Thompson / Craig Say Sorry

A Harrowing Childhood In Catholic Orphanages
1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-0-473-22285-7
Verlag: Weaving the Strands
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 220 Seiten

Conceived out of wedlock, Ann was just two months old when placed in the care of a Catholic orphanage. From the beginning, she was taught her mother was sinful and that she would be too unless the devil was beaten from her soul. She was sexually abused from an early age and forced to work long hours on the orphanage farm. At night, three or four nuns stripped Ann naked, tied her to the four posts of a bed and savagely attacked her with belts, hoops and sticks.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Thompson, Ann

Craig, Fiona

Leseproben

CHAPTER ONE
We had to sleep on our backs with our arms across our chests in the form of a cross to keep the devil away. I still do this, but now I lie on my side. A holy picture of a guardian angel hung above our beds. Everyone has a guardian angel of their own. Mine sits on my right shoulder. She is there all of the time, whether I am good or bad. My mother was sixteen when she gave birth to me in Wellington on 31 March 1941. At the age of two and a half months, I was taken to St Joseph’s Orphanage for Girls in Christchurch. It was the first of the three Catholic orphanages where I would spend the next twenty-five years. Sitting on a potty is my first memory. I can still picture this row of little potties on the floor. We had to stay on them until we had done something. Sometimes we’d have been sitting there for so long the potties would stick to our bottoms when we got up. The big wooden doll’s houses I played with are still there. I don’t know about the little pieces of furniture, though. When I went back to the orphanage in 2007, I glimpsed the doll’s houses through the window, but I couldn’t see the furniture we used to rearrange over and over again inside them. Even more than the doll’s houses we just loved something to cuddle. We used to make these little rag dolls out of cloth and sticks. We’d stuff the head with bits of rag or paper, tie something around the neck to hold it all in place, then put a stick across for the arms. We learned to make the little dolls by copying the bigger girls. Eventually the dolls would disappear. It didn’t worry me because I always knew I could make another one. I’d just find some more rags. I was quite a bit older when I learned there was such a stigma attached to being in an orphanage; it was the next worst thing to being illegitimate. I was both. My fate from birth was in the hands of two orders of nuns who had control over my upbringing and treatment. I was given little education and almost no chance to develop any skills apart from those that suited the nuns’ purposes. From the age of five, I was made to work in the orphanage. It was also when I was about five that I had the worst accident of my life. It happened at around six in the morning one wet Sunday. Rather than have us walk in the rain to the nearby Mount Magdala Convent for early Mass, the nuns had sent us to the kitchen. We were always made to go to the kitchen instead of Mass when it rained on a Sunday. On this particular morning I was one of about twenty girls unsupervised. When we heard a knock at the door and a man’s voice outside, all the girls but me ran out of the kitchen. Scared stiff, I climbed onto a big glass cupboard. When the knocking stopped the other girls came back to help me down. As they tugged my legs, the dress I was wearing caught on a nail, pulling the cupboard over on top of me. I ended up in hospital for six months recovering from a fractured skull. The visits of Mother Francis of Rome are what I remember most about that time in hospital. Mother Francis of Rome was my favourite nun because she was kind and gentle and I enjoyed every moment I had with her. She was my only visitor – I never saw any other children while I was in hospital. You can’t imagine how much I looked forward to Mother Francis’s visits. No other good came of the cupboard falling on me. The outer edges of the auricles of both my ears were sliced off and I had to have stitches on the crown of my head. The scars are still there and even now I get such bad headaches it feels as if my head will break open. Even though the bad fall from the cupboard landed me in hospital, it didn’t stop my love of climbing, which continued to get me in trouble. I was out on the swings one day and a dog came jumping up at me. I climbed up the chains of the swing – higher and higher – to get away from it. When I saw a man talking to the dog I came down. The man was the pig man. I was scared of him and when he started chasing me I ran into the convent where I knew I was not allowed to be. The convent was the nuns’ part of the orphanage. It was where they ate and slept and we weren’t allowed in the door that led to it, but I