So, okay, from time to time I’d make a small cut – just a tiny little cut – into the nerve that holds the hand closed, and bang, it would spring open, and that became: ‘They crippled them!’

The media was going on about it – once the nerve is cut, you can’t use the hand any more – but those kids weren’t using their hands before I cut the nerve! They weren’t feeding themselves, or sitting reading. They were vegetables, unless you count the way they’d try to scratch their own eyes out.

The other thing people forget is that I was trained at all these things – I’m a nurse! – so it was no problem to me to modify the hand, or make the tongue a bit shorter or to do whatever else had to be done with the stomach tubes. And yes, we did use stomach tubes to feed them, or most of them, because how many hours do people think there are in a day? Was I supposed to sit there and spoon-feed nineteen children three times a day? Clean up after nineteen children after they’ve dropped food all down their chin?

People said, ‘Some of them were so skinny! You can’t have been feeding them properly because of how skinny some of them were!’ That’s rubbish too. The skinny ones were skinny because they pulled their stomach tubes out. That was their choice to do that, not my choice, and they couldn’t expect to get another meal because there were no other meals, so the ones who pulled their tubes out got skinny, and the tube kids got nice and fat.

People say that’s cruel, and they can say what they like, but the fact of the matter is Delaney House was as quiet as any other house on the street, which is another way of saying I ran that place like clockwork, and the only person who had a problem with it was that silly sister of mine, Agnes Bloody Moore.

Snow

Chapter Twenty-one

Those of you who have been following Snow’s letters closely will know that last letter was the first time that Snow admitted her sister did have a problem with what she was doing at Delaney House. She didn’t say what it was, but that is still more than she has ever told police.

I know that because I got hold of the transcript of the first conversation Snow had with police – technically, I suppose it was an interview – after her trial, using the Freedom of Information laws.

I’m going to run through a few of the important points here, but the first thing you should know is that there is a special squad of officers within the New South Wales police force whose identities are always kept secret. It’s called JERT, which stands for the Juvenile Emergency Response Team, and its members deal only with crimes against children.

When Snow Delaney was taken in after the raid on Delaney House it was JERT officers who led the questioning. Two officers – by law, one of them had to be female – sat down in chairs on one side of an old police desk, facing her, with a video recorder mounted in the corner of the room.