My Mother's Children: An Irish family secret and the scars it left behind.

by Annette Sills

  I have big news. Fancy meeting up for lunch tomorrow?

  I was surprised when she texted back straight away.

  Great. Got something to tell you too.

  I suggested the café in Central Library in town. It wasn’t far from her clinic and the library had recently had a spectacular refurbishment. I’d taken some students there recently and I wanted to show her.

  A curtain of drizzle was falling from an ashen-coloured sky as I stepped off the tram in St Peter’s Square. Central Library is Manchester’s Pantheon. It has white Corinthian columns, a two-storey portico and a dome façade. It stands out like a flying saucer above the red-brick industrial and gothic architecture that dominates the rest of the city. The recent refurbishment had transformed it. They’d created a new three-hundred-seater reading room, a gaming area with Xboxes and PlayStations and a children’s section in the basement based on The Secret Garden, one of my favourite childhood books. The dark stairwells and gloomy corridors that I remembered from my student days had been replaced by light and airy open spaces. Like a dried-fruit cake with its filling scooped out and replaced with sponge.

  I hurried towards the entrance steps past the small homeless camp that had sprung up outside. Tents and anti-austerity banners filled the passageway between the library and the gothic town hall next door. A frazzled woman with henna-pink hair and an Irish accent asked me for money. I immediately examined her face. I’d quickly developed a habit of scrutinising tall gangly types with fair hair who vaguely resembled Mikey or me. Or anyone with an Irish accent born around 1960. I’d even followed a couple of candidates down the street for further inspection before telling myself to cop on.

  And yet my sibling could easily be living on the streets. Maybe he or she hadn’t been adopted into a good family as I hoped, instead staying in the home and sent to one of the industrial schools and been scarred by neglect and abuse. The streets were teeming with damaged souls raised in institutions who’d never adjusted to normal life afterwards.

  I rummaged in my purse for some change, handed the woman a two-pound coin and made my way up the steps.

  Karen was sitting at the far end of the café on a grey retro sofa below a sepia image of marching suffragettes. Elegant in skinny jeans, a teal silk scarf and tan knee-length boots, she was talking intensely into her phone. She didn’t see me approach and, when she did, she ended the conversation abruptly. Looking flustered, she slipped the phone into the pocket of the camel coat beside her. I suspected Simon Whelan was on the end of that line. I felt like shaking her. How could she still be involved with him after everything that had gone on? But I hugged her instead. Our friendship was already strained. The last thing I wanted was to get into an argument about her love life.

  We joined the queue at the food counter and picked up trays. I put a Diet Coke and halloumi salad on mine and she opted for a thick green smoothie and goat’s cheese panini.

  She looked around. “Love the make-over. So light and spacious.”

  She paid for both meals, waving away the tenner I held out to her. “My treat,” she said, unaware of the smooth-skinned Eastern European behind the till giving her the eye.

  We sat back down on the sofa where we’d left our coats. It was lunchtime and the café was busy. Behind us a table of Chinese students were giggling and eating Lancashire Hot Pot and opposite an elderly couple in pastel-coloured rain-jackets were looking down at an iPad.

  I ripped the plastic off my salad. “How’s my gorgeous goddaughter doing these days?” I asked.

  Karen shifted in her seat. “She got an email last week about her place on the Erasmus programme.”

  “Really?” I dug my fork into a chunk of halloumi. “Already?”

  “She’s off to Rome in September.”

  “Rome. Wow.”

  Karen rolled her eyes and stirred her coffee. “Her dad’s pissed off because she’s chosen Italy and not Portugal or Brazil. He wanted her to improve her Portuguese.”

  “I didn’t realise she saw much of Marco.”

  She frowned and raised her goat’s cheese panini to her lips. “She sees more of him since she went to uni. He doesn’t live far from Sheffield now.”

