All the buildings at Castledare were simple single-storey, red brick and tile, some with steel roofs painted red – not like the grand three- and four-storey mansions in England that we had been brought up in, with their splendid entry gates and courtyards surrounded by manicured lawns and gardens. Here, a single giant pine tree, known as the ‘piece tree’1, where all the children gathered underneath in summer between morning and afternoon school sessions, dominated what served as the courtyard.
1 ‘Piece’ was a snack, usually bread and jam, eaten by the children during the morning and afternoon school breaks.
Situated well east of the mouth of the Swan River, Castledare was bordered on one side by a small river, a tributary of the Canning River. To the east of the property was swamp and what looked like a small dairy farm. Thick pine forest encircled the rest of the property. This was indeed a strange land.
We found ourselves completely surrounded by English children aged between six and ten, who were curious about and even envious of the new arrivals. Most of the children were thin and dressed in ill-fitting, tatty clothing: cotton khaki shorts that ended below the knee, making the children’s legs look even skinnier, and plain cotton shirts of different colours and sizes half hanging out of their trousers, and an assortment of jumpers and cardigans.
None of the children had footwear and most had dirty feet, some with small festering sores on their arms and legs, the combined result of mosquito bites and poor nutrition. By comparison, we looked like the little plump princes from the kingdom of plenty, thanks to six weeks of shipboard food. We were smartly dressed in our new English woollen trousers, shirts and jackets, with shiny shoes and socks. Each of us carried a small case filled with clothing and knick-knacks from the ship.
By the stare on the unsmiling faces of children, this looked an unhappy place to be. Len B., the oldest in our group, had seen enough and, like the rest of us, had sensed the gloom and depression that hung like a fog on a dull morning.
‘I’m not staying here,’ he declared. ‘Have a look on your suitcases, lads. It reads Fremantle, Port of Fremantle. This dump is miles away from Fremantle.’
A confrontation between us and the tough Christian Brothers was inevitable, as Len demanded we be returned to Fremantle. The principal, Brother Patrick O’Doherty, was having none of it. Dissent of any kind was quickly nipped in the bud. Brother O’Doherty, then 29 years old, was easily just under 2 metres tall, the biggest man I had ever seen. Covered in a tent-like black habit and white collar, he looked twice as big again.
He marched us off into a room where we were stripped of our fine English clothes, footwear and cases, and dressed as ‘proper’ orphans in clean, ill-fitting, well-worn clothing, which had our allocated number discreetly written on it. We were then marched in bare feet into Brother Murphy’s classroom and lined up in front of the blackboard before his class of around 40 highly amused children whose envy had dissipated somewhat now that we were dressed like them.
All of us were in a state of shock, hardly believing what was happening. This was to be a passage from disbelief to despair. I stood nearest Brother Murphy, a man as tall as O’Doherty but thinner, with a lean and creased face, who towered over me while still sitting in his chair.
‘So what do we have here?’ he said. ‘A bunch of spoilt brats demanding to be taken to Fremantle. Indeed!’
A muted nervous laugh came from some of the class. He took the cane he kept near his chair, rose to his full height, and began to thrash it against the side of his habit, making a thwacking sound. His message about what would happen to us should we try to escape or ‘do a bunk’, as it was commonly called, was clear and unambiguous.
‘We don’t like children who run away. We have to report missing children to the police. It is very inconvenient. But good boys we reward,’ he said, as he sank back into his chair.
‘You like lollies, son?’ He turned to me, at the same time unwrapping a small toffee that he popped in his mouth.
‘No,’ I said.
I had never heard of lollies as we had called them sweets in England.
‘We have a cheeky one here,’ he cried, ‘he doesn’t like lollies!’, while grabbing and twisting my ear at the same time. The class laughed.
My ear had never been twisted this savagely before, not even by the nuns in England. I struggled to free myself and before I knew it, I was caned on the hand. Brother Murphy had risen to his full height, and gave me one stroke of the thin cane on the palm of my hand.
Most of the new children were crying. Brother Murphy proceeded to lay down the rules, regulations and punishments, swishing his cane for emphasis. He taunted us for being ‘sissies’ and ‘sooks’ and encouraged the other children to laugh at our despair, which most did, following his lead.
