Children Of The Poor Clares (23 page)

Frances got on with her very well. ‘She’s soft, like me,’ she said, and she invited her to spend Christmas in Dublin. Her mother promised that she would and then returned to England, saying she would sell her house and settle her affairs. Frances never saw her again. She wrote to her several times. The letters were returned ‘Not known at this address’. She was more bitter and unforgiving about this second abandonment than she ever was about the first. She has torn up the cuttings from the newspaper, determined to wipe out all traces of the re-union.

Frances is now married and has three more children. She hides, mostly successfully, the scars of her childhood. She keeps going, wanting to give her children a better life with less pain and hurt. ‘Perhaps I haven’t done so badly after all,’ she says. ‘I’m a survivor, aren’t I?

Tina, b. 1951

We first spoke to her on the telephone nearly a year before we met. She said that she would talk to us but could not do so for a few weeks because she had exams. We waited until the date she had suggested, telephoned again and a friend told us she had gone on holiday. We tried another couple of times”: the friend first said Tina was on sick leave and later that she had left. We wrote, but received no reply. Some months later we heard that she was working in Cork. Worried that perhaps we had been harassing her and that she really did not want to talk to us, we asked another girl to sound her out again. Tina sent a message that she did want to meet us. We offered to come to Cork, but she said she would come to Dublin, and, rather to our surprise, she telephoned a few days later and arranged a meeting. She hitch-hiked up and we spent the day together.

She was a handsome young woman, tall with smooth, dark hair and rosy cheeks. She emanated solidity and dependability and was clearly highly intelligent. ‘I’ll tell you everything,’ she said.

‘I have a very bad memory. I can remember nothing before I was eight. So long as I had music and books I was all right, I was in my own world. We made up lovely stories about ourselves. We all invented things about our parents.

‘My mother was sixteen when I was born. I was put into St. Joseph’s when I was seven months old, and she went off to England, got a job and married a man she met there. He’s a kind decent man: he told me he wanted Mammy to get me over, but that she wouldn’t. She was ashamed because I was illegitimate and she had joined the Legion of Mary and had made friends. I’d been seeing her in the summer after they started to take me home for the holidays. When I was eight, I’d asked if I could come. I didn’t know she was my mother at first—I thought my auntie was my mother. Another aunt let it out when I was about nine. It meant nothing to me but after that I didn’t know what to write to them in letters—”Dear Mummy and Daddy” or what. Sometimes she introduced me as her sister, sometimes as her niece. She feels guilty about me—no, not for putting me in the orphanage, but because I am illegitimate. It does hurt me, but I don’t let her know.

‘My memories of the convent are hazy. I always seem to make excuses for the nuns. They went into the novitiate and then they were thrown into a zoo—there was no thinking behind who they sent in to look after us. We were wild because of the way we were reared. I’d say we would have driven anyone mad—all kinds of children, all different ages. Mother Anne would be up till all hours making bedspreads, curtains, dresses. She fought and worked for our physical comforts but she forgot the main thing we needed. It was hopeless I suppose. We were love-starved. They thought the only way they could control us was with the strap. We used to talk in the dormitory at night and Anne once heard us and made fifteen or sixteen of us stand in the corridor just in our nighties. She went to bed and forgot about us, so we took pillows and blankets and lay in the corridor. It was quite fun.

‘She walloped us next day—though I have no memories of ever being beaten. I just can’t remember… but once… I was still in the little ones’ dormitory; I was seen by one of the nuns talking to Maureen Harty and Joan Thomas. They would have been about thirteen. “I had expected better of you,” she said. I just had on a nightie… and the strap was as thick as this… and I was trying to get away from her… I tried to hide under the bed…

‘I remember things leading up to incidents, but cannot remember the actual beating. I remember the planned punishments—sixteen girls all lined up, then put over Anne’s knee, with our bare bottoms. I was eleven before I realised it wasn’t the way to treat children. Now I can’t bear to be hit, and I literally, physically, have to hold myself back if I see anyone using physical violence. I can’t bear it.

