by Lily O'Brien
After a while, Mary came back to the stables to see how we were getting on with cleaning the muck up, but we had walked off and she couldn’t find us anywhere. And she had to go around, gather up all the horses and put them back in the stables and it took her about an hour to gather them all up. As we were walking around the back of the house, we forgot all about the stables and at the end of the farm we found a donkey tied up in a field. The donkey was very calm and it seemed happy to have some company, so we untied the donkey and we both got on its back, and then we rode the donkey up and down the field. It was only a small donkey and, after a while, it began to get tired, so we decided to take turns sitting on its back, while the other walked the donkey up and down the field. We fed the donkey some grass, and playing with the donkey was much more fun than cleaning out the stables; but then Mary found us and she shouted at us to get back and clean the stables.
But as I was getting off the donkey, Daisy slapped the donkey on the bum and it ran off, with me still holding on for my life. It was scary, but I loved it; and when the donkey finally stopped, I fell off its back and on to the grass and we both couldn’t stop laughing. Then Mary began laughing with us and it was the only time I ever saw Mary smile. Then she said that it was time for us to go home and we all left the farm.
On the way home, I thought Mary was going to have a go at Daisy and myself for not cleaning the stable, but she never said a word about it and she dropped us off at our house as if nothing had happened. For the next six years, I carried on cleaning her guesthouse for her all on my own, with me being her little slave and the nuns being paid money for my services.
At Willows, the nuns had an old sewing machine and occasionally they would let us play with it and I thought it was great fun messing around with bits of old material and I tried making things with it. Then one day, while I was playing around with the sewing machine, one of the nuns came over to me and she showed me how to use it properly and I seemed to pick it up easily, so she showed me how to make a couple of pillowcases and simple things like sheets and handkerchiefs.
And after a while, she showed me how to make patchwork quilts and even more complicated items, including clothes. And the nuns thought the things that I made were great and they allowed me to use the sewing machine every day. After a couple of months, the nuns and staff began praising me and telling me how good I was with the sewing machine, they gave me some pattern books, and they asked me to see if I could make a dressing gown from the patterns. So I had a go and it came out great, and the nuns allowed me to make things all day long; and after a few months, I had made hundreds of items, from pillowcases to quilts. And they were so pleased with what I had done that they allowed me to carry on making things for the rest of the year. The nuns and staff were very good to me while I was playing with the sewing machine and they never hit me once.
But then one day, they told me they were having a summer fair and all the things that I had been making were for them to sell on a stall at the fair. I couldn’t believe it, they had used me to work for them again, making them even more money, but this time it was out of something that I liked doing. That was it, I gave up straight away and I never made another thing for them again. It was a shame because I was good at making things and I thought it was fun until then and I never once thought of it as work.
The only time I had a break from cleaning the guesthouse was when the nuns sent me away for the summer, Christmas and Easter holidays and on some of the half terms, when people would come to our house and take me away with them. The people who took me always pretended to be nice while at the convent, but once they got me away from the nuns, they treated me like shit until the last day of the holidays when they brought me back to the nuns. And they always acted as if they were angels and I was the evil one and the devil.
I remember one evening, just after I got back from one of the so-called holidays, daddy unexpectedly turned up at the house and he was drunk; and as he stood outside the house, he shouted at the staff that he wanted to see his children. But the staff and nuns told him that he was not supposed to be there and they told him that if he did not go away, then they would have to call the police to remove him from the property. But he continued shouting at them and we all watched him through a window as he became angry towards them and then he looked over in our direction.
He could see us at the window waving at him and he waved back at us, so the staff went outside and they told him that if he could just shut up for a moment, then they would go and get us. He agreed and the staff let us all go outside to see him for half an hour and then he had to go, but he had upset us and now we wanted to go home with him. The staff told him to go away and then they dragged us all back inside and they locked all the doors and windows, so we could not get out and follow him.
Once inside the house, I shouted at the staff, telling them that I was not happy; and as I was walking away from them, one of the staff grabbed me from behind. She grabbed me by my hair and dragged me into the living room, then she hit me around my head so hard that I collapsed to the floor and she just left me there, closing the door behind her as she left the room. I can remember feeling very drowsy and sick and I had the smell of blood in my head, but I managed to get up, out of the room and back up the stairs to my bedroom. I walked towards my bed and I collapsed face first onto the bed; and as I tried to turn myself around, the room began to spin. I can remember having a severe headache and that was the last thing I remembered, until I woke up half way through the night vomiting all over myself and the bed, then I flopped over onto my face again and I fell back to sleep. When morning came, I was woken up by two members of staff who were looking down at me as I lay on the bed, they grabbed me by the arms and then dragged me into the bathroom and cleaned me up, then they sent me off to school and I felt sick for the whole day.
When I got home in the evening, Cathy, a member of the staff, told me to go into the living room and to wait for her there. I walked into the room and, as I turned around, she was standing right behind me; she must have followed me straight into the room. At first, she never said a word, she just put her hands together and she began to play with the rings on her fingers. I looked up at her and I asked her what she wanted, but she said nothing, then she turned and locked the door, then she clasped her hands together and she swung them up into the air. I looked up and I could see that she had turned the rings on her fingers around so that all the sharp bits that kept the diamonds in place were pointing inwards and down towards me. And with a big grin on her face, she smiled at me and then she brought her hands down and slapped me into my head.
