Author: Penny Wark
Publication: Times
Date: August 23, 2005
URL: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,171-1745917_1,00.html
Tormented by the Sisters of Mercy during her
childhood in Ireland, Kathleen O'Malley has written a book about her ordeal
to exorcise her demons
Kathleen O'malley lives in a neat bungalow
with shiny furniture and lots of photographs of her husband, her son and herself.
She always looks very glamorous and today, her hair and make-up considered
and precise, her pronunciation received and modulated, she looks like what
she is, a Hertfordshire lady golfer and magistrate. She is a woman with exceptional
poise, and it is not long before she indicates that she has no intention of
losing it: "You aren't going to make me cry are you, please?" she
says with an uncharacteristic downward glance.
Of course, I don't want to make her cry, but
I am here to talk about her catastrophic childhood in an industrial school
- a euphemism for workhouse - in Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s, and as anyone
who survived this experience will confirm, it is a painful subject. There,
incarcerated by 6ft walls and under the tutelage of the Sisters of Mercy nuns,
Kathleen was beaten, starved and humiliated to a point where she felt worthless
and wanted only to be invisible. Her education was scant; instead she was
put to work scrubbing floors, in the laundry and, barefoot and dressed in
rags, in the surrounding fields. She knew only cruelty and so, like the other
girls, she became cruel, too. She stole food, sometimes raw potatoes from
the store, sometimes she rifled through the pigswill bin, scraping out banana
skins and eating orange pith. Denied water between what passed for meals,
she drank from toilets. And for years afterwards she told no one, heeding
the words of the nun who warned her that her past must be a secret because
people would judge her by it. "When each girl left Sister Cecilia said,
'Don't tell anyone where you come from, they will look down on you'. Well,
that sticks with you. Why would you tell anyone?"
It was only when Kathleen became a magistrate
eight years ago that she recognised her own worth and allowed herself to look
into her past. Her son was an adult - "I would never have done anything
while he was growing up because I still had this fear of being found out,
where I was from" - and she was aware that in Ireland other survivors
of industrial and reformatory schools were talking openly about their abuse
and lobbying the Irish Government for reparation. That was when she instructed
a solicitor in Dublin to retrieve the papers that tell her story, which is
published this month in Childhood Interrupted, a moving account of her early
years, and of a society dominated by an intolerant and hypocritical Roman
Catholic Church.
She dedicates the book to her late Mammy,
Mary O'Malley, and it is primarily a vindication of this "greatest mother
and most courageous woman" whose unmarried status made her a target for
Ireland's mid-20th century moral guardians: the State, the Catholic Church
and the NSPCC. Kathleen was born in 1942 and, like her older sister, never
knew her father. But her mother, a colourful woman who worked as a cleaner,
had spirit and pride and made a loving home for her children in a Dublin tenement.
"We were poor, but so what? I had everything I needed, I had my rice
pudding after my main meal and got to go to sleep in Mammy's bed. I just remember
being loved and cuddled," Kathleen says. The girls even had ribbons in
their hair, but the quality of their mother's care counted for nothing when
the NSPCC charged her with being "destitute" - ie, unmarried - and
sent her daughters to St Vincent's Goldenbridge, an Industrial School. Kathleen
was 5.
There she was put to work threading rosary
beads on to wire that cut into her hands, and she was beaten: "There
did not have to be a reason." The greatest shock, she says, was that
there was no toilet paper. "We wiped our bottoms with our fingers, then
we wiped them on the walls. There was always a lingering stench." Further
persecution came when the nuns ordered the girls to gather in a yard and remove
their pants. These were put on a pole and the other girls had to vote on whether
they were soiled or not. Girls who had dirty pants were beaten in front of
everybody. "I never did understand it. How could we be expected to keep
ourselves clean?"
By the time Kathleen and her sister escaped
a year later, they had scabies and ringworm and were painfully thin, enabling
Mammy to argue in court that she should keep them on the ground of health,
Kathleen believes. Their happy life resumed, but when Kathleen was 8 she was
locked in a room by a neighbour and raped. She said nothing, but within a
few days she could barely walk; when her mother took her to hospital the child
was found to have gonorrhoea. Boldly, given the mores of the time - sex, let
alone sexual abuse, was deemed shameful and never discussed - Mammy made the
assault public and pushed for a prosecution, unwittingly giving the NSPCC
the proof it needed that she was an unfit mother and that her children needed
"protection". This time her daughters - there were now three - were
committed to Mount Carmel Industrial School in Moate, Co Westmeath, until
their 16th birthdays.
The physical deprivation was similar to Goldenbridge:
one pair of clean pants a fortnight, the same jumper worn all winter. "We
must have stank, we were urchins really," says Kathleen. But as she describes
the eight years of persistent neglect and abuse that she endured, it is the
emotional deprivation that is most disturbing. The girls were not allowed
to talk to each other, which meant that there was no friendship or solidarity
between them, no care for each other, no way of expressing how they felt -
indeed they learnt not to express their feelings. Kathleen felt lost and alone
and as she cried herself to sleep each night (and then invariably wet the
bed), she could only conclude that she was a very bad girl.
This feeling came from the rape - Kathleen
had made the connection between that abuse and being sent to Moate - and was
cruelly reinforced by the nuns who demonised the O'Malley sisters. One would
shake her head whenever she saw Kathleen and say: "Them O'Malleys. They're
rotten to the core." The rationale was that because their mother was
unmarried, she was both worthless and a threat to the social order. Therefore,
so were her daughters, and they must be punished for their mother's sin. Kathleen
reads from the NSPCC form that committed her to Moate in 1947: " 'Being
illegitimate whose mother is unable to support her and consents to her being
sent to a certified industrial school'. My mother never consented to that."
