Daphne Mcdonald
They weren’t really kind at all
Daphne:
We finished up in an orphanage, my sister and I.
Rob:
Did you?
Daphne:
Hm.
Rob:
Do you want to talk about that?
Daphne:
It was the Mater Dei Orphanage at Narellan. (sp) It was run by the Sisters of the Good Samaritans, and they weren’t really kind at all, that lot. (laughs) If a girl broke a plate, she was caned in front of the whole school. On a Sunday morning, you’d all line up, and, as, we didn’t have anything like that because we were so young. See, I was only five, and my sister would have been six.
And, we, well one day there, we were running down the hill and she fell over and broke her arm. I was always a podgy little thing, and my sister was rather thin. And I always remember this, one of the nuns said to me, “No wonder she broke her arm, a big fat thing like you falling on top of her,” (laughs) And I thought that was a terrible thing to say, because I would have died for her, you know, we were, just the two of us we were so close together and, my mother had gone to work to try and earn some money so that she could go and train to be a nurse. And when my sister broke her arm, and they had to call for a carriage to come out from Camden, because there were no motorcars, and, we were waiting that night, I was watching for the light on, on the carriage coming on the road, and I was waiting outside the room and they brought her in, and they gave her a peach. And I was so hungry I ate the skin. (laughs) Now that’ll tell you something about the meals. They threw the skin out and I picked it up and ate it.
It seemed to wash over me that, in the orphanage – my sister and I were just so close together, that we just… and I remember my mother promised that she would always take me out of the orphanage before I turned six, and she did, but we went straight into the other convent, which was a big surprise! (laughs) And they were strict there. Hm. I remember getting a dreadful belting once. I was blue from the, the knees to the back. Made to lie on the bed and belted with a clothes brush – the back of a clothes brush.
