The Lost Child of Philomena Lee (Original Edition)

by Sixsmith, Martin

  McQuaid and Barrett made as if to interject, but Aiken was in full flow.

  ‘And what happens to the babies after their mother is gone? I understand the sisters have sold thousands of them to Americans about whom we know nothing, who could be murdering the little things for all we know. And those left behind? Well, you’ve blocked the adoption legislation, so they go to our wonderful orphanages, or our lovely, caring industrial schools. And all of those are run by the Church, of course, so we carry on paying you! The state has no control over what the brothers and the sisters do to them – and they don’t treat them with kid gloves, that’s for sure. Half of them come out so damaged they spend the rest of their lives trying to recover from it . . . or they turn into thugs and criminals themselves.’

  Frank Aiken was in his stride now and vaguely conscious he had gone farther than he intended. The archbishop was not a man to be crossed and Aiken was expecting a rebuke, but to his surprise McQuaid replied in a voice that trembled with emotion.

  ‘Minister, I beg your pardon. You accuse me of putting our children in danger. This is not fair. I love these children, Minister. I love them.’

  And with that he rose to his feet, gathered his silken robes and strode out of the room.

  EIGHT

  Roscrea

  Anthony Lee was growing into the world. His mother doted on him and Sister Annunciata brought him surreptitious treats – little toys and rattles, sugar biscuits and rusks. The faces of those who leaned over his bed to tuck him up at night were friendly, and Anthony learned early on that he could be a powerful generator of affection. He responded to the love of others with smiles of his own; he found life an easy art. The suffering and cruelty that swirled through Sean Ross Abbey, the pretence, the anonymity, the cowed silence and frustrated anger meant nothing to him.

  Philomena Lee found it less easy to make friends. Like all the girls there, her abiding feeling in a world full of silence and secrecy was one of loneliness. Now that she knew what lay ahead, now that Sister Annunciata had confirmed the inevitable separation, she grew even more attached to her son. In the evening she was loath to leave him; she pleaded with the nursing sisters and the lay staff to be given more time before he was taken away to the night nursery. Every parting became a rehearsal for the final parting.

  One winter evening early in 1953 Philomena returned from the laundry to find Anthony gripped by colic: the spasms of pain were twisting his little body this way and that. She spent the knitting hour and her own dinner time walking him up and down the long corridor, trying to ease his distress, but her baby screamed inconsolably. She was young, with no experience of infantile disorders, and she panicked. She convinced herself Anthony was seriously sick. When the night sister came to take him from her, she told her how worried she was and asked if she could keep him overnight.

  ‘Just this once, Sister. Just while he’s sick. He needs me to be with him. He’ll never sleep if I’m not there, and I’ll never sleep if I don’t have him.’

  But the sister told her not to be so stupid.

  ‘It’s not for you girls to say what happens to the children. They no more belong to you than the sun or the moon. Your job is to feed them and work your three years. Then we’ll find them proper mothers who deserve to have children.’

  Philomena listened with growing alarm. It appeared to her that Anthony – her world, her only joy – was in danger. She wrapped him in her arms and fled. Her heavy wooden clogs clattering on the flagstones brought nuns and girls running as the sister caught up with her by the locked door at the end of the corridor. Both women were panting and Philomena was weeping, but the nun showed no pity. Taking Anthony from her, she laid him on the floor and beat Philomena with hard, practised fists. Philomena slumped to the ground, sobbing as the nun picked up her baby.

  ‘Do that one more time and your next stop is the asylum,’ the nun spat. ‘You won’t like it in there, take it from me; and you can be sure you’ll never get out!’

  The nun walked off. Philomena lay there until a tentative hand rubbed her shoulder and a gentle voice whispered in her ear. She could barely make out the girl’s face, but she felt her arm around her. The girl lifted her from the floor and helped her to the mothers’ dormitory, laid her on her bed and tucked up the blanket. She said her house name was Nancy and she would come in the morning to see how Philomena was doing.

