The
Lost Child of Philomena Lee
A Mother, Her Son and a Fifty-Year Search
MARTIN SIXSMITH
MACMILLAN
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the many people who spoke to me in recorded interviews or over a pint of Guinness and furnished the memories, information and documents that made this book possible. Their stories are the stuff of the pages that follow. I am also grateful to Conor O’Clery, Don Murray, Besty Vriend, Stephen Taylor, Mary Sixsmith, Brian Walsh, Tobias Hoheisel, Jane Libberton, John Cooney and Kit Grover for their generous help with my research and their attentive reading of the text.
Contents
Prologue
PART ONE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
LONDON
PART TWO
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
LONDON
PART THREE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
LONDON
PART FOUR
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
Epilogue
Prologue
The New Year of 2004 had come in. It was getting late and I was thinking of leaving – the party was flat and I was tired – but someone tapped my shoulder. The stranger was about forty-five and a little tipsy. She told me she was married to the brother of a mutual friend, but she wasn’t planning to remain so much longer. I smiled politely. She put her hand on my arm and said she had something that might interest me.
‘You’re a journalist, aren’t you?’
‘I used to be.’
‘You can find things out, can’t you?’
‘It depends what they are.’
‘You have to meet my friend. She has a puzzle she needs you to solve.’
I was intrigued enough to meet the friend in the cafe of the British Library – a financial administrator in her late thirties, smartly dressed with sharp blue eyes and jet-black hair. A family mystery was troubling her. Her mother, Philomena, had drunk too much sherry that Christmas and had broken down in tears. She’d had a secret to tell her family, a secret she’d kept for fifty years . . .
Do we all yearn to be detectives? The conversation in the British Library was the start of a search that lasted five years and led me from London to Ireland and on to the United States. Old photographs, letters and diaries now litter my desk – the hurried, anxious scrawl of an eager housewife, tearful signatures on sad documents and the image of a lost little boy in a blue jumper clutching a toy plane made of tin . . .
Everything that follows is true, or reconstructed to the best of my ability. There were clues to be found and no shortage of evidence. Some of the actors in the story kept diaries or left detailed correspondence; several are still alive and agreed to speak with me; others had confided their version of events to friends. Gaps have been filled, characters extrapolated and incidents surmised. But that’s what detective work is all about, isn’t it?
PART ONE
ONE
Saturday 5 July 1952;
Sean Ross Abbey, Roscrea, County Tipperary, Ireland
Sister Annunciata cursed the electric. Whenever there was thunder and lightning it flickered so desperate it was worse than the old paraffin lamps. And tonight they needed all the light they could get.
She was trying to run but her feet were catching in her habit and her hands were shaking. Hot water slopped from the enamel bowl onto the stone flags of the darkened corridor. It was all right for the others: all they had to do was pray to the Virgin, but Sister Annunciata was expected to do something practical: the girl was dying and no one had a clue how to save her.
In the makeshift surgery above the chapel, she knelt by the patient and whispered encouragement. The girl responded with a half-smile and something mumbled, incomprehensible. A lightning flash lit up the room. Annunciata pulled up the covers to shield the girl from the blood on the sheets.
Annunciata was barely older than her patient. Both of them were from the country; both from the depths of Limerick. But she was the birth sister and people were expecting her to do something.
In the chapel below, she could hear Mother Barbara gathering the girls, ordering them to pray for the Magdalene upstairs – a sinner like them, who was dying. The disembodied voices sounded distant and harsh. Annunciata squeezed the girl’s hand and told her to take no notice. She lifted the patient’s white linen gown and wiped her legs with the warm water. The baby was visible now, but it was the child’s back she could see, not the head. She had heard about breech births; another hour and she knew mother and baby would both be dead. The fever was setting in.
The patient was flushed, her speech reduced to quick, stumbling phrases: ‘Don’t let them put him in the ground . . . It’s dark down there . . . It’s cold down there.’ Her blue eyes were wide with panic, her jet-black hair stark against the white pillow.
Sister Annunciata bent down and wiped the girl’s brow.
The girl had no idea what was happening to her. She’d had no visitors since she arrived, and that was nearly two months ago. Her father and brother had put her in the nuns’ care, and now the nuns were going to let her die.
Annunciata thanked God that it wasn’t herself lying there, but she was a practical girl, from a farming family. She gripped the baby’s flesh. It was warm and alive. Mother Barbara said sinners deserved no painkillers, and the girl was screaming, screaming for her baby: ‘Don’t let them bury him . . . They’re burying him in the convent . . .’
