Mount Magdala & Nazareth House 1941 to 1965

24 years in these catholic church orphanages. The Good Shepherd and then the Nazareth House nuns took the place of my family. They told me my mother was dead. In the two orphanages life needed to meet the nun's requirements. In part this meant that, because my mother was sinful, if I was not beaten to change me, I would be too. So they said when they beat me. I find it hard to think about it because to remember it to re-live the fear and confusion - the unhappiness of being a child able only to hope that if! earned the nun's favour, I would become one of the children who the nuns cared about; who had a life which was sure to end in Heaven. Instead of being the child the nuns' found me to be - who needed to be beaten for her mother's sin and because, although there was little hope for it, that might help me to be worthy of love - eventually God's love. I always knew it was a childhood filled with pain and confusion. I now realise the nuns who were good; were doing God's work, were also cruel, were vicious women, monsters. I never thought that the things that I was afraid of were caused by my childhood experiences. What sticks in my mind about the nuns is how they always told us that we were no good, all I heard every day was. "You'll never be any good, your mother never wanted you, you'll end up in the gutter like her, no one will ever want you. It is so hard to forget that - it is there all the time. What the individual members of the two Orders did and what the senior <b>...</b>