Chapter 7 — Goldenbridge

Emotional abuse

She said that the nuns were really not involved in the day-to-day activity in Goldenbridge. When she was there, it was run principally by the lay staff and older girls. She recalled Sr Venetia, who would have been the only nun who did have contact with the Institution, but the other nuns were only seen in church: They used to come down now and again around Christmas to watch a film ... which was the only time you ever saw Venetia laugh. They never acknowledged you. They were there at that side, here we were at this side. You might as well have put a bar – there was no way they were ever going to talk to you. Even in the church, there were all these so called holy people, they never acknowledged you.

A witness who was in Goldenbridge for nine years in the 1960s described her time there: I mean the first sentence that always comes to me is that it was a reign of terror, it was a terrifying place for any child to be. Speaking for myself I found it utterly terrifying, it was vicious, it was so full of fear, it was so full of tension. It was indescribably terrifying.

When she left, she described how she felt: If I start at the beginning, I was completely and utterly depressed, completely unfit to function in the world outside. Within months of leaving Goldenbridge I was in a psychiatric hospital ... I have lived through some of the darkest, darkest, blackest, blackest depressions imaginable. I have lived with shame, absolute abject shame. I felt like a nobody, worthless, a nuisance, a waste of space on the planet, utterly. I hated every adult who walked the planet ... I was bitter, I was angry. I was broken. I tried to be happy if that makes sense, I really did try. I tried to be normal, but you couldn’t be. People would say to you, “Where are you from? I would say, “did I ask you where you came from”. I would say, “No, Mind your own business, don’t ask me”.

She said she found this question so difficult to deal with that she often lied.

She found filling in application forms, which required parents’ names and occupations and where she was from, to be deeply upsetting and shaming for her.

She said that, although Sr Venetia wasn’t anything as bad as Sr Alida, she was very capable of battering children and, in particular, she was verbally very cruel to children: She was very good at calling you names, and Sr Venetia was capable of being very cruel to particular children ... She was very good at humiliation, Ill tell you that, she was very good at that.

She spoke of particular girls who suffered humiliation at the hands of Sr Venetia. One particular girl suffered from perspiration, and Sr Venetia used make her strip off to her underclothes every day and wash in front of all her peers. She said that Sr Venetia had particular girls whom she treated as favourites, and they were never beaten and got special treatment from her.

Many witnesses complained of the name-calling that they endured during their time in Goldenbridge. They spoke of being called ‘worse than the soldiers who crucified Christ’, or being called ’filthy’ and ‘dirty’. Other witnesses referred to verbal insults of being called ‘fat and ugly’, being called ‘crackpot and mad’. Other witnesses made reference to the hurt caused by the name-calling and the degradation that accompanied it.

For a number of complainants, one of the most difficult memories was the treatment they recalled their siblings receiving while in Goldenbridge. These witnesses suffered greatly, where those siblings went on to have serious psychiatric problems or even where they had subsequently died. They felt that, in some way, they might have been able to help the sibling had they spoken to them more openly about their experiences in Goldenbridge.

One witness, who spent seven years in Goldenbridge after the death of her mother, described trying to protect her younger brothers in Goldenbridge. They were bed-wetters, and she was very upset when they were punished for wetting the bed. She couldn’t bear to see them slapped, because she knew that they couldn’t help doing it. Even though she was just a child herself, she could see that beating children for wetting the bed was cruel and unfair.

She visited her younger brothers in another industrial school because she believed that, if the authorities knew that somebody from outside the Institution was watching, it would be easier on the boys there. This was an impression she got from Goldenbridge, where she felt that anybody who had a parent or relative in touch with the School got an easier time. She visited her younger brothers in the Industrial School until she was 18. At that stage, her father had returned. Eventually, the family were all reunited and, to this day, are very close.

She was nearly 10 years of age when she went into Goldenbridge and she had a clear memory of life before the Institution. She felt that it gave her a bit of a foundation and that she was luckier than children who had no mothers or fathers. She used to fantasise about a real home, and used to tell stories about things that happened on the outside. One of her brothers spoke to the Investigation Committee and confirmed that his sister did protect both him and his other brothers and sisters while they were in Goldenbridge.

Another witness, who had a good experience of family life before being admitted to Goldenbridge at the age of nine following the death of her mother, said that her overall impression of the Institution was of horror and fear. Her father died in 1967, but whilst he was alive he had regular contact with the family. He visited every second Sunday, but he would often arrive after he had been drinking. She recalled how Sr Eleonora21 and one of the lay staff would speak to him in a degrading way. His children would plead and beg him to take them out of Goldenbridge, and his famous saying was ‘keep your chin up ... it’s not what’s on the outside, it’s the inside that counts’. She said the family were very poor. Their mother was a lovely woman. She believed that the fact that their father visited them regularly spared her from a lot of the abuse that the other children were subjected to. One of her great dislikes in Goldenbridge was that some of the girls were treated as favourites and pets.

She spoke about being beaten and abused if underwear was dirty, and also spoke of the humiliation of being lined up naked to be painted with a treatment for scabies. She was quite clear that the way in which this treatment was carried out was designed to maximise the humiliation of the children, particularly of older girls.

Some of the witnesses at the Goldenbridge hearings were men who had been sent there as young boys. One man spoke of the loss of family contact as a result of being placed in Goldenbridge at two years of age in the early 1960s. He said: Goldenbridge was a tough place as a young little boy. When I think of my own kids and I think that if anybody hurt them I would destroy their lives. That is the only true way I have got of reflecting on what happened to me as a kid growing up.