The Girl Nobody Wants: A Shocking True Story of Child Abuse in Ireland (11 page)

CHAPTER 5

The Holidays without Fun

Months passed and eventually I settled down in the house; then one morning, Sister Ann told me that it was going to be the end of school term soon and that all the children in the house, including me, would be going away for the summer holidays. She said that some people were going to come to the house and take all of the children away for the six-week holidays and that we must all be good with the people and behave ourselves, while staying with them in their homes.

I was very excited at the thought of going on holiday as I had never been on holiday before, but we had only been at the house a few months, so the nuns didn’t want to split us up. But they had a lot of trouble finding a family that would take all three of us little ones away together as one family. All the other children in the house had already gone away and we were the last to leave; but eventually, the day finally came and now it was going to be our turn to go on holiday. A member of staff shouted up to me to get my suitcase and to hurry up. I looked over the banisters and a young nun was standing in the hallway at the bottom of the stairs looking back up at me.

I ran down the stairs and towards her, ‘I’ve come to take you away with me’, she said. I looked up at her and I told her that she had to wait as my sisters and brother were coming with me, but she said, ‘No, only you’re going on your own.’ I looked at her and then I ran over to my brother and sisters and I grabbed hold of them, but then Sister Ann came into the hall and she grabbed me by my hands and she peeled me away from my brother and sisters. ‘Please don’t take me’, I said and then we all began to cry and my sisters shouted at her to stop pulling me, but Sister Ann told us to shut up and grow up. Then she told me that I was a stupid child, as she pushed and slapped me out of the house and into the back of a waiting car.

I began to cry and I felt frightened by what she was doing to me, but she was not bothered about how I felt, then she slammed the car door shut, just missing my fingers in the door, but hitting me into the face with it instead. I put my hands up and I held my face as I fell back into the seat, and the nun drove off, leaving Sister Ann standing in the driveway, smiling at me, as the car drove out of the grounds. I looked at the driver and it was the young nun. I shouted at her to stop the car, but all she did was tell me not to worry as it was only for six weeks, and then she would come and collect me and bring me back to the house. ‘I promise’, she said.

She drove for miles and I cried for the whole of the journey, and I kept telling her that I wanted to go home, back to my brother and sisters, but all she kept telling me was that it was a holiday and that I was going to enjoy myself and have fun. After several hours, we eventually arrived at a farm that was in the middle of the countryside; and as we pulled into the drive, the nun told me that the woman of the house had three children all about my age. And she told me that I would be able to play with them every day and I was going to have a lot of fun during my six-week stay with them. We got out of the car and we walked up to the front door of the house, but she didn’t stay with me; instead, she turned around and walked back to the car, leaving me all alone. I looked back at her, but she never turned around, she just got into her car and then she drove off.

I stood looking at the front door to the house, then it opened and a woman came out and she told me to come inside, then she closed the door behind me. The first day was fun and the woman was nice to me, and I played games with her children and, at the end of the day, I went to bed happy. The next morning, I got up and had breakfast, and then the children showed me around the farm and then they told me the names of all the animals they had.

But that night I wet the bed and the next morning the woman and her children all shouted at me and they called me names for wetting the bed. And from that moment on, they all turned nasty towards me and I could tell they didn’t like me anymore. The children stopped playing with me and the woman allowed her children to tease and torture me, by calling me dirty and smelly, and they told me that they hated me.

After I had wet the bed, the woman said that I couldn’t sleep in the clean bedroom anymore and I had to sleep in another bedroom away from her children, and she made me share a bedroom with an eighty-year-old man, who was filthy and smelt bad. She made me sleep at the end of his bed and all the woman gave me to cover myself with was an old army blanket, but the blanket made me itch and it smelt as if it hadn’t been washed in forty years. The man was so old that he could hardly get out of the bed on his own and almost everything in his room was about the same age as him. The sheets and mattress were damp and everything in the room stunk of piss. I could hardly breathe and, at bedtime, I would almost choke from the smell of the piss lingering around the bed and I had to keep my head hung off the edge of the bed just to get some fresh air that was entering the room from a gap at the bottom of the bedroom door.

Scattered around the bedroom floor were pots and jugs that the man had been using to piss in, but no one ever came in the room to empty them, so they would just sit on the floor until he managed to get out of bed. Then as he walked around the room, he would knock the containers over with his walking stick, letting the piss run down through the gaps in the floorboards; and as the piss dried up, it left damp sticky stains scattered around the floor.

I had to sleep in the room with him for the whole of my stay with the family, and some mornings the woman’s children would come into the bedroom and empty jugs full of cold piss all over the bed and me. Then they would run out of the room as fast as possible, while holding their breath and slamming the bedroom door behind them so that the door slamming would shake everything in the room and wake the old man up; and then the old man would shout at me and tell me to fuck off out of the room. Then the woman would open the bedroom door and laugh at me, while the old man tried to push me out of the bed with his walking stick. But she would make me lie in the damp bed until she said that I could get up, and I would be cold and shivering the whole time and she knew it.

Every morning, the woman and her children would call me names and tease me, by telling me that I would have to sleep in the bed with the old man forever and that I would never be going back home to see my sisters or brother. They would all sit in the kitchen having breakfast, but they would never offer me a place to sit down, they said that I had to go eat with the animals and then they would throw scraps of food onto the damp piss-covered bedroom floor for me to eat, while they made animal noises at me. This went on for the whole six weeks of my holiday and for all that time I stunk of piss and my clothes were constantly wet from it. So every morning, I would go down to the end of the farm and rest in an old caravan just so the sun could shine through its windows and warm me up and dry my clothes out; and while I was in the caravan, I would try and sleep without the smell of the piss choking me. But the woman never once gave me a wash and all the time she said that I was a worthless piece of shit and that I was never going to see my family again.

