‘The Philippines.’ She waved one hand in exasperation. ‘Breda, I’m a total adolescent next to you.’
‘Nothing wrong with adolescents,’ Breda shot back with one of her grins. ‘I’ve had four and believe me, they’re great!’
‘What about middle-aged adolescents?’
‘The best, kiddo.’
Cecilia had met all four of Breda’s boys: Michael, Sean and James, and the youngest, Conner, who was still living with her. The fact that wiry little Breda had produced such great strapping lads – all of them were over six feet – was nothing short of amazing. The three who’d left home were constantly dropping by with their mates and their girlfriends, joking and arguing and making food for themselves. It was a close and lively family. All the boys were loud, good-natured and very accepting of Cecilia. Sometimes when she was in her room listening to their voices down in the kitchen she was transported back to her own childhood. It made her sad all over again to realise all she’d lost. Suck it up, the mean voice played in her head. It’s what you deserve.
Breda suggested again that Cecilia begin the family reconnection with a letter to her mother. So Cecilia sat down and wrote a letter and then … didn’t send it. Couldn’t, somehow. Then she wrote another and another and when she found she couldn’t quite find the courage to send even one of them she found Patrick’s address and began to write to him.
But the same thing happened. In the end she couldn’t bring herself to slip the stamped and addressed letter into the box.
Some days she was tempted to jump on a plane and go back to Europe. Why stay hanging out on the periphery of Breda’s life, writing letters that she didn’t post, thinking thoughts she knew were rubbish?
And yet something stopped her. It was too much like running away again.
Peach
A week after we’d made the appointment, Det and I are in the archivist’s small office. Apart from a desk and a computer there’s a central table and some chairs. The place is neat and ordered and the man polite and friendly. All kinds of memorabilia hang around the walls.
‘Please sit down,’ the archivist says, smiling at us. ‘Now, which of you was wanting the information on Sister Annunciata?’
‘Me,’ I say nervously, ‘and thanks for seeing us.’
‘That’s a pleasure,’ he says,‘but please understand we don’t have much on any of the Sisters, nor on the girls who passed through here.’ He frowns. ‘Things were different then. They didn’t take many pictures and the records aren’t very thorough. But I did have a quick look for you and have found a couple of items.’
My heart begins to race as he picks up a thin manila folder from near the computer. I’d agreed to this meeting without really considering what it would be like if I was shown … anything.
‘We’re busy trying to computerise.’ He shakes his head. ‘I’m only employed here part-time, and it’s a big job.’
I nod and try to return his smile.
He puts the folder on the table between us and draws out a piece of paper.
‘Sister Mary Annunciata entered the noviciate in 1963. She supervised the girls in the laundry for a good part of her time here, but she also taught in the infants’ school while attending university.’
‘University?’ Det is surprised.
‘Yes, a lot of the Sisters went to university at that time. Would you like to see a photo of her?’
I nod mutely.
He opens the folder and brings out a couple of black-and-white photos. One is a group shot of rows and rows of nuns, all of them dressed identically in heavy dark robes, most with black veils and some with white.
‘So many,’ I mutter in awe.
‘Over a hundred.’ The archivist smiles. ‘Looking after over a thousand girls.’ He points to a nun standing tall in the middle of the back row. She is looking directly at the camera and smiling, her head turned slightly to the side. ‘That’s her.’
I stare hard at the face but the image isn’t sharp. The closer I look the less able I am to discern anything distinctive.
‘This is better,’ he says, pulling out the next photo.
I gasp involuntarily. It’s much better. Not only is the image clearer, but it is a close-up by comparison. The camera snapped three of the Sisters in the middle of work. They are standing in some kind of garden – vegetable patch, maybe – with their overskirts and aprons pinned up behind. It looks as if one of them has just said something funny and they are stopping a moment to laugh.
The archivist points to the thin one in the middle. ‘That’s her.’
