by Lily O'Brien
And we all spent the rest of the day kneeling under the table and getting long marks along our knees and shins from the floorboards that we were resting on. When evening came, we were ready to collapse from exhaustion and we desperately needed food and water, but all the man and woman said was get to bed. And they did the same thing to us for the next few days, only feeding us scraps from the table and a drop of water before we went to bed.
Then one morning, while they were having breakfast, the man said to his wife that he didn’t think the nuns were paying him enough money to look after us and he said that he wanted to send us back to the home. But the woman told him that it was too late and that no one would be at the house on Christmas day. He looked down at us under the table and then he told us to get up and to go outside and play; we jumped up, hitting our heads on the edge of the table as we ran for the front door, but the door was locked and we couldn’t open it. The woman looked over at us and then she got up and walked towards the door and we moved out of her way while she opened it for us; and once it was open, we all ran outside.
It was freezing, but it was the first time that we had been outside in almost a week, so it didn’t matter about the cold. It was great being outside, and around the back of the house was an old caravan, and we played in and around the caravan for the rest of the day, pretending that we were back at daddy’s house. And during the day, we used the caravan as a toilet, as we didn’t want to go back into the house and then made to hold our wee for the rest of the night, but the man had been watching us through the window and he caught us using the inside of his caravan as a toilet. He came running out of the house, shouting at us and he ran into the caravan and he began kicking us, and he kept kicking us until we all fell onto the caravan floor screaming with pain. Then he dragged us by our clothes out of the caravan and back into the house and he made us kneel under the kitchen table for the rest of Christmas day, while he got drunk. And for the rest of the day, he called us all the names that he could think of and the woman said nothing.
A few days later, the woman said that it was the end of the holiday, and she told us to get into their car and they drove us back to the nuns; and on the way, they never spoke a word to us. When we arrived home, we got out of the car and the man and woman told the nuns that we had been very bad children and we had caused them nothing but trouble for the whole two weeks. And that we behaved like pigs every day, calling him and his wife names that he could never repeat in public and that we had ruined their Christmas. Sister Ann apologised to them, saying that she would punish us in the appropriate manner for what we had done to them. After the man and woman left, Sister Ann hit us as hard as she could and then she sent us to bed, but we were so happy to be back that we went to bed smiling to ourselves.
A few days after the Christmas holiday, we all went back to school; and after a while, I noticed that all the girls in my class were having birthday parties, but for some reason I was never invited to any of them. I was so desperate to have a birthday party that I would have done anything to have one, so I told one of the staff, Cathy, who had always been nasty to me, about all the girls having parties and she suggested that we should have a birthday party for me. As she knew, it was going to be my birthday soon, so she said that she would bake me a big cake and that I could invite all my friends from school to the house if I wanted to. I was delighted and I couldn’t wait to tell my friends; I had never had a birthday party before and I knew it was going to be great.
As soon as I got back to school, I told a couple of my friends all about the birthday party I was going to have and the next day they came back to the house with me. I was so excited, and as I walked into the house, I looked around and I could see some bread and butter laid out on the table, but no cake. I went over to Cathy and I asked her about my cake and my party; but as I spoke to her, we were interrupted as the other children came in from school and pushed past me. After a few seconds, it was all calm again, so I asked her again, ‘Where is my party? My friends have come home with me for my party.’ She looked at me and then she shouted, ‘What party? Who said you was going to have a birthday party? Who do you think you are asking for a birthday party?’ Then, in front of my two friends, she raised her hand and slapped me around the face as hard as she could. While shouting, ‘Why should we bake a cake for you? Now eat your bread and butter’ and she gave us one slice each.
My friends were in shock and they just looked at me; they couldn’t wait to get out of the house and as far away from me as possible. I started to cry and Sister Cathy grabbed me by my hair and swung me around the room, pulling chunks of hair out of my scalp and then dropping me to the ground and humiliating me in front of everyone. My friends backed away and they ran to the front door, desperate to get outside and as far away from me as possible. The nun, Cathy, had set me up on purpose, she had set it all up just to make me look bad in front of my friends and to put me in my place. What she did to me was so cruel and it was probably one of the nastiest things she could ever have done to me. She had taught me never to ask for anything else again, as all I would get was a beating.
I celebrated my birthday in my bedroom with my sisters, brother, a swollen head from the beatings, a handful of my own hair in my pocket and a pain in my head that stayed with me until the next morning. The next day, I went back to school, but none of my friends spoke to me; they stayed away from me for months and they made me feel very unhappy and alone and I never wanted to go back to school after that.
However, soon after, I got the measles, and I was able to stay in bed for a couple of weeks and that got me out of going to school. But Sister Ann had to give me medicine three times a day and she hated it. So whenever she came up to my bedroom, she would bring a member of staff with her and she would tease me by thumping the stairs with her hands and stamping her feet as loud as possible, pretending that she was in a bad mood and that she was going to kill me when she got to my bedroom. And when they came into the bedroom, Sister Ann would get the member of staff to sit on my chest and hold my mouth open while she poured the medicine into my mouth, chocking me and making me almost vomit. Then she would get up and walk out of the room, laughing and slapping the staff on the back, while telling her that they had both done a good job, and she would turn around and look at me before she slammed the bedroom door shut.
