No One Wants You

by Celine Roberts

  We all left the hospital at 4 am. My cousin Tommy drove off back to Dublin and I went to stay the night at Tommy Junior’s house.

  The next day, Saturday, Darren my nephew was being confirmed in the Catholic Church. It was a big family occasion and everyone was invited but I didn’t go. Instead I went to the hospital and stayed with my mother. She drifted in and out of sleep all day. I had polite small talk with her. She was not well enough to have any deep conversations. I had loads of questions to ask her. I wanted answers.

  One of the times as she drifted off, she mumbled, ‘Ronan is with me.’

  You never saw such speed. I sprang out of my chair to her side, ‘What, where, where?’ I realised she was hallucinating and sat down in my chair, with a slow exhale of breath.

  Her cardiologist came to see her.

  I said to him, ‘My mother looks very precarious. She is very erratic.’

  He said, ‘You’re right, she has been bad for a couple of years.’

  I wasn’t prepared for how ill she really was.

  I said to him, ‘This is it?’

  He pursed his lips and silently nodded assent.

  During one of her lucid moments I asked her if she would come and live with me in London where I could look after her. She said she would. I felt she was being her usual self. She would say anything to get out of a difficult situation.

  I asked her if she wanted to talk about anything. I asked her if she wanted a priest. My perception of what she might want to talk about and hers might have been different.

  The priest came.

  She asked to see him alone. He left without speaking to me. She never told me what she had said to him. I never saw him again. The Irish clergy were never very empathetic towards me.

  I left her for a short time and joined the other family members for lunch at the confirmation celebrations. After eating, I went straight back to the hospital. I felt that I wanted to be with her until the end. I knew that she would die. It was only a matter of a few short hours and I did not want her to die alone.

  About 7 pm that evening, I went back to Tommy Junior’s home to freshen up before the long night vigil to come. While I was at his house, I was informed that Avril had phoned to say that the nurses at the hospital had said that our mother needed rest.

  I wanted to get back to the hospital but Tommy Junior thought that it was better not to go. I went along with that decision, grudgingly. I was sure that she was going to die in a few short hours.

  My head began to race. Were my siblings conspiring against me, to prevent me from being with my dying mother? Why didn’t they want me to be there? Did they not realise that I would know what a dying person would need? As a nurse, I know that when someone is just about to die, it can make such a difference to have someone there with you as you slip out. Rest was little use to her at this stage. I wasn’t going to prevent her from resting; I just wanted to be with her when she died. Was I the only one who knew that she was dying? Maybe they thought that I might be a bit hysterical or over the top.

  I went to bed, but no sleep came. At 4 am, the phone extension in my room rang. I grabbed it immediately. It was the hospital. They told me that my mother had died. I was raging. I felt that Avril, alone, or in collusion with some of my siblings, had prevented me from being where I wanted to be. I should have been assertive, jumped in a cab and gone back to the hospital. I wasn’t with her when she died because I didn’t want to antagonise my siblings. I kept it all in and told Tommy Junior and Marion she was dead and we went to the hospital.

  I remember thinking, ‘Oh God, she is gone.’

  I was angry that she had brought ten children into the world and that she had died alone.

  I came out of the ward, rushed down the stairs on my own and shouted, ‘It is all so bloody unfair.’

  I wanted more time, to say what there was to say.

  I told her that I loved her, many times.

  I wanted her to tell me that she loved me.

  She never said it.

  Her body was taken to the undertakers on Sunday evening. She was buried next to my father at Mount Oliver’s Cemetery, on the Tuesday.

  I came home to London on the Wednesday. I took the whole week off work to recover.

  How did it affect me?

  One thing was certain – my mother had not won this time.

  EPILOGUE

  Onwards and upwards

  Since the death of my parents, there has been a form of closure to a part of my life. But in the slamming of one door, truly another one has opened.

  I am trying to look forward emotionally but in order to progress, I have to look over my shoulder at my past. In doing so, it has thrown up a mountain of questions to which I do not have the answers. With the help of counselling, I am embarking on a confrontational retrospective journey down a not-so-pleasant memory lane.

  Most of the sequences, which I recall, have to be analysed, truthfully. I cannot run away and hide emotionally from them and pretend that they did not happen.

