The other non-public face of the nuns was the reality that they were barely providing shelter, with a very basic diet, for children whom they believed were paying, by their very existence, for the sins of their mothers. According to the Catholic Church in Ireland, the sin that their mothers had committed was that they became pregnant and had a baby, while unmarried. This sin was unacceptable before the eyes of God, everyone involved in religious life, and the decent people of Ireland. And so the vast majority of people shunned girls who admitted to such a sin. And worse, the children of these unmarried mothers were also shunned and considered to be an embarrassment. Industrial schools, often known as orphanages subsidised by the state and run by charitable orders of nuns, became the solution to the problem. Some of the children in the orphanage felt like they were in the army, others felt like it was prison.
There was a timetable for everything and there were rules for every little thing. If the rules were broken, each broken rule had its own merited and rigorously meted out punishment. I remember that we had to clean all the skirting boards in the orphanage. It took hours and if you got even a tiny mark on the wall above, you were beaten. A lot of the nuns had a leather strap that used to hang beside their rosary beads and they would beat you immediately. You were afraid to cry. If you did, you were beaten more. You had to keep quiet all the time, like you were choking. You had to hold it in. You could never scream. Some of the girls couldn’t help it and the nuns would hit them with the strap again and again. There was high dusting as well, which was over the picture rails and then we would have to scrub all the floors. There was never a bit of dirt in the orphanage.
I have not been able to banish from my memory the screams and suffering of small children who were punished for breaking some very flimsy and unjustifiable rules. Watching a punishment being carried out on another girl, particularly if she was younger than you, was very difficult. Sometimes there was a very fine line between a rule being broken and not being broken. Many children were punished for nothing and often too harshly. If a girl wet her bed, she had to stand at the end of the dormitory with the wet sheets and then wash them herself. Your hair was sometimes cut as a punishment so that everyone would know. Otherwise we all looked the same, with the one haircut, in the same second-hand looking clothes. If a nun shouted at you to ‘Halt’, you stopped dead in your tracks – obedience to the nuns was absolute.
The nuns weren’t all evil. Some of them had a bit of compassion but they were afraid of the stronger nuns. We were told again and again that we had to suffer for the sins of our parents. I was told that I was damaged – ‘ruined for life’ – because I wasn’t even a virgin. I was used goods and I had to suffer for it. They all knew about my past.
Some of them wanted to humiliate us. You would have to stand still for hours on end or you wouldn’t get any dinner or you weren’t allowed outside. Some of the special children, who had families outside the orphanage, got to do Irish dancing or to be in the choir, but I was never allowed. There was a press where children who had relatives on the outside were allowed to go to buy sweets if they had been given some money. They’d never share the sweets. I think they were told not to. I remember one time a girl was walking in front of me and she dropped the sweet paper. I picked it up and licked it until there was nothing left on it at all.
An uncanny punishment I used to receive was the nuns’ attempts to make me feel guilty by asking, ‘What would your auntie nuns think of you now?’ If I heard this once, I heard it a hundred times. I had no idea what this meant as I did not know any ‘auntie nuns’. Consequently, in my ignorance, I escaped the punishment of the guilt complex they were trying to force on to me.
But everything is relative. As I had come from hell, I thought the orphanage, with all its rules and regulations, was heaven. I loved it. The sister-in-charge of the entire orphanage was a responsible person. Some of her line managers were also fair, but others were obsessed and tough. I quickly worked out that if you caused trouble, you got into trouble, so I caused no trouble.
On my second day at the orphanage, I was told to go to the office. I was given my number. From now on, I was to be known as 1797. I also had to call at the sick bay unit for a routine medical check-up.
The local doctor visited me in the late afternoon. The check-up was the usual inspection of hearing, sight, teeth, nose and breathing. When he asked about my private area, I sat on the chair, crossed my legs and my arms. I hung my head.
He asked me, ‘Have you been interfered with?’
I could not raise my voice to answer him.
He qualified the question, ‘Have men had sexual relations with you?’
All I could do was nod my head, and burst into tears.
He murmured to himself, ‘Oh, my good God.’
He then called the nun in and said to her, ‘She will have to be seen by a gynaecologist. She will need a full gynaecological examination. I will give you a letter of referral and you should make an appointment as soon as possible.’
I wondered what they were talking about but understood none of the medical terms. The doctor told me that I was fine and then said that I was dismissed.
On the morning of my third day at the orphanage, the sister-in-charge sent for me and told me that I would have to go to school. She said that they wanted to assess my education to date. She put me in fifth class. While living with my foster-parents, my attendance at school was practically nil. Years later, I went back through the attendance records at my primary school. I found that out of a total of eight years of primary education, my total days at school amounted to less than one academic year. I still don’t understand how the school let this happen without reporting it.
So after three days in fifth class, in the orphanage school, the nuns felt that there was no point in me spending any more time in school. I heard the nun in school say to another nun that I was pure stupid, knew nothing and understood nothing that was being taught in class. I do not really blame them for this assessment. It was not their fault that I was 13 years of age and had never received a basic education.