But I’d recognised her already. My birth mother is leaning on a work shovel in the attitude of a workman, which is sort of funny considering all that elaborate headgear she’s wearing. Her leather belt is pulled in tight to reveal a small waist, and the white starched material around her face encases bright eyes and a wide mouth with even teeth. The nun on her left is quite a bit older. She has thick glasses and a wide girth, and the other one has a round and jolly face. They all look happy and relaxed.
Det leans down closer and chuckles softly.
‘You look like her! The mouth, the eyes!’
I shake my head awkwardly and pull at my mouth. ‘No …’
‘You do!’
I feel self-conscious staring at this photo. As if I’ve been caught preening in front of a mirror.
‘Can we have a copy?’ Det asks.
‘I can have one made for you.’ He smiles at her enthusiasm.
‘No!’ I say quite loudly, surprising myself as well as them.‘I don’t think so. I don’t really want a copy.’ I laugh off the anxiety so evident in my voice. ‘Thank you for showing us and everything, but …’ ‘Of course,’ the man says kindly. ‘So this Sister is a close relative of yours?’
I open my mouth and then look to Det for help.
‘Her mother,’ Det explains, which makes me want to cry, because just the word immediately makes me think of my real mother. The one who bathed my knees when I had a fall, and made me hot drinks in the winter after school. The one who sat on the floor between Stella’s and my twin beds and read to us every single night.
‘Oh, I see.’ The man seems slightly taken aback. He slides the photos into the folder. ‘Yes, well, people often find this kind of thing confronting.’
This kind of thing? I want to ask how many times he’s had people coming in wanting to see photos of their birth mothers. He must be able to read my mind.
‘I have people coming in all the time wanting all kinds of information,’ he says. ‘I do have another item of interest, but you might rather wait for another day?’
I stare back at him.
Det looks at me eagerly.
I nod. ‘What is it?’
‘We have a letter she wrote to one of the laundry girls. The woman who received it gave it back to us. She’d heard we were interested in such documents and so …’ He looks directly at me. ‘Please feel free to say if you would rather I simply kept it here with the other material for another time, perhaps.’
‘I would like to see it now.’
The man nods, takes out a page of lined paper and puts it down on the table in front of me. ‘You see here.’ He points to the date. ‘1970.’
‘Yes,’ I whisper. Ten years before I was born.
My dear Faye,
Thank you for your letter. It made me sad to read of your distress since leaving us. I can only pray your bitter feelings will fade in time and that you can find it in your heart to forgive us our mistakes. The laundry work was very hard and relentless. Especially in summer and, well, you’re absolutely right, it hardly seems fair to put young girls to such hard work, especially, as you say, when there was no way out.
You write about me being the ‘only kind one’, but, Faye, if you think hard you’ll remember that isn’t true. What about old Mother Paula? And Mother Aloysius, with her cordial on the hot days and the sweets she’d pass out to keep everyone going when spirits got low? So many of the S
isters loved you. We still love you! It is true that we are not good at showing it. With so many girls to care for, and with so much work to get through every day, individual needs did get lost sometimes. But I promise you things are slowly improving. You might be interested to know that the Sacred Heart girls don’t work such long hours now. They are now divided up into smaller family-type groups, and they’re learning all kinds of different skills. I remember how you hated needlework. These days you wouldn’t have to do it! So that is something, isn’t it? We have a lady coming in once a week teaching leather work and another basic accounting. And we’ve got some deportment classes too. I’m sure the smaller, family groups work a lot better.
Mother Madonna leaving you on ‘the Cross’ until midnight that evening as punishment for using bad language was most unfortunate. That it was in winter and you were without a coat would have made it doubly awful. But, my dear, please believe that Mother would not have meant to do that. As you know, she was very strict but she was never deliberately cruel. Still … it was very hard for you.
I can only say again how sorry I am and that I will remember always your lovely bright restless spirit. You will always be in my prayers.
