‘Lights out and no talking!’ Sister Thomas’s voice bellowed across the dormitory. I’m watching you, Reilly,’ she added.
I froze with fear. Why me? I hadn’t done anything wrong, had I? Like everyone else, I had to lie on my back with my hands across my chest to keep the Devil out, and I tried to lie as still as possible so that she wouldn’t pick on me. The dormitory lights went out, the heavy door banged shut, and the sound of her footsteps faded as she moved away along the corridor.
‘Are you all right, Frances?’ Loretta whispered from the next bed, but I was too scared to answer in case Sister Thomas came back. She got out of bed and came over. ‘Are you all right?’ she whispered again, putting a comforting hand on my shoulder.
‘I’m OK,’ I whispered, not wanting to worry her.
All night long I lay awake with fear, the way I imagine a prison inmate might feel after being moved to a tougher jail with a much stricter regime. In my despair, tears rolled down my cheeks onto my pillow, and it was dawn before I finally drifted off to sleep, only to be woken almost immediately, or so it seemed, by the sound of the bell for morning prayers.
I dragged myself out of my large bed and knelt on the floor to pray. Sister Thomas’s voice rang harsh and cold through the dormitory as she started morning prayers. I could hardly keep myself awake and chanted the prayers robot fashion, aware of her eyes boring into me. By the time prayers were over, there was only one thought in my mind. How was I going to make it through the day without getting on the wrong side of Sister Thomas and the other nuns?
CHAPTER 3
Josephine
‘Sister Thomas is coming!’ hissed Bernadette.
‘What mood is she in?’ I asked, knowing that if she was in a bad mood, then I was going to get it. In the months that followed my move to the juniors, she’d made it clear, on a daily basis, that she hated me. Still, nothing could have prepared me for what happened next.
‘We have a pagan in the convent!’ she screamed as she swept into the dormitory waving a stick. ‘Where is she?’
I cowered next to my bed, hoping desperately that she didn’t mean me.
‘Reilly!’ she shrieked, pointing the stick in my direction. ‘You are a heathen, a child of the Devil! Nobody is to come anywhere near you!’
My knees gave way. I began to tremble from head to toe. What did ‘heathen’ mean? What had I done wrong?
‘Please, Sister—’ I started to say.
‘Silence!’ she yelled, running towards me, her face crimson with fury. ‘The Devil’s in you, Reilly! We’ll beat him out of you now!’
She leapt at me, bringing the stick down on my head. The next thing I knew, she was chasing me down a corridor shouting, ‘Demon child! Devil spawn!’
She drove me into a room in the nuns’ section of the convent, where she began to beat me even more viciously. Not long afterwards Sister Francis and Sister Kevin came into the room and began to join in, shouting, screaming and raining blows on me. I lay hunched on the floor, while Sister Thomas slapped me across the face and the others whacked me all over my body. Soon after that, I passed out.
I woke up on the floor, alone. My head throbbed with pain, I was covered in red marks and every bone in my body ached. There was a noise outside the door. A young nun came in holding a tray. Giving me a nervous look, she set the tray down on a small wooden table. I raised my head and tried to get up.
‘Don’t come near me!’ she said fearfully. ‘You pagan! I’ll be back for your tray shortly.’ She scurried out of the room.
My head swam. What did she mean? What did any of it mean?
Nothing was explained to me. It was only later that I pieced it all together. In order to take Holy Communion, you had to be baptised into the Catholic Church. And if you hadn’t been baptised, you were going straight to Hell. So, with my First Communion coming up, the nuns had applied to my mother’s church in Omagh for my baptism lines, a certificate to confirm that I’d been christened. Unfortunately for me, although Loretta and Sinéad’s baptism lines were sent on to the convent, mine weren’t. Either the priest had mislaid them or my mother hadn’t had me baptised – and the nuns had obviously decided to believe the worst.
I was locked in that room for three days. It was a large, empty waiting room containing a long, polished wooden table with old-fashioned dining-room chairs arranged along the walls. At night I pulled two chairs together and slept curled up across them, shivering without a blanket or cover. The only people I saw were the nuns who delivered my food and Sisters Thomas, Francis and Kevin, who returned several times to ‘beat the Devil out’ of me. By the time I was dragged up to the chapel for my baptism, I’d begun to believe that I was evil. There was no reason not to, after all. The nuns were married to God, so they had to be right. I’d been born bad and I was full of sin, so it was my fault that this was happening.
In the chapel I was told to stand on a chair and lean over the font. I was tiny for my age and could hardly reach up that far. Mrs Montgomery, a part-time teacher at the convent, stood up as my godmother. The priest chanted and crossed himself, and the nuns prayed along with him.
Suddenly, water was pouring down the side of my face and onto my clothes. The priest pushed me forward, knocking my head against the font, and continued pouring water over me. The top of my dress was soaking wet. Now they were trying to drown the Devil out of me.
It was less of a baptism than an exorcism, and I simply didn’t have a clue what was going on. Two weeks later I received my First Communion dressed like a little bride, wearing a plain white convent-issue dress, a white veil, white socks and plimsolls covered in shoe whitener.
