I STARTED school in 1955 in the Babies Class of a school in Ballycastle run by the sisters of the Cross and Passion.
My first teacher was Sister Marie (pronounced: Marry). I don’t have strong recollections of her but I remember my first day, being brought into the class and children crying as our mothers handed us over to the care of this woman in her blue nun robes and alarming headgear.
Her job was to teach us our first prayers, the Morning Offering and the prayer to the Guardian Angel.
We played with plasticine and I vaguely remember cutting coloured card with little plastic scissors.
Sr Marie applied discipline, scolded a little girl for coming to school in slacks. I remember that they were tartan patterned. I have no idea why that sticks out. Perhaps my little brain was struggling to ascertain the logic of the rule.
Sr Marie would slap us on the palms of the hand with strips of light wood, taken I think from fruit cases. The object was not to hurt us but to induct us into the system in which later beatings would be painful but not too surprising.
I was four years old.
Every day in class we got a little bottle of milk, about a third of a pint. That system ended in 1971. Corporal punishment continued until 1987. Everyone of my generation has stories about teachers who enjoyed beating children and others who were much more sparing with the strap and the cane.
I’d like to know which got better results.
I went on to a Catholic primary school in Belfast, situated first in the pavilion of Casement Park GAA grounds until the parish had raised enough funds for a new building. In secondary school I was educated - if you could call it that - by the Christian Brothers. All that I retain of much value, literacy and numeracy, I had already acquired in primary school. What I learnt on top of that I could probably learn now in about a week.
Anyway, they stood guard over us to free up our parents from the burden of managing large families.
The best of that time was studying English, discovering Orwell and Shakespeare.
Long years after having forgotten schooldays I was brought back into the company of sisters of the Cross and Passion. My wife, poet Maureen Boyle, was invited to research and write a history of the retreat centre in Larne run by the order.
That got us invited to visit Drumalis House and led to us befriending the sisters who ran it, Margaret Rose McSparran and Anna Hainey.
They didn’t wear the robes, and used their real names. They were converting the old retreat house into a more modern conference venue.
Their theological interests tended towards environmental concerns.
Drumalis House had been bought for the Cross and Passion order through deceit. The previous owner had not wanted to sell it to a Catholic.
The house is close to the shore and guns smuggled into Ireland for the Ulster Volunteer Force in 1912 were landed there.
Catholic girls of my generation were sent to Drumalis for spiritual retreats.
The large rooms of the old Drumalis house were partitioned into cubicles with single beds. Margaret Rose and Anna dismantled the partitions and uncovered the ornate fireplaces and restored the original elegance of the house and built an extension.
For years now, when travelling up the Antrim coast road we have been dropping in to Drumalis to say hello to Margaret Rose and Anna. They often gave us lunch. When I was in religious affairs journalism they were handy interviewees and could lend themselves to whimsey as much as to serious engagement with contemporary questions.
We did a story about how some visitors to Drumalis saw an incidental icon in the scar left by wind damage to a tree.
Once I visited while they were hosting a Zen Buddhist Abbott teaching meditation.
The last time I was there was to mark the retirement of the Margaret Rose and Anna. Among the guests were John Dunlop, a former moderator of the Presbyterian Church and his wife Rosemary. Some of the other sisters from the order joined us at our table. They were all in civvies. If there is a nun’s uniform now it is a woolen cardigan, tweed skirt and trainers.
They were full of stories about the early years in the order.
I asked if it was true that they had really had their heads shaved.
They said that it had to be cut short for the wimple.
I asked about the ‘discipline’ the whip that nuns were said to use on themselves, expecting to be told that was a myth.
“Oh, yes.” They had all used it. Only one said that she had thought the practice daft at the time.
And they talked about how silly it was and how silly much else in the regime they were inducted into had been.
But they were still there, women in their 80s who had been through a revolution and could laugh at the way they were abused and regimented.
Today you could pass them on the street and not know the lives they had led.
Handing over control of Drumalis, Sisters Margaret Rose McSparran (second from left) and Anna Hainey, retire and hand control of the historic retreat centre to Brian McKee, (far left) and Robert WrightMalachi O’Doherty’s latest book How To Fix Northern Ireland is
published by Atlantic Books
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