  Nancy was two years younger than Philomena, a quiet, stocky girl with a round face and dark eyes. She eased Philomena out of bed and supported her down to Mass; she took her arm as they walked over the courtyard to the laundries; and she helped her through a day’s work made unbearable by the bruises that covered her body. In the evening they talked. Both of them were lonely and scared, both looking for a friend, and the drama of their meeting drew them close. They ignored the ban on real names, ignored the ban on speaking about the past and told each other everything. Nancy said she was really Margaret McDonald, that she came from Dublin and had a newborn daughter called Mary. She had concealed her pregnancy from her family, given birth in the Coombe Hospital and been put away in Sean Ross Abbey immediately after.

  ‘And you know, Phil,’ she said, ‘no one has come to see me at all. Not a one since the day I came here. I know it’s a terrible thing I’ve done and I know my da’s ashamed of me, but sure I thought my mammy would come; I thought she’d come and see her lovely beautiful grand-babby . . .’

  It was Philomena’s turn to offer comfort.

  ‘Now, Margaret, don’t upset yourself,’ she said, holding her friend’s hand between hers. ‘Our parents all have their own troubles and they can’t be thinking of us all the time. We’re grown up now: we’ve got the babies to prove it, sure we have.’ Philomena smiled ruefully. ‘So we’ve got to get on with it and not complain about things. You know how Mother Barbara hates moaners.’

  Margaret nodded. She too had suffered at the hands of the mother superior.

  ‘Sure you’re right. I know that. But I miss my friends and I miss my brothers and sisters. And then I get to thinking how all alone we are in the world and sometimes I just get so unhappy I wish I could die . . .’

  Margaret broke off with tears welling in her eyes. Philomena put her arm round her friend and pulled her close. She told her she was not alone; told her how everyone in that place felt the same loneliness and the same despair, however much they put a brave face on it. And she told her they both should count God’s blessings: their children were fine and healthy and both of them the most beautiful babbies anyone ever had seen.

  Margaret’s little Mary was six months younger than Anthony, a striking baby with auburn hair and a small, finely chiselled face. Philomena admired her, and Margaret admired Anthony’s dark good looks. They sat and knitted together most evenings – jumpers for Anthony, fluffy cardigans for Mary – and they placed their children side by side so that when they woke in their cots the first thing they saw was each other. As the little ones grew and began to crawl, they played on the same rug, bumping into each other and laughing delightedly at the touch of another tiny being. Anthony, slightly older and more advanced, taught Mary to craw l and play. There was affection between the babies, and they brought joy to their parents, but sorrow was never far away.

  Young mothers would often come in from their day’s work to find their baby’s cot empty. Departures were rarely signalled in advance. In some cases the girl would act as if all was well and she was looking forward finally to being released from the convent; more frequently she would be overcome by the anguish of her bereavement, premature, irrevocable and brooking no appeal.

  Philomena and Margaret shuddered every time a baby disappeared. But they also had a tale of hope, to which they clung with the desperation of the condemned. One girl had managed to ‘escape’ from Roscrea and her story had entered the mythology of the place. With the help of relatives she had found a job as a maid to a wealthy Dublin lady who agreed to accommodate both her and her child. The nuns had seemingly been pressured into
letting her take the boy with her and she had been free for six months. Then, to the sorrow of those still in the abbey, she returned. The experiment had failed: the girl was sent back and two months later her baby disappeared like all the others. Despite its outcome, the story was cited as proof that there was after all a possibility they would keep their babies. Philomena and Margaret were frantically determined to do so.

  NINE

  Dublin

  A week after the audience in Drumcondra, Frank Aiken came back from a meeting with the Taoiseach in a foul mood. When Joe asked how things had gone, he grunted and slammed his office door. It was an hour before he asked for Coram to be sent in.

  ‘Well, that’s it, lad. We’re well and truly done for. Dev says he’s not going against the archbishop, and if the Church wants to send our babies to the Sahara Desert, then they can just go ahead and do it. McQuaid’s been on the phone telling him he doesn’t want the Adoption Bill and Dev says we can try what we like, but he’s not going to back us unless His Grace has a Pauline conversion on the road to Maynooth.’

