When prayers finished, I slipped away to the nearest toilet cubicle and closed the door. I dreaded having to put my finger in my mouth and poke around. What if it was a slug? I braced myself for the worst. Leaning over the toilet, I opened my mouth wide and scraped away at the roof with my fingertip, making sure to remove everything at once. Cringing, I held my finger at a distance to examine what was there, but instead of a slug on my fingertip, to my delight, I saw a large red jellied sweet. I quickly popped it back into my mouth and began to puzzle over how it had got there. As the morning went on, I became more and more intrigued. I asked around, but no one knew anything about it.
That afternoon Sister Austin made me scrub the kitchen floor instead of going to recreation with the others. This was my punishment for taking too long to eat the lumps of fat in the stew at dinner. While I was on my knees scrubbing, two of Sister Thomas’s pets – Gertrude and Agnes – came in. I immediately sensed trouble. They were big girls, much stronger than I was, and I’d had run-ins with them – and others like them – from the day I’d started in the juniors. They were always picking on me and putting me down, and often their aggression was physical. It never got any easier to cope with. In some ways it was harder to take than the nuns’ abuse, because the way I saw it, we girls were all in the same boat and should stick together.
They sauntered towards me. I tried to ignore them and kept my head down as I scrubbed the floor, but then Gertrude kicked the bucket over, and they broke into gales of laughter. Don’t react, I told myself. Keep calm. I tried hard not to show how furious I was because it would only make things worse.
They’d spilt dirty water all over the kitchen floor, and my legs were soaked. My shoes and tights squished as I got to my feet. Knowing that the nuns would delight in blaming me for the mess, I swallowed the insults on the tip of my tongue, bit my lip and began to clear it up before anyone came along and saw it.
My blood boiled as I wrung out the cloth. I felt pathetic, not standing up for myself, and wanted to get up and throw the bucket at Gertrude. But I didn’t look at either girls and managed to hold down my temper, even though I could feel their eyes on me and hear them sniggering.
It took a good twenty minutes or so to clean up the floor, by which time they’d left the kitchen. I thought that I’d try to visit Loretta later on, if I could manage to slip away unnoticed. I hadn’t seen very much of her since she’d started to work in the old peoples’ section of the convent, and I missed her a lot. It occurred to me that she might be able to give me some advice on how to deal with Gertrude and Agnes.
I tiptoed along the edge of the kitchen to avoid getting footprints on the floor and took one last look back to make sure that the job had been done properly. Suddenly, Gertrude, Agnes and two other seniors pushed me back inside the kitchen. I slipped on the wet floor and fell over. My legs and hands stung on impact, and I noticed that a load of shoeprints had already messed up my work.
All I could think of was how I’d have to wash the floor over again, but that was the least of my problems. As I stood up, the four girls grabbed me and pushed me up against the sink. They began to taunt me, calling me names and telling me I was ‘a little scrubber’ and ‘a dirty little bitch’.
One of them started poking me hard on the chest. ‘Tell me, Reilly, that ye’re a dirty little scrubber. Say it, Reilly! Say it!’
They were trying to provoke a reaction, and they got one. I started to fight back, pushing and screaming, ‘Get away from me ye bastards. Get away!’
One of them grabbed me and pulled me down onto the wet kitchen floor, forcing my arms up over my head. I kicked and shouted, but soon someone else’s hands were pinning down my head and covering my mouth and part of my nose, blocking off my air supply. Panicking, I struggled even harder. I managed to wriggle enough to breathe through my nose, but I knew I was in trouble. Pinned down like that, all I could do was kick out frantically, but then someone pulled at my legs and sat on them. I was completely helpless. I may as well have just given in then, but I couldn’t bring myself to. My instinct was to make things as difficult as possible for my attackers.
‘Let’s see how much this wee bitch can take,’ one said. The others laughed.