With the first slap, I fell to the floor and everything went black; my head went dizzy and it felt like my head was spinning. She followed me down to the floor with another slap into the back of my head and I felt her rings sink into the back of my head and my neck twisted as my head dug into the carpet. But she never stopped; she just kept slapping me and hitting me into the head. Again and again she hit me and I could feel spit from her mouth dripping down onto my face. I couldn’t get up, so I opened my eyes and I looked up at her; and each time I moved my body to get away from her, she would bring her hands back down and into contact with my head and the pain became unbearable. So I pulled myself together into a small ball and I waited for the slapping to stop, but it didn’t and she was using the rings on her fingers to do as much damage to my head as possible, knowing that when she was finished, no one would be able see the marks that she had left through my hair.
She continued hitting me and, after a while, I began to see red flowing inwards from the corners of my eyes and the pain in my head went away and everything began to go dark and fuzzy. And even though she was still hitting me and I could still just about see her hands raining down on me, one after the other, it didn’t hurt me anymore and I began to feel warm and peaceful inside. I felt my head as I lay against the carpet, but it didn’t hurt anymore, so I closed my eyes and I fell to sleep.
The next thing that I remembe
red was one of the nuns telling a doctor that I must have hyperventilated and blacked out at the top of the stairs, and then I must have fallen all the way down the stairs to the bottom, and that’s how I got all the lumps and cuts on my head. He looked at me and he thought it was a bit strange that I only had lumps and cuts on my hands, head and neck and on no other part of my body, but he was a friend of the nuns and staff, so it didn’t really matter to him how I got the marks. I can remember him telling the staff to keep me away from other people and not to send me to school for a couple of weeks until the marks on my head and neck went away, and they did exactly that.
I was able to stay in bed most of the time and the nuns gave me a lot of food and attention, but I was not allowed out of my room and I never saw anyone apart from my sisters and brother. All I could do was to get up and look out of the windows on the top floor of the house and I could see that the weather was getting warmer outside and I wanted to go and play. And once the nuns realised I was getting better, they allowed me to spend some time outside, playing on my own while all the other children were at school, but I never had any toys to play with. I had to make up my own games and I spent as much time as possible in the fields behind the house on my own, and I began making crop circles in the long grass by lying down and rolling around in the field. Then, when I was well again, everything went back to normal with them hitting me again as if nothing had ever happened.
At the bottom of one of the fields behind our house was a stream, and we would all go skinny-dipping in it, but we never told the nuns or staff what we were doing, as they would have hit us and punished us by sending us to bed. And one day, on the way down to the stream, Simon found a box of matches, lying next to an old jacket that someone had left in the field; so he picked the matches up, he put them into his pocket, and he soon forgot all about them.
The next day, while Simon and I were walking in the field, Simon put his hands in his pockets and, all of a sudden, he pulled out the box of matches. ‘Look what I found’, he said, while holding up the matches. I looked at him and I told him to throw them away as they were dangerous, and he did, but not before pulling all of the matches out of the box and striking them against its side. I shouted at Simon to stop, but it was too late; he slung all the lit matches up into the air and they landed on some dry grass and, within a few seconds, the grass went up in flames.
We quickly ran off back to the house and we ran inside closing the front door behind us. Then we ran up to the top floor of the house and we looked out of a window, and for the next five hours we both stood watching as one of the fields went up in flames. The whole sky lit up with the colour of orange from the flames and it went on all night, and about fifty people stood watching as the field burned to the ground. No one got hurt, but the smoke made everyone in the house cough; and for the rest of the week, all the staff and the children kept talking about what happened. We never did tell anyone that we did it and the next day we had to walk past the field to get to school and some of the field was still smoking, with little patches of grass still on fire from the night before. Simon held my hand tight and he looked up at me for reassurance, and then he smiled and shrugged his shoulders at me as we both looked straight ahead and just kept walking past the field, not once looking back, just in case someone caught us looking and then blamed us for what had happened.
After school, Simon and I took the long way home, so we didn’t have to walk past the burnt field, but the walk back took much longer than we thought and it made us late. When we finally arrived home, Sister Ann was waiting at the front door for us. I looked up at her and I held Simon’s hand tightly as we walked slowly past her, and once inside I dragged Simon along as fast as possible, so that she couldn’t hit him or trip him up just for spite. But as I walked along the hall and towards the stairs, she called me back and she asked me to go into the living room with her. I looked at Simon and I told him to run up the stairs and to hide in the bedroom until I get back, and then I walked into the living room and stood in front of her.