Her sense of shame was not helped by the rape
trial, at which she testified (the abuser was convicted). She urges me to
read the transcript - much of the time she was mute - and says that when she
read it for the first time she felt merely numb. "I've just got in my
memory a picture of a little girl in the dock. Motionless. Nobody beside me.
I know now that when you are persecuted the perpetrator will make you feel
that you really made them do it. I was burdened with that, and at Moate I
was put down on a daily, hourly, basis and if you're not, the girl next to
you is.
"This is ongoing, the pattern of behaviour
is repeated. I automatically took on responsibility for what had happened.
We had no rights. We were fortunate that the nuns gave us a roof over our
heads or we'd be walking the streets of Dublin. They had such power. When
people visited we were threatened to within an inch of our lives. We had to
say, 'I'm very well, thank you, I'm very happy, thank you, we have lovely
food, thank you'. You did it because you were within 6ft walls, there was
no one to talk to and if you talked, you knew what you would get."
And so she came to trust the nuns with what
she calls a "terrible adoration", a mixture of awe and fear. "I
look back and they were heavenly, they were Christ's brides. Even to get a
glimpse of them walking down the cloister - everything they did - hero worship.
But, then, victims do look up to bullies. It's renowned. I see it now, but
as a child I had an enormous need to please. I still do, though to a lesser
degree. It's rather sad."
She recognises now that she was brainwashed
by the nuns into believing that their treatment was for her own good. "We
were robotic." This is unsurprising, as she had no access to any other
authority figures, and for years after she left she sent the nuns presents
and visited them; she even took her baby son to see them 20 years later. Meanwhile,
as she became institutionalised and lost the ability to ask questions or have
opinions, her relationship with her mother stalled. She resented Mammy for
not having protected her and, with her elder sister, fled to London, where
she reinvented herself, losing her accent - "Everything associated with
Ireland was wrong. I needed to get rid of the entire skin, to be the same
as everyone else" - and explaining that she had been at boarding school.
"I was riddled with shame and felt such
worthlessness about myself. My past was a closed door. Dealing with religion
[she no longer has a faith] and being able to ask questions was what I was
developing and learning."
She spent years fearing that she would be
found out, especially when she became a beautician and worked alongside grand
colleagues on Old Bond Street. She was cagey and defensive, she says, but
determined, too, and forged out the middle-class life she craved. When she
met her husband, Steve, she told him about her past and he did not reject
her, though she admits that her past did affect her as a mother: she was needy
and overprotective, she says. "My son did demand his independence."
She puts her survival down to her mother's
love and diligence, though when Mammy died in 1976 Kathleen had not discussed
her past with her, and felt embarrassed by the Irish woman who did not fit
into her carefully constructed new life. Has she made her peace with her past
now, I ask. "Oh yes, I've vindicated my mother and moved on. When I was
appointed a magistrate I was accepted for me and that was really when I became
myself again, not having to pretend that I went to boarding school or lived
on a farm. I started to be myself."
Just before I leave I mention Aisling Walsh's
film, Song for a Raggy Boy, based on Patrick Galvin's account of a year at
an Irish reformatory school. "Thousands of children in Ireland were tortured,
robbed of their childhoods, by the religious," says Kathleen. "I've
been to three meetings of survivors and it's fecking this and fecking that.
It's the wrong image, but they are so angry and so hurt and know that they
are not being listened to. If I let it control my life, I'd be nothing."
Kathleen has visited one of the centres set
up by the Irish Government for survivors and found people "who have not
developed. They have drawing classes and sit and talk about nothing and they
want to please visitors: 'Can I get you a cup of coffee?' They're back in
the gulags, it's not helping them to move forward. The disrespect goes on.
"My compensation I will take on principle,
and if I can shame the Government into admitting that what it did was wrong,
it's worthwhile. When we were dismissed from class Sister Cecilia would say
'Will 'dem, 'dese, 'dat and 'dose go back to the orphanage'. Who are you?
You're either a them, a these, a that or a those."
Her voice rises and speeds up. "How could
they call themselves religious and treat children in this manner?" she
asks, but immediately controls herself again, and her voice softens and slows.
"Am I angry? Frustrated. Shocked. How could they have thought that they
were doing good by beating us? Well, if you're obsessed by the Devil, you
need it beaten out of you, and that is what we were told. They were evil,
sadistic people." She pauses. "Will you have a cup of tea?"
Childhood Interrupted: Growing up under the
cruel regime of the Sisters of Mercy, by Kathleen O'Malley, Virago, £10.99.
Available from Times Books First for £9.89, 0870 1608080
FINANCIAL ATONEMENT
IN 2002 the Irish Government set up the Residential
Institutions Redress Board to compensate people who were abused as children
in industrial schools, reformatories and other state institutions. Some 7,046
applications have been lodged and 3,665 processed. Offers have been made in
3,580 cases.
The average award is € 77,150 (£52,300),
with awards ranging from € 0 to € 300,000 (£203,400). To date
€ 282 million (£191 million) has been paid out. The board estimates
that more than 9,000 people will eventually apply for compensation and that
the total cost could reach almost €1 billion (£680 million).
ELLA STIMSON
