Christina Noble

The facts are…
Deep breath.
The facts are red ants making their bed in the skin of an infant’s skull.
The facts are pimps swarming around child prostitutes, the bui doi, the street kids of Ho Chi Minh.
The facts are children living in sewers in Mongolia, children killing children, children eating children.
The facts are too horrible to contemplate.
But they must be contemplated, because they must be contemplated, but also because they make up the vertebrae of her story.
Her story’s the thing.
Her story’s a knotted, blackened thing growing out of the worst human suffering, reaching like branches for some sort of heaven hewn out of hell on earth as it is in heaven on earth as it is in hell on earth as it is in heaven…
We could go on. We will go on.

She’s seen that hell and that heaven. She seen those children who have somehow endured and outlived unimaginable horrors, who were given the death sentence of no hope and beat it, wretches left for dead who survived, and then thrived.

Christina Noble was born in the Dublin slums two days before Christmas in the year 1944. Her mother married a bare-knuckled brawler who drank what money there was. When Christina was 10 her mother died, and she and her three siblings were split up and sent to separate orphanages.

She spent four years institutionalised in the west of Ireland, believing her brother and sisters to be dead, before escaping back to Dublin to live on the streets, sleeping in a hole in the ground in Phoenix Park. She was gang raped, became pregnant and had a baby boy who was taken away for adoption against her will.

At the age of 18 she ran away to join her brother in England, where she later married and had three children. Over the next decade she endured domestic abuse, was beaten, miscarried, suffered bouts of depression and a nervous breakdown and was subjected to shock therapy.

In the early 1970s, as the Vietnam War dragged on, Christina had a dream similar to the famous film footage of naked Vietnamese children running from napalm. In it, those children begged her for help. Almost 20 years later in 1989, still haunted by that dream, she finally arrived in Ho Chi Minh City to set up her Children’s Foundation and over the next eight years sought to serve children in need of medical care and protection from economic and sexual exploitation.

Noble could be found on the street after dark, chasing leads, following word of mouth, looking for isolated children or families stricken by the direst poverty, but her work paid off, and the foundation established medical centres, outpatient clinics, dental and educational programmes, vocational and job placement schemes, English classes, the Sunshine School Music and Arts projects, residential centres and physiotherapy clinics.

In 1997 she expanded its activities to Mongolia, where it put in place prison education programmes, healthcare projects, sponsorship schemes for children and revolving loan systems. To date, the Christina Noble Children’s Foundation has helped an estimated 140,000 children. On February 25, she received an OBE from Prince Charles in Buckingham Palace, an honour she hopes will gain further credibility for her foundation.

Even now as she speaks, she simultaneously inhabits past and present, often embarking on long, almost Beckett-like stream of consciousness monologues, and the rhythm of that speech suggests something William Faulkner once said.

The past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past.

As a child on the streets Christina used to love it when the moon came out, because then the shadows would be banished, the shadows that were older than any words or names she could put on them, shadows of things that frightened her: the woman who combed her hair and keened all the time; the ghosts and phantoms and revenants; the people who were still living but acted as child catchers for the world below; ones who’d put you in a bag and carry you away and hack you into pieces. And she was afraid of anyone who wore a peaked cap, because that signified authority, childcare authorities, or the police.

But most of all she was afraid of the devil.

The fear gave way to weariness, the weariness gave way to more fear, and those dark nights seemed to go on forever, nights when her energy levels ebbed to those of the catatonic, especially at the soul’s hour, four o’clock, when she would wait and wait and wait for the curtains of the sky to part and slowly the sun would come up and burn off the ghosts again.

And on those mornings when she was woken by the stirring of the streets, the sounds of walking, the clip clop of horses’ shoes, and the chink of milk bottles, come six or seven o’clock she would make her move, because if she didn’t she would have to wait another hour or two until the big people, the normal people, had all gone to work. She wished she could be like them, not just wished, she ached to be like them, to be walking, moving, going somewhere, having somewhere to be; running for buses or hurrying to factories, not this endless, timeless purgatorial not-being until night time comes again.