  We chatted a bit more about Alexia and we ate. Karen seemed ill at ease. She took a few more bites of her panini then left it and her eyes kept darting around the café, unable to hold mine. She was usually such a cool customer and it was unlike her to be agitated. She’d always been good for me that way. Her calm confidence was a balm to my angsty nature and tendency to overthink things. She helped me talk things through and put things into perspective. I poured some of my Diet Coke into a glass and we reminisced for a while about the Old Trafford days when Alexia was a little girl.

  “Joe’s probably going to bugger off soon if we don’t have a baby,” I said suddenly.

  She looked taken aback. “Don’t be daft. Joe will never leave you.”

  “He might.”

  She shook her head dismissively. “Anyway, didn’t you say you had some news in your text?”

  I sat up straight and fanned myself. “You won’t believe it.”

  “Try me.”

  I took Dad’s letter out of my bag, handed it to her, then everything gushed out of me like water from a cracked pipe. I told her how Tess had given her baby away, how it had affected her afterwards and how I was determined to find my sibling. She sat up straight and adopted her therapist’s pose, legs crossed and hands resting on her knees with her head slightly bowed. She listened carefully, shaking her head now and again, a pained expression flickering across her face. When I finally stopped for breath, I could see she was genuinely affected by what I’d told her and I loved her for it.

  She sipped her coffee then her face suddenly screwed up like she was looking closely at something. “Remember the time you brought Tess to the hospital when Alexia was born?”

  I nodded. “Vaguely.”

  “You left the room at one point and Tess asked if she could hold her. When I put Alexia in her arms she started crying.”

  “Really?”

  “I asked her if she was OK but it was like she didn’t hear me. She kept stroking and kissing Alexia’s head then she started singing to her. It was like she was somewhere else. I probably forgot to tell you about it. Those first few days are such a whirlwind with a new-born.”

  I closed my eyes. “I keep going over and over about how she scared she must have felt in that home. She was only sixteen when she gave birth. She must have been terrified. Even though I’ve never given birth myself I can imagine the horror.”

  Karen shook her head slowly and sighed. “They’re so tiny and defenceless. All you want to do is hold them close and protect them forever. Her pain must have been unbearable.”

  “Whatever anyone says, she and all those other women had no choice when they gave up their babies. They were forced adoptions. They were made to sign their babies away under duress because the sight of a single mother on the loose was too much for Catholic Ireland at that time to bear. Their families, the Church, the State, they all wanted them to disappear. They were seen as a stain on society and they were made invisible.”

  Karen put her coffee on the table. “I had a client once who was forced to give her baby away in a Mother and Baby home. She was young and never told anyone. Afterwards she almost drank herself to death. She couldn’t cope with the barbaric treatment she received in the home at the time of the birth and the fact that her baby was gone. I just can’t imagine Tess’s pain. No wonder she was unwell.”

  I fought back tears. “And all those years afterwards wondering where her baby ended up. Was it adopted? Did it end up happy in a good family? Or did it make it out of the home alive at all? The not knowing must have weighed on her.”

  Karen leant forward and put a hand over mine. Then she sat back and frowned. “But why do you think Tess and your dad didn’t just run away when Tess got pregnant? Why give the baby up? They had two more kids together.”

  I pou
red the rest of my Diet Coke into my glass and drank. “I know. I can’t get my head around that either. Maybe it was the shame they’d have brought on the families they left behind. It’s hard to grasp the hold the Church had in small towns and villages in Ireland then. Having a daughter up the duff out of wedlock was a catastrophe.”

  “Not only in Ireland, Carmel. Mum’s parents in Glasgow refused to speak to her for two years when she told them she was keeping her black baby and not marrying my dad.”

  I sat up. “God, yes. I forgot about Dee.”

  An image of Karen’s mum came to me. She was in the front room of their council flat in Hillingdon Road curled up in a battered armchair. She was drunk. Her arms were swaying above her head and she was urging us to listen to the words of Dylan’s “Desolation Row” which was playing on the turntable. Dee wore multi-coloured maxi dresses and chokers years after they’d gone out of fashion, drank neat vodka and took shit from no one.

  A shadow of sadness fell over Karen’s face and I leant over and squeezed her arm. “Dee had her demons but she also had guts,” I said.

