Children Of The Poor Clares (16 page)

Connie thinks it was this Abbess who introduced the ‘godparent’ system. She was given a woman she called Auntie Dot, who used to visit her sometimes on Sundays: ‘I used to think perhaps she was my mother.’ Margaret Ryan was given a godmother who wrote to her every week, and sent her sweets and comics. Gradually the children were coming into contact with the outside world. Many went on holiday to relatives, and they were allowed to visit the homes of girls who went to the national school.

Christmas and the annual outing remained the high spots of each year. ‘Christmas was really great,’ recalled Nora. ‘We sang at midnight Mass and we had rashers and eggs for breakfast. They were cooked the night before, but we didn’t mind. Then we had a big dinner served by the nuns who waited on us and the priests came in too. They really gave us the best: we had turkey, ham, plum pudding, biscuits and sweets. At three o’clock we got our parcels. Santa Claus called out our names. He really looked the thing up on the stage. We all got presents and tiny things out of a huge cracker.’ ‘There were plenty of children in the town who didn’t have half what we did at Christmas,’ said Margaret. ‘And at Easter Mrs Hickey, who had the sweet shop across the road, made a huge big egg out of plaster of Paris and it would be full of little eggs.’

In the summer was the outing. ‘We might go to Virginia or Gormanstown’, said Nora. ‘We’d be given a classroom in some school where we’d eat our sandwiches. Once or twice a year the boy scouts would come in from the town and do a play for us. We loved that.’ In 1961 the Poor Clares had their Centenary Jubilee which was attended by President, Eamon de Valera. The celebrations included an entertainment provided by the children, and a dinner.

In 1957 the Poor Clare nuns opened a free secondary school,
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built on their premises. It would, therefore, have been possible for the orphanage children to have continued their education until their committal orders expired. This might have given them a chance of escaping a future as domestic servants. But many of this generation of girls were actually kept out of primary school to work in the convent, or to look after the babies and little ones during the day and feed them at night—which meant that even if they were still in school, they were often too tired to study. Of the thirteen girls we interviewed who were born after 1945, four were illiterate when they left St Joseph’s—though two had since learned to read and write, and two other girls told us that they were the only orphanage girls ever to be sent to the secondary school.

The Department of Education’s Industrial School Inspectors—required by the 1908 Act to make the minimum of one visit a year—were the children’s most important link with the state authority which had ordered their detention. The Inspector’s visits often stood out in their memories. The words of Sally Johnson who left in 1955 echoed those of the pre-fire era: ‘When the state inspectors came you got a pudding—blancmange. Oh, there was great excitement over that! They’d put counterpanes on the beds and the place was cleaned even more’.

The younger girls told us of the visits of Dr. Anna McCabe. She was the Schools’ Medical Inspector for many years and had given evidence at the inquiry into the fire, describing St. Joseph’s as ‘one of the good schools’. Ann-Marie, remembering a visit, when she was about ten: ‘I was after getting a hiding and I was covered in marks. The doctor came unexpectedly and we all had to take off our clothes to be examined. Mother Catherine suddenly pulled me out of the line. “Come here, Ann-Marie,” she said. That was the only time she called me that. They never used our Christian names, and if ever they did you could see a child getting all excited—it did so lift us to be called by our names. Anyway, on this occasion Mother Catherine took me into the store-room and drummed it into me that I scratched myself on the hedge. The doctor said, “My goodness, what happened? What were you up to?” and I started to cry when I told her that I scraped myself. I had no intention of telling her the truth because if I did I was going to get another beating.’

Annual
Report
of
the
Department
of
Education,
1959:
‘The
great
majority
of
the
children
under
detention
are
committed
to
the
schools
on
the
grounds
of
lack
of
proper
guardianship,
and
the
efforts
of
the
school
authorities
are
directed
towards
providing,
as
far
as
possible,
a
substitute
for
the
family
life
 . . .
’

‘Lack of proper guardianship’ is a legal term. There were conflicting opinions over the years as to whether it was the Manager of the Industrial School or the Department of Education that was
in
loco
parentis
for committed children. It seems to have been in the mid-50s that the laws of the land were being broken, as well as Industrial School regulations. They were broken in three specific ways, all of them injurious to the children, by the people into whose care they had been given for this ‘proper guardianship’. Firstly, they were taken out of school before the minimum leaving age—and one must bear in mind that truancy was a statutory offence for which children could be committed to an Industrial School. Secondly, they were sent away to work both below the school leaving age, and before their committal term was up. Thirdly, several of the girls were sent to a non-certified, extra-legal reformatory.

Cissie Meehan entered the orphanage aged four. ‘I was delicate so I didn’t get much schooling. I had an awful cough and was in bed a lot. I don’t think I went to school much after I was nine. They probably thought I had missed too much, so they put me to work in the nuns’ kitchen—if you worked there you got their food.’ Ann-Marie remembered Cissie as someone who had no-one and who was given a harder time than most, both in the way she was beaten—sometimes just for looking grubby—and in the way she was worked. ‘We used to feel sorry for her when we’d see her all greasy-looking, carrying two big slop buckets for the pigs up the iron stairs from the nuns’ kitchen and then up more steps to the farm. It can’t have done her much good if she was delicate.’ When she was thirteen, Cissie was sent away to work as a domestic in Dublin.

Joan was sent out to work at the age of twelve. She maintained she was always brought back to the orphanage when the medical inspector’s visit was imminent, in case her absence would be noted. It was, indeed, contrary to the regulations for a child to be away except under licence, and we were to learn later that no licences for this period were issued. She said to us that she had always told Dr. McCabe that the marks on her had been made by Mother Catherine, although the other girls were afraid to do so.

