We turned round at the sound of shouting. Tommy Carroll, Mikey’s old friend from Priory Road Primary, squealed to a halt on his bike a few yards ahead of us. Mikey ran over and deftly manoeuvred his bulk up onto the handlebars. Shaking my head, I watched them zigzag down the road for a hundred yards or so. Then a white Ford Escort appeared out of nowhere doing at least forty. It was heading straight for them and I covered my face with my hands and bit my lip. A horn blared and tyres screeched.
A few seconds later I peeped through my fingers to see the pair of them disappearing around the corner into Egerton Road, hollering and laughing.
“You stupid English bastard, Mikey Flynn!” I yelled, my heart swelling with love.
But the luck of the English that had followed my brother since he was a boy was soon about to run out.
Chapter 7
Fierce winds weaved themselves around the city and rain needled the windscreen. I was late. If I didn’t make it to the appointment it would be weeks, possibly months before I got another. A traffic diversion in Whalley Range added to my woes and I took the long route via Fallowfield and Rusholme. I put Classic FM on the radio for some relaxing tunes but instead got a news report about migrants in the Calais jungle breaking through security fences and heading for the Channel Tunnel. David Cameron was saying that all economic migrants posing as asylum seekers would be caught and detained and sent back. When had Britain suddenly become so unkind towards immigrants? I thought about Tess and Dad setting off for the boat to Holyhead. We were a far more welcoming place back then.
I pictured Dad writing the letter after a long shift on the building site, his damp work clothes spread out like a scarecrow in front of a coal fire in the room he shared with the Roscommon boy. He was barely twenty. He’d not long been transplanted from the rural landscape of Mayo with its craggy mountainous backdrop and lush green fields to a strange and grey industrial city. Though surrounded by his own in Manchester, he must have felt pain and longing after leaving his friends and family and landscape behind. Or maybe not. Maybe all he felt was excitement at the new life he was about to encounter and a sense of freedom. I wished he was around to ask. I could sense his love for Tess in every line of the letter and his hopes and dreams for their future together. It was a love that never waned, even at the most difficult times when she wasn’t well. He was her rock and her stability and his untimely death swept the ground from beneath her feet. Her already fragile mental health deteriorated quickly after he died and the shock of the blow left us all floundering. I tried to recall the details in the letter and form some kind of timeline and narrative about what happened.
Tess would have been barely sixteen in September 1960. At a guess she was about seven months pregnant and detained in some kind of Mother and Baby home or maybe one of the notorious Magdalene Laundries, in a town called Tuam. I shuddered. I knew that Catholic Ireland of that era wasn’t kind to girls and women who fell pregnant outside marriage. I’d seen documentaries and read about the laundries and the Mother and Baby homes run by nuns. Women and young girls were hidden away and forced to give their babies up for adoption. Viewed as sinners and a stain on society, they endured prison-like regimes and were used as slave labour during their pregnancies and beyond, doing unpaid laundry, needlework and lacemaking for up to twelve hours a day. Punishments I read about included shaven heads, bread-and-water diets and beatings.
Some of the homes weren’t just for unmarried mothers either. Women and girls who’d committed petty crimes or girls whose families had too many mouths to feed often ended up there. I remember Eileen O’Dowd from school once telling me her nan had been locked up for two years in a home in Dublin for stealing a chocolate bar from the local shop when she was ten. The women inside often had very little contact with the outside world, which would account for Tess and Dad’s letters being smuggled in and out.
I shook my head. Had Tess really been in a place like that? Poor, damaged Tess. Had she and Dad really given up their firstborn for adoption? But they were loving, devoted parents to me and Mikey. They were starting a new life in Manchester and leaving Catholic Ireland behind. Why put Tess through the anguish of having the baby in the home then giving it up to the nuns? Why not run away and keep the child? It didn’t add up. Or perhaps their baby simply hadn’t made it.
The signs were scattered throughout my childhood. Things were starting to come back to me. All those nights Tess sat up knitting baby clothes. Was she knitting for the baby she had given up for adoption? Was she making it warm clothes because she felt she’d left it out in the cold? The way she always kept us at arm’s length from the Catholic Church. There were no pictures of the Sacred Heart or the Virgin over our fireplace. With the exception of Mikey and St Bede’s, we never attended the local Catholic schools like all the other Irish families. We never went to Mass either. I thought back to the day of the O’Dowd baby’s naming ceremony. Thirty years on, it was etched in my memory like a scar. Tess went there to plead with Eileen’s parents to baptise the baby. She was obsessed with the fact he was a “bastard”. In her poor splintered mind was it because she’d given birth to