One thing became clear – we were going to have to toughen up and get used to being beaten. Corporal punishment, combined with an inculcated fear of authority, was used to control children here. Instead of being raised by women, who had mostly sheltered us from men until now, we were cast into a sea of tough men and older boys. Despite their hard edge, the nuns had definitely been softer. This was like stepping out of kindergarten into a military camp and Murphy was the brutal sergeant major – yet this was where the nuns, who we once thought had genuinely cared about us, had sent us. The shock was instant and great. Our sense of bewilderment, abandonment and betrayal was overwhelming.
The magic cocktail of 100 small children, often out of control, and ineffectual management, meant that Castledare had descended into a ‘time of trouble’2 in the early 1950s under the administration of Brother McDonnell, a deeply religious man who lacked teaching and organisational skills. Professional qualifications among the Brothers were rare, as they were considered expensive and unnecessary, and outside advice was unwelcome.
2 Barry M. Coldrey, ‘Trouble at Castledare’, The Scheme: The Christian Brothers and Childcare in Western Australia, Argyle Pacific, 1993, p. 357. Dr Coldrey is a Christian Brother.
The visitation reports of the time give an impression of what happened during the ‘child uprising’ of 1951. Children absconded en masse, swimming the river fully clothed to escape. There was general disorder in the classrooms with boys jumping out of windows, calling the Brothers names and throwing stones. The house annalist at the time wrote, Young as they were, these boys were accustomed to test in diverse ways the powers of endurance and disciplinary strength of the newcomers on the staff. He added, the milder methods – detentions, withdrawal of privileges etc. – having failed to restore order and discipline, the Brother Superior was compelled to allow the use of more drastic punishments as necessary to bring about the desired effect. 3
3 Barry m. Coldrey, The Scheme, 1993, p. 357.
These punishments proved effective. To regain control, the ‘ringleaders’, a handful of nine- and ten-year-old children, were sent away to Bindoon, another institution.4 Order was restored.
4 Barry m. Coldrey, The Scheme, 1993, p. 357.
Brother McDonnell had resigned as director in late 1952 and was replaced by Brother O’Doherty, a charismatic no-nonsense young superior who set about restoring order. The regime at Castledare when I arrived in 1954 was likely an overreaction to the earlier breakdown of order, and drastic punishments had become more or less a permanent feature, especially for runaways. Corporal punishment was often used to dominate and control children.
Running away was a real option for the residents and they often talked about it. The Brothers had a hard time preventing it. In Britain, and especially in the United States of America, homes where children were regularly running away were often investigated by the authorities, who took this as an indication that something was wrong and checked for evidence of malpractice. In Western Australia, runaways were investigated by the police and then returned to the homes and flogged, a brutal practice that was known about by the government authorities. Unhappiness was never accepted as a legitimate reason to run away. Official paranoia in the early days about runaway children roaming wild in the streets of Perth reached absurd levels. Children were often fingerprinted like common criminals – more than 150 boys and girls aged five to thirteen were fingerprinted on their arrival at Fremantle so that the authorities could keep track of them.5
5 In 1947, the undersecretary for lands and immigration, with permission from the minister – the legal guardian of the child migrants – wrote to the Police Commissioner that a police officer was to meet the children arriving on the Asturias and fingerprint them so that ‘the Department will, in future, be able to identify each individual child’. At this time, the rights of child migrants in Australia were ignored. in 1948, 150 children from Bindoon and other institutions had their tonsils forcibly removed – not at the Children’s hospital, but at the Clontarf orphanage under the supervision of a nursing sister. news of this kind of treatment would have caused outrage in Britain.
Castledare during the O’Doherty years apparently entered a golden age and there were glowing reports of vast improvements and an air of progress and contentment. However, the children would not have endorsed these reports. They were never asked their opinion – the administration did not bother to ask if they liked their new homes or even the country.
Typical thinking in Australian institutions at this time was that if you improved facilities, building new classrooms, new toilet blocks, new chapels and so on, everything else would fall into place. Even in medical examinations the focus was on the physical – as long as a child was physically healthy, it didn’t matter if they were an emotional and psychological wreck. No-one made the link between the severe depression suffered by abandoned British children who had been uprooted from their country and sent away against their will to their antisocial behaviour. The ‘child uprising’ of the early 1950s was the direct result of dislocation, betrayal and plain misery. But their behaviour was to be ‘cured’ with religion and more violence.
