?” she turned her nose up at me. ‘Sure, don’t yah use toilet paper ta clean yerself with? Yah dirty little divil yah.”
“It’s too hard on me hole, I mean me bum, Sister.”
“Too hard indeed. You should be grateful yah have paper ta wipe your dirty little self with. There are children out in the world who’d be eatin’ that stuff – the paper I mean! Pull them things back up. I can’t be walloping yah and lookin’ at that filth at the same time.”
It worked! Before I’d gone in there to receive my punishment, John Priestley, who was waiting outside the office to see the witch, had let me in on his secret: deliberately skid-mark your undies so she’d make you pull them back up. Admittedly I might have overdone it a little. But it did do the trick and stopped the cane from drawing blood.
“Just the dirty underpants.”
She made me touch my toes before tapping the cane on my bottom, sizing up her target. Then, as she raised it high into the air, it always amazed me that she would whisper a prayer under her breath.
Can you believe it? Lord forgive me! I wanted to ask the question, “If caning boys’ arses wasn’t a bad thing, why are yah asking the Lord for forgiveness?” But I was thrown by the fact I’d counted eight strokes instead of the usual six.
“You gave me eight of the best, Sister,” I said, before asking politely if there was the possibility of her giving me a credit note for those two extra strokes – which I could use on my next visit to her office.
“What?” her face suddenly turned a shade of purple.
“Like one of them IOU notes yah get in the shops, sister.”
“I’ll give yah a credit note!”
“Thanks Sister.”
I couldn’t for the life of me understand what I’d said that was so wrong. But it had obviously upset the Mother Superior. She went berserk and began swinging the cane wildly at me. I could hear it whooshing through the air and past my ears as she flailed it around like a drunken cavalier in a sword fight. Running around her office, ducking and dodging her onslaught, she still managed to catch me a couple of good whacks on my back before I’d opened her office door and made good my escape, with her chasing after me along the corridors like a wild banshee.
It was no wonder I’d been so joyful when, nearly a year after my arrival at St Vincent’s, the nuns announced they were leaving for good.
Too Close for Comfort
“This way Mother Superior. That’s it, bring the little boys in closer to you,” coaxed the local photographer-cum-journalist assigned to write a short editorial on Sister Ignatius’s imminent departure from St Vincent’s. “Closer, closer,” he urged, as he clicked away with his camera. “That’s it, that’s it. Oh, what angels.”
Angels? He wouldn’t be saying that if he’d eyes in the back of his head to see 12-year-old Danny O’Connell dipping his thieving hands into his camera bag and stealing the small camera and packet of Woodbine cigarettes.
“Once a thief, always a thief!” Sister Ignatius would constantly remind us all. Of course, it was an accusation none of us could honestly disagree with. It wasn’t as if we hadn’t attempted to do the right things, according to all the self-righteous religious garbage we were taught by her and her coven, day in, day out. But when you spend a long while praying to the Lord for something good to happen and you receive feck all in return, it’s only human nature to look for an alternative way of getting what you want. And so we would steal it first, and then ask the Lord for his forgiveness afterwards.
Sister Ignatius reluctantly complied with the wishes of the photographer as his camera whirred and clicked at the beautified images of the saintly nun, with her muscular arms clasped around the shoulders of the two crying orphans – the very picture of sadness as they hugged the Mother Superior one last time. Had anyone looked closely, they would have seen panic written all over the children’s faces as she pressed them tightly into her pious bosom. Motherly? She feckin’ certainly wasn’t. Superior? I’d go along with that. Pious? Even Lucifer himself stood a better chance of entering the gates of heaven than that evil woman.
Every time I clapped eyes on her, I got twinges in the cheeks of my backside. A backside she had so often beaten black and blue, seeming to relish every moment. The only other time I’d had contact with her in the 11 months I had been in St Vincent’s was either at Mass, Benediction, or religious studies in the classroom – her emphasis on the three R’s being religion, religion, and more feckin’ religion. It was such a wonderful notion to think God might have given her that face as a penance for beating little children’s arses. Just as it was wonderful to know, after a year of physical torture from her unnaturally large hands, Sister Ignatius was finally leaving us, along with the rest of her unholy coven of nuns.
“Go on Tommy.” Sister Benedict suddenly thrust the large shining brass crucifix into my hand. “Go and make the presentation ta the Mother Superior.” She attempted to nudge me forwards, but I wouldn’t budge.
A skeleton of a nun, with her black habit hanging loosely over her bony body, it wasn’t surprising Sister Benedict was usually mistaken for one of the scarecrows in the school’s three-acre vegetable field, where she would sometimes stand, with her head bowed in silent prayer.
“I don’t want ta give her anything,” I said.
“Mother Superior wants yea ta be the one.”
I bet she feckin’ did. “Well I don’t want ta be the one.”
“Ah, go on now.” Sister Benedict gave me another nudge. “It’s an honour.”
