Children Of The Poor Clares (12 page)

The picture the three women painted of their childhood in the orphanage was almost unrelievedly harsh and bleak. Only Christmas seemed to bring a little colour into their lives. ‘It was wonderful. People used to come in to serve us from the town. It was the only day we got enough to eat, the only day we enjoyed ourselves,’ was how Hannah put it.

For Ellen it was more poignant. ‘We used to look through the bars out into the street at the lights and the shop windows. We used to long for Father Christmas to come and leave something under our pillows. Once, my older sister got me a little sixpenny doll and wrapped it in a hanky. I was so thrilled.’

Occasionally, said Ellen, some of the older children, accompanied by a lay teacher, went out for a walk on Sunday, through the fields at the back, and sometimes to Lough Swellan, a few miles outside the town. On Sundays and Holy Days they walked to Mass in the cathedral. Some townspeople recollected their cleanliness and tidy appearance, and told us that the children were looked after very well. A local newspaperman gave a more chilling description: ‘They would huddle together; they didn’t walk properly and held each other’s hands as though for support. We never really thought about the orphans, though, they were just there, rather like the buildings. Those nuns should never have been put in charge of them. The children looked half-witted to me—though we hardly ever saw them unless there was a procession to the cathedral.’

A frequent comment we heard in Cavan and elsewhere was: ‘If it wasn’t for the nuns they’d have been out on the side of the street.’ Over the years, the nuns would say the same thing to the children. Neither the girls nor the general population were aware that the state was paying for their upkeep. The widely held view was: ‘Sure the poor nuns were doing their best’. But one of the men we met who had tried to rescue the children in the fire, felt differently: ‘An enclosed order should never have been given the care of children.’

The girls did have contact with some of the town children who attended the national school. Some of them were from the ‘Half Acre’, a densely populated slum area, and the fight against head lice was a continuous battle. Ellen: ‘I couldn’t work in the bathroom when they were doing the little ones’ heads. I hadn’t the stomach for it.’ Older girls rigorously applied Jeyes Fluid, hot water and fine steel combs to little heads covered in sores and scabs.

The town children were remembered as being very snobby. ‘They looked down on us; we were just orphans’. But Hannah remembered one of the girls from Sullivan’s store bringing them in pieces of cut-up rhubarb and sugar. ‘She knew we were starving.’ One woman who had attended the national school said the town girls were not encouraged to associate with the orphanage children. ‘They played separately, sat on different sides in class and we never knew their names. They really were pathetic. But we envied them having hot cocoa at lunchtime, even though it was made with water.’ She also remembered Miss Bridget O’Reilly as ‘a thin woman with a hard, bony face and black hair in a roll’.

The orphanage children always felt the lack of encouragement. ‘The girls from the town were always being praised, but not us,’ Loretta said. ‘Everything I’ve learned, I learned by myself.’ Ellen: ‘How could you learn when you were afraid all the time? Mother Carmel used to say in class: “I’ll get you afterwards!”

The poor diet, indifferent hygiene, inadequate clothing, harsh discipline and profound lack of care took their toll on the girls’ health. Hannah remembers two of her friends dying from tuberculosis. ‘I used to get boils on my head. My mother cried when she saw me. A nun burst one by hitting me on the head with a stick and the stuff ran down the side of my face. One morning Lizzie Brophy said she could not get up, but Mother Carmel ordered her out, although we kept saying she wasn’t well. Lizzie kept crying that she had terrible pains, but Mother Carmel hit her with a black strap. When she did get up, she fell on the floor and was taken to the Infirmary. They said she had rheumatic fever. The poor thing died a few weeks later. She was fourteen. God forgive me, but when I read about Belsen, I thought it was not much different.’

Annual
Report
of
the
Department
of
Education,
1925:
Each
school
has
its
own
medical
officer.
Most
schools
have
a
trained
nurse.

Annual
Report
of
the
Department
of
Education,
1928-9:
Mortality
rate
3.5
per
thousand.
This
rate
is
somewhat
higher
than
that
for
the
country
as
a
whole.
Medical
officers
make
quarterly
inspections
of
all
pupils
and
special
attention
is
given
to
delicate
pupils.
Numbers
under
detention
6,515.
Seven
boys
and
sixteen
girls
died.

The Industrial Schools’ regulations required that the children be ‘respectful and obedient to all those entrusted with their management and training and to comply with the regulations of the schools.’ For a breach of the rules, which might include running away, a child over the age of twelve could, as a punishment, be sent to a certified reformatory school. Over the years, the threat of the laundry reformatories, run by orders of nuns who specialised in custodial care of ‘wayward’ girls and women, sometimes became a reality. There was Mary McHenry, for example. ‘She used to comb her hair into a quiff. The nuns would make her comb it straight again.’ said Ellen. ‘One day she pulled off a nun’s veil—I can’t remember why—but we all thought it was good enough for her and we were delighted. But they sent Mary up to Dublin to a reformatory.’ Hannah spoke of children trying to escape—‘One girl who would have been thirteen or so, ran away. She wanted to tell the Inspector about our treatment. Somehow she got on a bus before she was caught.’

Hannah once successfully threatened a persecutor with higher authority. ‘We were playing hide and seek, and one of the girls was under the bed when a nun came in and heard her giggling. The nun told us to take off our clothes so that she could beat us and the other two did, though one of them was an adolescent and quite big, but I wouldn’t. I said that my mother had told me to tell the Abbess if I was being ill-treated, and she didn’t touch me.’ She also said that when Mother Carmel damaged Annie Hegney’s eye, Annie ran out and told the Bishop. ‘There was some kind of a meeting and they didn’t hit us so much for a week or two.’ According to both Hannah and Ellen, some girls ‘went mental’ from the beatings they received.

