The Girl Nobody Wants: A Shocking True Story of Child Abuse in Ireland (19 page)

And all I could tell her was that Father Brien was tired and he wanted to lie down for a moment. But she knew that something was wrong and she never let him near me again; and soon after our little incident, Father Brien was assigned to a church in Australia and I never saw him again. I didn’t know it at the time, but for many years after Brien was sending me letters, telling me how he felt about me. However, the adults around me were keeping the letters from reaching me and it wasn’t until about six years later that I found out, when a bunch of letters were handed to me and I just threw them all away, never reading one of them.

Whenever my stay with Alice and Terry ended, I never wanted to go back to the home, but I had no choice. But Alice always promised me that she would always come back to get me on the next school holiday, and she did, and she would never send me back to the home empty-handed. She would always give me bags of stuff to bring back for the other children, she would give me clothes, toys and ribbon for them; and when I got back, the children loved it all. They would play with the things all day until the nuns got fed up with it all and then they would take it all away from them, saying they were going to keep it all safe for them, but the children would never see any of it again. I continued going back to Alice and Terry every year until the day I left Willows and the convent, and I miss them both very much.

CHAPTER 8

Time to Leave

I was getting older now, and the nuns began to give me pocket money each week, so I could buy myself sweets from the shops on the way home from school. But they also had a little black note book that they kept the names in of all the naughty children, and my name was always in the book. The trouble was that the nuns always used the book against me and they used it against me to keep me from having my pocket money each week. If I had been bad during the week, then my name went into the book and I never got my pocket money. I got so used to them waving the black book in my face and telling me that I was not getting any pocket money again, that in the end I told the nuns to stick the book up their ass, and I never saw the book or any pocket money again.

It was only five pence a week anyway, plus I had my own way of getting money. As at the back of St Joseph’s was a field where every weekend men played football, and they would use one of the rooms in the convent as a changing room, leaving all their clothes lying around the room as they played football. Then me and some other kids would sneak into the room and go through their pockets, looking for money. And we got more money in a month than we would ever have gotten from the nuns in a whole year. We would all get a couple of pounds each, then we would sneak off to the shops and buy ice cream, sweets and even fags and matches. It was great; but after a few months, the nuns found out about us stealing the money and they locked the changing room door and that was the end of that.

One morning, I came down from my bedroom and I told the staff that I had wet the bed again and she told me not to worry, and that she would change the bed sheets later in the day. So I sat down, ate my breakfast and then I went off to school, but she never changed my sheets, she just pulled the covers back into place and then made the bed, leaving it wet. Then in the evening, when I got back from school, all the staff in the house were rushing around and cleaning the house, putting clean towels, soap and shampoo in the bathrooms and even fresh food into the kitchen cupboards.

Then the staff gathered us all together in the dining room and they told us all to be good, because some people from the health service were coming to see us and they were going to check over the house. The staff cleaned us all up and, just as they had finished putting clean clothes on us, two men walked into the house and the two men introduced themselves as health inspectors,. Then they asked us children many questions about the house and the food that the nuns had been feeding us. Once they were finished talking to us, they walked around the house, checking on the condition of the kitchen and looking in all the food cupboards; then they went into all the bedrooms and took off all the blankets and sheets from the beds to check the condition of the mattresses.

Everything was fine until they went into my bedroom and pulled back the covers on my bed; it was still wet and the sheets smelt, and they had stains all over them. The two men were very angry with the staff and they left the house complaining to the nuns that they would be making a full report about what they had found. Sister Ann said goodbye to them and then she closed the front door, walked over to me and slapped me into my face. ‘That’s for wetting the bed’, she said, and then she asked me why I never told the staff about the wet sheets. I tried to explain to her that I did tell the staff that morning, but the staff said that I was lying and she told Sister Ann to leave it at that; but she didn’t and she kept slapping me and shouting at me for not telling them about the sheets and she blamed me for everything that went wrong. In fact, I do believe to this day that the staff had set me up that day, just to get me the beating from Sister Ann.

As time went on, I began to notice more things going on around the house and some of the strange behaviours going on between some of the nuns and staff. Over the years, people would come and go and so would some of the children; and if you asked the nuns if they were coming back, you would be told to shut up and to go away. I also noticed that some of the nuns had become very close to each other; they had been working and living in the same home and convent for so long that some of them had become almost inseparable, sticking to each other like lovers or conjoined twins. They always walked around in pairs and never ashamed of showing affection to one another in front of us. I will never forget two of the staff that made me feel very uncomfortable when they were around me. They were always playing with each other, touching and fondling each other’s bodies and they never stopped. They would constantly touch each other’s tits and put their hands up each other’s dresses and touch each other between the legs. And they would use a long wooden spoon while they were in the kitchen to poke up each other’s knickers and then they would use the same wooden spoons to stir our dinner while they prepared our food in the kitchen.

Then at mealtimes, they would sit next to each other at the table, smiling and giggling at one another while they put a hand down each other’s knickers and rubbed each other’s private parts under the table. They were disgusting, but I could never say anything to them, and if I looked at them, they would stop for a moment and then give me a dirty look as if I had interrupted them while they were doing something very important; and I always felt embarrassed and uncomfortable while they were around me.

Over the years, I would see and hear things that I could never speak about to anyone, and many of the staff and nuns would touch the children and each other as if it was normal and nothing to worry about. And while I was in the same bedroom as them, they would get into bed with each other and rub each other’s bodies; and they made me feel sick, but to them it was fun having someone in the same room with them while they played around with each other.