With her strong fingers – and then with the hard steel forceps – Annunciata pushed and twisted the tiny body. It moved, reluctantly, loath to abandon the sensuous warmth. A gush of pale red liquid spilled onto the white sheet. Annunciata had found the baby’s head. Now she was pulling it steadily forward, dragging a new life into God’s world.
Sister Annunciata was twenty-three. She had been Annunciata fo
r five years. Before that she had been Mary Kelly, one of the Limerick Kellys, one of seven.
The night the priest came he had sat for a drink and commiserated with old Mr Kelly on the ill luck that had denied him sons. After the third whiskey, he had leaned forward and said quietly, ‘Now, Tom. I know you love the girls. And what better could you be doing for them than look after their futures. Surely, Tom, you can spare one of them for God?’
Five years later, here she was – Sister Annunciata, spared for God. For the next few days whenever Annunciata was with the little one she nursed him as if he were her own. It was she who had delivered him, saved him, launched him into the light. He had been christened Anthony at her suggestion and she felt they had a special bond. When he cried, she comforted him; when he was hungry, she longed to feed him.
The boy’s mother was called Marcella by the nuns – in here no one was allowed to use their real name. Abandoned by her family, she clung to Annunciata. In turn, Annunciata gave Marcella comfort, reassuring her that she did not condemn her like the other nuns did. Defying the decree of silence, they would find quiet corners in which to exchange the secrets of their past lives. Cupping her hands round Marcella’s ear, Annunciata whispered, ‘Tell me about the man. Tell me what it was like . . .’
Marcella giggled, but Annunciata leaned in closer, desperate to understand.
‘Go on . . . What was he like? Was he handsome?’
Marcella smiled. The few hours she’d spent with John McInerney now seemed like a flash of light in a benighted life. Since her arrival at the abbey she had treasured them, dreamt of them, endlessly reliving the memory of his embrace.
‘He was the handsomest man I ever saw. He was tall and dark . . . and his eyes were so gentle and kind. He told me he worked for the Limerick post office.’
With a little encouragement from Annunciata, Marcella told her all about the night her baby was made – when she had still been free and happy, when she had still been Philomena Lee.
The evening had been warm; the lights of the Limerick Carnival, the music from the ceilidh and the smells of candy floss and toffee apples had given it the thrilling feel of adventure. Philomena had locked eyes with the tall young man from the post office who laughed with her and gave her a shot at his beer glass. They had looked at each other with a mixture of wariness and excitement. And then . . . and then . . .
TWO
7 July 1952;
Dublin, Ireland
The summer storms that had hindered Sister Annunciata on the night she delivered little Anthony hadn’t been confined to Roscrea. The Irish Republic was modernizing its power systems and in the Dublin suburb of Glasnevin fallen cables meant Joe Coram awoke on Monday morning to a darkened house. A half-hour later, his wife Maire laughed to find him in the gloom, eating a breakfast of untoasted bread and cold tea. Joe laughed too. He was young and strong, still in love with his job, with his wife, his house, with the world in general. He gave Maire a hug, thinking how pretty she looked.
‘I’ll be late home tonight, Maire – assuming the trams’re running. I’ve this blasted working group on Church–state relations’ – he ignored her rolled eyes – ‘and it’s no secret things are a bit sticky right now.’
Luckily, the trams were OK and Joe Coram got to the office no bother. Within ten minutes, he was beginning to wish he hadn’t. His secretary was off sick and a note on his desk informed him that the minister wished to see him at once.
Frank Aiken, the Free State’s minister for external affairs, was in a foul mood and the whole of Iveagh House was holding its breath. Aiken was a stubborn man who bore a grudge conscientiously – he still had not forgiven former comrades who supported the Treaty back in 1921.
Joe knew what the fuss was about – he ran the department’s policy on passport and visa issues, so he’d been involved in the Russell– Kavanagh affair ever since the story first surfaced six months earlier. In the antechamber of the minister’s office, a young private secretary gave Joe the briefest of briefings: ‘It’s the bloody Jane Russell thing coming back to bite us. Now the foreign papers have got a hold of it. I’d show you the telegram, but Frank has it in with him. You’d better be on your toes.’
Frank Aiken was on his fifth cigarette of the morning when Joe tapped and entered. The desk in front of him was the usual jumble of departmental documents, newspapers and discarded Manila envelopes, and Aiken looked almost comically livid – Joe briefly imagined fumes rising from his bald pate. Barely lifting his eyes from the copy of the Irish Times he was scanning, the minister held out the official telegram.
‘What’s this supposed to mean, Coram? Where have they got all this from? What are we going to do about it, man?’
