was not uncommon for a Catholic baby to be adopted by a Protestant family. Children aren’t born with religious, political or racial beliefs and the Lawton family did not mind where the child came from as long as it was the Celt side of Anglo-Saxon. His legal father was a copyright lawyer, born and educated in Northern Ireland and employed by a partnership that had offices in Belfast and London.The family had houses in the centre of both cities and even though his father spent most of his time in the Belfast office his mother preferred London, not least because it meant getting out from under the marshal law that governed the Province. By the time Bill was a teenager she had become entrenched in her only true interest - and the main reason she wanted to live in London - her charity organisation. She would be out of the house from dawn till late on her never-ending quest to feed and clothe the poor children of the world, which is what led to Bill boarding at the Royal Hospital School near Ipswich at thirteen years old. The school was a grand old institution and strongly associated with the Royal Navy, enforcing upon its students traditions such as parading most Sunday mornings before church in full dress uniform, brass band and rifles included. The school was equally enthusiastic about rugby, and even though he did not make head of house or captain of the first fifteen, his two foremost ambitions at the time, Bill had to say at the end of his five years at the school that he had enjoyed every one of them. He saw his parents on average once every couple of months for the first few years and by fifteen started spending more of his half- and full-term breaks with friends or travelling. For the last two years he spent all his vacations, apart from a couple of days around Christmas, roving alone, mostly across mainland Britain and occasionally France. He preferred travelling by himself for a number of reasons: none of his friends shared his specific historical interests; he was a spontaneous sightseer, jumping on and off trains as it suited him; but most importantly, he had learned how much easier it was to meet girls when alone.
He had never ventured into the Irish Republic for no other reason than he had not developed an interest in Irish history; his trips were generally motivated by his interest in a place. He was not particularly intrigued by politics or religion but would describe himself as a Loyalist or a Protestant if pushed. He bore no ill towards Catholics and like most people his age on the mainland he did not particularly care what the Troubles in Northern Ireland were about and wanted to see the bombing and the fighting come to an end.
Bill was eighteen and on his summer holidays prior to starting university when his curiosity about his origins grew enough to motivate him to explore them - as long as the process wasn’t too time consuming. Bill was not necessarily interested in meeting his birth parents; if anything he was inspired once again by his fascination with history. His prime area of interest was eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European history, specifically the French revolution, the British industrial revolution and America’s formative years up to the First World War. He hoped his own family history would reveal itself to have played some part in those times but he was not expecting much. He had no idea how his life was to change with the discovery of his ancestors, or one in particular.
It was his father who, respectful of the young man’s inquisitiveness, furnished him with the information that set the investigation in motion. He dug up the old adoption papers, which showed Bill’s birth parents to be John and Mary Meagher. His father was not completely sure about all the facts but he believed they were both killed in a traffic accident. Bill was a competent researcher and looked forward to the challenge of uncovering more. It did not take him long to discover his parents had died on a Saturday afternoon in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland. John and Mary Meagher were originally from Tipperary in the Irish Republic and had left it five years before Bill was born to move to Ulster to take over the small farm John had inherited from an uncle. When John and his wife died, the farm, which was not a particularly successful venture, was taken over by relatives who owned adjacent divisions of what was originally one large concern.
Bill’s research failed to produce a location where they were buried and so he decided to visit the farm in the hope of finding out more. It turned out the family that had taken over the farmhouse were distant cousins and they informed Bill his parents had been killed in a head-on collision with a drunk driver and that their bodies had been sent back to the Republic for burial. The cousins showed little enthusiasm in helping Bill. In fact they were down right inhospitable. They were unimpressed that Bill had come all the way from London that day and did not even invite him into the house for a cup of tea, conducting the entire conversation on the doorstep. The last thing Bill asked before leaving was if they had any photographs of his parents. They did not, and with that they closed the door on him. Bill felt embarrassed and confused by their hostility and it was only on the bus back to the family home in Belfast that it dawned on him that it was possibly because of his accent. He might have been born a Catholic, and a Meagher, but as far as they were concerned, he was now an English Protestant, kin or not.
