As I made my way back to the sofa I raised my glass to Paddy and Peggy, to their kind hearts and wonderful attitude to life. I still missed them and would have gladly given up the house and everything in it to see them walk through the door one more time.
I sat back down and picked up my laptop. Connection at last. Taking a deep breath, I googled the words Mother and Baby Home and Tuam, the name of the town in Galway where Tess was staying when Dad wrote the letter. The first result that came up was a Wikipedia page. I read the first few lines. There was indeed a home operating in the town in the early sixties. It was run by an order of nuns called the Bon Secours. I was about to click on the page but I was distracted by the second search result showing underneath. I sat upright.
It was a headline from an Irish broadsheet dated June 2014 that said:
Mass Grave of up to 800 Dead Babies Exposed in Mother and Baby Home County Galway
Chapter 10
I clicked on the article, my hand trembling slightly.
The building in Tuam operated as a home for unmarried mothers and their babies from 1921 until 1961. It was run by the Catholic Bon Secours order of nuns. Babies born there were adopted or fostered or stayed in the home until they came of age to be sent out to local industrial schools, themselves recently the centre of many abuse scandals. The mothers were made to stay on in the home to breastfeed and to work after the birth in order to pay for the services the nuns had provided. All the mothers lived separately from their babies.
In 1975 two boys playing in the grounds of the home discovered a number of tiny skeletons in a concrete pit. The local community at the time said the find probably dated back to the times of the Great Famine and the area was sealed up. Later, a nearby family made a small grotto at the site and tended it as if it were a grave.
In 2012, a local historian looking into the history of the building came across the story of the boys and the bones. Suspicious, she started to research the number of deaths in the home. She traced the death records of almost eight hundred babies and toddlers who had died there during its sixty-year existence. The historian then looked for graves and burial records in the burial sites in the town and the surrounding areas but found only two official graves relating to children who died in the home. The questions now being asked are these: Where are the others? Are the children buried in a mass unmarked grave at the spot where the boys had been playing? If not, then where are they?
Other disturbing facts about the home have emerged. It seems the death rate was more than five times the national average and one in four of all children who lived there died before the age of five. Many died from malnutrition which was most odd as the localcouncil were paying the nuns a considerable sum to house the children. Others died of infectious diseases such as TB and measles. Rumours have also been circulating for some time about children being adopted illegally in the US and the UK.
The spokesperson for the Bon Secours Order had no comment to make and said that all death and burial records are currently held by the local health board in Galway.
***
I put the laptop to one side and sat perfectly still, trying to process what I’d just read. Had that actually happened? Had the nuns really done that? Discarded hundreds of babies’ bodies in a mass grave without giving them a burial? I leant forward and pressed my hands over my stomach. I felt nauseous. It was almost like I’d witnessed the depraved acts myself. I sat like that for a while then I went back online and read another five articles in quick succession, all from the Irish press, all saying similar things.
“Oh my God,” I kept saying over and over. All other words seemed to lodge in my throat. Why hadn’t I heard about any of this before? Admittedly, I didn’t read the papers every single day but this was a major story that broke over a year ago. Why hadn’t I read about it in the British press? I put my palms on my cheek. My neck and face were burning. I needed air. Wrapping myself in a throw from the sofa, I picked up my glass and headed into the garden.
The air was fresh, cleansed by the wind and rain of earlier and slightly chilly. I walked over to the small rockery under our bird table. Lifting one of the rocks I took out the small plastic bag I kept hidden there. Then I sat on the patio steps, pulled the throw tight around me and rolled myself a joint. Joe disapproved of me smoking. He probably thought I was killing the few remaining eggs left in my ovaries. He used to partake of the odd joint himself but gave up when he started his health kick. I didn’t want to give up. I was too fond of the lull it gave me whenever I felt anxious, that lovely calm that fell over me and mollified my jittery thoughts and pounding heart.
I waited until Susie next door had finished smashing bottles into her wheelie bin then I lit up.
Veiny blue smoke snaked into
