by Irene Kelly
‘No!’ she said in a stern voice. ‘No, Irene. That’s not good at all. No wonder you’re here. You’re stupid. Come up to the front.’
I was shaking as I eased myself out from behind my desk and followed her up to her desk at the front of the classroom. She sat down then behind her desk and pulled out a long wooden ruler.
‘Hold out your hands!’ she instructed. ‘Palms up!’
Trembling, I did as I was told and . . . Thwack! She brought the ruler down hard on both my palms. Oh God. The pain exploded over my hands in a white hot flash. Tears stung my eyes. Thwack! She did it again. And again. By the time she was finished I was sobbing really hard from the terrible, throbbing pain.
‘You’ll learn to do things my way in my class,’ she trilled. ‘Now go back to your desk! And stop your snivelling!’
I ran back to my desk and sat down, clasping my poor, hot palms in my lap.
‘Hey.’ I heard a little whisper from my left. Gently I turned my head to the side and I saw a little girl next to me with dark eyes, pale skin and freckled round cheeks looking at me earnestly.
‘Don’t cry,’ she whispered. What? Why is she telling me not to cry? I’m in agony!
‘It gets worse if you cry,’ she whispered. I looked at her again, confused. She just shook her head.
It was all so hard, so confusing. I still didn’t know what we’d done wrong to be sent to this place or how long we were going to be here before our mammy came to get us.
After school finished at 2.30 p.m. I returned to the main orphanage and was given a job for the rest of the afternoon. I was handed a bucket and a rag and told to scrub the hallway and the corridors. I nodded obediently and immediately got down on my knees and started scrubbing. In some ways, it was a relief. For a while I could just concentrate on this small task and not worry about all the other people in this place and the endless rules and praying. I worked hard, concentrating on just a little bit of the wooden floor at a time. It seemed like I disappeared into my own world because the next thing I heard was Sister Beatrice’s voice.
‘That’s not right!’ she said crossly. I looked up, terrified she was talking to me, but then I saw she was addressing the girl who was working in front of me.
The girl had been scrubbing away at all the skirtings but now she stopped and just kept herself very still, her head lowered and her rag in her lap.
There was silence for a moment and then a massive clang as Sister Beatrice kicked over the girl’s bucket of dirty water. The grey water spread out everywhere, all over the floor we’d both just cleaned.
‘Now do it again,’ she sneered and she turned and walked away.
That night, I lay awake thinking about home and whether our mammy was missing us all. I wondered where they’d taken Peter and Cecily and how long we would have to stay here. I couldn’t understand why the nuns here were so mean to us. Before now, I always thought that nuns were nice people. They were God’s special people on earth so they were meant to be good and kind, like God. That’s what I’d always been told, anyways. It just didn’t make sense. None of it made sense.
‘Budge up.’ A little whisper came through the darkness and I felt the sheet lifting, letting in a chill breeze.
‘Agatha!’ I whispered. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I can’t sleep,’ she said. ‘Please. Just let me in.’
I was too tired to argue. So, reluctantly, I scooted over to the side of the bed. Agatha climbed in and curled up next to me. For a fleeting moment, as I closed my eyes and settled down to sleep, I forgot about St Grace’s and imagined we were back at home, cuddled up under the coats on our big bed. Mammy was in the other room, and soon our brothers and sisters would join us. As I succumbed to sleep, I told myself that tomorrow I would go and play out in the fields again. This was home, everything was fine and I was safe again . . .
7
IRENE
Ripped in Two
‘Oh no. Oh no. No no no,’ Agatha wailed, her hands over her face, her whole body shivering with fear. Agatha was four years older than me but for some reason I always felt protective towards her. She was soft and seemed so scared of everything. She looked at me then with her big eyes and I knew that this was something I had to help her with. On the floor in front of us lay the sopping wet knickers she had thrown off the night before. When I’d awoken that morning and seen them lying there I suddenly understood why she had climbed into my bed in the middle of the night.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said quickly. ‘Just go and get ready. I’ll sort it out.’
