Sorrowful mysteries etched into bleeding fingers
By FINTAN O'TOOLE

STRANGELY enough, of all the images in Louis Lentin's superb documentary film on Goldenbridge orphanage, the most disturbing for me was not one of the violent ones - a child deliberately scalded with boiling water or beaten with a club until her whole leg from ankle to hip burst open. We see so much brutality on the screen that most of us, I suppose, have learned how to shield ourselves from it. The really searing image was more mundane and less dramatic. It was the group of middle aged women sitting at their desks in the classroom, re enacting the endless hours they spent from the age of four onwards making rosary beads.

It was terrible because, after 30 years, they could still do it apparently without having to think. They could look into the camera and talk powerfully and coherently, and all the while their hands were working away on their own, the wire strung over one forefinger, a kind of pliers held in the palm, the beads in the other hand. They had to do 60 lots a day after school, stringing together 600 beads, 60 decades of the rosary uttered not with the lips or in the head but in the flesh and bone of raw, trembling fingers.

The prayer's sorrowful mysteries and ascendant sighs, the mourning and weeping in this valley of tears, were, literally, etched into these women's bodies. The wire wore a groove into the top of the finger, so that it sat in an open wound while the children strung it with beads. Sometimes pieces of glass from the beads splintered off into a child's eye. Even now, decades later, if you looked closely at the woman's hand while she spoke and worked, you could see that the inside of her thumb still had the mark of those countless hours of cruel drudgery.

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