Children Of The Poor Clares (15 page)

Frances Devany, born in 1950, described how Mother Anne would stay up all night sewing: ‘One Christmas I got a navy dress with green socks. I was so thrilled.’ A social worker who had worked in County Cavan at around this time also remembered that Mother Anne had divided up the dormitories into cubicles for the girls.

But even though the girls’ lives had improved in some ways, their punishments remained severe, arbitrary, and outside the constraints of the rules and regulations governing industrial schools. Many of them would recall particular incidents, sometimes when another child was the victim, which stood out in their mind, never to be forgotten. Nora said, ‘The worst time was when I was sent to fetch the strap after breakfast for Deirdre Ryan. I was shaking all over and I wondered what the girls would think of me for getting it, but what could I do? I remember Deirdre saying, “No matter what she does, I’m not going to cry.” “Oh” said Mother Anne, “so you’re not going to cry are you?” She walloped her and walloped her and we were all bursting out crying and saying, “Deirdre, please cry! Oh, please cry!” But she wouldn’t, and in the end she was let go.’

Several of the girls referred to that occasion, as they did to another involving Mother Catherine. They would mention it again and again, almost incredulously. Nora said, ‘Mother Catherine came in one day with a big box of sweets. She called us all together and told us to take a big handful each. Just one sweet was a treat to us and we just couldn’t believe it. The little ones were staring at her. When we’d all taken them, Mother Catherine said, “Now, you can put them all back again. I’ve made right fools of ye.” How could anyone have been so cruel to children? I’ve never forgotten it. None of the girls have.’

Elizabeth told us, ‘Mother Catherine, she had a horrible mind
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God forgive me, but she shouldn’t have been a nun. Ann-Marie and I had to look after little twin babies when we were about eleven, I suppose, and feed them at night. “Who fed the babies?” she asked the next day. I stood up and she said, “And I suppose you fed the boy?” She sent someone for the wooden spoon. I know I got sixty slaps because I counted. It was so unjust that I decided to run away. I got as far as the courtyard door when Catherine came running after me, begging me to come back. I said I would go to the police if they hit me again, and she said they wouldn’t. After that they only hit me when I wet my bed. But when I was thirteen or fourteen Mother Anne called me up because I had put a pair of stockings belonging to an older girl to dry on a radiator and we weren’t supposed to do that. She slapped me with the cane again and again. My wrist turned a horrible colour, yellow but no blood. It hurt dreadfully. I went up to bed where she’d sent me and lay there with my wrist out so that everyone could see how awful it looked. Mother Anne came in and thought I was asleep and I heard her gasp out, “Good God, what have I done here? God, I couldn’t have done it.” She sent up a girl to get me down to dinner and I got a second helping for the first time in my life. Otherwise the only time we got enough was at Christmas.’

Connie Fitzpatrick, born in 1947, went to the orphanage when she was almost three: ‘I wish I could know who I was or if I was illegitimate. It would put my mind at rest.
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Other girls spoke of Connie as being popular with the nuns and well treated by them. She told us she had loved the orphanage. ‘Mother Anne was fond of me. She always called me by my Christian name. They were good to me but I’ve seen what I’ve seen—girls getting lashed on their bare bottoms. Once a crowd of us were hanging out of the central heating pipes pretending to be monkeys and Mother Anne came down and caught us. She was carrying a pile of wood like as if she had broken up a box for firewood. She hit me with a piece of it and when she tried to pull it away she couldn’t because there was a nail stuck right into my hand. She pulled and pulled, and there was blood everywhere. Then she threw all the sticks down and brought me downstairs and bandaged me up and she was… kind of crying.’

Connie used to help to look after the younger children when she was ten or eleven. ‘Sometimes there’d be around twenty of them, five or six-year-olds. I felt sorry for the nuns a lot of the time. They had an awful lot to do looking after us.’ We put this point to several others. Elizabeth Bright’s reaction was typical: ‘But the nuns had very little to do. We did the cooking and the cleaning and we fed the babies. The only thing Mother Anne did was to make sure we were spick and span and she made us beautiful clothes.’

