The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting by Evanna Lynch

Author:Evanna Lynch [Lynch, Evanna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2021-10-19T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

As it turned out, my parents had not spent their evening in London at the theatre or a Michelin-starred restaurant enjoying an artisan cheese board. Later, I learned that they had staggered out the door of Peaceful Pastures and wandered away, feeling lost and shaken. Then, like any frightened Irish person who finds themselves shuffling around the mean streets of a vast foreign city, their heart crying out for the smell of homemade stew and overly familiar neighbours, they had found themselves appealing to God and been irresistibly drawn towards a holy place, a convent of nuns that they’d been told of that stood just a hundred yards up the road from the clinic. They had knocked on the door to the convent, two desperate strangers from the street, unheralded and empty-handed, and were immediately escorted to the parlour, whereupon they were met by the Mother Superior, Sister Paula, a cheerful, practical Donegal woman, who sat them down and listened quietly as they recounted the day’s events, punctuating their tale of woe with murmurs of empathy and understanding. When my dad finished speaking, she nodded, posed no questions and simply said: ‘We can help you. But first, will you have something to eat?’

Later on, Sister Paula had shown my parents to accommodation in the grounds of the convent. She gave them keys to the building and said they could stay there as often as they needed to, so they forewent their booking at a nearby hotel and spent the night – and every other visit to London after that – tucked up cosily amid the Sisters of Charity. Years on, both parents still talk of the Sisters with misty-eyed appreciation. ‘Say what you will about the Catholic church,’ my mum – an occasional verbal correspondent of God, but not an especially religious person – says anytime the church comes under fire ‘…but those nuns were real-life angels to us during that time.’

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.