Children Of The Poor Clares (11 page)

Rules
for
Industrial
Schools:
The
children
shall
be
supplied
with
plain,
wholesome
food
according
to
a
Scale
of
Dietary
to
be
drawn
up
by
the
Medical
Officer
of
the
School
and
approved
by
the
Inspector.
Such
food
shall
be
suitable
in
every
respect
for
growing
children
actively
employed
and
supplemented
in
the
case
of
delicate
and
physically
under-developed
children
with
special
foods
as
individual
needs
require.

The food that the children ate was clearly not up to the standard required by the rules. At the time of the fire, government grants came to 15 shillings a week for each child. A comparison can be made with the income and expenditure of a typical wage-earner’s family in the 1930s. The wife of an under-gamekeeper on Lord Farnham’s estate a few miles out of Cavan town, could easily have complied with the dietary requirements. At this time her husband earned £1 a week on which she had to feed and clothe her husband, herself and three children, pay the rent and cover other expenses. On their tiny plot they grew vegetables and kept hens. ‘I gave them an egg for breakfast, with bread and butter or porridge. Dinner was a rasher and potatoes and cabbage. For tea we might have home-made soda bread, brown and white, with butter and jam—I made that too. Or we might have boxty.
15
I bought a pound of steak for Sunday.’

The nuns, living in the convent, had a completely different diet from the children. Ellen remembers getting the smell from their kitchen: ‘It was so good, it would make you feel faint. You’d go weak at the smell of eggs and bacon.’ Hannah: ‘We’d love working in the convent kitchen because we’d get their food.’

The son of the gardener employed by the community often helped his father in the vegetable garden, whose produce, he said, was exclusively for the Convent. ‘He grew asparagus, beetroots, peas, beans, tomatoes, cauliflower and early potatoes.’ There was also a farm at the back, run by the steward. ‘It produced milk and potatoes and he kept the hens. The eggs would have been for the convent, and the potatoes for the orphanage.’ The nuns, he said with satisfaction, ‘always had a very full table in the convent.’
16

Loretta thought that the children got milk, but Hannah and Ellen said they did not get any. All three said that an egg was as unknown to them in the Orphanage as an apple. Although there was also an orchard on the grounds up on the hill behind the buildings, its produce too was exclusively for the convent table.

Sullivan’s store was the main supplier of foodstuffs to the convent. A man who worked there during the 1930s and ‘40s told us: ‘We could see what food went out to them. I’d say that the nuns ate the same food as the children: tea, bread and butter for breakfast, maybe rashers and eggs for dinner. They had a lot of potatoes.’

We have no data about how the nuns’ standard of living was financed, nor do we know whether or not the government grants at this or any other time were spent directly on the children. The Department of Education told us that it did not audit the accounts. We were later informed by members of the Order, including its Mother General, that over the years the children were subsidised by the Order’s own funds, but no evidence was offered to back up this assertion.

The titular, and legal, manager of the Industrial School was the Mother Abbess, but she appeared to have delegated her authority to another nun. At the time of the fire, as stated during the Inquiry, this was Sister Mary Clare. Before that it seems to have been a Mother de Salles. However, from the three women’s stories, it was hard to establish who was actually taking care of the children. According to Hannah, the finding of clothes was achieved in a haphazard fashion: ‘We’d put on whatever knickers were around, and maybe two left boots—you got what you could find.’ None of them could remember any health care: ‘You’d have to be dying before they’d notice you,’ said Hannah. ‘I remember going to the toilet and looking down and seeing lots of worms, but I told nobody. There was nobody to tell. We often fainted in Chapel in the morning, and then you’d just be put out to walk up and down.’

In the absence of adult supervision, some of the older girls left in charge of them were ‘rough and hard’, as Ellen put it, towards the little ones. It also gave one of the girls who had stayed on after sixteen, unlimited licence. Ellen and Hannah still remembered her with horror for her brutality. Hannah said that ‘She used to lash children until their skin came off’, and Ellen remembered how ‘She beat a child till it collapsed’. This older girl also used to make children who had wet their beds sit on a chamber pot all night. After one bed-wetting, they remembered how she tied the child to the bed and whipped her. Once she attacked Ellen, pushing her up against a door, and throttling her until she thought she was choking to death. Eventually, said Hannah, ‘Someone managed to tell a nun what she was doing and she was sent away.’

Each Friday night, the women said, the teaching nuns used to come over to the Orphanage to bathe the children, see that they changed their underwear and say prayers with them. Hannah remembers two or three children together in the bath. ‘You’d be wearing a horrid wet shift that someone else had already used.’

The uniform of the 1930s, as described by Loretta, consisted of navy-blue rough serge dresses with pinafores and thick black stockings knitted in the orphanage, and hob-nailed boots. ‘We had liberty bodices and our knickers were made out of flour bags. In summer we had a calico dress and sandals, but no ankle socks and never jumpers or cardigans.’ Clothes were apportioned in a somewhat haphazard fashion.