Joe read it. It was the overnight bulletin from the boys in the Bonn embassy and its first agenda point was a translation of an article in a West German newspaper, a downmarket scandal sheet called Acht Uhr Blatt. There was little doubt why the embassy had decided Frank Aiken needed to see it: the headline was 1,000 CHILDREN DISAPPEAR FROM IRELAND.
The paper had unearthed the full story of the Jane Russell affair. It described how the childless Hollywood actress had flown to Ireland to try to adopt a young Irish boy; it gave all the details of her agreement with Michael and Florrie Kavanagh from Galway to take baby Tommy off their hands; suggested that large amounts of money were involved in the deal; and – worst of all – included a frighteningly accurate description of how the Irish legation in London had issued the child a passport to fly to New York with no questions asked. This, said the article, was proof of the Irish government’s policy of condoning the export and sale of Irish children: ‘Ireland has today become a sort of hunting ground for foreign millionaires who believe they can acquire children to suit their whims in just the same way as they would get valuable pedigree animals. In the last few months hundreds of children have left Ireland, without any official organization being in a position to make any enquiries as to their future habitat.’
Aiken wiped his brow.
‘Right’, he said. ‘What I need from you, Coram, is a thorough brief – no details withheld, however embarrassing. I want every bit of information, every bit of bad practice and every bit of evidence about the archbishop and the Church’s malarkey. Is that clear? And I want it by Friday. Off you go!’
The evening’s meeting on Church–state relations was fraught. Joe was stuck taking minutes until well after eight o’clock. Most of the cabinet members were there – even Eamon de Valera, the Taoiseach, turned up for a good part of it – and the discussion had become increasingly heated. By the time Joe got back to Glasnevin Maire had made the dinner, seen it go cold and scraped the congealed mess into the bin.
‘There’s your dinner, Joe Coram.’ She laughed. ‘Blame it on de Valera or whoever you want to, but there’s no remedy for it – you’ll have to be happy with the old bread and dripping tonight!’
Joe laughed too and put his arm round Maire’s waist. ‘I’d live on bread alone and think I was a king so long as I had you, dear,’ he said. ‘And I’m sorry for your trouble with dinner. Once Frank and Dev got going about the Church and the nuns and the passports, there was no stopping them. I’ve twenty-five pages of notes that I’ve to decipher for Wednesday, and then Frank wants a briefing paper on the whole shenanigan, going right back to the Mother and Child fiasco, by the end of the week. I tell you, there’ll be a few more late nights before the month is out, Maire dear, and a few more dinners in the bin, no doubt.’
Maire made as if to clout him round the back of the head, but paused mid-swipe and gave him a kiss on the cheek.
‘Did you see the Evening Mail tonight?’ she asked, remembering the mental note she’d made to show him the article about Jane Russell and the allegations from the German press. ‘You see people like her in the cinema and you think they must have life easy, don’t you? Then you find out she’s got her own sorrows just like the rest of us.’
Joe picked up the paper lying on the kitchen table.
‘I saw it right enough. Frank made us send out for a copy from the stall in Merrion Street. And Jane Russell’s not the only one: we’ve been handing out passports for these babies like there’s no tomorrow. Off to America they go and no one knows what becomes of them.’
Maire looked at her husband and saw he was thinking the same thing she was: they’d been married for three years now and the family were starting to ask questions.
‘Never mind Jane Russell,’ she said, kissing the back of his neck. ‘It’s us who need a baby, Joe Coram. So finish that feast you’re eating and come and give me a hand to do something about it!’
THREE
11 July 1952;
Roscrea
Affairs of state did not trouble the inhabitants of the convent of Sean Ross Abbey a mile outside the Tipperary town of Roscrea. And neither nuns nor sinners got to see the posters for His Kind of Girl starring Jane Russell and Robert Mitchum on the walls of the Roscrea cinema. Neither nuns nor sinners read the newspapers, and Mother Barbara kept the solitary wireless set safely under lock and key. The long days in the laundries, the long nights in the dormitory were filled with thoughts of God, or thoughts of the life that had gone before.
The mother superior was not a woman to be kept waiting. It was 9 a.m. and she had already been to Mass, eaten her frugal breakfast and spent a trying half-hour untangling some unnecessary and potentially embarrassing entries in the abbey’s double-entry accounts book. She was looking at the wall clock of her office and tutting when the door knocked and Sister Annunciata rushed in, out of breath and apologizing for turning up late – she so dreaded these weekly meetings that she seemed always to be late for them.
‘I’m so sorry, Reverend Mother; it’s been a terrible tizzy this morning. We ’ve had three girls in labour overnight – one of them took over seven hours – and there’ve been five new admissions and—’
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