The Girl Nobody Wants: A Shocking True Story of Child Abuse in Ireland by Lily O'Brien

dry bed again. However, most evenings when I got back into bed, the smell from the sheets was so bad that I would gag and choke for the first few minutes until I got used to the smell again, and I would get dizzy from the fumes off the sheets, but eventually I would fall asleep. I slept in the bed for months until the smell got so bad that I couldn’t sleep or even stay in the bedroom without coughing or choking, so I decided to change the sheets myself; but we never had any, so I went out and I stole some from other people’s washing lines.
    Over the next few months, our situation went from bad to worse and I never heard a thing about mum, our aunty hardly ever came around to see if we were ok and we soon realised that we had to look after ourselves if we were going to survive, as no one else was going to do anything for us. We knew that our dad loved us, but that was about as far as he would commit himself to us; he would never look after us and he used any money he had to drink himself stupid, down at the pub every day. I found it very difficult adjusting to my new life in Ireland and it just became harder and harder for me every day and because we had very little food to eat, if any at all, I began to lose weight fast. My older brothers and sisters could see the state that I was in, so they began to take me out with them each day and they explained to me that I could get potatoes, carrots and other root vegetables from the fields if I used my hands to dig for them.
    And while we were in one of the fields and they showed me how to dig into the earth, I had a go and I managed to dig up some carrots, but we couldn’t cook them so they told me to eat them raw. I shock the carrots and rubbed the dirt from them with my hands and then I put a carrot into my mouth and I dug my teeth into it, but I couldn’t chew it. The carrot was so hard that my teeth became stuck and everyone laughed at me, and I had to pull on the carrot to get it out of my mouth and I thought my teeth were going to come out with it. I was hungry and felt like crying, so one of my bigger brothers took the carrot from me and he put the carrot into his mouth and he began to chew the carrot for me and then he spat the bits out into one of his hands and he gave the bits to me to eat.
    He said that my teeth were baby teeth and I was too small and weak to chew the food, and everyone thought it was funny, including me. The farmers knew what we were doing in the fields, but they never stopped us and the only time we got shouted at or chased by them was when we ran past the small farmers’ shops in the village and we took an apple or a turnip to eat from outside the front of the shops. We would grab at anything and then run off into the fields with it and hide until we had finished eating what we had stolen.
    Most mornings before I left the house, my brother Ted would grab Daisy, Simon and me, because we were the smallest and the easiest of the kids to pick on, and he would make us all stand in line in front of him while he gave us our orders for the day. One of my jobs was to pick up all the fag butts and all the round pebbles that I could find along the roads around the village. The fag butts were for him and my older brothers to make their own fags with and the pebbles were for him to use in his slingshot. He told me that the pebbles had to be perfectly round to do the most damage and if I didn’t get it right, he would shoot me with the pebbles that would not work well for him, so I had to get it right or I would be in trouble.
    I had to do this for him every morning; even when it was cold and raining, he still sent me out and I had to walk along the road looking down on the surface for pebbles and fags. But after a while, my back would ache from bending over and I would feel sad for most of the time, but I had no choice, as it was my job. Then, when I had finished, I would hand Ted the pebbles and he would go out and use them around the village, doing as much