Rock Me Gently

by Judith Kelly

  Rock Me Gently

  Rock Me Gently

  A MEMOIR OF A CONVENT CHILDHOOD

  JUDITH KELLY

  First published in Great Britain in 2005

  Copyright © Judith Kelly

  This electronic edition published 2009 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  The right of Judith Kelly to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This book is a memoir and the incidents presented are true to the author's recollection

  The articles reproduced as appendixes in this book are published with permission of the New Statesman, Daily Express and Young Minds Magazine

  The letters reproduced as appendixes in this book are published with permission of Ruth Norton and Marjorie Lamb

  All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 36 Soho Square, London W1D 3QY

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  eISBN: 978-1-40880-690-6

  www.bloomsbury.com/judithkelly

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  For Cate Lowes

  Contents

  Introduction to the Paperback Edition

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Epilogue

  Appendix 1

  Appendix 2

  Appendix 3

  Appendix 4

  Appendix 5

  A Note on the Type

  Introduction to the Paperback Edition

  On one Internet blog site, I am condemned as ‘a thief, a soapy sneak masquerading as an author’ in order to get my memoir noticed. This blogger, who has not read my book, believes that I have cribbed from many best-selling books written by well-known authors and therefore the truth of my story is in doubt. Apparently, if a newspaper reports it, then it must be true. In the New Statesman* (30 January 2006) I am accused of fabricating my story and that details of my ‘awful “memories”, have been plagiarised from other books. My dissenters have even protested that I never attended the institution I describe in my story. Others imply that I had left the convent before the incident that is the focal point of my story (Daily Express, † 28 December 2005). My publisher has given me this opportunity of replying to these accusations. I realise that plagiarism is wrong and although I do not wish to excuse my actions, I would like to offer an account of what happened.

  The seeds of my decision to tell my story were sown in the early 1970s following the discovery of the diary I kept whilst at Nazareth House convent from 1951 to 1953. In September 2000 Sister Alphonso, also known as Marie Docherty, was found guilty of terrorising the children in her care at Nazareth House in Aberdeen and Lasswade from the 1960s to the 1980s. This same nun had at one time been ensconced in Nazareth House, Bexhill-on-Sea, which is the home I attended as a child. My decision to embark on the story you are about to read could no longer be put off. The pressure of injustice against so many innocent children, particularly the two girls that died, had grown too great to be ignored and my determination to move forward and tell the truth became my primary goal.

  I had no idea that the final result would be of such interest to anyone - I was writing this book for myself, and for my two friends - and sadly, I thought there was nothing new to be revealed about the ill-treatment of children within religious institutions. But I was proved wrong. Yet writing my story was a journey through terror and horror and certainly after the book was published, reaction to it proved to be something I had not anticipated.

  It was clear to me even in those early days that while writing my story I would have to remain objective, despite the trauma of revisiting my past and the way it would affect me. I had to distance myself from the emotive content in both the convent and kibbutz chapters. Detaching myself in this way helped me endure the telling of my story.

  When I embarked on my mission I lacked confidence in my writing ability. I sat in libraries reading stacks of books in order to understand how a sentence or chapter is put together. I learnt how other authors use words, the turns of phrases they employ I learnt by seeing how the greats had done it. I slowly learnt what inspired me and what didn’t. So at first I began by a process of imitation making copious notes whenever a sentence produced an image that best fitted my childhood memory with the intention of later changing the language into my own words.

  As I progressed the many notes and Post-its stuck around my walls and computer grew. As did the many dog-eared books I had gathered in my need for guidance. And that is where, to my deep regret and to the immense pain of other authors or their representatives, I grew careless. As the years went by, I became muddled about which sentences were my own and which belonged to the masters of literature. This last sentence may sound immensely egotistical because how could an amateur author confuse her own dilettantish writing with the likes of Charlotte Bronte? I admit to being fully aware that similarities to Jane Eyre existed in my story. I hoped the reader would be aware of them too, thereby illustrating the many similarities between Nazareth House and Loworth School. In some respects, I was unconsciously attempting to contrast my life with Jane Eyre’s.

  Although my story is tragically factual, after receiving advice from an editor I changed the style of my story from factual to a ‘show not tell’ format. In other words I had to strive to make the reader feel as if he or she was watching the events by showing, not merely telling, the story. My progress was slow. The only certainty about my childhood is what I remembered. The evidence I painfully gleaned from the Coroner’s report about my friends’ deaths and the details from my diary had to be distilled to a few paragraphs. How to put them together? The chapters of my days on the kibbutz also required this type of consideration - here eight months had to be reduced to eight chapters. In both the convent and the kibbutz chapters, I describe a dialogue that never happened, yet the tone of those conversations remains the same - all accurate but never before having been brought together.