And night time always came again, and with it, the horrible narcoleptic fear, the feeling of wanting to sleep forever to escape from that never ending paralysis nervosa, the constant anxiety at the prospect of being found, hiding in public toilets, breathing on her hands and feet to keep them warm, the chilblains, the constant hollow in the pit of the gut akin to a hunger, and then the real hunger, the starving fucking hunger, like a hole in herself, when she would eat anything: crab apples that gave her cramps, stuff hanging from the trees, even the warm candle drippings she guzzled down when she plucked up the courage to sneak into the church.

But then, in that church, she felt guilty about not having been to confession, afraid of dying with her soul in a state of sin, and being delivered unto him, the devil. And the whole cycle of fear and hunger and weariness would start again.

But when the moon came out everything was safe and bright. It made her feel as if her mother were watching over her, protecting her, the moon was her own patron saint. Except one night she saw the moon in the water, not the sky, and that water was beautiful and suffused with light, and she thought about going into it, and how lovely it would be not to have to wake up anymore, but just to float like Ophelia, surrounded by flowers and wreaths.

It wasn’t that she wanted to die. It was just that she didn’t want to live.

That was a long time ago. She sits back and lights one cigarette off the next, and swears she’ll quit, and goes as far as making to break the whole bunched bouquet of 18 cigarettes in half, but then allows herself be talked out of it. She looks across the sitting room of her terraced house in Lucan, filled with knick-knacks and rugs and pretty things from Mongolia and Vietnam.

Earlier in the afternoon the journalist had asked a question about how much bearing her own childhood had on the way she deals with the street kids. And now that she thinks of it, she never answered it, not really, just used it as a jumping off point for talking about something else.

But what she did tell him was that she was always a carer, even when her Mammy was alive. She knew the difference between her Mammy being a little bit sick and a lot sick. She would look after her little sisters and her brother, and she would go out on the streets and try to find her father and bring him home, because that meant her mother wouldn’t have to worry.

"My childhood was a shit childhood," she says to him now, "horrific, it was a nightmare, but I remember the good times in my childhood too, I remember the laughing, the climbing, the swinging over, the tap dancin’, the singin’, the jokes, the half moon cake with a bit o’ cream in it, the patsy pops, sittin’ on me dad’s lap with the harmonica. And I remember him smashed and pissed out of his head, his paralysis on one side, I remember asking people to help me drag him out of the canal, not once: over and over and over. I remember getting down on my knees in the fuckin’ freezing cold winter in the ice and begging God up to the sky, ‘Don’t let my daddy die’, ’cos I’d lost my Mam – to lose my dad was the end of the road. But we’d already lost him. We’d already lost him. He couldn’t be responsible for us any more. His brain was gone with intoxication from alcohol."

She thinks about the institutions back then, those years when she thought her brothers and sisters were gone and she was alone, and all the while they were going through the same thing.

"My brother Sean spent seven years in Artane and Letterfrack," she says. "He kept running away from Artane because of the horrors that went on in there. Double pneumonia, he nearly died in Galway hospital, he jumped into the bay; he said better to die in the Atlantic than in there. They fished him out and they left him standing all day and night in the freezing yard in his wet clothes, they took his shoes away from him. And then they told the boys they couldn’t play football because he’d run away, so the boys all beat the shit out of him."

She remembers asking her brother what was the worst thing, and he told her it was that they took all hope, they stripped him of dignity. But still, she says, they never took his soul. They made a pact between them in that black Maria, before they were scattered, they put their heads together and swore that no one would take their souls.

Those experiences, those memories taught her how to deal with the street kids. Don’t try and diagnose them. Don’t label them. Don’t plague them with questions. Let them come.