Maureen Harty was born in 1940. She was greatly admired by the other girls, because she was so pretty. She had, at first, refused to talk to us—’I would go out of my mind if I had to think about that place’—but later she changed her mind. Mother Catherine dominated her memories which were mainly of constant, pointless beatings. She suspected that this nun was jealous of her long, golden hair: ‘Once when it was all tied up in a ponytail, she cut it off by the elastic.’ Maureen said she was constantly nervous: ‘I hated to hear my name called for fear I’d done something wrong, and would be beaten. Once we had this white stuff to eat—I suppose it was macaroni or tapioca—and it made me sick. I was made to eat the vomit and was sick again.’ She said that in school all thefts were blamed on the orphanage children: “Come up to the front, you orphans, and turn out your pockets!” I knew all the time that we looked awful. We wore boys’ boots with a tag at the back.’ Maureen wet her bed until she was twelve, when she was sent to Dublin for an eye operation. ‘Everybody was so kind to me in the hospital that I stopped being afraid and I never wet my bed again.’

Although many of the older girls behaved like mothers to the younger children, sometimes forming a particular attachment to one of them, others contributed in their own way to the ‘reign of terror,’ copying what they had seen. Maureen remembered, ‘Some of them were very cruel. If you wet your bed they’d put you under a cold shower and beat you.’ Tina said, ‘The stronger ones beat us and bullied us. I was terrified of Sheila Delaney. She would suddenly hit out at you really violently.’ Tina was fond of Deirdre Ryan, several years younger than herself. ‘I told her to call me in the night, and I’d carry her to the toilet.’

The two youngest girls we met were the Ryan sisters: Margaret, born in 1953 and Deirdre, born a year later. Because they were so close in age they were not, as usual, separated in the orphanage. Deirdre thinks that they were born in England and that their mother, who was unmarried, went to work in a factory, leaving them with a baby-sitter. She imagines they must have been neglected because the RSPCC took them away, sending them first to the Poor Clares’ home for babies in Stamullen, and then to St Joseph’s when they were three and four. Two years later, Deirdre remembers, their mother came to see them. ‘It’s as clear as yesterday. She gave us sweets and biscuits and I was so excited I wet my pants. The nuns were mad. They took away the sweets and made me stand in a corner. We saw her again for the last time when I was seven. She was wearing a brown hat and coat.

‘Margo and me were always being beaten but we stood up for each other. I was real wild, and I used to jump out of windows and climb trees. I was sent to a psychiatrist because I wasn’t learning at school—I can write a little but I wouldn’t be able to read out loud. They used to clatter me for this the whole time, even when the doctor told them I shouldn’t be hit. But I was sick a lot of the time and when you were ill I must say they’d look after you well.’

Margaret was quieter and more thoughtful than Deirdre. ‘I think our mother used to send us sweets and things. Once she came to see us. I think I was seven or eight but the nuns never said she was our mother. I’ve always held that against them. The posh people would be shown into the parlour when they came, but our mother was kept standing out in the yard. I remember how cold it was. I think she may have wanted to take us away because the nuns said, “Do you want to go?” and we said “No!” Nothing was ever explained to us. I’d love to find my mother. I used to think about her a lot, especially at Christmas, but I wouldn’t interfere with her. After all, she might be married and her husband not know about us.’ Their refusal to go away, without any previous warning or preparation, with a virtual stranger, was hardly surprising. It happened with two other girls we spoke to: Mary McNeill and Martha Prendergast.

‘Deirdre was terribly delicate’ said Margaret. ‘She used to get Ribena to drink. I’d have to get her dressed in case the nuns would murder us for being late. Her fingers used to be hanging down with broken chilblains and yellow stuff coming out. I remember her once screaming out my name and when I rushed up into the dormitory two of them had her on the bed and they were beating her. They had Mother Benedict with them. She was a teaching nun—maybe they brought her over for a kick, excuse my saying it.

‘Nora O’Hanlon was very good to us. She’d hide us behind her so that the nuns would hit her instead of us. If Mother Anne or Mother Catherine called us into the workroom I would be holding on to the wall with fear. Deirdre and I were sent to a psychiatrist once. He watched us playing for a while, and then he asked us if we wet our beds. We were mad and said we didn’t. He said Deirdre was a bit wild, but that we were both quite normal.’

