In a tiny flat in Colchester ten years ago Frances Reilly gathered up the courage to face her demons.

She hadn’t been able to talk about what had happened to her as a child in an orphanage in Belfast; instead, her psychiatrist told her to write.

As the words formed, Frances began to feel release. For the first time in 30 years she was not hiding away.

Everything was tumbling out – the brutality, the loneliness, the fear, the guilt.

Now she has turned those notes into a book, Suffer Little Children. Every word of that title is still heartfelt.

Today, Frances lives in a comfortable, three-bedroom home in Wivenhoe with one of her children, Darren, and her 11-year-old grandson.

There is nothing here to suggest Frances’s horrific past. It’s all normal and cosy – a handsome Christmas tree stands in the sitting room, Christmas stockings hang from the mantlepiece, waiting to be filled, the cup of tea is just how it should be.

And Frances? She is petite, dark and not physically ravaged by the demons. Her eyes are bright, direct and they tell me she is pleased to see me.

“Where do I begin?” she asked, in her Belfast accent.

“How about at the beginning, when you and your sisters were left with the nuns at the orphanage?”

“Abandoned, we were abandoned,” she declared.

“It was 1957. I was three. My younger sister was only eight weeks old. A babe in arms.”

She cannot remember what was going through her head as her mother left. She cannot even remember if she cried. All she remembers are the nuns.

“The orphanage was run by a convent, and the nuns were from the order of the Poor Sisters of Nazareth.

“From the beginning, we were physically abused.

“They believed cleanliness was next to godliness, so all the girls were scrubbed with (cleaning) fluid and beaten for the least thing.

“We had sticks broken over our backs for looking at a nun the wrong way and for bringing the devil into the orphanage.”

“And how were you supposed to have done that?”

“We never found out. But a nun would come into the dormitory and pretend to find the devil under a bed.

“Then she would scoop him up and throw him out of the window and demand to know who had let him in. They said it was their duty to beat the devil out of us.”

So, they didn’t much like children?

“I don’t think they liked anything, except beating us. I think they got something out of it, some pleasure. They were sadistic, deviants.”

In 1998, Frances began her civil action for abuse against the convent.

The case went from the High Court in London to Belfast, to the House of Lords and back to Belfast. Earlier this year, a decade later, she settled the suit against the convent, the first person in Northern Ireland to fight a successful action against the order.

“The settlement was very favourable and what I wanted,” she smiled.

“But this isn’t over yet – at least, not for the order. There are hundreds of cases being brought against the order in Scotland and many more in Northern Ireland.”

Frances never knew her father; none of her siblings did.

“It wasn’t until much later that we discovered we all had different dads and my mother had no idea who or where they were.”

Frances did not see her mother again for 21 years. Then she tracked her down to London. She believes her mother, who is now dead, had been a prostitute.

“When we came face-to-face, mum just laughed. She had been drinking whisky and was drunk.

“When I asked her why she had dumped us at the orphanage, she replied ‘When you grew up, I knew you would take my men’. Nothing more. She was probably talking about prostitution.”

Frances saw her mother regularly over the next two years. Then, when she began meeting brothers she never knew she had, it became too much. She severed contact.

“After she died, I did not feel anything. She had left us at that place without a thought for our welfare. How could any mother do that?”

Frances was married at 16 and, before she was 20, had three children. That relationship has long gone, but she still keeps contact with her children.

She settled in Essex in the late 1980s with her second husband, Kevin, who was in the RAF. Although they are now divorced, they are still best friends and have two children, Darren, and Chris, a civil engineer.

But this is no fairytale happy ending. Frances’s life at the orphanage and her relationship – or lack of – with her mother left her mentally scarred.

She still has obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), is over-protective of her children and grandchildren and finds it difficult to socialise outside the family.

God? She shakes her head.

“The nuns said they were married to God and were doing his bidding. I prayed to God to be rescued, but, in the end, the only person who was going to help me was me.”

Then she smiles.

“But this is going to be a good Christmas – and I’m so excited. In three weeks my book will be in all the bookshops. I’m an author!”

  • Suffer Little Children, by Frances Reilly, published by Orion, is on sale from mid-January.