No One Wants You

by Celine Roberts

  But in all the confusion of my foster-mother being taken away to hospital, no arrangements were made for me. Later that night, I was taken to the parish priest. I asked him not to send me back to that house and I told him why I was afraid to return. He seemed to ignore my complaints but he did take me some distance away to a family where I could stay, just for that night.

  I felt so relieved. I did not have to return to that dark, dismal house that night. I had been afraid that when I went back there all the usual men would call in. I felt a bit uncomfortable with the family but I thought if I helped with the work they wouldn’t send me home. When one of the sons asked me to go down the field with him to help with the pigs I got up immediately. I set off in front of him and I didn’t say a word on the way down. I was scared of him because he was so big and older than me. It was dark as we got further from the house. I couldn’t see the pig-shed but I knew we were nearly there. His hand pushed me from behind and I fell on the ground. He turned me over and pressed his hand into my tummy to stop me moving. He pulled my dress up and fumbled with my knickers, trying to get them off. I couldn’t move. I didn’t make a noise. I knew what was happening. He had piercing eyes. I froze as he glared down at me. He grunted and twisted and pushed himself inside me. I bit down on my lip so that I wouldn’t cry out with the pain. Then it was over and he rolled off me. I didn’t move. He got up, pulled his trousers up and was walking off when he turned and said, ‘You’re only 11 aren’t you? You can’t have babies yet?’ I was still lying on the ground, with my bare legs spread out on the wet grass. I was shivering from cold. I still didn’t dare move. I was afraid to get up. He was wrong about my age but I just mumbled ‘yes’ and then there was silence as he walked off.

  The next day, the priest arrived to collect me. He told me that I was going to stay with a niece of my foster-mother. He said that I would be staying with her for the duration of my foster-mother’s stay in hospital. In the end I stayed there for about six weeks.

  I liked it there.

  I was well fed. I never felt hungry. I was allowed to take food from the cupboard, whenever I wanted some. At home, I was never allowed to eat unless I was given the food by my foster-mother. When I realised that I could eat whenever I wanted, I was not shy about it. I ate more and more, at every opportunity. They had such lovely food. The woman of the house was a very good cook. She baked all sorts of sweet cakes. She baked apple and rhubarb tarts. I had never tasted such wonderful food. But I know that they never expected a young girl to eat so much or so often.

  They used to say prayers at night and they wanted me to join in. At first, I could not recite the prayers, as I did not know the words. But they taught me the words. Through nightly repetition, I learned them all.

  I really enjoyed being included.

  The prayers were said out loud and everyone knelt on the floor, facing a chair. Everyone had his or her head bent down, and you weren’t supposed to look around. I often sneaked a look, just to see what everybody else was doing, while praying. They were always earnestly involved in their recitations. Everyone took turns to say certain prayers. When it came to my turn, I used to shout them out loud and I was never shouted at for shouting.

  I was enrolled at their local school in Knocklong, County Limerick. The teacher there was very kind to me. She spent some time teaching me some different prayers, and she started to teach me some reading and arithmetic. I also made my first attempts at writing. I was 12 years old before I wrote my first word. That first word was my own name, Celine. It was very scratchy, but I had written it myself. I felt so proud that I could write. I knew that I wanted to continue going to school. I wanted to learn lessons in school.

  I gradually began to realise that there was a better life to be had, than the life that I was leading. I also began to realise that what was normal in my life, was not regarded as normal for other people.

  One day I was told that my foster-mother was being discharged from hospital. The lady of the house said that I would have to go back to her house to look after her. She said that my foster-mother was recovering, but that she would need constant care and attention.

  I was devastated.

  I could not believe that I would have to return to my foster-mother. There was nothing I could do about it. I was powerless.

  I was delivered back to the house that I hated, by bicycle, the very next day. I did not have a chance to say goodbye to anybody at the school.

  When I saw my foster-mother, I saw a frail old woman in the bed. She was only a pale shadow of her former self. I now find it difficult to understand why, but at the time I felt sorry for her. But I soon found out that she was in no way remorseful. She may have been ill, but while she was confined to bed, she remained her usual grouchy self, especially in her attitude towards me.

  She felt that it was my place in life to cater to her every need. Considering that I had been told so often that I was unwanted by anyone else and useless, I just did what I was told. I started to look after my foster-mother, with as much motivation as I could muster.

  When my foster-mother came home from hospital, her male friends did not call as often as previously. She was not able to drink alcohol or to remain out of bed for more than one hour at a time. Once out of the bed, she quickly became exhausted. She had no stamina and her breathing was troubled. While I had to wait on my foster-mother all the time, it was much better than having to satisfy the sexual desires of the men who had called to the house for the previous six years.

  My foster-mother remained bedridden and towards the end of 1961, she was taken into hospital again. This was to become my salvation. Although I did not know it at the time, I was never to see my foster-mother again.

  I was never to return to that house of horror.

  It was the end of a period of my life that contained no laughter. I thought I might also be able to stop crying, even though I shed most of my tears in private. If I cried in public, there was always somebody to scream, ‘Stop crying’, at me. My usual response to this was, ‘I am not crying, they are just tears dropping.’