“Not for me it’s not. And I don’t want the honour anyway.”
“Don’t be showin’ yourself up now, look! Everybody’s gawkin’ at yah.”
“They can gawk all they like, I don’t care.”
“Ah, there’s a good fellow.” The auld witch suddenly gripped a handful of my hair on the nape of my neck and twisted it, her momentum pushing me forwards in the direction of the rostrum.
Wanting to faint, I exhaled every ounce of breath I had left in my body and stopped breathing. I prayed silently to Jesus to please let me faint in a heap. But he still turned a deaf ear.
Gasping for breath, I was frog-marched to within a foot of the rostrum, where Sister Ignatius stood, at least another two feet taller than usual, with her gobstopper eyes glaring down at me. She had her favourite whipping cane in her left hand and I could only assume she was either taking it with her as a trophy, or she was going to present it to me as a souveni
r.
“Hello Tommy.” Her grotesque grin leered down at me and I suddenly had the strangest feeling, as if everything around us was moving in slow motion, like those special effects you get in the films. There was a stillness in the air, as the crying boys suddenly stopped crying, the cheering boys suddenly stopped cheering and everyone looked in my direction.
Even the birds in the trees had suddenly stopped singing, as though they’d all wanted to share in this special moment with me. Then a thought suddenly sprung into my head, almost like a revelation from the Almighty himself. I looked down at the Mother Superior’s big toes protruding over the edge of the rostrum and I swear to this day, I heard a divine voice telling me, “Beat the feckin’ living daylights out of them feet with that crucifix.”
“God bless yah, Tommy.” Sister Ignatius leant over the rostrum and in one foul movement snatched the crucifix from my raised hand – saving herself from being a cripple for the rest of her life. She then grabbed my cheek between her massive forefinger and thumb and squeezed as hard as she possibly could. “I’m going ta miss yah Tommy.”
“Miss me arse you mean.”
Her saintly smile suddenly deteriorated into a toothy snarl, while the photographer’s camera kept clicking and whirring away, unaware of the battle of wits being played out to the bitter end between the pair of us.
She promised to make me cry one day and had been unsuccessful, to date. This was now her final moment, her final opportunity to squeeze a tear out of me. “Cry you little fecker!” I could almost hear the words on the tip of her tongue as she squeezed my skin to its limit. But she failed to squeeze one teardrop out of me. And I remember thinking, not her or anyone else will ever force me to shed a tear ever again.
I was proud of that moment. Proud of retaining my dignity and of pushing myself through the pain barrier, just for the hell of it. I was proud, too, of the fact that everyone was looking our way, witnessing the final battle between us.
Then they were gone. Sister Ignatius and her holy army of battleaxes turned their backs on us and walked off, as if we had never existed in their lives. And perhaps to them, we hadn’t. Cheek squeezing aside, there were no handshakes, no goodbyes, no blessings. No thank yea’s for letting us beat yer backsides black and blue. They were gone. And a new era was about to begin.
Drill discipline
The crying boys were still crying. The others stood around in small groups, discussing the departure of Sister Ignatius and her coven and what that might mean for us. With the initial excitement now over for me and the cheek of my face still smarting from the vice-like grip of Sister Ignatius’s shovel-sized hand, I felt indifferent to it all.
There were no fond memories jumping out at me. I could not in any way relate to those strange, distant people who would have us believe they were married to God and yet seemed to have sold their souls to the devil. And though, in fairness, I couldn’t tar them all with the same brush, they had all seemed to have one thing in common: their indifference towards the children of St Vincent’s Approved School.
The school was formerly a lunatic asylum, which says it all really. It wouldn’t have surprised me in the least if Sister Ignatius had been a former patient here, prior to it being taken over by the Catholic Church and the Nugent Catholic Care Society, who were paid and trusted to care for their charges, but who miserably failed to do so. And just as insignificant as we had been to these so-called Sisters of Mercy, they, in turn, were just as insignificant to most of us.
Besides, I was too preoccupied with watching Paul Lyons scaling the dizzy heights of a 30ft sycamore tree and willing him to fall to be paying much attention to what was going on around me. The last time he’d fallen he’d spent two weeks in hospital, with a broken leg, a broken arm and a fractured collarbone. When he came back to the school, they’d laid on a small welcome-home party for him, with jelly, blancmange and sponge cake. I was wondering whether that sort of thing would continue under the new regime and hoping to find out soon enough.
“Right, we can cut out the crocodile tears for starters,” snapped our new headmaster. He seemed slightly baffled, looking to his right and then to his left, before peering over his shoulder, as if he’d lost something or someone. And then we saw him.
You could almost hear a pin drop in the instantaneous silence, as all eyes fixed on the large, bespectacled fella zipping up his flies having just exited the boys’ outside toilet block.
“It’s Sister Ignatius dressed as a man!” someone guffawed, taking the words right out of my own mouth.