As she ran off to the bathroom I ripped the damp sheets off Agatha’s bed and replaced them with the dry ones from my bed. Then, as fast as I could, I put her sheets on my bed. Just in time.
At that moment one of the nuns patrolling the dorm strode past our row of beds – she caught my eye and I swallowed hard. I must have looked like I was doing something wrong because she stopped in her tracks. Slowly, she walked towards me and as she did, her eyes darted from the floor to my bed. She knew!
‘Irene Coogan!’ she addressed me sharply.
‘Yes, sister!’ I snapped to attention.
‘Irene – tell me, whose knickers are those on the floor?’
‘They’re mine, sister.’
‘And are they wet?’
‘Yes, they are, sister.’
And if I put my hands on your sheets, would they be wet too?’
‘Yes, they would, sister. I’m very sorry, sister. I wet the bed last night. I’m sorry.’
‘Get to the window!’ she bellowed.
For a second I didn’t know what she meant but then she spun me round and pushed me towards the large window that looked out over the courtyard.
‘Face the window!’
I did as I was told – my cheeks burned hot with embarrassment as I realized that all the chatter and noise from the other children in the dorm had died down. The place was silent. The next thing I knew, sister had pulled up the window in front of us and she was edging a long wooden pole out of the window next to me. On the end of the pole were Agatha’s wet knickers. By now the courtyard below was full of children running towards church for morning prayers but when the sister’s voice rang out, everyone stopped and turned to look at us.
‘Look at this girl!’ she called to them. ‘Look at Irene Coogan here. Look at this dirty girl. She’s wet her knickers. Look at her dirty, filthy knickers! Look at them!’
The sister waggled the pole in front of me and the knickers bobbed up and down accusingly. I could hardly breathe. This was all my worst fears come true – I shook with shame as the whole orphanage, every single child, looked up at me. I wanted to disappear at that moment. Please make it stop, please make it stop. Oh God, please make it stop . . .
For the rest of the day, I could barely bring myself to look at anybody. I felt so humiliated, so utterly destroyed. I just wanted to disappear into a corner and hide myself away until it was time to go home, until Mammy came to collect me. When is that? When is she coming to get us all?
‘Thank you,’ Agatha whispered in the queue for breakfast that morning. I just nodded. I didn’t want to talk about it. All I knew was that from now on we had to make sure that Agatha went to the toilet every night before bed.
At school I tried to keep my head down so that I didn’t get the ruler again. My hands were still blistered from the day before and this morning’s experience with the knickers had been a horrifying ordeal. If anything more happened to me at school I felt I would just snap like a twig. Fortunately, Mrs Lawley found another victim to harass in the morning and I managed to sit at the back without attracting any further attention. After another lunch of pigswill we were sent out into the yard for some fresh air. It was even colder today and my bare legs stung from the biting wind, but I tried to put it out of my mind as I stood against a wall, trying to make myself as small as possible. I wrapped both arms round myself against the cold. I just wanted to stay out of harm’s way today, try to keep myself
safe. There were so many rules in this place, it was hard to avoid a slap or a beating for five minutes at a time.
After a while I noticed a large gathering of children around a doorway at one end of the yard. I was curious. What are they all doing there? Before long a lady in a white apron appeared at the doorway with a big porcelain mixing bowl and a second later she tossed the contents of the bowl towards the crowd of children. A shower of bread rained down and, in that moment, the whole yard exploded into life. Children dived onto the scattered morsels, grabbing bits of bread, fighting each other for scraps, then running off to the other end of the yard. I didn’t move – even from a distance I could see that most of the bread was green with mould. In no time at all the bread was gone and the crowd had broken up. Now all I could see were children hunched over or squatting in corners as they ate their bread. They shielded the bread with their bodies, as if afraid someone might snatch it at any moment. Like animals, the thought flashed through my mind. They look like animals.
Three days after I started school, when lessons finished at 2.30 p.m., I was sent to work in the nursery for the rest of the afternoon. One of the other children led me across the courtyard to a separate building where I was shown up the stairs and into a very large ward. From the moment I walked in, I was assaulted by the noise. The ward was filled with rows and rows of cots – about a hundred in all – and in each cot was a baby. A crying, wailing, miserable baby. I scanned the room quickly, trying to see my brother Martin and sister Cecily, but the place was too big and I couldn’t find them.