  It was an end to a period of which I have a dominant memory of ‘torn clothes and a torn body’. The clothing was always ‘second-hand’, always dirty and never washed afterwards. If it was not torn when I received it, somebody else ripped it, usually a man, trying to get me out of it.

  I was taken to stay with a different niece of my foster-mother. Her name was Kit. She was happy in her life and she lived with a lovely compassionate man, her husband Tony, outside a small market town called Buttevant, in County Cork. They had no children of their own. She became the nearest thing to a mother that I could have had.

  The first thing she said to me was, ‘You are never going back to that house of shame.’ From this moment on, we formed a sort of bond between us.

  They had a small bungalow, which was spotlessly clean and nicely decorated. It had all the modern conveniences, which I had never been used to previously. It had electricity, piped running water, a bathroom and a Rayburn cooker, which seemed to keep the whole house warm.

  It was in this house that I learned to wash myself properly. There was hot water, heated by the Rayburn cooker and piped to all the taps. That first evening, Kit tut-tutted as she cleaned places on my body that I am sure had never seen water before. She showed me how to wash my body thoroughly. I still feel that I will never cleanse myself fully of the filth from those dark days.

  It was late December and Christmas was only a matter of days away. The first time I walked in the front door of their house, I was stunned by what I saw. I was stopped in my tracks with amazement. With my mouth wide open, I inhaled deeply. I had never seen anything so beautiful in my life.

  What I saw before me was my first Christmas tree. It had all kinds of decorations on it. There were many little silver and gold balls. There were little silver bells attached by silver chains. The best part of all was the set of about a dozen Christmas-tree lights, which flickered on and off. I thought it was jus
t magical.

  After being fed, they put me in a large double bed, which I had all to myself. I expected someone else to turn up, to sleep in it also, but it was all for me.

  That first night, I did not sleep a wink. I was so excited. I thought I was in heaven.

  Kit and Tony were very kind to me.

  The next day, they brought me to Limerick City in their car. They brought me to a large department store and bought me new shoes and new socks. The shoes were coloured cream and the socks were blue. This was the first time that I had ever had shoes and socks that were bought brand new and had not been used by somebody else. Up to this time in my life, my clothing, shoes and socks had been supplied as charitable donations and were always somebody’s cast-offs.

  I loved the fuss that the sales lady in the store made of me. She called me ‘a little lady’ and made me try on so many different pairs of shoes, until I found a pair that I really liked and wanted.

  I felt overwhelmed. It was the first time I’d ever been given a choice. Nobody had ever asked me what I wanted before. My wants or needs had never been considered. It was a difficult gesture for me to appreciate. While such a consideration was rare in my life up to that time, it was a concept that was to remain elusive in my life, right up to the present day.

  That Christmas, Kit and Tony had a television installed in their house. I had never been to the cinema and consequently had never seen a moving picture. The introduction of a television into the house was frightening at first. I treated it with suspicion. I could not feel at ease with a box, with live people in it, in the same room as me. But I got used to it very quickly. I soon wanted to watch it all the time. But there were no programmes until about six o’clock in the evenings. They used to turn it on an hour beforehand, and we would all sit around it, watching the unmoving test card, while it played the same music. It was all very exciting.

  On Christmas Eve we all went to midnight mass in the local church. When we came home I stayed up for a while, helping to make stuffing for a turkey, which we would have for Christmas dinner the next day. I had never seen so much food for three people.

  I went to bed that Christmas Eve night, as happy as I had ever been before. Early the next morning, the three of us assembled around the Christmas tree, and Kit gave out presents to Tony and me. Tony only got one present and all the rest were for me. I must have got about seven presents.

  There was a skirt, a blue one.

  There was a set of handkerchiefs.

  There was a pink cardigan.

  There were different bars of chocolate.

  There were some sucky sweets.

  There was a hat, a beret type.

  But my favourite of the whole lot was a handbag. It was fairly small and brown in colour, but in one corner, in gold letters was my name, Celine. I cherished that brown bag with my name on it.

  Once again, I thought I was in heaven.

  These people gave me so many presents, and made me feel so welcome in such a short space of time. Both of them were very kind. Even when I did something wrong like one time when someone gave Kit a lovely hairbrush and I sat on it and the handle broke. She was angry and snapped, ‘Nothing good ever came out of that place’, meaning my foster-mother’s house. I was scared but I knew she would forgive me and she didn’t hit me.

  But the experience of my short life had already taught me not to expect very much from anybody. Unfortunately I was right and my world was to be dashed again.

  About three months after Christmas, Kit and Tony said that they wanted to talk to me. The three of us sat down around the table in the kitchen one evening. I was drinking a mug of Kit’s strong sweet tea and just beginning to tuck into a jam sponge cake that she had made earlier. I had just taken a bite of cake when they told me that they could not keep me with them any longer.

  My world collapsed.

  I could not swallow the piece of cake. The mug of tea crashed to the table, as my arm was no longer strong enough to hold it.

