‘Hush, I’m no Sister, I’m just a slave here,’ the other girl said scornfully. ‘That’s the way they treat us girls that had no dowry and no education. We’re here to do the dirty work. You’ll do OK if you came in with a dowry. They’ll send you teaching or nursing. The rich ones get away with murder, getting the easy jobs like sewing and working in the library. Come on, put your stuff away, and close your curtains to show your cubicle is taken. We’d better hurry or Agnes will come looking for us,’ Fausta urged, whisking the curtain halfway around the metal rail.

Brigid entered her new habitat and gazed around her – not that there was much to take in. The cubicle was surrounded by cream curtains that screened off the narrow single bed and a bedside locker on which rested a lamp and a ceramic wash bowl and jug. A wooden crucifix hung on the wall behind the bed. The bed itself looked even harder and lumpier than the bed at her granny’s, Brigid thought despondently. She placed her new apparel neatly in the bedside locker and followed Fausta back down the corridor to begin her new life.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The shock of her incarceration, the shared sleeping space, and her tiny cubicle were the hardest things to bear during those early weeks of her postulancy, when all Brigid wanted to do was to run home and hide. The prospect of being kept awake by her fellow inmates snoring, sobbing and rustling behind the privacy of their curtains at night made her frantic with worry that she wouldn’t sleep, because at five a.m. the harsh main lights were turned on by Mother Agnes, and Brigid would have to tumble out of bed, bleary-eyed, to kneel and pray at her bedside. Sometimes she fell asleep on her knees.

Brigid tried her best to read the Latin Office but she hadn’t got a clue what it meant. After a half hour in silent meditation they would file down to the long, narrow, tiled refectory for breakfast.

Brigid was amazed on her first morning to be served tea in a bowl. It was the French way, she was told, and as the congregation was ruled from France, they followed the Mother House’s rules and traditions.

In the days that followed, she and her fellow postulants, two Cork girls, a Dublin girl, and two Wexford girls, were introduced unceremoniously to the rigid daily regimes of the Soeurs du Secours Miséricordieux.

Porridge and brown bread and butter set them up for the day and prepared them for the duties ahead, which included clearing the tables, dusting the chapel, cleaning the dormitories, taking classes with Mother Agnes to study the Rule and the postulant’s manual they had been issued with.