No One Wants You (7 page)

I burst out in loud, anguished sobs. I couldn’t remember all the words that the judge had said. So he said the sentence again, in groups of two words at a time and I repeated them. As I finished repeating the words, I felt very alone in the world. There was nobody there for me.

The cruelty officer gripped me tightly by my upper arm and I was led reluctantly from the court. Once again, I was crying, deep racking sobs.

So that was it.

I got a chance to see the Justice’s Memorandum many years later as the Justice’s Minute Book was in the National Archives. It read: ‘Ordered that Celine Clifford be committed to the certified industrial cchool at Mount St Vincent’s, Limerick, to be there detained as and from this date up to but not including the November 14, 1964. County Council notified. No order as to contribution.’

In those days, the Substance of Complaint, under the Children Acts 1908–1941 was a common method of dealing with children with behavioural problems. It was used to commit children to industrial schools for all sorts of petty crimes, from theft of a loaf of bread, to stealing a bicycle. Some of these children had very abusive upbringings and were full of anger. Some of them were out of control.
Perhaps
this might explain the rough treatment I got from my cruelty officer.

On March 2, 1962, at 13 years of age, as I was led from Kilmallock Courthouse, now called Celine Clifford, I thought I was beginning a life sentence in jail. The well-dressed lady had disappeared. She had not made any contact with me. I was taken back to the same office where I had earlier spent most of the day.

I entered the office with my head held low. I was looking at the ground, with my hair falling all around my face. It was wet with my tears as they fell, uncontrollably.

I would have been grateful for any human comfort at that time, but none was forthcoming. I would have loved a drink of water even but I was too afraid to ask. In the court world of men I felt I was even the wrong sex and even that was my fault!

I felt that I could not trust anybody. I still believed I was going to jail.

‘You’re coming with me to the orphanage. You’ll be well looked after there,’ the cruelty officer said to me.

I stopped sobbing almost at once. I had distinctly heard the word orphanage. If it had been said before, throughout that long day, I had not heard it.

‘Does that mean that I am not going to jail for ever?’ I asked in a low voice.

‘Of course you are not going to jail. Whatever gave you that idea? You’ll be better looked after there, than before now. You were very lucky that woman made a complaint to the ISPCC.’

‘What complaint? What woman? What is the ISPCC?’

‘What went on in that house was disgusting. The whole world knows about that house. I just have to sign some papers here in the office and then we’re off,’ he said.

I had a million questions to ask. But I was afraid to open my mouth, in case I got into more trouble.

‘Of course, my shoes and trousers are ruined because of you,’ was the last statement I heard from the cruelty officer.

Before I left, while nobody was looking, I checked for any evidence of where I had wet the office floor earlier that day. Horror of horrors, it was still visible. I silently prayed to God that nobody would notice the stain. I felt so guilty about it.

FOUR

Safe in Prison

THE CRUELTY OFFICER
wasn’t as rough after the hearing. He came back to the office and took me gently by the hand this time and led me away. We were going to the orphanage so I had stopped crying. The journey took about half an hour by car. The time passed quickly.

We got out of the car and walked to a heavy wooden door. The officer rang a bell and a nun opened the door and she invited us in. She took us into what seemed to be a large waiting room. It was warm and comfortable and smelled of lavender floor polish.

It was lovely.

‘This is Celine Clifford. She is coming to stay with you, Sister,’ said the cruelty officer.

‘We are expecting you, Celine. You are most welcome to the Mount Orphanage. This will be your home. I hope you will be happy here,’ said the nun.

I was still clutching tightly to the cruelty officer, as I looked cautiously around the room.

The nun said that the other children were saying the rosary and that I might like to join in. As I knew how to say the rosary, I said, ‘Yes, please.’

She led the way down some long corridors. A faint murmur of sound became a choir of children’s voices
chanting
the responses to the familiar leads of the rosary. The nun said that she would come and get me as soon as the rosary was over. I was then silently introduced to another nun who was leading the prayers, by a system of nods between the two nuns.