Inspectors from the Department of Education were required to make annual visits to each industrial school. It was their comments which were used in the compilation of the annual reports. At this time a Miss O’Neill visited the girls’ schools. Hannah recalled, ‘They used to get a tip-off that the Inspector was coming. A lovely stew with meat would be put on to cook and we would be all cleaned up, and they would put counterpanes on the beds. The nuns used to load her down with chocolates and presents when she was going. Perhaps she got my bead bag! She hardly looked at the place.’

The nuns’ lives then were very restricted and their regime severe. They would leave home as girls, expecting never to see their families again, not even to attend their parents’ death-beds or funerals. They were not permitted to leave their own convent until 1944, and for many years after that, it was only to a sister House. When they died, they were buried in their own graveyard on the hill behind the convent. A local woman told us that if anyone rang the bell at the convent and a nun came to the door, she would have to talk standing sideways so that she could not see out into the street.

The names of the nuns whom the children loved for their kindness came up consistently in their conversations. There was Mother Dymphna, who spent years working alongside girls in the laundry, and Mother Scholastica and Mother Felix, who, with older girls, took the babies from the Infirmary during the fire. Ellen could still hear Mother Dymphna saying that Mother Carmel would ‘die three times for her cruelty’. She remembered Mother Dymphna smuggling extra food for the girls into the laundry. She would make an excuse to get a girl to come and help her and then give her a piece of bread and dripping. Mother Mary Clare also gave them food and sometimes even tea, a rare luxury. ‘But even when you were little,’ said Ellen, ‘none of them would put their arms round you.’

The advent of a new manager dramatically affected the atmosphere of this small, closed-in world. ‘When Mother Clare came, we were dancing on air with freedom. When she gave us an orange, we didn’t know whether to eat the skin or the fruit. She gave us knives and forks, and we stopped lining up to get our food like Oliver Twist,’ said Loretta.

During the inquiry into the fire, Dr. Anna McCabe, the Medical Inspector of Industrial Schools, described St. Joseph’s as ‘one of the good schools’. In the opinion of the gardener’s son, the orphanage children were always well cared for. ‘Sometimes my father would give them an apple or a tomato. The children in Cavan were well-treated.’

But the women who had been in St.Joseph’s as girls, knew differently. Hannah: ‘I’ve had nightmares about that place all my life.’ Loretta: ‘You’ve no idea what Christianity was like in those days. I’ve never been to church since.’ And Ellen, a devout woman who attended Mass daily, said, with tears in her eyes: ‘I sometimes wonder how the nuns could have been so cruel to little children with no one in the world to love them.’

*       *       *

Hannah was about thirteen years old when she was told that she was not going back to school. ‘They put me to work in the laundry after that. We got up at five in the morning to wash the nuns’ calico drawers and other things. One spot and they’d be thrown back at you and you’d get a clatter round the ear.’ Each nun’s washing would be in a separate bag and included soiled cloth sanitary towels. ‘We had to steep them first and then scrub them in cold water. It was terribly cold that water, your hands would always be red and raw. You’d boil them then, and, if they were badly stained, you’d have to put them on the bushes to bleach.’ She also remembered having to ‘tease’ the lumps out of the nuns’ hair mattresses and how all the hair would go into her mouth and nose.

Ellen: ‘The girls did all the cleaning, washing and cooking. I liked it at first, because it was something different to do, like helping to polish the brass in the chapel. Then we got tea and toast in the convent kitchen. It was lovely. Later on it all became just work. We’d be down on our knees, scrubbing and polishing, six in a line.’

Under the terms of the Education Acts which applied to all children in Ireland, the girls at St Joseph’s were supposed to stay at school until they were fourteen, but this was not always the case, and decisions were made about their future in an arbitrary manner. After they reached the age of sixteen, even when their committal orders expired, some girls were kept on to sew or to work in the laundry. Mother Dymphna told us that she had eight girls of different ages working with her before the fire. Ellen was kept on until she was eighteen to do the extremely delicate and skilled embroidery and punch work, table mats, linen and underwear, which the Order sold. She said that she and the older girls who had been kept on to work sat at a separate table in the refectory and had tea for breakfast. ‘They did not beat us when we were older. I suppose we were of more use to them then.’

Loretta, too, was clever with her hands. She said that from the age of about fourteen she worked in the sewing room, making the children’s clothes, and she also did a spell in the laundry. The girls were thus receiving ‘industrial’ training as required in the rules, as they were by scrubbing, cooking and polishing. ‘There’s one good thing you can say about all of us,’ Hannah declared. ‘We’re all good housekeepers!’

When they finally left St Joseph’s, most of the girls were sent out to work as domestics, some to the hospitals or other institutions run by the many religious orders who provided much of the country’s social and educational services.
17
Others were sent to work in private homes. Too often they seem to have been badly exploited and were ignorant of their rights. Hannah remembers one girl who was sent to a farmer. ‘She never got paid, and she had to do everything: milk cows, dig spuds, do housework. They worked her like a slave. She came back covered in abscesses. I’ll never forget it. She went into hospital and died after a while. She was about twenty-two. It’s terrible to think of it.’ Hannah, usually a matter-of-fact woman, was visibly upset by the memory. She maintained that Mother de Salles told people not to pay the girls. ‘Then Mother Mary Clare changed that. She wrote to people and made them pay.’

Ellen’s elder sister was sent out on licence to an aunt who, like the rest of the family, had never come to visit her nieces.
18
‘She treated her like dirt and worked her like a slave. My sister asked me to see if I could get the nuns to take her back in again.’ Ellen said that the two Galligan sisters who died in the fire had gone out to work, but had also asked to come back because they were so harshly treated.