Rules
for
Industrial
Schools:
The
children
shall
be
supplied
with
neat,
comfortable
clothing
in
good
repair
suitable
to
the
season
of
the
year
not
necessarily
uniform
either
in
material
or
colour.

Department
of
Education
Annual
Report
1925:
Another
important
factor
in
shaping
the
character
of
the
children
and
creating
and
maintaining
self-respect
is
that
there
should
be
as
little
difference
as
possible
between
them
and
other
children
in
the
matter
of
clothing.

A woman who attended the national school on the convent premises at this time remembered the orphanage children wearing unfashionably long dresses, never having jerseys, always looking frozen and having terrible chilblains. Ellen, Hannah and Loretta spoke constantly of the cold. ‘We had no coats for years,’ said Hannah and she recalled how they used to freeze in bed. ‘There were great big windows and a cold wooden floor and five rows of beds. There was only one tiny fire in the place, and that was in the schoolroom.’

The women were conscious of how they must have looked. Hannah: ‘If your hair got tangled, they’d cut the bits out and never waited till you brushed it and it was always cut any old how. If a girl tried to put a little wave into her hair, they’d brush it back, as though there was something bad in you.’ Even the older girls were never given brassieres, although these were usual in the outside world.

Gifts of clothes and food were sometimes sent in for the children but were never, then or later, received by them. Hannah said, ‘I had an aunt in America who used to send us clothes but we never got them. My mother came to see us once a month and she’d bring us biscuits and sweets. We couldn’t tell her how we were treated because the nuns would wait outside the door listening in case we’d tell her about the cruelty. She’d never have very long, they’d tell her she would have to go. Then they’d take the sweets and biscuits off us. I once got a little bag from Bishop Finnegan for being the best in class. It was satin and covered in beads. They took that off me as well, and I never saw it again. We used to win medals for Irish dancing but they were used to make a crown for the Statue of Our Lady in the convent.’

Loretta had a similar memory. ‘I won medals for singing and dancing in the Feis but I never got them. They went to make a halo for the Virgin Mary.’ Entertainment of any kind was rare, although Mother Carmel did occasionally put on a play. But, for the most part, the children were nearly as enclosed and cut off from the world as the nuns. The games they invented for themselves showed a remarkable similarity down through successive generations. Ellen remembers cutting dolls out of paper, dressing them with silver paper and putting them into matchboxes. By 1943 they must have had hoops to play with in the concrete school yard because their burned-out shapes were found after the fire. In the summer they were allowed up the back into the convent fields. ‘There were swings up there. We used to drink chestnut water made out of leaves, crushed up in water with a few grains of sugar.’

Department
of
Education
Annual
Report,
1925:
Each
school
has
its
own
plans
for
brightening
the
lives
of
its
pupils.
Girls’
schools
in
general
have
fewer
outdoor
games
than
might
be
desired,
although
they
have
many
cheerful
recreations
of
other
kinds.

Many of the girls must have been in the Orphanage for ten or more years. Although the 1908 Act stated that detention could extend only from the age of six to sixteen, local authorities placed some younger children in this and other Industrial Schools. That is, they were not committed through the courts, and this is why there were children at St. Joseph’s under the age of six at the time of the fire. Before then, if institutional care was required, small children would have spent their early years in the County Homes that had evolved from the old workhouses, in charity orphanages run by religious orders, or in institutions for unmarried mothers. There was a notorious example of one the latter institutions in Castlepollard, Co. Westmeath, where mothers were compelled to stay with their babies until they could be fostered out or sent to Industrial Schools.

Industrial School regulations permitted children to return home for a week’s annual leave (extended to two in 1935,) and the Department of Education’s 1934 report noted that ‘of an increasing number of pupils going home on a week’s holiday, almost all return on the day fixed.’ Hannah’s widowed mother repeatedly asked if she could come home for a holiday, but the request was always refused. No reasons were given.

In those days, many of the girls were in St. Joseph’s because of the death of at least one of their parents, most frequently a mother, judging from the list of those who died in the fire. Hannah, the youngest of seven children, was three years old when her father died. He left a smallholding of a few acres of rough, boggy hills, and after struggling for several years to make a living (this was before the advent of the widow’s pension in Ireland) her mother despaired of supporting the family. Taking the four oldest children with her, she went to live with her father. He could not take the three youngest girls, so Hannah’s mother had them committed to St. Joseph’s. The sisters rarely saw each other because they were kept apart in different groups, according to age.

Loretta McMahon never knew who her parents were, and she had spent much of her life compulsively searching for her roots. A nun told her that she was about five years old when she came to St Joseph’s, that she was illegitimate and was considered dull and backward. Like many who went through this and other institutions, she had no birth certificate. She found this to be a constant obstacle, whether for obtaining a passport, establishing pension rights or a claim to her home. Her attitude to her childhood was that however bad it was in the orphanage—’like Charles Dickens’, life outside in those times was harsh too. ‘But in there,’ she said ‘it was life under duress.’