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

had been going for years; older Irish men and women who’d been gathering in draughty community halls in Ireland, the UK and the US to talk about the traumas they’d suffered at the hands of the Church and State. Women incarcerated in Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby homes, grown men abused by clergy in industrial schools and church sacristies, adults illegally adopted who were trying to trace birth parents. It struck me how the diaspora was home to so many wounded souls. In their shoes I’d have fled Ireland too. I’d have tried to erase my past and make a new life elsewhere just like Tess did. I was both devastated and enraged to learn that my baby brother had died. But, at the same time, I could see that something was happening out there. The tide was now turning. Survivors were unearthing their secrets and opening up about what had happened to them. Their stories were spilling out onto the shores all over Ireland and I was rooting for every single one of them. I just wished Tess could have done the same and told me hers.

Chapter 19

Julia eyed me as I poured myself another glass of Chianti. It was our second bottle and I’d drunk most of the first. I relaxed into the battered Chesterfield in her front room. It had large windows and spectacular views over the bay. I stretched my legs and rubbed my stomach, bloated from the delicious Thai green curry and cheesecake she’d made for dinner.

The room was happily chaotic and smelled of dog. Once vivid yellow walls were faded, floor-to-ceiling shelves overflowed with books, photographs and CDs and a Singer sewing machine sat in the corner swathed in fabric. The warm morning had turned into a cold evening and Julia had made a small fire. She leant towards it, coaxing the coals with a poker. The heat was intense but rest of the house, with its high ceilings and cold tiled floors, was permanently draughty. Mattie had stayed on in Belfast to perform at a corporate event after the family christening so I had Julia all to myself. I asked her to put on one of his CDs. His lovely voice filled the room with “O Mio Babbino Caro” so it was like he wasn’t absent at all.

My favourite aunt was the youngest of Dad’s four sisters and the wild child of the family. The oldest, Moira, worked in finance and lived respectably with her family in Dublin. Twins Nancy and Irene were both nurses who’d settled in Cleveland, Ohio. Julia, also a nurse, had joined them when she was eighteen. After a short stay she’d upped and left Cleveland, hitch-hiked the length and breadth of the States, and settled in a hippy commune in California. There she met and married Tony Shapiro, a chisel-jawed draft-dodger from Brooklyn with red-leather cowboy boots and a Charles Bronson moustache. A honeymoon photo that Julia sent to Dad had pride of place on my living-room wall. She and Tony are in the Nevada desert standing in front of turquoise camper van painted with sunflowers. She looks like Ali McGraw in Love Story, with waist-length dark hair, razor-sharp cheekbones and tiny denim shorts. The marriage lasted only five years because of Tony’s philandering ways. Granny got cancer not long afterwards. Grandad had died a few years earlier so Julia reluctantly returned to Westport to nurse her. She decided she liked being back in Ireland a lot more than she’d expected and stayed. She carved out a dazzling career in women’s health, campaigning on abortion and contraception issues at a time in Ireland when very few did. In her late thirties she stumbled across Mattie at a bridge evening. A bulky Belfast widower, he had six children and a beautiful tenor voice. They lost a daughter, Maeve, to cot death early in the marriage. Julia’s feisty spirit never quite recovered afterwards.

I loved my aunt dearly. After Dad died I spent three summers at the house in Clew Bay. She taught me to ride a horse, apply make-up, and follow a dress pattern. She took me to the seaweed baths in Enniscrone and she pierced my ears with a sterilised needle. When it was time to go home, I clung to her, dreading my return to Manchester’s drab streets and Tess’s black moods. I secretly wished Julia was my mother just as she probably wished I was Maeve, the daughter she’d lost.

Now she put the poker in its holder and sat back in her chair. I leant over and touched the silky sleeve of her blouse. It was mustard with an intricate pattern of tiny white butterflies and it looked perfect next to her snow-white bobbed hair.

“One of your own creations?” I asked.

She nodded and picked up her wineglass. “I got the fabric at a market in Rome when we were there a few months ago.”

“It’s gorgeous. My friend Karen’s moving to Rome. You remember Karen, don’t you?”

“Sure, how could I forget her?” she said with a weak smile. “Wasn’t she the talk of the village here once?”

I winced. Karen had made quite an impression back then. Eighteen and backpacking around Ireland, we had dropped in on Julia for a couple of nights. After a raucous evening in Lydon’s pub in the village with the local youth, we ended up at a party in the holiday home of the O’Connells, a wealthy Dublin family down the road. Mr and Mrs O’Connell were away and Karen spent the night in the marital bed with their eldest son. Luke was a toned and tousled med student at UCD who revved around the coastal roads on a Harley Davidson. The next day Karen hopped on the back of it and the pair of them took off to a festival in Kerry without telling anyone. Mrs O’Connell was livid, though. She arrived at Julia’s house and paced up and down the kitchen with big, lacquered hair and