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wedidn’t hear her coming. Suddenly she would appear and she would just stand at the door with a big smile on her face. That was what she used to do! She would never
say
anything.
    Teresa Mee, a nun seconded to Killiney for six months, once saw a young Holy Child girl running furiously down the corridor (not allowed) and as she turned the corner she ploughed into Mother St Dominic. The girl was horrified at what she had done. Mother St Dominic, seeing the extent of the child’s mortification, drew herself up to her full height, let loose a great smile across her face and commanded, ‘Do it again!’
    Maeve liked to say that the nuns, who had only just arrived in Ireland, were utterly unaware of what they had got themselves into. Unable to understand the Irish accent, they were putty in the girls’ hands; the girls could tell them anything and they’d believe it.
    For her part, the shrewd Mother St Dominic used to play along with this and respond that given the choice between teaching natives on the Gold Coast of Africa (another mission of the Society of the Holy Child) and fulfilling her missionary duty among middle-class Irish girls in County Dublin, the Gold Coast presented itself as distinctly preferable!
    There was a happy atmosphere at Killiney and a compassionate one, with attention to the individual a priority. Mother’s great strength was to instil self-esteem in her girls by finding something in each one of them to admire. ‘She had the most wonderful insight into each of us,’ said Susan McNally. ‘It had an incredible binding effect on all of us.’ It worked like this: ‘Shehad a room downstairs where she would have little chats with you. She always used to say, “Come in Susan, close the door, sit down, now what’s on your mind?” You could pour your heart out to her.’ Every girl availed herself of these ‘chats with Mother’.
    As the fathers of Maeve and Geraldine hoped, Mother’s regime also prepared the girls for a fast-changing world in which women were already gaining ground. One of Maeve’s early articles for the
Irish Times
praises nuns for being at the forefront of career guidance , which at the time barely existed in Ireland. ‘They no longer look out on the wicked world from behind cloistered walls and urge their girls to seek similar shelter,’ she wrote. ‘People would say there was something about the Holy Child girls,’ agrees Valerie. ‘They would stand up. They were able to express themselves. They were able to have an opinion about things.’
    Independent thinking did not extend to religion, however, which was dispensed with Jesuit intensity. From the moment Maeve arrived in 1950 she entered what she later referred to as her ‘religious maniac’ phase.
    At school ‘our Catholic faith permeated everything’, says Valerie.
    Everything we thought about, said or did during the school day. The first class of the day was Christian doctrine. We said a prayer before each lesson and we said grace before meals. The boarders attended daily Mass and evening prayer in the school chapel. We had a yearly retreat and at the end we exchanged holy pictures with something personal inscribed on the back.
    In
Light a Penny Candle
, Elizabeth’s friend Monica cannot believe that at the convent they pray before every class, even before maths and history. The novel captures beautifully the innocence and unquestioning beliefs of Maeve’s younger self and her friends during their time at the Holy Child. As Elizabeth White is a Protestant evacuee from England she knows nothing of Irish or Catholic ways. All must be explained to her, like the concept of ‘limbo’, for example, which Catholics believe to be a place where dead babies are held; not having been baptised they are in a state of original sin and cannot be admitted to Heaven. The idea of masses of innocent dead babies hanging in some remote space, in endless twilight, would be macabre in any other context, but in the convent with