by J. M. Smyth
LUCILLE
When Sean Dock was reburied on the Donavan land, an old man came up to my father and said that he’d heard about the funeral and wanted to speak to Robert Donavan. He was told that he hadn’t yet arrived.
As the afternoon drew on, the old man explained that he was a friend of Robert Donavan’s mother and had been in the cottage the night the twins were born.
In 1949 Mr Donavan senior and his wife Teresa and their three children – Conor, fourteen, Edna, eleven, and Amy, ten – lived in poverty. When Mr Donavan was killed in a farming accident, the priest arrived and took their children away. With no land of her own and her husband gone it wasn’t unusual then for the Church to regard women as unable to care for their children. The police took Conor, Edna and Amy to an industrial school.
Some weeks later, Teresa learned that she was pregnant by her husband. She travelled to England to get a job and make a home for herself and her children and returned after seven months to collect them. But the Church wouldn’t let them go. The trauma brought her into labour, a Doctor Skeffington was called and the twins were born. He advised a couple of weeks’ rest then left. Afraid that the priest would take them, the reason that she’d kept her pregnancy to herself, she wrapped the twins in shawls and took the bus to Dublin to catch the ferry back to England.
Conor went to England before the old man learned he’d been released. And there he stayed, working and searching for his mother.
He returned years later and built the Donavan farm into what it is today. If he’d found Teresa, he’d have found the twins. The old man said he hadn’t the heart to tell him he’d lost two brothers as well as a mother. Time, he thought, would bring them back.
Red Dock was found that night in his car, in a byroad less than a mile from the Donavan farm. He’d died from a bullet wound to the head. A man called Kane had been seen parked near the industrial-school cemetery. My father believes that Charlie Swags had him killed because he’d kept his son on remand while he had the evidence to have the charges against him dropped, though it was never able to be proven.
In an upstairs safe in the Copper Jug an old St Patrick’s Industrial School enrolment ledger was found. Names in it were traced and Cornelius Hockler was arrested.
He was tried and sent to an institution for the criminally insane.
My father was troubled by what Red Dock had said to him in connection with how Amy, Edna and Conor Donovan had died. He spoke to those who had known Sean Dock. They told of child slave labour, of Sean Dock being put to work on the farm and almost dying as a result of falling into a slurry pit. He had also worked in a small medal-casting foundry and was once overcome by poisonous fumes. And he was kicked to death by a Christian Brother.
The twins’ entry in the ledger records the date they were taken there: 18 October 1949 and their mother: Teresa Donavan, Clonkeelin, Kildare. The first two letters of her surname, ‘DO’, the ‘C’ for Clonkeelin and the ‘K’ for Kildare were underlined in ink. Twins Robert and Sean Donavan: Robert and Sean Dock.
In 1949, when my father was a young constable, he was called to the city hospital. A woman, clutching two babies to her breast, had collapsed on the gangplank of the Liverpool ferry. She was taken to hospital and pronounced dead on arrival. He was handed the few personal belongings she had (they’d been wrapped in brown paper and it was not his place to read them) and told to take her twin sons to the care of an industrial school.
He remembers the conditions with disgust. But, again, it wasn’t his place to act.
I asked him whose it was. He didn’t answer.
My own belief is this: Red Dock put me in the care of the Church because my father put him and Sean in the care of the Church.
Below the twins’ entry was written: ‘Brought in by Garda Winters’.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Huge thanks to my agent Svetlana Pironko. Without S, you wouldn’t be reading this.
Big thank you too to Chris Kydd, Laura Nicol, Thomas Ross, Laura Kincaid, big boss Campbell Brown, and all the gang at Black & White Publishing for working their magic.
