Children Of The Poor Clares (18 page)

Cissie Meehan was sent out to work at the age of thirteen with a warning from a nun not to go ‘into dark corners or hay barns with a man’. She too, had many jobs. In some she was badly treated—once she telephoned St. Joseph’s for help, and Sister Catharine came and brought her back. ‘Then I got a job in a hospital in Dublin. I got double wages—£14 a week, because I worked from seven in the morning until five as a ward maid, then until twelve at night as a kitchen maid. Then I’d go dancing. Life was beginning to be a bit rosy then.’

But not for long. She met a man, fell in love and became pregnant: ‘I know it was wrong but he had a lovely smile. It was only the once and we were going to get married.’ But he was killed in a car crash, and Cissie was sent to stay with the Good Shepherd nuns in Limerick. ‘It was like a prison there. The nuns were very deceitful and lied to me about my fiancé’s mother not ringing up—they wouldn’t let me talk to her. I never told her I was pregnant because she’d been very good to me and I had too much respect for her to give her the shame and the worry. I had the baby in St. Patrick’s home in Dublin. She had lovely blue eyes. It was very nice there and I kept her until she was adopted at four months.’ Girls from other Industrial Schools were also there. They had told Cissie that she was lucky to have been in Cavan, and that the nuns in their schools ‘used to strap them to the beds and beat them.’

Soon after, Cissie met another man, became pregnant and married him. He was violent to her for some years until she hit him back. Since then, she told us, they had got on quite well. When we met her, she was in a state of euphoria because, after years of searching, she had managed to trace her mother, now an invalid and living in Wales. On a tape-recording, punctuated with the sound of sobs, her mother explained that when her husband deserted her, she had been compelled by desperate poverty to put Cissie—her youngest child—into St. Joseph’s. She had then left Ireland to find work. Correctly assuming that Cissie was to be kept at St. Joseph’s until she was sixteen, her mother told her she had written to the Poor Clare nuns some time before this but was informed that Cissie had gone. She claimed that they had refused to give any address. Meanwhile, Cissie herself had asked for her mother’s address but was told by the nuns that they had no record of it. Mother and daughter came together through the chance intervention of a parish priest whose aid they had sought. ‘I’ve had hard times,’ Cissie said. ‘But now that I’ve found my mother, nothing else matters.’

We were able to locate the Morans, the first family Cissie worked for. Mr. Moran was an ex-Army officer with an air of command. Cissie, he said, was the second girl they’d had from Cavan. ‘We only kept the first one four days. I was fascinated by her because she was so wild. I don’t think she had ever been let outside the convent door. She was mad on anything in trousers. She was wonderful at scrubbing and polishing and, although she was a bit simple in a wilful way, she was intelligent enough to be taught. She never smiled but she wasn’t intentionally rude. But she was useless to us, a total liability. I thought it was a disgrace to have let her loose, and we had to take her back to Cavan. I remember the silence in the orphanage. I wouldn’t have believed there were young children around. The rooms glistened with polish and you got the feeling that where you had been standing would be immediately re-polished when you left. It was pathetic to see her going off. She walked away with her hands together in front of her and her head down. I tell you I’d almost want you to use my name, but I have a sister a nun and it could embarrass her.

‘We only had Cissie for a month or so and then we had to leave her back too.’ He didn’t realise she was only thirteen at the time. ‘We were led to believe she was sixteen or seventeen, but mind you she could have been that. She was good to the children and just wanted to play with them. But when she took them out she’d make dates with fellows on building sites and we had to stop it. Our children were capable of looking after her instead of the other way round. I have nothing to say against the girls. It was not their fault. It was my impression that they were beaten into submission. If you raised your voice they’d cower in a corner.’

Eilís (one of the women who attended the national school in the early 1950s): ‘Now I am appalled to think of what happened to those girls in later life. At the time I didn’t think too much about it although I dimly realised that when they left they had no homes to go to.’ She remembered one girl in particular: ‘She truly exuded goodness and charity. She wanted to be a nun but couldn’t enter because she was illegitimate. I met her years later in Dublin working as a domestic in a hotel. It was a terrible shame because she was so bright.’