Sister Thomas had her excuse now, not that she needed one, because she’d had it in for me since the day we’d met. Everyone else in the dorm knew it. They heard her telling me I had the Devil in me and that I was going straight to Hell. They watched her order me out of bed to pray for no reason, and they saw her slap me and punch me and beat me with a stick. What they didn’t see – the beatings she inflicted when no one else was around – they could imagine when they saw the cuts and bruises on my arms and legs. She didn’t care who saw the wounds she inflicted, unless there was an inspection coming up, when she was more careful about where she hit me. Some days she’d walk past my bed, ringing the morning bell, and give me a look that said, ‘I am going to make your life miserable today, Reilly.’
But while I was the main object of her fury, she also had pets, a group of girls whom she treated less severely than the rest of us, even going so far as to give them pieces of fruit and other treats. I think they could sense that it would please her if they were mean to me, so they picked on me all the time. Some of the other girls followed their lead, and I found myself with only a few friends. Luckily, I wasn’t someone who liked to hang around in groups, but obviously I found it hard being picked on.
Mary had left the convent – she’d only been in for a short-term stay and had now gone back to her family. So I was really happy when my little friend Josephine moved up to juniors. I taught her all the rules, just as Loretta had done for me. She became my closest friend, and we spent most of recreation time together, talking about what we’d do when we got out of the convent. Such dreams were important to enduring our present desperate situation, and we really let our imaginations run riot.
Of course, we had our little arguments from time to time. Sometimes it irritated me the way she followed me around like a duck, trying to get my attention. I’d snap at her when she touched me under the chin to make me look up, and I teased her for ending every sentence with ‘you know’. But most of the time we were inseparable. I lived for recreation time and the chance to chat to Josephine. Talking was restricted for so much of the time in the convent that it was a relief to be able to babble away to my friend.
The winter of 1962 was the coldest in Ireland for many years. One bitter Christmas morning, on our way to chapel, Sister Austin took Josephine out from the line of girls.
‘The
re’s a family who would like to adopt you,’ she said, ‘but first you’ll spend the weekend with them to see if they like you. Now, come with me and get ready.’
My heart sank when I heard Josephine’s news. Of course, I was pleased for my friend that she was getting out of this awful place, but already I felt the pain of losing her.
Without her, the weekend seemed to go very slowly. Envious of her for being on the outside, I kept wondering what she was doing and tried to imagine what life was like beyond the walls. But it was almost impossible, so I decided to wait until she returned on Sunday night. Hopefully, there would be time for quite a few chats before she left for good – that was, if the people she was visiting liked her. Selfishly, I hoped that they didn’t, because then she wouldn’t leave the convent, but I hated myself for having such uncharitable thoughts and worried that I’d burn in the fires of Hell for them.
Sunday finally came, but by six o’clock Josephine still hadn’t come back. Nobody seemed to know what was keeping her. I grew more and more impatient as the evening wore on. Then, Sister Austin was called to the phone, and when she got back to the dormitory she looked as though she’d seen a ghost.
‘What’s the matter, Sister?’ one of the girls asked.
But for once the nun appeared to be blind and deaf to us. Zombie-like, she walked to the end of the dormitory and into the room where she slept, known among the nuns as a ‘cell’. Leaving the door half open, she knelt by her bed and started to pray.
After that, things got even stranger. The nuns on duty kept being called away, returning pale and tight-lipped, if they returned at all, and we didn’t recognise the nuns on patrol in the refectory. We weren’t told off for talking in line, and no one checked to see if we’d washed properly before we went to bed. Something big had obviously happened, but none of us could find out what it was. By lights out we were sure it must be something bad.
I lay in bed wondering what it all meant. Mostly I worried about how it might affect my sisters and me. Usually, someone would have found out something by now, even just by listening outside a door to the nuns talking among themselves. But the nuns were saying nothing – to us or to each other.
At least Josephine’s safe, I thought. The people who’d taken her out for the weekend must have liked her so much that they’d decided to keep her while the adoption went through. It wasn’t the way things were usually done, but I couldn’t think of another explanation. Although I hoped that she was having a good time and liked her new family, I was sad to think that I wouldn’t get a chance to say goodbye properly. How lucky she is to be free, I thought, as I drifted off to sleep.
The nuns remained preoccupied for several days, and still none of us managed to find out why. Josephine hadn’t returned, and I’d started spending my recreation time with a girl called Chrissie. Neither of us fitted in with the gangs that hung out during recreation, and as we got to know each other we discovered we had quite a bit in common. We were both small, we enjoyed Irish dancing, and we preferred the company of one or two best friends to hanging around in a group. I missed Josephine a lot, though, and talked about her all the time. Chrissie didn’t mind; she just hoped that one day we could become as close as Josephine and I had been.
Every recreation time was spent the same way, quietly talking and walking through the recreation ground. Then one day our routine was broken. As Chrissie and I walked along, arm in arm, our attention was drawn to two policemen who were striding through the grounds towards the main convent buildings. Everyone looked on in amazement until they vanished from sight around the side of the buildings. Silence descended over the recreation ground. None of us had ever seen policemen in the convent before.