The administration at Castledare was ignorant that, after the passing of the Children Act 1948, Britain was moving away from institutional care. It took until 1956, when the Ross Report was published, savagely criticising Australian institutions as unfit places to raise children, before child migration to Castledare was stopped.6
6 The Ross Report of 1956 effectively brought child migration to an end, although it did continue on a smaller scale with some secular organisations into the 1960s. Read more about the impact of the Ross Report, and the Australian government inquiry set up in response, in Part ii, pages 281–282.
By now there was no chance of returning home to my family. Section C of my immigration documents demanded repayment of my free passage from my sponsoring organisation in case of repatriation, so this ruled out any possibility of return. I had no choice but to accept being banished from the country of my birth and loved ones. This period proved to be the very lowest point in my life.
I was never able to settle at Castledare, fervently believing that the authorities had made a big mistake and that once they realised it they would send me home. I missed my country and my loved ones with whom I had experienced my first sense of joy and belonging. All my pathetic history was bound up in England. Emotionally I resembled a Russian doll, layered shell on shell and only emptiness within.
Soon after arriving at Castledare, I suffered my second breakdown. I began having ‘falling’ dreams in the middle of the night. I woke up just before hitting the ground and realised I was sitting up in bed screaming.
Other times I was awakened because another child was having a nightmare. Often I could hear children quietly sobbing or calling for their ‘mummy’. The large main dormitory, one of two in which more than 70 children slept, was noisy at night. I spent countless hours lying awake, feeling miserable just thinking about England.
I had no idea how far away I was from my homeland or, if I ran away, how long it would take to be back in the comforting arms of the Brooms. I no longer believed that they hadn’t wanted to see me because I knew Joy loved me too much. I began asking myself why and searching for answers other than what was preached to us day in and day out: have faith, trust in God; this is his plan. I seriously doubted this was God’s plan as even Jesus had a loving family. The Sisters and Brothers, too, must have families and loved ones. I concluded that most of the adults around me made wrong decisions believing they knew best and called it God’s work. This way it was nobody’s fault – God worked in mysterious ways through religious adults who prayed often for God’s guidance.
The pine forests that surrounded the orphanage suited the dark mood into which I had been plunged. For the first few months I withdrew deeply into myself, seeking neither solace nor friendship from other children, and keeping a low profile and trying to be invisible. We were jailed in a foreign country and someone had thrown away the keys. We were told escape was impossible – and we knew it.
I began having powerfully lucid dreaming experiences. I discovered I could leave my body almost at will and see it lying in bed in the middle of the night, while I flew back to Southampton to visit everyone. I could speak to the family but no-one could hear me. I could see Joy and Roy sitting by the fire and little Wendy showing off her latest drawing. My bedroom was empty and some of my toys were scattered on the floor. My bright-eyed teddy bear was propped up against a pillow, as though beckoning me to bed. I could wander through all the rooms and see that they were just as I had left them. The dreams were incredibly real and lasted for several months. They were my refuge and the only thing I lived for. Then they suddenly ended and I was never able to get them back. While they lasted, they were of great comfort.
Castledare in 1954 was overcrowded, a foreign place in a strange country with poor facilities and too many children being cared for by too few people. It was staffed by people with an abysmally poor understanding of the needs of disoriented and disturbed children.
The Brothers, who I constantly feared, carried short, thick leather straps and gave usually one or two painful whacks on the palm of the hand, often for the most innocuous offences such as talking during mealtimes or getting a sum wrong in class. Corporal punishment was excessive and was delivered on a daily basis. The wail of yet another child echoing throughout the buildings achieved the desired result.
On the weekends we all gathered in a small theatre. The names of troublemakers or runaways were read out and they were punished on the stage, caned or strapped on bare buttocks. Thomas T., one of the altar boys, was gruesomely beaten after he broke into the sacristy in the chapel and got drunk on altar wine. Runaways, troublemakers and children having difficulty at school were generally earmarked to go to Bindoon.