The Bishop of Kilmore, in his funeral oration for the children who died in the fire, had told the congregation that those ‘dear little angels, now before God in Heaven, were taken away before the gold of their innocence had been tarnished by the soil of the world.’

The world into which these emotionally crippled and utterly ignorant young girls were thrown was one of which they had no experience, in which they did not know how to behave, and whose rules of survival they had not been taught. Some, amazingly, overcame their profound handicaps, but many could not. They drifted from job to job, first as live-in domestics, often treated as skivvies, and then from one dismal rented room to another. Occasionally they met with kindness and some understanding, but Irish society held an abundance of people indifferent to their difficulties and willing to exploit the girls in every way.

Men preyed on them, treating them as fair game. The only support they received was what they could give each other. We heard of so many having babies, often more than one, when they were unmarried; of girls who had drifted into prostitution, or who had become involved with drugs or had spent time in mental hospitals. We heard about Theresa Dwyer who had ‘brains to burn’, and was sent to the Gloucester Street laundry ‘reformatory’ where they said she’d had a terrible time. At that time in her late twenties, Theresa had last been seen wheeling a hand-cart from the Regina Coeli, a home run by the Legion of Mary for destitute women. Sheila Delaney, who used to bully the little ones, had been known to the Dublin vice-squad for fifteen years as a prostitute, and had numerous children. She refused to see us, saying that the nuns ‘had done their best.’

1959 was the year in which Cissie Meehan was sent out to work, quite illegally, aged 13. That year, according to the Department of Education, girls discharged from Industrial Schools had been sent to 113 jobs. Of these, 102 could only be described as domestic. A report published in 1966 by a voluntary body
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inquiring into Industrial and Reformatory Schools ascribed this typical statistic to the girls’ low intelligence. From our personal encounters with them we failed to find evidence to support this contention.

Cissie recalled ‘The awful part of those years was that there was no one to turn to. You didn’t know where to go when you were in trouble. I don’t blame the nuns at all; they did their best for us. But maybe if you write this book people will understand a little bit what we went through and what it was like for girls from orphanages.’

In May 1968, the Dublin branch of the Legion of Mary, a Catholic lay organisation, produced for its members only, the following report on young prostitutes, aged between sixteen and twenty-four, living in the city: ‘We find that the greater proportion of those involved are illegitimate orphans who have spent the greater portion of their childhood in orphanages and convents. Apart from their mental capabilities, this abnormal form of life with too many mothers and sisters, and having no fathers or brothers appears to have an effect which may be almost impossible to overcome.

‘They appear to have no training but only warnings on how to behave and deal with boys and men. They appear to have received little or no training to fit them to earn a living or on the problems or economies of looking after themselves materially in a flat or hostel. In this state they are suddenly discharged into public life without a necessary, supervised transitional period and are faced with an almost inevitable future. To us the reaction seems to be so violent that it might be said they make straight for the first available man out of complete control.’

Around that time, Dr. John Charles McQuaid, the Archbishop of Dublin, blocked the showing of a film to social workers, psychiatric child welfare workers, and nuns working in orphanages and group homes. The film, made by the Tavistock Institute in London, showed the effects of emotional deprivation on young children. The reason he gave: ‘It might upset the good nuns.’

CHAPTER SIX
 

‘God Help The Poor Orphans, They’re Not Normal’

Sally, b. 1940

When she talked about Mother Dymphna, a big smile lit up Sally Johnson’s face. ‘The sight of her made my day. I’d go into the laundry and she’d say, “Take the weight off your feet” and she’d make me a cup of tea. The others had no-one. I always had her.’

Sally, a bright, good-natured mother of four boisterous children and wife of a solid, decent man, an accounts clerk, was living in a semi-detached house in the English midlands. She believed she was the first baby taken into the orphanage. ‘They put me in a basket and left me with Dymphna in the laundry. I saw on my notes that I didn’t walk until I was three. Perhaps it was the lack of space!’

