Becoming Myself: The True Story of Thomas Who Became Sara (5 page)

I came home and had lunch, or should I say gulped it down, such was my excitement. We went to my mother to get the money for the tickets, but she told us that only one of us could go to see the film and that someone was Fred. I wasn’t taking it this time. I returned to school determined that I was going to see the film, so I decided to take matters into my
own hands. I went to see the head brother, Brother Sebastian, and told him that my mother had told me to ask him if there were any spare tickets for the film, because she could not afford to send me to the pictures. It was, of course, a lie on my part, just as it had been on my mother’s. She had the money, but just wanted me to be at home doing the housework as usual.

Brother Sebastian gave me the ticket and I got to see the movie. It was spectacular and I enjoyed every minute of it, and it didn’t matter that I had no money to spend on sweets; I got to see the film and that’s all that mattered. I did this knowing full well there would be a major showdown when I arrived home, but, just this once, I was too determined to be afraid. It was amazing how much courage I found to stand up to my mother.

‘Where were you until this hour?’ my mother asked when I got back.

‘I was at the film,’ I said, trembling, knowing that I was in serious trouble and that I would be sent to bed without anything to eat and the prospect of a severe beating, along with the usual shouting and verbal abuse. I was determined that she was not going to win out this time, especially after what she had done to me in not keeping her promise. It was showdown time!

‘And where did you get the money for the pictures?’ She asked this with a tone that was clearly designed to terrify me into confessing. But I was adamant that I was not going to cave in. This was one beating she was not going to give me, nor for that matter was my father, not if I had anything to do with it.

‘I won the ticket in a raffle,’ I said.

‘You’re lying! Get down on your knees here and tell me the truth.’

I had to kneel on the hard floor in front of her and my smirking brothers. It was awful, but I was still determined. I’d never had a single victory or let-off with my parents up to this incident, but this time it was going to be different. I started to cry, but said nothing for a few moments.

‘You will stay there until you tell the truth’, she said.

So I thought for a few moments then said: ‘I found the ticket in the school yard and brought it to Brother Sebastian. He told me to go round to all the classes and see if anyone lost it. Then he said if no-one claimed it, I could keep it, so no-one claimed it and I was allowed to keep it and go to the film.’

She remained unconvinced, but I remained steadfast and immovable. True to her word, she kept me kneeling there for what seemed like an age, but the longer I knelt there, the more courageous and determined I became.

Suddenly she said: ‘I’m going to send your brother Fred in to see Brother Sebastian tomorrow and if he says you’re lying, I’ll fucking kill you, you little bastard!’

My brothers looked on with an air of superiority and were convinced that I was most likely going to get the hiding of my life the next day. But neither they nor I could have predicted what was to occur.

I was in class the following day, finding it impossible to concentrate on my lessons, not that unusual for me, but particularly hard when all I could think about was the inevitable beating that awaited me when I returned home; not to mention being sent straight to bed for the umpteenth time without dinner.

A pupil knocked on our classroom door: ‘Master Mullally, Thomas Dunne is to go down to Brother Sebastian’s office immediately.’

This is the moment I had dreaded. I was convinced that I was going to be exposed and pay the consequences. This filled me with the most awful terror and my stomach, not for the first, or the last time, was in terrible pain. I went down to Brother Sebastian’s office and knocked at the door.

‘Come in.’

I went in very sheepishly. ‘Brother Sebastian, I’m Thomas Dunne and I was told to come down to you straight away.’

He looked at me with a smile and said: ‘Thomas, your brother Fred has just been in to see me and told me this story about you finding a ticket in the yard and that you brought it to me and that I told you to go to each class to see if anyone had lost it. Now, Thomas, is that true?’

I was completely petrified; not only was this head brother going to cane me, but I was certain to get the hiding of my life when I went home. ‘No, Brother Sebastian, it’s not true.’

