Sister Bernadette recalls how she once struggled to wake her pupils at the Goldenstein convent boarding school. “They would plead with me: ‘just five more minutes’ snooze, Berna’”, she chuckled. More than 50 years on, the tables have been turned, with former pupils taking it in turns to wake the three remaining nuns at the convent. “Sister Bernadette in particular likes a lie-in,” said Christina Wirtenberger, one of their carers.
Sisters Bernadette, 88, Regina, 86, and Rita, almost 82, are still recovering from the shock of having run away on 4 September from a nearby retirement home where they had been placed – they say against their will – and broken back into their former convent, the imposing Schloss Goldenstein, in Elsbethen, just outside Salzburg.
