"Posthumously published, this courageous and deeply personal memoir recounts emotional and physical abuse inflicted by nuns in mid-century Dublin."
“Nuns being abusive? How could they? They were servants of God. They were revered and feared in equal measure by the community. But behind the doors of the church they were simply just feared by the children they ruled over”. So author Suzanne Walsh shares in the opening pages of Vow of Silence, breaking her silence in the hope “it will help other victims come to terms with what happened”. This also sets the style and tone for the rest of this affecting memoir, beginning with the first terror Walsh and her siblings experienced when they were left with nuns as a result of their daddy dying and Mammy having to leave Ireland to find work in London.
What follows is a harrowing, unflinching account of daily beatings, neglect and starvation to the point that “we were in our own hell every single day with no one to tell or turn to.” Though their mother returned after four years, the abuse the siblings’ experienced remained a secret - “We never told anyone what happened - certainly not our mother - after we were constantly threatened by the nuns. It was a secret we kept as children and had kept with us for more than 50 years – until the Ryan Commission was introduced by the Irish Government in 1999”. Through the author’s story we are afforded insights into the post-WWII poverty that forced working class families to entrust their children to orphanages, making it both a powerful personal memoir and a poignant record of horrific chapters in British social history.
| Primary Genre | Biographies & Autobiographies |
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