by Doyle, Paddy
‘Do you like it here?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘sometimes.’
She and some of the other girls remarked on how I addressed the nun as ‘Mother’. They laughed and said they always referred to the nuns as ‘Sister’.
‘Do you ever get hit or sent to bed without any supper?’ I asked.
‘Only if you’re really bold.’
‘I’m always getting hit and locked in the coal shed. Once I got locked into the boiler house.’
‘The big girls get slapped sometimes,’ she said, ‘but not the little ones.’
‘It doesn’t matter if you are big or small in our school, you still get slapped,’ I replied, before a group of bigger girls joined in our conversation.
‘I got slapped once for not having the laces of my shoes tied right. I wouldn’t like to tell you where they slapped me,’ one girl said, laughing.
She didn’t have to. I knew.
When the rain stopped we played chasing again and in the middle of the game the nun and my aunt Mary emerged into the bright sunlight. I walked towards them and the nun insisted that my sister come with me.
‘Have the pair of ye made friends?’ she asked.
‘Yes, Mother,’ I answered.
‘And will you come and see Ann again before you finish your holidays?’
My aunt said that I would. As I was about to leave St Mary’s the nun suggested that I kiss my sister goodbye. I was embarrassed and very conscious of the older girls giggling. I refused to do so.
‘Sure he has a girlfriend across the road from me,’ my aunt said.
‘Is that what he’s up to? Wait till I tell Mother Paul.’ Both of them laughed but I was terrified that something would be said about my friendship with Ria.
‘Now he’s no good, Mrs Boyle, is he? He wouldn’t even give his own sister a kiss.’
The old woman nodded her agreement, exchanged a few more words and then took my hand to leave. I turned and waved to my sister, happy to have met her.
That evening before saying the Rosary and going to bed I went out into the back garden of my aunt’s house. Overgrown blackberry bushes stooped under the weight of fruit and the air smelled sweet. Having eaten some berries, I reached cautiously through a gooseberry bush and plucked some of its fruit, and though they were not quite ripe I ate them. The bitterness reminded me of Mr O’Rourke and the garden at St Michael’s. I rolled the fruits around my mouth, enjoying their taste and the feel of their hairy texture on my tongue.
The raspberries were less difficult to get at. I picked a handful and ate them. I loved the garden, its smells and the long uncut grass rubbing against my leg where my stocking had slipped down. I lay down for a few minutes munching a blade of grass and allowing my nose to be tickled by it which made me sneeze. My aunt knocked on the kitchen window with her ring and beckoned me to come inside.
‘Will you look at the state of you,’ she said and took me into the kitchen to clean my face, particularly around my mouth.
‘You couldn’t say the Rosary with a face like that,’ she said.
During the night I woke with a violent pain in my stomach. I was desperate to go to the toilet, but was afraid to get out of bed in the darkness of the house. Then I remembered the chamber pot beneath the bed which my aunt told me to use if I needed to go to the toilet during the night. I groped around until I found it, raised the shirt I was wearing and sat on the pot. My bowels emptied hurriedly and I missed the pot almost completely. The pain was intense but I could not shout for help. When it passed I stood up to try and see the extent of the mess. I could feel my feet wet from the faeces on the carpet, and when I lifted the pot up my hands were soiled from dirt on its outside. The smell in the room was almost unbearable, a sour sickening stench. I wanted to go to the bathroom to clean myself before my aunt discovered what had happened, but decided to wait until morning and try to get up before she did. I slept erratically that night, waking and looking towards the window for any sign of morning.
‘Jesus, Mary and Saint Joseph,’ my aunt shouted. ‘What is that awful smell?’
I was startled out of the sleep I had never intended to go into by her shrill voice.
‘Have you dirtied the bed?’ she asked.
‘Just a bit,’ I said, explaining that I had wanted to use the toilet during the night but was afraid of the dark.
‘I used the pot under the bed,’ I said.
‘You stupid child, that pot is for passing water. Get out of the bed.’
