By Bernie Bell

Here’s a tale, a true tale……………I know it’s true, because the lads (adoptive) mother, was my Mum’s doctor.

Some years ago, when on holiday in Ireland, Mike and I met a lad who told us this tale……………

He’d been adopted, when he was a little boy. Before that, he’d lived at an orphanage, which was also a convent.  The convent had its own chapel, with attached graveyard.  The nuns tended to choose the same names, like families do, sometimes, and so, there were graves there, with names on the head stones, of past nuns, which were the same names, as the present nuns.  Using a child’s view of the world, this little lad had come to the conclusion that the graves, were where the nuns, slept at night!  He thought that each night, the nuns retired to their graves, to sleep, to awake refreshed to carry on terrorizing the children, the next day!

He believed this to be so, for years, and the graveyard really gave him the creeps.  It was only when he got older, that he rationalized it, to being that the nuns liked to use the same names, within that order.

Imagine how that little lad, was seeing the world around him – nuns that were teaching him in the day, retiring to their lairs at night, out in the churchyard, below the window of the dormitory where he was sleeping.  Now that, is creepy.