The starting point to ‘bunk’, or run away, was the laneway to the left of the entrance near the ghost tree (a giant Moreton Bay fig tree said to be haunted). As most of the running away occurred during daylight, children seen crossing the paddock were reported and often a Brother would be waiting at the other end to bring them back. One of the children became a hero after he managed to get all the way into the city of Perth by conning several bus drivers into believing he had lost his money. His extraordinary achievement in our eyes was the equivalent of manned flight to the moon. Wandering the city, he was picked up by police and promptly returned, being given the obligatory hiding.
Bullying among the children was rife. Older children snatched biscuits or bread and jam from the hands of smaller children during the morning and afternoon breaks. Brother Murphy’s pet was a big ten-year-old boy who was a renowned bully. The other children warned us from the beginning to do his bidding. Some of the smaller children had become almost like slaves to this bully, handing over their ‘piece’. I watched the greedy boy act out his fantasy as youngsters pulled him through the pine forest by rope on a sled made out of corrugated iron, while he whipped them with an imaginary whip.
Food was a big issue with all the children. Twice a week the truck travelled to the Perth fruit and vegetable market to pick up spoilt produce for the pigs. The better quality food ended up in the kitchen. Sometimes the quality was excellent – it was either feast or famine, depending on the season. When the van arrived from the Clontarf bakery with freshly baked bread and currant buns, the delicious smell lured hordes of children and we surrounded the van until the food was safely delivered to the kitchen.
I used to think the whole world was short of food and, because we were orphaned, naturally we were at the end of the queue. Poor Rosie, the Aboriginal cook, often had to scream at children to get away from the slop bucket outside the kitchen door where they were fighting over food scraps from the dining room of the Brothers and staff. I know this because I was one of these children.
The staff at the time consisted of five Christian Brothers, Rosie and her two helpers, and Jim, the dairy and pig man, and his offsider, usually an ‘old boy’ from Clontarf or Bindoon. Other helpers included three refugee nuns from a Hungarian order who lived and worked on the property, a resident priest and an auxiliary women’s group, who, with the nuns, were mainly responsible for washing, stitching and patching our clothes and dispensing medical treatment. We never had real contact with these women – the Brothers looked after us.
We comprised more than 130 boys aged between six and ten, and had four classrooms for classes between first to fourth grade. Two main dormitories served as sleeping quarters: one for the children who wet the beds and the other for the ‘dries’. Kapok mattresses, packed hard over time, were covered with a thick piece of rubber. Sheets, blankets and pillows were ex-military issue and the woollen blankets were especially thin. Porcelain cups and plates in the dining room were also from the military.
Life at Castledare was strict and regimented – each day a humiliating carbon copy of the day before. Up in the morning, make your bed and stand next to it for inspection. After inspection, join the line of children waiting for bread and porridge. After breakfast, do your ‘charge’, the cleaning job you were allocated by the Brothers, like sweeping the dormitories or mopping the bathroom floors. After charges, join the lines being readied for the march into the classrooms. After morning class, join the line for the march into the dining room for lunch – and so it went, day after day, like an endless military parade. Not even birthdays interrupted the routine – they were recognised but without fanfare.
After school the routine varied little. We either did sport or played on the oval, or did work such as weeding the gardens, scraping up pine needles in the pine forest or collecting dried cow manure patties for the flowerbeds. At 5 pm, we were herded, 40 or 50 at a time, into an open shower block for a shower. The taps were operated by one of the Brothers. The first time we were all terribly embarrassed and tried to cover ourselves with our hands, but we soon learnt that at Castledare there was no room for modesty and personal dignity. Being inspected by a Brother sitting in a chair after the shower was humiliating. After Brother Marques arrived it became worse, as he sometimes sent us back in for another shower. As he looked down at our pivate parts he would say, ‘Go and clean your dirty feet this time’.
The Castledare Fair was held once a year. It was a charity event from which all proceeds went to the home. We looked forward to it with great excitement – the fair, and the concerts given by the choir, were the only events to interrupt the drudgery of our lives at Castledare. Overnight a little tent city emerged on the property and sellers sold trinkets, toys, sweets, jams and homemade cakes. Each child was given 10 shillings to spend and within half an hour at best, most had spent all their money.
