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. The dull grey sand-and-cement plaster was unadorned with anything that might be suspected of flamboyance, such as 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 was proud of the fact that she did not easily get upset by circumstances, and always maintained a quiet disposition. She was a good listener, and was comfortable with acknowledging her vulnerabilities. Would these traits assist her in the meeting she would soon be attending? 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.
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. While she waited the time passed slowly, each minute adding to the sense of foreboding in advance of her meeting.
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. She was beckoned in by the Reverend Mother herself. 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. Although tiny, this was caused by the panic that threatened to break through the exterior that she had, up to now, kept composed. 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 probably 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 at this point. Eventually 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
I’ve been asked by the people who were involved in the events described here to make a record, because the history of Ireland after independence was dominated by ideas that led to what are now perceived to be serious problems. For some reason or another they all seemed to come to a head in the decade of the 1980s. The writings of others about these matters have convinced me that the reasons for this can only be speculated about. Perhaps when readers come to the end of my narrative they will be able to formulate their own ideas about the matter.
When I found myself serving as an engineer on the construction of an offshore gas rig in the town of New Ross in county Wexford at that time, I didn’t realise that the disparate group of people and circumstances I would come across there could combine to create both a tender romance and a high tragedy, and at the same time illuminate the damage made possible by the excesses of certain ideologies when their practice was rigid, even fanatical.
The reader has just been introduced to Helen Peavoy, at the time a teacher in the local convent school. Her trouble started when she found she had to defend an accusation of being pregnant at a time when she was not married and, worse, was perceived by some in the town to possibly be in a relationship with a man who was married, albeit separated. In today’s world he would have been divorcee, but at that time such a solution to a failed marriage was not allowed by the law of the land in Ireland. There was nothing less than a ban on the enactment of divorce legislation in the constitution of the country. That’s changed now, but the people had to vote in two referendums to allow it to happen.
The unfortunate fact for Helen was that the suspicions in the minds of her tormentors was not without foundation.
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
“They’re talking a lot about the Magdalene laundries, after the disgrace of the mother and baby homes. They discovered hundreds of dead baby’s 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 practically 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 extremely hard. 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’d hardly 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 friendly 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 only 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 woken up 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. 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 probably 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 had black hair. 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 treating us with gentleness, her face was kind. She had these beautiful dimples around her mouth, which I have always associated with compassion 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 really sorry when all that started happening.”
1982
Ned Rocket had left his pub and turned left. 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. 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. Although he was separated from his wife, he was the carer of their only child, Imelda. He was pleased with the relationship she had with him. One day he had heard her discussing their parents with some of her school friends she had invited to visit the living quarters they shared over his 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 really 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. Then he’ll always ask a serious question about whatever it is you were talking to him about.”
“Not like some of the teachers in school,” said one of her young friends. “Sometimes they’ll give you the impression that you’re only 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.
