Children Of The Poor Clares (20 page)

‘But I was rough too. I’d kick and pull hair if I was attacked by one of the other girls. I was always in trouble and I always got blamed. I seem to have been hated by all the girls and by the nuns. I know that most mothers will smack a child sometimes. The trouble with the nuns was that they didn’t know when to stop. Sometimes when they’d been beating you, you’d want to throw your arms around them and beg them to forgive you.

‘They’d tell us that if we didn’t behave we would be sent away to Gloucester Street, to the reformatory. When I was ten or eleven I was taken there one day by Mother Anne and another nun in a car. I was terrified out of my life that they were going to leave me there. I can see it all clearly as if it was yesterday. It reminds me of a scene in a film. All the girls had their hair chopped short like as if they were boys. I’m not joking, but they were wearing sacks—anyway, the stuff you make sacks out of. They were working so hard at the laundry that the sweat was coming down their faces and there was steam everywhere.

‘Mother Anne said to me “I don’t want you to talk to Philomena O’Brien in case you disturb her”—she was one of the older girls they’d sent there—but I didn’t see her anywhere. I’d say they had her locked away. We sat and had tea with the nuns and I remember them talking and saying that Phil was unsettled.

‘I got my Primary Certificate when I was only nine. We got a good education really. When I was ten I had to look after eight babies. We had them in the dormitories so that we could feed them when they cried. I would be up four times in the night and I used to be so tired I couldn’t do my homework. I was supposed to continue into the secondary school but I had an accident, climbing up to get a tennis ball on a low roof. I fell off and broke my arm. We’d been playing in a part of the yard where we weren’t supposed to go and they told me I wouldn’t be allowed go on with school because of my disobedience. I was put in the kitchen for about six weeks, then a nun came who knew shorthand so they decided to let a few of us do a commercial course in the secondary school. We did Pitman’s and I got my first exam but then that nun went and another came who could only do Greg’s
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and got us confused so I was taken out of school again and put into the kitchen. We’d often be taken out of school for a while to do a job until someone else became available.

‘There is something I’m still ashamed of. I was twelve or thirteen when I was taken off the commercial course to look after five tinker children. They used to dirty themselves and it was my job to clean them. I used to thump the oldest, a boy, aged five or six, because he used to dirty his pants. He was frightened of me, I know.

‘I left the orphanage when I was fifteen. I was sent to work for titled people, first for £1 and then £1. 10s. a week as a kitchen-parlourmaid. I served at table too and had different uniforms and a cap just like
Upstairs,
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ow
nstair
s
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. I was only allowed out for Mass—you never saw such an upright life!

‘I had an awful lot of jobs after that. I worked for a cousin of the Abbess, Mary Joseph. She sent her money for me to go to a commercial course twice a week. But the cousin wouldn’t let me go because she wanted me to baby-sit. When I met the Abbess later she said she was disappointed in me, but I couldn’t tell her that I hadn’t been allowed to go. I was very lonely most of the time. I never ate with any of the families—I wouldn’t have felt it was right for me, even if they’d asked me—and I mostly had to use the outdoor toilet. I wasn’t allowed to wash in the bathroom so I used the kitchen sink.

‘I met Dermot at a dance when I was sixteen. We’d only been going out for two or three weeks when he invited me home and from then on his mother was wonderful to me. We got engaged but I’d say to myself “I don’t want to get married; I don’t want to settle down.” I could never have any kind of sensible conversation with him because I was so ignorant and so I’d make sure I’d never say too much. I was afraid I’d make a fool of myself. I used to feel sick with tension. I now realise the nuns shouldn’t be given the care of children, but I’m glad I was brought up that way rather than somewhere where the father would be cruel to the children when he had too much to drink.

‘When Dermot was drinking, after we got married, I used to lie awake crying, thinking that bad and all as the convent had been it was better than this. I used to get up in the morning to change the children, then I’d give them a bottle and I’d take a pill and go back to sleep. I used to wish that I could wake up and find myself back in the orphanage with all the girls around me again.’