Once I had recovered from the measles, they sent me back to school with Simon and Daisy; but when I got into the classroom, the nun told me to stand at the front of the class and to wait there for her while she went to get me a uniform to put on. But when she returned, she had with her a thick woollen dress that was the old school uniform from about thirty years ago. She told me to put it on and I did, but it was itchy and I became very hot in the dress, and the nun told me that I had to wear it every day from now on, so I sat down and got on with my work.
I couldn’t read or right very well as I had never been educated to that degree in the past. I was only six years old and I had hardly ever gone to school. So, whenever I got something wrong, the nuns would shout at me and make me stand in the corner of the room with a hat on my head that had a big D for dunce on it, so that all the other children could see that I was stupid. And the other children would make fun of me, by calling me stupid and thick, and it made me feel sad. The nun would make me stand there for the rest of the day, until it was home time, and at the end of the day my feet would hurt and my legs would shake from weakness as I walked all the way home.
I spent the next six months going through the same routine week after week and the nuns made me dress in the same woollen dress every day. Even after school, Sister Ann made me keep the dress on until it was bedtime and, when I finally took it off, my skin would be red from the heat and the scratching that I had done all day from wearing it.
One day, Simon, Daisy and a few of the other children got the flu, so the nuns made me walk to school on my own; and when it was lunchtime, I had to walk all the way back home on my own and it was horrible walking by myself.
However, as I arrived home for lunch on the second day, I walked into the dining room, and a small boy was already sitting at the table and he was eating his dinner. I could see that he was sick with the flu, because his eyes were red, he had green mucus dripping from his nose and it was running down his face, and a member of staff was feeding him his dinner with a big tablespoon that was so big it could hardly fit into his mouth.
As I sat down to eat my dinner, the boy began to vomit and he vomited his food all over the table and on to his plate. The member of staff became angry with him and she began shouting at him and the boy began to cry, and then she screamed at him that she was tired of feeding him and then she slapped him around the face. She then turned around and shouted at me, telling me to eat my dinner; but just as I was about to, she got the spoon that she was feeding the boy with and she mixed all the sick and dinner together on his plate and then she fed it to him. Then she scooped up more of the sick from the table and mixed it in with his food and the boy vomited again, and then I gagged and I vomited too.
She went mad at me because of what I had just done and she spooned up more of the sick from the table and forced the whole spoonful into the boy’s mouth, almost choking him; and he vomited again and the sick came out of his nose. She then ran around the table and hit me around my face with the boy’s spoon and I vomited again, with the sick coming out of my mouth and my nose at the same time. Then the sick ran down my face and onto my plate and she hit me again with the spoon and she told me that I had to eat it all, and she began mixing my dinner and the sick together. Then she fed it to me, but I choked and I kept vomiting, with food coming out of my nose again as I tried to keep my mouth shut. So she ran back around to the boy and she put another spoonful of the mix into his mouth, and then she ran back to me and she fed me with the same spoon, while telling both of us that we had to eat it all and that she would keep feeding us until it was all gone.
The food stunk and it was sticky and slimy with green bits of sick mixed in with it, but I kept swallowing the mix and the boy did the same. She continued slapping both of us and I could tell by the look on her face that she was getting mad and crazy with us, and she was running around like the headless chicken did back at dad’s house. She was running from one side of the table to the other and she kept it up until all the food was gone, then she told me to go back to school and to say nothing to anyone about what had just happened. I got up and I had to go, but the boy was petrified and he was shaking with fright; he looked over at me and he held out his arms while asking me not to go. ‘Please’, he said, but I had to leave and I headed out of the door and back to school, and from that day on I never saw the boy again.
Every day, the nuns would have fresh mincemeat and vegetables delivered to the house, but it wasn’t for us, it was for them. The butcher’s boy would peddle his bike up to the house and he would have the mincemeat sitting in a basket on the front of his bike, wrapped in white paper and tied shut with twine. But on this particular day, the road had just been re-laid with new tar and, as the boy rode his bike along the road, his peddle slipped and he fell over, dropping all the mincemeat across the newly laid road. It went everywhere, mixing in with little black bits of tar and small stones that lay on the road’s surface. The boy got to his feet and in a panic he gathered up all the mincemeat, black tar and stones, wrapping it all back together and then delivering it to the nuns as if nothing had happened. But I had seen him do it, so I went along and I told the nuns and they said thanks.
Then that evening, when I went down into the dining room for dinner, the nuns announced to everyone that for a change they had made a lovely mincemeat stew for everyone and they asked us to thank the lord for the wonderful food we were about to have. I sat down and I looked into my bowl, and I could see that it was the mincemeat the boy had dropped onto the road earlier in the day and it still had all the stones and tar mixed in with it. And there was a small amount of oil seeping out of the tar that was floating on the top of the hot stew and it smelt strong and nasty, like the smell you get from a garage. I could see that the nuns were very excited with anticipation, and they were almost wetting themselves as they waited for us to put the first spoonfuls of the mix into our mouths. But one of the nuns couldn’t wait any longer and she ran over to me and she began to feed spoonfuls of the mix into my mouth, just to see the expression on my face.