  Joe Coram had been expecting something similar, but even he was surprised by the vigorousness of de Va lera’s hand-washing.

  ‘So did the Taoiseach say what we should do? Just go on issuing passports to any child McQuaid wants sent abroad?’

  Aiken stood up and paced the room.

  ‘That’s the measure of it. I tried everything, but he keeps harking back to the bloody Mother and Baby Scheme and what that did to the last government.’

  Three years earlier, a short-lived opposition government had attempted to introduce the Mother and Baby Bill, offering free medical treatment and advice for all expectant mothers. The then health minister, Noel Browne, had promoted the scheme on the grounds it would bring Ireland into line with other civilized nations. But Archbishop McQuaid had railed against it, saying it would encourage single mothers and illegitimate births, allow state interference in moral issues (the preserve of the Church) and ‘usher socialism into Ireland by the back door’. The rhetoric had grown so heated and opposing positions so entrenched that the issue became a trial of strength between Church and state. McQuaid had denounced Browne’s proposals as ‘totalitarianism’ and had written the Vatican that it was ‘an attack on the Church under the guise of social reform’. Browne was summoned before an inquisitional court of bishops which read him a formal statement saying his scheme was contrary to Catholic social teaching. He had been forced to resign in April 1951 and the collapse of his scheme had brought down the government two months later.

  In his resignation speech Taoiseach John Costello had acknowledged, ‘As a Catholic, I obey my Church authorities and will continue to do so. All of us in the government . . . are bound to give obedience to the rulings of our Church and our hierarchy.’

  Joe Coram had been a middle-ranking official in the Department of External Affairs at the time of the row. In December 1949 Browne had sent a formal note to the department, querying the lack of safeguards for the children being exported by the Church to America. ‘There is no means of knowing,’ he wrote, ‘that those adopting are suitable persons . . . or if they may be persons already turned down as adopters in their own country . ’ He asked the DoEA for an assurance that ‘the fate of children sent to the United States will be protected’.

  Joe replied, promising to look into Browne’s concerns, but found the subject blocked by senior DoEA officials. A departmental memo advised against replying to the minister ‘until the Archbishop has arrived at his policy’ adding, ‘Our policy should be to keep out of this as much as possible.’ Disappointed by the pusillanimity of his superiors and alarmed by the dangers Irish children were being exposed to, Joe had contacted Noel Browne privately to express his personal support and the two men had become friends.

  ‘The hierarchy are the factual instrument of government on social and economic policies,’ Browne had told Joe. ‘Our prospects for the preservation of effective cabinet government and for badly needed reforms are utterly gone.’ In a series of bitter conversations Browne had expressed his loathing for McQuaid and had shared his suspicions about one specific, ‘unnatural’ facet of the man’s character. Joe had listened and absorbed everything the former minister told him. Now he was going to use this information to help his current boss avoid the same fate that had befallen Noel Browne.

  Maire was horrified when she heard what Joe was contemplating. He told her one evening after a couple of sherries. The news pulled her up sharp.

  ‘But why would you do it, Joe? Why would you pick a fight with the most powerful man in Dublin? And did you ever think what it means for us if you lose?’

  Joe handed her the single typewritten page he had discussed that afternoon with Frank Aiken.

  With growing alarm, Maire read the reported testimony of an unnamed boy recounting a meeting he claimed to have had with ‘John the Bishop’. The boy told how John Charles McQuaid had invited him to a private room in a pub near the archbishop’s palace, placed him on the sofa beside him and asked him how he was enjoying school.

  ‘Slowly,’ the statement went on, ‘it became clear to the child that John the Bishop’s roving hands and long fingers had intentions other than getting information about school.’

  Maire was in a panic.

  ‘Where did you get this from, Joe? How do you know it’s even true?’

  Joe said quietly, ‘I don’t know it’s true. And it was Noel Browne who gave it to me. He’s convinced McQuaid is a pederast.’

