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

by Annette Sills

  Our last house in Cranley Road in Old Trafford was a two-up two-down new build. It had damp, paper-thin walls and noisy Geordie bikers for neighbours. Alan and Shelley were large and hirsute with matching dragon tattoos. They were pleasant enough but they revved their Harley Davidsons at all hours and had lots of loud theatrical sex. Times were tough for me and Joe back then. He’d not long been made redundant from his IT job with a banking firm after the 2008 crash. Interest rates were rocketing so I had to teach evenings and days at three different colleges for a low hourly wage to pay the mortgage. Joe hated being at home and got very down about it all. But the one good thing about living in Old Trafford was Karen. She was a five-minute walk away and came round a lot. I got to spend time with my gorgeous goddaughter but not enough to make me want kids of my own. Karen’s positivity was a ray of sunshine back then. I don’t know what I’d have done without her. Then one June morning in 2009 when Joe got a phone call from his dad in London and everything changed.

  For half a century Joe’s parents, Peggy and Paddy, lived a quiet existence in an unremarkable street in Greenwich. Peggy was a retired midwife who busied herself making pottery in her shed and working with South London Irish Community Care. Paddy was a large florid-faced and gently spoken man with a mischievous sense of humour and his own building firm. They visited us regularly and we visited them. I loved them dearly. They were simply a joy to be around.

  It was a sunny June afternoon when Peggy got off the bus in Greenwich High Road after visiting her friend Marjorie in Lewisham hospital. As she stepped out into the road, she was hit by a speeding car driven by teenage joy riders. She died of serious head wounds the next day. A month later Paddy died of a massive cardiac arrest. Many attributed it to a broken heart, such was his devotion to Peggy. A few months later Joe and I scattered their ashes in Skibbereen in County Cork, where they used to go courting before they came to England. Joe sat on a nearby rock and wept for a long time, one of the few times in our marriage I’d ever seen him cry.

  Peggy and Paddy bought their Edwardian terrace in 1972. Paddy built upwards and backwards, hoping to fill it with children. But they were blessed with just one. A year after they died, it sold for just over a million. Joe was hammered for inheritance tax but there was still enough left for us to leave Cranley Close and buy our dream home in Chorlton outright. I couldn’t believe it was happening. I’d never had any money in my life. Shortly after we moved in, Joe got a job as project manager with a small IT firm based in the Science Park in town. It meant a lot of travelling but we couldn’t complain. A year after that I was offered a permanent position at the university for three days a week. Overnight we’d gone from struggling to keep a roof over our heads to enjoying a very comfortable existence.

  As I made my way back to the sofa I raised my glass to Paddy and Peggy, to their kind hearts and wonderful attitude to life. I still missed them and would have gladly given up the house and everything in it to see them walk through the door one more time.

  I sat back down and picked up my laptop. Connection at last. Taking a deep breath, I googled the words Mother and Baby Home and Tuam, the name of the town in Galway where Tess was staying when Dad wrote the letter. The first result that came up was a Wikipedia page. I read the first few lines. There was indeed a home operating in the town in the early sixties. It was run by an order of nuns called the Bon Secours. I was about to click on the page but I was distracted by the second search result showing underneath. I sat upright.

  It was a headline from an Irish broadsheet dated June 2014 that said:

  Mass Grave of up to 800 Dead Babies Exposed in Mother and Baby Home County Galway

  Chapter 10

  I clicked on the article, my hand trembling slightly.

  The building in Tuam operated as a home for unmarried mothers and their babies from 1921 until 1961. It was run by the Catholic Bon Secours order of nuns. Babies born there were adopted or fostered or stayed in the home until they came of age to be sent out to local industrial schools, themselves recently the centre of many abuse scandals. The mothers were made to stay on in the home to breastfeed and to work after the birth in order to pay for the services the nuns had provided. All the mothers lived separately from their babies.

