Thompson Say Sorry

A Harrowing Childhood in two Catholic Orphanages
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5439-9467-4
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 244 Seiten

Ann just two months old when she was placed in a Catholic orphanage in Christchurch, New Zealand. She was physically and sexually abused by religious and lay staff at the orphanage and forced to work long hours on the orphanage farm and laundries. This is one of the first books to look at abuse within New Zealand Catholic institutions.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Thompson, Ann

Leseproben

CHAPTER 2. Five Years Old With the Older Girls. 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 me? He and the nun talk and then she opens up the sack. I can’t see for a while. She tells me that I am being punished because of what my mother has done. Oh, Mum, what did you do that I should be treated this way and is there no God to help me? Jesus said, ‘Come little children unto me for I am mercy,’ but there was no mercy for me. Once Mother Euphrasia locked me in a room with no windows for what seemed like three days. ‘The lobby’, it was called, though some of the girls knew it as the boot room. Before shoving me in and shutting the door she had thrashed me, but I didn’t know what I had done wrong. Years later, when I went back to the orphanage to work, I couldn’t bring myself to go into the lobby and I couldn’t use the toilets near the kitchen either because that’s where Mother Euphrasia had pushed me into a sack and left me. * * * Mother Euphrasia would walk up behind me and slap me about the head. Sometimes she would curl my hand into a fist, then, holding on to my wrist, she would start slapping me across my face. I could not stop her. When I tried she would punch my head and face so hard that she once burst my right eardrum. I am deaf in that ear and I think that was one of the reasons I couldn’t hear at school and why I was put at the back of the classroom when I was older. The slow people were put in the back; the clever ones went to the front. During her violent battering Mother Euphrasia broke my nose, too; not once but five times. For years I had a bit of bone protruding from the lower part of my left nostril because of the beatings. Finally, in 2002, I had it operated on and removed because it was aggravating the sinus troubles I’ve had most of my life. When the doctor took X-rays before the operation I learned how many times my nose had been broken. The X-rays showed all the damage that had been done to my nose when I was young. Fly- Pinches Mother Euphrasia and another nun, Mother Agnes, would stand together and pinch me on my arms, taking pieces of skin off with the tips of their fingernails. These fly-pinches, as we called them, were very painful and bled a lot. The worst thing about all of this was that I never knew when or where Mother Euphrasia was going to sneak up behind me. I was always looking back to see if she was there and when I wasn’t expecting it she would come out of nowhere. When she got a good hold of my skin, my ears or my hair she would pull me around while I screamed and begged to be let go. I couldn’t get away. In the end I’d just stand there and not say a word while she hit me. What could I say? When Mother Euphrasia and Mother Agnes both beat me, I’d just stand there, too, and sort of go out of myself so I didn’t have to feel the pain or think of what they were going to do next. Then they would start calling me Stubborn Shirley. I began to take special notice of the nuns’ and the lay female workers’ fingernails. Some of them had very long fingernails with the quicks pushed right back to show deep moons. I think I noticed them because it was the women’s fingernails that hurt me so much. Shirley Ann was the name my mother had given me. Years later I found out that her sister’s name was Shirley and she’d called me after her. Sometimes the nuns would call me Shirley Ann, but when they started calling me Stubborn Shirley I began to hate my first name and insisted they call me Ann. ‘Stubborn Shirley, you’re just like your mother,’ Mother Euphrasia would taunt over and over. Why do they always bring you into it, Mum, when they are cruel to me? I hate the name Shirley and they say it in such a hurtful way. My name is Ann. Every Sunday afternoon, when it was fine, we went for walks over to the Mount Magdala Convent to pray at the grotto, a brick alcove with a statue of Our Lady inside. Sometimes on these walks we were taken to the field where the nuns had wild rams and I would be put in the paddock with the rams on my own. The rams would chase me while Mother Euphrasia watched. I would run away and fall over,...