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Authors: Jonathan Gash
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matronly supervision, returning at evening to sleep in the Living Out Block under a nun’s stern monitoring.
There she met Damien, who didn’t last long, except he caused ructions within Magda that almost caused her to take her own life, but she got lucky and managed not to, mostly from fear.
Magda was sent to the Living Out Block, in another dormitory. No school this time, just girls working. It was a revelation.
There, Magda heard so many new things that she was lost. One strangeness was newspapers. People mixed willy-nilly in the street with anybody. Churches were islands of familiarity of sight, sound, incense scent. There was no King with his seventeen telephones and hadn’t been for many years, though a Queen over the water doubtless had as many phones, and Liverpool was a place where footballs teams caused serious arguments in Dublin bars.
Damien strove to insert his fingers in her behind the paper packing sheds and caused some blood but the month passed and Magda was relieved she was not pregnant. She was told by two other girls she’d had a narrow escape. A girl called Emily, who had a last name and been raised in a different convent of a different order because her auntie was one of the nuns there,explained to Magda all about sex. It was astonishing, and made Magda shocked but thankful Jesus and his Mother Mary had escaped that terrible business. She associated sex, whatever it meant to mankind, with a struggling grappling turmoil behind some paper-packing shed where the foreman might come upon you and send you to prison or worse.
‘Just think, Magda,’ Emily warned. ‘You might have had a baby and then what?’
‘What?’ Magda asked, stricken.
‘The baby would go into the Magdalenes like you did, and then you’d be back there for life.’
‘Would I?’
‘Course you would. That’s what they’re for. Machinists most of them, or in laundries for life.’
The baby, though, would do what Magda had had to do – grow up there. Damien was uncaring about everything, and reputedly had several other episodes – though only two reached the dick, Emily explained blithely, because the lads are mortal scared of doing more than fingers in case they got forcibly married or punished by the courts. The girls were well known, and Magda was one of them, being pointed out by some of the other lads who were drivers and loaders of the baled papers the firm sent out at five o’clock of a working day.
Magda couldn’t understand how the system of sex – snogging, mauling, getting as undressed as far as you could manage without letting anybody see what was actually going on, getting the lad to spill into some convenient paper or rag that was afterwards thrown away among the waste – had come to be when it was forbidden everywhere. Vaguely she eventually came to believe that it was possibly not all the fault of the English, who had, until she grew out of the convent, beenwholly responsible for the persistence of sin everywhere. It was a mystery who kept sex going among the Faithful, though she knew she had a deal to do with its persistence, having started out early by having Christ crucified before she was even five.
She was eighteen when she recognised the priest she knew she had to murder. It was almost a relief, because it brought into her mind the understanding that there was a degree of finality to the problem of sinfulness and deaths of lovely people like Lucy.
And, more to the point, of Lucy as she kept falling, because that was the one event that Magda could not get rid of. In fact, she often wondered, after her sixteenth birthday, when she’d felt so full of herself that she’d allowed Damien to do his rutting and work his fingers into her so painfully, how it came to be that she had been so idle in thinking of this horror that she had waited so long before deciding that steps had to be taken.
The memory caused serious distress still, though she never spoke of it to anyone and, as far as she
There she met Damien, who didn’t last long, except he caused ructions within Magda that almost caused her to take her own life, but she got lucky and managed not to, mostly from fear.
Magda was sent to the Living Out Block, in another dormitory. No school this time, just girls working. It was a revelation.
There, Magda heard so many new things that she was lost. One strangeness was newspapers. People mixed willy-nilly in the street with anybody. Churches were islands of familiarity of sight, sound, incense scent. There was no King with his seventeen telephones and hadn’t been for many years, though a Queen over the water doubtless had as many phones, and Liverpool was a place where footballs teams caused serious arguments in Dublin bars.
Damien strove to insert his fingers in her behind the paper packing sheds and caused some blood but the month passed and Magda was relieved she was not pregnant. She was told by two other girls she’d had a narrow escape. A girl called Emily, who had a last name and been raised in a different convent of a different order because her auntie was one of the nuns there,explained to Magda all about sex. It was astonishing, and made Magda shocked but thankful Jesus and his Mother Mary had escaped that terrible business. She associated sex, whatever it meant to mankind, with a struggling grappling turmoil behind some paper-packing shed where the foreman might come upon you and send you to prison or worse.
‘Just think, Magda,’ Emily warned. ‘You might have had a baby and then what?’
‘What?’ Magda asked, stricken.
‘The baby would go into the Magdalenes like you did, and then you’d be back there for life.’
‘Would I?’
‘Course you would. That’s what they’re for. Machinists most of them, or in laundries for life.’
The baby, though, would do what Magda had had to do – grow up there. Damien was uncaring about everything, and reputedly had several other episodes – though only two reached the dick, Emily explained blithely, because the lads are mortal scared of doing more than fingers in case they got forcibly married or punished by the courts. The girls were well known, and Magda was one of them, being pointed out by some of the other lads who were drivers and loaders of the baled papers the firm sent out at five o’clock of a working day.
Magda couldn’t understand how the system of sex – snogging, mauling, getting as undressed as far as you could manage without letting anybody see what was actually going on, getting the lad to spill into some convenient paper or rag that was afterwards thrown away among the waste – had come to be when it was forbidden everywhere. Vaguely she eventually came to believe that it was possibly not all the fault of the English, who had, until she grew out of the convent, beenwholly responsible for the persistence of sin everywhere. It was a mystery who kept sex going among the Faithful, though she knew she had a deal to do with its persistence, having started out early by having Christ crucified before she was even five.
She was eighteen when she recognised the priest she knew she had to murder. It was almost a relief, because it brought into her mind the understanding that there was a degree of finality to the problem of sinfulness and deaths of lovely people like Lucy.
And, more to the point, of Lucy as she kept falling, because that was the one event that Magda could not get rid of. In fact, she often wondered, after her sixteenth birthday, when she’d felt so full of herself that she’d allowed Damien to do his rutting and work his fingers into her so painfully, how it came to be that she had been so idle in thinking of this horror that she had waited so long before deciding that steps had to be taken.
The memory caused serious distress still, though she never spoke of it to anyone and, as far as she
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