I was picking up the Small Child today from school and found myself parked ouside a property that shares a common fence with the school ground/ This house has been here since before I went to school there 30 years ago only now if is adjacent to the back wall of the kid’s new art block… but back in the 70s it was where our monkey bars and swings were.
Every day when I stop outside this house I have a fleeting memory of someone we called Window Willy’. There was a man who lived in that house for the whole seven years I went to primary school there and he got that nickname because he was in the habit of occasionally standing in the window in his bathrobe and flashing his naked form to the kids playing on the monkey bars. No shit. Everyone in the school knew about Window Willy, even the teachers. They would tell us ‘Stay away from the fence children and don’t look up at his windows”. They pretty much gave the impression they thought he was harmless.
I don’t know if there was any action taken by the school in relation to Window Willy back then but the manner in which it was generally tolerated or ignored astounds me now that I’m a parent myself. As it turns out a few years ago I found out that there was a priest in our parish around the same time who WAS meddling with children from the school. The Year 7 girls used go over to the priory and cook and clean for Fr Fitzmaurice as part of their ‘Home Economics’ classes and it seems Fr Fitzmaurice used to take liberties with the girls by getting them in a closet or cubby of some sort and he abused untold number of girls there during his tenure. It turns out that many of the women in the parish knew Fr Fitzmaurice was a bit ‘handsy’ but no one did anything about it. (Link to Broken Rites about Fr Fitzmaurice) Unbelievable.
Well all I have to say about all this is thank fuck things have changed! I’m parked outside Window Willy’s place today thinking about all this crap and wishing it was mandatory for anyone living in the vicinity of a school to have a Blue Card.
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