The Girl Nobody Wants: A Shocking True Story of Child Abuse in Ireland (17 page)

For the rest of our stay in the hospital, the nurses allowed us to stay up for as long as we wanted and the doctors fed us food we had never seen or tasted before and we both felt happy. I got better, but Simon was still sick and he was vomiting all day long and he would use the metal bins around the ward to be sick in; but just as he was about to vomit, I would pull the bin away from him and the sick would go all over the floor. Simon would just laugh, thinking it was very funny as the vomit came out of his nose and mouth at the same time and then covered the hospital floor.

But the doctors didn’t think it was funny; but they never shouted at us for what we had done, instead they gave us lots of attention and love, which was just what we needed. None of the nuns or staff at the home had ever treated us like kids and we liked it and we wanted to stay in the hospital forever, but eventually we got better and we had to leave. But before we left, the doctors gave us lots of toys and sweets to bring back to the other children in the home; but when the nun came to take us back home and we got in the car, she took everything from us and we never saw any of it again.

I was only home for about a week when I became sick with the mumps; I couldn’t believe it and I must have caught them at the hospital. Then Karen got them and we both had to spend the next three weeks together in our bedroom, all on our own; and every day one of the nuns would come into the room and squeeze me by my neck to see if I was ok, and to get me to take my medicine. But as I was recovering from the mumps, I caught another infection and I became very ill. I got so bad that I could not even cope with any type of light, as it made my eyes hurt and it gave me a headache.

Then after a few days, my body became covered in red blotches and my whole body felt stiff. The staff became worried about what I had caught and they soon stopped coming into the room, as they thought they were going to catch something bad from us; and a few days later, a doctor came to the house, and he gave us some medicine. The nuns and staff would only come as far as the bedroom door, they would leave us food and drinks on the floor outside the bedroom door and we had to get up and go get it ourselves. We were so sick that we could not even walk and we had to crawl along the bedroom floor to get to the food and water. And just for spite, the staff and nuns would put the bedroom light on, so that we were in pain and we would beg them to turn the light off before they left, but they never did. They loved it and they could not get enough of being spiteful to us; and just when we needed them most, they showed us their true colours.

Then one night, Sister Ann came into the bedroom and she sat next to my bed. I was still awake, but I had my eyes shut, so she had no idea that I knew she was there. At first, I thought that she was going to hit me and I got myself ready to protect my head; but instead of beating me, she just sat in the room and stared at me. Then, after a while, she got up and left the room and I fell to sleep. The next night, she did the same thing. I thought it was a bit strange that she was not hitting me, but I didn’t care what she was doing as long as she was leaving me alone.

The third night that she came into my room it was very late; I was exhausted from praying all evening and I was just about able to stay awake. She came in, she sat down on a chair next to my bed, then she bent down and picked my knickers up off the floor, and she put them against her face and then she smelt them. Then she put her other hand on top of my blanket and she began to move her hand up and down over the blanket, rubbing my whole body through the blanket. I stayed still and I kept my eyes shut, hoping that she would stop what she was doing and go away; but she didn’t, she just kept rubbing her hand up and down my body. I was waiting for her to move her hands up to my neck and strangle me or for her to do something horrible to me, but instead she just kept rubbing her hand up and down over my body. I felt strange and I didn’t know what to do, so I just pretended that I was asleep and she continued smelling my knickers for a few more seconds, then she threw them to the floor, got up and left the room. I didn’t know what to do, so I just pulled my night clothes and my blankets back into position and then I went to sleep.

When morning came, I thought to myself that she must have wanted to be my friend. But as I walked into the dining room for breakfast, she was standing by the door and as I walked past her she gently slapped me around my head and I knew that everything was the same as usual between us. After breakfast, I went off to school and, on the way, I told Daisy what Sister Ann had done to me for the last few nights and she said that she thought it was a bit strange, but she told me to forget it. She said that if Sister Ann was not hitting me in my bed, then it must be ok for her to touch me and I thought no more of it.

However, that night when I went to bed, she did the same thing to me again and she kept doing it to me for the next few weeks; and each night, she would spend more time touching me through my sheets and blanket. I felt bad for letting her touch me, but I knew that if I had said anything to her, she would hit me and then she would tell the other staff that I was lying and making things up to get her in trouble, so I said nothing to her. I did, however, tell some of the older girls about what was going on and they told me that all the staff and nuns had been doing the same thing to them for years and it was nothing to worry about and they just laughed at me. They said that I had to accept it, as it was normal for the nuns and staff to touch all the children as they got older, so I left it at that and I never told anyone else again.

Days led into weeks and weeks became months and then years went past. I still looked thin and I was nearly always sick; the nuns never gave us much food to eat and it was the same thing for all of us children living in the house. We had very little to do all day, we had nothing to play with and the nuns and staff kept anything given to us, like birthday presents, gifts, nice clothes and anything of value, all locked away in cupboards around the house. Then, after a while, everything in the cupboards would all just disappear and whenever we asked to play with toys, they would say that we did not deserve nice things and that is why they kept them from us.

Then one Saturday, Sister Ann told me that it was going to be sports day and she said that I didn’t have to go to work and in the afternoon the nuns gathered us all up into age groups and then each group had a colour and my colour was red. We all went into a field at the back of the house and we began to play games; it was a lot of fun and because I was the oldest in my team, I was stronger than all the other girls were and I kept winning. When we all finished playing, the nuns gave out prizes and we had a choice of what we could have and our house, Willows, picked footballs because we had never had one before. And by the time the nuns had finished handing out the prizes, we had a lot of balls. When we got back to the house, the nuns brought all of us into the hall and they told us that we were allowed to keep the balls and they never took them away from us. But once all the balls had broken, they never replaced them either. It was a lot of fun that day and I will never forget it.