When she pulled the curtains open I realized the full extent of the mess I had made. My shirt had dried out and become caked to my skin, the carpet was hard where the faeces had dried into it.
‘Oh my Jesus, the carpet, the carpet! How am I going to clean that? I should never have taken you, you dirty thing. Is it any wonder your father and mother couldn’t put up with you.’
‘I couldn’t help it,’ I said, ‘it came too quick.’
‘Get out of this room quick. Take that pot with you, empty it and clean yourself.’
As I carried the pot out of the bedroom, I turned and apologized, offering to clean the carpet.
‘Get out of my sight,’ she said.
I stood naked in the bathroom washing myself. The door opened and my aunt watched.
‘Just wait until I write to Mother Paul and tell her what happened.’
I continued washing, unaware of my nakedness until she reprimanded me. ‘It is a sin for a man to be naked in front of a woman, you should have a towel around you.’
My aunt didn’t speak at all during breakfast except to tell me that I could not go out onto the avenue to play and that she was getting in touch with my uncle to arrange for me to be brought back to the school as soon as possible.
On Friday evening Ria came to the house to find out if I was sick. I heard her telling my aunt that her mother had asked her to call, since she had not seen me for a couple of days.
‘He’s going back tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow!’ Ria exclaimed. ‘He told me he was staying for two weeks.’
‘He was but the nuns need him back in the convent to serve at High Mass.’ I was afraid my aunt was going to say why I was being sent back and was relieved when she didn’t.
‘Can he come over to my house later on?’ Ria asked.
‘We’ll see,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to get him cleaned up and make sure that he gets to bed before the long journey. I’ll bring him over for a few minutes later on.’
‘Thanks, Mrs Boyle,’ the girl said, before the door closed. My aunt gave me a stern warning about how I was to behave in the O’Neills’ house. I presumed it was all right for me to go and, walking towards the hall door, I opened it.
‘Wait,’ she said.
She put on her coat and checked again in the mirror to see if her hat was all right. Then she took my hand and led me across the road. Ria’s mother and father wondered why I was going home so soon.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘You know the nuns.’
I sat quietly in one of the soft armchairs in the front room and Ria sat on the arm of it.
‘Will you write to me?’ she asked.
‘I will if I’m let,’ I answered. ‘I don’t know if I would be allowed.’ Mr and Mrs O’Neill gave me a glass of lemonade and some biscuits and as my aunt led me out of their house Mr O’Neill handed me a ten shilling note. My aunt suggested that she should mind it for me. It was the last I saw of it.
Back in her house we knelt to say the Rosary and as it was Friday, she said the Five Sorrowful Mysteries: the Agony in the Garden, the Scourging at the Pillar, the Crowning with Thorns, the Carrying of the Cross, and finally, the Crucifixion. When the Rosary was finished she brought me upstairs for a bath. She washed my chest and my back, my arms and legs. Then with the face cloth she rubbed hard between each of my toes. When I protested that she was hurting me she replied that she couldn’t send me home dirty.
‘Wash between your legs yourself,’ she said handing me th
e flannel. As soon as I stepped out of the bath she wrapped me in a long white towel and dried me quickly. She offered me a drink of milk and a piece of bread before going to bed, and as I went upstairs she reminded me to go to the toilet.
Early next morning my uncle called to collect me. He was alone and, judging by the conversation between my aunt and himself, didn’t really want to drive me back to Waterford. As they talked I got into the car and within minutes I was on my way back to St Michael’s.
Before leaving Wexford town, my uncle stopped at one of the larger shops and invited me to pick anything I liked from the shelves stacked with toys and books. I told him that I would like a football.
‘And what else?’ he asked.
‘An annual,’ I said.
‘Pick whichever one you like,’ he said.
I picked a cowboy one and handed it to him. He gave it to the shop assistant who put both items in a bag. On the way out of the shop he bought me a large ice-cream cone which I licked as we walked along the street. Someone bumped into me and the cornet fell onto the footpath and when I was about to retrieve it someone stood in it.