I was put kneeling down, between two other girls at a long bench seat. As I looked at the girl on either side of me, each in turn smiled a greeting. As the rosary drew to a close, a large number of the children surrounded me. There were so many of them asking me questions, I could barely raise a voice in reply. Some of them wanted to touch me. I recoiled slightly. But they were all good touches.

A surge of emotion overwhelmed me. I could feel the blood rise to my cheeks. I realised for the first time in my entire life that I felt safe.

I thought to myself, ‘I am going to love this place.’

The nun came back to collect me as promised. She asked me if I had been fed. As I had not been given any food during the day, I suddenly felt hungry. In truth, I was always starving but in the past months I’d gotten used to being fed so I was now hungrier than ever. The nun said that I should join the other children for supper, and afterwards they would bath me and show me where I would be sleeping.

She took me down to the refectory, where all the other children were already noisily ensconced at the various long tables. It smelled of sour milk. I never heard such bedlam. Everyone seemed to be shouting or talking at the same time. Each one wanted me to sit at her table. It was so exciting.

Supper consisted of bread and jam, washed down with cold milk. There was a plate piled high with bread and jam. I wolfed down as many slices as I could. The menu for supper was always to consist of bread, margarine, jam and cold milk. But there were rules about the bread, margarine and jam.

You could have bread and margarine for supper. You could have bread and jam for supper. But you could NOT
have
bread AND margarine AND jam together for supper. This little rule did not bother me.

After supper, two different nuns took me to the washing area. They told me to fill a bath and I did not know what they meant. They showed me how to turn on a tap. With two inches of water in the bath, I turned off the tap. The nuns laughed at me. Some of the orphan girls heard the laughter and came to see the fun. They began to tease me. It did not feel nice to be teased about being dirty and not knowing how to fill a bath for myself.

One nun took charge. ‘Get out of here the rest of you, and Sister and I will show Celine what we mean by clean,’ she said. Then they filled the bath full of clean warm water. They asked me to take off all my clothes and get in and sit down in the bath.

As I undressed, I laid my pretty suit on a nearby chair, together with my cream shoes and blue socks. On top of these, I laid my precious brown leather handbag, with my name Celine embossed in gold for everyone to see.

When I was in the bath, the two nuns rolled up the sleeves of their habits. They gave me a cleaning all over that I will never forget to this day. Every piece of flesh that was reachable was scrubbed clean. They used some vile foul-smelling potions on my hair and the rest of my body. When the bath was finished, the nuns wrapped me in a huge towel, and partially dried me off.

As I was rushed out the door of the washing area, between the two nuns, I glanced over my shoulder at the chair that held my jealously guarded special possessions: my pink cardigan, my blue skirt, my cream shoes, my blue socks and my beloved leather handbag. These few items represented all that I owned in the entire world.

I was never to see any of them again.

I asked the nuns where they were many times, but my questions were always dismissed lightly. They disappeared
into
thin air. I had just learned that if you get an unexpected present and you become attached to it, be careful because it may not be yours to keep for ever. It was a lesson that I was to learn many times in life.

When I was dry, I was given a nightdress to put on. I was then shown to what was to be my bed for the months to come. It was in a dormitory where there were about sixteen beds, lined up in two rows. The nuns smiled at me, as they reassured me about staying at the Mount Orphanage and put me to bed. The bedclothes smelled so clean. As I drew up the covers around my neck, I felt comfortable and warm.

I felt safe.

After such a long, stressful, exhausting day, I quickly fell asleep.

Sometime, in the middle of the night, I was woken up with a jolt. I screamed loudly as something hard hit my entire body. I had no idea where I was. I had felt so safe before I went to sleep, so I could not understand what had happened. I had fallen out of the bed. I had never slept in a single bed before!