The mix of children from all over the British Isles gave the Brothers a unique pool of talent of budding singers and actors. Castledare had a brilliant boys’ choir and competed well against other schools in the annual Eisteddfod. At Clontarf, our brother orphanage, the singers were considered by some to be second only to the Vienna Boys’ Choir. Much time and effort went into preparing the choirs for the Eisteddfods, along with the annual concerts, which always played to packed houses. The Brothers were keen on the musical classics of great modern composers such as Rodgers and Hammerstein and Gilbert and Sullivan. Thus we learnt the songs from HMS Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, The Mikado and Oklahoma, and others. In 1956 I took the role of Princess Chrysanthemum playing to a packed house at His Majesty’s Theatre. Concert night was always exciting. An army of women appeared to dress us in splendid costumes and paint our faces. Then we put on the performance, always greatly appreciated by the people invited to attend.
Unlike St Josephs Primary School in England, there was little by way of normal primary school activity, especially for the very young like me. There were no nursery rhymes, story readings, colouring-in books, plasticine, building blocks or toys. On the blackboard, written in large capital letters, was ‘All My Work Done for God’, followed by ‘AMDG’, the compulsory signature we wrote at the start of each page of our school exercise book. Our education seemed directed at turning young children as quickly as possible into pious and obedient little adults. There were activities for the older children, such as playing on the very large swing and monkey bar, rolling large truck tyres around the field, and playing with a football that was the wrong shape and bounced awkwardly on the handball courts.
Almost immediately I had difficulty in school and had to start again in grade one. I had lost most of the reading and writing skills I had learnt in England. I had been capable of writing simple messages to the Brooms on the drawings I made, but here I could not resurrect even those skills. I slowly relearned and progressed more or less normally, although I would always be two years behind my age group throughout the rest of my primary education.
The regular morning class march always included a number call and response, so that missing children could be readily identified. When we had first arrived, we were given a number. Mine was ‘113’. It appeared on all my clothing and even my wooden toothbrush. At roll calls our numbers were called out. We were expected to respond by calling out our surnames, military-style. Whenever my number was called, I simply responded ‘Hawkins’. The rest of the time my number substituted for my name. This process, combined with the other invasions of orphanage life, stripped away what little identity I had. I was reduced to a number at roll call. I succumbed to a robot-like obedience and only physical pain could make me cry.
We were forced to walk on sharp gravel stones in our soft bare feet, eat appalling meals and suffer the bites of the mosquitoes that invaded the dormitories every night. The only mosquito control involved burning dried cow-dung. The smoke from the smouldering manure was said to drive out mosquitoes. We spent long periods on our knees praying – especially for our benefactors and for more donations. This was the land the Sisters of Nazareth in England described to us as being made of fruit trees and milk and honey.
Religious teaching was regarded as more important than anything else and the best cure for disturbed minds. We recited the Catechism over and over, and learnt hymns in English and Latin. Many of the children became altar boys and joined the roster for regular masses and benediction in the chapel. We had a very good choir and could sing different Latin masses right through in Gregorian chant. We found most of the Latin hymns boring, with their repetitive themes, and we didn’t understand what they were about. I had first heard ‘Amazing Grace’ on holidays and wondered why we couldn’t sing such a song in our chapel. It seemed wonderfully melodic and the lyrics spiritual and beautiful. Later I realised it was written by a Protestant. The stirring ‘Faith of our Fathers’, which we sang constantly, was essentially our Catholic equivalent.
The principal, Brother O’Doherty, was a deeply religious man and like the majority of Catholic Brothers fervently believed we were, in the main, true orphans in need of Christian charity. He was privy to the only information about us in existence – our names, birthdays and certificates of baptism supplied by the nuns – although often even this information was wrong. He and his colleagues were aware that some children had foster families in England who had wanted to adopt them, although I never told O’Doherty about my English family, so withdrawn had I become. He often praised the good Sisters of Nazareth for their deep charity and compassion and this boxed me into a terrible dilemma about what to believe.
O’Doherty believed that if you prayed for something, you would receive it. Mesmerised by his faith, at times during prayers he appeared lost in a world of his own. He ruled that pride, confidence and self-esteem were sins, while humility, chastity and poverty were godly and holy.
He recited ad infinitum his favourite mantra ‘children should be seen and not heard’, regarding us as too immature and unsophisticated to deserve privacy, an opinion or any credibility. Like many Christian Brothers inspired by his teachers towards a spiritual vocation, he joined the order at fourteen and went to study at a house of formation known as ‘The Juniorate’, an Irish Catholic version of an English public boarding school. Undoubtedly it was his experience there that formed his ideas on childcare.
