by Lily O'Brien
Everything was fine until they went into my bedroom and pulled back the covers on my bed; it was still wet and the sheets smelt, and they had stains all over them. The two men were very angry with the staff and they left the house complaining to the nuns that they would be making a full report about what they had found. Sister Ann said goodbye to them and then she closed the front door, walked over to me and slapped me into my face. ‘That’s for wetting the bed’, she said, and then she asked me why I never told the staff about the wet sheets. I tried to explain to her that I did tell the staff that morning, but the staff said that I was lying and she told Sister Ann to leave it at that; but she didn’t and she kept slapping me and shouting at me for not telling them about the sheets and she blamed me for everything that went wrong. In fact, I do believe to this day that the staff had set me up that day, just to get me the beating from Sister Ann.
As time went on, I began to notice more things going on around the house and some of the strange behaviours going on between some of the nuns and staff. Over the years, people would come and go and so would some of the children; and if you asked the nuns if they were coming back, you would be told to shut up and to go away. I also noticed that some of the nuns had become very close to each other; they had been working and living in the same home and convent for so long that some of them had become almost inseparable, sticking to each other like lovers or conjoined twins. They always walked around in pairs and never ashamed of showing affection to one another in front of us. I will never forget two of the staff that made me feel very uncomfortable when they were around me. They were always playing with each other, touching and fondling each other’s bodies and they never stopped. They would constantly touch each other’s tits and put their hands up each other’s dresses and touch each other between the legs. And they would use a long wooden spoon while they were in the kitchen to poke up each other’s knickers and then they would use the same wooden spoons to stir our dinner while they prepared our food in the kitchen.
Then at mealtimes, they would sit next to each other at the table, smiling and giggling at one another while they put a hand down each other’s knickers and rubbed each other’s private parts under the table. They were disgusting, but I could never say anything to them, and if I looked at them, they would stop for a moment and then give me a dirty look as if I had interrupted them while they were doing something very important; and I always felt embarrassed and uncomfortable while they were around me.
Over the years, I would see and hear things that I could never speak about to anyone, and many of the staff and nuns would touch the children and each other as if it was normal and nothing to worry about. And while I was in the same bedroom as them, they would get into bed with each other and rub each other’s bodies; and they made me feel sick, but to them it was fun having someone in the same room with them while they played around with each other.
Between all the beatings, I did have a few nice times playing like a child, but my fun would always be interrupted by a nun or a member of the staff calling me names or hitting me for some unknown reason. But it wasn’t just me they abused; all the children in the home suffered in one way or another and, over the years, the constant abuse began to take its toll on everyone. Over time, some of the older girls were sent away to workhouses and the only reason the nuns sent them away was to keep them away from the boys; and some of the other children just disappeared over night and no one ever saw them again. I had not seen or spoken to most of my brothers for years and the only one I managed to have some kind of contact with was Chris, as he still lived in a home not far from ours. The nuns ran that home as well as ours, and occasionally I would pass Chris as I walked to school, as our schools stood right next to each other. But the nuns would never allow the boys and the girls to mix, so he would be standing on the corner waiting to go into school, and as I walked by we would have just enough time to say ‘Hi’ to each other, before he went inside the building.
Then one day, I managed to get to the school a bit early and Chris was standing on the corner, hoping to catch a glimpse of me as I walked past; and I had just enough time to ask him how he was, and he said that he felt sad at being separated from us and he felt lonely. He said that our older brother Ted was old enough to leave and he had gone back to live with daddy at the house. He looked sad and I wanted to cuddle him, but I had to go and we both went our own ways to our schools. I knew then that the same thing was going to happen to Simon and me, as we were a lot younger than our other sisters were and soon they would be old enough to leave our house, and they would go home to daddy, leave us behind to suffer at the hands of the nuns.
I felt sad and sorry for myself; and sure enough, three months later, they sent Jenny away, but not because she was old enough to leave, but because she was a bad girl and she had caused a lot of problems with the boys from one of the other homes. She had been caught kissing and messing around with the boys, so the nuns sent her off to a workhouse in Dublin; but I heard that a few days after she got there, she escaped and she had run away to London, to our mum’s house, and she was never coming back.
Now Karen was the oldest and it wasn’t long before she started to take an interest in the local boys; but she wasn’t allowed to have a boyfriend, so she had to sneak out of the house late at night to see the boys. Every evening, she would open a second floor window and then climb down the drainpipe and sneak off for an hour or two; and then Daisy and I would have to stand by our window and wait for her to come back and then we could help her back into the house.
But the window was high off the ground and we had to tie three bed sheets together for her to climb back up to the window. Daisy would tie one end of the sheets around her waist and then I would pull on the sheets, but Karen was fourteen years old and too heavy for us to pull her up on our own. And as she grabbed hold of the sheets and she began to climb up them, we would slide along the floor and slam up against the wall and almost fall out of the window as she climbed up the bed sheets. She was so heavy that we had to sit on the floor below the window and wedge ourselves against the wall, while Karen climbed up, laughing at us as she climbed through the window and fell on to the floor from exhaustion. Sometimes, we had very little strength to help her, so we had to tie one end of the sheets to the legs of one of the beds; otherwise, we would never have been able to hold her weight.