  In 1975 two boys playing in the grounds of the home discovered a number of tiny skeletons in a concrete pit. The local community at the time said the find probably dated back to the times of the Great Famine and the area was sealed up. Later, a nearby family made a small grotto at the site and tended it as if it were a grave.

  In 2012, a local historian looking into the history of the building came across the story of the boys and the bones. Suspicious, she started to research the number of deaths in the home. She traced the death records of almost eight hundred babies and toddlers who had died there during its sixty-year existence. The historian then looked for graves and burial records in the burial sites in the town and the surrounding areas but found only two official graves relating to children who died in the home. The questions now being asked are these: Where are the others? Are the children buried in a mass unmarked grave at the spot where the boys had been playing? If not, then where are they?

  Other disturbing facts about the home have emerged. It seems the death rate was more than five times the national average and one in four of all children who lived there died before the age of five. Many died from malnutrition which was most odd as the localcouncil were paying the nuns a considerable sum to house the children. Others died of infectious diseases such as TB and measles. Rumours have also been circulating for some time about children being adopted illegally in the US and the UK.

  The spokesperson for the Bon Secours Order had no comment to make and said that all death and burial records are currently held by the local health board in Galway.

  ***

  I put the laptop to one side and sat perfectly still, trying to process what I’d just read. Had that actually happened? Had the nuns really done that? Discarded hundreds of babies’ bodies in a mass grave without giving them a burial? I leant forward and pressed my hands over my stomach. I felt nauseous. It was almost like I’d witnessed the depraved acts myself. I sat like that for a while then I went back online and read another five articles in quick succession, all from the Irish press, all saying similar things.

  “Oh my God,” I kept saying over and over. All other words seemed to lodge in my throat. Why hadn’t I heard about any of this before? Admittedly, I didn’t read the papers every single day but this was a major story that broke over a year ago. Why hadn’t I read about it in the British press? I put my palms on my cheek. My neck and face were burning. I needed air. Wrapping myself in a throw from the sofa, I picked up my glass and headed into the garden.

  The air was fresh, cleansed by the wind and rain of earlier and slightly chilly. I walked over to the small rockery under our bird table. Lifting one of the rocks I took out the small plastic bag I kept hidden there. Then I sat on the patio steps, pulled the throw tight around me and rolled myself a joint. Joe disapproved of me smoking. He probably thought I was killing the few remaining eggs left in my ovaries. He used to partake of the odd joint himself but gave up when he started his health kick. I didn’t want to give up. I was too fond of the lull it gave me whenever I felt anxious, that lovely calm that fell over me and mollified my jittery thoughts and pounding heart.

  I waited until Susie next door had finished smashing bottles into her wheelie bin then I lit up.

  Veiny blue smoke snaked into the night sky. At the bottom of the garden, finger-like shadows from the apple tree fell across the lawn. There was a bald patch of grass near the flowerbeds where the previous owners had a trampoline, and the grass was taking ages to grow back. I wondered if grass ever grew over the unmarked grave in Tuam. Did the sun ever warm it? Did snowdrops or daffodils ever bloom there in the spring?

  I churned over what I’d just read: one in four children dying before the age of five, many from malnutrition despite the state paying
the nuns good money to keep them, women and girls working throughout their pregnancies and beyond, then forced to sign away any future contact with their child, rumours of illegal adoptions to the US and UK.

  Then there were the survivors’ stories. One woman recalled daily beatings by the nuns, the ache of hunger pangs and seeing the other children’s extended bellies. A man remembered lines of urine-soaked mattresses propped against a dormitory wall. Another said that some of the children spoke to each other in their own made-up language, such was their isolation from the outside world. Then the final insult. After all that suffering in their short lives, the children were denied dignity in death and their bodies were cast in the ground like pieces of rotten fruit without even a headstone or a simple cross to mark their existence. I shook my head and exhaled. After the paedophile scandals and the Magdalene Laundries I thought nothing more could shock me about the Catholic Church. How wrong I was.