  She batted her hand in the air as if squatting a fly. “If you say so.” Her face brightened, a wide smile spread from ear to ear and she rubbed her hands together. “Bloody hell, Carmel. You could have another brother or sister out there in the world. How amazing is that?”

  Her phone rang. Rolling her eyes and letting out a heavy sigh, she fished it out of her coat pocket. She looked down at the screen and blushed. “Sorry, hon. I’ve really got to get this. I’ll be back in a bit.”

  I watched her head out of the café with the phone to her ear. Simon again. Why couldn’t she just come clean and tell me she was seeing him again? Or was it the married Dan from the fundraiser night after all? I picked up the plastic coffee spoon and snapped it.

  Before Karen mangled him, Simon Whelan was a stable individual with a happy family life. He was a leading psychiatrist at the mental health clinic where they both worked with a GP wife, teenage twin boys, a Cheshire farmhouse and a holiday home on the Algarve. Six months into the affair, he abandoned it all to move into Victoria Road with her and Alexia.

  I met him a couple of times. He was her type, older and married, but not particularly attractive. Short and squat, he had an untidy mop of grey-white hair, watery blue eyes and a slight squint. But after a few hours in his company, I could see the attraction. He didn’t say much but what he did say was worth hearing. He was witty, highly informed yet very unassuming. But as soon as I spotted the devoted way his eyes followed Karen around the room, I knew the relationship was doomed. True to form she dumped him a year later. She never went into the details of what exactly happened but Simon had a breakdown and he lost his job. His wife eventually had him back, a broken man by all accounts. She’d sold the house in the meantime and downsized to a flat in Didsbury. His boys took it badly, turning up at Karen’s house and threatening her and Alexia a number of times.

  We only ever talked about what happened once at her place. I was sitting at the kitchen table and she was sitting on the floor in the corner next to Springer Bell’s bed. He’d just had a minor operation on his leg and she was fussing over him. She seemed removed, almost dismissive of the turmoil her affair with Simon had caused and more concerned about the welfare of her dog. Karen had a tornado effect on men. She sped through their lives leaving chaos and destruction behind. I’d seen it all before. I’d listened to the ins and outs of her turbulent love life for years without judgement or criticism. But that day I spoke up.

  Eying her sternly, I tapped my fingers on the table. “Have you no remorse at all? That poor bloke lost his mind. His career’s gone and his family have lost their home.”

  She looked taken aback. “I didn’t force Simon to leave his family.”

  “So you take no blame at all for what happened?”

  She fed Springer a biscuit. “No, Carmel, I don’t. Simon wasn’t a victim. He made his own choices. It simply didn’t work out.”

  I shook my head. “You are so fucked up.”

  She threw me a murderous look. “Just listen to you with your perfect marriage!”

  Then she tightened her arms around Springer and we never spoke about Simon Whelan again.

  Karen’s issues with men obviously had something to do with her dad Hassan’s abandonment of her and Dee before she was born. Dee’s dodgy lifestyle can’t have helped either. Karen tracked Hassan down shortly after Alexia was born. He’d moved to Nigeria. Curious to meet his only grandchild, he paid for them both to fly out and stay in his luxury beachside villa in Lagos. Karen lasted three days. She moved to a hotel where she rang me, livid, ranting on about his entourage of women and shady business dealings. She never said as much but I guessed he was some kind of pimp. She showed me a photo of him on her return. He was a mountain of a man and was leaning against an E-type Jag, surrounded by palm trees and blue skies. Dressed in a white suit and lilac open-necked shirt, he had her smile.

  She scowled down at the picture. “My gangster daddy,” she said. “Was it any wonder my mother took to drink?”

  The male role models in Karen’s life had certainly let her down but I suspected her inability to commit lay elsewhere. In her eyes, unrequited love seemed the only true kind. She was an addiction counsellor with a dependency of her own. She was addicted to men she couldn’t have.