I was horribly aware that my dress had ridden up to my waist, and now someone was trying to pull my knickers down. I tried to fight back with every last bit of strength I could muster, and for a moment it seemed to be working and I managed to break free, but they pushed me down again. I felt a hand covering my mouth again. I bit into it as hard as I could.
‘Stop fucking biting, ye wee bitch!’
I bit down harder. The girl screamed and pulled her hand away.
My mouth was free. ‘Someone help me! Get my sister. Get Loretta!’ I yelled, hoping that one of Loretta’s friends would hear. Then there was a tea towel over my mouth.
‘She fucking bit me! Me hand’s bleeding, the wee bitch.’
‘Don’t worry; we’ll give her what for.’ More laughing.
I felt my knickers being pulled down to my knees. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Sister Austin looking on from the doorway. She walked away, smirking. The girls went on laughing. One of them was holding a large ladle. Now she was trying to force its handle between my legs. I strained to keep my legs tightly closed. The handle of the ladle jabbed my thighs painfully, digging into my skin. I screamed and fought back, but it was useless. Then, just as I thought I was losing the fight, the bell went. The girls backed away from me.
‘This isn’t over yet, Reilly,’ one of them said as they left the kitchen.
I struggled to my feet and wiped the floor down quickly before dashing away. I managed to get into my line without the nun noticing that I was late. I’d heard the expression ‘Saved by the bell’, and now it had come true for me. Usually, I cursed the bells. This one had been a blessing.
The following day I found a moment to visit Loretta in the old peoples’ section – as well as the orphanage, the nuns ran a nursing home for the old and infirm in a separate building. Loretta was laying out the body of a woman who had just died. Combing her hair, she told me that she was making her look nice for her coffin. I thought it was creepy, but it really didn’t seem to bother her. In fact, it looked like she was quite enjoying the job.
‘Don’t worry about the dead. They can’t hurt ye. It’s the living I’m more worried about,’ she said.
It was so nice to see her that I stayed to chat for a while, despite the risks. Loretta told me that she’d been in serious trouble a few weeks earlier. She’d taken a really bad beating from the nuns and showed me the scars on her back, which were a quarter of an inch wide and very long. They were vicious, and I felt really sorry for her. When they’d finished with her, she said, they’d carried her by the arms and legs and thrown her into an ice-cold bath. She said it very matter-of-factly, but I couldn’t help expressing my anger. ‘Don’t ye worry about me,’ she reassured me. ‘I can take it, and I won’t let them bastards break me.’ Her brave words brought a bittersweet smile to my lips.
I watched her combing the dead woman’s hair, curling it around her fingers to make it look pretty, and realised that I wouldn’t be able to tell her about what Sister Thomas’s pets had done to me. I didn’t want her to get into any more trouble with the nuns, and knowing how much she cared about me, she’d probably have stormed off immediately to find every one of them, not stopping until she’d nearly killed them. Then she’d be punished again, beaten severely, and I didn’t want that. Anyway, I couldn’t always have her fighting my battles. It was time to start defending myself.
‘Did ye get the sweet I put in yer mouth the other night?’ she said. ‘It was a bit late, and ye were all asleep. I didn’t want to wake ye or leave it where Sister Thomas would find it.’
Finally, my curiosity was satisfied. ‘Oh that was ye! I didn’t know what the hell it was when I woke up. It scared the living daylights out of me!’
I told her the slug story and we laughed.
&n
bsp; ‘Are ye all right, Frances? Ye seem to be miles away,’ she said.
‘I’m fine. I just really needed to see ye. I miss our talks.’
Suddenly, the dead woman’s chest rose up and she gave a long, loud burp. I yelped and fled the room, terrified that she’d come back to life, and by the time Loretta had caught up with me, I was deathly pale and could barely speak. Meanwhile she was in fits of laughter.
‘It’s normal,’ she said, going on to explain that dead people often release gas and that can make the body move, especially before rigor mortis has set in properly.
