The Girl Nobody Wants: A Shocking True Story of Child Abuse in Ireland (12 page)

However, the day she left, a new member of staff arrived to replace her. Her name was Joan and she was going to be our cook. She was a very old woman and she seemed nice. The first day at the house, she gave us cereal for breakfast, a nice lunch and dinner; but the next day, when we all walked in from school and sat down for dinner, she was standing in the doorway and she was holding a large wooden spoon in her hand. I sat down at the table and I picked up a fork, I looked into my bowl and the food looked disgusting. It was mincemeat stew, but it was just a bowl of hot greasy water with a few pieces of mincemeat floating on the top, and a piece of black carrot floating just below the surface.

I put my fork into the bowl and I moved it through the liquid, making the grease part and then reform behind the fork in what looked like the colours of the rainbow. I was shocked at the thought of having to eat the thing and I turned around to tell the cook, but she was standing looking at me and she was slapping the wooden spoon against the palm of her hand. ‘You eat the food’, she said. I turned back around and I knew that if I didn’t eat the food, she was going to slap me with the wooden spoon. I dipped my fork back into the bowl and I began eating the stew, but it was taking me ages with the fork and I felt like I wanted to vomit. But she was still looking at me, so I picked the bowl up and swallowed its contents as fast as I could, hoping that she would go away and leave me alone.

And as soon as I had finished, my belly began to rumble and I felt awful and I wanted to get up and run outside to be sick; but as I got up, she told me to sit back down and wait while the other children finished the food, she then went into the kitchen to fetch the dessert. I put my head down onto the table and I waited for her to come back, and I was praying that I wouldn’t be sick until I left the table. She soon returned and, as I looked up at her, my belly rumbled and my whole body shook uncontrollably at the thought of what was coming next; and as she put the desert onto the table, I could see that it was stewed, steaming hot rhubarb and nothing else. It looked disgusting and she had not even put any sugar on it. I was still holding my fork, so I dug it into the rhubarb and then I put some of the rhubarb into my mouth. It was nasty and bitter and it hung on my fork like a thick piece of old rope, but she made everyone eat it, while she stood looking over us with her arms folded and the wooden spoon sticking out from between them.

My belly rumbled again and I could hear creaking noises coming from inside my belly and I had to keep my mouth shut to stop myself from vomiting the mixture of oil, water and meaty rhubarb across the room and over the other children. But I couldn’t help myself and I began to laugh and some of the mixture came out of my nose, but I tried to control myself and I managed to hold the rest of the mixture in my mouth, and I sat at the table until she told us to go back to school. I got up and walked out of the house, and as I turned the corner and walked out of sight of the staff, I came across all the other children; and they were all bending over, spitting and vomiting their guts up at the same time. I took one look at them all and then I joined them, and we all kept vomiting until nothing more came out of our mouths and our bellies were empty.

But now we were late for school and we had to run all the way back, and when we arrived the nuns told us all off; we tried to explain to the nuns why we were late, but they didn’t want to listen to us and because we were all such bad children they made us all pray for forgiveness. After school, we returned to the house and our evening meal was no better, but we still had to eat it; and once we had finished, we all got sick again. She had only cooked us a decent meal on her first day at the house, just to impress the head nun; and after that, the food that she cooked wasn’t fit for pigs let alone us, but it was all we had and, after a while, we got used to it.

It was now winter and the nights were getting longer and, as the weeks passed, the house got colder and colder, but the nuns never put the heating on in the house. They said that it would cost them too much money, so instead of heating the whole house and wasting money, they put electric heaters in their rooms only and left the rest of us to suffer in our freezing cold bedrooms. We were always freezing and our beds were made of metal, so if you touched off the bed frame with your body, the cold steel frame would make you shiver, and the nuns only gave us one blanket each, so every night we would have to wrap ourselves tight in our blankets to keep warm, but we were still freezing.