She was three at the time of the fire and by then would have been sleeping with all the babies and very young children saved from the Infirmary. ‘We younger ones were put in the old sanatorium outside the town while they were rebuilding. I can remember the day they brought us back, all the nuns were lined up on the stairs and Mother Dymphna said “Where’s Sally?” and picked me up and pressed a sweet into my hand… I can see her face as she did it.

‘I went into the orphanage at fourteen months. Dymphna told me that my mother was only seventeen when I was born. Her parents chucked her out. She went to work and I was left with her landlady and she didn’t feed or change me all day. I was committed till I was sixteen. My mother always wrote and sent presents and she did come to see me. I remember she kept crying. Once she asked me what we ate. We did not want people outside to know how we were treated and I told her we had tea, toast and eggs for breakfast, meat every day, a lovely dinner and as much bread as we wanted. In fact we had horrible half-cooked stirrabout for breakfast and we were half-starved. I can see her crying, saying, “No, I know you don’t have that to eat. I know, I know.” I think she must have asked Dymphna.

‘When I last saw her she would have been thirty at the most, but she looked old—she was thin, wizened and had a very lined face. She must have had a very hard life. When I left the orphanage I did ask the Legion of Mary to help me find her but they said it was a risk. Anyway, they couldn’t find her. I’d like her to know that I’m okay.

‘I was always terrified of Mother Bernadette. She was only young when she came—in her twenties or thirties at the most—but she hated me because of Dymphna, I think. I remember her beating the hell out of me with a broom. I smack my children if they drive me to it, but I would never really hurt them, and certainly couldn’t lift a stick to them. I remember one beating in particular; the one I got on Christmas Day for having a hole in my jumper. The bigger ones used to kick us in the shins and grumble when we had to take them our clothes to be mended and I was frightened to go in. I had my jumper rolled up so Bernadette would not see the hole. She made me roll it back down and when she saw it she went for me. When I escaped to Dymphna she made me tea on her awful old boiler fire, and one of the other girls mended it.

‘Once we were sitting in the dining-room and Bernadette hit me for some reason and I said to her, “How dare you hit me—I’ll report you to the cruelty man.” I ran for it then, and she came after me hitting me around the head and arms and I was screaming and screeching. After she stopped I ran into the laundry. Dymphna was crying, she knew my voice and could hear me screaming. “Why do you make her so mad?” she said. “You know how cruel she is.”

‘I used to threaten to run away but I never did. Perhaps I was lucky that I knew no different. We had grotty clothes and no coats except to go out to the cathedral for Mass. I always got rubbish because Bernadette gave it out. I loved books, all I wanted to do was to read. There was a big press full of books and comics too, but all for show. We only had them out now and again. Some of the girls brought me in books from outside, sometimes from the library. Dymphna gave me the newspapers that she got from the presbytery to light the boiler and I’d sit by her fire and read. I feel resentful now at my lack of education. But I escaped the workroom and I escaped the kitchen—I didn’t mind helping Dymphna in the laundry—that was lovely. We were never allowed to study or get above our station.

‘I sat the scholarship for the Loretto convent—I was the only one from the orphanage. I came fifth from the county, but they only took the first three. Instead of encouraging me to study, Mother Bernadette made me go and look after the children. I remember once I was going off to do my history homework. She stopped me and said I was to go in and look after the little ones. I told her I had to do my homework, but she said, “Oh, take it in there with you.” There were about a dozen toddlers to be looked after so I just gave up and shut my book.

‘I went on to the Technical School later with three others. I don’t think they sent anyone before or after us. We were made to do domestic science. I knew they were doing a commercial course upstairs and I wanted to do that so that I wouldn’t have to be a domestic. I remember going there one day with blood-matted hair from being hit with a brush. The teacher could see there was something wrong. “What’s the matter?” she asked. “I’ve got a cold” I told her. We didn’t want people to know we were beaten. She made me sit in the front near the fire, and I saw her and another teacher giving each other a look. They knew what went on.