"You can look at street children and think they’re smart," she says, "because smartness comes with survival, but they’re not so wise, y’know what I mean, there’s a huge innocence to street children as well, there’s an awful lot goes on beyond the eyes. What you see is a little child who’s had to grow up fast, or appear on the surface to grow up fast, a child who’s had to fend for themselves on the streets, who is very vulnerable, who has no choices, and if they do it’s choosing between the gutter or a home with relatives that are gonna beat the shit out of them, or abuse them in a hundred different ways.

"Or they’re on the streets because they’re abandoned, or because of abject poverty they leave the little shacks in the countryside to go into the big cities to try and find food, money. They have a dream that they’re gonna take their family out of the poverty, that endless journey they go on, that’s their ultimate dream, that’s the light, that’s the hope. And if that means their bodies get sold over and over and over again, in the back of their heads they’re thinking, ‘I can get this money for my Mammy’.

"But then, as time goes on and they become more worn down and weary and disillusioned with the big people, they lose even that sense of direction, because then the pimps take them over and they end up earning for the pimps or the gang leaders or whatever. Eventually they have no choice but to belong to some family, so they’ll choose a gang or a gang will choose them.

"It’s a terrible life for a child," she continues. "A child without childhood doesn’t really exist, it walks the streets, it sees the sun, it feels the rain, it feels the hunger and it fuckin’ feels the pain, I’ll tell you now. And no one really hears their cries because most of the time their cries are silent; their soul fuckin’ weeps and sleeps most of the time. But the child also has to know exactly what’s around it ’cos it has to survive in a jungle of big people."

She pauses, thinking about that, thinking about the jungle of the big people, thinking there are good people in the world, people marching against war. But she also wonders why there aren’t mass demonstrations against the war on children that goes on every day.

"Nobody knows the exact numbers of street kids," she says. "They know it’s increasing every day, and they know as we speak another kid is killed. Right now, as I talk, another kid is put into the icy river to drown deliberately because the parent who’s looking after them can’t hack it anymore, right now another child is being put into a fire to be burned, I know for a fuckin’ fact they are, I know for a fact I’ll pick them up out of the ice when I go back to Mongolia. I know another whole gang of kids are going to be taken away and put into a fuckin’ brothel, and into pornographic movies, and snuff movies. The Soviet Union broke up, what have we got? Fuckin’ millions of street kids, subhuman, livin’ down the manholes, the fuckin’ sewers, I fuckin’ know, I go down the manholes, I bring ’em up. That’s a war yeah?"

The journalist asks her how she keeps herself from shutting off. And if she doesn’t shut off, how can she bear to go on. And Christina admits that she often asks herself that same question.

"I left the Gobi desert just a few days before Christmas," she says. "I’m going back next week, and I wish I didn’t have to go back, d’ya know? When I left there, I just said, I’m going to switch off everything I’ve seen, I have to switch it all off, I’ve done my best. But that’s hard to do when you come back and the lights are all glistening in people’s houses and around the city, and people are singing ‘Jingle Bells’ and kids are opening presents, and I think about the little frozen bodies. How do I pretend it doesn’t exist? It fuckin’ does exist. And the day I go into denial even on a superficial level is the day I’m not fit to do any good.

"But what I have to do is keep a balance on it, ’cos if I don’t I’ll just become an emotional wreck, and I can’t help them. I have to say, okay, I see all of that, but I also see the ones who have had their childhood given back to them, I think about the kids playing tennis and football in our foundation. I think about the kid who couldn’t walk who now walks and has had his dream to become a postman come true, okay? I think about the baby with no legs and no arms who can now read, and write with their mouth, and do a computer. I think about the boy who was born with no eyes and is now a lecturer in Economics. I think about 54 children who were born with no eyes and are now studying Braille.