Straight away I felt sick, I tried to chew the mincemeat, but I couldn’t because of the stones crunching against my teeth, and the tar was sticking to my gums and it was getting between my teeth and making it hard for me to open my mouth. So I had to swallow the mix, spoonful after spoonful, while all the time she stood watching me. And she was slapping a huge wooden spoon against her leg in a threatening manner, making sure that I didn’t stop eating until it was all gone. She was just waiting for me to say something, so that she could slap me with the spoon, and she had a smile of pure pleasure across her face and she was almost jumping up and down with uncontrollable excitement while she watched me eat the food.
You could see that it was making her feel great as I swallowed every drop, leaving nothing, and I knew that she was going to punish me if I didn’t finish it all. When I had finished, I turned to her and smiled, and I knew that she could see the black tar stuck between my teeth and gums and I knew that it would make her happy. I got up, I went up to my bedroom, I climbed onto my bed and I waited for the pain in my belly to go away.
Just after my sixth birthday, Sister Ann told me that, from now on, I would be going with a woman to her house every weekend, and she would be collecting me in the mornings and dropping me off in the evenings. I didn’t understand what she was on about, but I soon found out what she meant. Every Saturday and every Sunday, the woman would turn up at the house in her car and she would pay the nuns some money, so that I could go with her to do all her housework for her. She would drive me to her house and, while I was there, I would have to do her cleaning for her, wash her clothes and polish all her furniture, then I would clean her toilet and do the washing up for her. She would make me sit on a high stool next to the kitchen sink so that I could reach down to all the plates and cups at the bottom of the sink, and not miss anything. Then, once I had finished, she would tell me to go and clean the bath, but the bath was always filthy and it always had thick scum lines all around the sides. I was only little and it hurt me to bend over the bath and I always got pains in my ribs from having to lean into it.
After I had been cleaning for her for a couple of weeks, she noticed that I was getting used to all the work and I was getting it done a lot quicker, so she gave me even more work to do. At first, she added the sweeping of the hallway and then the hoovering of the whole house; and then a couple of months later, I had three bedrooms and three bathrooms added to the cleaning list. Every Saturday and Sunday, I would clean for the whole day until about eight in the evening and when I had finished she would drive me back to the home and drop me off outside the gates, leaving me to walk the rest of the way up to the house on my own. Sometimes when I got back, Sister Ann would be waiting for me at the back door and she would smile at me as I walked past her and into the house.
Then one day, the woman told me that her guesthouse was quiet and then I realised what I was, I was her little chambermaid. So, instead of going to her guesthouse to clean, she said that she was taking me to her friend’s house, so that I could clean out the stables and pigpens on her friend’s farm for her, and the work on the farm was just as bad as working for her at her guesthouse. Then one Saturday morning, just before she picked me up, Daisy asked me if she could come to Mary’s house with me. Mary was the woman that the nuns made me work for as a chambermaid on weekends. I told Daisy that it was hard work and not very nice, but she wanted to come with me and the nuns thought it was a good idea, so they encouraged her to go with me. Daisy thought it was going to be fun cleaning all day, but she soon realised that I was being used as a slave and that I had to work all day long without a rest. As soon a
s Mary realised Daisy was with me and that she had nothing to do, she put her to work and she made us spring clean the guesthouse from top to bottom.
And when we had finished, she asked us if we wanted to make some cakes; it sounded like fun, so we said yes. And for the rest of the evening, she allowed us to make jam tarts and fairy cakes, it took us hours and when we had finished the whole of the kitchen table was covered in cakes and they looked so nice that we couldn’t wait to eat them. However, Mary had other plans for the cakes and she only gave us one each, and she kept the rest to sell for profit in her guesthouse. We both felt like crying, we had not eaten a thing all day and we were hungry, so Mary said that we could make beans on toast if we needed to eat; it was now very late, but we made the food and then she drove us home.
The following weekend, Daisy said that she didn’t want to go with me, but I begged her I didn’t want to go alone, I had been doing the cleaning on my own for the last couple of years and I just couldn’t do it anymore. I begged her to come with me and eventually she said ok. ‘But I’m not doing the cleaning’, she said. I said ok and I told her that we will have fun this time, ‘I promise’ and she came with me. But instead of Mary taking us to clean her guesthouse, she took us to her auntie’s farm and, when we arrived, she told us that we had to clean the stables. We looked at each other and then she gave us Wellington boots, a wheelbarrow, a shovel and a fork to pick the muck up with. I looked at Daisy and then Mary walked off into the farmhouse to have a cup of tea while we worked in the stable. But as soon as she was out of sight, we dropped everything and we ran off to explore the rest of the farm, but as we ran off we left the stable doors open, allowing all the horses to wander off.