The threat of being sent to the Gloucester Street laundry ‘reformatory’ in Dublin hung like a dark shadow over all the girls. Several spoke of Therese Dwyer. Joan: ‘She had brains to burn. She had a terrible time at the reformatory’. Ann-Marie: ‘Therese was so clever that it must have been frustration with her that made her difficult. Phil O’Brien was sent there, too. She was a bit wild and she tried to run out of the orphanage at night. Diana Sweetman as well—she was a lovely-looking coloured girl. She’d pulled off Mother Anne’s head-dress when she was being hit, then she got the strap off Mother Anne and beat her down the stairs. We thought it was the greatest thing we’d ever seen.’

Anne-Marie remembered Angela Moran. ‘Mother Scholastica really loved her ever since she was brought into the orphanage as a baby. She used to bring Angela up half her own dinner, and she’d give the rest of us a little something and say, “Aren’t they feeding you at all?” Angela and a couple of other older girls sneaked out one night. They were found out and sent to the reformatory. I’d say it broke Mother Scholastica’s heart.’ According to Tina, Angela escaped and returned to St. Joseph’s. ‘We were all in the laundry with Mother Dymphna and it was like an escape was being hatched—Angela was going off to England. I remember her saying that it was horrible at Gloucester Street and they had to wash sanitary towels.’ This happened around 1963.

A woman who grew up in Cavan told us that her mother worried about her walking home at night because of the soldiers from the barracks in the town who used to hang around the Industrial School’s walls in the hope of the girls getting out.

The 1908 Act provided for the removal, on summary conviction, to a certified reformatory school, of Industrial School children over the age of twelve who ‘escaped’, or who were found ‘guilty of a serious and wilful breach of the rules of the school, or of inciting other inmates of the school to such a breach’ or, at the order of the Minister for Education, of children ‘found to be exercising an evil influence over the other children.’
30
The laundry-reformatory to which the Cavan girls in later years were sent was run by Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge, in Gloucester Street, Dublin. Transferring them there was itself in breach of the law, because the institution was not certified and was thus outside the provisions of the act.

Despite the tragedy in 1943, fire drill was still not carried out regularly. Some girls could remember it happening once, others not at all. Ann-Marie said, ‘We were told that if a fire started at night we were to go straight down and out a certain door. They showed us where the keys were at night. There were other exits, and there was a fire escape, but the doors were always locked and not like the ones you can bang open. Two years before I left, they put in fire extinguishers. There were bolts on all our dormitory doors and they were locked on the inside so, in a fire, we could have unlocked them. The nursery with the bigger babies was locked from the outside. The younger ones were upstairs with us so that we could feed them. We never had fire drill.’

Three of the girls spoke in a matter-of-fact way about hearing supernatural sounds which they associated with the fire tragedy. Ann-Marie—’We used to hear footsteps running around upstairs in the attic at night. Like children running. We knew that no-one could be up there, but we didn’t think of it as anything special. And there was one place where you could often hear screaming. Sometimes you’d almost hear the footsteps coming down on top of you at night.’ Martha: ‘They had to get a Mass said in the place after Mother Anne and Mother Catherine heard the noises.’

The figure of Miss O’Reilly flickered, peripherally, through their memories. The recommendations of the Tribunal of Inquiry had been ignored. Ann-Marie: ‘When the nuns went on retreats she’d be left in charge of us. Even then I used to think it was a bit strange after what had happened during the fire.’

The girls remembered her as both mad and frightening. Ann-Marie: ‘She’d spend hours going round the Seven Stations of the Cross in the chapel, praying. If she saw you talking in Mass at the Cathedral, she’d reach out and hit you from behind with a cane. Sometimes she’d pull you out into a side aisle and give you a real beating—it did so shame us in front of the people. But she really was a bit gone in the head.’

Tina remembered her once pulling out a lump of a girl’s hair for talking during Rosary. ‘She used to torture herself by putting tight curlers into her hair and by soaking her feet in scalding water—she gave us sixpence to bring it up for her. And she was always going on about hell fire and the devil. “Three times the flames will come for you! And the devil will be waiting for you, and the flames will devour you!”‘

Once a year they were taken to Cullies Cemetery outside the town to say prayers over the mass grave of the thirty-six victims of the fire.

In the mid-60s, Mother Anne and Mother Catherine were replaced by Mother Theresa and Mother Cecilia, and conditions were easier in the short time remaining before the Industrial School was closed in 1968. As Margaret said, ‘They made things better for us. But they always separated the ones with parents from the ones without, in the way they treated us. If your father was someone, you’d get more. Theresa used to hit us but she was good all the same. We were allowed to watch the telly. Mother Cecilia would buy us ice pops on Sundays and we’d get marmalade with our bread and margarine for breakfast. On our birthdays she would make us a cake with candles on it and give us a holy picture and two sweets in an envelope. I suppose there were too many of us to give us love. I think the nuns honestly believed that they were doing good and would make us better by beating us. “If it wasn’t for us, you’d all be on the side of the road,” they’d often say.’

Some images the girls evoked of their childhood and adolescence dominated others: the perpetual praying and scrubbing and polishing; rooting in the hen bucket for scraps of food; small, cold feet standing in the dark on marble floors; the frightened efforts to dry wet knickers and sheets; the threat of the reformatory; the constant and casual brutality; the absence of male figures to replace fathers and brothers; the sisterly love and companionship; the loyalty to the nuns which made Cissie Meehan ask that we should tell the good as well as the bad. And, for many, a terrible sense of isolation relieved momentarily and infrequently by small acts of kindness.