felt it was the only way I could get away from the pig man. I saw a room with a piano in the corner. A nun was sitting at it playing. Mother Francis of Rome. I ran to her and she hid me behind the piano. I knew then that she was the one nun I could go to. I gave her a hug. She smiled at me and I felt a warm glow go though me. What was this feeling? It made me feel so good, I loved it … * * * The Sisters of the Good Shepherd had a farm, with big, open paddocks as far as the eye could see and long rows of hedges running along the fence lines. I was put to work in the early morning and in the afternoon on the farm, which produced food for the orphanage. I was only five when they first sent me into the fields to dig and bag potatoes and onions for the kitchen. When the bags were full they’d be so heavy I couldn’t lift them and if I tried dragging them along the ground I’d be slapped across my face by Mother Euphrasia because I couldn’t carry them. There was an enormous orchard and I had to pick apples, too. I learned the difference between weeds and flowers and which seeds to plant in the autumn and which to plant in the spring. The nuns had mostly cottage gardens with pansies and daffodils and roses. I knew to put the short plants in the front and the tall ones at the back where they’d be supported against the walls. My favourite flowers were the daisies I found in the grass because I could make daisy chains with them for Jesus and Mary. The pig man was also the gardener. He used to plant the vegetables, drive the tractor and mow the lucerne in the pad docks. We didn’t know his name; we only knew him as the pig man because he looked after the pigs. He lived in a shed on the property and twice a day he lit the fire in the enormous boiler beside the kitchen, which gave us hot water. The pig man used to drive the nuns about in a van because they didn’t have a car then. He was an old guy and I was scared of him because he was always chasing me. I was hardly ever with the other girls so he might have seen me as an easy target. I was always frightened something was going to happen to me so I’d climb the trees to hide or jump over the fence and lose myself in the long lucerne. Even now, when I’m driving in the country and I see paddocks of corn or long wheat, I’ll think, ‘That’d be a good place to hide.’ In the playground there were tall trees all along the driveway and climbing roses growing over the archways. I loved to climb to the tops of the trees and look down on everyone. I could hide up there, too, and if I stayed no one could get me. The pig man has come. Did he see me climb up here? The birds fly away whenever I move. He can see me now. I have climbed down to go to the toilet. I start to run; there is a big ditch across the driveway which I have to jump over. I miss and fall down into it. The pig man goes away. Will he get help for me? It is getting dark. I hear someone coming and they get me out. My head is cut open again. I go to the hospital and stay there for a while. Mother Francis comes to see me every day … just like the first time I was here. * * * Some years ago I phoned the hospital in Christchurch to try to get records about these two falls, but nothing could be found about me at all. The scars on my ears and the dent at the top of my head are the only evidence now. It’s possible I was put into the hospital at Mount Magdala rather than the city’s public hospital. I remember I was in a room by myself and a nurse in a white smock with a little cap looked in on me and gave me food and the doctor used to come and see me, too. Other than the visits of Mother Francis of Rome that’s all I remember about being in hospital when I was little. * * * At the age of five I had to leave the nursery and go to the older girls’ wing. Mother Euphrasia was the head nun looking after us there. She was the tallest of the nuns – by about a foot – and she was broad. She must have been about six foot and she just towered over us. Even though she was a big woman, Mother Euphrasia moved very quietly. If I was facing her and she opened her mouth to speak, the voice that came out was that deep I used to jump back in fear. It was Mother Euphrasia who made the next five years of my life a living hell. She was the cruellest of the St Joseph’s nuns – so cruel I would try to hide from her in the toilets by the back door of the kitchen. I was only five when Mother Euphrasia first began dragging me by my hair, or by my ears, from wherever I was hiding. She would put me in a sack, tie the top and tell me the pig man was going to come and take me away. I never saw her put any other child in a sack or treat anyone else as badly as she treated me. I would stay in the sack for a long time and every time I heard a car coming I would wonder if it was him. Don’t do this. Help me someone please! I think it but I don’t say it. If I call out I will be hit with a stick. The pig man is here. Is he coming to get...