Sins of the Mother by Irene Kelly Page B

talking about it but I knew I had to tell the truth. He was a doctor! Doctors were meant to make people better. Maybe if I told
him, he could make the nuns stop.
    ‘They’re . . . putting things into us.’ I gasped even as I spoke and the tears spilled out. A second later, I crumpled in distress. I had said it. I had done it!
    ‘I told you, doctor,’ I heard the nun say somewhere above my head. ‘Evil. She’s a very evil child. The devil’s in her.’
    I looked up beseechingly then.
Won’t you help me, doctor? Won’t anyone help me?
But the doctor seemed disappointed. By now the nun had wandered off and he got up off my bed,
shook his head and followed her out.
    I lay there, horrified.
He’s not going to help me. This is it now, this is my life. I’m stuck here and there’s nothing I can do to escape – I couldn’t run away
and I couldn’t hurt myself. Nothing is going to get better, nobody is coming to rescue me so I better just get used to it.
    Something inside me seemed to disappear then. I don’t know what it was or how it happened but it felt like I went away inside myself and some other little girl came and took over from her.
And this little girl had just one thought on her mind – survival. That night, as I lay in the infirmary recovering, I told myself that I would just have to get on with it. Head down, mouth
shut. Just get through it. Y
ou’re on your own now, Irene, so don’t expect help from anyone.
    The next day I was pronounced well enough to return to the dorm but, strangely enough, instead of being sent to the nursery after school I was put to making rosary beads instead. There were
about thirty of us in a large room and we were given the wire and the beads and we had to make them a certain way, the whole thing from beginning to end. The wire was sharp, and by the end of the
first day it felt like my fingers were torn to ribbons. Still, at least it was better than being in the nursery.
    We had to make at least twelve a week and I made sure I just kept my head down and got on with my work. I shut myself away in my own little world and tried to concentrate on staying out of
trouble. At least with the rosary beads I wasn’t tortured by seeing all the little babies and what the nuns and Bernie did to them. Still, at night, in the silence, I could hear the sound of
the babies crying. They sounded so real but we were too far away from the nursery ward to hear them so they must have been in my head.
    I got used to the random beatings – no matter how much I tried to be good, it was impossible to avoid getting a daily wallop across the head. I could be hit if I was talking in line, if my
hemline was down, my hair was too messy, my shoes were dirty, I didn’t clear up my bed properly, I gave the nuns cheek, I didn’t move quickly enough, I moved too quickly, I prayed too
loudly I didn’t pray enough, if I was late or early . . . on and on it went. The list was endless and made no sense. I could never get it all right so I just got used to getting hit. The
beatings only served to fill a deep well of injustice inside me. Apart from that, life was more or less a daily struggle to get enough food in my stomach so that I didn’t keel over.
    As for my brother and sisters, it was hard to think about them. I didn’t talk to anyone; I was just trying to get through it without anyone really noticing me. Agatha would take herself
off to the nursery in the evenings to see Cecily and Martin because she was like a mammy to them, but I didn’t go. Not after what happened to me while I was there. Something inside me had
gone away and I didn’t know if it was ever coming back.
    At Christmas we put on a Nativity show. We did our little show in the church on Christmas Eve and the place was packed with ordinary people from the town. For the first time I realized that the
nuns acted differently when there were outsiders around. They put on their best voices and they didn’t shout at us or beat