Sometimes after school, the nuns allowed us to play outside in the garden, while some of the staff and nuns cooked food for themselves; it was their way of getting us out of the way for a few hours, while they spoilt themselves with good food. On one particular day, the smell of the food coming from the kitchen was so nice that I just had to see what it was that they were cooking, so I made an excuse to the other children and I went into the house to go to the bathroom. Then, on the way back, I stopped at the entrance to the kitchen and I just stood and looked inside. One of the staff was sitting at the kitchen table eating a pork chop with fried onions and gravy, and it smelt so nice that I just stood looking and smiling at her. She looked over at me and, in a nasty voice, she told me to go away, but I just stood looking at her. ‘Go away’, she shouted, but I could not move, I had been sent into a dazed trance by the gorgeous smell of the food.

Before I knew it, she jumped up out of her chair, she grabbed the biggest wooden spoon I had ever seen from the table, and she ran towards me with it. I quickly realised what she was doing, so I turned around and I ran off through the house and up the stairs towards my bedroom, but she soon caught up with me, and she hit me as hard as she could around my legs with the wooden spoon. I kept running, but I tripped on one of the stairs and she landed on top of me, then she held me down with her body while she hit me on my legs again and again with the spoon. And she kept on hitting me until my legs were black and blue and she only stopped hitting me when she could not lift her arm anymore from exhaustion, and I had stopped moving.

My legs were so badly beaten that they were almost bleeding, but I never made a sound, until I told her that I only wanted to see the pork chop that she was eating because it smelt so nice and because I had never seen one before, but she said nothing. She just got up and walked back to the kitchen, leaving me lying on the stairs, and my legs had swollen so much that they didn’t look like my legs anymore. And I had to crawl the rest of the way up to my room on my hands and knees. It took over two weeks for my legs to get better and all the time I had to keep them covered up so the nuns and staff wouldn’t shout at me for showing the marks off to the other children.

Everywhere we went the nuns were praying, and Sister Ann wanted us to do the same. She would tell us that we had to pray to be forgiven for all our sins, but by now I knew I wasn’t going to hell, they were and no amount of praying was going to save them from their fate. In the evenings, Sister Ann would sit on the floor in the middle of the hallway of our house and she would make us all sit around her like she was the queen bee, and we would all have to do the rosary, and say Hail Mary’s and lots of other praying stuff that I hated. We all had to take it in turn to say our prayers, but every time someone got a prayer wrong Sister Ann would give them a slap in the face; and when it was Sister Ann’s turn, we would all end up laughing at her.

The whole situation was so funny that we just couldn’t help laughing, the thought of us all sitting there and her being serious in the middle, praying like it was going to save her, was just too much for everyone and we couldn’t help but take the piss out of her. I hated her for making me pray and she knew it; but to get her own back on me for laughing at her, she would make any excuse to cut my fingernails, and she would cut them down so close to the base of the skin that my fingers would bleed and throb with pain for days and days.

So, to stop her from hurting me, I began to bite and chew my nails until they were so short that she couldn’t cut them anymore. And on other occasions, she would tell me that I had head lice in my hair and she would use a metal tooth comb to get them out of my hair. She would dig the comb hard into my scalp, making my head bleed, then she would pour the lice lotion onto my head and she would allow the lotion to run into the wounds on my scalp so that the lotion would sting and hurt me. I seemed to be the only one getting head lice at the time, and the excuse was very convenient for her to use against me.

In St Joseph’s, there was a hall and at Christmas, before they sent us away for the holidays, we would have to perform a Christmas play and the nuns would have us perform the same play every year. However, before we could do the play, we would have to practice it; and for weeks, the nuns would make us do our homework first and then in the evenings they would send us out into the garden at the back of the house to rehearse the play. It was like more punishment to me, so instead of rehearsing the play, I would run off into the fields and try to hide from the nuns; but after a while, they would come out and look for me, and they would try to catch me and then bring me back into the house. However, I would run for miles up into the apple orchards, I would stay there for a couple of hours and then, on the way home, I would eat the apples that I had found lying on the ground and I would laugh to myself, thinking how great it had all been.

Once the Christmas nativities were over, it was time to go away on holiday again, but I didn’t want to go on holiday anymore; almost every time that I had been sent away, someone had either physically or mentally abused me, people touched me, hit me and called me names and I didn’t want any of it anymore. So when Sister Ann said that it was time for me to go on holiday again, Karen and I decided to run away and we decided to run back to daddy, and that day we began our plan.

Karen said that if we covered our faces with red spots and we pretended that we were sick, the nuns would not be able to send us away. I knew she was right, so I agreed with her and the next day she took a red pen out of her school bag and she spent about two hours covering our faces, hands and necks in red spots and then she put some white powder over our faces to make us look pale and sick. We had the measles. The children in the house always had the measles or chickenpox or some other disease that had red spots connected to it, so to us it was the perfect plan. After we had finished, Karen went downstairs and she told one of the nuns that I was sick and I could not get out of my bed as I had red spots all over my body. The nun said ok and then she came up to our room and looked at me; at first it looked like we had fooled her, but as she got closer to me she put her hand on my face and she rubbed the spots. The red ink smudged all over my face and she began laughing at me, then she said, ‘Wash your face, you’re going on holiday. The car will be here in a few minutes.’ I had no choice and I had to go away, like she said.

This time, I was sent to stay with a family that I had never spent time with before. They had six children and my stay with them wasn’t that bad; but when I got up on Christmas morning, none of the children were in their bedrooms. It was still early and the house was very quiet and I thought they must have all gone for a walk, so I walked down the stairs and towards the living room; but as I walked into the room, the whole family turned around and looked at me. It looked like they had forgotten all about me being in the house and the children were standing next to a heap of presents sitting under the Christmas tree.