With a month left of his holidays he decided to get this little investigation over and done with. The following day, equipped for no more than two nights on the road, he made the journey by train and bus to Southern Ireland and the village of Kumrady, several miles north-east of Limerick. On seeing the delightful setting his immediate thought was why his parents had ever wanted to leave. Enniskillen was not a patch on this place.
It was early afternoon when he arrived in the village. His plan was to have a look around the place his parents were born and raised in, find the grave in the church cemetery, utilise any spare time looking for their family homes and be on his way in time to get back to Limerick by early evening so that he could find a B&B for the night and return to Belfast the following day.
It took him a while to find the headstone, not that he had rushed in looking for it. Cemeteries fascinated him.The headstones transported one into the past, revealing the names of people who had actually lived, pure history that could pinpoint a precise day in the story of mankind. Within the confines of this one tiny cemetery, in the space of an hour or so, Bill found people who had been alive during the French revolution, the Peninsular War, the battle of Trafalgar and the Russian revolution. A high point of the day was finding two men who, it could be deduced, left the village when they were young, died somewhere in America in 1867, and were then shipped back to the place of their birth to be buried. Bill wondered how they had both come to die at the same time, and how they had enough money to pay for their bodies to be shipped all that way back to their little village.
When he did find his parents’ grave the first thing Bill tried to imagine was how they had looked to the world; the little things: how they had acted, laughed, talked, what they did with their everyday lives. Now that he was here, standing above them, the urge to know more about them grew stronger. A sadness washed over him but he couldn’t think exactly why. Perhaps it was nostalgia. He’d had pretty much everything he needed growing up and never felt deprived of anything, and he had hardly thought about them for more than a few seconds in all those years let alone missed them. For the first time in his life he felt a personal loss. He wondered how much like them he was, or which of them he was most like. His mother was twenty-three when she died, just five years older than he was now, and his father twenty-seven.
Bill leaned back on a nearby tree, lost in thought, unaware of a man approaching from behind, slowly making his way through the cemetery from gravestone to gravestone, reading each in turn. As he came around the tree he almost bumped into Bill, startling him. Bill noted the telltale white collar under the man’s tweed jacket. He was well mannered and acted most humble, as one might expect of a priest, however his appearance made him look more like a navvy; he was large, with heavy bone structure, powerful hands and a bull neck. He apologised for disturbing Bill but instead of leaving him to himself, as one might expect in a place such as a cemetery, the priest was intent on striking up a conversation. He was an American with a strong New England accent and introduced himself as Father Kinsella, on holiday from Boston and visiting relatives for a few weeks. His first question to Bill was what was an Englishman doing in an Irish graveyard.When Bill explained he was actually Irish and that his parents had come from the village the priest grew noticeably warmer towards him.At first Bill felt trapped by this friendly but overbearing character.This was a private time for him and now that it had been interrupted he wanted to beat a polite retreat at the first opportunity and be on his way. But Father Kinsella wasn’t ready to move on. He explained to Bill his fondness for reading gravestones, especially in Ireland, although the East Coast of America, specifically the central region, was particularly fascinating when it came to Irish headstones. He described how he once spent a two-month vacation following the trail of the famous 69th, an all-Irish Brigade that distinguished itself in some of the greatest battles of the American Civil War. He asked Bill if he knew that more than forty per cent of all foreign- born enlistments into the Union Army during the Civil War and about seventeen per cent of its entire strength were Irish. Bill did not. Father Kinsella knew his Irish history as well as any professor and was very passionate. He confessed that the names and dates on the headstones transported him back to times and places in America’s history and also Ireland’s often dark and troubled past. When Bill admitted he knew little of Irish history Father Kinsella did not hide his disappointment. In fact his animated expressions of horror initially amused Bill, though he had a feeling it might be unwise to show it.
‘What’s your name?’ Father Kinsella asked with an intimidating look, which once Bill got to know him, he realised was not nearly so intimidating. ‘I ask because there are very few Irish names that don’t have some history attached to them . . . Go on,’ he pushed. ‘Tell me it and I bet I’ll tell you a story about one of your ancestors that