On the other hand, I very much regret that I was not given the help to try to learn. But then I was part of a group of people that were an embarrassment to the community at large. I, along with my fellow inmates, merited only the absolute minimum assistance of any kind.
As my academic future was deemed to be a non-runner, it was there and then consigned to the educational dustbin. I was to stay in the orphanage proper and look after the younger girls, help in the kitchens and clean the toilets. Any skills that I could learn while I was carrying out my duties, I was to consider my education.
Once a week we had to scrub the cement yard and the drains with a deck scrubbing brush, on our knees. It was hard physical work. Needlework was also encouraged as a skill to be learned. There was always a mountain of torn or ripped clothing to be repaired. Every morning at least two hours were devoted to sewing the never-ending amount of torn clothing. I became quite adept at this chore. As part of our needlework training, we were encouraged to actually make the clothes that we would need, when we finally left at age 16, to join the real world and work for a living. Over a period of two years I managed to make a set of pyjamas, a skirt, a dress and a blouse. While I enjoyed the peacefulness of the sewing sessions at the orphanage, afterwards I was never able to do needlework, for pleasure or as a business. Forty years later I have only managed to make one pair of curtains. They were made under duress, to cover a bedroom window of an apartment that half the population of London could see into.
Cookery was another skill that I was to acquire as part of my orphanage training. Again, in reality, this meant acting as a servant, a skivvy, peeling carrots and potatoes in the kitchens attached to the orphanage. I was being trained for a career as a housemaid. In comparison to sewing, cookery at the orphanage was hard work. It required long hours and physical fitness. Breakfast for the following day had to be prepared on the previous evening, before going to bed. Two hu
ge pots of oatmeal porridge had to be brought to the boil and then simmered for about 45 minutes. The pots were so large and contained such a large volume of water, they took hours to boil. The stove was heated by solid fuel, mostly turf. It was part of my duties to keep this cooker alive and burning.
One perk of working in the kitchens was that I always had something to eat. While living with my foster-parents I was always starving. Even though the nuns kept a strict control on the stock of food and waste was not tolerated in the kitchens, there were always bits and pieces to eat. There were never any leftovers but some children might not eat their allotted food on any particular day, for a variety of reasons. The one reason that never applied was that they were given too much to eat. The food was always stews and the cheapest type of potatoes. We used to get a pudding on Sunday that was slimy and a dirty-pink colour. It always made me think of my past life and I never ate it. I used it give it to one of my friends on the sly. At least working in the kitchens, I could always steal a choice piece of meat or hide a piece of prepared food in a safe place. I would eat this at a later time, to replace a less appetising meal. Everyone in the orphanage stole food at one time or another. They had to or they would have starved.
This was not gourmet cooking for a small number of people. This was catering on a large scale. Around 220 mouths had to be fed, three times a day. The refectory tables had to be set with plates, cups and cutlery each time. All the plates, drinking cups and mugs were made from metal. This was to prevent breakages. All the eating and cooking utensils had to be washed after use.
The orphans, overseen by a nun, did all this manually. The nun’s role was entirely supervisory. She did not do any of the cooking or washing up. Neither did the nuns ever eat with us in our refectory. They had their own dining room. We were never invited or allowed to visit this area of the nuns’ community. It was in a separate building, on the opposite side of the compound.
But after I had been there a few months I did get an inkling of how the system worked. The supplier, in the same van, often delivered the food for both eating areas. Bread deliveries were always eagerly awaited. The orphans had to help carry in all the loaves of bread and the other girls told me how to hide food under our long knickers. We only got two deliveries per week and our bread was what the bread man called ‘returns’. This was bread that was returned from shops that had bought it from the bakery. If it was unsold or still in the shop when the next delivery of fresh bread arrived, the bakery took it back. It was always hard and mostly covered with blue mould. When it arrived at the orphanage kitchen, we had to cut off the mould before serving it at mealtime.
The nuns’ dining section got a fresh bread delivery every day which included a delivery of fresh pastries and confectionery. We called them buns.
Our delivery days were Tuesday and Friday and were eagerly awaited by whichever two orphans were on kitchen duty. The delivery man would nearly always manage to give the two girls a bun each for themselves to eat. What a treat that was. Sometimes he had whipped cream on pastry, sometimes jam and cream doughnuts, and sometimes buns with icing on them for us. They tasted so sweet.
We had to swallow them down as fast as we could. If we were caught eating buns, both the delivery man and ourselves would have been in severe trouble. He never asked for, or expected, anything in return, or payment of any kind. I will always remember him as a special person who did not discriminate against us orphans, at a time when most people saw us as human detritus.
Working in the kitchens also included working in the nursery where milk was the staple diet. Every second day a man with a horse and cart delivered the milk to the orphanage, in huge metal milk churns. They were stored in the pantry. There were no refrigerators in those days, so the milk was stored in the coolest part of the pantry. It used to turn sour very quickly, particularly during the warm summer months. It also contributed to the persistent smell of sour milk throughout the entire orphanage buildings. Of course we never noticed the smell, but visitors often commented on it.
