Prologue
This place that was built for women, although it had nice walks and hedges, could only have been designed by a man; there was not a flower to be seen. The edifice itself was a forbidding prospect at the best of times, with its grey, featureless façade broken only by the utilitarian sash windows that had been designed into all three storeys in the most monotonous manner. On this overcast morning in 1982 it was particularly depressing. Dull grey sand-and-cement plaster covered the walls, rejecting even the modest flamboyance of pebble dash. It was occupied exclusively by females, with the exception of two outdoor staff, a jack-of-all trades and a gardener. The pupils were all girls. The teaching staff consisted of nuns, ranging in age from their early twenties to the oldest, who was in her nineties, or lay women.
There was shrubbery alright, and nicely laid out gravel paths, all well maintained by the gardener. He was skilled and had been there for many years, although all he did was follow orders.
There were some flowers in the chapel, and in the main hall, but even they were not for the delectation of the nuns or pupils; they were there for the Glory of God. There was certainly nothing that might be regarded by the authorities as ostentatious.
Now many less-than-agreeable thoughts scudded through the mind of the young woman who had come in here about twenty minutes ago. She was aged in her mid-thirties. She wore her black hair short. Her comportment was upright and resolute, and anyone who examined her face would be made aware of her sense of determination. They would also be engrossed by the dimples that adorned her mouth when she smiled, although she herself was hardly aware of them.
She had made her way to the place of her appointment, and was sitting in the hallway outside the office of the Reverend Mother. This was a dreary spot. The bare stone slabs of the floor made common cause with the distempered walls of the corridor, which looked as if they were weeping, by virtue of the droplets of condensation that glistened upon them. Twenty minutes of waiting, each second stretching longer than the last, had sharpened her certainty that nothing good awaited her behind that heavy oak door.
Stop that, she commanded herself. The ability to take her thoughts in hand and control them had stood her in good stead before. There was nothing, she knew, that would not pass.
It seemed to her when it was opened that the office entrance had the aspect of a bear trap, and she was the unfortunate defenceless bear. Helen felt her pulse quicken as the Reverend Mother beckoned her inside with a single curled finger. The stiff material of the rustling habit wended its way to the other side of her desk, where it and its wearer sat down. The scent of furniture polish had always been a feature of this room. This morning was no different, and the young woman’s senses were further sharpened by the realisation that there was no chair on the outside of the desk. There was one parked up against a wall to the left, but it was too far away for her to fetch without betraying a sense of independence, and she did not want to do that now. It would have been seen as untoward, even insubordinate, by the habited woman opposite.
“Do you know why you were asked to come here?” Looking up.
“No, Mother.” Looking down.
“We have received information that suggests, it’s a terrible thing for me to say this, that you might be pregnant.”
“Who, why, who would have said such a thing?” said the young woman. “That’s not true.”
She would have liked to be sitting now, or even to have had something to hold on to. The front of the desk was inviting, but not an option.
“I’m not at liberty to tell you that. But you must surely know that for an unmarried teacher to become pregnant in a convent school such as this would give the gravest possible scandal to the pupils. Even to the staff.”
“I know that, Mother.”
There was a barely perceptible trembling of the young woman’s upper lip. The nun was looking at her with the utmost intensity, rather in the manner of the lioness that believes she has sensed the beginnings of fear in her prey.
“Have you something to hide? Are you telling me the truth?”
The young woman stood to her full height. That made her tall enough, and the fact that she was standing was a help.
“I’m getting upset because I cannot believe that anyone would be so wicked as to tell you something like that about me.”
“Can you assure me that you are not going to have a child?”
The young woman knew she was dealing with a seasoned interrogator. One wrong blink here, a word missed or used out of place, or the smallest hesitation, could tell against her.
“Yes.”
“I shouldn’t need to remind you that the fact that you were previously in holy orders places an even greater responsibility on your shoulders when it comes to matters of public morality and occasions of scandal, as a teacher in the convent.”
“No, Mother.”
There was a jarring hiatus then. She knew she must not avert her gaze from that of her interlocutor, nor break the silence. After a time it was the Reverend Mother who did both of those things.
“Alright, Helen,” she said, looking down at and closing, with some emphasis, the folder on her desk, “I’m glad we got that resolved. You can go now. Go with Christ.”
