NORTHERN IRELAND
Aljazeera
[with video]
Laurence Lee
Sitting opposite me in a hotel room in the town where she was brought up, Katie Walmsley quietly described her childhood. Her parents were splitting up, a priest suggested to her dad that the best place for her would be a children’s home for girls. The nuns would keep her safe and well.
“I held on to my daddy’s trousers,” at the door of the big, imposing building, she said. The nuns pulled her in, and within ten minutes she was sitting with her sister in a bath mixed with jeyes fluid (a toxic industrial detergent people normally use nowadays to get congealed fat out of drains).
Head partly shaved to look like a boy. The terror in the eyes of her sister. These things have been seared into her consciousness.
Katie will give evidence to Britain’s biggest ever inquiry into systematic abuse next week. She will tell the inquiry what she told us here; that the congealed pig fat – slops, she called it – was scooped up in a tablespoon by the nun when she vomited it up and she was forced to eat it again.
That the nuns made her clean the excrement from toilet bowls with her bare hands, and pick bits off the walls with her fingernails.
That she was punished for wetting the bed in fear, and grew up believing bed wetting had led to her parents’ separation.
That she was told she didn’t deserve a doll for Christmas because she had been bad.
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