  Maire’s eyes opened wide.

  ‘Noel Browne the TD? But everyone knows he hates McQuaid. Don’t you think he’s made it all up, Joe? It’s a hell of gamble.’

  Joe had run through the same arguments endlessly over the past few days and suspected Maire was right.

  ‘All I can tell you is that Noel was sure the story’s true. And all we’re going to do is let the palace know we’ve got it . . .’

  But Maire was beside herself with fear.

  ‘McQuaid will deny it. And you’ve only Browne’s word for it. You don’t have the boy himself, do you?’

  ‘Sure we don’t. But McQuaid doesn’t know that. If Browne’s making it all up, McQuaid will throw the thing in the trash and that’s an end of it. But if it’s true, His Grace might start being a bit more helpful . . .’

  Joe sent the note, and a week later Frank Aiken received a communication from the secretariat of Archbishop McQuaid that he should expect a visit from Father Cecil Barrett. Next morning Barrett came to see Aiken, and when he had gone the minister called Joe in to give him the news – McQuaid had consented to begin negotiations on the drafting of an adoption bill.

  Joe ran to his office and locked the door. Relief and triumph welled up inside him. When he looked down, he saw his hands were trembling.

  TEN

  November 1954;

  St Louis, Illinois

  As he waited for his sister to arrive, Loras T. Lane was thinking about Ireland.

  The Lanes had emigrated in the potato famine of the 1840s and like many Irish-American families they liked to think they remained connected to the old country. Loras had been born in Cascade, Iowa in October 1910, studied for law and business degrees and become a priest in 1937. He had spent a year in Rome, reading canon law, and been created a bishop in 1951.

  That was three years ago now, but the archdiocese had no vacancies and he had been put into what he laughingly called the clerical reserve, an auxiliary bishop waiting for a post. In the meantime he was serving as president of Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa; this was a Catholic college named for its nineteenth-century founder Bishop Mathias Loras of Dubuque, but Loras Lane used to joke it had adopted the name to honour his presence there. Now, though, Bishop Lane was on a mission. He had arranged to spend a week in St Louis, staying at the bishop’s residence on May Drive. He had made the trip down the icy Mississippi valley on a series of Greyhound buses. He had come to see his sister.

  Marjorie Hess, née Lane, was mar
ried to a German-American, a urologist by the name of Michael ‘Doc’ Hess, and the couple had three fine sons and a colonial-style house outside St Louis. But Marge had written Loras a couple of letters recently and he’d got the impression something was making her mightily unhappy. They’d always been close. Marjorie had been born just fifteen months after he was and it seemed natural he should spend his life loving and protecting her. After he got her letters he had written and called repeatedly to ask what was wrong, but Marge had clammed up. The months passed and still Marge would not open up to him. Loras sensed the thing was becoming a barrier between them so he had come to St Louis.

  Now as she entered the mahogany-panelled dusk of the bishop’s parlour, Marge seemed small, vulnerable, in need of his help like all those years ago when they were kids. Bishop Loras turned up the electric dimmer switch a tad so he could see her eyes. She didn’t want to talk, she said, but he knew she did. She was OK, she said, but he knew she wasn’t. He asked her if it was a problem with the boys, but she said no. A problem with Doc? Marge hesitated and her brother asked again.

  ‘Not exactly with Doc,’ she said finally. ‘Doc’s a fine man and he loves us all. But, you know, Doc wants a baby girl and he ain’t going to get one.’

  Bishop Loras came and sat on the soft worn arm of the leather couch, leaned over his little sister and laid a hand on her shoulder. Marge looked up at him like she always had done and gave a little sob.

  ‘It’s me,’ she said. ‘I’ve let him down. We were trying for so many years, Loras. For a little girl. But it just never happened. Then after poor Timmy died of the spinal meningitis and all . . .’

  Marge hesitated for a moment and blew her nose; the cruel unexpected death of their five-year-old son had hit the Hesses hard.

  ‘After that I went to see the baby doctor. And he told me . . . Things have gone wrong. You know, inside . . .’