Yours faithfully in Christ,
Sr M. Annunciata
‘Faye was one of the laundry girls,’ the man explains. ‘You’ve been over to the far part of the convent?’
We shake our heads.
‘There is a whole section over there that was pretty much cut off from the rest of the convent. Over the years, thousands of women and girls worked in the Magdalen laundries both here and in other cities around the world. The Sisters took in linen from outside, a lot of it from the hotels and the ships. It was the way the convent kept afloat financially.’
‘Were the girls paid?’
The man shook his head. ‘There are many written testimonies on the net and elsewhere as to the harshness of the work, but I thought seeing it was your … mother who wrote the note, you’d be interested.’
‘Thank you,’ I whisper.
‘It’s a very nice note,’ the man says encouragingly. ‘A note you can be proud of.’
‘Yes.’ But I can’t work out what kind of note it is. I feel numb.
‘Not such a nice note.’ Det decides for me.
‘Well …’ The man looks uncomfortable. ‘We have to remember that it was some time ago.’
‘So they worked in the laundry for no pay?’ Det is determined
‘Many were in trouble with the law. The nuns would take them from the courts; instead of going to jail they did their time here. But others too. Destitute women, women and girls with nowhere else to go.’
‘I see.’
‘It’s important not to judge by today’s standards. There was no government help for single mothers then or for wives fleeing abusive husbands with nowhere to live. It was a different world altogether.’
‘Hmmm.’ Det frowns and looks at me. ‘You had enough?’
‘Yeah.’
We thank the man and Det leads the way out.
At the door I turn back. ‘The Cross?’ I ask. ‘What was that?’
‘Not quite as bad as it sounds.’ The man smiles. ‘Up the far end of the Sacred Heart enclosure there was a big crucifix and sometimes girls had to stand beneath it as punishment.’
‘Sounds like fun,’ Det says.
We are quiet as we make our way out onto the street.
Cecilia 1968
‘Mother and Sisters, I humbly accuse myself of breaking the Great Silence twice during the last week and …’ Cecilia hesitated, feeling her face grow hot, ‘and also of being negligent in my work with the girls.’
It was Friday night and the Chapter of Faults was progressing slowly. Cecilia had come forward to kneel at Mother Holy Angels’s feet. Behind her the novices and postulants shifted on their knees wearily. She’d been dreading this all day and still held out hope that she might be spared having to go into details.
‘In what way negligent, Sister?’ No such luck. Mother was sitting upright in her large chair in front of the whole community, her eyes bright and alert in the soft light coming in through the windows, her right hand playing with her rosary.
Cecilia hesitated. There was no way out of this. Knowing that Mother Bernard, the nun in charge of the laundry, would have already told Mother Holy Angels the gist of what happened was making her feel sick.
‘There was an altercation in the laundry, Mother, and I forgot my prime responsibility.’
‘Forgot?’
Cecilia heard the sympathetic intake of breath from the novices behind.
‘A fight broke out between two girls in the laundry, Mother. It quickly escalated with the others taking sides.’
‘So a dangerous situation?’
‘Yes, Mother.’
‘What was the fight about?’ Mother asked.
She knows what happened, but she wants to make it hard for me so I’ll give up the poetry group.
‘It was about the little poetry group, Mother.’
‘The poetry group?’
‘Yes, Mother.’
‘What about it, Sister?’
‘The roles, Mother.’
‘The roles?’
The Sacred Heart girls worked in the laundry all day, five days a week, as well as Saturday mornings. They had a few hours on Saturday afternoons for leisure activities like needlework or cooking classes or basketball. Many girls were not interested in any of the activities and spent the time mooching around aimlessly in the few hours before Benediction. In that atmosphere, gangs often formed, gossip was traded and vendettas were carried out over trifling offences. To counter this, Cecilia had sought permission to start a little poetry group with some of the girls. There was no library, nor access to one, but she’d spied The Complete Works of Shakespeare getting dusty sitting up on the shelf in the recreation room amid the many volumes of pious literature. And so she asked if she might borrow it and write some of the famous speeches on the board for the girls to copy and learn off by heart. Initially the small group of eight or ten girls had not been enthusiastic, but when she began to tell them about Romeo and Juliet – the play she’d studied in matriculation – they became excited. It was about love and they were interested in love even if the language was impenetrable. One of them suggested they learn some of it, dress up and ‘play’ it at the end-of-year concert.