Looking back, the bad condition of the milk was probably why there were so many cases of enteritis suffered by the younger babies and children in the nursery area. The smell of diarrhoea was often overpowering, but was drowned out by the incessant crying of the suffering children, possibly infected by contaminated milk.
Another life-skill that I inherited from my time in the orphanage was lace making. The older orphans had to learn lace making. If you were found to be proficient at it, you were encouraged to do it all the time. The nuns sold it as decorative Limerick lace on the lucrative American market. I became quite proficient at it. However, once I left the orphanage, I never did it again. But I did collect decorative pieces of lace, done by others, as a hobby and have quite a few pieces of antique lace in my collection to this day. I suppose it serves to remind me of days spent safely absorbed in lace making.
When I had been at the orphanage for about four months, the sister-in-charge called me in to her office one Saturday morning. She told me to expect a visit from a nun from a different convent. She said that a Sister Bernadette would arrive the following day.
The mystery nun arrived as promised, on Sunday afternoon. I was waiting in the assembly area. She introduced herself to me as Sister Bernadette. She told me that I was her ‘case’ and that she was going to be a special friend to me. If there was anything that was bothering me, I was to contact her. If there was anything that I felt that she should know about, I was to contact her even faster. She promised that she would look after me. Even after I left the orphanage, I was to regard her as my confidante or special friend. She would leave her address with the sister-in-charge of the orphanage. It was a pleasant sunny day, so she suggested that we should take a walk around the convent grounds.
She started asking me some questions, like how I was settling in at the orphanage. As we walked through the rose garden, she sneezed and said that she might be getting a cold. The comment meant nothing to me but she used it to introduce the topic of changes to my body. She described to me how I would begin to get a cold every month from now on. She said that all girls of my age get a cold every month.
I told her I had often had a cold before.
‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘You have never had a cold like this.’
She told me that I would bleed every month. She did not tell me which part of me would bleed. I assumed that I would bleed from the nose if I were going to have a lot of colds. As I had had colds and nose bleeds for as long as I could remember, I was not in the least bit concerned. When I talked this interview over with some of my friends at the orphanage during the following week, I was to learn that Sister Bernadette had being trying to tell me that I would soon start getting my period. In the orphanage when girls had their periods, they had to queue up to get sanitary towels. The first time I saw them I thought they were getting white socks. I was jealous and thought why do I never get them? Soon after my chat with Sister Bernadette I had to start queuing myself. When you had heavier periods you had to turn the pad upside-down as the nuns wouldn’t give you any more. You’d wrap it in the toilet paper but you were only allowed two squares of toilet paper at a time so it was very difficult.
Sister Bernadette went on to tell me that the ‘monthly cold’ led on to the ‘things boys do to girls’. She started talking about babies. Her description of what happened in such situations was couched in prissy, descriptive names. When I joined in, saying men at home did that to me, she looked shocked and horrified. I told her about the ‘purple prick’ and how it could hurt you, and she began to realise that I knew many words to describe in detail what she was having trouble talking about. She visibly flinched at some of the words that I used. As far as I was concerned, they were all normal words, used every day in my foster-family home. By what I was saying, Sister Bernadette learnt a lot about the goings-on in my foster home but she chose to do nothing about it.
In a low voice, she finally said to me, ‘I think that you already know what I am t
rying to tell you.’ I could not tell by the tone of her voice whether she was disgusted by my knowledge or concerned for my future. I thought that the interview was coming to an end. But I was wrong. All the previous talk was just leading up to what she was about to tell me next. What she said next began with a very simple statement. But it was to upset me for the remainder of my stay at the orphanage. Up to this point, in comparison to the life of abuse and degradation that I had lived with my foster-parents, my stay at the orphanage was bliss. But I was to be unsettled emotionally for 30 years by what Sister Bernadette told me next.
She told me that I had a mother and father. She also told me that I had a grandmother.
I was shattered. When my foster-parents said that nobody wanted me, I had not really understood the exact meaning of that statement. But it became clear to me very quickly on that sunny afternoon, in the rose garden with Sister Bernadette.
She said that my father’s family lived in Limerick City, close to where I was presently living. The other family, which included my maternal grandmother, lived in County Limerick, but not too far from the city itself. I immediately became excited. I was jumping up and down with joy. I had always envied some of the other children at school, as they seemed to have the one thing that I did not – parents. Quite a few of the children at the orphanage had either one or both parents. Sometimes the parents even visited their children. I was always envious of them, as I never had even one visitor, never mind a parent.
I asked the nun, ‘When can I see them?’
She did not answer my question directly. She told me that my father could not be told of my existence. She said that he did not even know I was alive. She said that two of his sisters were ‘Mercy nuns’ in Cork and that they would be embarrassed beyond belief, and would be sent to the missions in Africa, if it became public knowledge that I was related to them.
No One Wants You Page 6