  I tried to remain true to the facts and feelings of my story, but if sentences have inadvertently been taken from another author’s book, whether fiction or non-fiction, then I am deeply apologetic to the authors and to my publisher and have amended those sections for this edition, but this does not alter the fact that the events within my story remain true. I am aware that some of my contemporaries from the convent contradict my account of events as documented in my story. However, for the matter of testimony there are also a number of witnesses who support my story. One woman’s reaction was: ‘You described the inside of the convent and the rituals of Nazareth House to a tee, but why did you dampen down the truth about the nuns’ cruelty?’ My response is that if we all had written our own version of those days, each account wo
uld have been diverse, yet each one true. If two people recall an event differently, does it mean that one is lying? Each of us remembers our time spent in the convent according to our varied circumstances, ages and emotional needs at the time, all of which makes for our own individual truth. Therefore, two children witnessing the same event are bound to remember it differently. And who could condemn any of our stories? As to the accusations that I have taken characterisations and scenarios from other books: I received written permission from each person in the convent and the kibbutz chapters and they will vouch that I have truthfully represented their personalities and the circumstances of each setting.

  My account of my days at Nazareth House does not attack the Catholic Church as much as it takes the nuns to task for failing to live up to what they preach. Only by facing up to the truth, by apologising to the victims or even by acknowledging what they did will everyone who attended these institutions be set free. The power the nuns wield could be an enormous instrument for good. It should never be used to conceal or stonewall when confronted with misdeeds or outright crimes. This is not just my opinion, but it is also that of some nuns and a member of the clergy who contacted me to thank me for writing my book.

  Since the publication of the hardback version of my book in February 2005, I received numerous letters from people telling me that my story had helped them speak up for the first time in their lives about their own childhood abuse. Knowing they were not alone in their suffering seemed to help them. The one review of my book that deeply moved me appeared on a website called Young Minds* (www.youngminds.org.uk) which is a national charity committed to improving the mental health of all children and young people. Written by Terry O’Connor, director of the Catholic Children’s Society (Arundel & Brighton, Portsmouth and Southwark) he understood the purpose of my story, to expose the hypocrisy within those institutions.

  I offer no solutions in my book, nor do I point out ways in which church officials or social workers could have prevented abuse within these homes that were located in the UK and many other countries, but I will admit that if the nuns had dealt with these situations openly, honestly and wisely, then so many people who still carry the scars of mental and physical abuse could have recovered and there would have been no need for a book like mine.

  For the future, I intend placing the diary I kept at the convent, together with all the letters I have received since my book was published into an archive.

  Judith Kelly

  April 2006

  * Appendix 1

  † Appendix 2

  * Appendix 3

  Prologue

  ‘Do you remember Frances McCarthy?’ She asks the question without expression.

  I’m sitting opposite the nun who abused numerous children in her care in a convent situated in the sedate English seaside town of Bexhill-on-Sea.

  The light is fading, and I cannot distinguish her features. From the sunset through the window, bright glints catch her hooded eyes, which look straight at me, sharp and mocking.

  ‘Yes, of course I do. She was my best friend.’ My voice is tense.

  She shifts in her seat, watching me. ‘Does it bother you that I ask that question?’

  ‘It doesn’t,’ I say curtly. ‘I no longer feel any guilt about what happened.’

  I know what she is trying to do, and I want to grab her by the shoulders and shake her until her teeth rattle. Instead, I sit here very still and remember all that I have tried so hard to forget.

  For many years I suffered the nightmares born of the time I spent at that convent. The memories that project across my mind are shared by the silent community of victims who once lived as I did, in a world that was deaf to our circumstances. And it all took place in middle England.

  This is a true story about love and caring among children in the face of extreme cruelty. It is my story, about the only two friends in my life who have truly mattered to me. One of them died at the age of twelve. The other recently said: ‘I’m still trying to get over my childhood, and now I’m ready to go into an old people’s home.’

  Chapter 1

  Let’s go so we can come home, let’s go so we can come home. I chanted the catchphrase to myself over and over as the Israeli bus began to rumble its way towards Haifa.

  It was August 1972, early morning and not yet light. In the waist of the bus sat a party of bearded Jews, Hasidim, like gnomes in black, with curly side-locks, broad hats and dangling fringes. I nodded at them but none responded; they regarded me with an air of haughty contempt. A large elderly woman shifted over in her seat to make room for me next to the window. I squeezed myself in. I hated the sensation of another human being wedged against my side. I could feel my own perspiration and was beginning to smell that of the others. I reflected that I was lucky to have a seat, and with a certain satisfaction watched the aisle fill up with people who had to stand. Sprinkled among them were several young backpackers with Stars and Stripes stuck on their rucksacks. College students, I thought, the types I would be mixing with on the kibbutz. I envied their cool clothes.

