A nun had sex with a workman as youngsters from an Aberdeen children's home acted as lookout.

There were gasps from a group of robed sisters in the public benches as the claim was made at Aberdeen Sheriff Court where Marie Docherty 58, also known as Sister Alphonso, denies 23 charges of child cruelty dating back 35 years.

According to one of the former charges of the Poor Sisters of Nazareth, the nuns who ran the Claremont Street home were "no angels".

And one member of the order had been having an affair, said Helen Cusiter. "She would put one of the children on lookout for her while she was fornicating."

Earlier the court heard that Sister Alphonso, accused of beating and force feeding children, had allegedly told Mrs Cusiter years later that she had "only been following orders".

Mrs Cusiter told of a chance meeting with the nun in 1992 when she went back to Nazareth House to visit another nun.

When she saw Sister Alphonso, Mrs Cusiter, now 43, started shaking as she went "spiralling back in time" and remembered the beatings. She claimed the nun asked her to go upstairs for a talk.

"Sister Alphonso started going on about 'did I remember much about my childhood?' and I said, yes, that I remembered the beatings.

"She said 'You have got to understand that I was only following orders at that time and it was not until I left Aberdeen and had a smaller group of children that I realised what the ones in Aberdeen had to suffer'."

After the meeting, Mrs Cusiter said that she started having flashbacks and panic attacks.

"I got this thing into my head that if things ever happened to me she would get my two children and do the same to them as she did to me."

Mrs Cusiter told the court she had some form of breakdown and has since had counselling from a psychiatric team and an occupational therapist.

She, eventually, she went to the police in 1996.

Later under corss-examination by the nun's defence counsel Paul Cullen QC, Mrs Cusiter denied maintaining "a good deal of contact" with the nuns at Nazareth House.

"Only with Sister Columbine," she said. "It was not all the nuns that were bad, there were just a few."

Mrs Cusiter also claimed that the nuns at Nazareth House had lied about a suggestion that she had asked for her daughter to be baptised there.

And she claimed a glowing tribute to the nuns, purporting to be in her writing, in their visitors' book, was a fabrication.

The trial continues.

This story was first published in the Aberdeen Evening Express