I then proceeded to tell him my sorry tale of how my mother had broken her promise to me and left me feeling upset at not being allowed go to the pictures and how I then came to see him and let on that my mother told me to ask him for the ticket.

He looked at me again with a smile and said: ‘Well, now, Thomas, I told your brother that that is what happened, but you must promise me never to do that again. Do you promise?’

Of course I said, ‘Yes, Brother Sebastian, I promise I won’t do that again.’

He told me I was a good boy and gave me two lollipops, then sent me back to my class.

I felt euphoric and triumphant. I had just this once managed to withstand my mother’s best and most determined efforts to get me to confess, waiting no doubt to give me another of her beatings around the head, coupled with the
usual verbal abuse. But not this time, definitely not this time. This was to be one of those rare kindnesses shown to me during these tender years and I was grateful for it.

During the summer holidays, we would find so many ways to pass the time. We played soccer, street tennis, bulldogs, rounders, handball, etc. The smell of fresh Bitumen being poured between the splits in the concrete is something I loved, and still do. It made it so much easier to make calls in our tennis matches, as we could see the lines more clearly. We would go for long walks up to the canal and play in the graveyard inside the Lawns at Le Fanu Road. Often, I went away on my own, walking, collecting bees in a jar and cycling around the Kylemore industrial estate.

But through all of this, I was secretly going through my own intense agonising over who I was truly meant to be. Any chance I got to play with the girls, I took it. We played a game called ‘piggies’ in which we would hop and push a shoe-polish tin between chalked squares until we got to the square at the top. It wasn’t as easy as it sounds. What I loved about it was that it was mainly the girls who played it and so I could play with them without looking conspicuous. Yet, in spite of these happy moments, I hadn’t the slightest idea why I should feel to completely at odds with myself, save what my parents, siblings, schoolteachers and schoolmates made me feel: that I was utterly stupid, retarded and worthless. I felt all that they made me feel, and yet these feelings of disconnectedness were coming from a very different place. I think it was my emotional response to various life situations, along with a very non-male intuition which left me feeling that I didn’t belong inside my male body. This feeling of being disconnected from my body was to get much stronger over
the coming years and was to become a serious life-and-death issue; something I could not share with another living soul.

As a young boy with all of these conflicting feelings, I was nonetheless determined to fit in. Like many young boys at the time I joined the altar boys when I was eight years of age. I was completely devoted to being the best altar boy I could be and was awarded a prize for being the ‘star altar boy’ on a few occasions. This was one of the upsides to the job. Another upside was serving at ten o’clock Mass, because this meant getting off school for a couple of hours each morning. Sometimes, it would be longer because some funerals and weddings would be held after 10 o’clock Mass. But the 7.30 morning Mass was a scary experience, especially in the winter when I had to get up before 7 a.m. and walk down dark cold roads to the church. I was really scared of the dark and my imagination always ran away with itself, imagining people I knew who’d died coming out of their gardens and grabbing me.

As altar boys we would be treated to trips to the theatre and to see films in the Plaza cinema. It was while I was with the altar boys that I got to see
Ben Hur
and the
Ten Commandments
for the first time. It was amazing watching the chariot races in
Ben Hur
on the large curving cinema screen. It felt like the chariots were actually running over us.

Another benefit to being an altar boy was that my mother and brothers were less likely to give me a hard time once I was wearing my soutane and surplice. Wearing them made me feel very spiritual and close to God.

The Tridentine Mass was still being said during my first couple of years as an altar boy, in Latin and with the priest’s back to the congregation. The people were like mindless
drones as they repeated verbatim the same prayers Sunday after Sunday, but that all changed after the second Vatican Council, which had taken place a few years earlier in the early 60s. The altar was moved nearer to the congregation and the priest now faced the people. However, the ceremony was still very grandiose in nature and clearly intended to create a feeling of reverential awe on the part of the congregation. It worked, of course, and people enjoyed the spectacle, although they rarely, if ever, understood the full significance of what they were actually participating in. It was years later that I found myself questioning the value of all these rituals and their impact upon my life.