‘You! Irene! Get over here!’ It was Sister Beatrice. There were two other members of staff and four older children like myself. With so many babies, we were hopelessly outnumbered.
‘You’re to change the nappies on the babies,’ Sister Beatrice instructed. ‘Every baby needs a fresh nappy and then it’ll be the beds. You have to strip and change the beds and then clean the floor. Do you understand?’
I nodded but I was struggling to stay focused. All around me little red-faced babies were standing up screaming their hearts out – it wasn’t normal crying either. It was different, like crying in pain. I went over to the changing table and picked up the first baby that I saw – a ruddy-cheeked boy with strawberry blonde curls in a long white gown. He was beside himself, bawling his eyes out.
‘Hush now, little one,’ I tried to soothe him. ‘Come with me and we’ll get you all sorted out.’ Strangely, the moment I picked him up he calmed down – it was as if all he needed was the warmth of another person’s touch. ‘Poor wee man,’ I whispered. ‘You just need a cuddle, hey?’
I laid him down on the changing table and unhooked the pin at the front of the terry-towelling nappy. As it fell away I could see it was heavy with poo. Then the smell hit me. Oh Lord, it was like he’d been sitting there in his own mess for weeks! The poor boy had such a red, chapped little bottom that when I cleaned him up he bled.
‘Hurry up, girl!’ A voice at my side suddenly made me jump. I looked up to see a middle-aged woman in a nursery apron with a sour face staring at me. Her heavy-lidded eyes were framed by a mop of short black hair. She had rough-looking skin and thin lips. If it weren’t for her massive breasts, I would have assumed she was a man.
‘I’m trying,’ I muttered.
‘Don’t give me lip, girl!’ she snarled. ‘Just do as you’re told.’
One of the other girls whispered to watch out because this was Bernie, and she was one of the staff that had been brought up in the orphanage. ‘She’s not a nun,’ said the girl as we emptied soiled nappies together. ‘But she’s just as mean. Sometimes even worse.’
For hours and hours I stood at the changing table, dealing with one bawling baby after another. Sometimes I tried to hold the babies for a little and rock them, just to give them some comfort. But if Bernie caught me holding them she’d shout at me not to dawdle.
At one point a terrible piercing cry rang through the nursery. Automatically I looked up and around to see where the cry came from. A second shriek drew my eye to Sister Beatrice who had a child laid down on another changing table.
She was doing something to a little girl, putting something inside her. I squinted to get a better look. What is going on? What is she doing? Whatever it was, that child was in terrible pain. As I squinted, Sister Beatrice looked up and caught my eye. She gave me such a fearsome look that I hurriedly turned back to my work.
I hated it in the nursery. There was something very wrong about the way the nuns and staff dealt with the babies, as if they weren’t people at all. But I didn’t have any choice – I was sent to work there every day after school and on the weekends too. At the start of my second week in St Grace’s it felt like I’d been there for a lifetime already, and my hopes of being rescued by Mammy were fading every day.
‘She’d come to get us if she could,’ Agatha reasoned one evening.
‘But what if she’s not allowed?’ I said. ‘Maybe we’ll have to be here for the rest of our lives. I don’t think I could stand it, Aggie. I hate it here.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Agatha replied. ‘She’ll come for us. You’ll see.’
But by the third week I was desperately unhappy. One morning, I walked into the nursery to be met by the sound of my brother Martin crying with pain. I knew it was him straight away – even above the ordinary cries of the other babies, I recognized my brother’s cries. I ran over to where I saw Bernie had him on a changing table – my brother still wore a nappy at night – and then I caught sight of something I didn’t like at all. Bernie had the nappy pin open and there was blood coming out of my brother’s back passage. I didn’t understand it – why was Bernie trying to hurt my brother like this? For a minute, I just stood there, unwilling to believe my own eyes. Was she putting it inside him? She was! As soon as I’d recovered from the shock, I started shouting at the top of my voice: ‘STOP! STOP! YOU’RE HURTING HIM!’