It was mid-afternoon before the car drew up outside the high grey gates of St Michael’s. My uncle pushed them but they were locked. He pulled the car halfway onto the pathway and switched off the engine. We both walked to the convent door and he rang the bell. It was answered by one of the nuns who had eaten with us on the day he had called to collect me.
‘Mr Furlong,’ she said, surprised, ‘and Pat.’ She showed us into the parlour saying that she would get Mother Paul.
In the centre of the highly polished parquet floor there was a mahogany table with six chairs around it. Everything shone and smelt of wax polish. On the wall over the beautiful ornate white marble mantelpiece was a large gilt-framed picture of a woman dressed in the habit of the Sisters of Mercy. Beneath the picture a brass plate had the words ‘Our Foundress’.
‘Are ye glad to be back?’ my uncle asked, his voice barely audible.
‘It’s all right.’
‘Next year ye can come again, you’ll be bigger and maybe you’ll enjoy yourself better.’
I nodded.
The door of the parlour swung open and Mother Paul came in to greet my uncle. The vindictive look on her face frightened me.
‘I’m awful sorry, Mr Furlong,’ she said, ‘I had no idea this would happen. I was sure the child wouldn’t have been any bother.’ She took a letter from her pocket and told him that it was from my aunt. ‘It just arrived in this morning’s post. The poor woman is distracted, God help her.’
She offered my uncle tea but he declined and, when he noticed I had not got my presents, told Mother Paul that he was just slipping out to the car for a second before heading off. While he was out, Mother Paul glared at me and through clenched teeth told me that I ‘was in for it’. ‘You are going to be a very sorry lad before I’m finished with you,’ she said, and would have continued had my uncle not reappeared. He handed me the bag with the football and the annual, then extended his hand to Mother Paul and said goodbye. As he walked towards the door I heard her apologize to him once again.
‘Go over to the assembly hall and give Mother Michael all the news, I’ll be over as soon as your uncle is gone,’ she said.
Thirty years later, as I sat beside my uncle’s hospital bed, I wondered if he could remember that day in 1958 as well as I could. As soon as the old man saw me he began to weep and every time I asked a question about my mother, his sister, or my father he avoided answering, saying simply that I would be all right. The conspiracy of silence had gone on so long that this frail old man would not break it. From whatever tiny answers I could coax from him it is only possible to sketch in the conversation he had with Mother Paul that day.
Mother Paul had questioned him about whether my aunt had said anything about me having nightmares. She told him that they were having a lot of difficulty with me talking constantly about my father’s death, but assured him that they were doing everything possible to convince me that the nightmares I was having were nothing more than bad dreams.
My uncle tried to stand up but slumped back into the chair. He buried his wrinkled face in his weather-beaten hands and wept.
‘I don’t know in the name of God what I’ll do when the boy is older,’ he said.
She reminded my uncle of the resilience of children and how they eventually forget even the most traumatic events and that in a few years it would be as though nothing had ever happened.
When he was with me in the parlour he had been clutching a brown £5 note. If I am still uncertain about everything that passed between them, I know for certain that as he began the lonely journey back to Wexford it was no longer in his possession.
In the assembly hall I was busy telling the other boys about my shortened holiday. I said that my aunt got sick which was why I had to come back. A small group of us looked through the coloured pictures of the annual. Cowboys on magnificent horses, driving herds of cattle or gunning each other down.
‘Is he telling you all about his holiday?’ Mother Michael asked.
‘I hope he’s not telling any lies,’ Mother Paul added sarcastically as she arrived. She asked one of the boys what I’d told them.
‘He said that his aunt got sick and that was why he had to come back, Mother.’
‘I see,’ Mother Paul said, her voice becoming more and more icy.