As an altar boy I had to attend numerous funerals; far too many for such a young boy. They had a deeply scarring effect upon my mind, bringing a terror of death into my life at a young age and adding to the darkness that was already engulfing my tender spirit. They made me far too serious and introverted.

As altar boys, we would have to attend the receiving of the remains on the evening before the funeral Mass. The bodies would be kept overnight in rooms at the back of the church, and if there were more than two coffins at a time, some would be left at the front side of the church. There were times when we would have to close the church, normally around 9 p.m., and when switching off the lights, we would have to check some of the rooms in the dark. It scared the living daylights out of me every time. Then there were those occasions when coffin lids were removed in order to allow loved ones to say goodbye for the last time. I found this a deeply emotionally disturbing experience, to stand there holding the crucifix and incense burner while staring at the corpses.

During these years, and for many years afterwards, I had
waking nightmares. They consisted of the most vivid images of me being buried alive, waking to the sounds of soil dropping onto the lid of the coffin. It terrified me so much that I would curl up against my brothers in the bed, but they would push me away, telling me I was a weirdo or they would ask me if I was ‘queer or something?’ I couldn’t tell them why I was doing it because they would have just called me an attention-seeker. If I couldn’t get comfort from being close to them, then I would curl up like a foetus and snuggle against my pillow, sucking my thumb, while the tears streamed down my face. I had to turn my screams and terror inward where no-one else could hear them. Eventually I would get to sleep, only to go through the same horror the next night, and again the following night.

The nights became weeks and the weeks became years. This continued right through until my early twenties, as did my thumb-sucking. (There is a photograph somewhere of me sucking my thumb while sleeping, taken while I was on two weeks’ camp with the
FCA
in Longford.) The situation wasn’t helped when we looked at horror movies late at night. I absolutely dreaded going to the toilet, because it meant going upstairs and expecting to see ghosts at the top of the stairs, or getting the fright of my life if the bulb had gone and I would have to look up and see the picture of the Sacred Heart on the wall, with the red light making it look very spooky.

I was sitting with one of my friends recently and sharing my experiences of the nightmares with her, when it suddenly dawned on me that it was not the fear of my own death that I was afraid of, but the death of my female gender identity; my female personality was slowly but surely being buried alive; literally! There is no other way of describing it other
than that it was absolutely terrifying. Every day of my life terrified me and I hadn’t a clue how to cope with it all.

It was while serving as an altar boy that I became convinced of my calling to the priesthood, but had to wait until I was seventeen before I could do anything about it. But I had a constant sense of spirituality from this time on. I had been so affected by my sense of calling that I engaged in religious role-playing in my bedroom with the help of some of my younger brothers and sisters. I would play the role of the priest saying Mass, using the dressing table as the altar and my brothers and sisters would act as altar boys. I guess they had a point when they thought I was weird. If I wasn’t saying Mass then I would re-enact the crucifixion, using the bed as the Hill of Calvary. I even cried out: ‘
Eloi, Eloi, sabacthani
. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ These words were to prove prophetic.

Even at this young age I would enter the church on my own and stare at the crucifix. Everything else in the church seemed so meaningless and false. The only thing I could relate to was the figure on the cross. I felt we understood each other, that we had something in common. I would ask if my sufferings were a preparation for a life of service, and if so, what kind of service that would be. Being a Catholic and having spent so long as an altar boy it seemed logical that maybe I was being called to the priesthood. My sufferings made some sense in this context. Maybe I had to learn to suffer in order to help others who were suffering. Maybe I was learning to separate from my family, I thought, because I would have to work with so many people that I wouldn’t be able to commit to a family of my own in the future. Of course, I now know that I was preparing for a life of a different kind, but it would be many years before I was to be able to live it, and so, for a long time, religion became my salvation.