She whipped round and gave me an evil look, then she pretended I wasn’t there and carried on putting on Martin’s nappy.
‘That’s right – all done!’ she exclaimed brightly.
She quickly tied up the nappy at the front, put the nappy pin in to secure it then helped Martin off the table. He winced as he moved away but he wouldn’t look me in the eye. I wanted to ask her what she had done but I was too frightened.
I shook with emotion. What are they doing to the children here?
It wasn’t right. It just wasn’t right. I knew it in my heart – the place was run by nuns but what they were doing to the babies was ungodly. It was bad and sinful. I knew that much. Each day I left the nursery with a heavy heart and the sound of the wailing still ringing in my ears. I hated the thought of leaving Cecily and Martin in that place. The nuns and the staff were so cruel to the little ones who were helpless to stop them. It was bad enough for me and I was six!
The following Saturday morning I was back in the nursery, dashing around trying to get all the toddlers onto the potties. Agatha was also there and we hadn’t been at work long before I heard her crying.
‘Irene!’ she called out quietly, obviously trying not to attract the attention of the nuns and the staff on the ward.
I scurried over to the corner where I saw she had our sister Cecily on the floor fully dressed except she had one shoe on; the other was in Agatha’s hand.
‘What is it?’ I whispered. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘I can’t get Cecily’s shoe on!’ she sobbed. She held out the little burgundy buckle-up shoe towards me and I took it. I had a go myself but it was soon clear that Cecily’s left foot was too swollen to get the shoe to fit. Confused, I took off the right shoe then peeled down Cecily’s tights. To my shock I saw that the whole of her left foot was one big, angry, red blister.
‘It’s burnt!’ I exclaimed. ‘Her foot is burnt!’
Agatha gasped with shock and now Cecily started crying. I could see she was in a lot of pain.
‘Was it the hot-water bottle?’ I asked Cecily and s
he nodded. The nuns put a hot-water bottle in the cots with the babies every night to keep them warm. Someone had put a hot-water bottle directly onto Cecily’s foot and left her like that all night long!
‘Please, sister!’ I called out to Sister Beatrice, who was in the middle of the room.
‘What is it?’ she answered tersely.
‘I think my sister has been hurt,’ I said. ‘Look at her foot. It’s blistered and we can’t get the shoe on it. Should I take her to see the nurse?’
‘No, don’t be stupid, child. Just push the shoe onto her. I’m sure it’s fine.’
Then she walked away. Agatha looked at me with despair but there was nothing we could do.
The next day I discovered I was so hungry I had no choice. After lunch, when we were put out to the yard, I went to the doorway to wait with the other children. When the lady with the bowl came out I made sure I dived headfirst onto a piece of mouldy roll. Then I scampered off to the far end of the yard and pushed myself into a corner, crouching down low so nobody could see me. I knew the drill. I had seen children snatch and steal pieces of bread from one another so I had to make sure I ate it quickly. There, I tore off chunks of stale bread and gulped them down, grateful to stop the terrible pangs of hunger that now left me doubled over in agony. Afterwards, I felt strangely numb. I had seen the children do the same thing a few weeks before and I remembered thinking how they looked like animals. Now I was an animal too. What is happening to me? What is going on? Nothing made sense any more.
At the nursery I saw the nuns doing that thing with the nappy pins to more and more children and it made me feel so awful I couldn’t sleep at night. It was the start of a new week and Bernie called me over one afternoon and ordered me to strip.
‘What for?’ I asked. I didn’t like the sound of this.
‘Don’t argue, girl!’ she snapped. ‘Do you want to be sent to the Mother Superior?’
I shook my head, no. The Mother Superior was the head nun. I hadn’t had much to do with her yet but I had heard how she beat children with a belt. I definitely did not want to go and see her so I did as I was told. Bernie told me to take off my knickers and dress and lay back on the wide windowsill which was two feet off the ground. Then she put the pin inside my privates. I knew the pin was open because I felt a terrible sharp pain. A second later she yanked it out again – Oh Christ! It was like she was ripping out my insides.