Oh the Sisters of Mercy

Each time I listen to the news there is a new confirmation of the terrible discoveries in Tuam, County Galway. Infant bodies in a mass grave, in a septic tank of all places. Such disrespect on so many levels. Like many people hearing these news stories I am deeply shocked, but as someone who survived convent boarding school for four years, I am not surprised. Recently my sister lent me a book, Childhood Interrupted by Kathleen O'Malley. She and her siblings were taken into care ( a word that must surely have a new meaning nowadays)and brought up in an Industrial School run by the Sisters of Mercy, who also ran the now infamous Magdalene Laundries. I recognised the breed of nun described there. Moral righteousness combined with cruel arrogance. God was on their side. I attended convent schools throughout my education . My primary school and grammar school were run by nuns from the Faithful Companions of Jesus order, who also ran a teacher training college in Manchester. They were religious and strict, but never cruel. In fact it was the older generation of lay teachers who put the fear of god into me at grammar school. When my sisters and I went to boarding school we met a very different type of nun. Our parents were in the Far East, where my father had taken a job as a civil engineer. Airmail letters took two weeks and in my misery there I used to joke that we would be dead and buried before my parents knew anything about it. It's hard to believe how difficult international communication was in the late 60s and early 70s. These nuns had a cruel arrogance I had never met before. Of the two kind ones, one left and the other had a breakdown. Perhaps we were singled out because our parents were so far away. Much of the unpleasantness affected us all though. Some of it was laughable. Confiscated non regulation underwear and tampax. Limited laundry and bath timetables. Hair washing once a week. All punishable if ignored, and of course as growing teenage girls who cared about how we looked and smelt, we did ignore it. Tales of punishments from the junior part of the school, where my younger sister lived. We weren't allowed to visit her. She was 7 when she went there. I was 13 and my other sister was 12. Punishments there included an iron bar across the back of your legs and being made to spend the night in a reputedly haunted room. The milk of human kindness for these lonely small children. We were more rebellious and resilient at the senior school. Sneaking letters out to friends, especially boys, via the day girls. Even to our parents so that they weren't censored by the nuns. They never believed us anyway. They were paying for the privilege of our boarding school education and there were many and varied reasons why we were closeted away there. In the years after I left, looking back on the peculiar education, the attitude of the nuns to us and the wider world, I felt sorry for them. They were dealing with teenage girls living the mid to late 1960s, with all its changing attitudes. It was beyond anything they were familiar with in Ireland and they only had their cruelty to try and control us. As these stories emerge in the press I realise that these nuns, unlike the first nuns I encountered at school,were of the same habit as the Sisters of Mercy. They weren't from that order, they were Presentation Sisters, but their attitudes and expectations were only a whisker away from them. They would have been capable I am sure. There's so much more I could write. Over the years I have alternately felt sympathy for them, utter contempt, benign dislike and occasionally sentimental at the strange bond that is created for those who have endured a convent education. A few years ago I was relieved to discover that there were radical environmental activist nuns in the States. It restored my faith in the potential of a religious life. Needless to say I am no longer a practising catholic, though I still consider myself a cultural one by virtue of my education. They say we make our own hell. When I hear these revelations in the news, I hope that's true.