Nora has vivid memories of the orphanage; picking gooseberries and strawberries in the nuns’ garden—’We didn’t get given any, only what we stole’, and of standing outside the nuns’ kitchen savouring the smell. ‘Their dog Wopsey did too. He never bothered with our kitchen. The nuns had lovely food—roasts and everything.’ Like Ellen Neary, thirty years earlier, she described getting chestnut leaves, putting them into bottles with water and a few grains of sugar, then shaking it and drinking it. ‘We’d collect buckets of leaves out of the hedges and eat them like mad. I’ve often wondered since if that was why we were so healthy. Sometimes one of the girls would get sent in oranges and we’d fight over the skins. We’d put our hands down the drains in case maybe the national school kids would have dropped pennies by mistake, and if ever we found one we’d go to Sullivan’s or Hickey’s and buy sweets. We didn’t like the holidays much because we had nothing to do. On Saturday mornings we used to sit in the yard taking the white part off silver paper or shredding material—teasing, we used to call it. I suppose it was for pillows and things.

‘The girls from Cavan were always very clean. We had a bath once a week. We’d stand in a line in our knickers, giggling at the girls who had big chests. We wore big drawers that came down to our knees. Each week they had to be inspected before we got clean ones. We used to stand at the end of our beds holding out the knickers and shaking with fright, and then the nuns would call you a dirty thing in front of everybody. It was cruel, it really was’.

Hunger and cold were repeated themes, even from this generation of girls. Up until the late 1960s, after Ireland had experienced a decade of increasing prosperity, they were still rooting for food in the hen buckets and fighting over scraps of burnt porridge. Mary said ‘We were always cold. We weren’t allowed cardigans until it got really cold and I used to be shivering in my summer frock. When you wet the bed, you’d be made to sit on the toilet for ages in the dark.’ Ann-Marie remembered ‘We used to get dreadful chilblains, and we never had any coats or socks until it was very cold. There was a pipe in the yard where the hot air used to come out from the laundry. We used to huddle in by the pipes and one girl would be warming her hands while another sat on the pipes to dry her knickers.’

A local woman recalled that time: ‘I used to go to early Mass, quarter to seven in the mornings. Prayer has always been a great comfort to me. The orphans used to be there in the freezing cold without any socks on, just sandals and short-sleeved frocks, shivering and yawning with being tired. Sometimes they’d be kept waiting for half an hour if the priest was late. Sometimes you’d see them faint. The parish has bought the chapel now from the nuns and it’s always centrally heated. It breaks my heart seeing all the heat going to waste when you think how cold the little children were for so long, and how they were never there to enjoy it.’

There were always some good, kind nuns. A figure who glows through the girls’ stories from the 1930’s until the orphanage closed in 1968 was Mother Dymphna, working uncomplainingly in her laundry. Frances told us ‘Sometimes you’d see her staggering up the steps with two big pails of water and we’d all run to help her. She had to work so hard and we all loved her.’ Elizabeth said, ‘Mother Dymphna was marvellous. If I could get my sheets to her in the laundry in time, she’d have them washed and dried so that I wouldn’t get the strap for wetting my bed. She used to cry when she heard the children screaming.’

Other nuns, too, were remembered with affection, particularly one who came to St. Joseph’s as a substitute when Mother Anne and Mother Catherine went away for a few weeks. ‘She could only have been about nineteen. You couldn’t believe there was such a friendly nun,’ said Martha. ‘She bought us new dresses and underwear and we had a fry in the evening and were allowed to stay up late. She must have had them in debt by the time she left.’ Joan also remembered her clearly: “Where another nun would hit you if you were crying about something and say “Go and scrub the floor!”, she tried to find out why we were crying. So many looked after us: that was the trouble.’ Of another nun, Tina said ‘Mother Paschal was hard and cross, but at the same time she would give you sixpence and say, “Get yourself some sweets.” Once she organised a concert for us, and the Mother Abbess gave us a big feed afterwards.’

Mother Mary Joseph, the Abbess at the time, was often mentioned by this generation of girls. Anne-Marie: “You’d see her coming out of the convent, maybe going up the garden for a walk, and we’d all run up to her, especially if she was carrying anything to see if we could help her. The nuns would try to stop us because they were afraid we might tell her something—”Go off and clean the sinks or something”, they’d say to us.’ According to Tina she loved music and arranged for a few of the girls to have free violin lessons.
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