by Alice Taylor
When she died quietly we all missed her dreadfully. Because she was ‘to the manor born’ she had brought to the ‘west wing’ a sense of gracious living and good behaviour. And because she was so determined to keep her brain alive and ‘bring her penny to the pool’, it was always a place of good company. She left me with a sense of admiration for her indomitable spirit and a deep appreciation for her type of woman.
Chapter 9
Faraway Places
On Sunday mornings they walked with orderly precision down the long winding avenue from the local convent, turned left up the steep incline of Main Street and into our parish church. Just before Mass they filed in military formation up the main aisle and edged demurely into the front rows of seats. Dozens of young fresh-faced girls wearing long-sleeved black dresses, well down below their knees, over black stockings and well-polished black shoes. The dresses were edged with white collars and cuffs. Well-trimmed hair was firmly held in place by hidden hair clips. They were the picture of dignity and decorum. Two browngarbed nuns, with crackling white front pieces and white-edged brown capes above long rustling skirts and clinking rosary beads, brought up the rear and slipped into the seats behind them from where they could keep a supervisory eye on their charges. To me they were as intriguing as super beings from another planet. I loved to watch them arrive and never took my eyes off them for the entire Mass.
Their convent was an impressive lordly grey limestone mansion at the end of a long winding avenue surrounded by rolling fields and magnificent trees at the edge of our town. Since 1620 this impressive building had been the home of the Aldworth family. An interesting story from the house involves Lady Elizabeth St Leger of nearby Doneraile Court, who later became the wife of Sir Richard Aldworth. She was the only woman Freemason in the world. The Masons, a male-only secret society, were holding one of their meetings in a room in Doneraile Court, when Lady Mary, who was reading a book in an adjacent room with a connecting door, fell asleep. When she woke up she listened in on their meeting and then, realising the gravity of her situation, she tried to make a quiet exit, but they were alerted to her presence. The Masons had two choices: execute her or accept her into the Freemasons – and luckily for her they chose the latter.
The Aldworths were one of the many Anglo-Irish families who had graced and grazed the lands of Ireland until their situation became untenable when we decided that this land was our land. After the departure of the Aldworths, the Sisters of St Joseph took up residence in 1927. They were an Australian order founded in 1866 by Mary Helen MacKillop, who became Sr Mary of the Cross and met much opposition from a male-dominated Church to her visionary venture of setting up an order of nuns to educate and care for poor children. But she persisted, and when she died in 1909 her order was well established throughout Australia. Her burning creed in life was: ‘Never see a need without doing something about it.’ The convent in Newmarket was a recruiting ground for Irish postulants for the houses in Australia and New Zealand, and the nuns there also taught music and ran a commercial school.
I never forgot those postulants, some of whom were not much older than I was, and I wondered how they had fared. Then in recent years I heard that one of them had come back and was helping out in our old parish. It was time to find out what had happened to one of the girls in black! So I met up with Sr Maureen and she told me her story.
At the idealistic age of sixteen, Maureen, from Cloncagh, County Limerick, was studying for her Inter Cert when she decided that her future was in the missionary field. She was one of a farming family of four girls and one boy. Growing up in a faith-filled home where the foreign missions were depicted as bringing God, hope and help to starving people, she wanted to carry the seeds of her faith and idealism to faraway places. She had just seen the film Quo Vadis and it had affected her deeply; Quo Vadis is a long saga depicting the persecution of the Christians in Roman times when they were thrown to the lions to be savaged for the entertainment of the Roman nobles. I can understand how this film at that time could have had such a dramatic effect. In that pre-TV era these films made a strong impact. They came across as reality. The idea of going out on the foreign missions to right all these wrongs appealed hugely to Maureen’s sense of justice and equality. She dreamt of bringing peace and education to a troubled world.
It could have remained a pipedream, but Maureen was a determined young lady and so she sat down and wrote to many convents in pursuit of her ideal. To her amazement, they all wanted their recruits to bring a dowry into the convent with them. This was out of the question for her as money was not free-flowing in the rural Ireland of the fifties. She also wondered why you would need all this money if you were going out to do good on the missions.
Then fate intervened and she saw a write-up in a local newspaper about the profession of a local girl in Australia, and the address of St Joseph’s Convent, Newmarket, was given. She promptly put a letter in the post to them. She had already discovered that they did not require a dowry. Accompanied by her parents, Maureen arrived for interview at St Joseph’s; her family, like most in rural Ireland at the time, had no means of transport, so a local hackney car had had to be hired. All went well with the meeting and Maureen was instructed to finish her school year and come back in three months’ time. After tea in the parlour they were given a tour of the convent, which was very impressive with its polished wooden floors and elegant curving staircase. She was furnished with a list of requirements and to this day she recalls vividly the huge efforts that her parents made to provide her with the very best. Having a nun in the family was regarded as a great blessing, and they got a loan from the local creamery to cover the expense. Her list included a dressing gown, and this was the first time Maureen had ever seen one. Another requirement was an umbrella, and they bought an elegant one that she could hang over her arm. But the most important purchase of all, as far as Maureen was concerned, was a beautiful pair of bedroom slippers, the first pair she had ever owned. She loved them.
