Rock Me Gently

by Judith Kelly

  ‘I’ll go then,’ I said. ‘Thank you for giving me your time.’

  ‘No, no. Let me show you the church. The Lord has been very good to me. He has allowed me to spend many years taking care of it. I cannot complain if now He feels that my work here is over.’

  She took me along a plain corridor with a series of alcoves containing garish statues of assorted saints. When we reached the church she turned to me and whispered, ‘Remember to cover your head.’

  ‘I haven’t got anything,’ I said with annoyance.

  ‘A hanky will do,’ she said, smiling encouragement.

  I fumbled in my pocket and found a small, not very clean tissue, which I laid on top of my head. Sister Mary looked at me with amiable satisfaction and opened the door to the church. Several small children who were kneeling in prayer turned to look at us. Sister Mary dipped her fingers in the holy water.

  I felt overwhelmed with concern. ‘Do those children board here?’ I was aware of the palpable dismay in my voice.

  She shook her head. ‘They’re day pupils.’ She genuflected to the altar. When she raised her head, she added in a whisper: ‘We have to use a good deal of discipline to keep order.’

  On our return to the front door, the nun at the reception desk glanced up at us furtively as she took another swig from her flask. Sister Mary opened the door on to the Hammersmith Road where, for some reason, she touched me, a hand on my elbow, and the touch startled me. Her fingers were cold on my skin.

  ‘I have to get back to the church,’ she said, guiding me towards the door.

  That unwelcome touch made me eager to get away, to be gone from the dark memories. She then shook my hand. Her palm felt dry and cold against mine as I held it for a moment, looking into her pale eyes. What was that strange sense of unity against the outside world that I felt with her? I was overwhelmed with a mysterious gratitude that I had survived the threat she once posed to my sanity and my life. I had been spared, and as I faced her finally, I bore no hatred, only pity.

  Yet if she had been candid, we could perhaps have built a mutual empathy in order to bury the ghosts, not the truth, from the painful past. Filled with sadness, I bent down and made a pretence of kissing her cheek.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said to her. ‘You can go back to your church now.’

  She seized my wrist in her sinewy hand and in a lowered voice said, ‘You obviously have no clear memories of those times and that’s understandable, for children forget very easily, don’t they?’

  Emotion rose up into my mouth, pounded against my skull. Rage. I suddenly felt I was being monstrously put upon, that the whole thing was an outrageous farce, designed to humiliate me.

  I looked into her eyes and, with a wicked surge of pleasure, said thickly, ‘Oh no, Sister Mary. You see, I kept a diary when I was here. So I shall always remember.’

  Epilogue

  12 July I998. I find their grave with the help of the cemetery officer. As I expected, there is still no gravestone to commemorate their short lives. It is simply a small mound of purple heather and weeds. Yet the memory of this place stops me still. Time shatters around me as I stand motionless amongst the graves. No one has been here before, of that I am sure. Time, like an ever-rolling concrete mixer, has left the graveyard an island entirely surrounded by DIY mega stores, video factories, fast-food joints and suchlike cultural boons. It’s just another high street facility. Where once it had been surrounded by green fields, it’s now a place, as Ruth would say, you’d not want to be caught dead in.

  I don’t know what to say, or do, or think. So I stand and recite the poem that Frances wrote for me all those years ago. The words are of little comfort.

  It is time for peace; time to give things a rest. Find a spot where I can shut my eyes and not have to revisit the places I’ve been. Maybe I could get lucky and forget I was ever there.

  I reach in my bag and bring out a small white stone I brought from the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem years ago. I place it on their grave.

  The poem that Frances gave me. Although I cannot think how Frances would have known it, ‘A Dream’ turns out to be strikingly similar to a poem by Avraham Koplowicz, a Polish child who was killed in Auschwitz. The poem is now held in the archives of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, in Jerusalem.