  I rested my face against the window. It had all been very sudden, my decision to come here. I knew I should feel excited, happy at the prospect of living and working with other young people for six months. It was idiotic to feel apprehensive. Nerves, of course. Life wasn’t meant to be easy.

  In the seat ahead of me one of the Hasidim read the Talmud, running his finger across the page. I watched him with envy. That man had a God and a community. He had a belief system in which pain and loss were explained in terms of an inspirational balance sheet, in which everything worked out in the end, and death was not really death. He believed he was one of God’s Chosen, whereas I felt like a digit in a random series of numbers. Maybe I should pray. But God would turn a deaf ear to me.

  I felt obvious and alone; the only one on the bus without group affiliation. Perhaps I could start up my own group - the Sisters of Reluctant Tourists?

  I squinted as bluish buildings and objects rushed jerkily past the windows, all stiff and brittle. Tel Aviv gradually fell away and the scenery outside the bus unscrolled itself like a speeding tapestry. We raced through hamlets of squat houses with corrugated iron roofs, which nestled among secretive woods of aspen and fir. Long stretches of trees with dusty foliage brushed the bus as it passed. And across a golden stubble field, small bands of farm labourers - male and female together could be seen tilling and sowing, clearing the land of rubble with the shallow blue line of distant hills behind them. Combine harvesters heaved yellow grain and straw, spewing it on to the land. Old men shuffled past, nodding their skull-capped heads. Young, richly bronzed, hard-muscled men in denim shorts stepped into rusting vans loaded with tomatoes.

  The talk and laughter of the other passengers faded away as the bus changed to a lower gear and a news bulletin buzzed loudly through the bus. The raspy consonants of the broadcaster’s voice made it difficult to understand what was being said. I examined the faces of the other inhabitants of the bus. The Hasid near me hunched his face over a cupped match, sucked the flame in through his cigarette with all his strength, and funnelled the smoke out through his teeth. Time thickened.

  As the radio crackled on, the other passengers lit up cigarettes from packs tucked into shirt pockets and handbags. Let’s have a fag and forget our troubles. We sat in a pea-soup fug of cigarette smoke until the broadcast ended. Had it not been for the large woman sitting next to me, barring my way, I would have jumped off the bus.

  The anxiety hit me full blast, without warning. My body was numb, inert, as I felt the slow, rolling pressure of panic building inside me. I could hardly move, hardly breathe. Things began scratching at the edge of my awareness, pulling, tugging at me. No! Not today, not here. I came to Israel to get away from these feelings. Just ignore them, they’ll die down of their own accord, I told myself. I must remain composed. I willed my mind to concentrate on the bus’s rocking movement. Let’s go so we can come home, let’s go so we can come hom
e.

  Slowly, slowly, the panic ebbed away, and I could breathe again. I wiped my perspiring forehead with my handkerchief and gulped in great lungfuls of cool air gratefully. See? I scolded myself. It’s not so hard, if you just try. I relaxed into the hammock-swaying of the bus. It held me suspended between the life I had left and the life that waited for me somewhere ahead.

  Suddenly the rattle of the bus seemed a threat from which I must escape, just as I had from England. I was a caged bird wherever I was. I believed myself to be free of all prejudices - I hated everyone equally. As if in response to my thoughts, the bus shifted down a gear and the brakes squealed to a halt. The driver gave a loud nasal shout of ‘Kiryat Ata!’

  That was my stop. Suffocating with nerves, I felt the blood glowing in my face. I grabbed my things and scrambled out, relieved. I was the only person to get off.

  The street was just a long row of squat, rust-coloured shops, like cubes of pink sugar, with green shutters over every window. The bus coughed away in a cloud of dust, leaving me feeling helpless and frightened, like an out-of-season tourist who had lost her coach party. I had not expected this solitude. I had not expected this strange abysmal town. When I had looked at the map of Israel, Kiryat Ata had been marked in quite large letters; I had been sure it must be a civilised place with modern shops, restaurants and banks.

  A voice in my head whispered: ‘You asked for it. It’s up to you now. You’re moving forward. That’s progress, isn’t it?’ But from what? Towards what? Did I really want to be here? Questions without answers, they spun in my head. I should turn myself round and go back to England at once, before I got caught up here. Let’s go so we can come home. Vainly I tried to recall another of Ruth’s catchphrases to calm myself - take the plunge, go with the flow, sink or swim - but stale cliches were no help. I was no longer a child. I was supposed to have accumulated things by now: possessions, responsibilities, goals, experience and knowledge. I was supposed to be a person of substance. But I didn’t feel weightier. I felt lighter, as if I was shedding matter, losing calcium from my bones, cells from my blood; as if I was shrinking.