  All energy drained from me. I was unable to speak. I could not even ask, ‘Why?’

  They told me that my foster-mother had died. I didn’t go to her funeral. Kit hadn’t told me at the time. I remember her saying, ‘Sure she’s no loss to you anyway.’ Even though in a strange way we would both call her ‘mother’ as she had also brought Kit up.

  They said that I had missed too much school. They said that I had to go to school again and that it was the law of the land. They said that they had no choice. They could not let me stay with them. They said that a neighbour of my foster-mother’s had complained to the ISPCC (Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children) months ago about the ‘goings-on’ in that house and that I had to be sent away. The cruelty officer from the ISPCC had called earlier that day and told them that he would collect me and take me away to a school the next day.

  As they said the words, I could sense myself closing down. I had known that feeling of hurt before. My protection was to close down all sense of pain. I did not cry, and neither did I say anything in response. I went to bed and lay there. As I tried to sleep, I was aware of Kit ironing my clothing and packing my few possessions. Eventually I fell asleep.

  The next morning, I got up and washed myself thoroughly. Shortly after we ate breakfast in silence, the cruelty officer from the ISPCC came and collected me. Despite tears all round, he took me away from the only people who had shown me any kindness in my life.

  Years later, I learned that Kit was the illegitimate daughter of my foster-mother’s sister. She was a kind woman who had her fair share of stress, from carrying the stigma of illegitimacy all through her life. On learning that Kit herself was illegitimate it dawned on me that she was either unwilling or unable to adopt me herself, because of her own birth status. She couldn’t have adopted a bastard because it would have raked up her own life history and all her neighbours would then know about it. She would not have been able to cope with someone like me bringing her whole world crashing down on top of her. I would have attracted too much attention.

  As we drove away from Kit’s house, I felt very fearful. I had only been told that I was going to a school. I asked the cruelty officer, ‘Where are you taking me?’

  ‘I am taking you to appear at the court in Kilmallock,’ he replied.

  I began to cry.

  The cruelty officer was a well-dressed man in a sports jacket and light-coloured trousers. He was a cold, serious type of a man. I felt that he did not like me. He did not try to reassure me in any way.

  I had never been to court before, but as far as I was concerned, nothing good ever came out of having to appear at court. I thought I was being sent to jail. Whenever I had heard the word ‘court’ before, it meant that somebody had to go to jail. My little knowledge of courts came from the many men who used to visit my foster-mother. Some of them were shady characters, who often talked about the world of judges and courts of law and being sentenced to jail.

  For the entire duration of the car journey I sobbed my heart out. I knew that if a person did something wrong, then they went to court. I knew that if you were sent to jail, you had to be sent by a judge of the court.

  I was in a panic that morning. I could not figure what I had done wrong. All sorts of bad things that I had done during my life flashed through my brain. But I thought that it must have been something terrible that I had done recently. If I was being taken to court for something bad that I had done a long time ago, why wasn’t I taken at the time it happened?

  ‘No,’ I thought, ‘it must be something bad that I did recently.’ But I hadn’t done anything.

  Kit had dressed me up in all my new clothes. I was wearing my new cream shoes and blue socks, which they had given to me before Christmas. So I knew that it could not be anything to do with my new clothes. I also had my new leather handbag, with my name embossed in gold on the outside, so that everybody could see that it belonged to me.

  Then it occurred to me. The only bad thing that I could possibly ha
ve done to merit being sent to jail was committing the crime of being too happy at Kit and Tony’s house. For the remainder of the car journey I prayed to God, between long racking sobs, to forgive me for what I had done. If he did not allow the court to send me to jail, I promised him that I would never be happy ever again.

  We finally reached Killmallock and the cruelty officer drove the car as close as possible to the front door of the courthouse. He got out from behind the steering wheel, slammed his door shut and rushed around to my side of the car. He opened the door and caught me firmly by the upper arm. His grip was so tight that it hurt me. He roughly pulled me from the seat. My sobbing became screams. Tears streamed down my cheeks.

  There were four or five small groups of people standing outside the courthouse and I can remember them all turning in my direction, to see the cause of the commotion. I was half dragged, half lifted up the courthouse stairs, by a vice-like grip on my upper arm, screaming and sobbing at the same time. I felt that I must be the worst living person in the whole world. I felt that I deserved any punishment that I was given. I thought, ‘Only the worst can happen to me now.’

  The grip was tightened on my arm, and I was lifted entirely off my feet, as we went inside the courthouse.

  ‘Will ya stop crying on me?’ shouted my attached cruelty officer, ‘You’ll come to no harm.’

  This was the first and only tiny inkling of reassurance that I was to receive from him. But there were many policemen in and around the courthouse, and all I could foresee at this time was a long period in jail. That was to be my punishment for the crime of being happy.

  I was hurriedly yanked back downstairs and out around the side of the courthouse. We entered again through a side doorway that turned out to be an office. Inside there were four policemen standing around a desk. Behind the desk was seated a man with a large book in front of him. I had never seen a book with such large pages before.