‘We needed someone to relate to and we only had each other. We’d yell abuse at one another—things like—”Your mother was a tramp!” Sometimes the relationships were warped—I suppose society would not think it right for the girls to cuddle each other. We just didn’t know how to behave. Joan Thomas tried to get me into her bed, but I didn’t fancy it. We would be looking for something from each other that we didn’t have to give.

‘Frances Devaney was my best friend. She was the same age and we had most in common. She had a beautiful voice—such a pity it wasn’t trained. She and I were the only ones sent on to the secondary school. Mother Ruth once picked Frances and myself out in front of everyone and said “You two are filthy dirty… a pity you wouldn’t wash yourselves!” That would have been after we had been up to do the breakfasts and clean the place and go to Mass before we could straighten ourselves and go to school.

‘Another time Mother Ruth said to me “Do you every play with yourself? Do you masturbate?” I said I did though I didn’t understand for years what she meant. She told me to tell the priest in confession that I masturbated. He said “What age are you child?” and laughed at me. Mother Ruth told me later that she gave me a hard time as a child because she wanted to make a genius out of me.

‘I loved Mary Joseph, the Abbess. We both had a great love of music. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained, Tina!” she’d say. Another time she told me “Don’t worry—if they throw us out, we’ll manage. You’ll play the violin and I’ll pass the hat!” Frances and Maureen Harty and myself used to race up to be the first to get the violins to practice.

‘I never studied for exams. The teachers encouraged me but the nuns never cared if you’d done your homework, only if you’d done your cleaning. Frances and I were the two oldest then. We’d get home from the school, have two slices of bread and margarine, then there would be so many sheets and pillowcases to wash every day. Monday, say, we’d do undies, Tuesday sweaters, Wednesday dresses and so on. It all had to be done by hand. We washed and swept the classrooms and lavatories; washed, swept and waxed the halls till they shone—you could have eaten your dinner off the floor. Before school we had to clean part of the orphanage as well. That would have been from eleven until we were sixteen. We spent all day Saturday cleaning. Once a month the nuns had to go on retreat and then Frances and I had to make sure there was complete silence—yes, the toddlers and the little ones too.

‘Father O’Toole—he was a friar—used to give the secondary school retreat. If any of us talked to him we used to be punished, and made to stand in the corridor. Once he stood me between his legs and rubbed me up and down and asked me didn’t I have knickers on.’

When Tina left St. Joseph’s she decided to become a nun. She joined another order, spent a year in a convent in England, then did a year’s course in theology at a seminary and was sent to teach at a private boarding school for wealthy Catholic children. ‘It wasn’t what I had in mind. I had a notion that if I got into an orphanage I could look after children. Anyway I left and my mother was very upset about it.’ Tina went to Cork and got a job as a shop assistant—’I didn’t want to be a burden on anyone’—and studied for the extra Leaving Certificate subject required to do an external degree in social science. She had done this and was now qualified.

Later that day, and although we had not asked her, Tina told us why she had not followed up our first contact. It was as we had suspected: she had been pregnant. Fighting back tears, she insisted on telling us what had happened. ‘I went to a home for unmarried mothers. It wasn’t too bad because my friend from work used to come to see me.’ She had loved the father of the baby, and he had loved her. He had wanted to marry her before she became pregnant, and was distraught when she refused, insisting on giving the baby up for adoption. His mother, too, was fond of her and tried to persuade her to marry him. Tina could not explain to us why, although she wanted to marry him, she could not. She said she had completely broken off with him, although he was still trying to get her back.

That evening, driving her to the Cork road, and considerably shaken by our meeting—as we were with many of the girls—we too tried to persuade her to go back to him, but she was adamant. She was sending her mother £25 a month (a substantial amount of money at that time) for her stepsisters and brother so that they should ‘want for nothing’. She seemed so solid, so strong, so dependable. ‘But,’ she said, ‘you’re wrong. There’s nothing there.’ We left her, standing alone, thumbing a lift.