Then one morning, the woman came rushing into the bedroom and she told me to get up quick, she said that I was going home and that I had to get ready before the nun arrived. She quickly washed me and gave me boiled eggs for breakfast and then she put clean clothes on me and told me that the nun was coming to get me. I was so happy; for the last six weeks, I had thought that I was never going to see my family again, and this was now going to be my life forever.

When the nun arrived, I almost died with shock, I just couldn’t believe that I was going back to St Joseph’s and back to my family. I was so happy to see the nun that I began to cry, but no tears fell from my eyes. I kept a cold blank face, and I hid my emotions, not wanting the woman or the nun to think that I was weak and pathetic. The nun held my hand and she told me to thank the good family for looking after me so well. I looked at the woman and her children and they all smiled at me and they told the nun that they were all going to miss me and that I was now like one of the family. Then the woman walked me to the car and she gave me a big hug and smiled at me as she walked away.

Once inside the car, I put my face against the window and I looked out at the woman, as she stood waving goodbye, and before the nun got into the car, she looked over at me and she asked me if I was ok. But I never spoke and I just kept looking out of the window; so she got into the car, closed her door and drove off; and as we drove out of the drive, she asked me again if I was ok, but I never replied. Then the nun said, ‘It’s ok. You will never have to go back there again’ and she drove away from the house. It started to rain on the way home, so I looked out of the car window and I could see faint flashes of light in the distance, and I could hear a thunderstorm as it rumbled above the clouds. And it sounded so nice that I wished it would come our way and blow the woman and her children up and send them all to hell.

It was dark in the back of the car and I could hardly see a thing, apart from the raindrops glistening on the outside of the widow. I put my face against the glass and I stuck my tongue up against its cold surface to catch the raindrops, knowing full well that I couldn’t. And the water droplets ran down the outside of the glass like tears and past me like I was nothing, and that was exactly how I felt, and it was as if the rain knew what I was thinking and it was crying for me.

I never spoke a word on the way back, but all the time I was thinking about my sisters and Simon and hoping they would be at the house when I got back, and I wished that I could be with them again. We drove for hours and eventually I began to fall asleep, but then the car stopped and the nun told me to get out. I looked up and I was back at our house, and I could see my sisters waiting for me by the main door of the house. I got out of the car and I walked up towards them; they looked at me and then they ran over to me and cuddled me, but I just stood looking at them. ‘Lily’, they shouted, ‘what’s a matter with you?’ But I said nothing. They turned and asked the nun what was wrong with me and she told them that I was just tired and that I would be ok in the morning. Then she told us all to go into the house and up to bed, and as I walked away, she slammed the car door making me jump. That evening, everyone exchanged tales about what they had done while on holiday, but I just looked at everyone and said nothing, as I was too upset to talk to anyone about my nightmare.

For the next two weeks, I never spoke a word to anyone and my sisters kept asking the nuns and staff what was wrong with me, but they just said that I was exhausted and that I would be ok soon. But I had a sick feeling inside my belly, I had a pain in my head that wouldn’t go away and I was unable to do anything for myself. And each morning, a nun or a member of the staff would come into my bedroom and get me dressed and then they would help feed me my breakfast.

But the nuns were becoming inpatient with me and eventually they told my sisters that if I didn’t start talking soon, they would have to take me away and put me into a mental hospital and no one would ever see me again. And from that moment on, every night when we went to bed, Karen would get into bed next to me and she would talk me to sleep, hoping that in some way it would help me to get better, and it did. After about a month, I started talking again and I began to play with the other children in the house; and for a while, the staff and the nuns left me alone to be happy.

For the next couple of months, life went on as usual around the house, with all of us going to school and Simon sticking to us like glue and especially to me, as if I was his mum; but then the nuns began to hit me again and over time the beatings got worse. Then one day, a new member of staff arrived at the house. She was much older than most of the other staff and she told us that she had been working in children’s homes for most of her life.

And the second she looked over at me, I could tell that she had taken a disliking to me, but I never understood why; and most evenings, when it was bedtime, she would play a game of hers with me. She called it the ‘slapping game’; she said that it was my punishment for being a bad girl all of the time. The game was that if I ran up to bed fast on my hands and knees, I would only get a few slaps around my head; but if I was slow at getting up the stairs and I used only my feet, then she would slap me hard around my head with a slipper, hitting me until I got to the top of the stairs and into my bedroom. All of the staff knew what she was doing to me, but they never once stopped her or questioned her actions, as they were all as bad as each other, in some way or another. All the staff and the nuns had their own games that they would use to get at us, and I think that by hitting us it somehow made them feel good about themselves.

But one of the nuns was especially bad to me, and whenever she walked past me she would pinch me on my arms, while twisting her fingers at the same time so that she could do as much damage to my skin as possible. And once she had finished pinching me, my arms would hurt, my skin would turn black and blue and the marks on my arms would take about two weeks to fade away. You could see that she was getting pleasure out of it and she looked very happy with herself after she hurt me. Then one day after lunch, the new member of staff, who played the slapping game with me, told everyone that she was leaving and going to another home. I couldn’t believe it, I was so happy; after everything she had done to me, she was finally leaving, but I didn’t want her to know that I was happy so I just sat there and said nothing. But as soon as she left the room, we all looked at each other and said, ‘Yes’ and we were so happy that we slapped our hands together with excitement.