  While I was waiting for Karen to return, I got out my phone and checked my Ryanair app for flights to Knock. I hugged myself at the thought of a trip to Mayo and the recent developments. As they said in the crime dramas, I now had a solid lead to go on.

  When Karen arrived back she looked flushed and distracted.

  I scrutinised her face. “Everything OK?”

  She nodded and looked away. She’d barely sat down when I reached into my bag and thrust a sheet of paper at her. It was one of the articles I’d photocopied about the mass grave in the Tuam home.

  “Have a read of that,” I said, sitting back and crossing my legs.

  Frowning, she looked down at the article, her face twisting and contorting as she read.

  “Sweet Jesus,” she said when she’d finished. She handed it back, holding it between finger and thumb like it was contaminated. “So Tess definitely had her baby there?”

  “I’m pretty sure of it. According to Dad’s letter she would have given birth to the baby in late 1960 and it was the only Mother and Baby Home in the area. It closed down in 1961.”

  “Please tell me she never knew about any of this.”

  “Hard to know. There wasn’t much about it in the news here at that time. Most of the reports came later on after she died.”

  She scratched her jaw. “Let me get this right. So pregnant girls and women were put into the homes and forced to give their babies up for adoption. The government paid the nuns money to look after the kids that weren’t adopted. But the nuns kept the money and neglected and starved them and then when they died they threw their bodies into a mass grave of some sort without a proper burial.”

  “Well, they haven’t actually found many remains as yet. But the historian who did the research has found the death certificates of the seven hundred and ninety-six children who died in the home between 1920 and 1961. She didn’t find any graves anywhere to match that number. I mean, think about it. Where else would those children be buried? Their mothers had moved on. Their grandparents would hardly bury them in the family plot, would they? Grandchildren or not, they were considered bastards and outcasts. There is no record of them in any local cemeteries either.”

  She shook her head. “Unbelievable. Almost eight hundred bodies.”

  “The Irish government are talking about doing some kind of commission. Maybe they’ll excavate. Who knows?”

  She looked over at the table opposite where a mother was feeding her toddler in a highchair.

  “Those nuns and priests must have truly believed those babies were lesser human beings because they were born out of wedlock. Babies like me and Alex
ia.”

  I nodded. “The Church and the State, which really amounted to the same thing, wanted to present this image of pure Catholic Ireland to the rest of the world. Fallen women had no place in that world and had to be hidden away and punished. You know how they referred to the women? ‘First offenders’ if they got pregnant once and ‘recurring offenders’ if it happened again. In the eyes of the State and the Church they were criminals who needed to be locked up. Though, of course, it was the families themselves who put them in the homes.”

  “Unbelievable.”

  “And Tuam probably isn’t the only Mother and Baby Home with a mass grave. It looks like there are others all over Ireland.”

  She winced then leant forward and lowered her voice. “So what are the chances . . . that Tess’s baby is buried there?”

  “Most of the deaths occurred in the thirties and forties when there was a lot of poverty. It’s far more likely Tess’s baby was adopted, probably illegally.”

  “Why illegally?”

  “In a word – money. Legal adoption was introduced in Ireland in 1952 but thousands of illegal adoptions involving wealthy Americans took place before and after. Families who had failed vetting in the US or wanted a child and didn’t want to hang around, simply went to Ireland. The whole process was a well-oiled adoption machine. Interested couples gave sizeable donations to Catholic charities elsewhere. The Church covered their tracks and made sure the donations couldn’t be traced back to the Mother and Baby Homes.”

  “So a form of trafficking, then.”

  “Exactly. Jane Russell, the Hollywood actress, did it. It caused a huge media storm in the UK at the time.”

  She glanced down at her watch. “Sorry, hon, this is so fascinating, but I really have to get back to work. So what next? What’s your plan of action?

  “I’ve contacted the Irish family agency to try and get hold of any birth or adoption certificates and I’ve written to the historian to see if Tess’s baby is on the list of children buried in the mass grave. But I haven’t heard anything back.” My face broke into a grin. “Then yesterday I had a breakthrough.”