‘Your aunt was sick all right. Sick of you! Do the honest thing and tell everyone what really happened.’ She grabbed me by the ear and guided me through the boys onto the stage in the assembly hall. Threatening me with her cane, which she brought swinging through the air, she made me tell them everything. When I was finished she hit me across the legs twice or three times.
‘I’m not going to give you the cane this time, at least not as much of it as you should get.’
I remembered the last time she promised not to give me the punishment I deserved and worried about what she had in mind.
‘I want you to wax and polish the dormitory floor first thing on Monday morning, I would make you do it tomorrow only it’s Sunday. You’ll start immediately after breakfast. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, Mother,’ I said.
‘I’ll take that football and the book too,’ she said, stretching out her hand. ‘Mark my words, it will be a long time before you see them again.’ As I walked down from the stage she said, ‘I don’t want any more trouble from you, no more raving and ranting about hanging men. I want to see an improvement in your conduct and I also want to see you lifting that foot of yours when you walk. Any more trouble and you can expect to feel the full brunt of the cane.’
I attended Mass next morning but, now that I was no longer allowed to serve, I had little interest in what happened inside the altar rails, though I always gave the impression of being in a state of deep meditation and prayer. I kept my head bowed, not out of reverence, but out of fear of being recognized by the townspeople. I envied the boys who were serving for I always regarded it as the ultimate accolade. Now I was just another one of the orphans. Not all the children inside St Michael’s were orphaned, many came from broken homes or domestic situations into which they simply didn’t fit. Inside the school there was a clear distinction between those who had parents and those who had not. Those who did have a father or mother alive who was an alcoholic were often berated by the nuns. ‘Is it any wonder your poor father took to drinking? The poor man must have been at his wit’s end trying to manage you.’ I don’t know if any of the other children there had parents who had committed the mortal sin of suicide. If there were, then like me, they were probably kept in ignorance.
CHAPTER SEVEN
After breakfast on Monday morning, Mother Paul reminded me I had a job to do, not that I had forgotten. I was allowed help in moving the beds but not polishing the floor. Another boy and myself moved two rows of beds to one side of the dormitory before he left me alone. I got the tin of wax polish and, with a pie
ce of wood that was with it, splattered lumps of wax onto the floor at intervals of a few feet, before spreading the orange-coloured paste with pieces of an old sheet, too worn to be used on a bed and barely adequate for polishing a floor.
Spreading the wax was difficult. First I covered the area and, when I had finished, went back to where I had started and began polishing. It was hard, heavy work, demanding a lot of energy. I used a polishing block which was a large piece of wood, with felt tacked to its base. By pushing this back and forth and leaning heavily on it the floor began to shine. It took me many hours to finish the entire dormitory and by the time I had I was exhausted and sweating heavily. I got help to put the beds back, ensuring they were in a straight line, and sat down on the edge of my own, waiting for Mother Paul to inspect my work. I was dozing when I heard her footsteps and immediately got to my feet, pretending to be fixing the lid firmly on the tin of wax. She walked slowly up and down the dormitory between the rows of beds not lifting her eyes from the floor. I stood and waited for her to complete the inspection, hoping she would find nothing to complain about.
‘What is this?’ she demanded.
She held her fingers so close to my eyes I had to back away to see properly.
‘Dust, Mother,’ I answered.
‘Why is it there?’ she asked sharply.
‘I don’t know, Mother. I didn’t see it, Mother,’ I answered.
‘If you used the eyes God gave you, you would have seen it. Get the dustpan this minute and clean out that corner properly.’
She stood over me checking and double checking until she was satisfied the floor was clean. I told her that I had missed dinner because I was working.
‘It’s a pity about you,’ she said. Then she pointed to the dormitory door saying that I would go without supper too if I didn’t hurry.
It was during the following winter when we were all walking around the schoolyard in the cold under the supervision of Mother Paul and Mother Michael, that they called me over. I listened to them discuss how I was dragging my left foot and heard Mother Paul say I was bright enough to be acting the fool, and her guess was that there was nothing wrong with me at all.