After doing this for months, I got sick of Karen keeping me up all night, just so that she could go and see the boys. So one night, I said to Daisy that when Karen gets back and climbs to the top of the sheets, let’s drop her; but Daisy said, ‘No, we might end up killing her and then what will happen?’ I said, ‘Well, she might just get hurt.’ Then Daisy said that she might just get back up and then she would beat us up for dropping her. We spent ages laughing and plotting what we were going to do to her when she came back and grabbed hold of the sheets. And in the end, we decided to drop her; and when she came back, we waited until she was halfway up the sheets, then we let go and, a few seconds later, we heard a loud thud as she hit the ground. We both looked at each other, then we got up and looked out of the window, and as we leant over and looked down, we could see Karen lying on the ground and she said that she had hurt her back. But after a couple of seconds, she got back up and we gave her another chance; and as she got to the top, we helped her through the window and into the room. When she got back inside the room, she stood up and then she beat us both up, by whacking both of us around the head with the lid of the rubbish bin that was in our room; and after that night, she never trusted us again.
A couple of months later, the nuns told us that Karen was now old enough to leave the home, and they sent a letter to our mother, explaining that Karen was now old enough to leave and a week later my mother sent my sister Tracy’s boyfriend, Fred, over to Ireland to take her back to London. The nuns couldn’t wait to get rid of her, but the paperwork wasn’t ready, so Fred had to spend a couple of days waiting around while the nuns prepared Karen’s leaving papers.
And while Fred was waiting, he spent a lot of the time hanging around the home and playing with me and giving me a lot of attention.
Then on his last visit to the home, before he left, he played with me as usual, but then he grabbed me by my leg and pulled me towards him, and I suddenly remembered whom he was and what he had done to me back at my sister’s house in London. I quickly pulled away from him and ran off up to my bedroom and locked the bedroom door. I knew Karen was going away with him the next morning, so later that evening I told her about what he had done to me back in London when I was a baby and I told her to stay away from him and to stay around as many people as possible. So that he could not get her on his own, otherwise he would do things to her that she wouldn’t like. She was afraid, but she understood what I was telling her; and the next morning, I helped her put three sets of clothes on, one layer on top of the other, making sure he would never have enough time to take all the clothes off and touch her. I cuddled her and we said our goodbyes and the nuns gave her a strange look, as they could not understand why she was wearing so many layers of clothes and why she was acting so odd, and then she left with Fred. I was so upset; I turned around and went back into the house.
Now it was only Daisy, Simon and me, with Chris still on his own in the boys’ house; one by one, all the others had left and now we had no one to protect us from the nuns. I told Simon and Daisy that we will never be split up or separated. But because we had no one to protect us, the nuns took advantage of us and the beatings they gave us became more frequent and more severe; and day after day, I was sent to my room and I never got a chance to see or mix with the other children in the house again.
I became depressed and I felt sad for myself. I told Daisy that she would be the next one to go, but she said, ‘Don’t you worry, I won’t leave you.’ Then we both went looking for Simon and when we found him we said that we were the three musketeers and that we would stick together forever and we all promised each other that we would never leave the home without each other. I looked at Simon and Daisy, and I said all for one and one for all, and then we all shouted it out together as loud as we could, letting all the staff and nuns know how we felt about each other. Then we marched through the house, shouting out as loud as we could that we would never leave without each other.
But the next day, one of the nuns came into our room and she told us that Chris was going to be leaving the institution soon and then she left the room smiling. At that moment, I decided that I would run away, I just couldn’t stick it any longer, but Daisy didn’t want to go, so I decided to take Simon and another little boy and girl from the home with me. And the next morning, we left early, we should have been going to school, but I knew it was my only chance to get away before anyone realized we had gone. I had decided to head home back to daddy, and as we walked along the road, we all held hands and we headed up along the Waterford road and in the direction of daddy’s village. I had decided that we would hitchhike, as daddy’s house was a long way away, and I knew that by just walking it would have taken us a whole day to get there.
We walked and walked; and after a couple of hours, a car pulled up and a man gave us a lift part of the way and eventually we made it to daddy’s house. We walked up along the cobbled path towards his house and I couldn’t believe it; he was there and he was as shocked to see me as I was to see him, and he cuddled Simon and me. We went into the house and we sat down, then I began telling him all about the nuns and staff and what they had been doing to us over the years; but within a couple of hours, the police came knocking at the door and daddy hid us all in the kitchen. They had come to the house to tell daddy that we were missing, but as they entered the house, they realized that they had found us; and after they spoke to daddy, they took us all back to the home.
