A discreet knock at the front door on a Saturday morning and I’m sent to answer it, picking up two silver half crowns left ready on the hall table.
I open the door to the nuns. Habited head to toe with only their faces showing, one is young and rosy-cheeked; the other taller, paler, older – both softly spoken. “Am I being good? Saying my prayers? Doing well at school?” It’s an uneasy exchange. Leaving God’s blessing on us all they depart, with our modest contribution to the care of children who have no mammies or daddies.
Once a fortnight, a man in a van takes our laundry to the nuns. It’s returned, impeccably starched and ironed. It’s the 1950s and I’m still in single figures and white socks. On my daily journey to school there’s a tall granite wall that runs the whole length of a road. Only from the high bus seat can I glimpse the upper storeys of a big gloomy grey house, its windows blank and never a soul to be seen about it. I’m ten or eleven before I realise this is where the nuns live. This is where our laundry goes. Naively, I believe it’s the nuns who do it.
In early teens, I become a regular attendee at the Derry Feis, because that’s where the college boys can legitimately be met. The choral competitions are the highlight of the week. (Everybody in Derry can sing.) Filing in under a nun’s gimlet eye come the children from ‘the home’, identically clad in terrible satin frocks with identical pudding-bowl hairstyles, not improved by the incongruity of a big floppy bow over one ear. Eyes downcast and silent, they wait their turn, sing superbly, win hands down, collect their trophy and are shepherded out, having communicated with nobody. There are sotto voce accounts from our schoolboy contemporaries of the savage treatment meted out to ‘home boys’ by sadistic teachers, confident there’d be no redress from parents.
Fast forward to adulthood. I’m still haunted by the memory of a visit made with colleagues to a children’s home – a roomful of cots and pleading little faces, arms extended, yearning to be picked up and cuddled. We, case-hardened infant teachers, left, shaken and in tears.
A couple I knew emigrated to Africa in the early sixties. Childless after years of marriage, they came home on leave hoping to adopt an Irish child. They chose an eighteen-month-old baby girl. The legal hoops they were put through nearly broke their resolve, but they persisted until they got her. An elderly relative of theirs delivered herself of the unforgivable opinion: “I don’t know what they’re thinking of – giving our name to God knows who.” Such was the climate of the time.
In a loving home, that child grew in wisdom, age and grace, the apple of her adoptive parents’ eye. She won a scholarship to Capetown University at sixteen. Today, happily married with grown-up children of her own, she has a high-flying job with a pharmaceutical company. The spirit quails to think of what her future might have been. But what of that child’s natural mother? The breathtaking cruelty of separating a mother from her newborn and denying subsequent access, flies in the face of all that is Christian or natural.
I’m persuaded that ordinary people KNEW. Of course they knew, or at least suspected, but were uneasily compliant in their silence – their misplaced reverence and exaggerated respect for the Church in a moral climate that was pitiless and unforgiving, salving their collective conscience by donations and fundraising. Now, too late for justice for the innocent, the harrowing truth is coming out. It will rebound to nobody’s credit.
In the current debate you’ll note, there’s not a word of the men responsible for the plight of these women, nor their accountability for condemning them to pariah status and a living hell without hope. Nor a scintilla of regret for the innocent infants who lived briefly and died anonymously, shrouded only in shame. It’s iniquitous that in this whole tragic saga, no-one has addressed the sins of the fathers.