  After I’d finished my joint, I went back inside and filled my wineglass once more. I took a photo of Tess from the bookshelf and lay down on the sofa with it. It was one of my favourites. Karen had had framed it in onyx and silver and given it to me on the day of the funeral. I held it up to the faint lamplight.

  Tess was holding me shortly after I was born. Even though she was thirty at the time she looked about eighteen. She was a slip of a thing in a blue shift dress with a white collar. Her blonde hair was curled at the ends and pulled back in an Alice band and she looked more like a schoolgirl with her baby sister than a mother with her child. I looked closely at her face. I’d always thought she looked happy in the picture but now I saw that only her mouth was smiling. Her eyes were wide and scared, like a rabbit caught in headlights. She’d waited fourteen years after the birth of her firstborn to have me and then another six to have Mikey. I knew she’d had a spell in hospital after I was born and I now wondered if my arrival had triggered bad memories of her time in the Mother and Baby home. I still couldn’t understand why she and dad didn’t simply get married after the birth – surely the nuns would have allowed that? Instead, they put the baby up for adoption, started a new life and tried to forget all about it. But the memories returned to haunt her like a weed bursting through a cracked paving stone. And I strongly suspected that burying her secret made Tess mentally ill.

  I’d once seen a TV programme about women who’d been forced to give their babies up for adoption in a Mother and Baby home. Every single one said they thought about their child every day of their lives. One called hers her “ghost child”. It was now clear to me that Tess also had a ghost child – one who had haunted my childhood, who had been in the kitchen the day Mikey ripped out of her belly, in our bedrooms every night when she tucked us in and on the doorstep every morning when she waved us off to school – and was also hovering in the porch on the day the picture was taken.

  I looked out of the window at the plate-moon hanging high in the sky and an image came to me. Another moon, the outline of mountains and two silhouettes on a hilltop in the dead of night. The caretaker from the home and a nun passing him a small bundle. I closed my eyes and swallowed. Is that what happened to Tess’s baby? Was its tiny body, now a mass of bones, lying in the mass grave in Tuam with all those others? It was a possibility. Yet thousands of babies had passed through the Tuam home in the years it had been open. Statistically it was far more likely my sibling had been adopted.

  My initial feelings of shock and disgust were turning to anger. Tess was sixteen when she went into the home. No more than a child. I had no doubt she suffered terribly at the hands of the nuns. How could any of those women and girls escape a hell hole like that without mental scars? Her mental health issues had to be related to the time she spent in that home. I was sure of it.

  I looked at the picture again, kissed her face and whispered, “I’m going to find your baby, Tess, I promise you.”

  I held it tightly to my chest. I was determined to find out what had happened to my sibling and to Tess. Someone was going to pay for what they’d done to my mother.

  Chapter 11

  “Why the hell didn’t you wake me?”

  Startled, I looked up from my laptop. Joe was standing in the kitchen doorway pulling on his high-viz jacket. He looked dishevelled, unshaven and cross.

  “Sorry, I didn’t notice the time. I’ve been up for ages but I’ve been engrossed in something.”

  I’d dozed off on the sofa in the kitchen, clutching Tess’s photograph, the night before. Then not long afterwards I’d been woken by the sound of Joe clattering through the front door. He stumbled into the kitchen and headed straight for the sink. He had his back to me and didn’t see me in the dim lamplight. I lay still without making a sound. I was stoned and drunk and didn’t want another argument. For once though, Joe was in a worse state than me. He wasn’t much of a drinker. He usually managed to stop after a couple and behave himself, unlike me. But it must have been a hell of a pub crawl that night. I watched, trying not to laugh, as he swayed and grabbed the edge of the worktop and tried to hold himself up. He started making ominous choking sounds like he was about to barf over the spice rack. He was all over the place and downed glass after glass of water. Then to my amazement he started to cry.

