My Mother's Children: An Irish family secret and the scars it left behind. by Annette Sills

Author:Annette Sills [Sills, Annette]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Irish Fiction, historical fiction, Irish Fcition, epub, Irish historical fiction, ebook, Irish Adoptions, family saga, mother and baby home, kindle Unlimited
ISBN: 9781781994214
Publisher: Poolbeg Press
Published: 2021-03-23T22:00:00+00:00

Julia poured us both a brandy. The wind was whistling outside and the night sky was clear. I sat back in the Chesterfield and listened.

“Mammy wrote to me in America saying Seán had suddenly upped and left for England. I was living in Cleveland at the time with your Aunt Nancy. No one knew why he’d gone. He returned for a couple of weeks in the summer when Nancy was home on holiday with her boys. He and Nancy were always close growing up and Seán told her everything. He was eighteen, your mother only fifteen when they met at a dance. He was stone mad for her. Tess was beautiful until the day she died but at fifteen she was like a film star. She was a natural blonde and she had this child-like way about her that made men want to protect her. She was ditzy, a little like Marilyn Monroe. Anyways, after his long shift in the bacon factory your dad would bike fifteen miles just to sit with her on the wall outside her house for an hour. He spent every penny he had buying her gifts and taking her to the dances. Mammy told him he’d lost his head. Then one day, completely out of the blue, Tess told him she’d met someone else. Seán was broken-hearted. He found out it was a friend of Tess’s brother. I forget the brother’s name now.”

“Tadhg. Tess rarely spoke about him. She told me once he’d ended up on the streets in London.”

“I didn’t know that. I just knew they were estranged. Anyway, the baby’s father was called James – she never told me his surname. He was a Protestant from a wealthy Anglo-Irish family who lived in the big house outside the village. Apparently he was older than Tess and very good-looking. He used to swan around the village in a fancy blue sports car with the roof down. Poor Seán knew he could never compete with that so he left for Manchester. Then the next thing Seán got word that it was all off with James. So he wrote to Tess saying he couldn’t forget her and asked her to join him in Manchester. She wrote back telling him she was pregnant and hiding it from her parents. She said she’d made the biggest mistake of her life choosing James over him but now she had to face the consequences. The next thing her mother noticed she was putting on weight and confronted her. All hell broke loose. James said he had no intention of marrying her. The local priest got involved and he and the brother took Tess off to the Mother and Baby home in Tuam.”

“God. Her own brother?”

“Tess told Seán he had notions. She said he was far more concerned about protecting the rich Protestant family than his own. Sure, you couldn’t blame her for not having anything to do with him after that.”

I uncrossed my legs, accidently kicking Dev who yelped beneath my foot.

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