The Girl Nobody Wants: A Shocking True Story of Child Abuse in Ireland (14 page)

And when we had finished, she asked us if we wanted to make some cakes; it sounded like fun, so we said yes. And for the rest of the evening, she allowed us to make jam tarts and fairy cakes, it took us hours and when we had finished the whole of the kitchen table was covered in cakes and they looked so nice that we couldn’t wait to eat them. However, Mary had other plans for the cakes and she only gave us one each, and she kept the rest to sell for profit in her guesthouse. We both felt like crying, we had not eaten a thing all day and we were hungry, so Mary said that we could make beans on toast if we needed to eat; it was now very late, but we made the food and then she drove us home.

The following weekend, Daisy said that she didn’t want to go with me, but I begged her I didn’t want to go alone, I had been doing the cleaning on my own for the last couple of years and I just couldn’t do it anymore. I begged her to come with me and eventually she said ok. ‘But I’m not doing the cleaning’, she said. I said ok and I told her that we will have fun this time, ‘I promise’ and she came with me. But instead of Mary taking us to clean her guesthouse, she took us to her auntie’s farm and, when we arrived, she told us that we had to clean the stables. We looked at each other and then she gave us Wellington boots, a wheelbarrow, a shovel and a fork to pick the muck up with. I looked at Daisy and then Mary walked off into the farmhouse to have a cup of tea while we worked in the stable. But as soon as she was out of sight, we dropped everything and we ran off to explore the rest of the farm, but as we ran off we left the stable doors open, allowing all the horses to wander off.

After a while, Mary came back to the stables to see how we were getting on with cleaning the muck up, but we had walked off and she couldn’t find us anywhere. And she had to go around, gather up all the horses and put them back in the stables and it took her about an hour to gather them all up. As we were walking around the back of the house, we forgot all about the stables and at the end of the farm we found a donkey tied up in a field. The donkey was very calm and it seemed happy to have some company, so we untied the donkey and we both got on its back, and then we rode the donkey up and down the field. It was only a small donkey and, after a while, it began to get tired, so we decided to take turns sitting on its back, while the other walked the donkey up and down the field. We fed the donkey some grass, and playing with the donkey was much more fun than cleaning out the stables; but then Mary found us and she shouted at us to get back and clean the stables.

But as I was getting off the donkey, Daisy slapped the donkey on the bum and it ran off, with me still holding on for my life. It was scary, but I loved it; and when the donkey finally stopped, I fell off its back and on to the grass and we both couldn’t stop laughing. Then Mary began laughing with us and it was the only time I ever saw Mary smile. Then she said that it was time for us to go home and we all left the farm.

On the way home, I thought Mary was going to have a go at Daisy and myself for not cleaning the stable, but she never said a word about it and she dropped us off at our house as if nothing had happened. For the next six years, I carried on cleaning her guesthouse for her all on my own, with me being her little slave and the nuns being paid money for my services.

At Willows, the nuns had an old sewing machine and occasionally they would let us play with it and I thought it was great fun messing around with bits of old material and I tried making things with it. Then one day, while I was playing around with the sewing machine, one of the nuns came over to me and she showed me how to use it properly and I seemed to pick it up easily, so she showed me how to make a couple of pillowcases and simple things like sheets and handkerchiefs.

And after a while, she showed me how to make patchwork quilts and even more complicated items, including clothes. And the nuns thought the things that I made were great and they allowed me to use the sewing machine every day. After a couple of months, the nuns and staff began praising me and telling me how good I was with the sewing machine, they gave me some pattern books, and they asked me to see if I could make a dressing gown from the patterns. So I had a go and it came out great, and the nuns allowed me to make things all day long; and after a few months, I had made hundreds of items, from pillowcases to quilts. And they were so pleased with what I had done that they allowed me to carry on making things for the rest of the year. The nuns and staff were very good to me while I was playing with the sewing machine and they never hit me once.

But then one day, they told me they were having a summer fair and all the things that I had been making were for them to sell on a stall at the fair. I couldn’t believe it, they had used me to work for them again, making them even more money, but this time it was out of something that I liked doing. That was it, I gave up straight away and I never made another thing for them again. It was a shame because I was good at making things and I thought it was fun until then and I never once thought of it as work.

The only time I had a break from cleaning the guesthouse was when the nuns sent me away for the summer, Christmas and Easter holidays and on some of the half terms, when people would come to our house and take me away with them. The people who took me always pretended to be nice while at the convent, but once they got me away from the nuns, they treated me like shit until the last day of the holidays when they brought me back to the nuns. And they always acted as if they were angels and I was the evil one and the devil.

I remember one evening, just after I got back from one of the so-called holidays, daddy unexpectedly turned up at the house and he was drunk; and as he stood outside the house, he shouted at the staff that he wanted to see his children. But the staff and nuns told him that he was not supposed to be there and they told him that if he did not go away, then they would have to call the police to remove him from the property. But he continued shouting at them and we all watched him through a window as he became angry towards them and then he looked over in our direction.

He could see us at the window waving at him and he waved back at us, so the staff went outside and they told him that if he could just shut up for a moment, then they would go and get us. He agreed and the staff let us all go outside to see him for half an hour and then he had to go, but he had upset us and now we wanted to go home with him. The staff told him to go away and then they dragged us all back inside and they locked all the doors and windows, so we could not get out and follow him.

