Sins of the Mother by Irene Kelly

you’re not angry with me are you?’
    ‘What for?’
    ‘You know, for the running away.’
    ‘No, no, I’m not angry, Irene,’ she said. Then she sighed and we both stopped talking. There was nothing more to say.
    From then on, I decided, I’d try to keep my head down and stay out of trouble. But at school the next day Mrs Lawley was in a foul mood. She stomped around the classroom,
swiping at us for doing the tiniest little thing wrong. Halfway through the morning I jumped when I heard her call out: ‘Irene Coogan! Come to the front!’
    Nervously, I walked to the front of the class – all around me the rest of the class scribbled furiously at their desks. Nobody looked up or caught my eye. They were all just relieved it
wasn’t them.
Oh God, what have I done now?
I wondered. My backside was already killing me from the beating with the belt. Now I expected to get my hands blistered again. I stood in
front of the desk and held out my hands.
    ‘No, come round here,’ Mrs Lawley insisted, indicating that I should come behind the desk to where she was sitting. Confused, I did as I was told. Once I was close enough, she
grabbed my hand and put it under her skirt and between her legs. She wasn’t wearing any knickers and I felt her . . . her . . .
urgh!
    I recoiled in shock and dragged my hand away.
What is going on now? This isn’t right! You have to wear your knickers – that’s what we are always told, or it is sinful
.
My mind raced and my stomach flipped over. Mrs Lawley grabbed my hand again and, with a quick glance across the classroom, making sure the others had their heads down, she put my hand right back
there. Now I started to cry. This was too much. I didn’t like it.
    I pulled my hand away again and whimpered, ‘No, I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to do it.’
    She grabbed my wrist now and held on hard as she pushed my hand down between her legs, but I was crying loudly and a few curious heads bobbed up. She let go and I pulled my hands up to my
chest.
    ‘Get back to your work!’ she shouted at the children.
    Eventually frustrated with my refusal to do what she wanted, she picked up her ruler. Relief flooded through me when I saw she only planned to hit me now.
    ‘Hands out,’ she snapped. ‘Back of the hands facing up.’
    Getting the ruler on the back of my hands was even more painful than the palms. But it was better than that other thing she’d tried to make me do.
    I no longer prayed for my mammy to come and get me – I knew that she wasn’t coming. So each morning when I opened my eyes and saw I was still in my small, cold bed
in St Grace’s, a heavy sadness settled on my chest like a thick blanket. It became harder and harder to drag myself around, I felt so sad. I tried to talk to Agatha but she didn’t want
to know. She had stopped trusting me after our escape plan had gone wrong. As for Mrs Lawley I didn’t talk to anyone else about what had happened. Who could I tell? There was nobody in here
who was kind to us children. It felt like we were always in the wrong, no matter what we did or didn’t do. To the nuns and the staff, it seemed that just the fact of us being here meant we
were bad children.
    As the weeks wore on, I saw that Mrs Lawley did that dirty thing with other girls too. She got other children to go up to the front and stand behind the desk to make them ‘touch
her’. It was horrible but, like everyone else, I kept my head down and pretended I couldn’t see what she was doing. We didn’t want to get into trouble and we didn’t want to
embarrass the girl in the front of the class either. She tried it a few more times with me but each time I struggled and each time I got the ruler. That
thing
– it scared me. It was
different from the beatings, I knew that. I knew you weren’t meant to do stuff like that. I mean, even touching yourself was banned. A child could be beaten half to death for such a thing. We
girls weren’t even allowed to