  Appendix 1

  Review of A Million Little Pieces by James Frey

  Kira Cochrane

  New Statesman, 30 January 2006

  James Frey, the bestselling American writer, does not like bullshit. We know this because, since the publication of his vomit-heavy addiction memoir A Million Little Pieces (2003), he has said so repeatedly in interviews. So intense is Frey’s loathing that he has the initials ‘FTBITTTD’ carved on his arm apparently standing for ‘Fuck The Bullshit, It’s Time To Throw Down’.

  All of which goes to show that you should never trust a man’s tattoos. Last autumn, A Million Little Pieces was selected by Oprah Winfrey’s book club, and went on to sell a staggering 3.5 million copies. Frey’s blank-eyed description of drug addiction and the recovery process evidently hit a nerve. But then, early this month, the investigative website the Smoking Gun published an article exposing many of Frey’s claims as false. In his memoir, for example, he writes of being with a school friend on the night she died in a train crash; records suggest that he wasn’t. He claims to have spent three months in prison after going on a crack-induced rampage in Ohio, but it turns out that he has only ever spent a few hours in jail, after being arrested for drunkenly parking his car outside a pizza restaurant.

  The upshot of all this is that a spotlight has once again been thrown on the memoir industry. In recent years, there has been an explosion in memoir sales and the genre now dominates the book charts (of the top ten general bestsellers this past week, eight were memoirs). In the age of reality TV, people seem to revere memoirs because they represent ‘the truth’ - unlike, say, novels, whose authors have in the past often been seen as natural ‘liars’. Today, even fiction writers are expected to make their work factually accurate; many novels are researched as carefully as biographies. Such blurring of fact and fiction has moved the other way, too, and in recent years memoirs have become more experimental, with writers such as Dave Eggers, Toby Young, Peter Carey and Joan Didion pushing at the boundaries of the form. This has led to some commentators suggesting that the ‘memoir’ label be replaced with the less wieldy, but more forgiving, ‘creative non-fiction’.

  Frey is not alone in having been accused of fabrication. Last year, Judith Kelly’s account of a horrific convent childhood, Rock Me Gently, was pulled from the shelves by her publisher after it emerged that many of the details of her awful ‘memories’ were plagiarised from other works. Augusten Burroughs, author of Running With Scissors (another account of a horrible childhood), was slapped with a lawsuit by the family he grew up with, who claimed that he presented them, erroneously, as ‘an unhygienic, foul and mentally unstable cult engaged in bizarre and at times criminal activity’.

  All this raises the question: do memoirs have any value if parts of them are untrue? Does a memoir’s value lie in its writing or in what it depicts? The answer depends on exactly what is fabricated, and how. In the case of the claim against Burroughs, the truth may well be subjective: any time you depict a real person, there’s a good chance they’ll hate what they read. In Frey’s case, however, the falsifications clearly aren’t subjective. You’re either with a childhood friend on the night she dies or you’re not. As such, the entire book is called into question, including its ‘emotional truth’ (a phrase to which both Frey and Winfrey have clung).

  The truth is that memoir can be an intrinsically exploitative genre. Descriptions of horrific personal struggles now dominate the bestseller lists, with Dave Pelzer the undisputed king of the genre. Such books tacitly compel readers to suspend critical judgement - which is forgivable if, like Pelzer, your mother made you swallow ammonia, but not so if your wor
k is an exaggeration. Frey has regularly compared himself to Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Kerouac, but when he tried to get A Million Little Pieces published as fiction, it was turned down - not surprisingly, because the writing is mannered, relentless and ugly. By publishing it as a memoir, however, Frey was able to exploit his readers’ sympathy.

  The real question that the Frey controversy and others like it raise is: why have these books become so popular? Why do people choose to read accounts of hideous experiences, regardless of whether they contain any insight? It is often said that people find succour in these types of books but, having had a fairly disastrous childhood myself, I have to say that the last thing I’m drawn to is a detailed account of abuse - whether child abuse, as in Pelzer’s case, or self-abuse, as in Frey’s.

