Children Of The Poor Clares (13 page)

Department
of
Education
Annual
Report,
1936:
All
the
schools
have
more
applications
for
employment
than
girls
to
place.
Reports
of
the
capability
and
conduct
of
the
girls
in
employment
testify
to
the
value
of
training
and
the
care
given
in
school
and
afterwards.

Department
of
Education
Annual
Report,
1933:
‘Careful
investigation
has
shown
that
the
rate
of
wages
paid
to
girls
who
left
the
schools
and
trustworthy
reports
of
their
industry
and
character
testify
to
the
maintenance
of
the
good
records
of
the
preceding
years.’

Constance Henry was one of the older girls who survived the fire. She became a nun in another Order, and, in response to questions in a letter from us, gave a totally different version of life in the orphanage. She wrote that she was put into St Joseph’s as a dying wish of her mother. She was four when this happened, and her mother was frightened that her only daughter would be taken by relatives who would work her too hard. ‘My earliest recollections of the place are of a Caring and Loving group of Nuns… I was fortunate in being placed under a Sister Mary Byrne who knew my family well. She told me I used to kick and scream if I could not have a pretty dress, very short and often sleeveless. I have no recollections of ever being dressed in “drab” uniform. I dare say my temper would have exploded if I had. A Mother de Salles was in charge of all the girls and was a kindly, very concerned person. She had a close liaison with our family as I learned later from my Father. Then there was Sister Mary Clare from around 1936.

‘Looking back on her reign, I feel her main emphasis was “Further Education” once we completed the National School. With the assistance of two lay teachers she organised domestic science classes, dressmaking, knitting, needlework, embroidery, cookery classes and laundry work. We competed for the annual Cavan show when I was fifteen, and I landed a first, second and third prize for various knitted garments and the teachers were just as excited as I was. Sister Mary Clare inspired us with a desire and love of reading and in the long winter Sunday evenings she had a store of books to choose from: novels, short stories, magazines, religious books and lives of the Saints. We learned singing, Irish, English and Plain Chant. Each year and on a special occasion we had a Concert for the nuns and relations consisting of drama, opera, dancing and singing and all enjoyed these. In summer we had P.E., netball, egg and spoon race, sack race and ball games and annually had a Games Day. Up the hill we had swings and other amusements and a large shed to store hoops, skipping ropes, balls, chairs and this sheltered us when the rain fell.

‘The day commenced with a call at 7.30 by one of the nuns. Wash, morning prayers and then breakfast at 8 to 8.30. We each had a little chore to do after breakfast until 9 a.m. which Sister supervised. Assembled at 9 a.m. to wash and dress for school. We had frequent Fire Drill Lectures at, I believe, three monthly intervals and we were well acquainted with the routes to take if fire occurred. Under-eights and those who suffered nocturnal enuresis were in St Clare’s dormitory with a senior girl in charge and some fifteen—and sixteen-year-olds to help her get the little ones to the toilet at night. I have no recollections of ever going hungry, the food was plain but it must have been sufficient to sustain us. Those of us who had relatives and parents did go on holidays annually and our parents and relations visited us. The Poor Clare Nuns whom I was privileged to know, were great, noble, saintly women, who inspired us towards good and beautiful ideals.’

Sister Constance (not her real name) had given evidence at the inquiry into the fire. It was she who told one of the men that the girls’ evidence had all been rehearsed.
19

We could discover little of what became of most of the girls who passed through the orphanage during that era before the fire. Certainly Ellen, Hannah and Loretta all married and, in time, made something of their lives. Even so, Hannah was tense with worry until all her children were grown and independent. ‘I was so frightened for them, frightened that anything would happen to me or my husband and they would go through what I did. I scrimped and saved and knitted and sewed and I made them do their homework, and, thank God, they’ve all done well.’

Ellen, too, was constantly fearful that she or her husband would die before their children were settled. ‘I used to be ashamed to say I was from the orphanage, and I burnt all the cuttings about the fire and the photo of me standing by the grave, but I’m sorry I did now.’ To Loretta, living in England, ‘the shame of that place’ was something from which her husband had helped her to hide. ‘I’ve spent all my life escaping from the orphanage, and I’ve succeeded too!’

Apart from their ‘industrial training’, the girls appear to have received no preparation for the world outside the convent walls. The usually complacent Department of Education reports had noted this, and in 1925 commented: ‘The standard of training and the preparation of pupils to be self-reliant in after life is much in need of improvement.’ The three women said they received no information on ‘the facts of life’. They were not prepared for menstruation, for which they were given a piece of lint-like cloth that had to be washed. As Ellen put it, ‘You could almost say we were a bit simple; why, we never even knew what age we were!’ Hannah said, ‘We didn’t know the difference between right and wrong. A lot of the girls went astray when they left. I don’t know how many fell. Something stopped me. I had a fear of getting into trouble myself, though I didn’t even know the facts of life until I was twenty-one. Just imagine that! I was working as a domestic and I came down the stairs in the dark… and there was this man who used to deliver things to the house: the dirty thing! That was the first time I’d seen a man’s body. There was a nice, odd-job man, an old bachelor, who worked round the house who was very kind to me, and when I told him what had happened, he explained things to me.’

