Lonesome Stray

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The story is based on my life in Institutions in Ireland in the 1930s and ‘40s, and my subsequent disposal (their word) to a strange woman who took me to an even stranger outside world. As a seventeen-year-old, free for the first time I made my way to the UK to join the forces. Christmas and free time were spent on camp or travelling to different parts of the country, staying overnight at YMCAs and Bed and Breakfast places. That was until, in a small mining village in Co. Durham, I’d found the love I’d never known, in the form of an eighteen-year-old factory girl whom I married three years later. It was not until 2006 did I discover why I’d spent my formative years in State custody. Under the Freedom of Information Act, offical documents reveal, I was charged as a two year old at Dublin District Court with receiving Alms. The named judge ordered me to be detained till my sixteenth birthday. I was placed in the custody of the Sisters of Charity in Co. Kilkenny until the age of ten, when I was considered old enough to start work. As a lone child I was transferred to the custody of the Christian Brothers at the notorious 'Artane’ Industrial School on the outskirts of Dublin City. Those six years stained my very soal.