A popular notion was that the Catholic orphanage system would produce new recruits for religious organisations, as well as produce large numbers of solid Catholic citizens who would marry and reproduce an army of like-minded Christians. This gave the Brothers a rare opportunity to try to shape the hearts and minds of the young Christian soldiers raised in a military-style ‘monastery’. The ritual of Holy Mass in the morning, catechism and religious instruction during the day, followed by rosary and benediction at night should have produced a legion of dedicated followers. The children, however, found few role models among their teachers, who appeared to live their religion only in church. The loving Jesus we knew in our simple understanding would have reached out and comforted a runaway child. This contradiction turned a small army of children away from the church before they had even reached adulthood.
Outwardly O’Doherty had a happy, carefree disposition and, while we generally liked and respected him, especially for his awe-inspiring religious convictions, we feared him in equal measure. He effectively shut down any meaningful communication he might have had with us. By putting children down, amid the laughter of the other children, he discouraged us from speaking out or ‘showing off’. He demanded absolute respect for himself and for the other Brothers, who he said had given their lives to the service of God. When necessary, he enforced this respect with corporal punishment.
O’Doherty taught religion with a fire and passion. A simple man, but one with enormous belief, he taught about the god of love, but also about the god of fear, and he could terrify us with his sermons. God divided the world into two groups of people. On one hand were the Catholics who were extremely lucky to have inherited the one true religion through baptism and thus earn the right to eternal salvation. The rest were tagged ‘non-Catholics’. The worst of the ‘non-Catholics’ were the Protestants. God was particularly annoyed with them. They had turned their back on Him when they split away from the mother church. Whenever the subject was broached, O’Doherty scattered like confetti angry-sounding words like ‘Lucifer’, ‘Luther’, ‘Hell’, ‘heretic’ and ‘excommunication’.
He warned us many times not to die in mortal sin as we would spend all eternity in Hell. Eternity was described as a beach where each grain of sand represented one year. When all the grains of sand had been picked up from all beaches of the world, this represented a single day in eternity. Hell, he described as burning hotter than the sun but without having the power to consume the flesh of the damned sinners, who would wail, gnash their teeth and beg for water for all eternity.
The two most common mortal sins appeared to be the sin of impurity and that of deliberately missing mass on Sundays. O’Doherty told us the story of the Protestant and Catholic boys who went fishing together one Sunday morning. The Catholic boy had told his mother he was going to mass when in fact he was sitting in a boat on a lake with his Protestant friend. The boat overturned and both boys drowned: ‘We only hope that God in his infinite wisdom and mercy had pity on the poor Catholic boy’s soul.’ The very best he could expect was a long stretch in Purgatory, which we were told was also a place of fire where those who died having committed venial sin would languish until their sins had been atoned.
I could only take an educated guess about the fate of the Protestant boy. It didn’t really bear thinking about. He couldn’t go to the first-class Heaven, because he wasn’t a baptised Catholic. Also, it would appear that he was directly involved in keeping a Catholic boy away from holy mass, and worse. If it were true that in the eyes of God a good Protestant was equal to a bad Catholic, he really didn’t have a feather to fly with and God was bound to throw the book at him.
Seeing that we all had committed venial sin (mere misdemeanours when compared to the mortal variety), as well as being born in original sin, it was extremely likely that we all faced some time in Purgatory. But the question of how much time had everyone stumped. The thinking was that because eternity was so infinitely huge, a few thousand years in Purgatory was a mere drop in the bucket. But a few thousand years of cleansing fire was something none of us looked forward to.
Babies who died before they could be baptised went to Limbo – an in-between place, neither Hell nor Heaven – for all eternity. This was the place I wanted to go to most. I didn’t like the devil and I didn’t like God –both were cruel and sadistic.
Irish Catholic theology about Purgatory and Hell was very popular at the time. Fire-and-brimstone sermons were particularly damaging to already frightened and insecure children. We were encouraged to make friends with only Catholic boys during the holidays, as Protestant boys were likely to lead us astray. We were also to remember that when we grew up we should never marry a Protestant, especially as there were so many good Catholic girls available.