Once inside the house, I shouted at the staff, telling them that I was not happy; and as I was walking away from them, one of the staff grabbed me from behind. She grabbed me by my hair and dragged me into the living room, then she hit me around my head so hard that I collapsed to the floor and she just left me there, closing the door behind her as she left the room. I can remember feeling very drowsy and sick and I had the smell of blood in my head, but I managed to get up, out of the room and back up the stairs to my bedroom. I walked towards my bed and I collapsed face first onto the bed; and as I tried to turn myself around, the room began to spin. I can remember having a severe headache and that was the last thing I remembered, until I woke up half way through the night vomiting all over myself and the bed, then I flopped over onto my face again and I fell back to sleep. When morning came, I was woken up by two members of staff who were looking down at me as I lay on the bed, they grabbed me by the arms and then dragged me into the bathroom and cleaned me up, then they sent me off to school and I felt sick for the whole day.

When I got home in the evening, Cathy, a member of the staff, told me to go into the living room and to wait for her there. I walked into the room and, as I turned around, she was standing right behind me; she must have followed me straight into the room. At first, she never said a word, she just put her hands together and she began to play with the rings on her fingers. I looked up at her and I asked her what she wanted, but she said nothing, then she turned and locked the door, then she clasped her hands together and she swung them up into the air. I looked up and I could see that she had turned the rings on her fingers around so that all the sharp bits that kept the diamonds in place were pointing inwards and down towards me. And with a big grin on her face, she smiled at me and then she brought her hands down and slapped me into my head.

With the first slap, I fell to the floor and everything went black; my head went dizzy and it felt like my head was spinning. She followed me down to the floor with another slap into the back of my head and I felt her rings sink into the back of my head and my neck twisted as my head dug into the carpet. But she never stopped; she just kept slapping me and hitting me into the head. Again and again she hit me and I could feel spit from her mouth dripping down onto my face. I couldn’t get up, so I opened my eyes and I looked up at her; and each time I moved my body to get away from her, she would bring her hands back down and into contact with my head and the pain became unbearable. So I pulled myself together into a small ball and I waited for the slapping to stop, but it didn’t and she was using the rings on her fingers to do as much damage to my head as possible, knowing that when she was finished, no one would be able see the marks that she had left through my hair.

She continued hitting me and, after a while, I began to see red flowing inwards from the corners of my eyes and the pain in my head went away and everything began to go dark and fuzzy. And even though she was still hitting me and I could still just about see her hands raining down on me, one after the other, it didn’t hurt me anymore and I began to feel warm and peaceful inside. I felt my head as I lay against the carpet, but it didn’t hurt anymore, so I closed my eyes and I fell to sleep.

The next thing that I remembered was one of the nuns telling a doctor that I must have hyperventilated and blacked out at the top of the stairs, and then I must have fallen all the way down the stairs to the bottom, and that’s how I got all the lumps and cuts on my head. He looked at me and he thought it was a bit strange that I only had lumps and cuts on my hands, head and neck and on no other part of my body, but he was a friend of the nuns and staff, so it didn’t really matter to him how I got the marks. I can remember him telling the staff to keep me away from other people and not to send me to school for a couple of weeks until the marks on my head and neck went away, and they did exactly that.

I was able to stay in bed most of the time and the nuns gave me a lot of food and attention, but I was not allowed out of my room and I never saw anyone apart from my sisters and brother. All I could do was to get up and look out of the windows on the top floor of the house and I could see that the weather was getting warmer outside and I wanted to go and play. And once the nuns realised I was getting better, they allowed me to spend some time outside, playing on my own while all the other children were at school, but I never had any toys to play with. I had to make up my own games and I spent as much time as possible in the fields behind the house on my own, and I began making crop circles in the long grass by lying down and rolling around in the field. Then, when I was well again, everything went back to normal with them hitting me again as if nothing had ever happened.

At the bottom of one of the fields behind our house was a stream, and we would all go skinny-dipping in it, but we never told the nuns or staff what we were doing, as they would have hit us and punished us by sending us to bed. And one day, on the way down to the stream, Simon found a box of matches, lying next to an old jacket that someone had left in the field; so he picked the matches up, he put them into his pocket, and he soon forgot all about them.

The next day, while Simon and I were walking in the field, Simon put his hands in his pockets and, all of a sudden, he pulled out the box of matches. ‘Look what I found’, he said, while holding up the matches. I looked at him and I told him to throw them away as they were dangerous, and he did, but not before pulling all of the matches out of the box and striking them against its side. I shouted at Simon to stop, but it was too late; he slung all the lit matches up into the air and they landed on some dry grass and, within a few seconds, the grass went up in flames.

We quickly ran off back to the house and we ran inside closing the front door behind us. Then we ran up to the top floor of the house and we looked out of a window, and for the next five hours we both stood watching as one of the fields went up in flames. The whole sky lit up with the colour of orange from the flames and it went on all night, and about fifty people stood watching as the field burned to the ground. No one got hurt, but the smoke made everyone in the house cough; and for the rest of the week, all the staff and the children kept talking about what happened. We never did tell anyone that we did it and the next day we had to walk past the field to get to school and some of the field was still smoking, with little patches of grass still on fire from the night before. Simon held my hand tight and he looked up at me for reassurance, and then he smiled and shrugged his shoulders at me as we both looked straight ahead and just kept walking past the field, not once looking back, just in case someone caught us looking and then blamed us for what had happened.

After school, Simon and I took the long way home, so we didn’t have to walk past the burnt field, but the walk back took much longer than we thought and it made us late. When we finally arrived home, Sister Ann was waiting at the front door for us. I looked up at her and I held Simon’s hand tightly as we walked slowly past her, and once inside I dragged Simon along as fast as possible, so that she couldn’t hit him or trip him up just for spite. But as I walked along the hall and towards the stairs, she called me back and she asked me to go into the living room with her. I looked at Simon and I told him to run up the stairs and to hide in the bedroom until I get back, and then I walked into the living room and stood in front of her.