Mother Holy Angels had been most unenthusiastic. ‘That kind of thing is too difficult for these girls,’ she told Cecilia. ‘Remember, most of them can’t manage even the simple things in life. Some nice songs for the end of the year would make more sense.’
But when Cecilia confessed her lack of any musical aptitude, Mother Holy Angels reluctantly relented. ‘Well, one can only hope it might improve their language,’ she’d said tartly.
‘And so, Sister? What happened?’
‘Mavis Banes badly wanted the main male role of Romeo, but I gave it to Faye Slattery who looks more the part of a boy and Mavis took offence.’
‘That child would take offence at anything,’ Mother muttered.
That child? Cecilia felt like reminding the nun that the girl was twenty-four, older than Cecilia herself. Mavis was heavy and clumsy and, it had to be said, rather slow. She’d not done well at the family placement she’d been assigned to earlier that year – the mother of thirteen children had sent her home early, reporting that Mavis had been worse than useless. But having no interest in little children was hardly a crime.
‘Go on, Sister.’
‘Unfortunately they were both allotted to the ironing room on Wednesday morning. They used the opportunity to snipe and to rouse each other up.’
‘Which is why we have prayers throughout the working day, Sister!’ the Mistress of Novices cut in sharply. ‘Prayers and hymns to keep the girls focused on their work.’
‘Yes, Mother.’ Cecilia felt her jaw tighten. ‘But it is sometimes hard to keep the girls praying all day, especially in the hot weather.’
‘Be that as it may, Sister,’ Mother sighed. ‘It works to quell frustration and rebelliousness.’
‘Yes, Mother.’
‘Then what, Sister?’
‘Well, Mavis kept calling Faye names, implying that she was a … well, that she had loose morals and the like.’ Cecilia flushed. The dreadful words the girls had used were simply unrepeatable. ‘Then they began to slap and pull at each other, and I was afraid that—’
‘As well you might be!’ the Mistress of Novices said indignantly. ‘The hot presses are very dangerous and all the irons would have been on. Something terrible could have happened, Sister. You and I both know there is always someone nearby for just such occurrences. You only had to ring the bell.’
‘Yes, Mother.’ Cecilia hung her head. She loathed calling in reinforcements.
‘And then?’
Cecilia felt weary. How long was this going to take? Why so much detail? ‘They were rolling around the floor clawing at each other,’ she whispered, ‘so I went over and … I sat on Mavis.’
A sudden soft ripple of mirth broke out behind her. Cecilia looked up hopefully, but Mother Holy Angels was not amused.
‘You sat on her?’
‘Yes, Mother.’
‘It is against our Rule to touch the girls, Sister,’ she said severely, ‘much less sit on them!’
‘It was very remiss of me, Mother.’ But was it? In fact, sitting on Mavis had worked beautifully. The tough girls had Cecilia sussed out as a softie very early on, and when she supervised them at meals or at work in the laundry their scorn was barely disguised. She was a nun, yes, and so she got surface respect, but as soon as her eyes moved or she turned her back they returned to their tricks.
When she’d panicked and sat on Mavis to try to stop the fight, the rest of the girls who’d gathered around to cheer on the two combatants pulled back in complete amazement. There was a few seconds of silence as they took in the sight of Cecilia, in full habit, her white veil awry and her legs poking out the end of her voluminous dress, sitting on the toughest girl among them, who was sprawled out on the floor. Then everyone had burst out laughing. Even Mavis.
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