A Voice from the Tuam Home - part three

FOR the past two weeks [these articles first appeared in Dec-Jan 2015/16], The Tuam Herald has published a series of articles based on the memoirs of Julia Devaney (1916-1985), who spent almost 40 years in the Tuam Mother and Baby Home, first as a child resident and later as an employee.

These articles have covered topics including Julia’s own life story in the home and her subsequent marriage; the mothers who had their children in the home and cared for them until they had to leave when their child was a year old; the children, and how they were looked after in the Home; fostering of the children out to local families, and adoption by USA-based couples; the harsh discipline in the Home; and the religious sisters who ran it.

In this final instalment, we give Julia’s perception of how the residents of the Home were seen in the town of Tuam, and her description of the physical reality of the Home and the lives of the children there.

We stress that these articles are a distillation of over 40,000 words recorded on tape by Julia. All words within quotation marks are Julia’s own.

* Some names have been changed to protect identities.

 

Dealing with the town

“The nuns would tell us not to be talking to local people in case they would be asking questions about the Home. We were totally cut off from the outside world. I always felt that the outside world had an edge on us, that they looked down on us.

“You’d feel you couldn’t cope with the outside world. One time a Home girl saw a sign in McTigue’s [drapers] window that said ‘Gifts for the Home’ and she was all excited, thinking that McTigues had gifts for us.

“Families outside used the home as a threat on their children, that if they didn’t behave, they would be sent there. Mrs T said that she used to say it to *Tommie. One time he was up at the stables with a stallion, and she got an awful fright and she came up to the stables to him and said ‘Put on your coat and cap right now, I am bringing you straight to the Home’ and [her daughter] went down on her knees and said ‘Oh Mammy, please give him one more chance!’

“The people who called with deliveries were all nice. The bread van would often give the girls a cake for themselves. People didn’t know what to make of the Home, you’d see them running past the Home in the evenings, they thought the place was haunted.

“Mrs Joyce down town was very nice, but the crowd that would gather at McCormack’s corner would jeer at us, they’d nudge each other saying that we were ‘one of the Home ones’.

“I was always self-conscious to this day. That place would leave that mark on you. If I met two people on the path, I’d imagine they’d be saying ‘that lady was reared in the Home, reared on the rates.’

When Julia married John Devaney in about 1963, she moved to his house in Gilmartin Road, but she was still conscious of her origins. Almost 20 years later, when making the tapes with Rabie Millane, she commented: “I still feel that people look down their noses at me. I wouldn’t like the Gilmartin Road people to know I came from the Home.”

 

The Home — former Workhouse

The Tuam Mother and Baby Home was located in a building that was originally built as a workhouse and was the last stop before the grave for thousands during the Famine

Later it was used as a barracks by the British Army, and was garrisoned by Free State soldiers during the Civil War.

Finally it was taken over by Galway County Council as a home for unmarried mothers and their children, and was run on the Council’s behalf by the Bon Secours sisters.

Julia described it as “A big open space and big grey stone walls. Each side of it was a three-storey building with a two-storey building in between, beautifully built walls like the Cathedral, cut stone, cold looking but beautifully built.”

Julia and the other members of the domestic staff did much of the routine maintenance. “We yellow-washed the dormitories, not whitewash. We would add yellow ochre to the lime tubs, and paint the big mighty dormitories. When [Mother] Martha came she wanted to change the whole place to whitewash and we had to go up big ladders and do all the yellow walls into white.”

Julia said the place was never comfortable. “They were always cold, ’twas a cold barracks of a place, they were perished, no heat, no warmth, no comfort. You’d see the women all around the old stove warming themselves before they went to bed. It wasn’t homely at all, no hot water jar.

“There used to be a hay box, they’d make the porridge the night before and three pots would fit in the hay box and the lid would be put on tight, it would cook in that. Everything would be locked up at that stage, except the hay box. The bread store and the milk store would be locked, padlocks everywhere.

“There was a stove specially to heat hot water for baths, it would heat the kitchen taps and you would draw it out for the baths. There were plenty of baths, and more down in the new maternity. The new mothers would go down every Saturday.”

In later years there were some improvements. “The Co Council put in great washing machines for them, monstrous washing machines, and a wringer and a big thing for hot water in later years. In the earlier years there were only washboards and sinks. “The dormitory floors were done with beeswax polish. The children’s play area had to be scrubbed each day. It was a big long room for toddlers and the smell of urine would come from the wooden floors.”

Julia chose to work in the garden rather than indoors as often as possible.

“I had an awful pride in my garden, we had the most beautiful flowers, every flower in season, belts of wallflowers, asters. We had two glasshouses, we would raise the seed in boxes. There were two little lawns on the Athenry Road side and concrete walks. Every Saturday evening we would brush the paths white to have them clean for Sunday.

“I read gardening books, and got a lot of experience of gardening as a child, as I always helped out in the garden.

“There was a lovely golden privet down the Dublin Road side, very well kept. We had cabbage, onions, lettuce, beetroot, parsnips, a lovely big belt of sweetpea, tomatoes in the glasshouse, chickens, hens, pigs, clocking hens, shrubs and trees towards Tubberjarlath.

“These were bulldozed when the [new council housing] estate went up.”

Every so often the Home would have important visitors.

“The County Councillors would come to the Home maybe once every three months and the nuns would have a big dinner for them. Oh, the Athenry Road would be full of cars with them, you know like a meeting in the Dail, and they’d have books called The Minutes, oh they’d have beef and everything, a glorious feed, it would be like the Last Supper.”

 

Julia’s verdict

“It was an awful place to be for any child. I’d say it left a mark on them for life. A terrible regime, children got up at 6.30 in the morning in a cold, barracks-like place and given rough food, leaving them pot-bellied. Drilling in twos in the veranda like a jail.

“I always noticed that the children were awful small for their age. They never got proper food, they were undersized because they never got the little tit-bits that children in families get.

“All they got was ould starchy food, they were all pot-bellied, When [Mother] Martha came she noticed the pot bellies and started giving them soup, but that was no better. Martha had some good points, for one thing she made sure that those that had a late supper got fresh tea, not the blue-grey-green tea that would be stewing since teatime.

“The poorest downcast family were better off than being in the Home: there’s love in a family home even though there’s poverty. The Home children were like chickens in a coop, bedlam, screeching, shouting in the toddlers’ room. They never learned to speak properly, ’twas like they had a language of their own, babbling sounds.

“I have terrible regrets for the children, I feel a sense of shame that I did not create a war, but then again what could I have done? It was a rotten ould place to rear children, marching them around the room to keep them out of trouble.

* * * 

“No, I’m not religious, thank God, not at all. I suppose I got an overdose of it. Or else the nearer the Church, the farther from God! We were always in the church, morning, evening, rosary and holy hour. The girls who came in from the country thought a lot more of the Church than we did. The chapel was in our midst.

“We often dodged the rosary, with as much trimmings after it as the rosary itself. Often I’d go out into the garden weeding [rather] than go into the Rosary.

“I think it was the garden that kept me sane. Oh, I loved the garden, it was like a sedative, the only thing I did love.

* * *

“It makes me lonely when I walk up to the Home site now, I think I can still hear the Home children shouting and laughing …”

* * *

 

THIS story has a happy ending. It is good to think of Julia marrying a kind man, having her own home, her little “heaven” in Gilmartin Road, where she had friends old and young, many of whom remember her fondly.

 

If you know of anyone whose story should be told, please contact us at The Tuam Herald office, or email editor@tuamherald.ie