Nun beat me and forced me to kiss her feet, court told

As a child, Helen Cusiter was forced to kiss a nun's feet to get permission to go swimming, she told a court yesterday. She also had to kneel in a corridor overnight at the children's home and she was "battered" two or three times a week, Aberdeen Sheriff Court was told.

As a child, Helen Cusiter was forced to kiss a nun's feet to get permission to go swimming, she told a court yesterday. She also had to kneel in a corridor overnight at the children's home and she was "battered" two or three times a week, Aberdeen Sheriff Court was told.

Mrs Cusiter, now 43, was giving evidence in the trial of Marie Docherty, 58, also known as Sister Alphonso in the Roman Catholic order of the congregation of the Poor Sisters of Nazareth. She faces 23 charges of cruel and unnatural treatment of girls between 1965 and 1980.

Mrs Cusiter, who was at Nazareth House in Aberdeen from 1967 to 1971, when she was 10 to 14, said Sister Alphonso would hit her with her fist or a hairbrush. Once, when she stole sweets from a shop after being refused permission to have them, the nun hit her so badly she was left bleeding and with a piercing headache, the court was told.

She said: "It was one of the really severe ones where her veil had come off and she was bright red like a lobster. She was really going at it hammer and tongs, punching, kicking me, hair getting pulled, thrown against the beds, against the wall. All over the room really."

Mrs Cusiter's voice shook as she described how the nun would lift up her habit for her feet to be kissed. "It was so degrading, humiliating."

She wept as she told the court that when Sister Alphonso pushed her off a swing, her head hit a wall, smashing four of her front teeth. "I hit it face-on and my mouth burst open and my teeth were broken," she said. She was made to wait a few days for the swelling to go down before she was taken to a dentist, and was told to say she had tripped and fallen.

She said in 1992 she returned to Nazareth House for a brief visit and saw Sister Alphonso for the first time in 20 years. "She started going on about did I remember much about my childhood and I said yes, I remember the beating." The nun told her she had been following orders.

The case continues.