The nuns never gave us coats, hats or any other type of winter clothes to wear and no matter what the weather condition was we still had to walk to school; and for most of the time, they made us walk around in thin cotton clothes. And if we complained about anything, the nuns would just slap us around our heads, telling us that we were the lucky children and without having them to look after us we would all be dead from neglect. Maybe we would be dead, but the way they treated us was no better than being in hell, and most days I wished and prayed that I were dead anyway.

I knew it was going to be Christmas soon, because the nuns wouldn’t stop going on about it and they behaved as if it was the best thing that ever happened to them. Then one night, one of the nuns put plastic figures of Jesus and Mary on the side in the living room, and when she had finished setting them up, she sat us all down and told us all about Jesus again and why they celebrated Christmas. And once she had finished, she told me that I would be going away for Christmas and that I would be staying with some nice people over the holiday season.

I looked at the nun and I thought back to the last holiday that I went on and I began to shake at the thought of what might happen to me. Then I shouted at the nun and I told her that I wasn’t going on my own like last time, and then she told me that my brother and sisters would be going with me. She then smiled and said that we would have a lovely time staying with a nice family, and then she walked away. I went up to my room, I sat on my bed and I began to cry. The next day, I tried to stay out of everyone’s way and I tried to hide from the nuns, I was hoping the nuns would forget all about me and send all the other children off for the holiday, leaving me all alone in the house until they all came back. But it didn’t happen and once the nuns found me, they sent Daisy, Simon and me off on holiday with an elderly couple.

The next morning, the couple came to our house and they drove us away in their car and it took hours for us to reach the village they lived in; and throughout the whole journey, they never once spoke to us. When we arrived at their house, the man and woman got out of the car and walked off towards the house, leaving us still sitting in the back of the car. We looked at each other and giggled at what they had just done. We thought they had forgotten all about us, but they never stopped and they continued to walk away, so we got out of the car ourselves and we walked up towards the house.

As we reached the front door, the couple opened the door and stood next to it as if they were waiting for us to enter. We stopped for a moment and we looked at the house, it was very old and it looked broken. We looked at each other and then we held hands and stepped inside, hoping everything was going to be ok. And as we walked in, we could see that most of the things inside the house were either old and dirty or old and broken. I looked at Daisy and Simon and I felt like I wanted to run back outside, but as I turned around the man stood in my way and he quickly slammed the door shut. Then, without warning, he shouted at us to get under the kitchen table. I grabbed Simon and Daisy and I ran towards the only table in the room and stood next to it, then I turned around and looked back at the man and woman. And the man ran towards us and he kicked us hard in our legs until we got under the table.

Frightened, the three of us screamed and huddled together under the table, but I was shaking so much that I wet myself; then Daisy and Simon began to cry, so I shouted, ‘What have we done?’ and the man shouted back, saying that we were dirty little gipsy bastard tinkers’ kids, and beggars, and that we had better stay under the table or he was going to kill us all. ‘And if you think you’re going to have a nice Christmas, think again. You’re going to get nothing from us, no toys, no presents, nothing at all, not even food. And you better not make a single noise for the next two weeks or you will be sorry.’

We huddled up to each other under the table, hoping the man would leave us alone, but then he walked over towards the table, bent down and spat into our faces; then he walked away, sat down in front of the television and glanced over at us again. So I put myself between Simon and the man, as I thought he was going to come over again, but instead he turned away and began to watch the horseracing on the television. I sat there for hours before I moved, but as I moved one of my legs forward to reposition myself, the man shouted at me and then he told me to kneel up under the table. I moved back and did what he said and he made me stay in a kneeling position for the rest of the afternoon. And once again, he said that he would kill all of us if I moved an inch; so I stayed still, but the pain in my legs became unbearable and my legs went numb from the knees down.

After a few hours, I asked him if I could get up, but he said no, and we had to stay there until bedtime. Then the woman came over to the table and she told us to get up and to get into the bedroom. I asked her if we could have some food, but she said that we didn’t deserve food and that we had to go straight to bed, she would not even allow us to go to the toilet. Our legs were stiff and we couldn’t walk into the bedroom as our legs had gone numb, so we had to crawl along the floor; and once in the bedroom, the woman put us all together in the same bed and it felt nice, we all cuddled up together and we quickly fell to sleep.