Chapter 1
ANTON
The offshore gas rig project brought me to New Ross in the spring of '82. Involved in a loveless marriage and glad for the distraction of work, I arrived with engineering plans and technical specifications—nothing that prepared me for the town's intricate social web or the rigid ideologies that governed it. Looking back, I see how naive I was, how unprepared for the way love and tragedy could unfold in a place where the wrong kind of relationship could destroy everything.
I didn't know Helen Peavoy at that stage, or that she was about to be trapped in a quietly desperate situation: accused of pregnancy out of wedlock and rumoured to be involved with a married man. In 1982 Ireland, being separated meant nothing in the eyes of the Church or the law—divorce remained constitutionally forbidden until two bitter referendums would eventually change that years later. But for Helen, caught in the old Ireland while yearning for the new, such future reforms would come too late.
The unfortunate fact for Helen—and what would ultimately prove devastating—was that the whispers and suspicions of her tormentors contained a kernel of truth she was desperate to protect.
The next person that needs to be considered is Constance McCarthy. Constance wrote a letter to a friend of hers when she was 68 years of age. She did that quite a bit later than the time of which I write, in 2014 to be exact. Here it is:
CONSTANCE McCARTHY 2014
“Mary Cummins,
116 Glenvale Close,
Carlow Town 11 January 2014
Dear Mary,
They’re talking a lot about the Magdalene laundries, after the disgrace of the mother and baby homes. They discovered hundreds of dead babies’ bodies in one of those places down in Galway.
There’s talk of compensation from the government. That’d be a good one. How do you compensate someone for taking away years of their life? One thing is for sure, though, nobody still has any real idea about what went on. A man came to interview me about my time in the laundry in Waterford. He hadn’t a clue. He said he was from a commission. That word meant nothing to me, but I learned it and made sure I’d remember it after he left me a form that had it written on it.
Well, I told him. He wrote it all down.
What a terrible country we had in those days, and it’s not mended yet, not by any means. But at least it is coming out into the open. The Taoiseach has called the Galway place, Tuam it was, a chamber of horrors. I’m 68 now. At the time I was 16, so that’s 52 years ago that this happened to me. OK I wasn’t pregnant or anything like that. So I didn’t see the inside of a mother and baby home. I was sent to a Magdelene laundry. Down in Waterford. This was all because of two interfering busybodies who thought they had a right to tell people what to do. How to live their lives. One of them owned a chemist’s shop. The other was a priest. His name was Father Murphy then, but he has since been promoted. He’s what they call Monsignor Murphy now. A highfalutin title for someone who does be seen sometimes late at night falling around the road with drink on him.
Was I badly treated? Of course I was. I was denied a proper education, after the priest had told my mother I’d get one in this place I was sent to. I had to work in the laundry for about ten hours a day. That was the extent of my education. Apart from religious instruction of course. We had to get up before six o’clock every morning to go to mass. And the rosary. We had to say the rosary for almost the whole day while we were working, led by a nun.
But hard as that was, it was nothing compared to what happened to one of the other girls. She was about a year older than me. I was right there, and it was horrible. How could women, because they happened to be nuns, inflict such cruelty on another woman, someone who was just growing up? Did it have to do with them being what they call celibate?
My father died in 1961. The day after he was lowered into the ground my poor mother started to stay in her bed more and more. When she was up she was like a ghost moving around the house. You wouldn’t know she was there. I suppose I didn’t help much with my late nights and loud music, anything to try to relieve the drab and dreary atmosphere around the house.
Before he passed away my father had given me a present of a camera for Christmas. Me and some of my friends went down the river in a boat that belonged to one of their fathers. There were both boys and girls on that trip. The boys did a bit of horsing around, splashing water up on us. I took some photographs. When I came back I brought them to this chemist’s shop to have them developed. The owner didn’t like what he saw in my photos so what did he do? He gave them to the priest! Then the priest arranged with my mother that I’d be sent to the Magdalene laundry in Waterford. I was there for the best part of two years.
When I was there I became friends with another girl, who was a year older than me. She became pregnant, or she might have already been pregnant when she was sent to the laundry. We all looked out for her until she had her baby, and then we all doted on him. He was lovely. He had a beautiful head of black hair, and big, brown eyes. They were like what I’ve read about in Mills and Boon, what they call a deep, liquid brown.
