Intrigue, lies and deeply buried family secrets
Tom McGrath unearths his grim and shocking past in this gripping memoir
It’s often said that children are naturally curious as they set about exploring the world around them. Yet this extraordinary book by retired solicitor Tom McGrath, part detective story, part historical research – knit together with good old-fashioned storytelling – derails this particular truism.
For it was not as a child living with his Aunty Lil and Uncle Tom above the fashionable Lido restaurant in Waterford city but when he came of age that the author was gripped by the inconsistencies and gaps in his family history, its myriad of secrets and lies.
In unearthing his intriguing family tree, McGrath takes the reader from the blood-drenched fields of France and the ravages of the Second World War where his father served courageously and performed a daring escape from a prisoner-of-war camp in Poland to Bessborough House in Cork where his mother gave birth to her first child, a little boy called Patrick, and had him cruelly taken from her in 1939.
His parents’ two very different but parallel stories, rooted in the social prejudices and repressive mores of their time, not least the overweening Catholic Church whose tremulous flock were taught to shroud every lapse or infringement of its strict dogma in shame and silence, are contemporaneous and ache with suffering and hardship.
Through a third story, that of his own, McGrath shows the painful legacy of that deafening silence – the close blood ties and extended family members he was deprived of and the needless loneliness he suffered when he was orphaned as a teenager while boarding in Rockwell, Co Tipperary.
Had he been allowed into the secrets of his true heritage and the facts behind his parents’ unorthodox relationship, he would have been familiar with his brood of McGrath cousins living only a few kilometres away, had the affection of his aunts and uncles, not to mention an even closer relative on his mother’s side.
Tom McGrath explains the book’s great personal significance in his poignant introduction, ‘Without a doubt, the writing of this book has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. It has filled a void and fulfilled a lifetime of searching for answers about who I and where I came from’.
As a young child, he writes, ‘You accept what you are wholeheartedly, particularly if you are surrounded by as much love and happiness as I was. It was not until years later that I realised my upbringing was different from that of my peers’.
But before he charts his personal odyssey from his early years as an only child with a dim sense of maybe having a few cousins somewhere, McGrath diligently recounts the wartime exploits of his father Tom McGrath Sr.
His father’s reticence about that time, owing to his reluctance to relive his suffering and a taboo that the author uncovers in the course of his research, forced McGrath into libraries and reading rooms, to the Spanish concentration camp where his father was held captive for a second time and to the National Archives in London, where he discovered an account dictated by his father as part of his debriefing by the military.
McGrath weaves key episodes from this eyewitness testimony into his vividly imagined first-person account of Tom’s life from his birth in Portlaw, 20km from Waterford city in 1904, to his emigration to England with his young wife, a local girl called Mary Fowler, to his conscription into the British Army, which he undertook like many soldiers in the naive expectation of never seeing any combat.
The author describes the atrocities of war, the harrowing toll on the men on the front line – their broken spirits, lice-infected bodies and bellies aching with the constant pain of starvation.
He maps out the circumstances of his father’s surrender along with thousands of troops at Dunkirk after months of terrible fighting and the brutal conditions of the POW camp known as Stalag XXA in Torun in the northwest of Poland from which his father escaped alone through a gap in a fence.
Tom spent the next year fleeing across Nazi-occupied territories, smuggled onto trains by members of the resistance, sheltering in safe houses and walking across the Pyrenees from the French town of Saint-Jean-de-Luz only to be heartbreakingly apprehended again.
By the time he put the army behind him in 1943, he was 39 years of age and probably assumed that fatherhood had passed him by.
But in 1950 back in Ireland and working as an ice-cream delivery driver he made a fateful delivery to the Lido Cafe in Barronstrand Street in Waterford city centre. There he met the Lido owner Elizabeth Vaughan, originally from Kanturk in north Cork.
Like Tom, Elizabeth, who was called Lil, also had a secret in her past, one that she feared could sully her reputation and banish her from respectable society.
The couple confided in one another and fell in love. Tom started to work in the Lido as front-of-house manager and, in late 1950, Lil became pregnant, giving birth on July 29, 1952, to Thomas Joseph, the author.
In that time an unwed couple could not raise their son like ordinary parents, so baby Tom was brought up until he was three years of age by an aunt and uncle in Kilkenny, with his parents who
After escaping a WWII camp Tom’s dad spent a year evading the Nazis