Between all the beatings, I did have a few nice times playing like a child, but my fun would always be interrupted by a nun or a member of the staff calling me names or hitting me for some unknown reason. But it wasn’t just me they abused; all the children in the home suffered in one way or another and, over the years, the constant abuse began to take its toll on everyone. Over time, some of the older girls were sent away to workhouses and the only reason the nuns sent them away was to keep them away from the boys; and some of the other children just disappeared over night and no one ever saw them again. I had not seen or spoken to most of my brothers for years and the only one I managed to have some kind of contact with was Chris, as he still lived in a home not far from ours. The nuns ran that home as well as ours, and occasionally I would pass Chris as I walked to school, as our schools stood right next to each other. But the nuns would never allow the boys and the girls to mix, so he would be standing on the corner waiting to go into school, and as I walked by we would have just enough time to say ‘Hi’ to each other, before he went inside the building.

Then one day, I managed to get to the school a bit early and Chris was standing on the corner, hoping to catch a glimpse of me as I walked past; and I had just enough time to ask him how he was, and he said that he felt sad at being separated from us and he felt lonely. He said that our older brother Ted was old enough to leave and he had gone back to live with daddy at the house. He looked sad and I wanted to cuddle him, but I had to go and we both went our own ways to our schools. I knew then that the same thing was going to happen to Simon and me, as we were a lot younger than our other sisters were and soon they would be old enough to leave our house, and they would go home to daddy, leave us behind to suffer at the hands of the nuns.

I felt sad and sorry for myself; and sure enough, three months later, they sent Jenny away, but not because she was old enough to leave, but because she was a bad girl and she had caused a lot of problems with the boys from one of the other homes. She had been caught kissing and messing around with the boys, so the nuns sent her off to a workhouse in Dublin; but I heard that a few days after she got there, she escaped and she had run away to London, to our mum’s house, and she was never coming back.

Now Karen was the oldest and it wasn’t long before she started to take an interest in the local boys; but she wasn’t allowed to have a boyfriend, so she had to sneak out of the house late at night to see the boys. Every evening, she would open a second floor window and then climb down the drainpipe and sneak off for an hour or two; and then Daisy and I would have to stand by our window and wait for her to come back and then we could help her back into the house.

But the window was high off the ground and we had to tie three bed sheets together for her to climb back up to the window. Daisy would tie one end of the sheets around her waist and then I would pull on the sheets, but Karen was fourteen years old and too heavy for us to pull her up on our own. And as she grabbed hold of the sheets and she began to climb up them, we would slide along the floor and slam up against the wall and almost fall out of the window as she climbed up the bed sheets. She was so heavy that we had to sit on the floor below the window and wedge ourselves against the wall, while Karen climbed up, laughing at us as she climbed through the window and fell on to the floor from exhaustion. Sometimes, we had very little strength to help her, so we had to tie one end of the sheets to the legs of one of the beds; otherwise, we would never have been able to hold her weight.

After doing this for months, I got sick of Karen keeping me up all night, just so that she could go and see the boys. So one night, I said to Daisy that when Karen gets back and climbs to the top of the sheets, let’s drop her; but Daisy said, ‘No, we might end up killing her and then what will happen?’ I said, ‘Well, she might just get hurt.’ Then Daisy said that she might just get back up and then she would beat us up for dropping her. We spent ages laughing and plotting what we were going to do to her when she came back and grabbed hold of the sheets. And in the end, we decided to drop her; and when she came back, we waited until she was halfway up the sheets, then we let go and, a few seconds later, we heard a loud thud as she hit the ground. We both looked at each other, then we got up and looked out of the window, and as we leant over and looked down, we could see Karen lying on the ground and she said that she had hurt her back. But after a couple of seconds, she got back up and we gave her another chance; and as she got to the top, we helped her through the window and into the room. When she got back inside the room, she stood up and then she beat us both up, by whacking both of us around the head with the lid of the rubbish bin that was in our room; and after that night, she never trusted us again.

A couple of months later, the nuns told us that Karen was now old enough to leave the home, and they sent a letter to our mother, explaining that Karen was now old enough to leave and a week later my mother sent my sister Tracy’s boyfriend, Fred, over to Ireland to take her back to London. The nuns couldn’t wait to get rid of her, but the paperwork wasn’t ready, so Fred had to spend a couple of days waiting around while the nuns prepared Karen’s leaving papers. And while Fred was waiting, he spent a lot of the time hanging around the home and playing with me and giving me a lot of attention.

Then on his last visit to the home, before he left, he played with me as usual, but then he grabbed me by my leg and pulled me towards him, and I suddenly remembered whom he was and what he had done to me back at my sister’s house in London. I quickly pulled away from him and ran off up to my bedroom and locked the bedroom door. I knew Karen was going away with him the next morning, so later that evening I told her about what he had done to me back in London when I was a baby and I told her to stay away from him and to stay around as many people as possible. So that he could not get her on his own, otherwise he would do things to her that she wouldn’t like. She was afraid, but she understood what I was telling her; and the next morning, I helped her put three sets of clothes on, one layer on top of the other, making sure he would never have enough time to take all the clothes off and touch her. I cuddled her and we said our goodbyes and the nuns gave her a strange look, as they could not understand why she was wearing so many layers of clothes and why she was acting so odd, and then she left with Fred. I was so upset; I turned around and went back into the house.

Now it was only Daisy, Simon and me, with Chris still on his own in the boys’ house; one by one, all the others had left and now we had no one to protect us from the nuns. I told Simon and Daisy that we will never be split up or separated. But because we had no one to protect us, the nuns took advantage of us and the beatings they gave us became more frequent and more severe; and day after day, I was sent to my room and I never got a chance to see or mix with the other children in the house again.