As soon as we got back, a member of the staff took me into the dining room and gave me a beating that I will never forget and I thought I was going to die. However, I was so used to the beatings that she had to hit me harder and harder so that she could get some kind of reaction from me and the satisfaction of seeing me twitch with pain. After the beating, she dragged me to my room and she left me lying on the floor. I was too upset to get up and I just lay there for hours, trying to think of ways that I could get them back. But it didn’t matter as she had locked the door and I couldn’t get out of the room. And I had to spend two weeks there, with all the windows and the door locked shut, and I had no company. The air in the room was hot and stale and for days I tried to open the window, but I couldn’t as they had screwed wooden blocks to the window frame so that I could not open it and run away. And they kept the bedroom door locked shut from the outside and they only opened it to allow my brother and sister in at bedtime, so they could sleep; and then in the morning, after they went to school, the nuns would lock the door again and I would be all alone once more.
One day, while I was locked in the bedroom, I began to have pains in my belly and, as the pains got worse, I shouted for the staff to open the door and to help me. I banged on the bedroom door, but no one came, so I lay on my bed and I waited for the pain to go away, but it never did. And within a couple of hours of me lying down on my bed, I fell asleep; and when I woke up, I thought I had wet my bed, but as I looked down I realised that I had started to bleed from between my legs. The bed sheets were soaked with blood and I became frightened and scared, so I got up and I ran over to the bedroom door; again, I shouted for the staff, but still no one came. I sat back on my bed and I prayed to God, but nothing happened.
I sat there and I thought I was going to die, the blood kept dripping out of me and I used my clothes to soak it up, and I kept my legs closed together, hoping it would stop the bleeding. I screamed out loud, begging for someone to help me, but still no one came and I began to cry, as I didn’t want to be alone when my life finished; but I was alone, so I curled up on the floor and I waited for my life to end. Hours passed and it was now evening and I was still alive, but my hands were covered in blood, I looked a mess and my clothes were covered in blood too. I looked up at the window and it was now dark outside, then I heard the noise of keys rattling as a nun came to the door to give me my dinner.
And as she opened the door and walked in, she dropped everything; all she could see was me standing in front of her covered in blood and she thought I had done something to myself. I stood looking up at her and then I told her that I was dying, and she almost fainted as I explained to her that I was bleeding from between my legs and that it wouldn’t stop. She looked at me and then she said that it was nothing and that I was a stupid bloody girl and then she walked away.
I begged her to stay and help me, but she just walked away, locking the bedroom door behind her. And all I could do was listen through the door as she walked down the stairs. I picked the food up off the floor and ate what I could and then sat on my bed, not knowing what to do. I was still bleeding when one of the nuns came back and opened the door again, and as I looked up, Daisy came into the room and, as she looked over at me, I began to cry and all she could see was my blood-covered body and clothes. I told Daisy that I was bleeding and that I was going to die, but then she smiled at me and she told me all about periods. I had no idea what she was talking about, as no one had ever told me about periods, growing up, having sex or even about where babies came from, and most of it was all a big shock to me.
Daisy then left the bedroom and when she returned she handed me a sanitary pad, and she said that it was the only one that she had and that the staff and nuns would not give her any more for weeks. She said that I had to put it between my legs and, when it was all wet and dripping with blood, I had to keep using it again and again. ‘That’s disgusting’, I said and I told her that I couldn’t, but she said that the nuns and staff would get angry if we asked them for more pads, so I used the pad and it felt strange; and when it got all wet, I put it on the side to dry out and then I used it again. But after a couple of days, it fell apart, so Daisy had to go and steal one for me.
I couldn’t believe what I had to do and I was so embarrassed about my periods that I hid them from the staff and nuns for almost a year, before finally telling them that I needed pads. But they already knew and they didn’t care if I asked for a pad or not. I was too embarrassed at having to wash out the pads that I just couldn’t do it any longer, and even then they only gave me one a month and I had to steal more if I needed them.
CHAPTER 9
Getting Them Back
Now the time had come for me to go to secondary school and the only school available to me was an all girls’ school run by the nuns, but I didn’t want to go as I hated school and everything to do with it. I hated the place, the people and even the lessons; no one had ever tried to educate me properly, and I was always behind in lessons and the nuns always made me sit at the back of the classroom like a dummy, ignored by everyone and out of the teacher’s way. And now it was too late for me and I was not interested in school anymore; I still had to go to school, and once there I still had trouble sitting at the back of the classroom all day with nothing to do and it was driving me mad. Plus the nuns were getting fed up with me and they made it obvious, with them giving me dirty looks whenever our eyes would meet in the class.
The only two men allowed inside the school grounds was the maintenance man and the headmaster Mr Williams, and Mr Williams absolutely hated me and every single girl in St Josephs. Over the years, everyone had forgotten that I had parents and it seemed like everyone around me hated me and thought of me as an inconvenience to them, and no one ever had time for me. I had been put in the home and in my position because of my parents’ inability to look after me and not because I was a bad person, but no one seemed to understand that, and they all blamed me for the position I was in. Mr Williams especially hated me, because I didn’t care about anything or anyone anymore, and the fact that I had no respect for him or his school made my situation even worse.