  I still have not come to terms with events that led to my being given to such an evil, ageing foster-mother. As I think of eating the wax candles in the church and stealing food almost every day of my childhood, it reminds me of a life of misery and neglect, abuse and starvation. I didn’t have the innocence of a happy childhood.

  I went back to visit the church beside Meade’s pub at Bulgaden one time and I found a plaque on the wall by the holy water font. It was commemorating a parish priest who had died many years before my time there. It read:

  Earnestly pray for the repose of the soul of

  Rev. James Walsh

  Thirty-nine years Parish Priest of Bulgaden and Ballinvana

  who by his Piety, Eloquence and Zeal

  put vice to shame

  and confirmed the well disposed

  He dept. this life Dec. 24 1858

  Aged 77 years

  Have Mercy on me O Lord according to Thy Great Mercy

  It was strange to think that the area had a problem with ‘vice’ almost 100 years before my childhood experiences. I just wished that someone had been there when I needed help. The area is now a community alert area. From my point of view it was too late. The community never took any notice of what was happening to me. I hope that they are more ‘alert’ now.

  To face that pain is not easy. I am unable to ‘lay those ghosts to rest’. The sexual abuse haunts me. Night after night, I see the faces of my abusers. As nightmares, the acts are replayed in the cinema of my head, to an imprisoned audience of one.

  I cannot escape.

  I feel angry inside.

  I struggle to find words to describe the tangible fear and horror that a young child experiences when a frenzied male adult is raping her delicate body. In cases of child sexual abuse, it always surprises me when adults think that young children do not try hard enough to stop an adult sexually invading their body. It is a commonly held perception that children should fight their abuser. What strength has a child against a fully adult man, who is so emotionally deficient that he can leave the broken and internally damaged body of a young seven-year-old-girl, lying on the dirty ground, waiting for someone else to rescue her?

  Today these men are reviled as paedophiles, but when they arrived at our house, they presented themselves as the most charming of men. Some of them were pillars of the local community. When they paid my foster-mother for my services, she was at her most pleasant to me. This behaviour has disturbed me throughout my entire life. How could any woman force another female, especially a young child, to indulge in this type of depravity? It was the behaviour of someone who suddenly realised that they had a considerable asset in their possession, and had to maintain it for its future earnings potential.

  I am not yet free of the horrors of the sexual abuse. I don’t even know if that freedom is available to me, ever. From where I am now, it is difficult to generate any optimism on that front.

  How did society allow these things to happe
n to me? Many people knew that it was happening and yet they allowed themselves to turn a blind eye. As long as it was happening to someone else or someone else’s child, they simply did not care.

  My ‘auntie nuns’ are players in my life that I have difficulty with. When I found my immediate family, members of that extended family began to appear. Some of the first members of my father’s family to contact me and ‘welcome’ me to the family were my ‘auntie nuns’, his two sisters. I received many letters from them, as if they had always been unaware of my existence.

  When I asked them directly, ‘Were you aware of me as your niece at any time?’ they denied any knowledge. I don’t believe them. I think they said it because if they admitted they knew about me, they could have rescued me. They were in positions of power, but they chose not help me. As Mercy nuns, they were an active part of the management of a very powerful institution. They were part of a religious order that indulged in institutional child abuse and treated its occurrence as normal behaviour. I find this difficult to come to terms with. Having witnessed such hypocrisy and denial from the clergy of the day, from close quarters, I could never respect them. So it is with disappointment that I have to treat any lofty excuses from my ‘auntie nuns’ as suspect, pious testaments. They alone know the truth and they have their own God to answer to.

  While at first I considered my father to be a god, his status as a deity declined rapidly for me. He was unable to control my mother. I thought that he was going to solve all my problems with her, but he was always trying to please her first, rather than me. While he accepted me unconditionally, he also wanted my mother to accept me. He was frustrated that he could never achieve a mother-and-daughter harmony between us. But he never delved deeper to see why my mother could not love me. I found him to be a weak man in the end.

  My mother provides the greatest turmoil in my head.

  The questions keep coming.

  Even when she was alive, she would not extend any quarter to me.

  She hated me.

  She went to great lengths to distance herself from me.