But if we treasured this child, we were in the ha’penny place compared to the love his mother gave him. He was the apple of her eye, the centre of her world. She played with him, she fed him, she changed him, and nothing was too much trouble for her to make sure he was as well looked after as she could possibly manage, given where she was. I have no doubt he was the last thing she thought about before she went to sleep, and the first thing that came into her mind when she woke up in the morning. She had him until he was over a year old. Can you imagine how close they became during that time? They have a word for it now; they call it bonding.
And then… And then. In the very early hours one morning I was awakened by terrible screaming. It was coming from the bed of my friend who had the baby. At least four nuns were around that bed. Two of them kept the baby’s mother, who was in a terrible state, a prisoner, while two more were busy taking her child out of its cot. Their black habits made them look like giant versions of the savage scald crows I’ve often seen in the fields. I can still hear her begging, 'Please, Sister, please don't take him'—while the others seized the child from his cot.
Me and a few others tried to help our friend, but we were beaten back by the nuns. They were using these long thin rods, they call them switches, to beat us with. The blows left welts on our skin. It took them no more than a few minutes to steal the baby.
Then the nuns marched, wearing the most severe expressions of grimness, out of the dormitory with the baby, who was never to be seen again, at least not by its mother or by any of us. I was shaking, but my friend was ready to die. She was beside herself. I will never, ever, forget it.
While it was happening I noticed there was one who held back. She was younger than the others. She took no part in what was going on. I could see though that she would have been powerless to stop it, although she looked like a strong person.
I got to know her from her supervision of some of the work we did in the laundry. She was a kind nun and, unlike some of the others, related to us girls in a personal way, instead of treating us like some kind of a herd, to be managed with harshness. As well as being gentle, her face was caring. She had these beautiful dimples around her mouth, which I have always associated with kindness in the years that followed whenever I saw someone with them. I know now she stopped being a nun sometime after that. She became a lay teacher, although she still worked in a convent school, here in New Ross. She got into trouble because she had a baby herself, and had to leave her teaching job. I was very sorry when all that started happening.”
Chapter 2
1982
Ned Rocket stepped out of his pub into the bright afternoon, a rare moment of peace in his complicated life. He appreciated his home town, especially on a bright, fresh day like this. The extent of the quays on the other side of the street that fell down to the bridge was visible, and he could see the buildings that used to be warehouses over a hundred years ago on the left. Now they were shops and apartment blocks. They were adapting to new realities just as he'd tried to do as a separated father in a country that refused to acknowledge divorce. There were a fair few people about. Good for his commercial neighbours, he thought, Accessories, Ladies Wear, Lingerie, the shoe shops.
He thought about his daughter Imelda, the centre of his world despite the church's whispers about their "broken home.. Though the priests might consider him a failure as a husband, Ned took fierce pride in his success as a father. Just yesterday, he'd overheard Imelda talking with her friends in their living quarters above the pub. In those days and in this town many business people lived ‘over the shop’.
“My dad has a way with him that I never recognised until recently,” she had been saying. “When you say something to him he has a way of turning around to give you his full attention. They he’ll always ask a serious question about whatever it is you were talking about to him.”
“Not like some of the teachers in school,” said one of her young friends. “Sometimes they’ll give you the impression that you’re a nuisance. I’ve noticed that about your father. I wish mine was more like him.”
Overhearing that conversation made him feel good, but that thought was followed by another: what kind of a so-called considerate parent would allow himself to listen in without their knowledge or consent to what his child was saying? Was that a bit like spying?
As he turned into Quay Street he was wondering, once more, about the structuring. He was happy with his prose, but for it to work his new one needed to be more than well-written. People who took the trouble to read a novel, especially if they had paid for the privilege, also wanted a coherent story.
He wasn’t aware of the woman, except as just another occupant of the street, until she fell. It looked like she had made a misstep into a small hole in the road. Then she was recumbent, just in front of him. How terrible for her. His first instinct was to get her back on her feet as fast as possible to end the embarrassment she must be suffering. His problem then was how to do that. What part of her body could he get hold of? She was in her late thirties, a bit more than average height for a woman, strongly built, but nothing like overweight. He settled on an elbow.