To me the story of the Catholic and Protestant boy seemed a contradiction as we had been taught in the scriptures that the way humans treated others was more important than the way humans treated God: ‘love one another’ was constantly drilled into us. I presumed it meant the whole human race, so I had to conclude that the God of fear was indeed illogical and vindictive.
As I believed almost everything that I was told, I was fearful and worried about the awful punishment that surely awaited me when I died. It was possible to avoid Hell and Purgatory if you confessed your sins to a Catholic priest, but timing was important. If you confessed your sins to a priest on your deathbed and at the same time received the sacrament of extreme unction and had no evil thoughts, your chances of immediate salvation were very good. By comparison, Purgatory was the long way round and could take thousands of years, though it could be avoided if you managed to die in time before committing another sin.
The God of love was an entirely different matter, always portrayed as Jesus in the pictures we were shown. A beautiful man, often surrounded by children, he loved the downtrodden, the marginalised, the sick and poor, but especially the children. And he threatened those who might harm them: ‘Better to tie a millstone around their necks and cast them into the sea, than harm any one of these my little ones.’
So it seemed clear that Jesus was on our side. Yet I couldn’t understand why O’Doherty was passionate about building a new chapel at a cost of thousands of pounds. Castledare couldn’t have been poorer, and neither could we. Why would Jesus want this money spent on a grand building to himself? Surely he would want the money spent on the children, putting flywire on the dormitory windows and doors to stop the mosquitoes biting us, or seats on the often-freezing porcelain toilet bowls. Wouldn’t he want the children to have footwear and underwear, like we had when we arrived, or to eat properly as the staff and the Brothers did?
The difference in quality between what we ate and what everyone else ate was immense. While the new chapel was being built the food became even more unpalatable and sometimes made me physically sick. Apart from drinking the nightly cocoa beverage, I often went to bed with an empty stomach as I could barely eat the bread puddings, lumpy rice puddings or sago, rhubarb and custard. To force the children to eat this unpalatable stodge, we were forbidden to leave the dining room until all the food had gone. I got around this by rolling what I couldn’t swallow into the bottom of my shirt, tucking it into my trousers and disposing of it as soon as I left the dining room, a trick learned from others. Sometimes we stole potatoes from the piggery and cooked them on a fire of pine needles in the forest. The half-burnt offerings were far more palatable then some of the food coming out of the kitchen.
In 1956, two years after my arrival, a new monk arrived to manage the small farm with Jim and his helper. Brother Marques’s duties included night-watch in one of the dormitories. He began to interfere with some of the children, sexually abusing the more gullible. He would put chocolates or lollies under his pillow and invite individual children to his bedroom to keep his bed warmed until he returned. On several occasions Marques tried to seduce me. I was terrified of him and avoided any eye contact.
Marques attacked me one evening while the rest of the children were at the pictures. I was ill in bed. He approached me in the main dormitory and asked me to go to his room where I would find chocolates under his pillow. The temptation of the chocolates was too much, so I retrieved the goodies from under his pillow, ate them and went back to my bed. I feigned sleep as he pushed and shoved to wake me. At one point he tried to lift me from my bed. I held grimly to the mattress, fortunately making me too heavy for him to lift. He stopped, to my great relief, as the children spilled in from the picture theatre. I never really trusted a man for the remainder of my childhood.
Brother O’Doherty, who often preached about the evils of impurity, remained ignorant of what was happening because children wouldn’t risk telling him or seeking his protection. After all, who would he believe – the accused Brother who had given his life to the service of God, or the child who should be seen and not heard? Worse, if O’Doherty revealed the name of the accuser to Marques, what future would the child have? This man, cleared of any wrongdoing, could kill a child with fear.
Another ‘benefactor’ and frequent visitor was Leo, who worked at His Majesty’s Theatre and had a small flat near nearby. He took many photographs of the children and sexually fondled some of us. On some Sundays he was allowed to take children who were not visiting with a holiday family back to his flat. I was among this group and we travelled on the back of his little green utility to spend a day with him. He fed us well and was generally very kind, and although I saw him abuse some children, he never touched me.
In my first few months at Castledare, I had watched excited boys leave for the city every third Sunday of the month on the back of a truck to visit their holiday families. Soon it would be my turn to meet an Australian family.