I refused to go back into the room, but I did see the funny side of it.
‘At least us Reillys were born with a bloody good sense of humour,’ she said, tears of laughter welling up in her eyes.
We hugged and I made my way back to the dormitory.
Seeing Loretta had cheered me up, even if it had frightened the wits out of me, and I couldn’t wait to tell my friends about the dead woman. It was going to be better than any made-up ghost story. That night, after lights out, I related my grisly tale. No one blamed me for running out on a burping dead woman, and some of them were really spooked by the idea, which of course triggered a round of ghost stories.
*
For the next few days I was continually on the lookout for Gertrude, Agnes and the others. Then I started to think that they might have decided to leave me alone, perhaps because they were worried about what Loretta would do to them. But they were just biding their time. One morning, when I was alone in the main hall doing an errand for one of the nuns, they pounced on me again. This time there was no bell to stop them, and they were out to finish what they’d started.
The attack was brutal, but it was to be the last. I fought back with a savagery and strength that shocked even me, biting, kicking and scratching frenziedly. Perhaps if I hadn’t struggled so hard, the whole thing might have been over sooner and they wouldn’t have abused me so cruelly. But I had taken enough – from Tom and Barry Murphy, from the nuns and from the nuns’ pets – and I simply refused to take any more, so I fought back, no matter what.
It took a while for them to pin me down, and several times I managed to fight them off and to break free, but each time they caught me again and dragged me back to the gym mats. It was a horrific attack and seemed to go on forever. They kept trying to pull up my skirt and touch me under my knickers with rough, fumbling fingers, and they kicked and punched and slapped me until I thought I was going to pass out. But I still refused to give in and kept fighting back. I couldn’t show any weakness. If I gave up the fight, they’d go on picking on me forever. Finally, I got my head free and sunk my teeth into someone’s arm, biting down until she screamed and released her grip. I kicked and thumped my way free of the others and ran across the hall towards my locker.
After the last attack I’d stolen a sharp knife from the kitchen and hidden it in my locker, hoping to move it to the dormitory when I got the chance. Now I reached inside the locker and pulled it out. Turning on the girls, I forced one of them to the floor and held the knife to her throat.
‘I’ll kill ye!’ I screamed, pressing the blade into her skin. ‘Ye hear me? Leave me alone, or I’ll kill ye!’
The others backed off, shrieking hysterically. Just then a nun came through the door.
I got the blame, of course, and took the punishment, but I was a changed person. Something in me had snapped, and those four girls were now scared of me. They sensed that I’d been close to using the knife. If the nun hadn’t walked in, one of them could have died.
After that, they kept their distance. The incident was never spoken of again, but all the other girls were aware that something major had happened. Suddenly, the seniors were wary of me, and everyone sensed a change in me. On the surface I appeared much the same, but something inside had been transformed. I refused to be victimised any more.
CHAPTER 21
Stowaways
I had no idea Loretta was planning an escape. She didn’t warn me or say goodbye. She just vanished.
I was stunned when we were called into the hall and it was announced that she’d run away. I simply could not believe it. It was inconceivable that she’d go without taking Sinéad and me, or at least telling us where she was going.
Evidently the nuns felt the same way. Sister Thomas, particularly, was convinced that I must know something, but Loretta had second-guessed them and told me nothing so that they couldn’t beat it out of me. They beat me all the same, as she must have known they would, breaking cane after cane on my head, arms and legs. Sister Thomas was determined not to stop until I confessed. It was one of the worst punishments I endured in all my years at the convent.
Later we heard that Loretta had made it to England with the help of a lad who did the bread deliveries to the convent. He’d fancied her for a long time, and although she didn’t feel the same way about him, she saw him as her ticket out of there, so she’d given him the impression that she was interested. He’d told her that his name was Jack the Knife, which she’d found amusing. He carried a large flick knife but was weedy-looking and nothing like the type of gangster the name suggested.
