A nun’s eye on Irish history

Another beautiful tale woven by Fr Jason Murphy in his bi-monthly column Let the Busy World Be Hushed...

We used to meet, the old Nun and I, beneath the green light of the exit sign in the large kitchen of the Convent and Nursing Home as she came at night to fill her mug with cocoa to carry up the stairs with her to bed. It was during the Grand Silence and we weren’t supposed to be conversing so the lights were never turned on as we whispered together each evening in the shadows of the large kitchen. I was working as a student for the summer months in this nursing home run by the Sisters of Nazareth who had previously ran children’s homes, built for the most part, in seaside towns across Britain and Ireland. This one was in Southend on Sea on the south east coast of England.

Sr Isadore had by then been in the order nearly 70 years and was now all bent over to one side, leaning on a stick as she stood talking in the half - light each evening. Our meetings were never planned but come nine o’clock I was sure to be waiting for her at the door of the kitchen as she made her way down the corridor from the convent into the nursing home section of the building.

We spoke mostly about her religious life, having entered the convent in Mallow in Co. Cork in the late 1920’s, travelling by boat to England to train for her noviciate in Hammersmith in London. We talked about her years, in fact decades, spent traipsing the towns of England, Scotland and Wales, going from door to door collecting money to keep the children, in a time when there was little or no state funding. She recalled the years when there was very little to eat in the Convent and sisters themselves, in the 1930’s, died of scurvy and diseases associated with malnutrition. She stood on street corners in the large cities of England her eyes cast downwards, as the convent rule dictated, keeping ‘custody of the eyes’, collecting pennies, sometimes facing ridicule and being spat at in the face in a time of anti - Catholic and anti - Irish fervour. She indeed attributed her gait to all the ‘wettings’ she got over the years.

Her life had not been one of comfort or stability, going from place to place, standing on street corners. Yet over the years she built up a ministry as people looked forward to the wee nun calling around the same time each year, for the penny that was kept; an opportunity for women at home to sit and talk and tell of their trials and tribulations to one who might give them a little time. She had a heart for people and an empathy to listen from deep within, to take all things to her heart and offer it to God in prayer.

In all our nightly conversations she spoke little of her early life and it was only when I returned a number of years later to celebrate mass for her diamond jubilee as a Sister of Nazareth, that I delved into her years of childhood. The young Mary Kelly grew up on a little farm in the parish of Kilmurray in west Cork, the eldest of her family she helped her father eek out a living on the land during these impoverished years approaching the First World War. The flame of Nationalism burned brightly throughout these years culminating in the death of Terence McSweeney in Cork in 1920 and the subsequent burning of the city during the War of Independence. Though she read to her father of the happenings written of in the Cork Examiner, their lives continued undisturbed, bar the trundling of lorries that went the road carrying the dreaded Black and Tans. As children they lay watching from the hillsides opposite. She walked barefoot through the fields to school and during the summer months helped in the cutting of turf, the picking of potatoes and the saving of hay.

As we spoke together in her room on the eve of the celebrations for her diamond jubilee, she recalled one August evening in particular, before they turned the road for home with a cart full of hay. In the quiet of the evening, only broken by the sound of the curlew below in the flaggin bottoms, they heard what sounded like shooting in the near distance. One round of bullets after another that lasted for about a half an hour. They knew the direction from which the firing came, below the hill on the passing of the road at Béal na Bláth. After a deadly quiet had fallen there then erupted what seemed like panicked shouting and both father and daughter ran across the fields only to see the frenzy of men running backwards and forwards. Down the embankment they came and only feet from where they stopped, they could see the body of Michael Collins lying face down on the ground, a gaping wound on the bottom of his skull. Men knelt down in prayer reciting the Act of Contrition. The two stood by in a stunned silence as the soldiers, tears falling from their faces, placed his body in the back of the car and drove off at speed.

The two, father and daughter, were left standing alone in the drizzling August rain, spellbound by what they had just witnessed as they gazed at what remained, a pool of blood that was to stain the spot where he had fallen.

As the old Nun sat those eighty years later, far from the fields of west Cork, tears fell from her eyes as she remembered that August day when she, as a little girl, got caught up in a moment of history in the midst of the ordinary, a moment that was to change the course of Irish politics for the whole of a century to come.