  Given that our interest in these kinds of memoirs can seem pornographic, perhaps it’s divine retribution that authors such as Frey occasionally exploit our prurience. In the meantime, one thing seems certain: writers will carryon writing memoirs. Many of these will be cliched and exploitative, but others will be original and genuinely moving. On 6 February, for instance, comes Rosalind B. Penfold’s Dragonslippers (HarperCollins), which is an account of an abusive relationship in comic-book form. It’s a careful, non-sensational and enlightening work that consciously avoids posturing or self-aggrandisement. And as such, it is decidedly not bullshit.

  © New Statesman. All rights reserved

  Appendix 2

  Judith Kelly breaks her silence to set the record straight over her controversial memoir

  Simon Edge

  Daily Express, 28 December 2005

  Judith Kelly is keen to make amends. ‘I’m sorry. I really am deeply sorry. I’m sorry about the plagiarism. The whole thing from beginning to end is a big tragedy.’ Her voice drops as she adds, more to herself than to me: ‘Stupid woman.’

  In her best-selling memoir, Rock Me Gently, the first-time author brought to life the experiences of girls at Nazareth House, a convent orphanage in Sussex. She was placed there by her mother in 1951 and her book describes a brutal regime closer to a boot camp than a school, in which savage beatings left permanent disfigurement, letters from relatives were deliberately withheld and one girl was forced to eat her own vomit.

  The harrowing account chimes with charges against branches of Nazareth House upheld in courts of law. But rather than forcing apologies from the nuns, the book has stirred up a bitter controversy around Kelly herself.

  It began when it emerged that she’d lifted many passages, almost word for word, from novels including Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock and Antonia White’s Frost in May, as well as Joe Orton’s play Loot.

  Since the Daily Express reported this in August, the floodgates of criticism have opened, with Kelly being accused of distorting her account and even placing herself at the centre of events which she cannot have witnessed.

  Now she has broken her silence.

  At her home in Surrey, she admits there is no excuse for the plagiarism but insists the other charges against her are totally unfounded.

  Copying from other books, she says, happened by accident. She was a novice writer who was desperate to tell her tale but did not know how to do it. ‘It took me seven years to write. I read masses of books to teach myself and I wrote down stuff. I had piles of notebooks and Post-Its stuck all over my wall and I just got lost sometimes and thought: “Oh, did I make that up? It’s rather good.” I regret what I did. I regret that I didn’t notice what I’d done, that I had taken some wording from other books. If I could turn the clock back I would.’

  But the accusations against her have gone beyond that.

  Fifteen of Kelly’s former schoolmates have signed a letter to her publisher disputing her version of events.

  One of them, Phyllis Durham, contacted the Daily Express to say:

  ‘I don’t remember her but she got in touch with a few of us seven years ago and asked if we would consider suing the nuns for cruelty. We refused because it’s no good dragging up the past. She’d then phone and ask us about our life in the convent. We gave her lots of details, all in good faith. She has now used these stories but embellished them for her benefit and we are furious.’ They were particularly angry at Kelly’s allegations of sexual abuse, which they say never took place.

  Equally controversial is the traumatic drowning incident at the climax of the memoir. Kelly describes trying in vain to save her friend Frances by grabbing her hand - but another former pupil has alleged she was not even there.

  In a written statement, Catherine Cooney says: ‘On August 19, 1953, Janet Dover, Frances McCarthy and myself were swimming in Bexhill-on-Sea when a tidal wave came. We all lost our footing. Janet grabbed me and so did Frances unfortunately, Janet and Frances let go of me and they drifted away under the sea. I was saved by Phyllis [Durham]. Judith Kelly was not in the sea with us.’ To make matters worse for Kelly, representatives of Nazareth House have shown the Daily Express evidence from the official discharge book which seems to show she left the orphanage on April 20, 1953 - four months before the drownings.

  While taking responsibility for the plagiarism, Kelly is determined to fight back against the new charges: ‘It’s inconceivable to me that people are saying I wasn’t there. Why would I make it up?’ She is also frustrated that Phyllis Durham and others now say the orphanage was not so bad. ‘When I first spoke to them they were full of how it destroyed them and now it’s all sunshine and light,’ she says. ‘If they don’t agree with my story, why don’t they write their own? This is turning into a witch hunt. I don’t think I deserve it.’ She produces a copy of a letter from the Nazareth House HQ which volunteers the information: ‘You left in September, 1953.’ She shows me her diary from that year, which records her leaving the convent for a week around April 20, as described in Rock Me Gently.