"I think about a little baby abandoned in jungle territory and the red ants all laying eggs inside of her head, and they ate it out and made it their house, and she was there and her little big belly from all the worms and hepatitis, yellow from top to bottom, just sitting there, a little small baby, and the doctors said, ‘She’s dead, there’s nothing we can do’. And I said, ‘Is she dead? She’s not fuckin’ dead.’ And I blew up her nose. And I think about her being a seven-year-old kid today with a great mother and father and her pinching everyone’s high heels, crafty, with her big red ribbon on her head and her frock down to her ankles with little frills. And I think about the people who helped us. I think about the five pounds from the old woman in the café: ‘I know it’s not much, I feel a bit embarrassed to give it to you, but it’s all I can afford’.

"I think that another 50 kids made it. Another 100 kids. Another 1,000. Two thousand. Two hundred thousand.

"And I can go out and have a karaoke night and have a great sing-song because the kid, the one they called ET because of his big eyes because of his heart condition, he’s come through the operation, they’ve saved his life, they’ve done heart surgery on him.

"Who gave a fuck about his heart surgery three months ago when he was on the street? And a doctor from Ireland was over there with me, and I said, ‘See this kid here? This kid has been buggered so many times he doesn’t know his name anymore. See him, look, he can hardly breathe’. And that doctor looked at me and just broke down crying, and I said, ‘Would you examine him because I reckon he’s got heart failure.’ And he examined him the following day and he said, ‘Yeah, this kid is in heart failure, he needs urgent surgery or he’ll die’. Five men had been buggering him. And they gave him a t-shirt and a bicycle. And he was terrified someone was gonna take the bicycle away from him, which they did eventually. And we found it hard to get the release for his operation because his supposed aunt and uncle, they bought him or stole him as a baby, they needed him out earning, they had him begging from day one."

For Christina Noble, the Children’s Foundation is not the realisation of a dream, or the result of a dream, it is the same dream she conjured out of the hopelessness of her life as a street urchin and her existence was so dismal that she chose to dwell in her imagination, in her imaginary house, with her imaginary friends, reading imaginary books.

"I probably thought about goin’ to the fuckin’ moon before anyone else did outside of the Greeks and the Chinese," she laughs. "I had dreams of going to the moon and creating a whole world on the moon for children and it would be full of colour, it would have all houses of red and blue and gold and yellow, yellow would be the predominant colour, and the moon was yellow, and inside was this world where the big people couldn’t hurt the little people no more, ’cos we were up there and we were looking down and we would be safe and take care of the animals and the birds and all be friends.

"And then I had my house on the ground as well, which was the Guinness house with a blue door and a big brass knocker, and Mammy would come out in an apron like Doris Day and she’d say, ‘Oh, come on in now, it’s getting cold’, and I could even smell cakes cooking in the oven – they weren’t but I could smell them, could taste them – and there was a big, big armchair and a fire and everything was yellow and my father was sitting reading the paper with his pipe, and me Mam had an apron with little floral frills on it, and there was a proper cooker and there was cupboards with all coloured dishes with blues and reds and rusty colours and the colours of the forest.

"Can you imagine this amount of colour everywhere? And who could have such colour? Nobody. I was lucky, I had all this colour, I could see it, I could feel it, I could breathe it, I could touch it, hold it, and that’s what kept me sane and kept my soul alive. My soul was everything that I am and everything that I do today is because of that. It’s not because I’m a nice woman. I swear, I smoke; I tried to give up the fags. I don’t have any illusions about who I am or where I come from, I don’t think I’m a saint, I don’t think I’ll go to heaven. Maybe I’ll be a soul that goes around. But I believe that there is a supreme energy, I think you’d be a fool not to, any human being must believe there’s an energy supreme to us, because you can feel it if you go up the mountains, you can feel it all around you, it penetrates the earth. You feel it and you understand why life has the right to live and be nourished and grow old."

She considers what she has just said, and cracks up laughing. And she says this:

"Maybe I’m just an old fool, but who cares. It works for the kids."