Part Three
 

CHAPTER SEVEN
 

‘A
Christian Country’

St Joseph’s, it was said at the time of the fire, was ‘one of the good schools’. This statement was made by the Medical Inspector, Dr. Anna McCabe, during her evidence at the Inquiry, and by
The
Belfast
Telegraph
in a news story. And it is true that, at that time, according to both Loretta McMahon and Ellen Neary, Sister Clare had improved their conditions. The son of the Poor Clares’ gardener, who had visited another Industrial School, run by the Sisters of Mercy in Moate, told us he had been horrified to see a small child in a thin dress made to stand outside in the frost for an hour—’Sisters of no mercy I called them!’. He insisted that the Poor Clares ‘never did things like that.’ But we had Hannah Hughes’ memory of the little girl in the 1930s, who had wet her bed, being made to stand out in the yard in the cold for hours, all huddled up and shivering in a thin dress—this was Mary Lowry who was later to die in the fire. If it was ‘one of the good schools’, then the question was: in what level of starvation, neglect and brutality were thousands of other children detained?

We had decided to focus on the story of St. Joseph’s Orphanage in Cavan rather than to extend our research to other Industrial Schools or similar institutions such as Reformatories, and voluntary orphanages, Catholic or Protestant. We believed that we could tell a more effective story and create a living picture, with a study, spanning the decades, of the institution whose ex-pupils had come, by chance, into our lives, a story that should be told primarily through their voices.
41
Nevertheless, in the course of our researches we were to receive information, both first and second-hand, about the wider area. Most of what we learned fitted into the same pattern as St Joseph’s. Some places seemed to have been worse. A few—so very few—seemed to have been better, at least during particular periods.

There was St. Anne’s Industrial School, in Booterstown, Co. Dublin, whose relaxed atmosphere amazed Sally Johnson on a visit there in the early 1950s. The Ryan sisters, sent there when St Joseph’s closed in 1967, also reported that it was quite different and that the children were not beaten. The Morans (who had employed Cissie Meehan) contrasted the Cavan school with St Philomena’s Orphanage, in Stillorgan, Dublin
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which was certified for the reception of boys under seven. In the 1960s, they used to take a child from there on holidays. On the first occasion they went to collect him, they arrived unexpectedly. It was, they said ‘charming’ with pictures, charts and decorations on all the walls. They saw the dining room, set for the next meal, just four to a table, with tablecloths and mats. The children were having so much fun in the playground that their own youngsters joined in, and it was difficult to get them to leave. The Morans’ only criticism was the excessive modesty of the children: the little boy would never take off his underpants in the bath. This orphanage, in an area of rapidly increasing property values, was closed on the order of Archbishop McQuaid of Dublin, and the land redeveloped.
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Those fragments, and a couple more which will emerge in the next chapter, are the only happy images that came our way. Everything else created a grim, harsh picture. The criteria we applied in using the following material was its relevance to the argument that St Joseph’s was not unusual either in the manner in which the children were treated, its effect on them, the abuse of power by an organisation answerable only to itself for its actions, and the failure of the State to carry out its statutory responsibilities.

In early 1976, we wrote a letter to several Irish newspapers, stating that we had undertaken a study of the Irish Industrial School system, using as a specific example St. Joseph’s, Cavan, in which the 1943 fire had taken place, and asked for any information. We received only two responses from ex-pupils of St. Joseph’s, but one of the replies was from a woman who sent us details of her childhood spent in another Industrial School, run by the Sisters of Mercy in Dundalk during the 1920s and 1930s, where she was sent after the death of her parents. (The Sisters of Mercy effectively had a franchise to operate more Industrial Schools than any other Order, with approximately 40,000 children passing through their hands over the years.) It could have been written about Cavan: the floor scrubbing and polishing; the black knitted stockings and boots; the inadequate and bad food—bread and lard, cocoa made with water, and cabbage-water soup. She remembered the apple trees whose fruit was not for the children, an egg once a year on Easter Sunday, no meat and no milk although the girls ‘milked cows and churned butter till we were ready to drop dead’—and the same, all-pervading fear. ‘Everyone in that place scared me stiff. There was no kindness whatsoever, it was so cold, it still haunts me.’