Ann-Marie was twenty-seven when we met, though we had to work it out for her. Like several of the girls, she could not recall her age off-hand, and looked even younger. A subdued, good-looking young woman, she was wearing jeans and a sweater and no make-up. She had four children. Her husband, a skilled mechanic, was an intense, emotional man. They had been married for ten years and were living in a new housing estate in Dublin. She told us most of her story in one long session with her husband present, and we gradually realised that she had never talked to him about life in the orphanage. We wondered why this was. She replied that he had never really asked her. He added that there was an orphanage
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in the town where he had been brought up, and people spoke about the boys as though they were sub-human. ‘You didn’t say that someone was an orphan, you said someone was “only” an orphan. I couldn’t understand a lot of her ways in the beginning, or how she could be so ignorant—incapable of holding any kind of conversation. For example, she’d never heard of Hitler. But in Ireland, where the church was concerned, you didn’t question.’

Ann-Marie later told us that after our long talk she was physically sick for two days.

To the world she presented a picture of confidence and competence. She was a good housekeeper, a loving mother, and she took care of the family finances. When she went out to work again, as a cleaner, soon after we met, she negotiated wages well over the local rates. Her employer described her as ‘well-trained’. She was also teaching herself to type. Although she had lived on the estate for three years, there was only one woman there with whom she was friendly. Previously, when neighbours had learned of her origins, they looked down on her.

The year before we met she had chanced to meet Mother Catherine. ‘She had gone so thin she was almost unrecognisable. She seemed pleased to see me although I was abrupt with her. I don’t believe it occurred to her that I could have remembered what she had done to me. Maybe she had even forgotten herself. I think that when they went back to the ordinary life of a nun, they must have started to think about the things they had done.’

The last time we saw Ann-Marie was in the evening. Her husband was away overnight. We went into the hallway and Ann-Marie reached up to the top of each door, took down a key and locked each one in turn. She saw our amazement. ‘Habit, I suppose’, she said.

Martha, b. 1947

Her house, in a new estate outside Dublin, was strikingly clean. Everything shone, including her two beautiful, passionately attended babies; crumbs were whisked off the table before they could settle. She was convinced that there was much child neglect in the area.

Anne-Marie Hanley had taken us to meet Martha the first time. When we asked if she would talk to us about St. Joseph’s, she immediately launched into the following story, repeating it virtually verbatim when we returned for the interview some weeks later.

‘The worst thing that ever happened to me in my life was the caning I got when I was eight or nine. Some of the big girls—I can’t remember all their names but Diana Sweetman was one—put me up to steal out of the Black Baby box in the school. They threatened my life if I told on them. They got me to go through the window and I must have been seen by someone. The nuns took me out of bed at 12.30 at night and tried to make me tell who else was in it with me. I couldn’t tell because the other girls had said they’d kill me. I’ll never forget that beating. All I could see was the strap flashing past me.’ Martha was on the verge of tears as she spoke. ‘I was black and blue all over. I still wake with awful nightmares of that strap and everything flashing red in front of my eyes.’ She put up her hand as though to ward off a blow. ‘Of all the beatings that was the worst. It’s the beatings, the beatings that give me the nightmares.’ She moved away and, with her back turned, fiercely pushed a cloth around an impeccable surface.

Martha was two months old when she was taken to Cavan from Stamullen, where the Poor Clares ran a baby home. Her father had left her there after her mother had died giving birth to her, and she had a faint memory that he came to see her once to take her away but that she refused to go. Martha would not make any effort to trace him now because ‘he left me.’ She’d experienced visions of her mother, shining, in a white dress. She could not, she told us, have survived without her strong personal faith.

‘I was a very lonely child. I felt I was left out of everything. I wet the bed because I was terrified to get out at night and because I think I had weak kidneys. I was more in bed than at school. They’d send you to bed for the day without food as a punishment. I was never at school for a full year and when I was nine or ten I was taken out of school to work. I had to light the furnace fire, clean out the Aga cooker in the orphanage kitchen and get the water on for the cocoa for breakfast before Mass. I had to scrub sixteen flights of stairs and three corridors. If I didn’t do it properly, I had to do it again.