Carrying a suitcase packed with a whole new wardrobe, each item tagged with her name, she arrived back at the convent. There she quickly fell into a routine of rising at half past five for morning prayer and Mass, to be followed by a day packed with study and regular prayer breaks. Every day the postulants walked up and down the long avenue with a study companion, learning off poetry and history. At the weekends there was a long walk to the Island Wood, which she enjoyed as it was good to get out into the freedom of the country and escape the confines of the convent. Sometimes in the evenings they gathered in the convent hall for Irish dancing.
But after six months Maureen was flooded by a huge wave of homesickness. She was filled with longing for home and ached with loneliness. She desperately wanted to see her mother and father, sisters and brother. She missed them dreadfully. Feeling trapped, she planned her escape. Getting away during the day would be impossible, so it would have to be at night under cover of darkness. Her plan was that she would slip out into the night and begin the long walk home. She could not carry too much with her, but her lovely bedroom slippers could not be left behind. But when the time came and she opened the door out into the black night, she lost her nerve. She was afraid to step out into the darkness. Her plan had to be abandoned. There was no choice but to stay put and cope as best she could with her desperate loneliness.
But soon to confront the young Maureen was a far greater trauma. A telegram came from home with the terrible news that her sister Nora had been diagnosed with leukaemia. She was just twenty. Her father came to collect Maureen, and the road home, for which she had longed so much, was now a traumatic journey to the Regional Hospital in Limerick. This was a newly opened, large impersonal hospital, where Nora already seemed to have slipped into a frightening sterile medical world. Her time was very short and during those weeks Maureen was allowed home each weekend to visit her. After the funeral she was allowed to remain at home for a few weeks to be with her parents. They were deeply appreciative of the nuns’ kindness in al
lowing Maureen home for those few weeks with them. Had she decided not to return to the convent, it would probably simply have added to her parents’ distress, as leaving the convent at the time was frowned on by society.
After returning to the convent, a numbed Maureen settled back into the routine, and six months later, with six other postulants, she was on her way to Australia. One can only imagine the suffering endured by the still-grieving teenager, not alone being separated from her bereaved family but also travelling to an unknown destination. At that time emigrants did not come home for many, many years and Maureen felt that she would never see her parents again.
The seven young girls boarded the train in Newmarket and travelled to Dublin where they were met by a priest who went with them by bus to Dun Laoghaire. From there they went by boat and train to Southampton. There they were joined by two nuns of the St Joseph’s of the Apparition order and boarded a luxury liner. The Iberia was on its maiden voyage to Australia. This was a whole new bewildering experience for the young Irish girls who had previously never been out of rural Ireland. On board the liner they were delighted to meet up with a charming warm-hearted Capuchin priest, Fr Colga O’Riordan. He was young like themselves, and on his way to a challenging new world. During the voyage they became great friends with him and in later years he attended all the important occasions in their lives. It was the time of the Suez Canal crisis, so they travelled around the Cape of Good Hope. They disembarked in Cape Town and had a day touring the city, chaperoned by Fr O’Riordan. It was all new and exciting, and a long way from the convent in Newmarket. The adventure of it all helped to distract them temporarily from the heartbreak of leaving home.
The sea journey took six weeks. At night the young postulants went below deck and joined some of the stewards who were devout Catholics, to pray the rosary with them, and during the day they played games on deck. While most of the passengers suffered from seasickness, Maureen was blessed with steady sea legs.
Very early on the morning of 21 January 1958 they sailed into Sydney Harbour. Maureen, with her initial idea of going on the foreign missions still firmly planted in her mind, had expected to see black people on the shore! This was understandable because at that time everywhere in Ireland, on the counters of shops and pubs, were African Mission collection boxes topped with cherub-like black babies, and when you dropped in your money, the baby, by the power of some simple inward mechanism, nodded in thanks! It was a superb collection strategy, especially as children loved the nodding black babies, but it probably led to the belief that all foreign missions led to Africa. Maureen expected to see the black babies of the African mission boxes running around. But this was Australia, not Africa.
They were met by white Australian sisters and taken to the mother house in North Sydney. On arrival, there was a ritual of welcome during which they received the official uniform of the postulant, which was a full-length black dress and a dainty black veil to the shoulder. They were given their official name by which they were to be known from then on. It was the feast of St Agnes, so Maureen got the name Agnes, and also Ita, which was the name of a Limerick saint. So she became Sr Agnes Ita.
