And you could hang out by the stairs that led to the second floor, just by the massive impenetrable and mysterious timetabel that was colour coded on the wall, and watch the girls go by. Every morning we hung out there in various combinations, me, Jim, Eugene, Gary, Scragie Hammill, Martin Keenan, sometimes even girsl would join us. The convent part of this school remained, though, the riotously gorgeous gardens an unreachable paradise behind the high glass windowns of the sixth form corridor.

The old part was linked by two glass sided corridors that descended like portals back in time to the years when the place was an all girls grammar school. It smelt different down there in the older part of the school, the floors not plastic and brightly coloured. Instead, parquet flooring and wooden boards and carpet, the stairs worn smooth and the heavy velvet curtains hanging on the high windows of the assemply hall - they seemed like a throwback not just to grammar school days but to some exotic theatrical past none of us knew about. And down at the farthest end, like wandering deeper and deeper into a dark forest, the place seemed to become more and more lightless, past the hall, through two sets of doors and into the recresses of the place, where there descended a set of stairs to the convent quarters itself. Down there was where they lived, the nuns, in the quiet and the dark where statues of various saints were waiting in shadowy alcoves to pounce on some unsuspecting youngster scurrying past on an errand or to a music lesson. From the bright shiny modernity of the news school to the darkeing, smokey gloom of the old school where dwelt the deepest sins and desires. It was all very Freudian.

All of this came back to me while talking to Sister Peg Murphy, who features in this episode. The nuns we knew, we never really suspected they had a life outside - they seemed like impediemnts or a bit like those statues - waiting for a misstep so they could grab you and punish you in accordance with the high laws of the church, whatever they were. And yet of course they had their lives and their dreams and their loves and thier sorrows. When I met Sisiter Peg, the narrowness of my view of the life of a sister was laid cruelly bare, for here was an Irish sister who was funny, humane, immediately recoignisable to me the way older women of a certain age are to me even today, and politically liberal, even in the teeth of the opposition of a hostile and authoritarian church. Indomitable, a personification of humility, of living the gospel in the truest sense, of kindness and of love.

You can read more about Sisiter Peg Murphy here:

https://www.gaffneyfuneralhome.com/obituaries/SrMargaret-MurphyOP

Recorded in Tacoma, Washington, around 2011.

Thanks for listening. See you next time.

Dominic