Review: "Girl in the Tunnel" by Maureen Sullivan

Girl in the Tunnel by Maureen Sullivan
Published April 2023 via Merrion Press
★★★

Sullivan grew up poor in Ireland when growing up poor in Ireland meant owning only one or two outfits, sleeping piled up with your siblings in one bed because the house was too cold to do otherwise, and going without food because there wasn't enough to go around. Her father died young, and her mother remarried—and the only person whom the marriage benefitted was the new husband.

At twelve, Sullivan finally told a teacher how bad things were at home. The teacher sought help for her in the form of a convent boarding school—and instead Sullivan was sent to the Magdalene Laundries. Kept separate from the other children her age, she was put to work doing laundry, day in and day out, as penance for having been abused.

I told on him, didn't I? That was the crime. That's what happened. I told the Church that my stepfather was molesting and raping me, and beating me and my brothers.

So they punished me for it. (7)

It was a life of misery and of drudgery—not allowed to continue her education, not allowed to be friendly with the other inmates, not allowed to speak to the children who were at the convent boarding school. Sullivan was perhaps the youngest inmate of the Magdalene Laundries (at least within the time frame when she was held there), and it was years and years before she understood why the powers that be had deemed it appropriate to put her there in the first place.

Day in, day out those nuns, those women and others like them, watched me at twelve, thirteen, fourteen and on until I was nearly an adult, work to the bone. They watched me, but not only that, they made it as hard for me as they could. They made me do hard time, hard penance, for a crime a man had committed against me. Something I had no control over. If I had taken a knife and gutted Marty Murphy like I had often dreamed about, at least prison would have let me go to school. (114)

The descriptions of the nuns are perhaps telling. Obviously I do not sympathise for a second with the choice to effect such terrible and ongoing punishment on an abused child, but Sullivan also makes a point about the nuns having in many ways dreadful lives of their own—more comfortable than the life they afforded Sullivan in the Laundries, certainly, but not happy ones. Not happy creatures. Sullivan does not sympathise, exactly (how could she, when neither did they?), but it's a fascinating perspective.

I'm reminded, a little, of more and more horror stories coming out about residential schools in Canada—these are stories that need to be told while those who lived the stories are still around to tell them.