‘They were half simple. A lot of the girls went wrong afterwards’ was Louis Blessing’s comment. Another man also thought that a lot of them ‘fell’ when they left and, according to Hannah, two of the girls ‘fell’ before they left the convent walls. One girl, she said, had a baby by a man working there, another was assaulted ‘up in the garden’ and ‘there was a girl had a baby by a soldier soon after she left’. We heard of another who had a baby within a year of leaving the orphanage, and had spent the rest of her life as a priest’s housekeeper, and of ‘poor Annie Hegney’ whose eye was injured by Mother Carmel, and who later married a local man who drank, beat her and gave her no money for their children’s food.

We tried to find ‘poor Katy O’Toole’. We had heard about her from several of the girls of later years. They said she was sent straight from St Joseph’s to the Magdalen Home in Galway.
20
It would seem that Katy was ‘detained’ there for twenty-one years until, during the 1950s, her sister, who was working for a Dublin doctor, happened to describe Katy’s situation to him. He went to Galway and got Katy out. The girls said that when they knew her—she used to visit St. Joseph’s—she was ‘a bit simple’.

Sister Constance, in her letter said that four years after the fire ‘I fulfilled my childhood ambition and entered a Convent in England.’ She said she was ‘well, happy and able to do a good day’s work. The great spirituality implanted in me by my parents and sustained and nurtured by these great nuns in Cavan is my best asset in my work with the sick. When reading, studying or listening to lectures on psychology and the detriment to people’s characters caused by “institutional upbringing”, I really have a good laugh, because thank God I seem to have escaped all these effects and I feel, and have felt, a contented, happy person.’

When Hannah left the orphanage, all she had were the clothes she stood up in and some sanitary towels. ‘I left on my sixteenth birthday. My mother came to collect me and we went and had tea in the town before going home. I’ll never forget going out of that door.’ She spent two weeks with her mother and then got a job as housemaid in Dublin. At twenty-five, she married a man who, she says, has always been good to her. When we met they were living in a scrubbed-clean little house in County Galway. She has lost her religion.

Ellen left the orphanage in 1942. She was given a winter coat, a beret, two interlock vests and two pairs of knickers. She went to work as a live-in alteration hand for six shillings a week and soon met her husband. ‘I have told him and my children all about my childhood. I think that’s why they are so good to me, because it was so sad. I suppose the worst thing was looking through the bars of the windows to the street and feeling so lonely, knowing there was nobody to come for you.’

For nine days during the year, they told us, and for three days before Christmas there had to be total silence in the orphanage when the nuns went on retreat. We wondered how small children could be kept quiet for so long. Ellen considered the question for a moment. ‘Fear,’ she said, ‘Fear will make you do anything.’

Department
of
Education
Annual
Report,
1943:
‘A
serious
outbreak
of
fire
which
unfortunately
resulted
in
the
death
of
36
persons
 . . .
took
place
at
St.Joseph’s
Industrial
School,
Cavan,
in
the
morning
of
24
February,
1943.’

CHAPTER FOUR
 

‘A Substitute For
The Family Life’

Annual
Report
of
the
Department
of
Education,
1946:
A
new
building
at
Cavan
of
modern
design
and
with
up-to-date
equipment
to
replace
the
Industrial
School
building
destroyed
by
the
fire
in
February
1943
has
been
completed
and
will
provide
accommodation
for
100
children.

‘There was a fine building put up after the fire,’ the local newspaperman told us. ‘I saw around it myself; a grand place. I remember looking at all the toilets and there were small ones for the babies going up to big ones for the older children. Everything was better after the fire. It cleared up a lot of things. The girls had a better time; they were around the town quite a lot, but you’d have to work at it to get them to talk to you.’

Two elderly nuns we met referred to everything as ‘before’ or ‘after’ the fire. ‘Everything changed after. Children were allowed out without escort; they were allowed to visit; allowed to go and help at the Bishop’s house. After 1943 we were amalgamated with Newry, before that we were never allowed out of the convent. Things got so much better after the fire that it was almost a blessing in disguise.’

Rosemary Tracey was sent to the orphanage a few months before the fire. She was twelve years old at the time and grieving for her mother, who had just died. ‘Mother had been ill in hospital for ten months and I’d always said that if she died, I’d die too. I felt I wanted to go and drown myself. I suppose they didn’t know what to do with me, the way I was, and my older sister would have been busy looking after the younger ones. They must have thought the nuns could do something for me. Anyway, they put me in the orphanage.’
21

She found it difficult at first, she said, but she made friends. Then, almost immediately, she lost them in the fire. ‘Nothing seemed the same after. It was so strange without them. Remembering them every time you went into the yard. I was unhappy in the new building and I felt closed-in in the new playground. It was so lonely without the other girls.’ She told us she could recall very little about the four years she spent in St. Joseph’s. As a young woman, she had entered the novitiate of another Order, but left after four years.