After some weeks Maureen was sent with two other sisters to a small remote community in New South Wales where the sisters of St Joseph had set up a school. Each day she helped out in the classroom. But after about six months the loneliness and isolation of this remote place got to her and a terrible homesickness set in. Still grieving for her sister and missing her family, she went through a hard time. However, while there she made one great discovery: she loved teaching. Realising that without the sisters these children would have no education at all, she knew that she now had the motivation to keep going.
Then followed two years in the novitiate. Prior to entering there was an assessment of each candidate. This gave the girls the opportunity to opt out and the congregation the opportunity to decide whether or not a girl was suitable for this vocation in life. Then began a period of fairly intensive study of theology and liturgy and a learning of the deeper ethos of the congregation. To Maureen’s delight, the person in charge of the novices was Irish and this brought a sense of home a bit closer. She still missed home dreadfully. Life in the novitiate was very strict, with rigid rules, and all post was read. But because the forty-four girls there were young and light-hearted, they also made their own fun and entertainment.
At the end of two years there was another assessment and once again the girls were given an opportunity to opt out and the leadership of the order an opportunity to decide if the candidate was suitable or otherwise. At the time it seemed harsh if a girl was deemed unsuitable, but in the long run it was probably better than to find out later that it was the wrong choice. By then Maureen had no doubts about the step that she was about to take and knew instinctively that she had found her niche. She was accepted for profession and with forty others took vows for three years. As she recalls the day of her first profession, a glow of happy recollection washes over her. ‘It was a glorious grace-filled day,’ she smiled. ‘I was filled with a flood of happiness and a sense of peace. I just knew that I was on the right road. But absence of family was a sadness on the day.’
She went to North Sydney Training College where she loved every minute of her training to be a teacher. Then she was missioned to the outback of New Zealand with two other Irish sisters. At the time, employment for many people in New Zealand was provided by a major undertaking of building huge dams to harness the rivers of this vast country for electricity. The people followed the work into remote places, resulting in many migrant parishes. The sisters travelled with the people out to these remote communities to bring education to the children. There was no other educational system.
But out in the bush the nuns had no source of income and depended totally on the generosity of the people for survival. ‘We never went hungry,’ Maureen said, ‘and we learnt to cook everything that they brought us. Sometimes we were a bit perplexed by what arrived and when I saw my first pumpkin I was not too sure what to do with it.’ She remembers the parishioners as being absolutely generous and wonderful. They were warm and welcoming and deeply appreciated the sacrifices that the nuns were making to bring education to their children. But Maureen did not regard it as a sacrifice. She loved teaching and was delighted to provide schooling to a whole generation who might otherwise have missed out. This was one of the reasons that she had become a nun. The fact that the lifestyle was primitive and lacking in luxury did not bother her at all.
Maureen was a natural teacher and loved her charges. Education was her field. Without the nuns many children would never have had the opportunity that education offered. As the schools of the order grew bigger and better, she moved up the ranks and became a headmistress.
She especially loved the Maori children who, she said, were as ‘bright as buttons’, though maybe not always academically. With their sense of story and music they brought the richness of their culture to the classroom and she, being Irish, felt a great affinity with their sense of family and tribe. They knew where they came from and who they were and had a huge loyalty to their own tribe. Their gathering place was called the ‘Marae’ and Maureen loved to see people dress up in colourful costumes for special occasions there.
As memories come flooding back Maureen remembered one lad in particular. He was a large young fellow who was a bit suspicious of the entire educational system and being taught by nuns did not impress him. He kept them at a distance, but Maureen did her best to engage with him. Then one day he arrived wielding a big strong stick and threatened Maureen that if she came too close to him she would get a good hard wallop of it! She was a bit scared of him, but tried from a distance to impart as much knowledge as she could. Years later she was very surprised to get a letter from him. He was in prison, which did not come as a huge surprise to her, but what did amaze her was that while in prison he had gone through a huge change and under the guidance of a prison chaplain, who was also a nun, he had become a
born-again Christian. He wanted to thank Maureen for being instrumental in his conversion to a better way of life as it was she who had sown the seed of his conversion by her attitude: she had inspired him and helped him not to ‘feel stupid’.
She remembered others too. One little girl was a brilliant student who soaked up knowledge like a dry sponge. ‘She was a bundle of mischievous energy and was constantly in hot water.’ Maureen smiled remembering. ‘The teachers were forever trying to sort her out. In the play yard I used to say to her, “Next year you are coming into my class and then you will toe the line.” My warning would always be received with a cheeky grin. Then one day I told her again, but before I could finish my ultimatum she cut in with an engaging smile, “And you will toe the line!” Maureen enjoyed her sense of independence and fun, especially at a time when you didn’t answer back to someone in authority. She loved learning and flourished under Maureen’s guidance, going on to third level where she graduated with the highest honours. She went on to play a significant role in the educational policy of the country. Without the nuns these educational doors would have remained closed to her.