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

it in the reading room at Chorlton Library where she went to read the Irish papers. I saw her tearing it from the newspaper, her hand shaking as she slipped it into the pocket of her shopping trolley. She probably sat alone in her armchair by the gas fire reading it over and over. So much unbearable pain after spending a lifetime thinking he’d been adopted and was living a good life in America or somewhere else. She had given birth to a healthy baby so why would she think otherwise? I looked back at the cause of death again. Unexplained heart failure. Had she made the connection with Familial Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy as I had? She’d already passed the faulty gene on to Mikey and blamed herself for his death. So after seeing this, did she think she’d killed her firstborn as well? I checked the date on the newspaper. Tess died three weeks after it was published. Had the shock of the discovery killed her?

“Welcome to Ireland,” the cabin crew said as we taxied into the airport. Céad míle fáilte. A hundred thousand welcomes.

Rain splattered the windowpane as the plane ground to a halt. It looked like the forecast had been wrong. I wasn’t going to get blue skies and sunshine after all.

Chapter 17

Dusk was falling by the time I got to the site of the Mother and Baby Home. The sky over Tuam was a swollen mass of bruised grey-blue clouds edged with yellow.

It wasn’t at all what I’d imagined. The building itself had been demolished in 1972 but I’d still pictured the site in a rural isolated spot. Instead, I found it in the middle of a modern housing estate, overlooked on all sides. To get there I had to walk through a small playground. It was empty apart from a shaven-headed boy of about ten. The boy was hanging upside down on the climbing frame, his bike abandoned nearby. When I stopped and looked around, he swung back onto his feet. He pointed in the direction of a small iron gate with a white wooden cross on it.

“The dead babies is over there, missus!” he shouted, then he hitched up his shorts, hopped on his bike and rode off.

A gentle drizzle was falling and I put up the hood of my waterproof and walked towards the gate. A lawn the size of a large garden was enclosed by a tall grey stone wall. In the far corner a woman stood under a red-and-white striped golfing umbrella in front of a small grotto. I went through the gate and walked across the lawn, conscious of every footstep in the dampening soil and what lay underneath. As I approached I saw a statue of the Virgin standing in a glass case. The blue of her dress glowed in the darkening air and her arms were outstretched. She was surrounded by lilac blossom, and bunches of other flowers, cards and soft toys were piled on the stony grass.

Despite being surrounded by houses, there was a stillness about the place, a silence only interrupted now and again by the rush of a passing car or the cawk of a crow. As I approached the woman turned and looked at me from under her umbrella. A string of Celtic stone rosary beads hung from her wrist. She smiled then closed her eyes again and went back to her prayers.

I reached into my bag and took out the bunch of lilies I’d bought at a Centra store on the way. The woman moved to one side as I leant over and placed them at the foot of the statue. On the card I’d written: ‘For our beloved brother and son Donal, All our love, Mummy, Daddy, Mikey and Carmel.

Donal. At least he had a name and sex now. But Tess’s maiden name – Dempsey. If Tess and Dad had kept him, he’d have been a Lynch. Donal Lynch. One of us.

Not one for prayers, I stood up and glanced around. The damp lawn glistened in the fading light. I wondered where his body might be. Would I ever know? All I wanted was to take back what was left of him to Manchester and lay him to rest with Tess and Dad and Mikey where he belonged. How could that happen, though? Even if they excavated the site and used DNA techniques, would they really be able to identify the remains of eight hundred children after all this time?

I stared at the statue of the Virgin with her welcoming, outstretched arms. The irony of it was not lost on me. An icon of virginity and motherhood watching over this grave. I dug my hands into my pockets and read the notes attached to the flowers:

God bless the angels.

May the Lord look over you.

I pray for your souls.

I had a sudden urge to pick up a stone and hurl it at the glass case.

“Lord have mercy,” mumbled the woman, kissing her rosary beads and slipping them into her pocket.

“He didn’t though, did he?” I said.

“Pardon me?” she said in an American accent.

“Your Lord. He didn’t have mercy. Not on any of the children here, anyway.”

She lowered her eyes. She was sixtyish with a creamy complexion and faint freckles. She wore expensive Gore-Tex and spotless white trainers and I imagined her preening a garden behind a white picket fence in a tidy suburb in Ohio, smiling and waving to passersby and telling them to “Have a nice day”.

An awkward silence ensued. We both watched as a young chaffinch landed on one of the teddy bears scattered at the Virgin’s feet. It hopped for a while then took flight, the white flash of its wings disappearing into the grey mist of rain.

“I get your anger,” she said after a while. “I lost faith in the Church a long time ago and I haven’t been to Mass in years. But I never lost my faith in God.