Children Of The Poor Clares Read Online Free Page B

had gone out at 8.30 p.m. and in the convent building by 10.30 p.m. The flicker of candlelight could be seen for an hour or so in two of the orphanage windows. The weather was clear and there was a light breeze blowing. Soon the street lights were turned off, and the last Garda foot patrol returned to the station. Over the road in Fegan’s, a drapery shop, a foursome had returned at 1.30 a.m. from a badminton party. At ten minutes to two, James Meehan, the town taxi driver, arrived at the Farnham Arms hotel to collect a passenger but found that the man had decided to stay the night.
     
    At 2.0 a.m. the group at Sullivan’s decided to call it a night. Cissie Reilly looked out of the window into the yard overlooked by the orphanage building to see what the weather was like. What she saw, billowing out of a vent in the building was smoke.
     
    It was a few minutes later that Miss Bridget O’Reilly, the lay supervisor, asleep in her cubicle inside the Sacred Heart dormitory, was woken by the sound of voices. Mary Caffrey, a sixteen-year-old girl, knocked at her door. Miss O’Reilly opened it, as she was to say later, ‘a little bit’ and, on being told that there was smoke in the room, she instructed Mary and another girl to go to Sister Felix, one of the two nuns in charge of the eighty-two children in the orphanage. A few minutes later, Miss O’Reilly ran out of the room after the two girls.
     
    The buildings were in darkness, and to get to Sister Felix’s cell, the girls had to go down the wooden stairs to the first storey, through a corridor and back up another flight of stairs. Mary tapped on Sister Felix’s door, told her there was smoke in the dormitory and asked for the keys to the laundry, the source, she thought, of the smoke. Sister Felix went into the convent, fetched some keys and gave them to Mary, who went off to the laundry. Meanwhile, a few older girls left the Sacred Heart to arouse others in St. Clare’s, the adjacent dormitory, and in Our Lady’s dormitory on the floor below. Miss O’Reilly arrived at Sister Felix’s cell and, the Sister said later, asked that the electricity be turned on so that the source of the smoke could be identified. This was done by Sister Clare, the other nun in charge of the children, who had already been woken and had come to Sister Felix’s cell.
     
    When Sister Clare turned on the main switch, it lit up the buildings, and simultaneously the electric bell on the main convent door began to ring. Sister Felix went to the Mother Abbess’s cell where the keys to the street doors were kept. These she brought to Mary Caffrey who had returned from trying to open the door to the laundry. Mary was then sent to open the front door and the Sisters got dressed.
     
    While all this was going on, a growing number of people out in the street had been shouting and pressing the doorbell in vain for five or six minutes. They had hammered and kicked at the heavy door, and someone tried to batter it down with an axe. Cissie Reilly had woken up John McNally, another young live-in assistant at Sullivan’s and they had been joined by others, including the young men working at Fegan’s who had recently returned home from the badminton party. Louis Blessing had already run up the road to the Garda station to alert the police and had returned. James Meehan, the taxi driver, hearing the commotion, drove down from the Farnham Arms, blew his car horn in an attempt to wake the nuns and then, urged by Blessing, drove off to get the steward of the convent’s farm, in the hope that he would have some way of entering the buildings. Just as they returned, Mary Caffrey was opening the convent door. They all rushed in and Mary showed some of the men to the laundry.
     
    A scene of noise and confusion rapidly developed. With the exception of the steward, few of the rescuers had any knowledge of the layout of the buildings with their maze of inter-connecting rooms, corridors, stairways and doors,