  “Shit!” he said, slamming his palm hard on the worktop. “Shit, shit, shit!”

  I was taken aback. He never cried.

  Then, as if suddenly reminding himself that Joe Doherty simply didn’t do that sort of thing, he straightened up like a soldier standing to attention, wiped his face with the back of his hand and staggered upstairs to bed.

  I tightened the belt of my dressing gown. It was a bright morning. Corn-coloured sunshine flooded the room and birds chirped through an open window. I’d been up since six scouring the internet for information about the Tuam home.

  I scrutinised Joe’s face. His eyes were puffy and surrounded by dark shadows. He’d pretended to be asleep when I slipped into bed the night before.

  “How was your evening?” I asked.

  “Fine.”

  “You were wrecked when you came in. I was on the sofa in the extension but you didn’t see me. You were hilarious.”

  He frowned and tugged at the zip of his jacket. “I may have had a few pints too many.”

  I laughed. “You could hardly stand up.”

  He leant back and folded his arms over his chest. “So how was your evening getting stoned and drunk on your own again?”

  His sharp tone felt like a slap across the face and I flinched.

  “You stank when you came to bed. You do know the neighbours can smell it through the window when you smoke in the garden, don’t you?”

  “I may have had a joint and a few glasses of wine too many.”

  He shook his head and pointed at the empty bottle of Riesling by the recycling bin. “You had a bottle of wine and fuck knows how many joints too many.”

  “Yesterday was a hell of a day. I might tell you about it some time.”

  “Isn’t every day a hell of day for you though, Carmel? Can you actually remember when you last had an evening without a drink or a spliff?”

  I shifted in my chair, under attack. “No, but something tells me you can.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “You’re not the only person in the world to lose loved ones, you know.”

  I stared down at the keyboard, willing him to leave. I wasn’t in the mood for any of this. But he did have a point. My drinking and smoking were constant and, I feared, becoming medicinal.

  “You coped much better with your grief than I did.”

  He snorted then bent down and tucked his trousers into his socks.

  “Or at least you seemed to.”

  He straightened up. “How the hell would you know? You were always too pissed or stoned or wrapped up in yourself to ask.”

  My mouth opened but no words came out. What the hell was wrong with him? Yesterday at the hospital he was husband of the year but now he was acting like he hated me.

  He picke
d his cycling helmet up from the worktop and as he turned to leave it hit me. This wasn’t about my drinking and smoking at all.

  I sat up. “They were all talking about babies last night, weren’t they?”

  He turned around slowly and nodded. “I was the only one there without kids. I want to be a dad, Carmel. You’re forty in a few months. We don’t have much time left.”

  I shut the laptop lid and sighed. “I’m scared, Joe. There are so many things that could go wrong. It’s not like the gene pool on my side is great, is it? There’s a very good chance any child of ours could inherit HMC.”

  He stepped towards me. “I’ve been reading up on it. They’re developing new tests that can check if a foetus has it early on.”

  I shrugged and folded my arms. “OK. So imagine I got pregnant and I did one of those tests and it came back positive. Then we’d have to decide whether or not to have an abortion. How difficult would that be? HMC killed Mikey when he was thirty-four. Tess lived all her life with it. A child of ours might live to be eighty so how could we go ahead with an abortion?” I put my elbows on the table and rubbed at my temples. “And then there’s Tess.”

  “What about Tess?”

  I swallowed. “A child of ours could inherit what she had. Her mental instability.”

  He shook his head wearily. “Let’s face it, Carmel. You just don’t want kids.”

  “You had a happy normal childhood, Joe. That’s why you’re so sure you want kids. You had two healthy parents who were in a good marriage and you never had to worry about money. Tess did her best for me and Mikey but growing up was tough after Dad died. What I experienced as a child isn’t something I want to replicate. And, unfortunately, we do replicate the past.” I sighed. “I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I’m just not sure I’d make a good mother.”