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Earlier this year a nun, Sister Alphonso, was convicted in Aberdeen of being cruel towards the children in her care in a children's home in the city. But is abuse all relative?

Nicola Barry recalls her days at the hands of the nuns she encountered - at a convent boarding school - and compares them with the turmoil she had to face back at home.

Stand in a hot cupboard all night, kiss dead nuns, make young girls sleep with their arms folded over their chest, force food down children's throats.

Where have I heard all this before?

In my convent days in Sussex during the Sixties.

Not only did I hear about these things, but they were done to me, to us, to thousands of children throughout Britain.

I was frequently locked in a hot cupboard, the place where boarders used to dry their underwear, and told to spend five hours learning Cicero's letters.

And, yes, we had to queue whenever one of the nuns died, then walk round their bodies, mumbling the odd prayer and plant a kiss on the cold, dead cheek.

I was told off repeatedly for refusing to eat the fat on meat. I hated gristle and fat. It made me sick. I was told by the nuns to think of the starving millions.

When I still refused, I was taken out into the freezing corridor and made to stand there until I ate the piece of fat. I can still taste it now. Vomiting did not get you off the hook.

Worst of all, we had our underwear inspected every night by the nuns. If they considered our underwear was not dirty, we were not allowed to wash it, but had to wear it again the next day. Nor were we allowed to wash our hair more than once a fortnight.

I washed mine every three days and got caught only once, but I had to clean the school all day one weekend as a punishment.

The case of tight-lipped Marie Theresa Docherty, alias Sister Alphonso, has been decidedly disturbing to say the least.

I am glad she was convicted for some of her activities - most notably for the way she repeatedly battered the children in her care.

Some of the other charges, however, have struck me over the weeks as utterly ridiculous. Many of them happened to us regularly at our school. In fact, Sister Alphonso's trial has confirmed my belief that abuse is well and truly in the eye of the beholder. Abuse is a relative term.	'The nuns put me on the road to comparative normality after a weird life at home'

At my convent, I was the beholder. Suffice to say that I preferred our strict regime in Sussex to being at home where my mother suffered from a mental illness.

A number of the nuns at my school were also mentally ill, I suspected. Certainly, some of the behaviour I witnessed was very strange, indeed. But their behaviour did not impinge on me as much as did my own mother's. In short, I preferred school.

Rather the deep-blue sea than the devil you know.

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