I was gradually introduced to the other children in the orphanage and I made some friends for the first time, which helped me. I also met the nuns who were responsible for its efficient, disciplined daily routine. I only met the nuns on a need-to-know basis. On the day of my arrival at the orphanage I had almost felt special but on the days following my introduction, I was let know, in no uncertain terms, that I was not in any way special. I was, in fact, only a small cog in what the nuns perceived to be a large and very important wheel. The nuns actually believed that they were providing an essential and valuable service to the Irish public at large. The public face of the nuns showed that they were providing a caring service, for poor unfortunate children, mainly the product of unscrupulous, unmarried mothers.

The other non-public face of the nuns was the reality that they were barely providing shelter, with a very basic diet, for children whom they believed were paying, by their very existence, for the sins of their mothers. According to the Catholic Church in Ireland, the sin that their mothers had committed was that they became pregnant and had a baby, while unmarried. This sin was unacceptable before the eyes of God, everyone involved in religious life, and the decent people of Ireland. And so the vast majority of people shunned girls who admitted to such a sin. And worse, the children of these unmarried mothers were also shunned and considered to be an embarrassment. Industrial schools, often known as orphanages subsidised by the state and run by charitable orders of nuns, became the solution to the problem. Some of the children in the orphanage felt like they were in the army, others felt like it was prison.

There was a timetable for everything and there were rules for every little thing. If the rules were broken, each broken rule had its own merited and rigorously meted out punishment. I remember that we had to clean all the skirting boards in the orphanage. It took hours and if you got even a tiny mark on the wall above, you were beaten. A lot of the nuns had a leather strap that used to hang beside their rosary beads and they would beat you immediately. You were afraid to cry. If you did, you were beaten more. You had to keep quiet all the time, like you were choking. You had to hold it in. You could never scream. Some of the girls couldn’t help it and the nuns would hit them with the strap again and again. There was high dusting as well, which was over the picture rails and then we would have to scrub all the floors. There was never a bit of dirt in the orphanage.

I have not been able to banish from my memory the screams and suffering of small children who were punished for breaking some very flimsy and unjustifiable rules. Watching a punishment being carried out on another girl,
particularly
if she was younger than you, was very difficult. Sometimes there was a very fine line between a rule being broken and not being broken. Many children were punished for nothing and often too harshly. If a girl wet her bed, she had to stand at the end of the dormitory with the wet sheets and then wash them herself. Your hair was sometimes cut as a punishment so that everyone would know. Otherwise we all looked the same, with the one haircut, in the same second-hand looking clothes. If a nun shouted at you to ‘Halt’, you stopped dead in your tracks – obedience to the nuns was absolute.

The nuns weren’t all evil. Some of them had a bit of compassion but they were afraid of the stronger nuns. We were told again and again that we had to suffer for the sins of our parents. I was told that I was damaged – ‘ruined for life’ – because I wasn’t even a virgin. I was used goods and I had to suffer for it. They all knew about my past.

Some of them wanted to humiliate us. You would have to stand still for hours on end or you wouldn’t get any dinner or you weren’t allowed outside. Some of the special children, who had families outside the orphanage, got to do Irish dancing or to be in the choir, but I was never allowed. There was a press where children who had relatives on the outside were allowed to go to buy sweets if they had been given some money. They’d never share the sweets. I think they were told not to. I remember one time a girl was walking in front of me and she dropped the sweet paper. I picked it up and licked it until there was nothing left on it at all.

An uncanny punishment I used to receive was the nuns’ attempts to make me feel guilty by asking, ‘What would your auntie nuns think of you now?’ If I heard this once, I heard it a hundred times. I had no idea what this meant as I did not know any ‘auntie nuns’. Consequently, in my ignorance, I escaped the punishment of the guilt complex they were trying to force on to me.

But everything is relative. As I had come from hell, I thought the orphanage, with all its rules and regulations, was heaven. I loved it. The sister-in-charge of the entire orphanage was a responsible person. Some of her line managers were also fair, but others were obsessed and tough. I quickly worked out that if you caused trouble, you got into trouble, so I caused no trouble.