  Initially she must have felt safe. I was not a threat. After our first meeting at the convent, she was probably happy enough that I would not cause her any problems. She probably felt very smug after our second meeting at the trade fair. Her secret was safe. But when I appeared again, with my own family in tow, wanting to meet my father, alarm bells started to ring for her. I was a loose cannon.

  Her darkest secret was in danger of being exposed and for that, she would never forgive me. I now wonder why, when she had married my father and had nine other children with him, couldn’t she tell him about me? After the intimacy of nine children, how could they have secrets from one another? Maybe she did tell him!

  They got married about one year after I was born.

  Why didn’t they come and get me then?

  Did my father know about me but pretended not to know, when he was confronted?

  Did they both decide to leave me to my own fate and never rescue me from hell?

  Could my mother not tell him about me because he was not my father?

  Was someone else my father?

  Tom O’Sullivan accepted me as his daughter, why couldn’t my mother accept me?

  She never gave in.

  I just wanted her to love me. I was definitely her daughter. Even as an adult, there was no denying me. Physically, I was just like her. I was the image of her. I think that is why Tom accepted me so readily. He saw me as a young Doreen.

  Finally, I find it difficult to accept that the Irish state and its public services allowed such abuse to occur undetected. Of course, it is not only the state but also society itself that is responsible for allowing those awful abuses. Irish society refused to admit that such practices existed, while many actually knew it to be true.

  I was there.

  Those men were there.

  The people where I lived were there.

  They knew what was happening, otherwise why did the ISPCC get involved?

  I am only now beginning to feel good about myself and to look back at some of the things I have achieved. When I finally passed my RGN exams I was awarded the Florence Nightingale medal for my high achievement in the exam. It was presented to me at Southwark Cathedral. That day I felt that I had fulfilled my promise to Father Bernard and Mrs Cooke in some way. I was so proud of that medal with my number and name on it, and I still wear it with pride to the Florence Nightingale memorial service at Westminister Abbey every year. Then, in 1982, I was asked to be the sole representative of all the Irish nurses working in the UK, as part of an ‘Irish contribution to Britain’ delegation, to make a presentation to the British Prime Minister who was Margaret Thatcher at the time. I presented her with a symbolic nurse’s cap. She was very pleasant to our delegation and arranged to have us shown around. Imagine me seeing all around 10 Downing Street! I felt really important and overwhelmed at the same time. I felt I had come a long way.

  In 2002 I was accepted by Brookes College, Oxford, to do my Masters in neurology and rehabilitation. Being accepted at Oxford finally proved to me that the nuns in the industrial school were wrong when they told me I was stupid.

  I have also made some changes.

  Harry still lives in the same house and we remain married. However, we lead separate lives. I asserted myself and obtained that freedom. He is the father of my son and, in that respect, I would not want to see him hurt.

  I am still very close to my brother, Tommy, and his family. We are in regular contact, to this day. Many of my other siblings have drifted from me. My son Anthony, his wife and my beautiful grandchild are my family now.

  And of course there is not a day in my life that I don’t think about my beloved Ronan. I miss him so very much but I know I will see him again one day.

  After so many years of ‘acting’ that everything was all right, of telling different lies to different people, just to survive and appear normal, I am glad that I decided that I had to change. I needed help. I was so tired of simply ‘coping’ with my past.

  When I decided to go for counselling, I had never spoken about my life, truthfully, to anyone before. It wasn’t easy to face up to the reality of my life, but now I have been able to put some perspective on it.

  And down through the years, while I may have wanted or coveted what other people had, I never wanted to be anyone else. I just wanted to be me.

  Now, I want to find the REAL me!

  With that goal in mind, I set out once again – a survivor.

  Acknowledgements

  To Gerry Ledwith, my agent, whose literary skills and endless gentle patience kept my aspiration to write alive.

  To Chenile, Aoife and Julie, at Merlin, for believing in me and taking the risk.

  To Charlotte and the team at Ebury for accepting my work and for being so caring to me personally.

  To Peter Davin for my promotional photos.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

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  Published in 2008 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing

  A Random House Group Company

  First published in Ireland by Merlin Publishing in 2006

  Copyright © Celine Roberts 2006, 2008

  Celine Roberts has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner

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