The next morning, the woman came into the bedroom and one of us had wet the bed, so she grabbed the three of us by our hair and she pulled us out of the bedroom and she told us to get under the table again, and to kneel on the floor until she said otherwise. She said that if we tried to sit instead of kneeling, she would kick us all to death, so we did what she said. Then the woman made the man breakfast and they both sat down at the same table, as we were kneeling under, and the woman told us to be very quiet while they ate breakfast. I looked up at her and I asked her if we could have some breakfast too, but the man said, ‘Shut the fuck up, you little bitch’ and he kicked me until I moved back under the table.

He continued calling me names and he said that I had to wait while he ate his bacon and potatoes, and if we were lucky, he might throw us some scraps of food when he was finished. About thirty minutes later, they finished breakfast and the man threw us some fat that was left over from the bacon and the skins from the potatoes. He said that it was all we were getting for the day and that we had better eat it all, as he did not want to see any of it left on the floor. I grabbed the scraps and gave some to Simon, but he couldn’t eat the bacon fat, so I had to chew it for him, and then I put the fat into his mouth for him to swallow and I gave him a potato skin to suck on, so that he got as much food as possible into his little belly. Then Daisy and I shared the remainder of the potato skins between us, as we never knew if they were going to feed us again.

After breakfast, the man and woman both got up from the table and they told us to stay under it, but I wanted to go to the toilet and I asked the woman if I could go. The man shouted at me and he said that I couldn’t and that I had to hold it in all day. I started to cry and I told him that I needed to go now, but he looked at me and said, ‘No, you have to hold it.’ I begged him, telling him that I couldn’t hold it any longer, but he walked away and after about ten minutes he returned and he said, ‘Ok, but you only have ten seconds’ and then he began to count. I got up and ran to the toilet, but I had trouble going and I couldn’t because of the pressure he was putting me under. He had frightened me and he had made me wait for such a long time that I was now unable to relax and I had to run back and get under the table again without going to the toilet, and then I wet myself, but I never told the man or woman. Simon and Daisy were too scared to ask if they could get up and go to the toilet, so they just wet themselves under the table.

And we all spent the rest of the day kneeling under the table and getting long marks along our knees and shins from the floorboards that we were resting on. When evening came, we were ready to collapse from exhaustion and we desperately needed food and water, but all the man and woman said was get to bed. And they did the same thing to us for the next few days, only feeding us scraps from the table and a drop of water before we went to bed.

Then one morning, while they were having breakfast, the man said to his wife that he didn’t think the nuns were paying him enough money to look after us and he said that he wanted to send us back to the home. But the woman told him that it was too late and that no one would be at the house on Christmas day. He looked down at us under the table and then he told us to get up and to go outside and play; we jumped up, hitting our heads on the edge of the table as we ran for the front door, but the door was locked and we couldn’t open it. The woman looked over at us and then she got up and walked towards the door and we moved out of her way while she opened it for us; and once it was open, we all ran outside.

It was freezing, but it was the first time that we had been outside in almost a week, so it didn’t matter about the cold. It was great being outside, and around the back of the house was an old caravan, and we played in and around the caravan for the rest of the day, pretending that we were back at daddy’s house. And during the day, we used the caravan as a toilet, as we didn’t want to go back into the house and then made to hold our wee for the rest of the night, but the man had been watching us through the window and he caught us using the inside of his caravan as a toilet. He came running out of the house, shouting at us and he ran into the caravan and he began kicking us, and he kept kicking us until we all fell onto the caravan floor screaming with pain. Then he dragged us by our clothes out of the caravan and back into the house and he made us kneel under the kitchen table for the rest of Christmas day, while he got drunk. And for the rest of the day, he called us all the names that he could think of and the woman said nothing.