My Irish grandmother’s guilty secret
A Cambridge professor turns sleuth to find out why her cousin is missing from this family snap – and unearths a heartbreaking tragedy
In a crumbling farmhouse in Co. Cork all through the 1960s, Clair Wills’s Catholic family gathered round the turf fire to pray the Rosary, as directed by Molly, the devout granny of the family. As Molly muttered the Hail Mary, ‘Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death’, was her conscience agonisingly pricked? Or had she buried her secret and her guilt so deep that she’d managed to smother them? Or did she in fact feel no guilt?
Molly’s secret was this. Just 40km away, her granddaughter Mary, whom she’d never met, and of whose existence young Clair had no knowledge, was incarcerated for years in a loveless mother and baby home run by the Sisters of Mercy.
When Molly had found out in 1954 that her eldest son Jackie had got a 19-year-old neighbour called Lily pregnant, she was in a state of deep shock. The whole callous protocol for brushing situations like these under the carpet swung into action. To avoid gossip, Lily was cast out and sent to give birth in Bessborough where unmarried mothers were given institutional names and forced to do heavy laundry work for no pay. Having given birth, they were then expected to give up their baby for adoption – first being made to buy an outfit for the baby to be given away in. At some of these ghastly homes (most notably in Tuam) babies died of malnutrition in large numbers and were buried in unmarked graves.
Molly’s son Jackie, the father of the baby, meanwhile, sailed to England to become an itinerant labourer. He would never return to Ireland or meet his daughter. Because Lily had a withered arm, she was treated as damaged goods in the home, and her baby Mary went to the back of the adoption queue. In fact, Mary never was adopted, but was sent to live in the orphanage aged four, after which Lily sailed to America, where she lived on Staten Island till her death in 2018.
Mary’s brief life story is tragic to the end. She managed to get to London to start training as a nurse. She became pregnant by an Indian doctor, was rejected by his family, and hanged herself in London in 1980, aged 25. Her status and occupation on her death certificate were ‘spinster and canteen assistant’.
Clair, who is regius professsor of English literature at Cambridge University, remains haunted by the story of the cousin she never met. She can’t quite remember the exact moment when she became aware of her cousin’s existence. At some point during her teens, her mother told her the gist of the story.
Such a merciless system of exclusion and incarceration of young women and children required the connivance of families, social services, nuns, priests, and the Garda, who dragged women and girls back if they tried to run away. What drove the whole edifice of cruelty and violence was the ‘puritanical, sexobsessed Church’, which codified sex outside marriage as a sin for which women must atone – and for which their babies must also pay the price of lifelong stigma.
Clair mentions that she herself once lost a baby, Thaddeus. He lived for just one hour, in June 1996, after Clair haemorrhaged during labour. A chapter of this always compelling book begins with the words ‘My baby’s headstone…’ Clair was determined that Thaddeus should have a particularly large headstone and plot, to make doubly sure that his short life would count. ‘In the background to my desperation lay all the babies that I obscurely knew had not counted enough.’
‘It is not an exaggeration to say,’ she writes, in this succinct and deeply thoughtful account of her decades-long quest to get to the bottom of the story, ‘that the violence done to our absent cousin Mary brought the family – in the sense of a group of people building a life together towards a connected future – to an end’. The family scattered: to England, to America. Clair herself was brought up in London by her mother (Molly’s daughter) and only visited her Irish grandmother in the holidays, where the cottage was as crumbling and full of holes and gaps as the family itself.
She managed to track down a nun called Sister Ciarán on the telephone – one of the nuns who had run the orphanage – to ask about Mary. Now in her eighties in a retirement home, Sister Ciarán was defensive, cold and unhelpful, although she knew Mary had later taken her own life. ‘She was a moody girl, a moody girl,’ was all Sister Ciarán would say.
As Clair writes, ‘that word “moody” opened up a world of misery on the part of my cousin, and callous indifference on the part of her “carers”’.
Digging deeper into what it was that drove the inexorable urge to banish and vanish Molly’s son’s pregnant girlfriend and the ensuing baby, Clair made two key discoveries about Molly which helped to make sense of it all. It emerged that Molly herself had, not once but twice, been pregnant out of wedlock as a very young woman. She’d given the first baby up for adoption, and never, ever mentioned it again. That secret only came out when two women in a local shop casually mentioned it to Clair’s mother when she was 13.
The second pregnancy was with none other than Jackie himself. Molly became pregnant with him in 1920, but managed to secure marriage to the baby’s father in time for the birth.
You might think those experiences would have made Molly more forgiving towards Jackie, Lily and Mary, but it did the opposite. Having successfully brushed her own sins under the carpet and retained her reputation, Molly was doubly intent on keeping her family’s reputation squeaky-clean.
Molly was far from alone in taking this course of action. Wills reminds us that families all over the country were doing exactly this, so terrified were they of the shame and vilification that would rain down on them if they didn’t. Between 1922 and 1998, 57,000 mothers were sent to ‘homes’ which were the very opposite of what we think of as home.