‘Nun broke my arm after priest abused me’

● Witness tells inquiry sister called her a whore and threw her against a wall

A nun broke a young girl’s arm as she reacted to discovering the child was being sexually abused by a priest, an inquiry has heard.

A witness told how she had hoped she would be protected when the nun walked in on the assault in 1970, when she was eight, but was instead called a “whore”, grabbed and thrown towards a wall.

Theresa Tolmie-mcgrane said she was then given a “real hiding” by another nun and threatened with having her other arm broken if she told anybody what had happened.

Ms Tolmie-mcgrane waived her right to anonymity at the Scottish child abuse inquiry to recount a catalogue of other abuses during her 11 years at Smyllum Park orphanage in Lanark, South Lanarkshire, which closed in the 1980s.

These included beatings, humiliations, freezing showers and children being forcefed inedible food, being told to eat their vomit and having their mouths rinsed out with soap.

The witness told the hearing in Edinburgh how she arrived at the institution, run by the Daughters of Charity of St Vin- cent de Paul, at the age of six in 1968 after an abusive early childhood.

She recounted how, about two years later, she had a job dusting pews in the church.

One particular priest would arrive early and ask her to sit on his lap, before progressing to making her to perform a sex act on him or watch as he did so, the inquiry heard.

“He said, ‘I need you to be a soldier of God, a good little soldier’,” she told the inquiry, adding the abuse went on for several months. On one occasion, a nun walked in to the room as it was happening, she said.

She told the hearing: “I thought, ‘Praise the Lord, she’s seeing this, she’s going to be angry with him and protect me’.

“Her whole face became distorted. I thought, ‘She’s angry with him’, [but] she was angry with me.

“She called me a whore, she took my left arm and yanked me out of his lap and flung me across to the wall [and said] … ‘Get the f*** out of here’.”

She told how she crawled away and had to go back to church, but when another nun found out she could not raise her arm she was given “a real hiding”.

“I said I couldn’t lift my arm, my arm hurt. I said [a nun] has broken my arm,” Ms Tolmie-mcgrane said. She told the inquiry how the second nun took her to hospital, but warned her: “Don’t you dare tell anybody what happened, young lady, or I’ll break your other arm” and assured her that she would be “lying to protect a man of God, so it’s OK to lie”.

Ms Tolmie-mcgrane, who later went to Glasgow University and now works in Norway as a psychologist, told the inquiry she was at Smyllum from 1968 until 1979.

Ms Tolmie-mcgrane told the inquiry she approached police officers visiting Smyllum on two occasions to tell them “the nuns are hurting me” but was “marched back in” to the institution on both occasions and then beaten by a nun.

The inquiry continues.