Six months after she’d gone I was still angry with her, still raw with the pain of her betrayal. How could she have abandoned us? How could she have left us unprotected in this hell? She’d known how bad it would be for me when she left. She knew that I’d be beaten within a couple of inches of death. That’s what really hurt me – that she knew and she left, anyway. She could at least have trusted me not to tell, however much I was beaten.
I didn’t want to be angry with her, but I couldn’t help it. I imagined her having a great time somewhere, enjoying the good life without even thinking about Sinéad and me. Sinéad still had her older sister. But for me, life was worse than ever. Without Loretta I suddenly found myself being picked on by the bullies who would have left me alone if she’d still been around. Then there were girls who had a grudge against Loretta and were now taking it out on me. And all this at a time when some of the girls had started to leave me alone. I’d been in several bad fights since she’d left. Other girls had suddenly become more of a problem than the nuns were, and their attacks were of an increasingly sexual nature, which horrified me. They’d learnt how to be vicious and spiteful from the nuns, and now they were even better at it than their role models.
I’d had enough. The only thing for it was to escape and make our own way to England, I kept telling Sinéad. But there didn’t seem to be much chance of breaking out for now because we were locked in a room for getting into a fight and answering back to the nuns who’d discovered us scrapping. Sister Francis was furious with us. It wasn’t the first time we’d answered her back, and she’d clearly had enough. We weren’t allowed to speak to anyone. Our slop was passed in to us on a tray, and there was nothing to do except talk about getting on the boat to England and trying to find Loretta and our mammy.
For two nights we slept on the floor without blankets. On the third day the slop came in on a tray again, but there was a vital break with routine.
‘She hasn’t locked the door!’ I whispered to Sinéad.
‘Let’s go, sure,’ Sinéad said, without hesitating. ‘Anything’s better than sitting around waiting to be beaten.’
We sneaked out of the room and made our way towards the back gate. There was no one around. The place seemed eerily deserted. All too easily, we found the key hanging from a hook on the wall. We unlocked the gate and stepped out onto the Ormeau Road. But something didn’t feel right. Now Loretta had gone, I had a funny feeling that the nuns had decided to solve the rest of the Reilly problem by deliberately smoothing the path to our escape. It was unthinkable that they didn’t know they’d left the door unlocked and had left the key to the gate in such an obvious place. It was all too easy, and that made me uneasy. I was waiting for something to go wrong.
‘We’ll need money if we’re going to get anywhere,’ Sinéad said, looking meaningfully at
two large wooden collection boxes outside the chapel next to the convent. They stood on heavy plinths at either side of the door, each locked with a padlock.
‘We can’t take them, don’t be stupid. We’d go to Hell. And even if it weren’t a sin, we’d never be able to carry them. Look at the size of them!’ I said.
Sinéad gave me a desperate look. ‘We have to do something. It won’t be a sin if we promise to pay it back as soon as we can. Anyway, they’re not attached to the stands. They’ll just come off if we lift them.’
‘You don’t know that for sure, do you?’ I felt nervous that we were even discussing the possibility of stealing from the Church. The more we talked about it, though, the more it felt like we were going to go through with it.
‘We’ll have to pay every penny back,’ I said. Sinéad nodded. ‘OK, then, let’s do it. As quick as we can.’
We looked to make sure nobody was watching.
‘It’s all clear,’ Sinéad said. ‘Let’s grab them now!’
She ran over to one of the boxes, and I went to grab the other one, but neither box detached from its stand. Sinéad just lifted the whole thing and started running with it. With no time to think about it, I did the same and ran after her. Our hearts pounding and the adrenaline pumping, we made it to the park.
We crawled through some bushes into a concealed clearing, dragging the collection boxes behind us. Panting, we sat down to catch our breath. I hoped that we hadn’t been seen. I knew that if the police turned up now, I’d be too puffed out to make a run for it. They’d be able to take me back without a fight, and I really didn’t want that to happen.
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