‘They used to threaten to send me to the reformatory, but I think I escaped that because the Mother Abbess wouldn’t allow it. I was bold I know, but I suppose I was just crying out for affection. Many brushes were broken on my back.’ Two other girls had previously told us of an incident when Martha refused to be beaten when they were all getting ‘a whacking’. We repeated their story of how Martha had turned on Mother Anne, torn off her veil, but was then left alone. ‘I was just fed up looking at leather straps and rods and it was so unfair because I’d had a beating the night before. Once I broke my ankle jumping down the stairs to get away from them before I could be beaten.

‘When I was twelve or thirteen they sent me to an old couple in Ballyjamesduff. Their children were grown and gone. They were very hard on me and I was very lonely. I had to feed the fowl and plant potatoes. The old woman was nice enough but it was the man—he tried to take advantage of me. He started fiddling with me. It frightened me and it wasn’t till I met my husband that I could bear a man to touch me at all—I still can’t stand it if another man even puts an arm around me. I couldn’t sleep because I was frightened the old man would come into my room—he slept in the next room and she slept downstairs. Then one evening she came into the kitchen and found him interfering with me. She told the nuns I was carrying on with her husband so they brought me back and flogged me. They kept saying “You were letting that man feel you,” and I didn’t understand what it was all about.’

Martha said she was very unsettled at the convent after she returned, and, in 1962, aged fourteen, she was sent to work in a Dominican convent in Dublin. She was given stockings, a new skirt, jumper, coat, a towel, a bar of soap and her bus fare. ‘As I was going they said “you’ll be the first one back here in trouble. Now don’t allow a fellow to put a hand on your knee or go into a hayshed with a man.”

‘They paid me 30 shillings a week at the Dominicans and I had to work very hard. I had a half day off a week. They were strict but I had good food. I could go out but I had to be in by ten o’clock. I was very lonely. Maureen Harty and Joan Thomas phoned me. They asked me to go with them to Bray for a picnic. I asked permission and was allowed. We went into an amusement arcade with slot machines and Maureen and Joan laughed at me when I asked about the picnic. There were fellows in there and one tried to pick me up. I told him I wasn’t an easy pick-up and he said “You must be the only orphanage girl who isn’t.”‘

There was a young nun at the Dominicans who had befriended her; Martha told her what had happened and she asked Martha whether she knew the facts of life. ‘Of course I didn’t, so then she explained most things to me, except some things she said I would learn when I was married. She warned me to be careful of men who would use me, so after that I made sure that I would never be used.’ This nun also helped Martha learn to read and write—’I couldn’t even write my own name when I came. I stayed working in that convent for eighteen months but the nun said I should leave because I would get nowhere if I stayed there. She told me I would meet a man some day when I was about twenty-four and he would be right for me.’

And so Martha did, but she also met with a lot of resentment from her father-in-law who wanted them to break it off when he heard she was from an orphanage, and he ignored her at the wedding. Now he was according her a grudging respect. Her husband was a quiet gentle man whom she treated with the same fierce adoration that she gave her babies. She was equally loyal to the few friends from St. Joseph’s with whom she was still in touch. They told us Martha would do anything for them. The only things she would not tolerate were for anyone to ‘use’ her, and dirt.

Mary, b. 1950

She was small, with a neat figure, regular features, brown curling hair, and an open smiling expression—just as she is in photographs taken in the orphanage. ‘What a happy, cuddly child that one is!’ people said. ‘It doesn’t look as if there was anything wrong with her.’ She chain-smoked and her nails were bitten to the quick.

‘I think I was four weeks old when I went to the orphanage. My mother had nine children before she was married. I was the only one she gave away. I’ll never forgive her for that. People have said to me there must be a reason why she did it. I can’t think of one. I’ll always remember one of the nuns in the laundry room one day shouting at us that if our mothers had wanted us, there wouldn’t be none of us there.