We appreciated anything that broke the monotony of convent routine, and the arrival of the policemen had certainly done that. It gave us all something new and exciting to think about. Everyone was busily dreaming up theories about what might have happened, or might be about to happen, and we were even more intrigued when the bell for the end of recreation time failed to sound.
Inevitably, curiosity got the better of some of the girls, who began to move in small groups towards the main convent building and peer in through the windows. By now the only nun left in the grounds was old Sister Clare, whose eyesight was so bad that she couldn’t make out what any of us were up to. Still, Chrissie and I stayed where we were. Sister Clare might be as blind as a bat, but the other nuns could appear at any time.
The next day, during morning prayers, Sister Thomas asked everyone to pray for Josephine, who would not be with us again. I was pleased for Josephine. Obviously, everything must be going well with her new family. At the same time it was really painful to think that I wouldn’t ever see her again. Tears ran down my cheeks as I joined in the rest of prayers. I prayed for her really hard that morning, asking God to please make Josephine happy with her new family.
On the way to morning Mass whispered messages started to travel down the line of girls.
Someone tapped me on the shoulder and hissed, ‘Josephine’s dead. She drowned in the River Lagan.’
‘That’s not true. She’s been adopted,’ I said, not moving my head for fear of being caught talking.
I wondered who could have started such a terrible rumour. For a few moments I considered whether it could be true, but the slicing pain I felt at the thought that she was dead was just too much to bear. No, it was ridiculous. Josephine was safe with her new family. She simply had to be OK. I felt angry towards whoever had started the rumour. It wasn’t the first time a story like this had gone round the convent, but none of the others had been true, so why should anyone believe this one? As we moved inside the chapel, the whispering stopped.
The priest moved to the front of the altar and began to speak. ‘We are offering the Mass up this morning for Josephine McCann. Josephine is no longer with us. We hope she is in Heaven with God. Your prayers this morning will help her. I’m sure God has his reasons for taking Josephine so young.’
The priest went on talking. I could see his lips moving and even hear some of his words, but none of them made any sense. I couldn’t take in the fact that my best friend, my only real true friend, was dead. It wasn’t till Mass had nearly finished that it began to sink in. Josephine’s dead, not happy in her new life, but dead. I felt the life draining from my own body – and the next thing I knew I was outside the chapel and a nun was telling me to put my head between my legs because I’d fainted. I didn’t recognise the nun. She must be new, I thought, or one of the nuns that didn’t have much to do with the girls. I started to come around a bit. Then, as it hit me for a second time that Josephine was dead, I began to feel sick and tremble. The nun asked if I was all right, and I broke into loud sobs.
‘Josephine’s dead! She’s my best friend, and I’m never going to see her again!’
I started to panic for her. I’d never really thought properly about what it meant to be dead. An image of Hell, of unbearable heat and flames, filled my head. But Josephine was really nice; surely she wouldn’t be in a place like that. So, instead, I tried to picture her in Heaven, in a white dress, like an angel. It was much nicer to think of her up in Heaven, smiling down on me and everybody else.
The next few days were horrific. I felt numb, as if a part of me had died with Josephine. Only now, with Josephine gone, did I fully realise just how close we’d become. The things that had irritated me about her were now the things I missed most about her. I would have given anything to have her back. I’d always been quiet, but now I withdrew into myself completely, responsive only to the mention of her name.
Stories of how she’d died started to filter into the convent. Apparently, she’d gone missing early one evening, and the family she was staying with said that they’d thought she’d gone to get some sweets. Once they realised she was missing, the police, some with sniffer dogs, along with loads of volunteers, went out searching for her. Eventually, several days later, she was found on some wasteland by a police dog, her
tiny hand sticking up through the ice of a small frozen pond.
I couldn’t understand it. None of it made sense. Josephine had been in the convent most of her life; she was only six, very timid and used to doing exactly as she was told. I was sure that there was no way that she’d have gone out on her own, especially after dark. Where would she have got the money to buy sweets? And why had it taken the family so long to notice she was missing? If they cared for her, they should have realised straight away that she was gone.
One of the rumours going around the convent was that the family had gone out for the evening and left Josephine on her own. But even if that were true, I still couldn’t imagine her running away. She would just have been too frightened. I talked to Loretta about it, and she agreed with me – it just didn’t add up.
Later Loretta told me that one of the daygirls had read in the paper that Josephine had been found on some waste ground near the MI, about two and a half miles from where she’d been staying. As Loretta pointed out, it must have taken her hours to stray that far. How was it that no one had noticed her? But if she hadn’t run away, how had she ended up in the pond?
By the time of the funeral I had strong suspicions about the people that had been looking after her and felt sure they must have done something to her. She was too timid to go out on her own, so either she must have been so terrified that she’d felt she had no choice but to flee or they’d done something to her and then dumped her body. And what of the nuns? How could they have let this happen? Surely they should have made certain that the people who took Josephine in could be trusted to look after her properly? But now the nuns were saying that perhaps Josephine had been trying to make her way back to the convent. As if. No one in their right mind would have wanted to return to that place.
Suffer The Little Children Page 3