  ‘In my book when my mother comes to see me, we all think I’m going to be leaving and this could be what happened. It is a mistake,’ she says.

  I wrote to the nuns in August, 2004, to give them notice of this book and I went to see them and left a copy of the manuscript. They never complained; they never said anything until now. I have heard stories about people’s records being destroyed or going missing and there were mistakes made.’ For our meeting, she has assembled a group of six old girls, some of whom have not seen each other for half a century. One of them, Marjorie Lamb, has a vivid memory of the drowning. ‘We went for a treat down the beach and that’s when the accident happened,’ she says, her voice cracking with emotion. ‘This man on the beach got us all lined up, to get us all out, and Judith was one of the bottom ones.

  ‘We were told not to say anything about it. If we talked about it or cried about it we got whipped.’

  Her only objection to Rock Me Gently is that it tones down the horrors.

  Another contemporary, Cathy Courtney, agrees: ‘My experience of that place was horrendous. It has affected my whole life. The nuns told me my mother was dead and she wasn’t. Those with no parents got the full brunt of it because they couldn’t tell anyone.’

  ‘It was a thousand times worse than Judith tells it in the book. It was a dark and devious time and there certainly was sexual abuse.’ Tracy Robinson says she was treated worse because she was of mixed race. ‘I’ve got scars all over my body from them but the worst scars are the mental ones. The nuns said black people had no souls and they used to say: “’Come on girls, call her nigger.” I had to fight for my survival.’ Phyllis Durham admits she prefers to put a happier gloss on her memories. ‘It was my parents who abandoned me - I can’t blame the nuns for that. We girls were closer than sisters and after we left we used to go back to that convent as a meeting place. My husband would say to me: “If it’s so bad, why do you all keep going back?’” But for some of the women, there is no getting over their experiences. ‘Some of us can’t forget it,’ says Marjorie. ‘I’ve had a hell of a life because of it and the anger and hurt will neve
r go away.’ Because of the plagiarism, Kelly’s publisher has cancelled plans for a paperback edition and she acknowledges she has only herself to blame. ‘That is the tragedy of this book - that I did something stupid like that but it’s still the same story. For some people I have opened up memories which are difficult to accept. I know that and I’m sorry I’ve done it to them.’

  © Daily Express. All rights reserved

  Appendix 3

  Review of Rock Me Gently by Judith Kelly

  Terry Connor

  Young Minds Magazine, Issue 76 May/June 2005

  Journey from a Frozen Soul

  This disturbing but moving ‘true story of a convent childhood’ is a far more composite personal account than the subtitle suggests. In fact, the writer spent a relatively short period of three years from the age of eight at a convent ‘orphanage’ on the south coast. This is in no way to diminish the terrible and enduring impact of this experience on her life but rather to draw attention to the more expansive nature of her affecting story.

  Memories of the convent resurface when, in her late twenties, Kelly comes across a diary and an old album kept by her during those dark days. These contain frozen images in word and photographs of her former classmates beside black veiled nuns on the beach or against the familiar background of the convent facade. Pictures which, reproduced on the book jacket, suggest a dreadful sadness in such tiny lives.

  The story of a haunted childhood is inevitably linked to issues of abandonment and loss, and bereavement runs through this book like the thread that joins the ubiquitous rosary beads. Kelly’s publican father died an alcoholic at twenty-nine: ‘I watched him down numerous bottles of his own prickly water, with their brass-bright depths. Then one afternoon he lay on the floor and wouldn’t get up.’ Shortly afterwards she was left by her mother in the care of the nuns. Additional information about her early family life would have been helpful in providing more background context given that these were the 1950s when institutional care was viewed as rescue and there was little or no understanding of the effects of separation.