All the Bad Apples
Page 23
“They weren’t the ones who wrote history.”
“True. But they found ways to pass their stories down.”
We’d typed up our family history. We’d sent it to my grandfather, to the rest of our family who weren’t Ryses, but who needed to be told nonetheless. Probably there were similar stories in the history of my grandmother’s side of the family. Mandy agreed that, curse or no curse, she’d start her new research there.
We’d sent our stories to Lizzie, Julia’s sister, now a very old lady. We’d sent them to her children and great-grandchildren, who were of an age with me and Ida. They’d gotten in touch, contributed stories of their own. We planned to meet in Sligo all together, a Rys family reunion, to honor the lives of those who came before.
We invited my grandfather but did not expect him to come.
“Okay,” said Ida, gathering up the letters. “Time to go.”
We met Finn at the wooden bridge, walked down the path by the Dollymount Strand to the statue of Mary, where Cale was waiting. On the mosaic stones at the base of the statue she had set out her candles and crystals, her unlabeled glass bottles full of a sweet, cloudy liquid. We took each other’s hands and I stood to say my prayer.
“Our Lady, Star of the Sea, watch over the boats to England. Watch over the planes. Bless the places with clinics and small pills, bless the bleeding women. Bless their tears and their relief. Our Lady, Star of the Sea, watch over the women. Watch over their passage home and erase their shame. Watch over the journeys, eleven every day, as it was in the beginning and hopefully will not always be, amen.”
I twisted my hands out of my friends’ grips, took two steps, and threw myself into the water. I surfaced, newly baptized by the sea at Dublin Bay.
In a heartbeat, my friends emptied their pockets, left their phones and their wallets with the candles, and with three great jumps, their screams like banshees echoing across the Irish Sea, followed me.
Author’s Note
Dublin, 2018
I wrote the first draft of this novel in a very different Ireland from the one in which I write this now. In June 2016, when I first sat down to plot and research the history of the Rys women, about a year before I would start writing it all into Deena’s story, excavations were beginning to be carried out under the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation on the site of the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway.
In the 1970s, two schoolboys found human remains in the grounds of the old home. The church vehemently denied that the remains were linked to the home and said that what the boys had found was most likely a famine grave. In 2012, local historian Catherine Corless began a self-funded investigation into the deaths of babies and children in the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home. She uncovered the names of 796 infants and children who had died in the home between 1925 and 1961, paid €4 each for every death record of those 796 children, and discovered that none of them were buried in local cemeteries. The children’s and babies’ death records suggested that many had died of malnutrition and neglect. Catherine Corless put forward the idea that the remains found in the 1970s were not part of a famine grave, but were those of the children who’d died in the home, who were then buried in an unmarked grave in a vault in an old septic tank.
Seven hundred and ninety-six children means that one child died in that one mother-and-baby home every two weeks. This is not fiction. This is not a story. This all happened in living memory.
This novel was, in part, fueled by rage.
The last Magdalene laundry in Ireland closed in 1996. It’s estimated that 30,000 to 35,000 women and girls were incarcerated in these Catholic-run institutions, with over 11,000 since 1922. Some were sent by social workers because their families could not care for them, some from reformatory schools, some by the police. Many were transferred straight from mother-and-baby homes after they’d given birth. Some were sent because they had suffered abuse or mental illness. Some accounts are from women who were sent because they were disobedient, because they were too pretty, for having a boyfriend, for being gay.
Most of the history of the Magdalene laundries relies on first-person accounts because, in a series of strange coincidences, almost all the records of these places held by church officials are either missing or were mysteriously destroyed before official investigations could be carried out.
There is still no separation of church and state in Ireland. It was only in 2018 that our constitutional ban on blasphemy was repealed. It is only in 2019 that primary schools’ “baptism barrier” will be removed, meaning that schools will no longer be allowed to deny non-Catholic children a place on the basis of religion (or lack thereof). It is only in 2019 that a pregnant person* will be able to access safe, legal abortion in this country.
* * *
—
All the Bad Apples is set in 2012, the year in which Savita Halappanavar died in a maternity hospital in Galway after having been denied the abortion that would have saved her life. When she requested a termination, after having learned that she was suffering a septic miscarriage, she was reportedly told that “Ireland is a Catholic country.”
Up until May 2018, when the people of this Catholic country—fueled by a grassroots feminist movement that called for a referendum—voted overwhelmingly in favor of repealing the eighth amendment, abortion was illegal in Ireland, punishable by up to fourteen years in prison. This included abortion in cases of pregnancy as a result of incest or rape, abortion in the case of fatal fetal abnormalities, and, until 2013, abortion in cases where the pregnancy was directly endangering the pregnant person’s life.