‘Sit down’, she said, and then she held up a hairbrush in front of me. ‘I want to brush your hair.’ I looked at her confused, she had never brushed my hair before, so I hesitated for a moment and then I sat down on the chair and I faced the wall. I tensed my shoulders as I waited for her to hit me with the brush, or for something else bad to happen to me; and sure enough, she dug the brush into my head and then she pulled down on the brush as hard as she could, pulling my head back as far as it would go. She hurt me, but I said nothing and she kept tugging at my hair until the brush came loose, then she did it again. ‘It hurts’, I told her. But she said, ‘Good, that means it’s working.’ Then she slapped me into the back of the head with the brush and she continued brushing my hair for what seemed ages. Then suddenly she stopped and she told me to go away. I got up and I walked out of the room and up the stairs to my bedroom; and as I walked in, I told Simon that he could stop hiding. Then I lay on my bed, crying to myself until I fell asleep, and all the time I was wishing I were dead, but in the morning I woke up and I knew my life would be the same as usual and I felt sad for myself.
One lunchtime, while on the way home from school, I stopped to play in the garden outside the house with Karen and another child; and while I played with them, a big brown car pulled into the drive of the house. It was Sister Ann’s man friend, the one who touched me in the back garden when I first arrived at Willows a long time ago. He got out of the car and he began to walk towards me. I stopped playing and I looked over at him; and as he walked up to me, he bent over and grabbed me by my arm and he began to pull me towards his car.
I struggled and I tried to get away from him, but he held onto me tight, he pushed me into the back of his car and then he slammed the car door shut, he went around to the driver’s door and he got into the car. His clothes smelt old and strange and he stunk of alcohol and cigarettes. I tried to get out of the car, but he had locked the door; then he turned around and pushed me back into the seat and he handed me a packet of sweets, while telling me to shut the fuck up and to stay in the car. I looked at him and he was so drunk that he had trouble putting the key into the ignition to start the car, but he eventually got the car started and he began to drive away, with me in the back.
But Karen had seen what he was doing to me and she began screaming at me to get out of the car, but I couldn’t. She ran in front of the car, ‘Lily’, she shouted and she banged her hands on the bonnet of the car, then she ran to the window and thumped the glass as hard as she could. I moved over to the window, I shouted back and I grabbed the door handle, but the door wouldn’t open Then one of the nuns came running out of the house shouting, ‘He’s taking Lily, he’s kidnapping her’ and she ran in front of the car and the man had to stop. She had managed to stop him before he drove out of the gates with me and she shouted at him to open the car door.
But she did not wait and she ran around and opened the car door herself, while the man continued to drive the car slowly forward and towards the gates. Still screaming at the man, the nun pulled me out of the car and then he stopped the car at the gates. He looked over at the both of us, and we could see that he was fed-up and angry with the nun for what she had just done, and because he didn’t get away with kidnapping me. He got out of the car and he shouted at both of us, and then he called the nun and me bastards as he got back in the car and then he drove off.
God knows what he was going to do with me; but for the next six weeks, he continued to harass me from his car, and every time I walked home from school, he would be parked by the side of the road with his car door open wide. And as I walked past the car, he would offer me sweets to get inside and to go with him, but I never stopped to talk to him and I would run past the car as quickly as possible, not giving him a chance to grab me.
Sometimes, he would turn up at our house and just walked straight in through the front door, he would be drunk and, as he staggered through the house, he would try to grab me or one of the younger
girls, and he would try to drag us away with him and into his car. But the nuns would turn up just in time and tell him to go away and then they would push him out of the house and lock the door.
He eventually stopped harassing me for a while; but as I got older, he started again and he harassed me for years, by pulling up in his car and offering me things to get in it with him. I never did, and I never spoke to him, I just ran from him. But I watched him for years while he harassed and talked to the older girls and offered them money, fags and gifts, to get in the car with him for a few hours, and some of the older girls did.
CHAPTER 6
I Want to Die
The smell of fresh air woke me early; it was summer and the air was warm, and as I lay on my bed I could hear the birds whistling, and I was daydreaming, pretending to be one of them. My window was open, so I whistled back at the birds, but it wasn’t the same and the birds just kept whistling; never once bothered by my attempts to copy or communicate with them. I looked up at the window and then I covered my eyes, wishing that I was one of them.
But all of a sudden, my concentration was broken by the sound of Sister Ann shouting at me to get up. I felt sad for myself and I wished I had been dead. I lifted my pillow and I placed it over my face and held my breath, but then Sister Ann came into the room and she pulled the pillow away from my face. ‘I want to die’, I shouted. ‘Good’, she said. ‘But you will go to hell if you do it that way.’ ‘Will I go to heaven?’ I asked. She looked at me and then she said, ‘No, you will be going to purgatory.’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘It’s not heaven and it’s not hell, only good people go to heaven.’ ‘Will you go to heaven?’ I asked. ‘Of course I will. I am a good person and I am married to god,’ she said, showing me a gold ring on one of her fingers. ‘You’re a bad girl, so you’re going to sit in a room all on your own forever, and you won’t go to heaven or hell, nobody wants you. You will have to sit in the room until you can prove that you’ve been good or bad, and then you will go to hell. If you want to go to heaven when you die, you will have to pray every day; in the morning and then again in the evening before you go to bed, and only then might you have a small chance to go to heaven.’
