Shameful secret of dirty laundry and difficult girls
LEAVES are falling, though not for the first time this year; parched plants shedded profusely during the long, dry summer. Maybe it’s why it seems ages since Pope Francis’s visit in August. Or maybe it’s the change of seasons which is bringing to mind the Papal visit, and stirring memories of how the Pope asked forgiveness, particularly for the abuse suffered by vulnerable Irish women at the hands of the church and State. For how lightly the latter has got off for its part in our shameful past; as if politicians and other prominent citizens didn’t give religious orders carte blanche to persecute the poor for their benefit.
Maybe it’s the seasonal change in the sky, the darkness drawing in earlier and earlier, which is bringing into view unwelcome shadows of our our darker times. Because you didn’t need to be an unmarried mother to be locked up in the laundry that was run by nuns in this and other country towns. Girls “from families that had no money would end up there”, remembers a local. “Girls too young to be pregnant; they were just difficult.”
He recalls how every Sunday “they’d be walked down Station Road, a nun in the front and a nun at the back, all dressed in the same uniform. Can’t look left or right; keep your eyes straight ahead. If they saw a man or boy, they’d be in trouble when they got back.”
That was their so-called day of rest. For the other six, society’s fat cats had found a profitable solution for these unruly offspring of the poor.
“They’d be cleaning sheets, often from wealthy farmers who wouldn’t have changed them for weeks, so there’d be a lot of work. They’d use the mangle and be hanging them all up, sheets and pillowcases, and there’d be other girls ironing and pressing them.”
Among them was his cousin’s daughter. “She was from a huge family and the mother couldn’t care for them properly. That daughter was a problem child. So a court put her into the laundry.”
Maybe those high spirits saved her life. Because “whatever treatment she was getting, she ran away, and where did she run but to my mother? She went upstairs and wouldn’t come out.
“I remember my mother in the room with her arm around this girl. The gardai came, and someone from the laundry, but my parents wouldn’t bring her down.”
The girl fled to England and “did very well. But she died young, in her 50s”.
Yet that was decades longer than some of the girls who spent their childhoods scrubbing dirty sheets. “People did die in the laundry. They were buried outside the ditch, in the shankyard. You can see the back of the laundry when the leaves are gone from the trees.”
But even when trees were in bloom, everyone knew it was there. The shedding leaves makes it impossible to ignore. And that, far from being difficult, the daughters of the deprived were all too easy to exploit. Forcing them to forfeit their family, freedom and often a future in service to — literally — the filthy rich.