The eighth amendment of the constitution of the Republic of Ireland gave equal right to life to the pregnant person and the unborn. After a High Court trial known as the “X case” (Attorney General v. X) in 1992—in which a fourteen-year-old girl, suicidal because of a pregnancy as a result of rape, was initially restrained from leaving the state for a period of nine months so as to stop her accessing abortion services overseas—pregnant people were granted the freedom to travel to procure an abortion, and the freedom to obtain information about abortion services overseas. It is estimated that since 1992 twelve women travel outside the country every day to terminate their pregnancies legally.
* * *
—
This is a different Ireland, but the past is still so close. The stigma. The shame. The silence of generations complicit in the institutional abuse and neglect of its people.
The places in this book are not all real places, but they are inspired by real places. The characters are not real people, but they are inspired by real people’s stories.
There’s great power in sharing stories. In connecting. In speaking truths. In bringing abuses to light. To read real stories of people who have had to travel to procure abortions, please visit In Her Shoes: Women of the Eighth (https://www.facebook.com/InHerIrishShoes), a Facebook page created to share anonymous stories of real people traveling abroad for abortions. To read real-life accounts of survivors of Magdalene laundries and mother-and-baby homes, please visit the Magdalene Oral History Project created by the Justice for Magdalenes group (jfmresearch.com/home/oralhistoryproject).
Cry. Rage. Speak out. Break the stigma. Break the curse.
If you or someone you know has been affected by any of the issues raised in this book, please remember you’re not alone. The following organizations can help.
NATIONAL SUICIDE PREVENTION LIFELINE
https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org
1-800-273-8255
NATIONAL SEXUAL ASSAULT HOTLINE
https://www.rainn.org
1-800-656-4673
THE TREVOR PROJECT—SAVING YOUNG LGBTQ LIVES
https://www.thetrevorproject.org
1-866-488-7386
PLANNED PARENTHOOD
https://www.plannedparenthood.org
/> 1-800-230-7526
acknowledgments
This book would not exist without an entire orchard of the best bad apples an author could wish for.
To Natalie Doherty, Naomi Colthurst, and Kathy Dawson, my magical editors, thank you for believing in this ambitious project, and for growing it from a spindly sapling into the book I imagined it could be but could never have written without your invaluable insight and expertise. Thank you for raging with me. To my agent, Claire Wilson, thank you for championing this story from a seed, and, as always, for your advice, guidance, and kindness.
To Wendy Shakespeare, Harriet Venn, Lindsay Boggs, Regina Castillo, Lindsey Andrews, and to the stellar teams at PRH UK and Penguin Teen USA, thank you for making my stories into beautiful books.
To my parents, Cathy and Frank, and siblings, Claire, Kevin, and Thomas, who are the most loving, nurturing, supportive family ever to produce an author who writes such dysfunctional families, thank you for being the roots that allow me to stand strong whatever the weather; I’m proud, as ever, to be a bad apple on this family tree. To my faves, Fleur, Aoife, and Jess, thank you for your incredible support; this book owes a great debt to deep friendships. And to my daughters, my two witch babies, thank you for the magic and the whimsy, for challenging me and teaching me, and for a love I didn’t know was possible.
about the author
Moïra Fowley-Doyle is half French, half Irish, and lives in Dublin, where she writes magic realism, reads tarot cards, and raises witch babies.
She spent several years in university writing about vampires in young adult fiction before leaving to concentrate on writing young adult fiction with no vampires in it whatsoever.
Moïra’s first novel, The Accident Season, was shortlisted for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize and received widespread critical acclaim. Her second, Spellbook of the Lost and Found, was shortlisted for an Irish Book Award.
All the Bad Apples is, in Moïra’s words, built of equal parts hope and fury—it’s about feminism and history, family and identity, and what happens when hidden truths are told. She wrote it as Ireland reeled from the findings of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation, as grassroots feminist activists rallied to repeal the eighth amendment, and the rage felt by so many in her country infused into a story about a teenage girl retracing her family tree and finding herself in its branches.
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* Throughout this novel, I have used the words mother and women when talking about people who can become pregnant because the focus of the book was on the women in Deena’s family in particular, but I want to emphasize that trans men, genderqueer, and non-binary folks—not just cis women—can and do get pregnant, and need to be included in the continuing fight for reproductive rights.