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Phyllis Whitsell lit a candle for her late mother and felt an overwhelming rush of love. “I felt her presence. It was a warm glow,” she says, as she remembers the moment.
“She was looking down, urging me to find out why she, the young girl who used to pray in that Irish village church, became an alcoholic and unfit mother.
“She wanted me to give little Bridget Larkin her voice back, to explain how she became ‘Tipperary Mary’.
“And the heartbreaking things I discovered made me understand why Mum had to give me up for adoption as a nine-month-old baby.”
Two years ago in a bestselling book Phyllis told how, aged 25, she traced her Irish birth mother and found she was a notorious drunk and troublemaker who lived three miles away in Birmingham.
In an extraordinary act of devotion, district nurse Phyllis began visiting her mum in uniform, pretending to a carer.
In Finding Tipperary Mary, mum-ofthree Phyllis wrote of the deep bond she formed with her own troubled mother during nine years of secret visits.
By the time she felt able to reveal her true identity, Bridget had slipped into the fog of dementia and never knew her “Little Phyllis” had come back to her. She died, aged 74, in 2003.
“I was devastated that I’d left it too late,” says Phyllis, 61. I’d lost my mum, but found her, yet she never knew.
“Bridget had told me many anecdotes and stories. Some were confused – muddled by time, drink and pain – while others were crystal clear, especially those about me. But I needed to know more about her life.”
So Phyllis decided to trace the real story of Tipperary Mary – which she tells through her mother’s voice – in moving new book A Song For Bridget.
It’s a tale of love, loss, rape, suicide and cruelty inflicted on unmarried mothers in 1950s Catholic Ireland.
Phyllis travelled to Templemore, Co Tipperary, the village where Bridget grew up with three brothers and a step-sister.
She never knew her farmer dad who died of sclerosis of the liver at 56, a month after Bridget was conceived. At 16 he hang Her m
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