It was just uncanny. Barring the gold-framed spectacles and the lack of a nun’s habit, everything about the tall fella seemed to fit in with the Mother Superior. As we stood watching his large figure loom towards us across the tarmac playground, his shovel-sized hands almost convinced me they were one and the same.
The giveaway came as he walked up to stand alongside Mr Lilly and the rest of the staff, bidding them good morning with a fat, pinkie-faced smile.
“Ah, Mr Sweet, there you are,” said Mr Lilly. “Can you get this rabble into four lines of 12?”
“Right you lot!’ Mr Sweet bellowed, like a Sergeant Major ordering his troops. “I want you to form four even lines of 12 along here. Come on, come on, quickly does it, we haven’t got all day.”
We formed one line of 27, one line of 13, one of six and one line of one, making 47. Paul Lyons was still up the sycamore tree.
“I said four rows of 12!” screamed Mr Sweet, standing with a large hand on the shoulder of 13-year-old Billy “Skunk” Smart, who was standing on his own. “Not very popular then, eh lad?”
“No sir,” said Billy, breathing his foul breath all over the unsuspecting new master, who staggered backwards, gasping for fresh air.
When he’d gained his composure, Mr Sweet walked back to the line of 27 and counted the first 12 boys as he walked down the line. “Right, the remainder – that’s you lot – move over to the next line.” He repeated this line by line until he came towards the end of the fourth line.
“How are we doing, Mr Sweet?” enquired the increasingly impatient headmaster.
“45, 46, 47 – we seem to have a lad missing, sir.” Mr Sweet retraced his steps back along each row, carrying out a second head count. “Definitely one lad missing, sir.”
“Will you get this ragtag of a mess into some orderly fashion,” snapped the agitated headmaster, glaring at us as we stood slovenly in line, nattering to one another.
“Atten-tion!” Mr Sweet barked, suddenly bringing his knee right up to his chin before slamming his foot back down onto the tarmac surface and standing as rigid as a wooden board, with his big arms straight down at his sides and his thumbs pointing to the ground.
We could only stare at him in bewilderment, not having seen the like of it before.
“Obviously there has been a lack of discipline around here,” said Mr Lilly, shaking his head in dismay. “It seems life has been a little too easy for this lot. Mr Sweet, get this shambles ship-shape and show them how to come to attention and stand easy on command.”
“Atten-tion! Staaand at ease! Bring those knees right up high lad. Higher! Arms straight down by your sides. Push those thumbs right into the ground. Not literally into the ground you idiot. I was speaking metaphorically. Metaphorically. Don’t give me any of your backchat lad. Now get back up on your feet.”
For the next half-hour, we were drilled in the art of looking like planks, which wasn’t too difficult for us. And as we were all competing against one another, it made it that much more spectacular once we’d got the hang of it. Though it didn’t come off without its casualties. Brian “Donkey” Carey (so called because of the way he elongated certain words, along with his hee-haw laugh) was standing a little too close behind Paddy Gavin, so, when he brought his knee up and accidentally kneed Paddy up the backside, the Irish lad swung around and chinned Donkey, knocking him
senseless with the one punch. To be fair, there wasn’t much sense you could knock out of Donkey, considering he had a mental age of six – so we’d been told by the nuns. Paddy had been so quick, none of the staff saw what had happened, and assumed Donkey had fainted in the heat.
Timothy White didn’t fare too well either. Trying hard to outdo Mr Sweet, he brought his knee up too high and chinned himself, causing a tooth to cut his lip in the process. And now he was crying even more loudly than he’d been just prior to the nuns walking off.
The hair of the lad from Scunthorpe had just started to smoulder. I only knew the lad as Noddy, named because of his head shaking like one of those nodding dogs you see in the back of a car. Once, I had attempted to have a conversation with him about football, but it was so difficult to tell whether he was agreeing with me or not, I didn’t bother talking to him any more.
Hurrying down along the line to Noddy, Mr Sweet began whacking his smouldering head. Unaware of what was happening, Noddy screamed his innocence, swearing blind it wasn’t him who’d stolen the photographer’s camera and cigarettes, stopping short of snitching on O’Connell.
Fifteen-year-old Michael Clarkson was the boy standing behind Noddy when his hair began to smoulder, so he was the number one suspect. Clarkson tried to convince the headmaster it was either caused by the heat of the sun or it was ‘spontaneous combustion’, which he’d read about in a book. But once he’d been strip-searched in front of us, the petrol lighter fell out of his undies.
“Name!”
“Michael Clarkson.”
“Michael Clarkson, what?”
“Just Michael Clarkson.”
“Sir! Michael Clarkson, sir!” hollered Mr Lilly, his face almost purple with rage. “Say it!”
“Sir! Michael Clarkson, sir!”
“Outside my office after we’ve finished here. I’ll deal with you then.”
Boy Number 26 Page 7
